Despite the partisan war in Washington that shut down the federal government this week, President Barack Obama has succeeded in implementing the first major health reform in the United States in nearly 50 years, as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act goes into effect. Even though its most virulent critics raise the spectre of "Canadian-style" health care, "Obamacare" does little to change the enduring differences between the two health care system. What, exactly, does "Obamacare" look like compared to Canada?

To ask whether public banks would interfere with free markets assumes that we have free markets, which we don't. Banking is heavily subsidized and is monopolized by Wall Street, which has effectively "bought" Congress. Banks have been bailed out by the government, when in a free market they would have gone bankrupt. The Federal Reserve blatantly manipulates interest rates in a way that serves Wall Street, lending trillions at near-zero interest and pushing rates so artificially low that local governments have lost billions in interest-rate swaps.

Banking, money and credit are not market goods but are economic infrastructure, just as roads and bridges are physical infrastructure.

State and municipal governments already have public lending programs, which are generally not seen as distortions of the free market. They exist because private banks are not lending in some sectors that need financing. Montana finances first-time ranchers and farmers; Sonoma County has its Energy Independence Program; and San Francisco has half a dozen mortgage lending and small business programs. Globally, public banks lend countercyclically, providing credit when and where other banks won't. This does not crowd out private banks. Germany and Taiwan, which have strong public banking sectors, are among the most competitive banking markets in the world.

A Belgian has been killed by medical euthanasia after pleading for death because a botched sex change operation to turn her into a man had resulted in "a monster".

Mother of sex change Belgian: 'I don't care about his euthanasia death'

Nathan, born Nancy, Verhelst, 44, was given legal euthanasia, most likely by lethal injection, on the grounds of "unbearable psychological suffering" on Monday afternoon.

Wim Distelmans, a cancer specialist who carried out the euthanasia, is the same doctor who late last year gave lethal injections to congenitally deaf twins who were frightened they were also going blind.

"I was the girl that nobody wanted," Mr Verhelst told Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper in the hours before her death.

"While my brothers were celebrated, I got a storage room above the garage as a bedroom. 'If only you had been a boy', my mother complained. I was tolerated, nothing more."

Dmitry Peskov has been forced to deal with rumours Mr Putin wed Alina Kabayeva, a 30-year-old politician and former Olympic gymnast, in a church ceremony last week.

"It's his decision and he's not obliged to talk about his personal life," Mr Peskov told Izvestia. "He works so much I don't know where he finds time for it."

Rumours that he had remarried were started by a Twitter user who claimed last week that the Federal Guards Service had blocked roads around the Iversky monastery in the Valdai Hills because "Putin and Kabayeva are being crowned," a reference to Russian wedding traditions.

It snowballed after being retweeted by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, prompting Mr Peskov to call it "an exercise in boredom."

Stouffville, - Cat owners in a community north of Toronto are being warned to keep their pets indoors after a number of severed cat heads were found, one of them near a daycare.

York Regional Police said Thursday there have been six recent incidents in Whitchurch-Stouffville where heads and, in one case, other body parts of a dismembered cat were found in public locations.

Investigators don't know what the motive behind the dismemberments could be, said Const. Andy Pattenden.

But he said it's believed the dismemberments were done intentionally, adding the heads were all placed within a one-kilometre area in residential neighbourhoods.

The first incident was reported Aug. 12 when a head and two legs were found near a daycare centre and police were called to the scene.

Five other cat heads were found during the next few weeks, with one being found near a school, and the last incident was reported on Sept. 13, when a homeowner found her cat's head in front of her residence.

In five of the six incidents, just the cat's head was found, usually on or near a curb, Pattenden said. No torsos were found and there was no sign of any blood.

