The FBI has investigated an incident that saw at least one Republican congressman swim naked at a drinking party in Israel last year attended by top leadership staff, Politico reported Sunday.

The news website said Representative Kevin Yoder of Kansas stripped and jumped into the Sea of Galilee during the privately-funded trip, joining colleagues and their family members who were partially or fully clothed.

The Israeli army has deployed an Iron Dome air defense system, designed to intercept and destroy rockets, days after two rockets were fired at the town of Eilat near the border with Egypt, a military spokeswoman said Monday.

"An Iron Dome battery has been deployed in the town of Eilat as part of tests, momentarily modifying the sites where these systems are deployed," she said but did not give further details.

The South Korean and U.S. military Monday began an annual joint exercise to test defenses against North Korea, a drill denounced by Pyongyang as a rehearsal for war.

More than 30,000 U.S. troops, both those based in the South and some 3,000 from overseas, are taking part in the drill known as Ulchi Freedom Guardian, which ends on August 31, the U.S. forces said in a statement.

Eight months since American troops withdrew from Iraq, Baghdad has signaled a readiness to bolster military ties with the U.S., America's top general said ahead of a visit to the country.

General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is due to fly to Iraq this week after talks in Afghanistan, will be the highest-ranking American to travel there since the end of the troubled U.S. military mission in the country.

The United Nation's troubled observer mission to Syria has officially ended after being recalled amid escalating violence as world powers fail to agree how to end months of bloodshed in the country.

The mandate of the U.N. Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS) expired at midnight Sunday after a roughly four-month deployment in which its work was hobbled by growing unrest that has cost tens of thousands of lives.

Jordan said on Sunday four rockets fired from neighboring Syria fell inside its northern border area, wounding a young girl and sparking a letter of protest.

"A young girl was injured on Sunday after four rockets fell on an area near the border with Syria as a result of clashes inside Syria," Information Minister and government spokesman Samih Maaytah told Agence France Presse without elaborating.

Jerusalem police on Sunday arrested three Jewish teens suspected of a brutal hate attack on young Palestinians, and magistrates remanded in custody another suspect detained a day ago.

"Altogether four people have been arrested," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Agence France Presse.

Julian Assange called Sunday for U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, the alleged source of a massive trove of secret government documents published by WikiLeaks, to be released from a military prison.

Assange made the appeal in a speech from the balcony of the Ecuadoran embassy in London, his first address since he was granted political asylum in his long-running bid to avoid extradition from Britain to Sweden.

Somalia's newly appointed legislature will elect the country's next president Monday, in a fresh bid to end two decades of unstable central government in the war-torn Horn of Africa nation.

The election of the new president would complete a complex process set in motion through a U.N.-backed agreement aimed at ending eight years of rule by Somalia's graft-riddled, Western-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and, it is hoped, would bring peace.

Syrian helicopters have dropped leaflets over the northern city of Aleppo urging residents not to shelter rebels and warning the Free Syrian Army it had one last chance to surrender.

Some of the leaflets dropped late Saturday, in what rebels and residents said was a first, were designed as official-looking checkpoints passes for supporters of the rebels wishing to surrender.