Gov. Nikki Haley wants to spend $19 million to hire 144 prosecutors so that police officers no longer are the ones prosecuting domestic violence cases in South Carolina.

Haley unveiled a number of requests and executive orders in a press conference Thursday aimed at reducing instances of domestic violence in South Carolina, which has been ranked No. 1 in the nation for the rate of women murdered by men.

South Carolina is one of three states in the country where police officers ”” not lawyers ”” prosecute domestic violence crimes in the courtroom.

Read it all from the local paper.

About two million Americans are hooked on prescription painkillers. In 2012, 259 million prescriptions were written — that’s one bottle for every American adult. CBS News went to West Virginia, a state that is attempting a drastic solution: allowing addicts to sue the doctors who got them hooked….

“We are talking in a certain sense drug traffickers. They are doing nothing but writing and cranking out prescription after prescription after prescription,” said DEA agent Gary Newman.

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The chronically homeless, on the other hand, are a subset of the homeless population that is often the most vulnerable. These are people who have been living on the streets for more than a year, or four times in the last three years, and who have a “disabling condition” ”” that includes serious mental illness, an addiction or a physical disability or illness.

According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, that represents about 20 percent of the national homeless population.

By implementing a model known as Housing First, Utah has reduced that number from nearly 2,000 people in 2005, to fewer than 200 now.

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Fine for teachers, but it can be tough on parents’ schedules and wallets.

In fact, the district says the schedule is so unpopular with families that it expects to loose several hundred students to other school systems.

“My best friend, she and her family, her two brothers, they moved to a private school because of the four-day school week,” says fifth-grader Chloe Florence. And that’s bad news for Apache Junction Unified, which is funded on a per-student basis.

Jennifer Florence says it just doesn’t add up, but her family has decided to stick it out.

“In a philosophical sense we believe very strongly in public education. So we are trying to support the system. Abandoning a ship, it will sink.”

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A Richland County jury on Friday afternoon socked a local bar with a $3.85 million negligence verdict in connection with the bar’s role in serving liquor to a drunk man who several hours later rammed his Jeep into a car, killing 6-year-old Emma Longstreet.

The jury, which began deliberations Thursday afternoon and broke for the night, deliberated more than eight hours in the civil case before reaching a verdict sometime before 4 p.m. Friday.

“Justice was served,” said Emma’s father, David Longstreet, who with his wife, Karen, their three children, and Kenny Sinchak, a motorist in another car, brought the lawsuit against the Loose Cockaboose Sports Bar.

The jury found the bar was serving liquor after a state-mandated closing time, and that it had served an obviously intoxicated Billy Patrick Hutto.

Several hours later, Hutto, a repeat DUI offender, ran a red light going 60 mph and slammed into the Longstreets’ car in Lexington County while they were on their way to church. Emma died later in a local hospital.

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“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you,” says Isaiah, 43:2, “and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.”

Well, for the most part, at least.

The biblical words resonated with area church leaders and parishioners affected by this week’s storm as they assessed the damage to their places of worship and helped each other find alternative spaces for upcoming services.

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Perhaps it’s not surprising that the best arguments against assisted suicide ”” especially advanced by such liberal icons as E.J. Dionne and Victoria Kennedy ”” are progressive. Liberals are generally happy for government to restrict individual freedoms to prevent violence and killing. They are also generally skeptical of the idea that choice leads to genuine freedom, especially for those without power on the margins of our culture.

Indeed, liberal states such as Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and, until this week, California had all recently rejected such legislation. Britain’s attempt to pass an assisted-suicide bill also went down to overwhelming defeat.

To get a victory in California, its supporters were forced to bypass the regular legislative process (which defeated the bill) and instead consider the bill in a healthcare special session, and under unusual rules. This context is as telling as it is disturbing.

Read it all from the LA Times.

We ask that you keep the families of those who have lost loved ones, those who have suffered loss of property and all those harmed or who are assisting in the rescue and relief efforts following this historic flood in your prayers.

While we are grateful to God that the majority of our Diocese has come through the recent catastrophic storm unscathed, a few of our parishes and people suffered significant damage that will not be adequately covered by insurance. It is also a reality that additional flooding is expected and the recovery process will continue for some time. That there will be unmet needs is certain.

