Remember the brouhaha that erupted when James Franco engaged in online flirting with a 17-year-old girl?

Franco blamed his own carelessness, saying he didn’t know she was underage, and I’d like to believe him. I certainly don’t want to believe, as has been suggested, that he cooked up the whole incident as a way to publicize his turn as a student-chasing high school teacher in Palo Alto.

If he did, he would be exhibiting the kind of faulty decision-making that marks just about everyone in the flick, which is based on Franco’s 2010 collection of stories about his California hometown.

Co-written and directed by Gia Coppola (granddaughter of Francis Ford and niece of Sofia), Palo Alto shows teens smoking, drinking, taking drugs and engaging in meaningless sex. And that’s on their good days. On their bad days, they destroy property, drive recklessly and generally endanger themselves and those around them.

Too often “the law” is nothing more than prejudice embedded in jargon.  

So the Obama administration, in its attempt to hammer another national security leaker, is directly challenging the right of journalists to protect confidential sources. Administration lawyers, arguing this week before the Supreme Court — which rejected New York Times reporter James Risen’s appeal of a Circuit Court decision that could require him to testify in the case against a former CIA officer — asserted, according to the Times, that “reporters have no privilege to refuse to provide direct evidence of criminal wrongdoing by confidential sources.”

New Mexico orders United States to protect people and environment

Plutonium and other radioactive elements were accidentally released from the only U.S. underground nuclear weapons waste storage site in New Mexico on Valentine’s Day 2014. More than three months later, investigators think they’ve found an underground container that failed – and that there are hundreds more like them, both underground and above ground, at different sites in New Mexico and Texas. Investigators haven’t yet said exactly what caused the underground failure in February, or whether more than one underground waste container failed, but there have been no reports of further failures among the hundreds of now suspect containers, all of which are thought to contain a dangerous combination of nitrate salt and other chemicals.