Last Friday morning, the tenants of 9 Laurel St. in Augusta were told their building was unfit for occupancy. They had to be out by that afternoon.

The 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech have been welcome reminders about how far we have come on our journey as a nation committed to equality and justice.

For more than a decade, the staff at the Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project has sifted through 550 repositories and private collections in 47 states, attempting to locate every document written by or to the nation’s 16th president.

Every year, the federal government shoves billions of dollars in grants and student loan subsidies over to colleges and universities to make an education more accessible for American students. Every year, colleges and universities respond by increasing their tuition, putting that education further out of reach.

It’s almost impossible to imagine an America before the “I Have a Dream” speech rang out from steps of the Lincoln Memorial 50 years ago this week.

An earlier, outdated version of George Smith’s column (“The Native Conservative: Keeping water clean is cheaper than cleaning it after it’s polluted”) ran in the Wednesday edition of the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. The print version was written before the clean water bond was removed from the final proposal. It was an editor’s error. An updated version appears at kjonline.com.

This week, the Maine State Board of Corrections voted to spend money it didn’t have. For once, that was the right thing to do.

The vast fields of strawberries in California or spinach in Arizona bear little resemblance to the small family farms of Maine. But federal regulations proposed to limit food-borne illness treat them too similarly, and would put undue strain on small businesses that have been a Maine success story in the last decade. The Food Service […]

Finally, from the frontlines of the U.S. obesity epidemic, comes promising news: Levels of obesity among low-income babies and toddlers have dropped in 19 states and territories by at least 1.8 percent and, in some places, as much as 19.1 percent from 2008 to 2011.