Edward Snowden ‘Pictured out Shopping in Russia’

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Photo Credit: LIFE NEWSA photograph purporting to show Edward Snowden, the US intelligence leaker, out in public for the first time since being granted asylum, has been published by a Russian news website.

In the blurry image published by Life News, a casually dressed man sporting a goatee with sunglasses perched on his head is pictured pushing a supermarket trolley full of groceries across a road.

A car with partly legible Russian plates and a crossing sign identify the scene as in Russia.

“The photograph was taken in Moscow,” said Life News, which is known for its close ties to the Kremlin and security services.

Read more from this story HERE.

As U.S. Struggles with Health Reform, the Amish Go their Own Way

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Photo Credit: Reuters/Jonathan BachmanThe debate over U.S. healthcare reform that has gripped the nation and led to a government shutdown is of small concern in rural Pennsylvania’s Amish country for a very simple reason.

Along with eschewing cars and many other modern technologies, the descendants of 18th-Century German immigrants who practice the Amish and Old Order Mennonite religions, have effectively opted out of Obamacare, along with most federal safety net programs.

A little-known provision of the law with its roots in a 1950s battle over Social Security exempts these communities from the individual mandate, an element of the Affordable Care Act that requires most Americans to purchase health insurance in some form.

But it is not the idea of health insurance the Amish reject – the close-knit communities essentially insure themselves.

“We have our own health care,” said a retired Amish carpenter, who like other Amish interviewed for this story, asked that his name not be used because of a traditional aversion to publicity and bringing attention to oneself.

Read more from this story HERE.

Jenna Bush: Hillary Clinton and I are ‘Related’ Through ‘Uncle’ Bill – George W Bush’s ‘Brother from Another Mother’

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Photo Credit: Neil Rasmus

Photo Credit: Neil Rasmus

Here’s some family ties you may just be learning about: apparently Jenna Bush-Hager is related to Hillary Clinton.

At least, that’s what the former first-daughter said at a benefit for the Save the Children organization in New York earlier this week.

Jenna was the emcee of the gala and spoke about the family ties she had with one of the evening’s honorees – former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

‘I’m not sure if you know this, but Secretary Clinton and I are actually related,’ Jenna announced.

Read more from this story HERE.

Drone Crashed, Almost Hit Me, says Manhattan Businessman (+video)

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Photo Credit: CNET

Photo Credit: CNET

We soon will live in a world where drones are zipping around us like grasshoppers.

We won’t stop to wonder what they’re doing, because we’ll have long discarded any notions of personal privacy. Perhaps we’ll visit YouTube every night to see whether we’ve appeared in some drone footage that day.

A Manhattan businessman may not be looking forward to the future quite so much. He claims that on Tuesday evening a drone nearly struck him as it crash-landed near Grand Central Station.

As WABC-TV reports, the unnamed businessman said the drone was “helicopterish” in form and weighed around 3 pounds.

Read more from this story HERE.

Nadine Schweigert, North Dakota Woman, ‘Marries Herself,’ Opens Up About Self-Marriage (+video)

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Photo Credit: Anderson Cooper

Photo Credit: Anderson Cooper

A 36-year-old North Dakota woman who married herself in a commitment ceremony last March has now spoken about her self-marriage choice in an interview with Anderson Cooper.

The marriage took place among friends and family who were encouraged to “blow kisses to the world” after she exchanged rings with her “inner groom”, My Fox Phoenix reports.

“I feel very empowered, very happy, very joyous … I want to share that with people, and also the people that were in attendance, it’s a form of accountability,” Nadien Schweigert told Anderson Cooper.

Schweigert said the ceremony was a celebration of how far she’d come since her painful divorce six years ago that led to her two children to decide to live with her ex-husband.

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Top 5 Reasons ANWR and Area 51 Are Alike

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area_51Joe Miller gave the keynote address at the Nevada Republican Party’s Unity Dinner last night in Las Vegas.

Despite the significant geographic differences between Alaska and Nevada, the two have one important trait in common: the majority of each state’s land is owned by the federal government. In Alaska, Uncle Sam holds the title deed to over 69 percent of the Great Land, outranked only by Nevada, where the feds control a whopping 84 percent. Ten states have more than a third of their land owned by Washington, DC. Miller, if elected, wants to work with other western states to bring those percentages down significantly.

Of course some of the best known federally controlled land in Alaska is ANWR and in Nevada, Area 51. What you may not know is that there are actually many similarities between them. Here are the top five:

5. Both are set aside as a federally controlled refuge: ANWR for animal wildlife, and Area 51…it’s classified.      

4. Both have limited accessibility: ANWR is accessible only by sea and air, Area 51 is only accessible by those wearing black suits and sunglasses who go by Agent G or Q…  

3. Both are said to contain vast treasures hidden underground: ANWR, oil and natural gas, and Area 51, state of the art flying machines and some say even the Ark of the Covenant.

