Orangeburg Massacre stirs debate 44 years later 

Cleveland Sellers saw plenty of civil rights protests throughout the South as program director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. When he arrived at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg in 1968, he thought it was time to quietly work for his degree.

On Feb. 8, the quiet ended.

Sellers joined a demonstration against a segregated bowling alley that ended with 30 unarmed black students shot by white police, three of them fatally. Sellers was wounded in the armpit.

It was the most brutal response yet to student protests that would change the nation, yet for decades it got little attention. Now, scholars and people like Sellers with first-hand accounts are changing that.

Today, academics, students and others meet in South Carolina for a three-day conference at the College of Charleston. They'll discuss the black power movement and the legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre. Sellers is one of the speakers.

The conference comes after a 2002 book, The Orangeburg Massacre, by journalists Jack Bass and Jack Nelson, and a 2010 documentary,Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968.

"South Carolina State was the first time ever in the history of America that a college student had been killed on their campus for doing absolutely nothing," says Sellers, now president of Voorhees College in Denmark, S.C.

Life Expectancy Shrinks for Less-Educated Whites in U.S.

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.

 Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

Too many children not vaccinated

 Too many children in the Upstate are not getting vaccinations that can protect not only themselves, but also other children in their schools and day cares, from sometimes dangerous and contagious diseases.

Although the number of unvaccinated students is only about 1.6 percent of the total school-aged population in the county, the trend is growing, according to a recent report in The Greenville News. And the greater the number of unvaccinated children, the higher the chance of some all-but-eradicated diseases gaining a foothold in the population once again.

Diseases like chicken pox, measles and mumps once were common in the United States, and still are common in other parts of the world. Systematic vaccination has all but wiped out those diseases here, but there have been sporadic outbreaks that have spread among children that haven’t been vaccinated. The diseases can be dangerous.

South Carolina, like other states, has a law that requires school-aged children to be vaccinated. However, there are religion-based exemptions. And many parents are taking advantage of those exemptions based on much-publicized, but scientifically invalid, reports of a link between vaccinations in children and autism.

Trade meeting in Japan cost SC estimated $54,000

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina taxpayers spent about $54,000 on an international trade meeting in Japan led by Gov. Nikki Haley, Commerce officials said Thursday.

That's the initial estimate of tax dollars spent on the six-day economic development trip to Tokyo, mostly for travel, hotel rooms and fees for the 35th annual conference of the Japan-U.S. Southeast Association.

Commerce Secretary Bobby Hitt called it money well spent, saying the trip was vital to building the relationships needed to bring jobs to South Carolina. The state is hoping to capitalize on Japanese companies' desire to diversify following last year's earthquake-tsunami crisis, which shut down most of the country's nuclear reactors and left the country more reliant on imports to supply electricity.

Japanese-based companies already rank second in foreign investment in South Carolina, behind Germany, according to Commerce.

Facebook Turns Off Facial Recognition In The EU, Gets The All-Clear On Several Points From Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner On Its Review

 
The ongoing investigation into Facebook’s transparency on user data and privacy by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner has come to a positive conclusion for the social network. The DPC, whose decisions had wider-ranging implications for all of Facebook’s business in Europe, had made several recommendations earlier in the year to bring Facebook’s policies in line with that of data protection regulations in the region. And it has now officially announced that “the great majority of the recommendations have been fully implemented to the satisfaction of this Office.” Key to Facebook’s success is that it is turning off its facial recognition features, also known as “Tag Suggest”: This feature has already been turned off for new users in the EU, the DPC notes, “and templates for existing users will be deleted by 15 October.”

The full, 74-page report is here and also embedded below.

Facebook had been the subject of a months-long investigation into its practices after complaints first raised in 2011 by a user group in Austria. The case has been handled in Ireland because this is the location of Facebook’s international headquarters, and has been through a few turns already where the DPC has laid out terms, and Facebook has responded, more than once.

Facebook Ireland Audit Review Report 21 Sept 2012

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