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What we're reading
— Central Maine Power Co. and its allies will keep access to its $1 billion corridor route if they can prevail in two upcoming court challenges.
— Business leaders are calling on the next governor and Legislature to prioritize strategies to help them find entry-level workers in a pandemic-tinged break from their typical concerns about Maine's workforce.
— In news that could help determine control of Augusta, No. 2 oil prices here nearly doubled between June 2021 and June 2022, Maine Public reported.
— A video showed that a Newport campground worker who was shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy on Friday pointed a gun at the deputy just beforehand.
— Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat from Maine's 1st District, urged a federal investigation into Chipotle after it closed an Augusta store where employees were holding the chain's first-ever U.S. union drive.
— This Maine city is using electrocution boxes and sewer death traps to annihilate rats. Now that's local government. Here's your soundtrack. |
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News and notes
Collins is one of the Republicans backing a bill to shield the right to contraceptives.
— A Democratic bill passed largely across party lines in the House on Thursday that would enshrine the right in federal law after a concurring opinion from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in a landmark abortion-rights case called into question an earlier decision on contraceptives.
— Collins told the Associated Press she was "most likely" to support the measure in the Senate, where 10 Republicans would be needed for it to pass.
— Democrats and the Maine senator are also trying to codify same-sex marriage in federal law in response to the same Thomas concurrence.
One of Maine's historic public buildings is on the market.
— That is the Old Post Office and Court House, the former federal building in downtown Augusta being listed at $2.65 million, MaineBiz reported.
— Finished in 1890, the 41,000-square-foot granite-faced building is one of the state's best examples of Romanesque Revival architecture. The federal government built such a grand outpost here due to Augusta's status as a publishing center at the time.
— While a small, satellite post office remains in the building now owned by private developers, Augusta's main post office moved to the seven-story Edmund S. Muskie Federal Building near the State House in 1966. |
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| A hummingbird feeds Thursday afternoon in a Roxbury garden. (Sun Journal photo by Russ Dillingham via AP) |
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