The governors of New York, California and Washington state formed a coalition to fight global warming in response to President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord.
The United States Climate Alliance will push to cut greenhouse gases and lead a state-level initiative to support the global agreement that the president has derided as harmful to U.S. interests, governors Andrew Cuomo, Jerry Brown and Jay Inslee, all Democrats, said in a statement Thursday. The three states represent more than 20 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.
The push reflects growing U.S. efforts at the state level for initiatives aimed at fighting climate change, as the White House moves in the opposite direction. That local support come from policies that will be difficult the Trump administration to change and will continue to drive demand for clean energy in the U.S.
“The White House’s reckless decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement has devastating repercussions not only for the United States, but for our planet,” Cuomo said in the statement. ‘‘We will not ignore the science and reality of climate change.”
Utilities are also criticizing Trump’s move.
“Today’s decision deepens our resolve on getting the policies right in California,” Melissa Lavinson, vice president for federal affairs at PG&E Corp., owner of California’s largest utility, said by phone Thursday. “Even without regulation of carbon, even without the Clean Power Plan, you’ve seen the industry transition its generation fleet.”
A South Carolina legislative panel has approved a budget compromise that begins shoring up the state pension system, spends $55 million to upgrade K-12 schools, and provides $68 million for Hurricane Matthew cleanup costs.
The agreement reached late Wednesday on a roughly $8 billion spending plan for state taxes ends weeks of negotiation. The Legislature is expected to return for a special session next week to approve the compromise.
Grants to help repair dilapidated schools in high-poverty districts will come three years after the state Supreme Court ordered legislators to improve opportunities for students in poor, rural districts.
The plan puts $150 million into shoring up the state pension system for public workers, following a law passed last month that increases employers' rates for the next six years.
Gov. Henry McMaster says a new law closing loopholes in South Carolina's Freedom of Information Act represents "a big step forward" in government transparency.
McMaster ceremoniously signed a law Wednesday that requires state and local governments, school districts, and other public entities to respond more quickly to public records requests and prevents them from charging excessive fees.
The law took effect with McMaster's signature May 19, which capped a seven-year effort to strengthen public access to government records.
McMaster says it doesn't go far enough.
To get past one senator's opposition, the Senate stripped out a section creating a state hearing officer to quickly and cheaply settle disputes.
McMaster says it's "cumbersome" for people to have to sue obstinate government agencies in Circuit Court.
Updated, 7:30 p.m. with statement from Preston attorneys
The South Carolina Court of Appeals said today that former Anderson County Administrator Joey Preston will have to pay back the $1.1 million serverance he received when he resigned in 2008.
The court ruled the severance null and void, and suggested that Preston's retirement account might be a source of income for the repayment. The court found the four council members who voted for the severance had a conflict of interest and that lower courts were in error in previous rulings. Preston will also be liable for legal fees, which have been estimated at between $600,00-$800,000.
The court found the severance was voted on in absence of a quorum, and that Preston can no longer pursue a counter-suit against Anderson County for breach of contract.
This ruling comes on the heels of last year's court ruling requiring Preston to repay $1.2 million in the former Anderson County Councilman Ron Wilson's silver Ponzi scheme. Wilson is currently serving a 17-year prison sentence in the case. The court in the silver case also had suggested the money be paid from Preston's retirement fund.
It is unlikely Preston has the resources to repay either/both cases, said one source in the case.
The ruling also reversed earlier court decisions which held the county acted improperly in seek remedy in the case against Preston.
The appeals court is sending the ruling back to the lower courts to "determine the rights and remedies of the parties in light of this opinion."
Anderson County has spent approximately $3 million to date on legal fees relating to the Preston case.
