The Carolinas news

South Carolina

COLUMBIA

Time runs out to pass immigration bill

An attempt to bring a harder-edge stance on illegal immigration to South Carolina will have to wait until next year.

The bill by Sen. Larry Grooms, R-Bonneau, was vetted Thursday in a Senate subcommittee, but the legislators have just about run out of time in the current session that is scheduled to end June 3. Grooms, along with Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, have said they will work to build support for the bill and work out concerns during the summer and fall so it can come up for a vote when the General Assembly reconvenes in January.

The legislation will be a tough sell in some circles.

The bill, filed earlier this month, would allow law enforcement officers to check the legal status of people that the officers stop on the suspicion of another crime.

The bill says race, color or national origin can't be the basis for an officer's decision to check immigration status.

COLUMBIA

Investigators re-create boat collisions

In a novel move, state troopers who specialize in vehicle accident analysis are attempting to reconstruct a pair of May 1 boat collisions on Lake Murray in which four people died.

The effort to create a re-enactment of a crash on water using techniques common for those on roads is a first for South Carolina.

Officials at the state Department of Natural Resources asked the S.C. Highway Patrol to get involved "because of the severity" of the two collisions involving four boats, state Natural Resources spokesman Lt. Robert McCullough said.

The deaths of two women and two men in separate collisions combined for the deadliest weekend on the 47,500-acre lake in a decade.

State officials are weighing whether to seek unspecified criminal charges in each of the crashes.

COLUMBIA

GOP primary slate shows diversity

Republican Party voters who go to the polls on June 8 could make an eye-popping statement by moving a black man and a woman of Asian descent toward spots in the U.S. House of Representatives and the governor's office.

That's right: South Carolina, whose political godfather once ran for president on a segregationist platform, could be one general election away from adding a dose of racial and gender diversity to a party that has often been criticized for lacking much of either.

"We have more women and minorities who have filed for office this year than in all of the primaries since 2000 combined," said Joel Sawyer, executive director of the S.C. Republican Party. "Some of those candidates have a better chance than others. It speaks volumes to the appeal of the Republican Party to minorities."

Certainly, state Rep. Tim Scott, R-Charleston, and his Lexington County colleague in the General Assembly, Rep. Nikki Haley, hope to be new standard bearers for their party.

Scott could be the nation's only black Republican among the 535 members of Congress, the first since J.C. Watts of Oklahoma left in 2003. Haley would be this state's first female governor and the first non-white to hold that office.

North Carolina

RALEIGH

Records reveal Sen. Helms' ties to FBI

U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms curried favor with the FBI and Director J. Edgar Hoover before starting his 30-year political life as a conservative icon, then occasionally called on the bureau for information and investigations, newly released records showed.

The FBI file on Helms, a polarizing figure who actively fought against the civil rights movement, was comprised mostly of agents investigating death threats, according to more than 1,500 pages released to The Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act request. Helms died July 4, 2008.

The threats came from gay rights activists, supporters of an indoor smoking ban, and many others who expressed no cause. One man carried a hit list and a .357 Magnum handgun into a 1991 Senate hearing, though documents indicated Helms wasn't the primary target of a man out to "penalize" lawmakers for the expulsion of State Department personnel from Moscow.

RALEIGH

Bill gives school districts options for fixes

N.C. districts would have more options to try to fix repeatedly failing public schools in a bill given final approval Thursday at the General Assembly, a move that gives Gov. Beverly Perdue a last-minute boost for the state's next federal grant application.

The measure passed 21-19 and now heads to Perdue's desk, where she intended to sign it into law Thursday evening so it could be inserted into the state's Race to the Top application that's due in Washington early next week, officials said. North Carolina wants to win up to $400 million.

The package lays out four options for local education leaders to use to improve more than 130 continually low-performing schools - those where less than half of the state have failed on end-of-grade or end-of-course test two of the past three years.

The biggest change would allow districts to "restart" a typical school by giving it the same flexibility as a charter school without making it independent from the district.