Editorials represent the institutional view of the newspaper. They are written and edited by the editorial staff, which operates separately from the news department. Editorial writers are not involved in newsroom operations.
Those nasty cigarette butts don’t just trash up the beach; they also constitute the world's biggest source of ocean trash, according to several environmental and anti-smoking groups.
With a polarized Congress unable or unwilling to work together to make difficult choices, President Donald Trump has stepped in and issued executive orders extending urgently needed federal benefits and legal protections to the unemployed and people facing eviction.
It would be understandable if the strain and uncertainty of the pandemic caused people to pay less attention to what their local government is up to, but that also would prove to be a tragic mistake in the long run.
It was July 16 when South Carolina passed a once-unimaginable milestone, with more than 1,000 COVID-19 deaths. By Tuesday, just 26 days later, another 1,000 of our neighbors likely will be dead from the novel coronavirus.
It’s encouraging to see Charleston County Council recognize the seriousness of one of this region’s biggest problems, a lack of affordable housing. And it’s encouraging that County Council is poised to take a meaningful step toward addressing it: creating a new income stream that would raise…
Airbus has offered to give up loan subsidies from Spain and France for the Airbus A350, which competes directly with the Boeing 787 assembled in North Charleston. The company said this gesture should settle the long-running Airbus-Boeing dispute over illegal government subsidies and that the…
Locking down South Carolina's nursing homes should have made them the safest places for the frail elderly. Instead, more than 10% of residents have tested positive for COVID-19, even as they suffer isolation that can increase the risk of abuse and neglect.
With $50 million in federal funding, S.C. officials have been moving quickly to provide students with internet service before classes resume and to expand high-speed service to unserved areas. So far, they’ve signed up 57,000 student households for free hot spot service through Dec. 31 at a …
The story of former Florence County Sheriff Kenney Boone is a classic American tragedy that’s hard to read, and not just because we’ve heard it too many times and know its inevitable ending:
Three spaceships are headed to Mars, including one containing a U.S. rover and a helicopter that will search for signs of past life on the Red Planet. SpaceX just successfully brought home two astronauts from the International Space Station in a reusable capsule that splashed down on Sunday.…
Gov. Henry McMaster and others have talked a lot about how the mixture of alcohol with the novel coronavirus in bars and nightclubs is driving a surge in COVID-19 infections among young people.
Remember the old call to “flatten the curve”? The primary goal of school closings and stay-at-home orders and other disruptions we’ve endured since March was to prevent the coronavirus pandemic from overwhelming our hospital system.
Your average person doesn’t get a visit from the mayor as she prepares to celebrate a 92nd birthday, but Christine Jackson isn’t your average person: She’s one of Charleston’s most significant civil rights leaders.
Voters in House District 115 are used to having a smart mainstream lawmaker representing them in the S.C. House, and that tradition will continue after Tuesday's special election to fill the seat that Judiciary Chairman Peter McCoy vacated when he was named U.S. attorney.
One of North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey’s longtime goals has been to make his city a great place to live, work and play, and perhaps his greatest challenge has been the third objective.
A 200-acre parcel along the upper Ashley River that the Lord Berkeley Conservation Trust recently put under an easement will ensure the small but important piece of land remains in its natural state to do what it does best: filter runoff draining into the river and help support a variety of …
Charleston lost some of its sense of security the night of May 30, as a peaceful protest wound down and was replaced by a smaller, more hostile group that lingered downtown and trashed scores of businesses and traumatized people in its path.
Charleston County passed a historic preservation ordinance in 2018 and appointed the first members of its new preservation commission last year. An issue that came before commissioners last month — a proposed natural gas line through the county’s largest historic district — shows what a good…
Disasters such as the coronavirus pandemic speed up trends already in progress, and that should be perfectly clear to anyone who has tried recently to drive out to the Isle of Palms to spend time on the beach. Under emergency auspices due to COVID-19, the City Council undertook a draconian a…
News that South Carolina’s charter schools are double-dipping in federal COVID-19 relief funding feels more than a little wrong, particularly coming just a week after Gov. Henry McMaster started throwing public money at private schools.
It’s time to start paying close attention to what comes swirling across the Atlantic, because meteorologists say hurricane season 2020 will be more active than normal — look at Tropical Storm Isaias, which could affect South Carolina as soon as Monday — and any evacuations will be complicat…
We usually think about police video in the context of deadly encounters between officers and suspects. But as The Post and Courier’s Stephen Hobbs reminds us, the need to protect the truth — whatever it might be — doesn’t end once a suspect is at the police station.
The Federal Communications Commission recently closed one of the last big loopholes in its campaign against illegal robocalls, a campaign that happily achieved major goals authorized last year by Congress.
Probably the craziest thing to come out of Education Superintendent Molly Spearman’s AccelerateEd task force — or, rather, to not come out of it — was the lack of a mask mandate on school buses.
