Washington -- Some 17 months after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Gulf Coast lawmakers in the U.S. House remain unable to agree on a bill to send spill fines to the affected areas.

While aides to two Gulf Coast representatives said last month that House lawmakers were on the verge of a breakthrough agreement, no accord has yet been announced and the members are now keeping tight-lipped.

At stake is potentially billions of dollars in environmental and economic recovery money, which Gulf states won't see unless Congress acts.

A government agency is taking on superstitious cults with unusual zeal

No other nation in recent history appears to have taken so fervently to apocalyptic prophesies as France has, reports the London Times. Then again, not many nations have a government agency specifically responsible for investigating "cults and suspicious spiritual activities." Indeed, the French agency - known as MIVILUDES - delivered a mass-suicide warning last week, apparently worried about a possible suicide frenzy come Dec. 21, 2012, the day the 5,000-year-old Mayan calendar ends. MIVILUDES contends that the Internet age, natural disasters, and economic turmoil - combined with the ancient Mayan prophecy - have inspired widespread belief in a coming Armageddon (there has been a recent migration of people to the hilltop village of Bugarach, said to be a place immune to apocalypse).

The agency's concern is not entirely outlandish: in the 1990s, 74 people belonging to a cult called the Order of the Solar Temple - 16 of them in France and eight in Quebec - died in murder-suicides to avoid an Armageddon. But cult expert Susan Palmer of Concordia University says that "MIVILUDES is creating artificial emergencies to support the state-sponsored anti-cult movement." Palmer, whose upcoming book The New Heretics of France, about the French anti-cult movement, believes MIVILUDES spends more time vilifying cults than actually researching them - "obviously trying to justify its own existence."

A US airstrike has killed at least 35 civilians and wounded 50 others in Elbur town of Galgaduud region in central Somalia, Press TV reports.

The incident took place in the village of Ceelgaras on the outskirts of Elbur on Saturday, a Press TV correspondent reported.

Local residents said dozens of civilians who were injured in the attack have been transferred to a local hospital.

A Somali government official has said that the aerial attack targeted al-Shabab's military base in the region.

The United States, in an unannounced meeting between Washington and Ankara officials, has reportedly agreed to train Turkey's intelligence forces.

The deal was made when Director of the US National Intelligence Agency James Clapper travelled to Turkey on September 18, and met with Chief of Turkey's National Intelligence Organization Hakan Fidan.

In his talks with other Turkish top officials, Clapper also discussed a planned deployment of a US radar system as part of a NATO-backed missile defense system in the eastern Turkish province of Malatya.

Turkey announced earlier in September that it has agreed on the deployment of the X-Band radar on its territory.

Political observers say the White House is trying to boost its influence on Turkey.

Turkey, Greece, Israel and Cyprus stake claims

The Middle East has moved north, with the Mediterranean emerging as home to some of the world's richest deposits of energy. And as in the Middle East, rights to resources will be settled less by law than by force, or by the threat of force.

Much of the conflict involves the island nation of Cyprus, situated in the eastern Mediterranean close to Turkey to the north, Israel to the south, and Greece, its cultural cousin, farther to the west. The 200-kilometre stretch of sea between Cyprus and Israel - believed to hold hundreds of billions of dollars worth of hydrocarbons - is now a checkerboard of prospective drilling sites that have begun to be exploited by Israeli, Cypriot and American oil and gas companies.

These companies and their three governments have no intractable conflicts with each other - in fact, they're developing their resources in close co-operation. Neither does Greece, which stands to become a major European hub for these energy finds, and longs to develop resources of its own in Greek waters to the west of Cyprus. According to a study for Economist Conferences, a business unit of The Economist, Greece could eradicate its debt by exploiting its Mediterranean hydrocarbons.

Photos and videos of Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden after he was killed in May in a U.S. military/Central Intelligence Agency raid in Pakistan should not be released publicly because they would reveal military and intelligence secrets and could lead to violence against U.S. personnel, the Obama administration argued in papers filed in federal court in Washington late Monday night.

