If news is something new, something you didn’t already know, something unexpected or out of the ordinary, then the article by The Post and Courier’s Nick Reynolds about South Carolina’s astronomical DUI death rate probably wouldn’t qualify.

On Aug. 6, 1974, a News and Courier columnist lashed out at South Carolina's highway department for having "one of the most inept design divisions in America." He listed several examples, but his main beef was the ongoing work to remove existing sidewalks to widen a local four-lane bridge to…

Less than a month after it went public, the folks behind the Pawleys Litchfield Municipal Study Group have a lot of answers:

No one knows if two environmental groups will prevail in court and force a rewrite of Charleston County's $5.4 billion half-cent sales tax referendum question that is expected to be decided by voters this fall, but voters have a logical recourse if the groups don't win.

It turns out our old friend Sharon Staggers wasn’t the only Williamsburg County elected official with her hand stuck in the cookie jar. Turns out, in fact, that she might not even be the worst offender.

The 120-foot-long former naval research vessel and its smaller companion mired in the mud near Wadmalaw Island’s Cherry Point boat landing serve as a glaring reminder that the problem of abandoned boats littering South Carolina’s coastal waterways is one that will never completely go away.

Most South Carolinians don’t have a dog in the Isle of Palms’ ongoing fight over whether to liberalize its seawall ordinance. But the debate at the very place where multimillion-dollar homes meet the public beach has been instructive in a state that’s grappling with whether to protect the br…

The Sea Fox Boat Co. and the Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission solved one problem this month when they agreed to abandon their controversial plan for a new public park and a private boat building facility on 86 acres along the Ashley River. Nearby residents in southern North C…

Things are getting pretty heated in the legal battle between Erskine College’s Charter Institute and a for-profit company that runs some of the charter schools that the institute allowed to operate with our tax dollars.

On Thursday morning, Charleston officials will hold a ceremony to reopen Hampstead Square, the historic East Side park whose four quadrants have been undergoing a series of cosmetic upgrades that are now completed.

The S.C. Department of Environmental Services raised eyebrows earlier this month when it admitted that it had paid $20,000 to a marketing company to design an unimpressive logo for the new agency.

Years ago, Charleston officials, civic leaders and residents began talking about the city's most pressing resilience challenges, and they agreed it would help to focus not only on what government should do but also on what homeowners and renters can do.

Did the Jasper County School Board suspend its superintendent for globetrotting on the taxpayers’ dime while the schools she was supposed to be overseeing continued failing to educate their students?

It’s getting hotter — Sunday was the warmest single day ever recorded, until that record was broken on Monday, according to the European climate service Copernicus — and we’re seeing heat waves lasting longer. This is posing a threat to public health, and while there is still much we don’t k…

When we lock people up — whether we call it incarceration or juvenile detention or involuntary commitment — we become responsible for their health and general well-being: We have to provide them with adequate food and shelter and clothing, and we have to tend to their medical needs.

For generations, the low-lying, forested land known as Snow's Island was protected by the very thing that drew Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion and his men there almost two and a half centuries ago: its remoteness.

It’s been a tumultuous few weeks in the presidential race — President Joe Biden’s disastrous display of decline in his debate with former President Donald Trump, a Supreme Court opinion that might green-light lawlessness by future presidents, the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump and now Mr…

A bill to honor Civil War hero, Reconstruction leader and Congressman Robert Smalls sailed through South Carolina's General Assembly this year almost as deftly as the Planter, a Confederate ship piloted by Mr. Smalls, slipped out of Charleston's well-fortified harbor one fateful night in 1862.

Henry McMaster was on the cutting edge of protecting South Carolina’s rivers. At a time when water wars were still a southern California concept and nearly everyone thought South Carolina would have all the water it wanted as long as it wanted it, Mr. McMaster recognized the economic threat …

Hilton Head Island is looking to replace the U.S. Highway 278 bridges that provide its only link to the mainland, and current plans call for new bridges that will have not two but three lanes in each direction on and off the island, for a total of six lanes. So why does Johns Island — which …

Adapting to higher sea levels means a lot of things for a city such as Charleston, and there's been plenty of debate so far on major infrastructure projects and new land development rules that aim to minimize harm from floods. Less talked about is how all of us should adapt our own behavior.…

In recent years, most everyone realized that a plan to build about 240 new homes at the headwaters of Church Creek in West Ashley — one of Charleston's most flood-prone areas and one where governments already have bought out existing homes because they flooded too frequently to fix — was an …

Anybody who thought the S.C. Legislature could silence the growing complaints about how it elects judges with a few tweaks was mistaken.

The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump was first and foremost an act of political violence — the most dangerous internal threat any nation can face.

Attempts to kill U.S. political leaders and would-be leaders are not common, but neither are they unheard of.