Attorneys for Preston told the Anderson Observer Wednesday night, the matter is still in the hands of the courts. There statement, released to the Observer at 7:19 p.m. is as follows:
""We have only just received the South Carolina Court of Appeal’s ruling from earlier today and have not had a chance to analyze the opinion, nor discuss it with our client. After a cursory review, we do have several concerns about the decision’s legal reasoning and findings. Once we have the opportunity to review the opinion more closely and discuss the ruling with Mr. Preston, we will decide how best to proceed. Based upon the Court of Appeals’ ruling, however, it does appear the litigation will inevitably continue, whether in the trial or appellate courts, since the opinion remands the case to the trial court for additional proceedings.”
ATLANTA — Peaches are such a part of Georgia’s identity that schools, streets and health care plans are named after them. Even the sticker you get when you vote is in the shape of the fruit. South Carolina, one state over, grows more peaches than Georgia. A giant statue of a peach is its most famous roadside attraction.
For almost all Southerners, a summer without a seemingly endless supply of peaches is unthinkable. But growers say the unthinkable is about to happen in America’s cobbler belt. A double punch of unseasonably warm winter weather and an ill-timed freeze has devastated the peach crop.
Production in Georgia might be a quarter of what it was in 2016, when the state produced 86 million pounds of peaches, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. In South Carolina, which is second only to California in peach production, the numbers are as bad or worse. As much as 85 to 90 percent of the state’s peach crop is gone, according to the South Carolina Department of Agriculture. The state’s peaches usually bring in about $90 million a year, and their impact on the greater economy is three times that much.
“It’s just really, really bad,” said Juan Carlos Melgar, an assistant professor of pomology at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C. “Historically bad.”
Although many growers have crop insurance, it won’t replace lost income. And it won’t help workers who rely on the peach crop. Peaches provide about 1,500 jobs in South Carolina. Many workers are from Mexico and spend as much as nine months pruning the trees, thinning the orchards and harvesting the crop. Many contracts are being canceled or cut short, and workers are heading home or trying to find other agricultural work, Dr. Melgar said.
The problem began with a long stretch of warm weather over the winter, which deprived the trees of chill hours. That’s the time a tree needs to be exposed to temperatures colder than 45 degrees to ensure consistent blooming and plenty of fruit.
Fruitless peach trees at Pearson Farm in Fort Valley, Ga., about 100 miles south of Atlanta. A double punch of unseasonably warm winter weather and an ill-timed freeze devastated the peach crop.CreditMaura Friedman for The New York Times
Then came a brutal three-day freeze in March. In South Carolina, many trees had blossoms or had already set fruit; that crop was devastated. In Georgia, the trees were so confused by the weather many just never produced fruit at all.
The strange weather combination might save some of the crop. Trees that had worried farmers when they were late to bloom because of the warm winter weren’t hurt by the freeze. As a result, Georgia will have early peaches, but growers warn the supply will stop by early or mid-July, which is when most people here say peaches begin to taste the best.
It’s an odd blessing, said Will McGehee, the sales and marketing manager of Pearson Farm, which grows peaches and pecans in Fort Valley, Ga., about 100 miles south of Atlanta, in a part of the state with 1.6 million peach trees.
“If you go by what the old-timers say, we should have had nothing,” he said. “Let’s just say we’re looking forward to pecan season.”
South Carolina has the opposite problem. The state’s early fruit was wiped out, but growers are hopeful about the late-season crop. There just won’t be that much of it. Roadside stands and local markets will be stocked with peaches, but there will be little to ship elsewhere.
In Atlanta, grocery stores might appear to have more peaches than usual in the next month or so because shippers are likely to forgo the cost of shipping most of the state’s peaches north, which is what they do when the crop is more abundant, said Gary W. Black, Georgia’s agriculture commissioner.
This year, Northerners might not miss that Southern fruit at all. The 2017 New England peach crop is looking great, growers there said. Of course, after last year, any peaches look good.
Will McGehee, the sales and marketing manager at Pearson Farm, said that bad weather spared some of the early peach crop, but that supplies will be limited. In other areas, the crop was wiped out.
The Northeastern peach crop was pummeled in 2016 when zero-degree temperatures hit orchards so hard some growers still call it the Valentine’s Day Massacre. Massachusetts had virtually no peaches, and the New Jersey crop, which usually arrives in markets by July, was down by half.
