Today 
Sunday, May 18, 2014 at 8:17PM Anderson County Council on Tuesday night will discuss the county's budget for 2014-2015, give final approval to the Duke Engergy Project near Williamston, hear a housing presentation by Anderson Interfaith Ministries and vote on third reading an ordinance on burying the remains indigent citizens.
The meeting will be held at 6:30 p.m. in the historic courthoiuse downtown.
Sunday, May 18, 2014 at 6:50PM
AT&T plans to pay $48.5 billion to buy DirecTV, the top U.S. satellite TV operator, in a bid for growth beyond an increasingly competitive cellular market.
The deal, announced on Sunday, comes as Comcast Corp awaits regulatory approval of its $45 billion bid for Time Warner Cable Inc, a transaction that has the potential to transform the television landscape by creating a new cable and broadband Internet powerhouse.
AT&T said it is offering $95 per DirecTV share in a combination of stock and cash, a 10 percent premium over Friday's closing price of $86.18. The cash portion, $28.50 per share, will be financed by cash, asset sales, financing already lined up and other "opportunistic debt market transactions."
Analysts said the deal would help support AT&T's dividend even as it confronts tougher competition from upstart T-Mobile USA and other cellular operators that have pressured its average revenue per user.
Sunday, May 18, 2014 at 3:38PM While one candidate for S.C. superintendent wants to legalize marijuana, another wants the NAACP to end its boycott of South Carolina. A third candidate has close connections to the Bush family. A fourth has been a strong proponent of abstinence-only education.
And that only hits the highlights. There are eight more candidates for S.C. superintendent of education in the June Democratic and Republican primaries on June 10.
The job pays $92,007 a year. It is an administrative position with responsibilities that include overseeing the state Department of Education and serving as secretary to the State Board of Education.
With so many candidates in the Republican race, a primary runoff is likely on June 24.
In the 2010 and 2012 primaries, all of the nine state-level races that had five or more candidates required runoffs, said Chris Whitmire, spokesman for the S.C. State Election Commission.
“A runoff may not happen, but if recent history holds true we would expect to see one,” Whitmire said.
GOP concern: Common Core
A majority of the Republican candidates have one thing in common: their vehement opposition to Common Core.
The education standards were developed by state education leaders and governors in 48 states. The standards specify what students should know at various grades; how they are taught is decided at the state and local levels. But the standards are opposed bitterly by some who say the federal government has coerced states into adopting Common Core.
The state Senate has sent legislation to the S.C. House that calls for a review of Common Core standards by Jan. 1, 2015. New standards would have to be enacted if that bill becomes law for the 2015-2016 school year, but the new standards still could be similar to Common Core.
The legislative action means that South Carolina’s new superintendent could have little say in what becomes of Common Core. But the issue is dominating the GOP primary to determine a successor to Republican Superintendent Mick Zais, who is not seeking a second term.
GOP candidate Meka Childs, a former Zais aide, said she was amazed by the pressure she felt as a member of the Education Oversight Committee to adopt Common Core. That pressure, she says, came solely because Common Core was tied to federal money.
“I don’t believe all federal money is evil,” said Childs, of West Columbia. But she wants to eliminate the federal government weighing in on standards, which she said are best addressed by states.
Sunday, May 18, 2014 at 1:33PM Tuesday's high-profile primary elections may extend a streak of sorts for Tea Party Republicans: losing individual races but winning the larger ideological war by tugging the GOP rightward.
Tea party-endorsed candidates are struggling in polls ahead of Republican congressional primaries in Georgia, Kentucky and Idaho. In each state, however, the "establishment" candidates have seen fit to emphasise their conservative credentials, narrowing philosophical differences within the party.
Democrats say such candidates trying to gain control of the US Senate in November's midterm elections will prove too far right for centrist voters. Republicans need to gain six seats to control the chamber. Holding Kentucky and Georgia against well-funded Democrats, both women, will be crucial to their hopes.
Six states will hold primaries on Tuesday. Georgia, Kentucky and Oregon have closely watched Republican contests for Senate; Pennsylvania and Arkansas have feisty gubernatorial primaries. In Idaho, Tea Party-backed lawyer Bryan Smith is trying to oust Representative Mike Simpson, who is seeking a ninth House term.
In Kentucky, Tea Partiers would love to knock off Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a 30-year senator they see as too accommodating to Democrats. Challenger Matt Bevin, however, has struggled under a barrage of attacks from McConnell and his allies.
