In 2007, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection began regulating development near significant vernal pools. That action worried some landowners, who saw the new rules as an overreaction to the environmental lobby and an unnecessary infringement on property rights. But those claims downplay the importance of vernal pools, and can scare people away from taking […]

This week, Lucius Flatley, urbane connoisseur of things clever and insightful, introduced Proust’s Questionnaire to the coffee-shop seminar. He informed the group that this questionnaire was originally a 19th-century parlor game invented by Antoinette Faure, daughter of the president of France, and consists of a series of personal questions asked of prominent people, to which […]

Over the past month, the Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee has received some positive financial news that will greatly help us as we finalize our recommendations to the budget. As many of you know, Maine revenues for December and January were better than expected and recently, the Revenue Forecasting Committee reported that General Fund revenues […]

In the realities of today’s newspaper business, investigative reporting on larger, statewide issues – stories that can take weeks or even months to report – have mostly disappeared. Newspapers cannot afford to dedicate a reporter to one story for that amount of time. It is a fact of the industry well known to John Christie, […]

In the realities of today’s newspaper business, investigative reporting on larger, statewide issues – stories that can take weeks or even months to report – have mostly disappeared. Newspapers cannot afford to dedicate a reporter to one story for that amount of time. It is a fact of the industry well known to John Christie, […]

Kit Smith of Brunswick is one of the leaders of a Bowdoin hockey team in the NCAA tournament.