Last Sunday's Senatorial elections in France were a gripping and telling sign of the public opinion of President Sarkozy's policies and the definite desire for a change of government. Never before, since the founding of France's Fifth Republic in 1958, has the control of the Senate gone to the Left Wing Socialist Party. Clearly, it is high time for the Sarkozy administration, which leans towards the Center Right, to read between the lines.

There are several facets on the political, economical and social levels of the implication of what the election results indicate about public discontentment with Sarkozy and his policies.

To begin with, it seems that here is a president who, rather than bring social unity and coherence in a country whose population is one-fifth of ethnic origin, appears to create more of an ethnic divide. This is particularly true of the Sarkozy relationship with the Muslim population in France, of whom there are 6 million and with whom Sarkozy has not only never tried to establish ties but rather isolated and alienated them. The recent ban on veils and prayers on the street is a potent example.

Granted France is a secular country, but those issues are very far from being what ails France today and what very well may cause the president his re-election. What is striking here is that with all of France's profound woes, why these issues even come up in Parliamentary discussions. While veils and prayers being held on the street may be an eyesore to some, they pose absolutely no threat or danger to French society.

Israel, working with deeply-embedded intelligence moles in the United States, including within the U.S. government and "off-the-books" intelligence front companies, has been pilfering spent U.S. nuclear fuel from American nuclear arms caches at a phenomenal rate over the last several years. U.S. and foreign intelligence sources have confirmed that much of the nuclear fuel has been shipped to Israel and other locations via the port of Houston.

The illegal smuggling of spent highly-enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium fuel from U.S. nuclear weapons facilities is the same outbound Houston shipping pipeline used by Bush-influenced Carlyle Group and the firm's front companies in Spain and France to ship precursor nerve gas chemicals to Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s, according to one Pentagon intelligence source.

The nuclear smuggling is a major back story to a September 8 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report titled "Nuclear Nonproliferation: U.S. Agencies Have Limited Ability to Account for, Monitor, and Evaluate the Security of U.S. Nuclear Material Overseas." The most serious finding in the GAO report states:

Berlin- German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has foiled Palestinian-Israeli negotiations when he approved building 1100 housing units in East Jerusalem.

She said, following a phone call with Netanyahu described by her as "very difficult," that "I am unable to believe anything Netanyahu says."

Haaretz newspaper described the crisis between Merkel and Netanyahu as unprecedented, due to the Israeli intransigence in continuing settlement activities.

It added that the US administration scolded the Israeli ambassador in Washington, considering settlement activities as endangering the resumption of negotiations and American efforts to achieve peace.

Israeli sources said Germany may stop supporting Israel against establishing a Palestinian state.

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.