A cancer science center honoring the memory of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who lived in Clover before her cells were used to create the first immortal human cell line, is on the way to become a reality in Halifax County, and on Wednesday Lacks’ legacy was honored from the floors of the Virginia House of Delegates and Senate.

The Henrietta Lacks Life Science Center currently is conceived to be a $50 million, 200,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art medical research and treatment facility, to be built in the Halifax County Industrial Development Authority’s Southern Virginia Technology Park (SVTP), a short drive from Henrietta Lacks’ Clover home and final resting place.

At the same time Wednesday, members of the Henrietta Lacks family and Henrietta Lacks Legacy Group were recognized by 20th District Senator William “Bill” Stanley and 60th District Delegate James Edmunds as part of efforts to bring to fruition the Henrietta Lacks Commission and Henrietta Lacks Life Science Center Project.
From the House floor, Edmunds described Lacks as “a Virginia hero, an African-American woman whose unique world-changing legacy has touched all of us, without most of us realizing it.”

The Dan River Region’s precision machining programs not only brought Virginia’s top elected official to Danville on Tuesday, it attracted another state’s governor as well.

Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam and Arkansas Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson toured the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research and other facilities to provide an example to Hutchinson and his delegation of community investment in workforce training.

“After seeing it, I’m glad that I came,” Hutchinson told the Danville Register & Bee following a tour of the Institute and its Gene Haas Center for Integrated Machining. “It’s an amazing investment in the community and its future.”

Good news for Pittsylvania County: dozens of new jobs are coming to town.

Amthor International, which is a tanker truck manufacturer, has been in Gretna since 1992. Now, they will be expanding, adding 90 new jobs over the next five years, and much more.

"Amthor International, the largest tanker truck manufacturer in North America, is going to invest $7.1 million to expand its operations in Gretna, Virginia," announced Virginia's Secretary of Commerce and Trade, Todd Haymore.

Project Manager Dodie Hudson and Senior Architect Larry Hasson and River District Tower's Dr. Mark Hermann discuss the transformation of the Dan River Research Building, now known as the River District Tower.

Dodie Hudson: Dr. Hermann, the executive director of River District Tower and he's also a practicing physician with Spectrum Medical, he knew exactly what he wanted coming into this space.

In eighth grade, Robert Mills, Jr., told his parents his dream was to become a farmer. His parents said that’d be a tough road to walk. The family had no land, capital or equipment and lived in a suburb.

On Oct. 17, the first-generation Virginia farmer held the 2017 Swisher Sweets/Sunbelt Expo Southeastern Farmer of the Year award in his hand and proclaimed the FFA creed to the more than 600 people attending the opening-day luncheon at the 40th anniversary Sunbelt Ag Expo in Moultrie, Ga.

That FFA creed “was the first words I heard when I entered my eight-grade agricultural class, coming from a suburb outside of Danville, Va., who had never had experience in agriculture. Those words inspired me to become an American farmer,” he said, “one of the proudest occupations you could ever have.”

With the FFA creed in his heart and a newfound fire in his belly, Mills took to fighting the long odds and slowly and steadily inched toward his dream. He started turning FFA projects into bigger ventures, and at 15 bought a used Ford tractor with a line of credit from the bank his mother worked at.

Last year, SGS Tool Company, a round solid carbide cutting tool manufacturer based in Munroe Falls, Ohio, was acquired by the Kyocera Corporation of Kyoto, Japan which employs around seventy thousand people across 231 group companies. The deal massively expanded the reach of the decades-old firm which is now called Kyocera SGS Precision Tools (KSPT).
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“The Kyocera acquisition has given us many advantages. It seems like we went from being a pretty well-known privately held company with about three hundred employees to being a publically traded global power player overnight,” says Marketing Coordinator Tim Stephens.

Munroe Falls also houses a KSPT distribution center, a tool coating facility and Global Innovation Center for research and development and training and education. The company operates a sprawling network of additional facilities dedicated to the cutting tools which remove material from workpieces when making parts for manufacturing. These facilities were established long before the Kyocera purchase and include manufacturing operations in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.

A Pittsylvania County elementary school is one of just seven in Virginia to be recognized as a National Blue Ribbon School for 2017. Union Hall Elementary School in Callands was recognized by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in an announcement Thursday. County superintendent Mark Jones said the school had improved immensely in student success in recent years. “That’s a national award for schools that really have just a tremendous academic record,” Jones said. Five other public schools and one private school in Virginia received the award. The awards are based on either performance on state achievement tests and graduation rates, or performance in closing the achievement gap between a school’s subgroups and all students.

From GoDanRiver.com

Danville has received an award from fDI (Foreign Direct Investment) Magazine, which ranked the city among the top micro cities for economic potential in its 2017-2018 American Cities of the Future study.

Danville ranked eighth in the list.

The magazine, which is a publication of the Financial Times, studies the most promising investment locations in North and South America, and then every two years releases the rankings as part of an analysis of various sized cities.

Micro cities are those with a population less than 100,000.

“It’s very humbling to receive this recognition from fDI and the Financial Times,” said Telly Tucker, director of the Danville Office of Economic Development. “When the international community recognizes the hard work and accomplishments by the City of Danville, it is gratifying on so many levels.”

The most technologically advanced subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic is manufactured and travels 4,100 miles from Virginia Beach, VA to Bilbao, Spain reaching depths of 11,000 feet below the surface and having the staggering ability to deliver 160 terabits-per-second which is more than 16 million times faster than the average home internet connection.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, along with Danville government and education leaders and dozens of high school students, participated in the ribbon-cutting ceremony for George Washington High School’s new precision machining program Thursday.

“This is the only facility like it in the commonwealth of Virginia,” McAuliffe said in a speech beforehand. “No other high school has anything like it.”

Along with Danville City Council and Danville School Board members, the machining program’s first class of nine students sat in the front row while McAuliffe introduced the program. Before the speeches, the students showed off the practice area and classrooms in the new facility, which included dozens of shiny aluminum machines the size of office desks, a computer lab with dozens of computers and a classroom.