The fight over how to define the new health law's success is coming down to one question: Who counts as an Obamacare enrollee?

Health insurance plans only count subscribers as enrolled in a health plan once they've submited a payment. That is when the carrier sends out a member card and begins paying doctor bills.

When the Obama administration releases health law enrollment figures later this week, though, it will use a more expansive definition. It will count people who have purchased a plan as well as those who have a plan sitting in their online shopping cart but have not yet paid.

"In the data that will be released this week, 'enrollment' will measure people who have filled out an application and selected a qualified health plan in the marketplace," said an administration official, who requested anonymity to frankly describe the methodology.

The disparity in the numbers is likely to further inflame the political fight over the Affordable Care Act. Each side could choose a number to make the case that the health law is making progress or failing miserably.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources, said insurance companies have received about 50,000 private health plan enrollments through HealthCare.gov. Even combined with state tallies, the figure falls far short of the 500,000 sign-ups the administration initially predicted for both private sign-ups and those opting for the expansion of Medicaid.

In recent weeks, administration officials have warned that the enrollment figures for October would be low, given the tumultuous launch of the health Web site.

The administration plans to use this count of enrollees because that's where their interaction with the healthcare.gov site ends, the administration official said. Insurance plans, rather than the federal government, are responsible for collecting the first month's premium.

Tormented survivors of a typhoon that is feared to have killed more than 10,000 in the Philippines rummaged for food Sunday through debris scattered with corpses, while frenzied mobs looted aid convoys.

Two days after one of the most powerful storms ever recorded flattened entire towns across part of the Southeast Asian archipelago, desperate survival tactics created fresh horrors.

On the outskirts of Tacloban, a coastal eastern city of 220,000 where tsunami-like waves destroyed many buildings, Edward Gualberto accidentally stepped on bodies as he raided the wreckage of a home.

Wearing nothing but a pair of red basketball trousers, the father-of-four and village councillor apologised for his shabby appearance and for stealing from the dead.

"I am a decent person. But if you have not eaten in three days, you do shameful things to survive," Gualberto told AFP as he dug canned goods from the debris and flies swarmed over the bodies.

"We have no food, we need water and other things to survive."

A white supremacist's mission to turn a small North Dakota town into an all-white enclave took an unexpected turn when a DNA test proved his bloodline included Sub-Saharan African lineage.

The 62-year-old Craig Cobb recently appeared on NBC Universal's The Trisha Goddard Show, where he submitted himself to a DNA test that indicated he was 14 percent Sub-Saharan African. He is 86 percent European, according to the analysis.

Cobb quickly rejected the results as "statistical noise," adding that "oil and water don't mix." Goddard maintained, however, "You have a little black in you." She tried to fist bump Cobb but was rebuffed twice.

Speaking to the Daily Mail after the show, Cobb said, "I agreed to the test because I assumed it was science." Instead, he called it "short science," the product of "craven and debased executives" whose "goal is to shock."

Even if a test he was comfortable with reported the same results, Cobb said his beliefs wouldn't be any different. "Well if I did have any nigger we don't want anymore of it," he said.

As RT has reported in the past, Cobb has accumulated about 13 properties in the small North Dakota town of Leith, where he is actively encouraging others with similar beliefs to move. In a town with fewer than 20 residents, Cobb plans to use newcomers to help seize control of the government and de-integrate the community.

Foreign-born United States veterans living in the country legally are being deported in a spate of "tough on immigration" actions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The November 2012 deportation of Arnold Giammarco, an Italian-born legal resident who grew up in Hartford, Conn. and served in the Army and National Guard, has garnered a significant outcry, including a Change.org petition and a website devoted to his cause, FreeArnold.com.

Gianmmarco, 57, was honorably discharged from the Army in 1979 and the National Guard in 1983. He was then charged with shoplifting and drug offenses after lapsing into substance abuse. He served his jail time and married Sharon Giammarco in 2010. They have a 3-year-old daughter.

On the Free Arnold website, Sharon Gianmmarco presents a portrait of a man who turned his life around and lifted himself out of substance abuse to create a stable family life.

"After four years of sobriety, he thought he would never again feel the cold burn of steel around his wrists," Sharon Gianmmarco wrote. "We thought that if we did the right thing, good things would happen. We thought that imprisonment was behind us and freedom was all around us and before us."