For Southerners, whose summertime rituals involve eating peaches over the sink, making them into cobblers and ice cream and canning whatever’s left, California might offer the only solution. That state is expected to grow about 625,000 tons of peaches. That’s up almost 8 percent over last year, according to Department of Agriculture estimates.
But one would be hard-pressed to find a Southerner who really wants a California peach, even though that state produces half the nation’s crop. California fruit can’t compete with fruit born in Southern soil and made sweet with the heat of Southern nights, they argue.
Peach loyalty goes beyond taste, especially in Georgia. The peach helped recast the state’s image after the Civil War and the brutal days of Jim Crow. Savvy Georgia peach growers started sending fat Southern peaches north in the early 1900s, beating Northeastern fruit to market and lifting the reputation of a region that desperately needed it, said William Thomas Okie, a history professor at Kennesaw State University who explores the history of the peach in his book, “The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture and Environment in the American South.”
He grew up in the South, the son of a plant breeder. And like many Southerners, he’d rather not eat peaches at all than eat one from California during a Southern summer.
“I feel like California peaches are just symbols of peaches,” he said. “They’re just the idea of a peach. I feel the same way about winter tomatoes.”
The Supreme Court on Tuesday placed sharp limits on how much control patent holders have over how their products are used after they are sold.
The case concerned Lexmark International, which makes toner cartridges for use in its printers. The court ruled that the company could not use patent law to stop companies from refilling and selling the cartridges.
Mark Lemley, director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, said that anyone who refurbished, repaired or resold used products would now be protected from patent infringement claims. The ruling will also prevent manufacturers from forcing consumers to buy supplies only from the original source.
“It’s good for consumers,” Mr. Lemley said. “It’s going to reduce consumer prices.”
Lexmark sold the cartridges on the condition that they not be reused after the ink ran out. Impression Products, a small company in Charleston, W.Va., nonetheless bought Lexmark cartridges in the United States and abroad, refurbished and refilled them, and sold them more cheaply than Lexmark does.
Lexmark sued for patent infringement, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a specialized court in Washington, accepted both of its main arguments, concerning domestic and international sales.
The appeals court acknowledged that the general rule was that buyers of patented products could do with them what they wished. But it said the conditions Lexmark placed on the sale of its cartridges could be enforced as a matter of patent law for sales in the United States.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for a unanimous Supreme Court on this point, disagreed. He said Lexmark could not use the patent laws to enforce the contractual conditions it placed on the sale of its cartridges. Under the doctrine of “patent exhaustion,” he wrote, once a patent holder sells an item, it can no longer control the item through the patent laws.
“The purchaser and all subsequent owners are free to use or resell the product just like any other item of personal property, without fear of an infringement lawsuit,” the chief justice wrote.
In honor of the National Spelling Bee, which starts today, Google decided to see what words people in each of the 50 states struggle to spell.
To do this, employees looked at Google searches of “how to spell ______” in each of the states from Jan. 1 to April 30 this year. Whatever word filled that blank most often in each state became denoted as that state’s “most misspelled word.”
The results may not be scientific, but they sure were amusing.
Perhaps most amusing, though, was that when Google first tweeted the “America’s Most Misspelled Words” infographic, it pointed out that folks in Washington, D.C., needed the help of the Internet to spell the word “ninety.” Only, the infographic read “nintey.”
Google quickly corrected the graphic, allowing its viewers to focus on the peculiar results.
People in Wisconsin, for example, most frequently searched for how to spell Wisconsin.
The longest word Americans didn’t know how to spell, searched for by both West Virginia and Connecticut users, was also an invented one: “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” the word that one magic nanny named Mary Poppins sang about. (In related news, “nanny” was Mississippians’ “most misspelled word.”)
The shortest word searched for, meanwhile, was “gray” by users in Georgia. It’s important to note, however, that Merriam-Webster dictionary also accepts “grey” as a spelling, though it noted this is less common.
