Mattress storein Charleston, SC

The College of Charleston basketball team has cracked Associated Press’ Top 25 for the first time in 20 years. The Cougars ranked No. 23 with 116 points from 61 AP voters in the AP Top 25 poll that was released Jan. 2.

Meanwhile, the USC Gamecocks were ranked No. 1 in AP’s Top 25 for women’s basketball.

“I think everyone was really excited and proud of this team and what we’ve accomplished so far,” said College of Charleston guard Ryan Larson. “The hard work is paying off, and it’s such a rewarding feeling. There’s still so much left for us to accomplish this season.”

The team currently has one of the nation’s longest win streaks at 13 games and is the first Colonial Athletic Association in the Top 25 since 1987.

In other headlines:

Charleston attorney found dead in his home. Well-known Charleston defense attorney David Aylor was found dead in his home Monday morning. The cause of death is pending. No foul play is suspected, according to the county coroner.

S.C. was hot spot destination for movers in 2022. North American Van Lines’ annual migration map found that South Carolina has the highest percentage of customers moving into its borders by a 2-to-1 margin. A total of 66% of movers came into the state, while 34% moved out. The Charleston area was the top pick for many of the movers.

Children’s museum gets a new director. The Children’s Museum of the Lowcountry appointed Karen Coltrane as the new executive director. She replaced Nichole Myles, who left earlier this year and is dedicated to helping the organization find some new footing, she said.

Lowcountry artists paint the town. A mural-painting business, mainly based in Charleston and Columbia, is painting bright and creative murals for visitors and residents to enjoy. Girls Who Paint Murals has painted over 50 murals in the past year since it started.

Breeze Airways to offer discounted specials from Charleston. Breeze Airways is offering low fares for the slower traveling season from Charleston to 16 locations. One way flights to New York, New Orleans or Florida are as low as $39. Other locations include Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia and Connecticut.

To get dozens of South Carolina news stories every business day, contact the folks at SC Clips.

Charleston Northeastern Basketball

Charleston's Pat Robinson III (15) drives against Northeastern's Jahmyl Telfort during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2023, in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

BOSTON (AP) — This might not be the best time for No. 18 Charleston to be taking a week off.

Sure, the Cougars could use the rest after playing four games in eight days. The players need to catch up on missed classes. And coach Pat Kelsey wouldn't mind seeing some of his recruits play — or his own kids.

But after winning 20 straight games — the longest winning streak in the nation — it might be better to just keep playing.

“I think we’re up to 20 now, but it’s always the next game,” said guard Pat Robinson III, who came off the bench Saturday to score 14 points and helped lead the Cougars to an 87-61 victory over Northeastern.

“Two or three months, we’ve got the winning streak," he said. "But it can be gone in a day — or in a few hours. So we really try to just be about the next thing, keep stacking wins on top of wins and just don’t be complacent.”

Ben Burnham scored 15 points off the bench for Charleston, which held Northeastern scoreless for more than four minutes late in the first half while turning a two-point deficit into a 36-21 edge. The Cougars (21-1, 9-0 Colonial Athletic Association) have not lost since the second game of the season, to then-No. 1 North Carolina on Nov. 11, climbing to their highest ranking in The Associated Press Top 25 since 1999.

“It’s awesome for our program. It’s awesome for our institution. It’s awesome for our city. Awesome for recruiting. But we have a really mature team that doesn’t get caught up in it," Kelsey said. “They just stay very even keel. And that’s what we’ll continue.”

Chris Doherty had 11 points and 13 rebounds and Jared Turner also scored 11 for Northeastern (8-11, 4-4). The Huskies haven’t beaten a Top 25 team since 2015.

Charleston opened an early 10-point lead before Northeastern cut it to 21-18 on Doherty’s layup with about eight minutes left in in the first half. It was 24-22 when the Cougars ran off the next 13 points – getting three baskets inside by Robinson before back-to-back 3-pointers from fellow reserves Burnham and Raekwon Horton.

A Daniel Island software firm — one of South Carolina’s few publicly traded companies — has been sold for $570 million after more than a decade of accumulating hefty losses.

Voya Financial Inc. announced Jan. 24 that it finalized the all-cash buyout of Benefitfocus Inc. The $10.50 per share deal was announced Nov. 1. Most shareholders voted in favor of it last week.

The sale gave investors a 49 percent premium over the closing stock price of about $7 the day before it was announced. The acquisition includes existing debt that Voya planned to repay.

Benefitfocus sells subscriptions to a cloud-based software platform that enables workers, mostly at large employers, enroll in and manage their health care plans and other benefits.

The acquisition “allows us to increase our capabilities and insights for the benefit of our customers, while deepening the strength and breadth of our distribution reach,” said Rob Grubka, CEO of Voya’s workplace solutions business.

