Bucyrus had a bullying problem, and city officials wanted to do more than punish students and react to incidents; rather, they wanted to stop the bullying before it began. They wanted a school environment in which standing up for someone in trouble would be a source of pride and standing aside would be a source of embarrassment. They wanted to teach courage in the face of persecution, even when — especially when — students saw their friends persecuting others.

An odd puzzle is taking shape in the labor market: Over the past three years, the number of job openings has risen almost 50 percent, but actual hiring has gone up by less than 5 percent. Companies are advertising a lot more jobs, in other words, but not filling them.

A proposal by Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection to scale back the state’s participation in federal pollution control efforts are the subject of much criticism lately.

Some social scientists divide social reform movements into two major groups, which we might call “externalists” and “internalists.”

“As a prosecutor, a judge, an attorney in private practice, and now, as our nation’s attorney general, I’ve seen the criminal justice system firsthand, from nearly every angle. While I have the utmost faith in — and dedication to — America’s legal system, we must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is in too many respects broken.”

Marriages of convenience rarely work out. So when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., picked Jesse Benton, political consigliere to the Paul family — Rand and Ron — to manage his 2014 re-election race, campaign sharps began placing bets on how long it would last.

On July 21, the MaineToday papers published a lengthy puff-piece about the Common Core State Standards headlined, “Test scores may drop under new standards,” subtitled more hopefully, “‘Common Core’ could enhance future learning.”

Jen Psaki, blameless State Department spokeswoman, explained that the hasty evacuation of our embassy in Yemen was not an evacuation but “a reduction in staff.” This proved a problem because the Yemeni government already had announced (and denounced) the “evacuation” — the word normal folks use for the panicky ordering of people onto planes headed out of country.