AIDS and HIV infections are on the climb. The numbers in Maine aren’t great, and they mirror a national trend that points to a more casual and dangerous attitude about AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases than held in the last decade.Cases of the terminal disease increased 2.2 percent nationally in 2002, the first increase in […]

Cicero, the murdered Roman statesman, explained the law thusly:“Law is the highest reason implanted in nature, which commands what ought to be done and forbids the opposite.”Most men know the law without resort to a lengthy civil or criminal code. They know it through simple living, passively absorbed common law, and mostly by religious teaching […]

Peter Walsh, the acting director of the Maine Department of Human Services, wants to change the way the state fights child abuse.Abuse is dealt with on a case-by-case basis, the problem has become endemic and Walsh and other experts who met last week to work on a different approach to the problem say a culture […]

Democrats are in a funk over their 2004 prospects, but for the wrong reasons.The nation remains a 50-50 nation. The presidential election is set to be a 50-50 toss-up.Democrats are passing through what in retrospect will look like a predictable period of chaos. But once one of their candidates emerges with the megaphone next March, […]

Missed opportunities. Alienated customers. Angry grandparents. Frightened children. If there was a single list of don’ts in developing a prosperous business plan, it would include these no-nos.The Recording Industry Association of America has accomplished all these things in one daft move: Sending out almost 1,000 subpoenas in an effort to target individuals who illegally share […]

So it turns out that Odai and Qusai are not really dead.Granted, the U.S. military says they are. It has had the corpses visually and forensically identified. It has shown the bodies to Iraqi journalists. It has put them on Iraqi TV.No matter. Many Iraqis remain unconvinced.“…a U.S. ploy to try to break the spirit […]

Bangor Daily News, July 26Gov. John Baldacci opposes the November referendum question that demands the state pay an added $260 million annually for schools to relieve the burden on local taxes. Unaffordable, he says, and suggests instead a plan that would add some $200 million. The difference between the two figures matters in a $5 […]

Pick, pick, pick.The media nit of the moment is that the president fibbed in his State of the Union address about Saddam’s purchase of uranium from Niger to further the Iraq nuclear weapons program.Yeah, sure, it’s troublesome (imagine, a president lying to us). But how safe, to get all high-minded and concerned NOW, to rail […]

Secrets, secrets, secrets. Twenty-eight pages of a joint House-Senate report on the failures of U.S. intelligence before Sept. 11 remain classified. The people of this country deserve answers.The 900-page document cites a multitude of problems with the way our government went about defending us from terrorist attack. The report provides important, specific information about how […]

Liberal denial about all things conservative has passed the bizarre and arrived at the absurd.The American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin has published a study of why conservatives are the way they are. The study was conducted by four researchers, who, according to a press release from the University of California at Berkeley’s (UCB) media relations […]