The new filings from the Justice Department provide scant details about the imagery, but CIA National Clandestine Service Director John Bennett wrote that the CIA has "52 unique....photographs and/or videorecordings" depicting bin Laden during or after the May operation. Bennett did not break down the tally further, but said all the imagery is classified "TOP SECRET," meaning that disclosure of the material could lead to "exceptionally grave damage" to U.S. national security.

There is no country in the world - perhaps in history - like Israel. It has done wonderful things like turning deserts into lush agricultural farms. It has also turned itself into a singularly evil State. Its resort to cruelty against Palestinians has few parallels in modern history. Its nuclear hypocrisy is unparalleled too.

Israel's greatest exceptionality is the immunity it commands in the world. It can do pretty much what it likes - and get away with it. Other countries get damned by "the international community" for all kinds of assorted sins: India is attacked for not signing the nuclear proliferation treaty; Iran is threatened for following a nuclear policy; Iraq was blown up for possessing nuclear arms it never possessed; China and Russia are criticised for persecuting their dissidents; Serbs and African leaders are tried for war crimes.

Legal groups in Canada and the United States have asked Justice Minister Robert Nicholson to open a criminal investigation against former U.S. president George W. Bush.

At a news conference today at the Vancouver Public Library central branch, two lawyers explained why there is a factual and legal case to hold Bush legally accountable in Canada for torture.

Katherine Gallagher, a senior lawyer with the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights, said that a 70-page indictment and more than 4,000 pages of supporting material have been delivered to Nicholson in his role as the attorney general of Canada.

She said that this provides the legal basis for investigating and ultimately charging Bush under the Criminal Code of Canada's torture provisions. She indicated that this should occur when he visits the Vancouver suburb of Surrey on October 20 for a speaking engagement.

"Over the last 10 years, our organization, working on behalf of individual survivors of torture and individual detainees at Guantanamo Bay, has tried to seek accountability and an end to the torture program in the United States," Gallagher said. "As you all likely know, there has been no investigation and certainly no prosecution of George Bush for his individual criminal responsibility for torture. We have also tried to hold U.S. officials accountable in various European countries, including France and Germany, and we have an ongoing investigation that we are a part of in Spain."

A US drone strike on Friday killed three Taliban fighters in Pakistan's tribal badlands bordering Afghanistan, blowing their vehicle into a ball of flames, local officials said.

It was the first deadly missile strike in a week and comes as Washington appeared to ease pressure on Islamabad demanding action against the Al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network based in the North Waziristan tribal district.

The militants were killed in Baghar village of neighbouring South Waziristan, where the Pakistan military carried out a sweeping offensive against homegrown militants in late 2009.

"A US drone fired two missiles at a vehicle and at least three militants were killed," a senior Pakistani security official told AFP on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to media.

In the world of weaponry, they are the sexiest things around. Others countries are desperate to have them. Almost anyone who writes about them becomes a groupie. Reporters exploring their onrushing future swoon at their potentially wondrous techno-talents. They are, of course, the pilotless drones, our grimly named Predators and Reapers.

As CIA Director, Leon Panetta called them "the only game in town." As Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates pushed hard to up their numbers and increase their funding drastically. The U.S. Air Force is already training more personnel to become drone "pilots" than to pilot actual planes. You don't need it in skywriting to know that, as icons of American-style war, they are clearly in our future -- and they're even heading for the homeland as police departments clamor for them.

They are relatively cheap. When they "hunt," no one dies (at least on our side). They are capable of roaming the world. Someday, they will land on the decks of aircraft carriers or, tiny as hummingbirds, drop onto a windowsill, maybe even yours, or in their hundreds, the size of bees, swarm to targets and, if all goes well, coordinate their actions using the artificial intelligence version of "hive minds."

"The drone," writes Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service, "has increasingly become the [Obama] administration's 'weapon of choice' in its efforts to subdue al-Qaeda and its affiliates." In hundreds of attacks over the last years in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, they have killed thousands, including al-Qaeda figures, Taliban militants, and civilians. They have played a significant and growing role in the skies over Afghanistan. They are now loosing their missiles ever more often over Yemen, sometimes over Libya, and less often over Somalia. Their bases are spreading. No one in Congress will be able to resist them. They are defining the new world of war for the twenty-first century -- and many of the humans who theoretically command and control them can hardly keep up.