Less than two months after nearly shutting down the federal government as they argued over the best way to reduce the budget deficit, there's word that Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill are again at odds and that another shutdown showdown is possible.

Politico reports that:

Today, the Canadian press picked up on a video that seems to have been making the rounds on car sites for a few days. Here's how the Toronto Sun introduces it:

Zahir Rana wanted to give spectators at the Targa Newfoundland rally a show they'd never forget — he did just that after putting a $1.5 million Ferrari into the Atlantic Ocean.

Time again for film critic Bob Mondello's recommendation for your home-viewing queue. This week, to prepare for the start of NBC's new TV series Prime Suspect, he suggests you look back at the original PBS series, starring Helen Mirren.

The year was 1991, and a new British police procedural had what then counted as a gimmick: Its star — smart, forceful, and assertive — was a woman, which was a big deal.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says he will submit his formal request for Palestinian statehood and U.N. membership on Friday, immediately after addressing the General Assembly.

This has already touched off intense diplomatic wrangling, and even more is expected in the weeks and months that follow.

"I don't remember any event in the last 25 to 30 years where it was so difficult to predict what will happen," says Yoram Peri, director of the University of Maryland Institute for Israel Studies.

A Roman Catholic monastery in North Dakota is putting its ranching operation out to pasture, because it lacks monks with cowboy skills.

Lucas Santtana is a Brazilian artist who has been hiding in plain view for years. I came across a record by Santtana back in 1999, EletroBenDada, which updated the experimental and political pop music of the 1960s and '70s Brazilian Tropicalia movement for a new generation. I heard nothing more from Santtana for more than 10 years, but it turns out he's been busy making great music in Brazil, even if hasn't been making it up to North America. His latest record, Sem Nostalgia, has just been released in the U.S.

There's closure in the investigation of a multistate outbreak of listeriosis linked to cantaloupes.

A BBC report this week about a project in the Philippines that has brought virtually free light to dark homes in some of that country's poorest neighborhoods brightened our day so much that we went looking to find out more.

It seems that taking a plastic bottle, filling it with clean water and a little bleach and then suspending it from a ceiling through a hole to the sky can bring about the same amount of light into a room as a 50-watt bulb. It's all due to the way the light of the sun refracts.

For the past week, Wired's Danger Room has been following a thread on how the FBI trains its agents on the subject of Islam. It started last week, when the national security blog obtained presentation materials that painted Muslims as a whole with the broad brush of violence and terrorism.

Here's how Wired introduced its first piece:

The notion of "beauty" can mean many different things to artists. For the Brothers Quay — identical-twin filmmakers — it often means dimly lit black and white images of animated dolls, screws, cogs — any manner of inanimate object brought to life. They're so good at it that fellow filmmaker Terry Gilliam called the Quays' Street of Crocodiles one of the best animated films of all time.