“Beautiful” and “pneumonia,” two very different words, tied for most “most misspelled word.” Users in California, Kentucky, Minnesota, New York and Ohio searched for the former, while people in Alabama, Illinois, Maine, Michigan and Washington sought the latter.
The other results simply raised questions.
For example, were users in Arkansas watching old Taco Bell commercials or searching for an indoor pup when they wanted to know how to spell “Chihuahua”? And was there a rush to the zoo in Louisiana, because the “giraffe” certainly isn’t native to the area?
What were the people in New Jersey counting to when they sought the spelling of “twelve” and who, exactly, was searching for “people” in Hawaii?
The problem with data, of course, is that it often poses more questions than it gives answers.
Take a look at the full list below, sorted by alphabetical order.
Washington Post - The Democrat running for Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney’s vacant South Carolina House seat claims to be putting it into play, with an internal poll showing him 10 points down in an environment where Republicans are less likely to vote.
A poll from Anzalone Liszt Grove Research, completed on May 25 and obtained by The Post, has Democrat Archie Parnell down by 10 points to Ralph Norman, a state legislator making his second run at the rural and suburban seat. That’s a six-point bump for Parnell since March, when he began running TV ads, and it’s closer than the margin in Mulvaney’s last few races or the last presidential elections in South Carolina’s 5th District.
Mulvaney, the first Republican to win the district, won his elections while a Democrat was in the White House. In a Trump-era election, ALGR finds Democrats more interested in voting, twice as likely (5o percent to 26 percent) as Republicans to call the election “very important.” Just 42 percent of the district’s voters back the American Health Care Act, which the pollster described as the bill “to repeal and replace” the current health-care law. Fifty percent of voters opposed it.
Parnell’s campaign hopes that the numbers could do what only happened belatedly in Kansas and Montana — get national Democrats to swoop in with funds. Parnell, a former corporate tax attorney, raised about as much money as Norman and avoided a two-round primary, while Norman triumphed in a bitter runoff that was not called for days. Unlike Montana’s Rob Quist, who ran as a populist but got caught flat-flooted by opposition researchers and some policy questions, Parnell has run as a pragmatist who wants to check the House Republican agenda. Unlike Quist, Parnell has been able to campaign without a Republican tracker filming his moves. Unlike Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat whose runoff also occurs on June 20, Parnell has not been the target of a single negative spot.
And to put it mildly, Parnell is less colorful than Quist, a 6-foot-3 poet and folksinger who performed at a nudist colony and wrote his own campaign anthem. Parnell’s sunshine-y ad campaign has leaned into his dry, deadpan persona; the latest of his web videos riffs on the new season of “House of Cards” by having Parnell intersperse villainous bon mots with actual news from the Trump administration.
The Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday proposed a $435,000 fine against United Airlines for purportedly operating an airplane “that was not in airworthy condition.”
In June 2014, United mechanics replaced a fuel pump pressure switch on one of the carrier’s Boeing 747 jetliners. But the FAA claims that the airline did not complete a required inspection of the repair before the plane resumed flying.
United flew the aircraft on 23 domestic and international passenger flights before the inspection was ultimately performed, according to the FAA. The plane may have even made two flights after the FAA notified United about the problem, the agency said.
“Maintaining the highest levels of safety depends on operators closely following all applicable rules and regulations,” FAA chief Michael Huerta said in a statement. “Failing to do so can create unsafe conditions.”
United, in a statement, provided a slightly different account of what happened.
“We immediately took action after identifying the issue and are working closely with the FAA in their review,” spokesperson Charles Hobart said.
The FAA said that United has asked to meet with the agency to “discuss the case.”
United has had a tough year. The airline was pummeled with bad press after a passenger was violently dragged off one of its flights in April after refusing to give up his seat. Video of the encounter quickly went viral.
The airline has since settled a suit brought by the passenger, Dr. David Dao, for an undisclosed amount.
Smaller incidents, such as a 3-foot-long rabbit that was found dead after it flew with United, have also hurt the company’s public image.
