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.

Subiaco - A gruesome discovery was made recently in an isolated house in Subiaco, Italy. A man's elderly father had died in August 2011 and he hid the body in a sealed room in his house in order to continue collecting his father's pension.

Giampiero Di Tullion, the man's unemployed, 44 year-old-son has now been arrested by the police.

His father, Domenico Di Tullio was a former typesetter working at the Vatican. He passed away on August 4, 2011 at the age of 85. His son wished to continue collecting his pension of between 1300 and 1400 euros per month, as they both used to live on the money. He walled his father's corpse up in his small bedroom off the living room of the house, and sealed the doorway with silicon.

Son Giampiero was a former drug addict and was involved in drug dealing. Due to his history, and the fact that his father owned weapons, police were making a routine check of the house.

When they arrived at the house, they asked to speak to the father, and at first the son told them that his father was seriously ill and was under the care of his brother in Rome.

Roma Today (Italian) reported that the police became suspicious, however, and officers, led by Captain Alessio Falzone, entered the house. When they got no answer at the bedroom door in the living room, they broke in through the sealed door. Not finding anything initially in there, they continued investigating, and discovered a double wall, a kind of niche made of bricks and cement, behind which he had concealed the body of his dead father.

According to police, the body was wrapped in tape, similar to a mummy. On investigating further, police found blood stains and they did not, at first, exclude the possibility that the man could have been murdered.

Giampiero was arrested on the charge of concealing a corpse, along with aggravated fraud. He did, however, manage to escape the charge of voluntary manslaughter, as the autopsy showed that his father died of natural causes.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, aka Comrade Bala, ran separatist party-cum-commune from bookshop in Brixton, south London

The 73-year-old man arrested on suspicion of holding three women captive in a south London flat for 30 years is a one-time Communist party activist who was well known within far-left circles in London during the mid- and late 1970s as the leader of a separatist party-cum-commune.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, known as Comrade Bala, had been a senior member of the Communist party of England (Marxist-Leninist) - a member of the party's central committee - but according to a history of the movement he split from the party in 1974.

His new organisation, described as "characterised by the ultra-left posturing and Mao worship", was called the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. But the group is not thought to have been active since the 1970s - before one of the women, now aged 30, was born.

According to several newspapers, the tiny African country of Angola has become the first country in the world to ban Islam and Muslims.

The Angolan Minister of Culture, Rosa Cruz e Silva was quoted by news agencies and Angola newspapers as saying, "The process of legalisation of Islam has not been approved by the Ministry of Justice and Human rights, their mosques would be closed until further notice."

As part of the ban, the Angolan government ordered the demolition of the mosques in the country.

According to Silva, the decision was the latest in a series of efforts to ban "illegal" religious sects in the country. Silva's statement was made during her appearance last week at the 6th Commission of the National Assembly.

© techpresident.comIs the Omidyar Network the new Standard Oil?

Adversarial muckrakers + civic-minded billionaire = a whole new world

Make no mistake, news that Glenn Greenwald is leaving The Guardian to start a new publication funded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar is giant news - a bigger deal, in my book, than Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post.

(UPDATE: I should disclose that the Omidyar Network helps fund CJR, something I didn't know until shortly after I published this post.)

This isn't just another startup.

What makes this extraordinary is the combination of muckraking - and, dare I say, dissident - journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill with the gargantuan fortune of one of the first internet billionaires.

The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don't tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo. Billionaires tend to have a finger in every pie: powerful friends they don't want annoyed and business interests they don't want looked at. The Way Things Are may not work for most of us, but it ain't bad if you're an American billionaire.

San Antonio - Friday morning. On duty. Full Uniform. Marked Squad Car. Officer Jackie Neal, 40, made a traffic stop and then allegedly sexually assaulted a 19-year-old woman, according to the San Antonio Police Department.

Police said the 11-year veteran pulled the victim over on the south side and managed to get her to stand behind his squad car.

San Antonio police Chief William McManus described the events that followed as "unthinkable."

An investigation was opened after the victim contacted police. According to a statement issued by the department, Neal was taken into custody by SAPD Special Victims' Unit detectives after officers pulled him over around 2 a.m. Saturday.

He was arrested on a warrant for sexual assault, a second-degree felony.