As the number of homeless people in Los Angeles County continues to rise, the City Council is weighing a ban on feeding homeless people in public areas.

City Council members Tom LaBonge and Mitch O'Farrell, both Democrats, introduced the resolution after complaints from Los Angeles residents. Arguing that meal lines should be moved indoors, the legislators said the proposal would benefit both the homeless and residential neighborhoods.

Actor Alexander Polinsky is one Los Angeles resident who complained about the number of homeless people crowding his neighborhood.

"If you give out free food on the street with no other services to deal with the collateral damage, you get hundreds of people beginning to squat," Polinsky told The New York Times. "They are living in my bushes and they are living in my next door neighbor's crawl spaces. We have a neighborhood which now seems like a mental ward."

"This has overwhelmed what is a residential neighborhood," Council member LaBonge said. "When dinner is served, everybody comes and it's kind of a free-for-all."

It was bad enough when three men in her section decided to skip out on a $96 bill, but it got a whole lot worse for waitress Suzanne Parratt when she was subsequently fired from her job for refusing to cover the unpaid tab.

The 31-year-old server had been employed at the Pig N Whistle in Midtown Manhatan since August without incident.

Then came last Tuesday's dine-and-dash during the evening hours of a hectic double shift.

"As soon as I realized, I went into full blown shock and then a state of panic knowing that I'd be held responsible for their $96 tab," Parratt told Gothamist.

She tried to explain the situation to her manager, Eugene Wilson, but says she was immediately slapped with a threat: Either she covers the check or her coworkers will.

More than seven out of 10 people in Northern Ireland have been deprived of basic essentials such as food due to rising energy bills, exclusive new research has found.

It also emerged that eight out of 10 struggle to adequately heat their homes, while almost everyone worries about being able to pay the bills.

Furthermore, the comprehensive study showed that, when it is cold, almost four out of 10 local people use less heating than they would like.

The shock findings come ahead of a major fuel poverty conference today, which is aimed at tackling the deepening crisis.

It has been prompted by ongoing energy price increases and the revelation that Northern Ireland has more fuel poor homes than anywhere else in the UK - or Western Europe.

The Northern Ireland Fuel Poverty Coalition (NIFPC), which is behind the 'Running On Empty' conference, claimed that one in four householders can't afford to keep warm at a reasonable cost.

Indeed, of the four UK nations Northern Ireland (42%) has the greatest proportion of fuel poor households, followed by Wales (29%), Scotland (25%) and England (15%), according to the Fuel Poverty Statistics Report 2013.

Chair of the NIFPC, Pat Austin, said that although the statistics are bad, the real-life stories make for shameful reading.

"I've heard of people putting children to bed and their lips were blue because they were so cold," said Ms Austin.

"In other cases families have been forced to have picnics in shopping centre to keep warm, while some people visit relatives at mealtimes to save money on energy it takes cooking food."

Ms Austin said the NIFPC has called together its 160 members to develop a "reinvigorated plan of attack".

An Israeli woman has been sentenced to paying $140 per day for refusing to circumcise her one year old son until the boy undergoes the procedure as required by Jewish law.

"The baby was born with a medical problem, so we couldn't circumcise him on the eighth day as is customary," Haaretz has quoted the boy's mother Elinor as saying.

The boy is now over one year old.

"As time went on, I started reading about what actually happens in circumcision, and I realized that I couldn't do that to my son. He's perfect just as he is," the mother said.

For the past two years, a mysterious online organisation has been setting the world's finest code-breakers a series of seemingly unsolveable problems. But to what end? Welcome to the world of Cicada 3301.

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an internet forum. The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

"Hello," it said. "We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck."

The message was signed: "3301".

A self-confessed IT security "freak" and a skilled cryptographer, Eriksson's interest was immediately piqued. This was - he knew - an example of digital steganography: the concealment of secret information within a digital file. Most often seen in conjunction with image files, a recipient who can work out the code - for example, to alter the colour of every 100th pixel - can retrieve an entirely different image from the randomised background "noise".

It's a technique more commonly associated with nefarious ends, such as concealing child pornography. In 2002 it was suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had planned the September 11 attacks via the auction site eBay, by encrypting messages inside digital photographs.

A former chairman of the Montgomery County Republican Committee in Pennsylvania who resigned last week after being accused of sexual assault was arrested on Tuesday on 19 counts, including rape and drug charges.

Sources told several news outlets last week that Robert Kerns had gotten drunk and assaulted a woman following a GOP dinner in October.

On Tuesday, Kerns was taken into police custody and charged with rape of an unconscious victim, rape of a substantially impaired person, sexual assault, aggravated assault without consent, aggravated assault of a person unaware penetration was occurring and 8 other forms of assault.

A woman was left shocked after finding what appeared to be a snake's head in a bag of frozen green beans.

Misty Moser made the gruesome discovery after pouring the green beans into a bowl at her home in Oregon.

She initially thought the body part was just a collection of beans but quickly realised it was something more sinister.

'I noticed it had a mouth, nostrils, and little tiny eyes. Not what I thought I was buying,' she said.

The store where she purchased the green beans, Fred Meyer, said it planned to investigate the incident once Moser had returned the vegetables with the snake head.

An Israeli soldier admitted that she shot and killed unknown numbers of Palestinian people, including children, on a Ukrainian television program that aired in early November.

Elena Zakusilo, a Ukrainian Jewish woman who moved to Israel in order to serve in the Israeli army, revealed on the Nov. 4 episode of the program "Lie Detector" that she had killed Palestinians and had shot at Palestinian children, but was unsure how many she managed to kill.

Zakusilo, who goes by the name Elena Gluzman in Israel, also explained that she trained army dogs to raid Palestinian villages and conduct video surveillance that she monitored from up to 10 kilometers away.

Four school employees, including the superintendent and an assistant football coach, were indicted by a grand jury investigating a possible coverup in the Steubenville rape case.

The charges were announced Monday by the state's top prosecutor, who decried "blurred, stretched and distorted boundaries of right and wrong" by students and grown-ups alike.

"How do you hold kids accountable if you don't hold the adults accountable?" Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine asked.

Superintendent Michael McVey, 50, was charged with tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice in the aftermath of the incident at the center of the case: the sexual assault of a drunken 16-year-old girl by two high school football players after a booze-fueled party in August 2012.

A Nashville bar owner claimed self defense over the weekend after fatally shooting country music singer Jerald Wayne Mills, 44, in connection with an argument over smoking.

Witnesses told WSMV that 44-year-old Chris Michael Ferrell shot Mills at the Pit & Barrel bar at around 5 a.m. Saturday morning following an argument that started when the singer began smoking in a non-smoking area. The suspect and the victim were reportedly friends.

Mills was later pronounced dead after being taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

"We're investigating Chris Ferrell's claims of self-defense," Nashville police spokesperson Kris Mumford told the Tennessean.

Ferrell had a valid permit to carry a handgun, according to WSMV.

In 2010, both the Tennessee state House and Senate overrode Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen's veto on a bill to allow handguns in bars.