A former Auburn music teacher, charged with sexually touching a student, was confined to house arrest this week. Jim Raymond can only emerge from his home nocturnally, unless for legal matters.We have no sympathy for him; as someone with strict conditions on his behavior, he should have followed them.Yet his punishment is puzzling. Home confinement […]

Fighting fires – as everybody should realize by now – is more complicated than showing up and splashing water on the flames. Comprehensive preparation and strong scientific know-how are arguably the firefighter’s most valuable tools, not their axes or hoses.They certainly were earlier this week, when an inferno rose from the Washburn-Norlands Living History Center […]

It’s deplorable to think (and worse to accept) that health insurance is stymieing perhaps the most groundbreaking scientific achievement of this century: understanding the human genome.Yet it is. Fear of losing coverage dissuades people from investigating their inner workings, despite the benefits to health such revelations could bring. They are afraid this information would be […]

We’re tired of the gamesmanship between the Androscoggin County commissioners and sheriff’s office.Commissioners low-balled their salary offer, $42,000, for erstwhile chief deputy Eric Samson. It made no sense for Samson, who now earns about $50,000, to accept a promotion in responsibility and a demotion in compensation.Nor is it sensible for commissioners to say this promotion […]

Although Lewiston deserves applause for its rapid response to the deplorable playground in Kennedy Park, it does beg a question: What took so long before?For years, downtown advocates called for restoration of playground equipment in Maple Street Park, which was removed for the controversial Heritage Initiative, and never returned.Only last year did the Lewiston City […]

Long-awaited checks from the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 start arriving this week, either zipped electronically into bank accounts or stuffed into mailboxes in crisp, white government envelopes.Stimulus checks were a great idea in January and February, when Congress and the Bush Administration enacted the bill. On Feb. 13, when the president signed the act, […]

Often, the Maine Legislature is chided for wrong decisions in the frantic, waning hours of its session. Last week, however, seven members of the Appropriations Committee showed wisdom is possible, despite wildness.By a 7-6 vote, the committee rejected funding LD 1693, which would have restored about $203 million in retirement benefits to state employees employed […]

We didn’t intend to turn this into “shellac the Environmental Protection Agency” week, but EPA made this difficult to avoid. This installment is about its apparently light-as-a-feather Performance Track program.NBC News, for Earth Day, highlighted the woes of Performance Track, a valued designation bestowed by EPA onto companies for self-reporting environmental gains, even if the […]

With uneasy agreement between the city of Lewiston and the 12-Hour Club regarding the “legal” graffiti wall now whitewashed, literally, the time has come for a return to more traditional approaches to controlling graffiti vandalism.Namely, stepped-up enforcement, a strong community-based response to stopping vandalism before it happens, and removing it after it does.The wall was […]

In Friday’s editorial, Fuel resturant was identified as within an area around the Oak Park apartments proposed for a ban on bars. Though Fuel is within four blocks of Oak Park, it was not in the proposed prohibited area.We regret the error.