"That day in May when he was taken from us, we were running full speed ahead and were suddenly yanked backwards by an invisible rope that tied us to our past."

Gianmmarco is one of thousands of green card-holders who serve in the U.S. military, reported the Connecticut Health I-Team.

Democracy can be better served by randomly selecting representatives, argue Italian researchers.

Democracy can be better served by randomly selecting representatives, argue Italian researchers.

Dr Alessandro Pluchino of the Universita di Cantania and colleagues report their findings on the pre-press website arXiv.org.

"We think that the introduction of random selection systems, rediscovering the wisdom of ancient democracies, would be broadly beneficial for modern institutions," write the researchers.

Dr Pluchino and colleagues developed a computer simulation, in which they studied the behaviour of politicians when randomly selected independents were introduced to a model parliament.

Their model relied on four categories of people in the parliament. These were: 'intelligent' people (actions serve both personal and social interests), 'helpless or naive' (loss for self, but gain for others), 'bandits' (benefit themselves, but not others), and 'stupid' (actions produce a loss for everyone).

The model, involving a parliament made up of two parties, had 500 individuals who could each propose and vote for or against acts.

Dr Pluchino and colleagues found that in all cases studied, adding random legislators improved the performance of the parliament. Specifically, there were more acts passed with social benefit.

Jimmy Kimmel is in hot water!

On Saturday, hundreds of protesters targeted ABC Studios in Burbank, Houston, and Phoenix to protest the Oct. 16 segment of "Jimmy Kimmel Live" where one of the late night host's tiniest guests suggested that we should "kill everyone in China."

The comment was made by a young boy during an unscripted segment called "Kids' Table," after Kimmel asked a roundtable of children how the United States should repay its $1.3 trillion debt to China. Both ABC and Kimmel have since apologized for the comment, and are no longer airing "Kids' Table."

ABC said at the time, "We offer our sincere apology. We would never purposefully broadcast anything to upset the Chinese community, Asian community, anyone of Chinese descent, or any community at large. Our objective is to entertain." Kimmel added, "I just want to say I am sorry. I apologize. It was certainly not my intent to upset anyone."

However, Chinese-American groups and protesters refuse to accept the apology. ABC Studios has not responded to Yahoo TV's request for comment regarding the protests.

Performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky stages protest at 'apathy, political indifference and fatalism of Russian society'

Red Square has seen a lot over the centuries, from public executions to giant military parades, but a performance artist broke new ground on Sunday when he nailed his scrotum to cobblestones in a painful act of protest.

Pyotr Pavlensky said the protest was his response to Russia's descent into a "police state" and was timed to coincide with Police Day, which Russia's law enforcement officials celebrated on Sunday.

"The performance can be seen as a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of contemporary Russian society," Pavlensky said in a statement. "As the government turns the country into one big prison, stealing from the people and using the money to grow and enrich the police apparatus and other repressive structures, society is allowing this, and forgetting its numerical advantage, is bringing the triumph of the police state closer by its inaction."

Wildlife officials have removed an arrow from a young deer's head and released the animal back into the New Jersey woods.

The arrow that had completely pierced the 5-month-old male deer's head was removed Saturday by biologists with the Department of Environmental Protection.

The biologists who did the procedure say the arrow had not damaged any major arteries or organs and the deer's prognosis for survival is excellent.

A word on job applications at Colorado College has sparked a controversy.

The word "queer" appears in the voluntary gender section responses of the applications and the private school in Colorado Springs stands by the wording.

"I'm a little skeptical of what that could present to potential employees," Colorado Collage Quinn Webb said.

The options include to not disclose, "male", "female," "transgender" or "queer." The "queer" option is stirring up some controversy. Rex Fuller with Denver's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, And Transgender (LGBT) Community Center weighed in.

"It's true that for many years lots of people were called 'queer' and it was a derogatory term and they find it offensive, but there's definitely a younger generation that is trying to reform the term and give it new meaning," Fuller said.

The Gladiator: John Fitzgerald Kennedy


In my previous post, I included a chapter from Farewell America which gave a broad overview of the "American Psyche." It is crucial to understand the forces at play here in order to understand why John Kennedy was murdered, and why, when he died, the death knell of the American Republic - as well as its people - began sounding.

As I have written before, most Americans are woefully ignorant of their true history, and by design.