McConnell, who was caught off-guard by the Tea Party movement in 2010, has scrambled to win support from conservatives who dislike compromise. He quickly allied himself with the state's junior senator, potential 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul, who beat McConnell's hand-picked candidate in the 2010 primary.
And in February, McConnell voted against raising the debt ceiling, a vote that past GOP leaders often swallowed in order to avert a government default.
In Georgia, the Republican primary to succeed retiring Senator Saxby Chambliss drew a crowded field, including three US House members. All are battling for the top two spots, with a 22 July runoff virtually certain.
Polls suggest Representatives Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey, who espouse Tea Party principles, may have faded in recent weeks. A former secretary of state, Karen Handel, won endorsements from Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Express.
Representative Jack Kingston and businessman David Perdue have walked a careful line: showing more openness to establishment support while still catering to hardcore conservatives who dominate Republican primaries. When the US Chamber of Commerce endorsed Kingston, Broun called him "the king of pork".
That tag might have fit a few years ago. Kingston, a longtime appropriations committee member, has proudly steered millions of federal dollars to his district. But Tea Party-driven attacks on federal spending have sent Republicans scurrying to tighter-fisted ground. Kingston raised eyebrows in January when he voted against an appropriations bill, after working hard to insert funding for Savannah's port.
In a sign of the narrowing differences between Tea Party activists and traditional Republican groups, Kingston was endorsed by Brent Bozell, an outspoken critic of Republican "moderation”.
Sunday, May 18, 2014 at 4:42AM President Barack Obama is "madder than hell" about the scandal enveloping the Department of Veterans Affairs, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough said on Sunday.
McDonough spoke two days after Dr Robert Petzel, the under-secretary for health, resigned amid a widening investigation into record falsification and allegations that at least 40 veterans died while waiting for appointments at a VA hospital in Phoenix.
Dr Sam Foote, a whistleblower in the case, said on Sunday Petzel's resignation was "a great first step".
The Dayton Daily News reported that since 2001 the VA has paid out $36.4m to settle claims of “delay in treatment”. The newspaper found 167 cases where delay in treatment was cited as a key reason for the settlement.
“The president is madder than hell,” McDonough told CBS's Face the Nation. “And I’ve got the scars to prove it, given the briefings I’ve given the president.
“Nobody is more outraged about these allegations than the president of the United States.”
On the same talk show Dan Dellinger, head of the American Legion, said it was “unforgivable” that the VA had been hiding delays and called again for the veterans affairs secretary, Eric Shinseki, to resign.
“The issue is we are having veterans die waiting for the care they have earned,” Dellinger said, before calling on Obama to speak out. “We need the White House to come forward,” he said.
At a stormy Senate hearing this week, Shinseki refused to step down. He too said he was “mad as hell” about the allegations of fatal delays and cover-ups. Critics pointed to a 14-day limit to provide care for veterans applying for the first time that was introduced by Shinseki, and said the system was unworkable and resulted in VA administrators devising ways to cover up months-long delays.
“No one should be treated this way in a country as great as ours,” the Arizona Republican John McCain told Shinseki.
“The standard practice at the VA seems to be to hide the truth in order to look good,” said the Washington Democrat Patty Murray. “That has got to change once and for all.”
Saturday, May 17, 2014 at 5:45PM A vast collection of author Pat Conroy's handwritten manuscripts, personal papers and family memorabilia is going to the University of South Carolina and will be made available to scholars around the world.
Conroy is appearing Friday at the university's Hollings Library with USC President Harris Pastides to make the announcement.
Because the 68-year-old author does not use a typewriter or computer, the collection includes 10,000 handwritten pages of all his varied drafts, from early work “The Water is Wide,” through “The Prince of Tides,” “The Lords of Discipline,” and “My Reading Life.”
Conroy's works consistently top best seller lists. Several have been made into movies, including “The Prince of Tides,” which Barbra Streisand starred in and directed.
Included are 80 scrapbooks of letters, photos and news clippings put together by Conroy's late father, Don, the abusive Marine Corps pilot who inspired Conroy's novel “The Great Santini.” Baby books, childhood compositions, movie scripts, love letters, divorce papers and even financial records are included.
Dean of University Libraries Tom McNally said it is fitting the collection remains in the state that inspired so many of Conroy's works. “Pat writes about South Carolina, he lives in South Carolina, South Carolina and the Lowcountry are his heart and soul,” McNally said.
