Michael T. Slager—the white police officer arrested Tuesday and charged with murder after video surfaced of him gunning down an unarmed black man, Walter L. Scott—has been fired from the North Charleston, S.C. police force. He had served for five years.

After roughly a decade of living in nightmarish captivity and being forced to view a man's exposed dick on a weekly basis, residents of one Charlotte, N.C. neighborhood are organizing to rise up against their nude oppressor.

President Obama's State of the Union Address in January was the highest-profile moment of post-Recession recovery bluster. As Obama noted in soaring rhetoric, "we've seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficits cut by two-thirds, a stock market that has doubled, and health care inflation at its lowest rate in fifty years." And more than the actual signs of recovery, national fist-pumping has sent a resounding signal that the country is in full-on comeback mode.

The body of Kay Grayson—known to locals as the "Bear Lady" who cared for the animals that lived on her 12 miles of land east of Columbia, North Carolina—was found on her property 200 yards from her trailer. Investigators believe she was dragged into the woods by a bear. She was 67.

The FBI has agreed to investigate the death of 17-year-old Blandenboro, NC teen Lennon Lacy, who was found hanging from a trailer park swing set Aug. 29 by a dog leash. Local officials ruled his death a suicide, but skepticism cast by the teen's mother, the NAACP, and the county coroner has compelled a federal probe.

If the explosion of attention around "hot mugshot guy" Jeremy Meeks earlier this year proved anything, it's that America is thirsty for sexy alleged criminals. It was only a matter of time before someone was anointed "cute mugshot girl," and 18-year-old Alysa Bathrick is your lucky winner.

A former North Carolina high school teacher has been accused of carrying out a sexual relationship with an underage student whose name and initials she later tattooed on her body—and with whom, texts seem to suggest, she and her husband had a threesome.

A black teenager in Fuquay-Varina, N.C. was pepper sprayed by police inside his own home earlier this week after neighbors reported him as a burglar.

In a video that would be funny if it didn't revolve around violent bigots, representatives of the Ku Klux Klan confirmed the organization's call to shoot border-crossing immigrants from Central America to advance its goal of a "white homeland" in the United States.

A North Carolina man is dead following a shootout with authorities after opening fire on a mobile home, killing two people. Reuters reports that alleged shooter Andrew Michaelis had argued with his wife prior to the incident. She took shelter at her father's trailer at the Crystal Springs Mobile Home Park. Michaelis allegedly fired a semi-automatic weapon into the trailer, killing his father-in-law, Gary Simpson, and his 10-year-old grandson, Trekwan Covington.

Last week, Valerie Macon became the poet laureate of North Carolina. Valerie Macon is a disability claims processor with no major publications who was picked singlehandedly by the governor. And you still can't get the slush-pile intern at Copper Canyon Press to answer your goddamn emails.

North Carolina State Police are on the hunt for two twentysomethings with an apparent affinity for fake, expensive dinosaurs. The couple can be seen in security footage from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh jumping a barrier, snatching the $10,000 Edmontosaurus hatchling replica, and running off with it in a bag.

Meanwhile, as everybody continues to piss and moan over the free-speech rights of overpaid commencement speakers, Republican lawmakers in one state are trying to pass a law that would jail anyone who discusses the industrial chemicals used in fracking.

Clay Aiken won the Democratic nomination for North Carolina's 2nd congressional district this afternoon, just one day after his primary opponent, Keith Crisco, died from injuries suffered in a fall.

Clay Aiken, the runner-up from season 2 of American Idol, holds a slim lead in his Democratic Congressional primary against former North Carolina Commerce Secretary Keith Crisco this morning. Aiken is ahead by just 372 votes with all precincts already reporting, leaving the race too close to call.

There's still time for you to vote for the anti-gay marriage ex-drag queen in today's North Carolina GOP primary for Senate. As he puts it: "Regardless of what I did in my twenties—remember to VOTE today—vote conservative and vote after praying." And DANCE after voting. In Lucite platforms!

Mark Harris could win North Carolina's GOP Senate primary next Tuesday. If so, he may easily become the state's next U.S. senator. And he could do it all with sketchy "love offerings" from parishioners caught on tape passing the hat at the church where he's a pastor.

Nothing says "cool" like being in charge an elite private school in suburban North Carolina. So it's fitting that Durham Academy's Head of School Michael Ulku-Steiner and his assistant Lee Hark would announce the school's closing today in the coolest way possible: with a cover of Vanilla Ice's "Ice, Ice, Baby."

It's election day at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill! Who's your pick for student body president? You have a 25 percent chance of being represented by Emilio Vicente, a homosexual from Guatemala who clambered into America through a barbed-wire fence when he was six.

American Idol maven and auburn-haired Broadway crooner Clay Aiken thinks "Washington is dysfunctional." So he'd like to be a congressman and fix all that now, please, thank you very much.