Cheers and jeers from around the news:

• Jeers to unemployment. Maine’s February rate was 8 percent, a full 3 points more than the year prior and the highest rate since 1991. This announcement coincided with news that Maine is one of 13 states with laws that prevent its qualification for an extra 20 weeks of federal jobless benefits.

State officials are examining whether to change the law to allow Mainers who’ve exhausted their benefits to get this extension. With unemployment at 8 percent, this review shouldn’t take long. Unless there’s incontrovertible reasons against it, the law should change.

• Cheers to the Maine Medical Association for taking claims of ill health effects from wind turbines seriously. The MMA hosted a panel discussion on the topic this week. Though the science is far from conclusive, there’s enough concern to make studying the impact of turbines on health a priority.

While more research is needed, it shouldn’t come at the expense of projects. A statewide moratorium on turbines, as suggested, would serve to put Maine further behind in developing alternative energy technology. A more rational course is to start studies at operational wind farms to see if – as theorized – the reported effects lessen over distance.

Regardless, of course, this matter needs some solid conclusions. Harnessing power from the wind is too important to Maine to be left in limbo, with concerns about health either unfounded or underestimated.

• Cheers to the death of legislation to outlaw force-feeding of birds in Maine to produce the delicacy foie gras. There are plenty of real problems to tackle without inventing new ones.

• Jeers to the blow to a bill to let Mainers buy health insurance beyond state borders. The Legislature’s Taxation Committee voted 8-4 against it this week. Regardless, the idea still has merit, even as a trial. Maine lawmakers would be shortsighted not to consider anything that could stabilize the volatile costs of insurance here, even ones they may not particularly like.

• And while in Augusta, cheers to attempts to modify or repeal the Informed Growth Act, which requires retail projects greater than 150,000 square feet to study their economic effect on the local community. When big-boxes were booming, this act seemed somewhat sensible to gauge potential deleterious effects on local businesses.

Now, the recession has changed everything. The act should be amended to allow towns and cities to opt out if they meet certain criteria, or be repealed entirely.

The conditions it was created to respond to are probably never coming back.

• Finally, jeers to the struggles of the U.S. Postal Service. Instant communication is stifling an undervalued form of communication – letters – which, as historical records, are important windows into our development as a civilization.

We fear future historians combing through our endless e-mail forwards, bawdy jokes and grammatical misadventures won’t have quite the same experience as their predecessors.