With nearly 82 percent of the vote, Republican Richard Cash on Tuesday easily won the S.C. Senate District 3 seat vacated by Lt. Gov. Kevin Bryant.
Cash ran uncontested for the race, after winning the
Of the 3,034 votes cast, only 679 (18 percent) of the write-in votes did not go to Cash.
The District 3 seat was previously held by Lt. Gov. Kevin Bryant. Bryant become the state’s Lt. Governor after Gov. McMaster was sworn in in January.
Cash won a Republican Primary Runoff earlier by a narrow margin over Carol Burdette. Burdette received 611 of the 679 write-in votes. No Democrat or third party candidates registered to run for Tuesday's race.
Teen births continue to decline in the United States, with health officials reporting a 9 percent drop from 2013 to 2014.
Births to 15- to 19-year-olds fell to a historic low of 24 births per 1,000 women in 2014, said Sherry Murphy, a statistician at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.
At the same time, the proportion of births to women 30 and older increased, said Murphy, lead author of the report.
Mothers 30 and older accounted for 30 percent of births in 2014 -- up from 24 percent in 2000, the researchers found.
There were other changes in U.S. birth patterns as well.
"The number of overall births increased 1 percent in 2014 to about 4 million, compared with 2013," Murphy said.
The infant mortality rate decreased slightly in 2014 to a historic low -- about six infant deaths per 1,000 births, the findings showed.
However, "the U.S. infant mortality rate is still higher than many other developed countries," Murphy said.
Other key findings from the report included:
Decreases in cesarean deliveries continued, and preterm births declined for the seventh year.
Death rates for children aged 1 to 19 did not change significantly between 2013 and 2014. Unintentional injuries and suicide were the top two causes of death in this age group.
For the report, the researchers used 2013 to 2014 records that included birth certificates, death certificates and reports of fetal death across the United States.The report was published online May 30 in the journal Pediatrics.
Carol Burdette, former candidate for the South Carolina Senate District 3 seat left vacant by Lt. Gov. Kevin Bryant, has purchased Facebook ads saying accusations she said are being spread by Richard Cash implying she is a write-in candidate for today's election are not true.
Cash, who defeated Burdette in the GOP primary, prompted the following statement late yesterday:
"The Anderson County Republican Chairman emailed and texted me this weeken requesting I make a puiblic statement about an accusation made by the Cash campaign of a 'write-in Carol Burdette.' Let me say for the last time publicly/privately again, I am not involved in any effort (even if it is true) to have my name written on the General Election ballot for State Senate tomorrow.
This is yet another falsoe highly charged accusation by our Republican nominee Mr. Cash as he again attempts to motivate his supporters to turnout for an election. Since it worked once, he is probably just doubling down on his past political tactics. As a Republican, I would prefer Mr. Cash and the Anderson GOP focus our Party's attention on cleaning up the ethics mess at the statehousee, and making sure we become the same party of solutions at the local level we are on nationally. The over 60,000 Anderson County Republicans deserve better than a nominee and a local party (made up of just a few dozen people) who spend time personally attacking folks and engagin conspiracty theories."
FITS News is reporting the South Carolina Democratic Party was wagin a robocall campaign encouraging voters to write-in Carol Burdette, but so far no one has come forward on the record to say they have received such a call.
Observer attempts to reach Cash for comment have so far come up short. Will update when he repsonds.
CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — A new alternative certification program is being offered for college graduates in South Carolina who want to teach but don't have an education degree.
A Texas-based company called Teachers of Tomorrow is offering a program where participants spend a year as a classroom intern and take about 300 hours of online courses.
After completing those requirements, the candidates will have to complete three years of teaching in sixth through 12th grade with a provisional license before getting their professional state teaching license.
The Post and Courier of Charleston reports (http://bit.ly/2qz2gjb ) is the eighth alternative certification program recognized by South Carolina and a bill signed by Gov. Henry McMaster will allow the state Board of Education to authorize more.
The programs are designed to fill teacher shortages around the state.
Thursday, June 1, 2017 at 6:59AM 