A stormwater pipe under an unlined coal ash pond at a shuttered plant in Eden, North Carolina, burst Sunday afternoon - draining tens of thousands of tons of coal ash into the Dan River.

Duke Energy, which owns the Dan River Steam Station, retired since 2012, estimates that 50,000 to 82,000 tons of coal ash and up to 27 million gallons of water were released from the 27-acre storage pond. The leak has at least temporarily been stopped, while Duke works on a more permanent solution. Coal ash is a toxic waste byproduct from burning coal, usually stored with water in large ponds.

The closest community at risk from the spill is Danville, Virginia, which takes its water from the Dan River about six miles downstream of the pond. No water quality issues have been reported so far.

"This is the latest, loudest alarm bell yet that Duke should not be storing coal ash in antiquated pits near our state's waterways," Frank Holleman, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) told the Charlotte Business Journal.

A female school administrator in California who was accused in a viral YouTube video of sexually abusing a student has admitted to police that she had an inappropriate relationship with her the victim, starting with she was just 14.

Andrea Cardosa, 40, was arrested Monday when she turned herself into the Riverside County Sheriff's Office - more than two weeks after she was publicly accused by Jamie Carrillo.

Police began investigating Cardosa, an assistant principal at Alhambra High School in Los Angeles County, Ms Carrillo - now 28 - posted a YouTube video in which she accused Cardosa of abusing her for several years, starting when she was a 14-year-old student in 1999.

The video included a recording of a phone call in which Cardosa appears to admit having a sexual relationship with Ms Carrillo when she was teenage student.

Ms Carrillo posted the clip on January 17 and it made national headlines. Cardosa resigned from her job at the school the same day.

Since then, a second former student of Cardosa's - 18-year-old Brianna Govea - came forward to say she was sexually assaulted, a well. That abuse, Ms Govea claims, took place from 2009 until 2010.

The Texas teenager who avoided prison after a psychologist described him as suffering from "affluenza" has been ordered by a judge to attend an undisclosed rehabilitation facility.

Ethan Couch was given ten years' probation last December for killing four people and seriously injuring two while driving drunk. On Wednesday, district judge Jean Boyd again did not issue any jail time and assigned him to the centre in a court hearing that was closed to the media.

The sentence handed out by Boyd last year outraged the victims' families and the case attracted national attention after a psychologist called by the defence testified that the teenager had "affluenza", indicating that his behavioural problems were influenced by a troubled upbringing in a wealthy family where privilege prevented him from grasping the consequences of his actions.

Critics said the outcome was an egregious example of a justice system that treats the rich and the poor differently.

Committee attacks church's handling of sex abuse allegations, but archbishop says findings are outdated and ideological

The leadership of the Roman Catholic church is engaged in a tense standoff with the United Nations after a damning report on the Holy See's handling of the clerical sex abuse scandal was branded out of date, unfair and ideological by a top Vatican official.

After the appearance last month of a Holy See delegation before the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the expert panel published a series of highly critical observations accusing the church of failing to acknowledge the scale of the problem and implementing policies that led to "the continuation of the abuse and the impunity of the perpetrators".

The committee said it was particularly concerned that, when dealing with allegations of children being abused by priests, "the Holy See has consistently placed the preservation of the reputation of the church and the protection of the perpetrators above children's best interests".

I don't know what did or did not happen between Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow more than 20 years ago, and neither does Nicholas Kristof. What I do know is that Allen is a moral nihilist. This should not be taken as evidence that he sexually molested Mia Farrow's adopted daughter when she was 7 years old, or taken as a sign that he'd condone such behavior. But it does mean he espouses a philosophical outlook that renders him powerless to condemn it.

Let me be clear about two things right off the bat. First, I'm a great admirer of Allen's filmmaking - and like Andrew Sullivan and Rod Dreher, I think the artistry of his films can and should be judged apart from his (perhaps substantial) moral failings. Second, I consider nihilism to be a viable, albeit false and ultimately chilling, philosophical and existential position. In describing Allen as a nihilist, I am not issuing an indictment - simply describing an outlook that he has elaborated in several films and interviews over the years.

Allen's most thorough cinematic treatment of nihilism and its moral implications can be found in what may be his greatest film, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). The movie tells the story of an ophthalmologist named Judah Rosenthal (played by Martin Landau) who decides to kill off his lover Dolores (Angelica Houston) when she threatens to divulge their affair to Judah's wife. (Allen's Match Point (2005), an inferior film in almost every way, explores many similar themes.)

At first wracked with guilt over the murder, Judah eventually gets over his moral qualms. (As another character quips in the film, "comedy is tragedy plus time.") In a shocking subversion of Hollywood-style happy endings as well as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment - in which the character Raskolnikov is driven by unremitting guilt to confess a pair of murders to the authorities - the film ends with Judah seemingly at complete peace with himself and thriving in every way: Happy, wealthy, successful, adored by a beautiful wife and daughter, with the latter soon to be married.

When a real terrorist attack happens, sometimes we don't hear about it until months afterward (if we ever hear about it at all). For example, did you know that a team of snipers shot up a power station in California? The terrorists destroyed 17 transformers and did so much damage that the power station was shut down for a month. And it only took them 19 minutes of shooting to do it. Of course most Americans have absolutely no idea that this ever happened, because they get their news from the mainstream media. The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at that time says that this was "the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred", and yet you won't hear about it on the big news networks. They are too busy covering the latest breaking news on the Justin Bieber scandal.

