A gunman fired several shots at a pair of police officers, hitting one, and held two hostages for nearly nine hours - but all came away from the standoff without serious injuries.

The worst injury Wednesday occurred when an Inglewood policeman was shot in his bulletproof vest. He was taken to a hospital in good condition but "in a lot of pain, police Capt. James D. Madia said. He suffered blunt force injuries and was set to spend the night in another hospital as a precaution, police said.

The second officer in was not hit but was hurt when she fell down in the chaos that followed, Madia said. She was treated at a hospital and released.

The 45-year-old gunman and the girlfriend and her 14-year-old daughter that he held hostage in their house all came away unharmed, police said.

Pedestrians with their heads buried in mobile phones are increasingly being warned against walking carelessly through traffic - but an Australian man texting as he crossed the road has encountered one obstacle he could not have predicted.


An Australian man using a mobile phone has been caught on security vision jumping out of the way of a hidden snake trying to bite him.

In a near-venomous experience near Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, a man using a mobile phone was forced to dance frantically out of danger when he almost accidentally stood on a snake as he crossed the road.

The frantic encounter from earlier this month was caught by a security camera and the video posted online this week shows the startled serpent lashing at the man, who tries to get away.

Parenting 101

Parenting is said to be one of the most, if not the most, taxing jobs in the world. They say as a parent you don't get paid with money, you get paid with love. And no matter how many children you bear, it still always feels like taking care of one for the first time. According to the American Psychological Association, "Parenting involves three main goals, ensuring children's health and safety, preparing children for life as productive adults and transmitting cultural values". A parent-child relationship built on good values may define how the child will be in the future.

The first walk, the first words, the first tooth, the first birthday, all these things are milestones that any parent would never want to miss as they are indicative of the growth of their precious children. As parents, you may have a different style of rearing your child. You may be authoritative, authoritarian, permissive or uninvolved. You may also be a mix of all four. And mind you authoritarian and authoritative are not at all the same. As parents you should give your children just enough measure of freedom to be able to explore the world and do what they need to do. Free play is the first freedom parents confer their children. Creating a safe and accessible playground for them to explore is a responsibility parents must undertake in order to allow their children's full potential to be unleashed.

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.