The next time you visit a hospital, it is your wallet that may end up hurting the most. All over the United States, it has become common practice for hospitals to wildly inflate medical bills.

For example, it has been reported that some hospitals are charging up to 30 dollars for a single aspirin pill. And as you will see below, some victims report being billed tens of thousands of dollars for a non-surgical hospital visit that lasts only a few hours. When something is seriously wrong with us, most of us never stop to ask our health professionals how much it will cost to actually treat us.

In that moment, we are desperate and we just want someone to help us. Many doctors and hospitals take full advantage of this by billing their "customers" as much as they feel they can possible get away with.

It is a legal scam that is bilking ordinary Americans out of billions of dollars every single year.

The Catalan parliament has passed a law giving its regional president the power to carry out a non-binding consultation vote on secession from Spain. Catalan nationalists believe this law enables them to hold the long-awaited independence referendum.

On Friday, the Catalan parliament voted in favor of the new law, with 106 MPs supporting it and 28 voting against.

The MPs hope it will bring Catalan President Artur Mas a step closer to the planned independence referendum on November 9.

However, while the nationalist block thinks the bill directly paves the way for a referendum on independence, the Catalan socialists who allied with them for the vote do not share this opinion.

The Spanish government called the Catalan consultation vote illegal and said it will be taking the matter up at the Constitutional Court. The court has the power to suspend the vote after it hears the case on Tuesday.

Madrid maintains that any kind of secession vote has to be decided by the whole country, citing Spain's 1978 constitution.

Turkey has allowed thousands of Syrian Kurds fleeing Islamic State (IS) militants to cross its southern border, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said. TV footage showed exhausted people, mostly women and children, crossing into the south-eastern border village of Dikmetas under tight security.

The move followed clashes with Turkish Kurd protesters who were calling for the refugees to be allowed in.

Syrian Kurds have been massing along the Turkish border since Thursday. They have been fleeing escalating clashes between IS and Kurdish fighters in the area.

Turkey - which shares a border with Iraq and Syria - has taken in more than 847,000 Syrian refugees since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in 2011. It is under pressure from Western countries to stem the flow of foreign fighters joining Islamic State.

While there are variations in Christian theology about the nature of Satan and demons, traditional Christian thought holds that these creatures are evil, the threat from them is real and should be taken seriously. Exactly what self-proclaimed "satanists" think about all this is unclear, other than that they make a public show of worshiping Satan and calling upon demons for assistance.

Thus, it may be that the Oklahoma City satanists, who call themselves the Dakhma Angra Mainyu, believe that the black mass they're holding on Sunday, Sept. 21, at the Oklahoma City Civic Center, is harmless fun, or a deliberate insult to Catholics (since the "black mass" is a perverted parody of the Catholic Mass), or even a serious attempt to call upon dark forces.

But according to the beliefs of a priest from the neighboring Diocese of Tulsa, both those putting on the event and those attending--although poorly attended in the past, this year's event has sold out all 88 tickets--may be in spiritual peril.

Even though the event has been tamed a bit to comply with state law (the usually naked female "altar" will have lingerie; and vinegar is being substituted for urine) and it will no longer feature a Consecrated Host (after a legal challenge, organizer Adam Daniels returned his pilfered Communion wafer to the Church, specifically, Archbishop Coakley of Oklahoma City), Monsignor Patrick Brankin is worried.

The unpopularity of French President François Hollande fell to a record low in September, says a recent poll. Only 13 percent of French people say they are satisfied with Hollande's performance as president.

86 percent of France's population don't support Hollande, says the IFOP [French Institute of Public Opinion] poll. Its results were published in Le Journal du Dimanche, a French weekly newspaper. The French president has lost four points since August.

The pollster interviewed 1,970 people, aged 18 and over, between September 12 and September 20.

Hollande's popularity is the lowest among the workers parties - only nine percent. 20 percent of Left Front and 19 percent of the Greens (Europe Ecology) approve of Hollande. His highest rating is among the members of his own Socialist Party - 42 percent.

The families of German citizens killed in the Malaysian plane crash in eastern Ukraine are planning to sue the Ukrainian authorities in the European Court of Human Rights, accusing them of manslaughter by negligence.