2. Trespassing on either will lead to a heavily armed federal agents descending upon you from above. If only the federal government could find the same sense of urgency in enforcing our borders. 

1. Finally, spending any length of time on the ground in either location could lead to close encounters with species unfamiliar to most people. 

18-Year-Old Girl’s Request for Something So Simple Before She Suddenly Died Becomes Global “Pay-It-Forward” Movement (+video)

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picture - pay-it-forward-AJO-7Earlier this month Alyssa Josephine O’Neill, 18, made what appeared to be an everyday kind of request — she asked her mother to take her out for a pumpkin spice latte the following day. But her request turned out to be anything but everyday. O’Neill died the next day, Sept. 4, of an epileptic seizure…and she never got her latte.

“We were just shocked at the sudden loss and didn’t know what to do,” her father, Jason O’Neill, tells CNN. Alyssa was diagnosed a year ago, notes Deseret News.

“There isn’t a protocol for when you lose a child,” he tells the Erie Times News. “We didn’t know what to do or how to do it. But we knew that lying in bed and crying didn’t feel good. We wanted to feel good and honor Alyssa’s memory…”

Two days after Alyssa’s funeral, her family went to a Starbucks in Erie, Pa., their hometown, and bought lattes for 40 strangers — all O’Neill asked of the store manager was to pen an #AJO hashtag with a purple marker (her favorite color) on each cup in his daughter’s memory….

“It just kind of exploded at that point,” O’Neill recalls. “We had somewhat of a following, but nothing like this.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Texas Town Experiences Ending of ‘Charlotte’s Web’ in Real Life as Spiders Take to the Skies (+video)

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Photo Credit: Kevin Hamm via Facebook

Photo Credit: Kevin Hamm via Facebook

At the end of E.B. White’s classic children’s book “Charlotte’s Web,” the spider with the title name dies and her offspring send their silk threads into the sky, taking off from the barn and leaving the pig Wilber with only three of Charlotte’s children as companions.

This arachnid experience, known as “ballooning,” is exactly what a Texas town witnessed this week, seeing the white strands floating through the air and landing on buildings and cars.

“I thought it was weird; I’d never seen it before,” Myrna Olivas told KTVT-TV. “It just landed on my head and it left again.”

Read more from this story HERE.

$5.25 Million For Senate Hair Care And 21 Other Ways Politicians Are Living The High Life At Your Expense

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picture - Barack-Obama-John-Boehner-Nancy-Pelosi-Harry-Reid-Mitch-McConnell-300x300If you want to live the high life, you don’t have to become a rap star, a professional athlete or a Wall Street banker. All it really takes is winning an election. Right now, more than half of all the members of Congress are millionaires, and most of them leave “public service” far wealthier than when they entered it. Since most of them have so much money, you would think that they would be willing to do a little “belt-tightening” for the sake of the American people. After all, things are supposedly “extremely tight” in Washington D.C. right now. In fact, just the other day Nancy Pelosi insisted that there were “no more cuts to make” to the federal budget. But even as they claim that things are so tough right now, our politicians continue to live the high life at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. The statistics that I am about to share with you are very disturbing. Please share them with everyone that you know. The American people deserve the truth.

According to the Weekly Standard, an absolutely insane amount of money is being spent on the “hair care needs” of U.S. Senators…

Senate Hair Care Services has cost taxpayers about $5.25 million over 15 years. They foot the bill of more than $40,000 for the shoeshine attendant last fiscal year. Six barbers took in more than $40,000 each, including nearly $80,000 for the head barber.

Keep in mind that there are only 100 U.S. Senators, and many of them don’t have much hair left at this point.

But hair care is just the tip of the iceberg. The following are 21 other ways that our politicians are living the high life at your expense…

Read more from this story HERE.

Michelle Obama has Nearly 2 Million Fake Twitter Followers

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

…According to the Twitter analytics application Status People, 37 percent of Michelle Obama’s 5,290, 506 Twitter followers — or approximately 1,957,487 followers — are considered fake. Thirty-five percent of her followers are inactive, and 28 percent are considered “good,” or real…

Percentage-wise, she still fared better than President Barack Obama. Over half of Obama’s Twitter followers, according to a Sept. 20 Daily Caller report, are fake – 55 percent, or 20.2 million out of 36.8 million followers, to be more exact.

Read more from this story HERE.