High level of arsenic have been detected near Duke Energy's Riverbend power plant, right next to Charlotte, North Carolina's main water supply source.

The toxins have been traced back to Duke Energy's coal ash pits, after abnormal levels of arsenic were discovered on June 20.

While the state safety threshold for arsenic in surface water is 10 parts per billion (ppb), June's reading showed levels of 95 ppb, according to Mecklenburg County officials.

The samples came from the water adjacent to the Duke Energy's Riverbend Steam Station Coal Ash Ponds in Mountain Island Lake. The two ponds at Riverbend hold 3.6 million tons of coal ash, which showed the high levels of arsenic. The discovery came after operators drained the coal ash ponds at the Riverbend Steam Station in January, in preparation for excavating the ash.

From the west to the east, and the south to the north of our global horizon, it is the same tableau: the horrendous killing fields of disaster capitalism where its cohorts of 18-wheelers, heavy road machinery and police patrol cars roam the landscape continuously and are turning us and the better principles of our humanity into countless road kills. Hell on Earth is to be our common fate, and we might have already reached a point of no return. The corporate hyenas and political vultures that generally constitute the global elite are joyfully feeding on the carcasses of justice and morality; rationality and empathy; common sense and the notion of public good; sound governance without corruption and equality before the law; and last but not least, freedom and fair governance through democracy.

New housing laws are forcing poorer tenants to leave London as the government start to charge them market rents.

The fact that it is cheaper to have a mortgage in the capital than it is to rent speaks volumes and only goes to show the poor state UK's housing market has come to.

Areas once considered inhabitable or "too rough" have now turned into wealthy upmarket regions of London and investors are snapping them up.

Imprisoned whistleblower Chelsea Manning was taken to a hospital in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas after reportedly attempting suicide in the maximum-security military penitentiary, where she is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking classified documents.

Manning was transported to the hospital Tuesday, according to CNN's crime reporter Shimon Prokupecz.

Recent scandals involving US military personnel have been widely covered by the international media. Instead of being the "bulwark of American democracy" and the "defenders of peace and security" American bases and their occupants are rapidly becoming a symbol of lawlessness and crime, as evident by the vocal criticism that has been voiced by various members of the international community in various countries around the world and numerous protests local residents have held in a desperate bid to have these bases removed.

Less than a week ago a new wave of protests swept the US embassy in Japan, after the arrest of yet another American soldier who was driving a car while drunk on Okinawa.

It should be remembered that it's been only a short while since US military commanders introduced prohibition on military bases on Okinawa after a US soldier injured two local residents in a car accident. Okinawans have been demanding the closure of US military bases on the island for years. The latest string of incidents resulted in the largest anti-American protest of the last two decades. The demonstration was attended by tens of thousands of people that demanded the military bases be shifted to a deserted part of the island to avoid the continuation of numerous criminal deeds committed by US servicemen. Similar demands are being voiced by the residents of pretty much all the islands of Japan.

Okinawa witnessed the bloodiest skirmishes between American and Japanese soldiers during the Second World War, and has been forced to live under total US occupation until 1972. Beginning in the 1950s the so-called "red threat" was used as a pretext for the continued occupation, though nowadays there's no certainty from whom the US is trying to protect Okinawa, all while victimizing its citizens.

The ABC will apologise to its viewers and review its science program Catalyst after an independent investigation found a controversial episode on the potential health risks of Wi-Fi that went to air earlier this year breached its editorial standards.

The damning finding - which will see reporter Maryanne Demasi suspended from on-air assignments until at least September - comes two years after a similar investigation slammed a Catalyst program questioning the use of cholesterol-reducing medications.

As with the earlier program on cholesterol, the Wi-Fi episode will be removed from the internet.

Prominent scientists attacked the February program at the time as scare-mongering and unscientific for questioning the links between Wi-Fi and brain tumours.

A Syrian former Guantanamo detainee has gone missing after resettling in Latin America. An internal alert was issued by a Brazilian airline for Jihad Ahmed Dhiab, as Uruguayan authorities had for weeks believed that the ex-prisoner was in Brazil.