McNally, who negotiated the acquisition for the library with a bookseller friend of Conroy's, said the archive was acquired for the university through a donation made by USC alum Richard Smith of Columbia and his wife Novelle in memory of Richard's mother Dorothy. McNally declined to describe the cost of the purchase. It will include everything Conroy writes in the future, the dean added.
Conroy never learned to type, McNally said, because his father forbade it, deriding it as “women's work.”
“The Great Santini was old school, really old school!” McNally said with a chuckle. But that may turn into a special blessing for scholars, the dean said.
“With modern computers now, the best we get are a few drafts, and unless some old drafts are saved along the way, for most authors, they are gone,” McNally said. With this collection, academics and scholars will be able to trace the transition of the writer's thoughts and work, accompanied by the letters and journals Conroy kept over the decades.
An archivist has been hired to organize the collection and it will be ready for scholars to access in about a year, McNally said.
Friday, May 16, 2014 at 8:30PM An email sent to parents Friday informed them that whooping cough was identified at two Upstate schools.
According to the email from school officials, a case of whooping cough has been identified at Wren High School and Wren Middle School.
School officials said the possible exposure occurring on or before May 16.
According to school officials, whooping cough is a contagious disease that affects the nose, throat, windpipe, and lungs.
Whooping cough is spread easily by coughing or sneezing. People with whooping cough may have coughing fits. The severe cough can last for weeks or months, said school officials.
Whooping cough can be dangerous for babies and for people with lung disease or weakened immune systems.
Friday, May 16, 2014 at 11:31AM Duke Energy Carolinas announced today it will build and operate a 750-megawatt natural gas-fired combined cycle plant at the existing Lee Steam Station site in Anderson County, S.C. The North Carolina Electric Membership Corporation will own 100 megawatts of the project.
The decision to move forward with this project is part of a comprehensive, long-term plan to add new generation, modernize the fleet, maintain a diverse fuel portfolio, and manage customer costs while delivering a high-quality, reliable power supply.
"This will impact the entire Upstate of South Carolina," said Anderson County Council Chairman Tommy Dunn.
“Natural gas-fired combined cycle plants are a good match to meet the significant energy needs of our customers over the next 15 years, and are expected to be an important part of the future Duke Energy Carolinas generation portfolio,” said Clark Gillespy, Duke Energy state president – South Carolina. “They are very efficient in the production of electricity using natural gas as fuel and have very low plant emissions.”
The Public Service Commission of South Carolina approved the plant in April, and the company finalized plans to move forward with construction earlier this month.
The company is in the process of procuring equipment and the contracts to begin construction so the project will be commercially available in November 2017. Construction is expected to begin in summer 2015.
“The Lee site is a great location for a combined cycle plant,” Gillespy said. “Duke Energy will be able to leverage existing site infrastructure to minimize new generation project costs and impacts to the community and environment.”
This project represents a substantial long-term investment by Duke Energy Carolinas in the Lee Steam Station site and surrounding community. At least 500 jobs will be created during the height of construction, with about 25 full-time employees to operate the plant once it is online.
“Anderson County has a long, successful history with Duke Energy,” said Dunn. “Today we celebrate Duke Energy’s latest investment in our community, which will bring quality jobs for our residents. We are grateful to Duke Energy’s leadership for choosing our county for this project and for continually shaping the future of the Upstate.”
“We’re very proud of our company’s history in Anderson County,” Gillespy said. “We’re honored that government and business leaders strongly support this project and recognize the positive impact it will have in this county for decades to come.”
"It's a game changer for us, that's for sure," added Williamston Mayor Mack Durham, where the plant will be located. "It's the beginning of a lot of great things in Williamston."
Friday, May 16, 2014 at 3:43AM Mayo Clinic researchers stirred excitement on Thursday by saying they had treated a patient's blood cancer with a specially engineered measles virus, but even scientists involved in the work caution the response does not prove they have a cure.
Many failed cancer drug trials involving hundreds or thousands of patients include results from "outliers" whose disease subsided inexplicably. So while the method employed by Mayo may provide a promising lead for study, it has to be corroborated in many more cases, they noted.
We have an enormous amount of work to do to determine if this is generalizable and how to best apply the approach to other cancer patients," said Dr. Stephen Russell, the report's lead author and a hematologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “We haven’t discovered a cure for cancer here."
He and his colleagues write in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings that multiple myeloma‎ in a 49-year-old woman seemed to disappear after she received an extremely high-dose injection of a measles virus engineered to kill the cancer cells. Multiple myeloma‎ affects immune cells called plasma cells, which concentrate in the soft tissue, or marrow, inside bones.
