If the charter school movement is going to succeed in Maine, it will be as a supplement to traditional public schools, not as an enemy of them.

The best way to hire productive employees is to look for people with qualifications, talent, honesty and commitment. Now, however, a small but growing number of employers are looking for something else as well: job applicants who don’t smoke. As much as we despair of the death and damage caused by tobacco, this new employment criterion strikes us as a lamentable and unwarranted intrusion into applicants’ private lives — and one that should worry anyone in this country who has an elevated risk for any sort of injury or illness. In other words, most of us.

Unless you’re directly affected, it would be easy to conclude that predictions about the impact of the automatic spending cuts known as “sequestration” were exaggerated.

Congress passed the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in the early days of the Internet to crack down on malicious hackers, but federal prosecutors have stretched the law since then to apply to computer users who merely violated a website’s terms of service.

And yet, after the carnage in December that killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., the shootings of teenagers in Miami’s Overtown and Liberty City, the drive-by killing of a mother talking with a friend outside her home in Liberty City — after all of that and so much more from coast to coast — Congress still seems unable to ban assault weapons.

Back in 2010, the Legislature created an exemption to the state’s right-to-know-law that you could drive a truck through.

* Angela Palmer, 4, burned to death in an oven in Auburn, Maine, in 1984; mother’s boyfriend convicted of murder.

Nobody wants a youngster to be separated from his or her biological parents, but no one can say for certain why this is happening more often to Maine’s children.

When former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta estimated the number of unreported sexual assaults in the U.S. military to be about 19,000, it put in clear focus how prevalent the problem truly is.

There’s more to the pledge to have and hold a spouse “in sickness and in health” than you might imagine.