You don't need to take a side in the novel lawsuit that the state of California filed this week against Exxon Mobil — in which the state accuses the company of leading a decades-long campaign of deception about the effectiveness of recycling plastics — to appreciate that our state, our natio…

Superintendent urges teachers to use PragerU videos that push politically conservative ideology, backs legislation to keep liberal opinions out of classrooms.

The four-year battle between the team developing a large, new mixed-use building at 295 Calhoun St. and the city and neighborhood and preservation groups that have opposed it seems to be coming to an end, and that's a good thing. As we have said, the only real solution to this years-long deb…

On July 6, 2014, a 26-year-old woman was driving drunk and crashed into a police car driven by Dillon Police Officer Jacob Richardson.

The redevelopment of the historic Chicora Elementary School in southern North Charleston has been a touch-and-go prospect ever since the nonprofit Metanoia decided to tackle the ambitious project several years ago, in hopes of not only preserving a building but also giving the neighboring co…

Of all the local governments being asked to forgo future property tax revenue to help build out public parks and infrastructure for what we hope will be Union Pier's imminent redevelopment, the Charleston County School Board faces the most difficult choice.

It’s hard to imagine that whoever posted implicitly racist comments about the Philip Simmons High School football team meant them as a threat. It’s equally hard to imagine that high school students aren’t old enough to know better. Particularly if, as all indications suggest, those students …

Legislators haven’t yet rallied around a plan to respond to the surprising S.C. Supreme Court ruling that declared their school voucher plan unconstitutional, but Gov. Henry McMaster says he wants a do-over in court “so that the children of low-income families may have the opportunity to att…

Other than mayor, no city official rivals that of police chief in importance. After all, a city government's first job is to keep its residents (and visitors) safe; everything else flows from that.

There is no question that Freddie Owens committed horrible crimes. He fatally shot a convenience store clerk while he robbed the store in 1999, allegedly because she couldn’t open the safe. After his conviction and before he was sentenced to death, he murdered his cellmate.

Now that we know more details about what the city of Charleston would get for committing almost $50 million to a major redevelopment at a strategic West Ashley gateway, we can recommend this project more robustly. While the new plan contains only a small fraction of city office and meeting s…

Two months ago, the Secret Service failed to protect former President Donald Trump from an assassination attempt, which fortunately did not succeed at least in part because local police spotted the gunman, who fired prematurely and inaccurately. On Sunday, the Secret Service succeeded, spott…

Nearly a year after the state entered into what has become an extremely lucrative rental contract with the chairman of the State Ports Authority, legislators are having second thoughts about agreements that require taxpayers to cover insurance, utilities and property taxes in addition to ren…

We’ve mostly steered clear of S.C. Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver’s effort to take over decisions about what books can and can’t be available in public schools, because we agree that schools shouldn’t offer books that are essentially how-to manuals for having sex.

We understand why those urging Charleston County voters to approve a new sales tax proposal in a November referendum are campaigning under the name "Citizens for Safe Roads." It's because "Citizens for an unpopular and unnecessary third bridge to Johns Island that will cost at least $2.4 bil…

So now the Atlantic Beach Election Commission wants the state to investigate what it calls voter fraud involving 13 ballots from the November election that it says without evidence came from non-residents.

The Exchange Club Fair of Charleston does commendable work generating income to support local charities and service organizations and promoting patriotism, but we're scratching our head as to why its leaders now think they're transportation experts.

Fourteen-year-old Colt Gray is an outlier. Two-year-old Zane Sebastian Burgess was not. Yet the boys are two sides of the same coin. Or perhaps more correctly, their parents are.

It should go without saying that elected officials should pay taxes like the rest of us, but unfortunately it doesn't. Sometimes — for instance, since we've learned that two North Charleston City Council members apparently believed otherwise — it should in fact not only be said but also ensured.

The race is on for Berkeley County's leaders to prepare for the coming wave of population growth and to ensure all the new residents, homes and jobs change the once-rural county for the better, not for the worse.

The growth of oyster farming operations in South Carolina's coastal waters on balance is a good thing, as this emerging new fishery holds the promise of positive additions to the state's economy and our restaurant menus. 

It takes a special kind of person to voluntarily spend eight hours a day in a room with someone else’s 3- or 4-year-old — let alone a dozen of them. They can scream for no particular reason. They run around at what can seem like warp speed. They follow instructions when they want to. Some pr…

We hope the structural concerns that prompted last month's temporary closure of the Peoples Building in downtown Charleston are indeed able to be addressed so it can reopen soon. But the surprising news that its water intrusion and resulting rust had reached such a critical point is another …

We’ve never been convinced that kids ever need cellphones, but certainly not in school. Teachers have long agreed with that second part, and this year the South Carolina Legislature finally embraced that idea. But instead of taking the time to write a well-thought-out ban itself, it gave som…

Goose Creek has a deep history, extending back to colonial times when settlers valued its link via the Cooper River to the port city of Charles Towne and its far enough inland location that offered plentiful fresh surface water. However, its landscape today reflects its much more recent hist…

We consider our editorials sort of like court rulings — not that they have the effect of law but that they should build upon previous opinions and not depart from our established positions without giving a very good reason why.