And maybe it is good thing that most people don't know about this. The truth is that we are a nation that is absolutely teeming with "soft targets", and if people realized how vulnerable we truly are they might start freaking out.

If you have not heard about the attack on the Silicon Valley substation yet, you should look into it. The following is an excerpt from a Business Insider article about the sniper assault...

The Wall Street Journal's Rebecca Smith reports that a former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman is acknowledging for the first time that a group of snipers shot up a Silicon Valley substation for 19 minutes last year, knocking out 17 transformers before slipping away into the night.

The attack was "the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred" in the U.S., Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time, told Smith.

Evidence found at the scene included "more than 100 fingerprint-free shell casings", and little piles of rocks "that appeared to have been left by an advance scout to tell the attackers where to get the best shots."

So much damage was done to the substation that it was closed down for a month.

Emergency Management released the audio tape of Freedom Industries reporting the Jan. 9 chemical spill that shut down access to public water for 300,000 people in the Charleston area.

The remarkably laconic late-morning phone conversation between a company representative and a hotline operator named Laverne reveals Freedom Industries minimizing the extent of the spill and making several flat-out misstatements about what's transpiring. It's safe to predict that this tape will become Exhibit A in pending civil litigation accusing Freedom of negligence and in any potential criminal charges related to the spill. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Charleston has said that it has launched a wide-ranging probe of the incident. Freedom Industries and its executives have denied any wrongdoing.

The caller from Freedom Industries, identifying himself as Bob Reynolds, says on the audio tape that the substance being released isn't toxic or hazardous and isn't escaping into the Elk River. A containment wall has blocked the spill from spreading, he adds. Both statements were incorrect.

Before the lawsuits and the retreat into federal bankruptcy court, before the change in ownership in a veiled roll-up by an out-of-state coal baron, before the Justice Department's environmental-crimes investigation, the presidentially declared emergency, and the National Guard's arrival - nine years before all of that - the co-founder of Freedom Industries, the company at the center of the Jan. 9 chemical spill that cut off tap water for 300,000 West Virginians, was convicted of siphoning payroll tax withholdings to splurge on sports cars, a private plane, and real estate in the Bahamas. And 18 years before that, in 1987, before he started Freedom Industries, Carl Kennedy II was convicted of conspiring to sell cocaine in a scandal that brought down the mayor of Charleston.

Little known, even locally, Freedom was born and operated in a felonious milieu populated by old friends who seemed better suited to bartending at the Charleston-area saloons they also owned. "These people who were running Freedom Industries weren't the sort you'd put in charge of something like chemical storage that could affect the whole community," Danny Jones, Charleston's current mayor, says. "Who are these guys, anyway?"

Good question. Kennedy kept the books for bars and restaurants, including a rib house Mayor Jones used to own, although he hadn't gotten to know him well. "He was pleasant enough," Jones says. Until the spill, the mayor had no idea his former accountant had been enmeshed with Freedom. That really seems troubling, Jones says, "especially with the cocaine stuff in his history."

A cafeteria manager has been put on paid administrative leave following an incident that saw up to 40 students with unpaid school meal tabs having their lunches seized and thrown away.

Salt Lake City School District officials investigating the seizure warn that more employees could be put on leave.

Officials originally said the decision to trash the lunches was made by a district-level "child nutrition manager," but now say that the investigation could implicate people higher up on the chain of command.

The seizure, which occurred Tuesday at Uintah Elementary in Salt Lake City, prompted cries of outrage from parents, local and state politicians and social media, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

Utah state Sens. Jim Dabakis, a Democrat, and Todd Weiler, a Republican, held a press conference outside the school Thursday before joining the students for lunch.

Weiler condemned the decision to take lunches from students, calling it "bullying."

Would you like to buy a house for one dollar?

If someone came up to you on the street and asked you that question, you would probably respond by saying that it sounds too good to be true. But this is actually happening in economically-depressed cities all over America. Of course there are a number of reasons why you might want to think twice before buying any of these homes, and I will get into those reasons in just a little bit. First, however, it is worth noting that many of the cities where these "free houses" are available were once some of the most prosperous cities in the entire country. In fact, the city of Detroit once had the highest per capita income in the entire nation. But as millions of good jobs have been shipped overseas, these once prosperous communities have degenerated into rotting, decaying hellholes. Now homes that once housed thriving middle class families cannot even be given away. This is happening all over America, and what we are witnessing right now is only just the beginning.

The photo that I have posted was sent to me by a reader just the other day. It is a photo of a house in Yakima, Washington that is apparently being given away for free. At one time it was probably quite a lovely home, but now nobody seems to want it...

This piqued my curiosity, so I started doing some research and I discovered that homes all over the nation are being sold off for a dollar or less. The following are just a few examples...

-Buffalo, New York: "The Urban Homestead Program that is offered by the City of Buffalo enables qualified buyers to purchase a home that has been deemed 'homestead eligible' for $1.00 and there are plenty of properties left. There are three main requirements when purchasing a homestead property; the owner must fix all code violations within 18 months, have immediate access to at least $5000, and live there for at least three years. You also have to cover the closing costs of the purchase."