How much stuff can a beachgoer do if a beachgoer wants to do stuff on a beach?

It’s exciting news that SpaceX, the private company that just sent a highly successful spaceship to dock with the International Space Station, wants to put a human on Mars in a dozen years.

Popular notions of the U.S. Senate filibuster, the practice of talking bills to death or delaying their passage, tend to come from film, such as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” or from legendary past examples.

It would be wrenching for the country to be faced with another showdown over the federal debt ceiling. But the solution should not be, as Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner recently suggested, to dispense with the debt ceiling because it is an inconvenient impediment to ratcheting up the national debt.

The celebratory gunfire in Gaza that greeted the start of the Nov. 21 truce may have been in part to greet the end of the slaughter of the Israeli onslaught. This has seen at least 162 Palestinians die, the majority of them civilians, and in excess of 1,200 people injured. Some of these will die later and many more will have to live with crippling disabilities for the rest of their lives.

‘We’re No. 10! We’re No. 10!” You may not hear that very often at football games, but it rang loud and proud in Augusta last week after the U.S. Department of Education released its tally of high school graduation rates for all 50 states.

Though those who are critical of Gov. Paul LePage’s decision in 2011 to remove a specially commissioned mural from an anteroom at the offices of the Maine Department of Labor don’t agree, the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston made the legally correct decision in saying the governor had the right to do what he did.

Incorrect information appeared in a Nov. 27 editorial about a new law that caps treatment for drug addicts.

It seems a little hard to credit, but news reports this week said that nearly 1 million people from all over the nation have signed online petitions supporting their states’ secession from the United States.

Let’s take it as a given that teachers and school administrators must be able to intervene physically when students’ actions become disruptive or dangerous to themselves or others.