If we had a dollar for every complaint we've heard about tree trimming, we would be comfortably retired by now and not writing this editorial about tree trimming.

South Carolina eye doctors fought for years to prevent a national nonprofit from providing free eyeglasses to poor kids in Charleston.

Can we all agree that the erotic/bondage novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” doesn’t belong in the children’s section of the public library?

The city of Charleston faces no greater challenge than how it will adjust to an era of rising seas, stronger storms, heavier rains, sinking ground and rising groundwater, and it must adjust to this reality with a sense of urgency as well as a sense of patience, as this is a long game that ca…

To more and more Americans, this fall’s election feels like it could mark the beginning of the end for our democratic republic. Where they differ is over who poses that threat: Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

During last year's Charleston mayoral election, no issue provided as much contrast between incumbent John Tecklenburg and challenger William Cogswell as their visions for what to do at one of West Ashley's most visible — and flawed — intersections, where Sam Rittenberg Boulevard joins up wit…

Almost a decade ago, a pathetic offshoot of the KKK took its cowardly show to Columbia to protest the Legislature’s decision to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds. Another out-of-state hate group, this one on the far left, staged a counter rally on a different side of th…

We’re heartened by news that South Carolina’s Commission on Higher Education seems to be getting itself back on even footing following revelations that it sat on $152 million that could have been helping students afford college.

As South Carolina continues to lead the nation in growth, its ongoing challenge is to ensure all of its new population and accompanying development don't change what drew people to this state in the first place.

If you were asked to amend South Carolina’s constitution so it says “only a citizen of the United States and of this State of the age of eighteen and upwards who is properly registered is entitled to vote as provided by law,” what would you think that means?

One reason more people have been reluctant to embrace calls to reduce greenhouse gases — and in turn lessen the degree of future climate change and its negative impact on future generations — is an understandable concern that the sacrifice being sought is too large, especially given the ever…

To casual observers, it all looked quite friendly — chummy even — when a special S.C. Senate committee met Thursday with the executives of Dominion, Santee Cooper and Duke, who want to speed up the state’s approval process to let them build new power plants to address what they call a loomin…

We're encouraged by recent progress toward redeveloping Union Pier and creating a new neighborhood that would be a worthy complement to downtown Charleston's most historical neighborhoods, even though we still know little to nothing involving the property's sale price and conditions or its p…

In Lake Wobegon, that fictional Midwestern town where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average, they look forward to the annual release of school test scores. Most other places, not so much.

If sunshine is the best disinfectant, heavy rains can be the opposite, creating an unsanitary mess. That's what we saw across Charleston earlier this month as Tropical Storm Debby reminded us of at least two weak spots of our region's primary sewer system.

We don't know all the events, disagreements and hurt feelings behind the unfortunate and unsettling exodus of 10 board members from Spoleto Festival USA. Nor do we have particular insight into the festival's high rate of staff turnover in recent years, as Mena Mark Hanna took over from Nigel…

We’re not accustomed to good news out of the Charleston County School District, as the current board and its most recent predecessor seemed determined to throw up obstacles to improvement.

Back to school unfortunately has come to mean back to kids bullying each other and getting into fights and taking guns and other weapons to school, either to threaten others or in misguided efforts to protect themselves. It’s part of a wider cultural degradation toward the normalization of v…

It has been the better part of a decade since the city of Charleston acquired the roughly 2-mile-long former railroad right of way that runs from the top of the peninsula southward to the former railroad buildings around Mary, Ann and John streets in hopes of making a new urban trail along t…

South Carolina’s new chief justice never has been convinced that lawyer-legislators are a problem. The public perception of them is a different matter, particularly as prosecutors have stepped up their attack on the special privilege his predecessors have granted them: He worries that the gr…

Charleston Mayor William Cogswell's decision to impose a curfew beginning at 11 p.m. Aug. 5 — as forecasters called for a devastating amount of rainfall from Tropical Storm Debby — might have spared many from the misery of having their cars ruined and from the very real dangers that flow fro…

Back when the private Erskine College decided to give itself the power to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars in tax money, and rescue failing charter schools from state-mandated closure, and of course keep its cut of our money, we warned that others would follow suit if the Legislature…

South Carolina needs to start making plans for finishing its piece of the East Coast Greenway, a three-decade-old effort to build a sort of urban Appalachian Trail along the East Coast, from Maine to Florida.

The most obvious problem with the South Carolina drug interdiction program Rolling Thunder is that its success is measured in part by how much money police seize from innocent people — or at least people never charged with a crime.