One of the most influential dystopian novels ever written, 1984 has had a profound effect on the world. Since its publication in 1949 many of its concepts have entered modern day parlance. Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak and Room 101 are all part of Orwell's world. What's more, as a result of the book, Orwellian is now a term to describes official deception, secret surveillance, and manipulation of the past by a totalitarian or authoritarian state. Orwell hoped that by writing 1984 he'd help stop such a state ever coming to pass. Read these thirteen quotes to decide for yourself.

"If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself."

The inability of the media and politicians to focus on the real issues never ceases to amaze.

The real crisis is not the "debt ceiling crisis." The government shutdown is merely a result of the Republicans using the debt limit ceiling to attempt to block the implementation of Obamacare. If the shutdown persists and becomes a problem, Obama has enough power under the various "war on terror" rulings to declare a national emergency and raise the debt ceiling by executive order. An executive branch that has the power to inter citizens indefinitely and to murder them without due process of law, can certainly set aside a ceiling on debt that jeopardizes the government.

The real crisis is that jobs offshoring by US corporations has permanently lowered US tax revenues by shifting what would have been consumer income, US GDP, and tax base to China, India, and other countries where wages and the cost of living are relatively low. On the spending side, twelve years of wars have inflated annual expenditures. The consequence is a wide deficit gap between revenues and expenditures.

"Some people make a living, others make a killing" - an exclusive new documentary on Tony Blair which will break unexplored ground

Dear Friends,
I'm making the definitive documentary about the Blair years. Years of war and plunder, death and destruction, corruption and disillusion. Tony Blair killed the Labour Party as we knew it. He and George W. Bush helped kill a million people in disastrous wars and Blair is currently making a financial killing out of both.

In 2003, I was expelled from the Labour Party over my outspoken opposition to Bush and Blair's war in Iraq. I promised that until the last day of my life I would go on fighting to put Tony Blair on trial, a real trial in The Hague, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. This documentary, the mother of all documentaries, will expose Blair's crimes.

This documentary will not be another sterile chronicle of the Blair years. I witnessed his mendacity firsthand and am able to offer you the inside story. I will pull no punches in going toe to toe with those in the upper echelons of New Labour; the likes of Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell are all in my sights and so are the big business bankers he consults for. There is no doubt that the debates will be heated. But from that heat will come light.

The church bus involved in a deadly three-vehicle collision in eastern Tennessee was carrying a group of seniors on their way back home from a religious conference.

The group was called "Young at Heart," said Rick Cruz, the pastor of the Front Street Baptist in North Carolina.

They were returning home from the 17th annual Fall Jubilee conference in Gatlinburg after three days of preaching and singing.

"We do know that there were several that went on to be with the Lord," Cruz told his congregants Wednesday night.

Authorities are expected to release more information Thursday. But this is what they know so far:

The Wednesday crash may have been caused when the bus blew a front tire, crossed a grassy median of Interstate 40, clipped an SUV and collided with a tractor-trailer.

Eight people were killed: Six on the eastbound bus; one of three occupants of the SUV, and the tractor-trailer driver, the Tennessee Highway Patrol said in a statement.

"We hope and pray that there will be no more," Sgt. Bill Miller told reporters Wednesday evening.

Fourteen others were injured, some critically, authorities said.

The wreck occurred about 2 p.m. in Jefferson County, about 40 miles east of Knoxville, said Tennessee Department of Safety spokeswoman

People started to gather at Front Street Baptist in North Carolina as soon as they heard the news, CNN affiliate WBTV reported.

"I'm in a state of shock," Jerry Wright told the affiliate.

Front Street Baptist, on its Facebook page, thanked people Wednesday evening for their prayers.

"We know that God is in control and we need His comfort and peace," it said.

A Russian military space official admitted Wednesday that the country will be powerless to act should Earth become the target of an interplanetary incursion.

Sergei Berezhnoy, an aide to the head of the Titov Space Control Center, said that Russian aerospace defense authorities have not been tasked with preparing for the contingency of an alien attack.

"There are enough problems on Earth and in near-Earth space," Berezhnoy said in response to a reporter's question.