When | 10 a.m, Monday

When historians record the most influential South Carolinians of the late 20th-early 21st century, they may turn not to politicians or the purveyors of popular culture but to one of their own, a courtly bespectacled professor with a wry and wicked sense of humor.

Don’t ask historian Walter Edgar to pick his favorite South Carolinian.

After two weeks of debating the state’s $6.7 billion general fund budget, things started to get silly Wednesday in the state Senate.

The U.S. unemployment rate remains above 8 percent, and every politician extols the importance of job creation. Yet each month thousands of manufacturing jobs are there for the taking – but companies are unable to hire sufficiently skilled workers.

The student unrest movement in Quebec – where more than 2,500 people have been arrested in what are now daily and often violent protests – is spreading across Canada.

In an aggressive effort to boost deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has begun to increase by nearly 25 percent the number of agents tasked with finding and deporting illegal immigrants with criminal records, pulling 150 officers from desks and backroom jobs to add extra fugitive search teams around the country.

Just in time for the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season, forecasters with the National Weather Service in Wilmington, N.C., are getting a boost in technology to help them better identify and predict how much rain and hail is falling in a specific area during a storm.

A federal prosecutor wants former Little River resident Jasper “Jay” Knabb to spend more time in prison than she initially recommended because Knabb continues to be evasive about his finances after pleading guilty last year to master-minding a $40.8 million pump-and-dump stock scheme related to the Pegasus Wireless Corp. technology firm he founded.