It’s no surprise that a recent survey found widespread agreement that the Charleston region has a serious lack of affordable housing. Anyone who looked to buy or rent in recent years can tell you that.
Gov. Henry McMaster’s decision to replace most of the board of the S.C. Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics offers yet another reminder of how far our state is from getting its arms around the coronavirus pandemic.
It’s understandable that Mount Pleasant’s leaders would take their time to ensure that the town’s new comprehensive plan strikes just the right notes. After all, growth and development issues have driven the town’s politics for years.
We’ve been arguing for weeks about whether it’s safer for kids to stay home or return to in-person classes with South Carolina’s COVID-19 infections soaring. That’s the wrong question.
For generations, Charleston’s regional growth has spread along Interstate 26 like oil up a wick, and news that Walmart plans a major distribution center on the State Ports Authority’s Ridgeville Commerce Park marks yet another big step west.
President Donald Trump is soon expected to sign a far-reaching public lands bill that for the first time will permanently and fully fund the 55-year-old Land and Water Conservation Act at $900 million per year and provide $9.5 billion over five years for maintaining national parks.
In the age of COVID-19, the Congress has been spending breathtaking amounts of money in ways we never would have imagined: sending $1,200 checks to everyone it can find an address or bank account number for, providing larger unemployment checks than the paychecks they replaced, doling out bi…
Anyone who still doubts the struggles that the pandemic has created for many in the Charleston region should show up at 9 a.m. Friday at Mount Moriah Baptist Church on Rivers Avenue in North Charleston.
Rarely has a particular building gone from being so publicly embraced to so publicly ridiculed in a short period of time — even before it was built.
In the middle of a pandemic that is stretching our hospital capacity and seems stubbornly unwilling to just go away on its own, nurses are essential employees with a capital E.
The novel coronavirus has led the federal government to run up the national debt at an unprecedented rate. The numbers are mind-numbing but essential indicators of our economic health.
The renovation of North Charleston’s old Chicora Elementary School for use by community groups, including a school, is one of the most worthy projects to emerge in this city in recent years. It would be a shame to see it all fall apart.
Cozy Bear definitely should not to be confused with Yogi or Smokey. Cozy Bear doesn’t prevent fires, it sets them.
Sending kids to school two days a week would solve a lot of the problems pediatricians identified when they warned that children's physical and mental health also were at risk if we don’t get them back in the classrooms this fall, but it won't solve them all, and it could plunge families into financial turmoil. The Charleston County School District says it can bring students back five days a week in at least half the schools; it needs to make changes to hold five-day classes in a lot more schools.
The fire that gutted a front-line Navy ship in San Diego last week will leave the military with fewer options for deploying vertical-landing F-35Bs in the Pacific region and weaken the United States’ ability to maintain navigational freedom in the disputed South China Sea.
There are times when police need the element of surprise — to be able not just to show up unannounced but also to break down a door and come charging into a house in the middle of the night, weapons drawn, in order to prevent a dangerous criminal from harming a hostage, or escaping, or destr…
Special interests that try to manipulate our votes don’t fight to keep their identities secret because they’re publicity shy. They do it because their causes often are unpopular, and they know that voters might be more cautious if they knew the motives behind their messages.
Among Charleston’s greatest challenges has been finding a way to help pay for the major capital projects it needs — and expects to need — to combat flooding and sea level rise.
Coal-generated electricity is on its way out, and it’s clear environmental groups will apply whatever pressure they can to hasten its demise. But that doesn’t excuse the state Department of Health and Environmental Control for failing for years to properly monitor and regulate pollutants and…
The bad news is the city of Charleston’s yearslong legal fight over the existence of its tour guide licensing program is over, and the city lost.
As COVID-19 infections continue to spike and our hospitals fill up, the SC Revenue Department is ramping up its annual push to pack everybody into clothing, footwear, electronics and home goods retailers on a single weekend for the annual back-to-school sales tax holiday.
South Carolina’s lone law enforcement academy in Columbia closed in March because of the pandemic and just reopened last week at about half capacity. The backlog of new hires awaiting the Criminal Justice Academy’s required training is now around 300 statewide.
It seemed like a great idea: Launch a new public warning system for the Charleston area so residents can understand the current threat level of COVID-19 and adjust their plans accordingly.
The fact that we have to affix a stamp to our envelope when we mail in our absentee ballot does not mean — as Democrats claimed in their lawsuit seeking absentee ballots for all during the pandemic — that South Carolina levies a “postage tax” on voting. That’s like saying we have a gasoline …
Energy markets are changing fast, especially around natural gas and big infrastructure projects, and that has some important implications for South Carolina diversifying and growing its energy mix.
The U.S. Supreme Court decision that private-school-choice advocates are cheering doesn't mean South Carolina has to give parents vouchers to abandon the public schools. It's a reminder that we shouldn't subsidize religious or secular private schools.