An obese mother in the US is trying to put on weight in order to become the world’s fattest woman.
Donna Simpson, from New Jersey, weighs 273kg but told the Daily Mail newspaper she had her heart set on reaching her goal weight of 1000lb (450kg) in two years.
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In order to pay for the enormous amounts of food she is eating — her weekly grocery bill is $815 — Ms Simpson makes money by running a website where men pay to watch her consume fast food.
SondraK, Lympian Slayer 
The retirement nest egg of an entire generation is stashed away in this small town along the Ohio River: $2.5 trillion in IOUs from the federal government, payable to the Social Security Administration.
It’s time to start cashing them in.
For more than two decades, Social Security collected more money in payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits — billions more each year.
Not anymore. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes — nearly $29 billion more.
Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg. Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds — which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg’s municipal offices.
To illustrate the government’s commitment to repaying Social Security, the Treasury Department has been issuing special bonds that earn interest for the retirement program. The bonds are unique because they are actually printed on paper, while other government bonds exist only in electronic form.
They are stored in a three-ring binder, locked in the bottom drawer of a white metal filing cabinet in the Parkersburg offices of Bureau of Public Debt. The agency, which is part of the Treasury Department, opened offices in Parkersburg in the 1950s as part of a plan to locate important government functions away from Washington, D.C., in case of an attack during the Cold War.
One bond is worth a little more than $15.1 billion and another is valued at just under $10.7 billion. In all, the agency has about $2.5 trillion in bonds, all backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. But don’t bother trying to steal them; they’re nonnegotiable, which means they are worthless on the open market.
Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn’t be worse...........
A masked Palestinian Muslim demonstrator holds stones during clashes with Israeli forces in Ras al-Amud just outside Jerusalem’s Old City…
As Virginia Thomas tells it in her soft-spoken, Midwestern cadence, the story of her involvement in the “tea party” movement is the tale of an average citizen in action.
“I am an ordinary citizen from Omaha, Neb., who just may have the chance to preserve liberty along with you and other people like you,” she said at a recent panel discussion with tea party leaders in Washington. Thomas went on to count herself among those energized into action by President Obama’s “hard-left agenda.”
Rodgie
A New Jersey nuclear plant laborer arrested in Yemen with 10 other suspected al Qaeda members was in contact with the same radical Yemeni-American cleric tied to Fort Hood shooting suspect Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan…
A man offers a rose to a woman to mark International Women’s Day in Belgrade…
...the Christian half of my upbring said “thou shalt not kill” and thus I’ve never owned a firearm.
Someone broke into a fish hatchery run by an Everett School District environmental education program and killed thousands of baby salmon.
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The state has replaced the school district’s fish at no charge, but the caretaker at the hatchery says the emotional damage is not so easy to undo....
Coffee may be their poison of choice, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get tea at their party too.
Organizers of the Coffee Party — which grew out of messages and videos on Facebook and has received a boost in recent days from media coverage — originally billed themselves as a response to the conservative, grassroots Tea Party movement. But Coffee Party spokesman Camron Moore said the movement is neither liberal nor conservative, and even Tea Partiers are welcomed to crash their party....
Coffee partiers held low-key gatherings today to discuss the movement....
...Minnesota Majority staged the rally on the state capital mall to hear Reps. John Kline and Michele Bachmann speak to the gathered opponents of the overhaul of the health-care system
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I’d have put the crowd somewhere between three and four thousand. They were not just numerous — the largest rally I’ve personally attended at this venue — but also enthusiastic. Some got a little overly enthusiastic, such as the few who brought actual pitchforks. (They were asked to step to the back of the crowd.) Almost every sign carried to the rally was homemade, as you can see from the pictures. They all came out to the capital on a day where the temperature didn’t get above 40 degrees during the entire rally, and where a cold wind blew across the mall....
bacon
Toby Elles, 22, made the discovery after burning the food when he fell asleep while cooking.
After lifting off the scorched bacon Mr Elles, from Salford, Lancs, could not believe his eyes when the Christlike image stared back at him.
The face is complete with eyes, nose, a beard and is framed by long flowing hair.
Mr Elles, a cashier for Halifax Bank, said: “I fell asleep cooking some bacon and it had burned this face onto the pan, it’s some kind of miracle…
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An Israeli doctor says,
“Medicine in my country is so advanced that we can take a kidney out of one man, put it in another, and have him looking for work in six weeks.”
A German doctor says,
“That is nothing; we can take a lung out of one person, put it in another, and have him looking for work in four weeks.”
A Russian doctor says.
“In my country, medicine is so advanced that we can take half a heart out of one person, put it in another, and have them both looking for work in two weeks.”
An ILLINOIS doctor, says.
“You guys are way behind. We recently took a man with no brains out of ILLINOIS , put him in the White House and within SIX MONTHS, half the COUNTRY is looking for work.”
What’s your favorite punctuation mark?