Combined with existing customers, the the buyer estimated it will serve about 38 million individuals after the acquisition. It said in November that Benefitfocus “will operate as a distinct business ... with continuity in the existing ... management team.”

Voya said it will provide investors and analysts with details about “the strategic and financial benefits of this transaction” quarterly earnings update on Feb. 8.

A spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether any job cuts are planned or whether it plans to maintain a presence in Charleston.

Benefitfocus has only turned an occasional quarterly profit since Goldman Sachs took it public on the Nasdaq in 2013. Its cumulative losses over the years have exceeded $400 million, and it came under pressure from a hedge fund in late 2020 to consider a sale or take other measures to increase its lagging stock price, which at its peak topped $57.

In its final financial report as a public company, Benefitfocus said in November that its loss for the first nine months of 2022 widened to $16.5 million from $11 million while revenue declined 7 percent to $174 million,

Benefitfocus was started in Mount Pleasant in 2000 with about 15 workers. It had about 1,100 employees as of the end of 2021 at offices in Charleston, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. Most have been working remotely since the COVID-19 pandemic, and the company has been scaling back its real estate needs.

Shares of “BNFT” stopped trading Tuesday. Voya’s stock was down slightly to $68.23 by mid-afternoon.

Benefitfocus issued it final financial report in November, saying its loss for the first nine months of 2022 widened to $16.5 million from $11 million while revenue declined 7 percent to $174 million,

SPARTANBURG — Milo’s Tea Company plans to invest $130 million in establishing its first South Carolina operations in Spartanburg County by the end of 2024.

The 110,000-square-foot plant located on Park 290 at Interstate 26 in Moore will accommodate brewing and bottling operations for ready-to-drink beverages and will be the company’s fourth plant in the U. S., according to a news release.

The expansion is expected to bring 103 new jobs to the area.

“South Carolina and Spartanburg County in particular proved to be the right ecosystem to help us advance our people-first culture by offering an excellent standard of living for our associates and robust workforce development resources to drive economic prosperity not only for our people, but also for the region,” company CEO Tricia Wallwork said.

Milo’s Tea Company is a family-owned beverage company based in Birmingham, Ala., that provides a variety of flavored teas and beverages to customers.

The company was founded in 1946.

Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

Building on previous work from the community-initiated Anson Street African Burial Ground project, a team of researchers from Penn led a community-engaged collaborative study that confirmed that the individuals closely align genetically with populations in West and West Central Africa.

The City of Charleston, South Carolina, has been on a quest to better understand the remains of 36 people, described collectively as “the Ancestors,” since their chance discovery a decade ago in the city’s center.

In 2020, a team from the University of Pennsylvania and the nonprofit Gullah Society, whose mission was to reclaim African and African American burial sites around Charleston, made progress by sequencing the Ancestors mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). That group included Ade Ofunniyin, Joanna Gilmore, and La’Sheia Oubré from the Gullah Society, along with Theodore Schurr, a professor in Penn’s Department of Anthropology; Raquel Fleskes, then a Penn graduate student and now a University of Connecticut postdoctoral fellow; and others.

The research—a community-initiated and community-engaged study today called the Anson Street African Burial Ground (ASABG) project—showed that most of the individuals had originated in Charleston or sub-Saharan Africa and, given the burial ground’s location, had likely been enslaved. At the time, that work was the largest DNA study of its kind. It was also unique in its aim to involve the community from the start, guided by the questions and concerns of the people directly affected by what the researchers might find.

A new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper expands on those initial results, this time getting more granular and precise. Through whole-genome sequencing, the researchers confirmed that most of the people had West African or West Central African genetic ancestry and were genetically male. Beyond that, the ASABG team verified that just one mother-child pair was related. The researchers say that, taken as a whole, these findings significantly increase what’s known about African diversity in colonial America.

“All the work we have done has been directed toward learning more about the experiences of the Ancestors and by extension the experiences of enslaved African Americans at that time,” Schurr says. “The community in Charleston has been the driving force behind this work, as its members wanted to know who the Ancestors were and what their life histories were like.”

In fact, the project grew out of feedback from the community, prompting the Gullah Society to advocate for the 2019 reinterment of the remains on the original grounds where they had been discovered and for a scientific inquiry centered around answers sought by the local African American community. Schurr and Fleskes joined the project in 2018. “Our aim has always been to do science that doesn’t objectify these remains but rather tries to restore personhood to them,” says Fleskes.

With permission from the community, she, Schurr, and the other ASABG team members started by analyzing mitochondrial DNA, the genetic material inherited from the female line alone and a frequent jumping off point for research of this type, given its abundance, size, and the fact that it’s often well-preserved. That examination revealed broad strokes about the individuals’ background and demography but couldn’t go as deep as whole-genome sequencing would. Archival maps and subsequent bone analysis led the researchers to conclude that the remains belonged to enslaved people.