The former detainee was one of six who resettled in Uruguay as part of a proposal by then-President Jose Mujica. Under law Dhiab is entitled to leave his new home for other countries, but authorities across borders have lost all track of him, with the Uruguayans insisting for weeks he was in Brazil. However the Brazilians say they have no record of him entering the country, the Associated Press (AP) reports.

Alarms were first raised in late June, when law enforcement in Brazil began the search in coordination with American and Uruguayan authorities. According to the Washington Post, US officials believed Dhiab had left for Brazil without the necessary documents to do so legally. Local Uruguayan media reported then that the former detainee was free to move about as he pleased, but the Brazilians confirmed he had previously been denied entry into the country.

Uruguay's internal minister was unable to clarify the situation, although, according to the AP, another Uruguayan official claimed that Dhiab was in fact allowed to enter Brazil. In either case, the deepening mystery threatens to inflame further the tensions between the White House and Congress - Dhiab's resettlement being part of the Obama administration's strategy for eventually shuttering the Guantanamo Bay facility.

The appetite for U.S. real estate continues to flourish, but international buyers are shifting their sights from luxury to less-pricey properties. This may be due to overall higher home prices, along with a stronger U.S. dollar, which both cost foreign buyers more at the negotiating table. There are also fewer nonresident foreigners investing in the market.

"Weaker economic growth throughout the world, devalued foreign currencies and financial market turbulence combined to present significant challenges for foreign buyers over the past year," said Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors (NAR). "While these obstacles led to a cool down in sales from nonresident foreign buyers, the purchases by recent immigrant foreigners rose, resulting in the overall sales dollar volume still being the second highest since 2009."

Foreign buyers purchased $102.6 billion of residential property in the U.S. between April 2015 and March 2016, according to NAR's annual report on international activity in U.S. real estate. That is a 1.3 percent decline in dollar volume from the previous survey. The number of properties purchased, however, rose 2.8 percent to 214,885. The value of homes bought by foreigners was typically higher than the median price of all U.S. homes.

Veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are calling for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to indict former Prime Minister Tony Blair for war crimes. They spoke to RT about their sense of "betrayal" over the Blair-era Iraq War.

At the Westminster rally to mark the publication of Sir John Chilcot's report, after a seven-year investigation into the 2003 Iraq conflict, military veterans told RT of their disgust at the circumstances surrounding the war.

Dan Taylor, 28, served in Iraq in the artillery. He is now a member of Veterans for Peace, a growing group of ex-services anti-war campaigners.

After reading aloud from the platform the names of five Iraqis and five UK soldiers killed in the war, Taylor told RT: "I think Corbyn will indict [Blair] and he needs to. The question is, is there support behind him to do it?"

He also said the Chilcot report must now be "torn to pieces. We need to look at what isn't said. I suspect it will be heavily redacted and it has taken far too long."

On Wednesday, Facebook made an announcement that you'd think would only matter to Facebook users and publishers: It will modify its News Feed algorithm to favor content posted by a user's friends and family over content posted by media outlets. The company said the move was not about privileging certain sources over others, but about better "connecting people and ideas."

But Richard Edelman, the head of the communications marketing firm Edelman, sees something more significant in the change: proof of a new "world of self-reference" that, once you notice it, helps explain everything from Donald Trump's appeal to Britain's vote to exit the European Union. Elites used to possess outsized influence and authority, Edelman notes, but now they only have a monopoly on authority. Influence largely rests with the broader population. People trust their peers much more than they trust their political leaders or news organizations.

For 16 years, Edelman's company has been surveying people around the world on their trust in various institutions. And one of the firm's findings is that people are especially likely these days to describe "a person like me"—a friend or, say, a Facebook friend—as a credible source of information. A "person like me" is now viewed as twice as credible as a government leader, Edelman said at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. "We have a reversal of traditional influence. It is going not top-down, but sideways."

This is part of a larger divide that has been opening up between "mass populations" and "informed publics" (Edelman defined the latter group as those who have a college degree, regularly consume news media, and are in the top 25 percent of household income for their age group in a given country). The 2008 financial crisis, he argued, produced widespread suspicion that elites only act in their own interests, not those of the people, and that elites don't necessarily have access to better information than the rest of the population does. The sluggish, unequal recovery from that crisis—the wealthy bouncing back while many others struggle with stagnant incomes—has only increased the skepticism.