For those reasons, the Diocesan office is recommending the following possible responses to this disaster…

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"This is a different kind of bad" Haley says, telling people in Gtown, Jamestown, Givhans Ferry to get out before the floodwaters #SCFlood

— ABC News 4 (@ABCNews4) October 8, 2015

@wachfox crews work in the morning hours to create a temporary dam in hopes of repairing the Columbia Canal breach pic.twitter.com/YTH6pU8QcQ

— Ryan Burgee (@ryanthephotog) October 8, 2015

Q: What do critics say?

Many doctors continue to object to it, as do many religious leaders and activists for the disabled who fear that the disabled could be put under duress to end their lives prematurely.

The California Catholic Conference, the Medical Oncology Assn. of Southern California and the California Disability Alliance note that similar bills have failed recently in Connecticut, Delaware and Colorado.

“This bill is simply about protecting doctors and HMOs from liability,” Marilyn Golden, a senior policy analyst for the Berkeley-based Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund told The Times earlier this year, “and tells people with disabilities who face a terminal diagnosis that may well prove inaccurate that there is no dignity in our lives.”

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This was the scene an hour ago as a SC pastor pushed an unearthed casket out of the flood waters @WCBD pic.twitter.com/qLVe3q4i5l

— Matt Alba (@mattalbaWCBD) October 5, 2015

At least 18 dams have breached or failed in South Carolina since Saturday, the state’s emergency management agency said early Tuesday.

One failure, of the Overcreek dam in Forest Acres, sent a torrent of floodwater raging downstream and forced a mandatory evacuations near Columbia.

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Back in Charleston for the night, waters still high,roads still tough to get through.Short vid from Richland flyover pic.twitter.com/EDkRznt7Jk

— Tim Scott (@SenatorTimScott) October 6, 2015

On a few topics, Riley was brief and to the point.

Invest in early childhood education, he urged, and increase the amount of money available for public infrastructure, perhaps through an increase in the state’s gas tax.

It is imperative that communities have well-functioning roads, bridges and public transportation, Riley said. “We have to have thriving, livable metropolitan areas that are creating jobs, and transportation is a very important part of that.”

Riley also mentioned the importance of attracting high-tech jobs, naming a handful of technology companies headquartered in Charleston, including Blackbaud, maker of fund-raising and nonprofit software; BoomTown!, purveyor of real estate software; and Benefitfocus, which specializes in human resources software.

Read it all from The State newspaper in Columbia, SC.

The denial of God — or the blithe bracketing of the question of God — is not a harmless parlor game. Rather, it carries with it the gravest implications. If there is no God, then our lives do indeed belong to us, and we can do with them what we want. If there is no God, our lives have no ultimate meaning or transcendent purpose, and they become simply artifacts of our own designing. Accordingly, when they become too painful or too shallow or just too boring, we ought to have the prerogative to end them. We can argue the legalities and even the morality of assisted suicide until the cows come home, but the real issue that has to be engaged is that of God’s existence.

The incoming freshman class at Harvard is a disturbing omen indeed, for the more our society drifts into atheism, the more human life is under threat. The less we are willing even to wrestle with God, the more de-humanized we become.

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[Emmanuel] Thomason discovered that South Carolina is one of at least 25 states that have what’s called a “responsible father registry” where unwed fathers can sign up to be notified if their child is put up for adoption, and urged Emanuel to look into it. Thirty-thousand children were born out of wedlock in South Carolina according to the 2014 census, yet less than 300 men signed up for the registry.

But at the time, Emanuel said he didn’t think signing up was necessary. To him, it seemed like a lack of trust for Skylar’s mother. Instead, he and his family focused on organizing a family baby shower. But when Skylar’s mother never showed up, Emanuel got nervous and signed up for the registry.

A few days later, a messenger showed up at Emanuel’s house to hand him papers showing that his daughter Skylar had been born over a week earlier, that she had been given up for adoption and had already been placed with an adoptive family in another state.

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A South Carolina judge says he will release some police documents and other evidence in connection with the Charleston church shooting that claimed the lives of nine African-American worshippers.

Judge J.C. Nicholson said he first wanted to sit down with attorneys for the victims and the news media to review some of the more graphic evidence ”“ including photographs of the crime scene ”“ before deciding specifically what will be released.

During a hearing in Charleston on Wednesday, Nicholson also indicated the 911 calls would be released but that there had been no decision whether the tapes themselves or just simply transcripts would be released.

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In a landmark victory for supporters of assisted suicide, the California State Legislature on Friday gave its final approval to a bill that would allow doctors to help terminally ill people end their lives.