Tuesday's news that Charleston once again topped Travel + Leisure's readers list of top U.S. destinations should not have surprised anyone. After all, our city had held the No. 1 spot for 11 years, and nothing happened to change the magazine's 186,000 reader responses this year. And we toppe…

Four months after the S.C.State Ports Authority agreed to sell Union Pier to Charleston businessman Ben Navarro for an as-yet-undisclosed price and involving as-yet-undisclosed conditions, we don't know much more than we knew back then.

Any day now, an independent auditor will start digging into South Carolina’s treasury, trying to figure out the origins and purposes of that mysterious $1.8 billion that Treasurer Curtis Loftis finally came clean about this year — along with whatever other problems our state’s financial chie…

Gov. Henry McMaster once again demonstrated his commitment to preserving South Carolina’s abundant natural resources last week, with vetoes of two provisos that would have invited property owners to build illegal seawalls on our wide sandy beaches.

While Charleston was among the nation's first cities to use zoning to preserve its most historic buildings — and while the Board of Architectural Review's scope and territory have gradually expanded since its creation almost a century ago — the city has fallen behind in identifying and prote…

We’ve heard a lot about what the super-partisans think about the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Trump v. United States. Of course, most of them didn’t need to read it to come to a conclusion: A decision that placed any limits on efforts to prosecute former President Donald Trump for his att…

The city of Charleston didn't create the problem at 88 Smith St., where a single-family home was built a century ago atop two historical yet largely abandoned cemeteries that hold hundreds of graves. But as we noted three years ago, the city could and should do more to address the increasing…

A year ago, when a disgruntled underling who didn’t get the job she wanted made trumped-up allegations that Charleston County’s then-School Superintendent Eric Gallien had created a hostile workplace, the School Board responded in a shameful way.

When people complain about growing government in South Carolina, they’re usually complaining about spending increases designed to keep pace with inflation and pay for enough services to meet the demands of our exploding population. On a per-capita basis, total spending and total number of st…

As one of the fastest-growing states in the nation, South Carolina faces a special challenge to ensure its growth doesn't erode a key aspect of our state's livability: the relative ease in which we can crisscross our state, from the mountains to the beaches. Some might mistakenly think addre…

It's not too surprising that the FBI has opened an inquiry into how the city of North Charleston directed $1.3 million to 13 nonprofits working to reduce gun violence. The idea behind these grants appeared well-intended, but it had become clear months ago that the program was an invitation t…

Never underestimate the ability of South Carolina’s elected officials to come up with new and imaginative ways to conduct the public’s business in secret.

This is the time of year when it’s most important to protect ourselves from the sun’s damaging ultraviolet rays — not only to keep cool but to stay alive.

The Fourth of July is another great day on the American calendar in which gatherings with family and friends, travel and cookouts compete for our attention with the weighty matters that gave birth to the holiday in the first place.

After a lone gunman killed 60 people and injured more than 500 at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017 — a level of slaughter made possible in part by a bump stock device and a semiautomatic rifle — the federal government did the right thing and banned such devices. Unfortunately, it did so th…

If you think it’s strange that we celebrate Independence Day with both a federal and a state holiday but only have a federal holiday for Juneteenth, you’re right.

Three years ago, we joined others in lamenting Dominion Energy's plan to cut down more than 500 mature palmettos on Folly Beach, as they had grown dangerously upward and into overhead power lines. And we noted the only good options were to avoid planting such trees directly under power lines…

We look forward to seeing how many and which pork-barrel projects S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster vetoes this year, because that will tell us which legislators refused to provide basic information about the earmarks they sponsored. It also will tell us whether Mr. McMaster, having done a tremendous…

The reform measure the Legislature sent to Gov. Henry McMaster on Wednesday won’t solve the multitudinous problems with the way South Carolina picks judges.

In the Republican runoff for Charleston County sheriff, former Mount Pleasant Police Chief Carl Ritchie received about 1,200 fewer votes than he did in the primary two weeks earlier. He still won the nomination anyway because Greg Kitchens' vote total dropped by more than 4,000.

It was no surprise that House budget negotiators agreed to stick South Carolina taxpayers with a $2 million bill to pay beachfront property owners and their attorneys because state regulators have been enforcing a 36-year-old law.

The State Ports Authority should be commended for resolving the longstanding labor dispute that has prevented its new crown jewel, the $1.3 billion Hugh K. Leatherman Terminal, from operating at anywhere near what it was built to handle — and to resolve it in a way that should bring a new er…

We're pleased that the city of North Charleston still has most of the $25 million in sidewalk repair and capital project money that it had agreed to spend in equal sums in each of its 10 council districts; this only confirms our view that there is a vastly better approach to handling this ty…

Lawmakers have been focused on the state budget since they ended the regular legislative session May 9, and passing it is the main reason they’re returning to work Wednesday. But the most important governmental reform in decades is still hanging in the balance, as is the year’s most talked-a…

Jon Ozmint is a former state prosecutor who made a name for himself as director of the S.C. Corrections Department by refusing to let legislators get away with slashing funding to the prisons while simultaneously passing ever-tougher crime laws to send more criminals into those prisons for l…