Cheers and jeers from around the news:

• Cheers to the Air National Guard for agreeing on a full environmental impact study of low-level flights across Western Maine. Enough questions about these flights were raised to make this study appropriate.

What’s most pleasing is the Guard chose to conduct the study; it was not compelled. It was unlikely that a higher power, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, would have required one, leaving the decision to do so wholly with the Guard.

To us, this proves the strength of arguments made by residents and elected leaders about these flights. They need more study. Apparently, the Guard agrees.

• Jeers to the Guinness Book of World Records. We hope the world-record lump of coal appears in their stocking this year, after rejecting the world’s longest single-sheet Christmas letter from Rumford for inclusion in the record book.

Maybe Guinness was too busy judging the world’s longest strand of beads. Or the longest line of pizzas, laid edge to edge. Or the world’s longest pita bread. Or counting the 4.5 million dominoes toppled during a made-for-TV special on world “Domino Day” last November.

Or any of the other inconsequential-to-the-history-of-mankind records that Guinness elects to record in its book each and every year. Why the world’s biggest single letter to Santa Claus, which was mailed to the North Pole, doesn’t qualify is a mystery.

It just doesn’t seem fair. Maybe Rumford should have printed its letter on pita bread.

Nevertheless, good for Scot Grassette and all the kids and community members involved in the letter’s creation. They created a holiday sparkle, and perhaps a new tradition for Maine.

• Cheers to the city of Lewiston for mentioning the historically unmentionable: that public assistance programs can burden communities and regulations could be tightened. It probably won’t gain tremendous traction in Augusta, but it should, at least, be deliberated.

Public assistance is in a quandary: Right now, the need for it is great, while the ability to provide it is compromised. This makes it ripe for review, to ensure those who need assistance most are receiving it, while also gauging whether programs are operating at highest efficiency.

But enough of the “dumping ground” commentary or class warfare allegories. It’s not about that. People need help. Government should provide it, but not at its own fiscal detriment or in manners that are unfair or unsustainable. The dollars should go as far as possible.

Because there’s not enough of them to go around.

•And lastly, jeers to our illustrious lawmakers, who after months of talking about the need to reduce the number of bills this coming session, still managed to submit legislation requiring public restrooms to provide disposable sanitary lids for toilet seats.

Another crisis averted. We feel safer already.