Four states ”” Oregon, Washington, Montana and Vermont ”” already allow physicians to prescribe life-ending medication to some patients. The California bill, which passed Friday in the State Senate by a vote of 23 to 14, will now go to Gov. Jerry Brown, who will roughly triple access to doctor-assisted suicide across the country if he signs it. Mr. Brown has given little indication of his intentions.

The California bill is modeled on the law in Oregon, with several notable changes. The California law would expire after 10 years and have to be reapproved, and doctors would have to consult in private with the patient desiring to die, as part of an effort to ensure that no one would be coerced to end his or her life ”” a primary concern for opponents of the law.

Leaders of the “death with dignity” movement said they hoped the passage of the California law could be a turning point.

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Minneapolis officials are unveiling a million-dollar program aimed at preventing ISIS from radicalizing and recruiting Americans in the Twin Cities.

The effort is in response to the fact that Minnesota’s burgeoning Somali-American community ”” the largest in the U.S. at between 15,000 and 20,000 people ”” has become ground zero for ISIS’s U.S. recruitment push.

Law enforcement officials say between 50 and 60 young people in Minnesota have either successfully traveled to Syria, been stopped at an airport en route or are under investigation for allegedly planning to do so.

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As South Carolinians observe the Labor Day weekend, more are discovering it’s easier to find a job. Unemployment has dropped from a high of 11.6 percent during the depths of the Great Recession in June 2009 to 6.4 percent in July. But South Carolina workers also know wages for those jobs are growing ever so slowly.

South Carolina ranked 36th in the nation in wage growth from 2013 to 2014 ”“expanding only 2.6 percent, according to the most recent year-to-year comparisons from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

North Dakota was first at 6.4 percent, buoyed by the rising oil shale industry. Nevada was last at 1.4 percent, with its wages tied to the service and tourism industries.

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Understanding the religious life of early America is an important business, and not just for scholars. That is because all sides in today’s religious and constitutional arguments appeal to the past when they lay out their ideas for how things should work in the 21st century.

Conservatives generally want churches and church-affiliated organisations to enjoy wide sovereignty; they cite the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of faith, and also its bar on the establishment of any religion, the so-called “non-establishment” clause. At least since the 20th century, non-establishment has often been taken to mean that the government and judiciary should avoid delving much into the internal affairs of a church, because to take any position could imply state backing for one religious line. Liberals, meanwhile, tend to have an idealised image of the absolute separation of church and state, as laid down by the founding fathers; they use that picture as an argument for keeping religious ideas and taboos out of policymaking. For both camps, Thomas Jefferson’s statement of belief in a “wall of separation” between church and state is another important text. Liberals see the wall as protecting politics from religion, while conservatives see it more as protecting religion and its followers from political interference.

But what if both camps are wrong, because in the young American republic, state and religion were never fully separated? Sarah Barringer Gordon, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says 20 years of research have convinced her that during the early decades of American life, state authorities interfered heavily in the affairs of churches and in doing so, helped to remould the American religious scene. The story she tells is nuanced and intriguing.

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The sun rises over the Port of Charleston and with it, the start of another day where a new symbol of Made in America buzzes with activity.

Workers are preparing to load another cargo ship of BMW vehicles, built at the German automaker’s plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

While Michigan is still the heartbeat of America’s auto industry, South Carolina is one of several southern states that have become a greater focal point for automakers scouting out locations for new plants.

“We really focus on foreign investment, on adding new jobs to our country [and] not just our state,” South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley told CNBC.

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Haley knew early on that she’d attend every funeral, even speaking at them when asked. She wanted each family to feel the state’s embrace of support.

“And I felt the need to go for me,” she says during a rare moment of quiet in a sitting room at the Governor’s Mansion.

Haley wanted to know the nine beyond a list of names.

“I had a need to meet them. I had a need to know, because I knew the forensic story. I knew the investigative part of the story. I needed to know the people.”

Through each funeral, she met them.

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Hawaii Gov. David Ige has signed a bill that will allow transgender men and women to more easily change the gender on their birth certificate.

The new law eliminates the requirement that someone must undergo gender reassignment surgery before officially making the switch. Ige signed the bill Monday.

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The question is posed: Can the United States go on as it has been with a good portion of its working class almost entirely isolated from the promise of our country?

It is a yes or no question. A “yes” involves the acceptance of a rigid, self-perpetuating class system in a country with democratic and egalitarian pretentions ”” a system upheld and enforced by heavy-handed policing, routine incarceration and social and educational segregation.