Ukraine should have closed its airspace if it couldn't provide for the safety of flights over its territory, Elmar Giemulla, a professor of aviation law representing the three families of German victims, told Bild am Sonntag, a German Sunday newspaper.

"Each state is responsible for the security of its air space," Giemulla said. "If it is not able to do so temporarily, it must close its air space. As that did not happen, Ukraine is liable for the damage."

According to Giemulla, by leaving the airspace open, Kiev authorities "destroyed" the lives of hundreds of innocent people. Thus, Ukraine committed human rights violations, he concluded.

Scotland may not have followed in Sir William Wallace's footsteps to free itself from its English bonds, but that hasn't stopped nearly a quarter of Americans from a little bravehearted hope of their states seceding from the US.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll sought to see if Thursday's Scottish independence referendum ‒ which failed ‒ inspired Americans to dream of secession from the United States. According to the results, 23.9 percent of those surveyed either strongly supported or tended to support the idea of their state breaking away from the union.

Both Democrats and Republicans supported the idea of severing ties with the federal government, though the Grand Old Party (along with residents from the West and Southwest) was more in favor of secession than Dems and Northeasterners.

Texas Nationalist Movement president Daniel Miller told RT that Texans are unhappy with how Washington politicos ignore the issues most important to their state.

"One of the big issues in here Texas right now... is obviously the border and immigration," Miller said. "Over the last eight years, issues related to the border and immigration have consistently polled as the number one concern for Texans, yet the federal government continues to do absolutely nothing substantial about addressing the border crisis or the immigration issues."

A January 2013 Public Policy Polling survey found that about 20 percent of Texas voters said they would support secession because of President Barack Obama's re-election, and 67 percent were opposed.

Described by Cornel West as "the most acute observer and insightful analyst of the 'Obama Phenomena,'" Paul Street is the author of seven books, numerous project studies, and hundreds of articles published around the world. His publications include the prophetic, "lucid and penetrating" (Noam Chomsky) volume Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008), described by John Pilger in 2009 as "perhaps the only book that tells the truth about the 44th president of the United States." Street's Crashing the Tea Party (2010, co-authored with Truthout contributor Anthony DiMaggio) is "essential reading for anyone concerned about the changing nature of American politics" and helped solidify Street's status as one of "America's most important social and political critics" (Henry Giroux).

No longer content to limit his focus to one side of the dominant and narrow US political spectrum - either Obama Democrats or Teapublicans - Street has turned his attention to the plutocratic American system as a whole. Below we post the introduction to Street's latest and most important and sweeping book yet: They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm Publishers, September 2014). Inspired in part by the Occupy movement or "moment" of 2011, Street's new volume harkens back to John Carpenter's campy but classic film They Live (1987). Carpenter portrayed the United States as subject to invasion and control by alien invaders who wore corporate suits, distributed wealth and power upward, subverted democracy, managed minds and warmed the earth's climate - all in the name of free enterprise and economic growth. They Rule moves from Reagan era science fiction to the nitty-gritty details of how the US ruling class rules and why it matters in our current 21st century New Gilded Age. According to Gar Alperovitz,They Rule is "aserious, useful, and well-written and well-researched guide to the challenges we face and the genuine options we have as American corporate capitalism and its politics continue to decay."

As a direct result of sanctions on Russia, there is an overabundance of fruits and vegetables in France, Spain, Poland, and elsewhere in Europe. Basic law of supply and demand dictates prices of crops would fall. And they did.

While most foolishly want to stick it to Russia, few actually are willing to pay the price if it affects them.

All Sierra Leone's six-million population have been confined to their homes. The three-day shutdown is a desperate bid to fight the outbreak, as US health officials warn the disease could spread to over half a million people.

"Today the life of every one is at stake, but we will get over this difficulty if all do what we have been asked to do," President Ernest Bai Koroma said in a national address on Thursday, a day before the shutdown was due to come into force.

People were in a hurry ahead of the edict to buy food. Shopkeepers were distraught at the prospect of losing three days' worth of income, given that much of the country's population, including the capital Freetown, live on as little as $2 a day or less. Each day is a struggle.