A second woman also with multiple myeloma began responding to the therapy, but her cancer eventually returned. Four other patients who received the high-dose therapy had no response.
You never know whether it's really what the person received from the measles virus or something we don't understand, said William Phelps, program director at the American Cancer Society, who was not involved in the new research.
Russell and colleagues believe the two women who showed some response had few or no circulating measles antibodies, which might eliminate the engineered virus before it has a chance to kill the cancer cells. The therapy will now enter a mid-stage trial to see whether more patients with low circulating antibodies respond to high-doses of the virus, he said.
Friday, May 16, 2014 at 1:21AM South Carolina could quickly catch up to its northern and southern neighbors in solar energy production if a solar bill that’s headed for House debate gets passed this session, solar advocates said Thursday.
Georgia and North Carolina each ranked in the top 10 states for amount of solar installed in 2013.
The comprehensive solar energy bill that would allow South Carolinians to harness the sun as an energy source for electricity has avoided roadblocks so far as it makes its way to the House floor.
The bill wound its way through a House sub-committee Tuesday and passed out of the Labor, Commerce and Industry Committee on Wednesday on its way to the House floor for debate, likely sometime next week.
Solar advocates and utilities have each touted the bill as a compromise, and it has so far garnered wide support in the Senate and in its first stages of House debate.
“So far there’s been a great show of support for what is truly compromise legislation,” said Blan Holman, lead attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center based in Charleston. “I think it shows that it’s a balanced bill and will help South Carolina.”
How soon South Carolina reaps the rewards remains to be seen.
Thursday, May 15, 2014 at 10:07PM A Senate panel narrowly advanced a bill requiring South Carolina's school districts to teach students how to write in cursive by fifth grade after questioning its $27.6 million price tag.
Senators sent it to the full Education Committee Thursday on a 3-2 vote. The budget office has estimated districts would have to spend $25 million on instructional materials and $2.5 million on travel for teacher training.
Republican Sen. Ray Cleary of Murrells Inlet says that's ridiculous. He says every elementary school teacher should know how to write in cursive, and students only need a pad of paper.
The estimate is being revised and is expected to be much lower.
State standards haven't required cursive writing in the classroom since 2008.
The subcommittee postponed the mandate's effective date to 2015-16.
Thursday, May 15, 2014 at 6:38PM The Obama administration has given the go-ahead for insurers and employers to use a new cost-control strategy that puts a hard dollar limit on what health plans pay for some expensive procedures, such as knee and hip replacements.
Some experts worry that such a move would surprise patients who pick more expensive hospitals. The cost difference would leave them with big medical bills that they’d have to pay themselves.
That could undercut key financial protections in President Obama’s health-care law that apply not just to the new health-insurance exchanges, but to most job-based coverage as well.
Others say it’s a valuable tool to reduce costs and help check premiums.
Some federal regulators appear to be concerned. A recent administration policy ruling went to unusual lengths, acknowledging that the cost-control strategy “may be a subterfuge” for “otherwise prohibited limitations on coverage.”
Nonetheless, the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services (HHS) said the practice — known as reference pricing — could continue. Plans must use a “reasonable method” to ensure “adequate access to quality providers.” Regulators asked for public comment, saying they may publish additional guidance in the future.
HHS spokeswoman Erin Shields Britt said in a statement that the administration is monitoring the effects of reference pricing on access to quality services and will work to ensure that financial protections for consumers are not undermined.
One way the new approach is different is that it sets a dollar limit on what the health plan will pay for a given procedure. Most insurance now pays a percentage of costs, and those costs themselves can vary from hospital to hospital. Now if you pick a more expensive hospital, the insurance still pays the same percentage.
Thursday, May 15, 2014 at 10:00AM Interested in helping a charity, but you don’t have that much time to give? You can easily help Meals on Wheels-Anderson!
Meals on Wheels is seeking volunteers to pick up food donations from local BiLo Grocery Stores in the area. BiLo has been a very generous supporter of Meals on Wheels and donates food items that the organization can use to prepare meals or to send out to their recipients to supplement the daily hot meal they receive.
Meals on Wheels-Anderson typically serves more than 600 people each weekday. Food donations from grocery stores like BiLo have a significant impact on Meals on Wheels. If you would like to volunteer just one hour of time each week, please call today to begin giving back to the community!
Please consider helping the hungry senior citizens of Anderson County. To volunteer, please call 864-225-6800 or email jcampbell@acmow.org.