A “no” is just the start of a very difficult task. The mixed legacy of the Great Society ”” helping the elderly get health care, it turns out, is easier than creating opportunity in economically and socially decimated communities ”” has left the national dialogue on poverty ideologically polarized. And many policy proposals in this field seem puny in comparison to the Everest of need.

But there is one set of related policy ideas that would dramatically help the poor and should not be ideologically divisive. How about a renewed effort to help the poor by refusing to cheat them?

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Using nine pens ”” one each for the families of the victims of the Charleston church killings last month ”” Nikki Haley on Thursday signed a historic measure that will remove the Statehouse’s Confederate battle flag.

The flag will fly above the Confederate Soldier Monument on the Capitol grounds one more night before being lowered in a ceremony at 10 a.m. Friday and taken to a museum in Columbia where it will be displayed with other Civil War relics.

Attended by dozens of lawmakers, three former South Carolina governors and civil rights activist the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the bill signing was held under the Capitol dome from which the Confederate flag had flown for decades as a show of defiance against integration before being moved to the monument 15 years ago.

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The Confederate flag will leave the South Carolina State House grounds after five decades this week after the House overwhelmingly approved a bill to remove the Civil War icon early Thursday morning.

The House voted 94-20 to banish the flag from the Capitol after more than 12 hours of debate over the historic measure.

The bill now heads to Gov. Nikki Haley for her signature. Haley started the call for removing the flag in the days after nine African-Americans were shot and killed in a historic Charleston church last month.

“It is a new day in South Carolina, a day we can all be proud of, a day that truly brings us all together as we continue to heal, as one people and one state,” Haley said in a Facebook post.

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Recognizing they lacked votes in a key Assembly committee, authors of legislation that would have allowed terminally ill Californians to legally end their lives pulled the bill Tuesday morning.

Senate Bill 128, the End of Life Option Act, had already cleared the state Senate, but faced opposition in the Assembly Health Committee. That included a group of southern California Democrats, almost all of whom are Latino, after the archbishop of Los Angeles increased its advocacy efforts in opposition to the bill.

“We continue to work with Assembly members to ensure they are comfortable with the bill,” said a joint statement from Sens. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, and Bill Monning, D-Monterey, and Assemblywoman Susan Eggman, D-Stockton. “For dying Californians like Jennifer Glass, who was scheduled to testify today, this issue is urgent. We remain committed to passing the End of Life Option Act for all Californians who want and need the option of medical aid in dying.”

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Around 9:30 a.m. Monday morning, as state Senators filed briskly into chambers and protestors waved their red rebel banners outside, about 100 people congregated amidst the chaos in the South Carolina Statehouse rotunda and sang “Amazing Grace.”

But first, Hal Stevenson closed his eyes and led them in prayer.

“We pray for our state. We pray for our nation. We pray for our world that the grace that’s been displayed in our state will catch on, that your holy spirit will direct each of us to love our neighbors as ourselves and do your will.”

They’re not activists, Stevenson said. They don’t represent any formal organization, either. But they are Christians ”” from multiple denominations, races and political ideologies ”” moved by the showing of grace from the families of the nine people murdered at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston last month.

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…in the wake of the 5-4 Obergefell decision by Justice Anthony Kennedy and the U.S. Supreme Court, the Chicago Tribune has followed up with a news report about Reardon that does a good job of describing his decision, yet does little to dig into the thoughts and beliefs of those who either oppose or dismiss his strategy. Consider, for example, this passage in which an Orthodox bishop seems to echo, in reverse, some of Reardon’s thinking:

Bishop Demetrios of Mokissos, chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago, said he doesn’t foresee such a boycott in Chicago. He even questions whether it’s legal.

“I can’t imagine any of our priests doing that,” he said. “It hasn’t happened yet and I don’t anticipate it happening to make a political statement,” he said.

That’s a really important quote.

I would stress that this statement by a Greek Orthodox bishop in no way represents an endorsement of Obergefell, but it clear indicates that there will be theological and legal debates ahead ”“ inside Eastern Orthodoxy in this land and in other sanctuaries ”“ about how priests should handle this clash between state and church.

In other words, this quote should have been near the top of the Tribune report and backed with more material explaining, on the record when possible, the views of those ”“ in Orthodoxy and elsewhere ”“ who have rejected Reardon’s strategy.

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