“Those findings generated a great deal of interest from the community, which encouraged us to continue this work,” Schurr says.

As a next step, the team conducted a more extensive analysis, using data from 18 low-coverage genomes. “With ancient DNA research, the DNA you’re able to extract isn’t in the same form as for a living person. It’s broken up, fragmented,” Schurr says. “We want high coverage, which means 10, 20, 50 copies of the complete genome. In this case, the amount we had was small, so we call that low coverage, yet it was still adequate to complete these kinds of analyses.”

In conjunction with material from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, these data provided greater clarity on the Ancestors’ genetic history. Specifically, the researchers found that nine had DNA that aligned closely with populations from Gabon in West Central Africa, and nine had DNA that lined up with reference populations in Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia. In addition, of 27 individuals for which the researchers could analyze genetic sex, 21 were chromosomal males.

To verify what the researchers had determined with their initial mitochondrial DNA analysis, they also looked at 31 uniparental haplotypes, including both mtDNA and Y chromosomes, that are passed down from just one parent each generation, according to Schurr. “They represent a unique part of the genome inherited in a singular kind of way,” he says. From these data, they confirmed the connection between one mother-child pair and strengthened their hypothesis about the remains’ genetic origins; of 27 individuals analyzed, 24 displayed genetic characteristics also found in contemporary African and African American populations.

“We’ve also been able to confirm that at least one of those individuals has a genetic signature that shows mixing with a person of Native descent,” says Schurr. “That’s interesting because the first people enslaved in Charleston were Native Americans. Shortly thereafter, African people were brought to colonial America as forced labor.”

The findings, which align with what the researchers expected they might see, have been shared widely. The team filmed its scientific process in the lab, reported back to the community every few months and held a webinar series to share results. “We wanted to make sure the community members were the first people we talked to,” Fleskes says. “This project is about relationship building, trust building, being transparent in all steps of the research process, and being accountable.”

Schurr says this research can make visible a history that was either previously unknown or has historically been overlooked. For that reason, he and colleagues are creating material about the Ancestors and other aspects of Charleston’s past that they hope the city’s STEM curriculum might eventually incorporate. Schurr says he also thinks the findings have already influenced Charleston to start taking responsibility for its history, through actions like the reinternment of the Ancestors.

“We want to bring views forward that have largely been ignored,” Schurr says, “to help acknowledge that this is not something separate from American history but a part of it.”

Funding for this work came from the National Geographic Society (grants NGS-52378R-18 and NGS-54324E-18); the University Research Foundation of the University of Pennsylvania; the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Department of Anthropology; the City of Charleston; the Gullah Society Inc.; a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania; and a National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (Grant SPRF-FR 2105384).

Theodore Schurr is a professor in the Department of Anthropology in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a consulting curator in the Physical Anthropology and American sections of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Anthropology at Penn.

Raquel Fleskes is a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. She earned her Ph.D. from Penn in 2021.

Other co-authors on the paper include Graciela S. Cabana of the University of Tennessee; Ade A. Ofunniyin and Joanna K. Gilmore of the Anson Street African Burial Ground Project and the College of Charleston; Chelsey Juarez of California State University, Fresno; Emilee Karcher of the University of California, Davis; and Grant Mishoe and La’Sheia Oubré of the Anson Street African Burial Ground Project.

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - As the City of North Charleston grows and leaders work to rebalance the city’s districts, they want the public to get involved.

The city is holding a public meeting Tuesday and city leaders are encouraging residents to come look over the plan and share their thoughts or concerns. Redistricting is meant to make sure that each vote is counted equally throughout the city.

The population of North Charleston jumped more than 20% from around 97,000 in 2010 to around 117,000 in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Ryan Johnson, the Public Information Officer for North Charleston, said every district will be affected.

Johnson said specifically, there has been a lot of growth along Dorchester Road, and he said expects the districts that fall within Dorchester County to be drawn smaller to account for population changes.

He said community input in this process is essential because these districts will determine the council member’s areas that will represent the public.

Click here to view the proposed maps and other data and reports from the City of North Charleston.

Tuesday’s public meeting starts at 5 p.m. and will be held on the third floor of North Charleston’s City Hall, located at 2500 City Hall Lane. The meeting can be viewed online here.

Johnson said residents who are unable to attend today’s meeting can submit comments online, or email written comments to fieldsc@northcharleston.org. The maps will also be on display at the Gethsemani Community Center, the Perry-Webb Community Center, the North Charleston Athletic Center and the north Charleston Aquatic Center for the next two weeks.

“We just want to encourage people to look at the new maps, look at the data, and all that’s been involved in that, and give us your opinion and your feedback,” Johnson said.

He said the city may make changes to the proposed draft after receiving public input.

From there, the map will go through the typical ordinance process, requiring a couple of city council readings before being officially adopted.

Copyright 2023 WCSC. All rights reserved.