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Down East Dispatches

Opinions, advisories, and musings from the length and breadth of Maine


Deer Isle

Down East DispatchesStuart Kestenbaum, 64, was appointed to a five-year term as Maine’s poet laureate (replacing Wesley McNair). Kestenbaum is the former director of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.

Springvale

Seven-year-old Sophia Houle, sidelined by an illness, virtually joined her classmates on a field trip to a robot exhibit in Portland by sending a robot of her own. Sophia uses an iPad to drive her robot, named “Snowball,” built from a second iPad affixed to a pole with wheels.

Solon

Residents jammed the Solon Corner Market when it reopened eight months after a building foreclosure forced it to shutter. The 60-plus-year-old store is the only grocery in town and one of only a handful north of Skowhegan.

Cashes Ledge

This undersea mountain range was removed from a list of contenders for national monument designation. Environmentalists had hoped to get protection for the range because of the biodiversity found there.

Augusta

City animal control officer Francois Roodman and game warden David Ross broke up a fight between two bald eagles that had locked talons in a territorial battle on Arsenal Street.


Isle au Haut

Islanders gathered for the 2015 annual town meeting, convened a year after it was originally scheduled because the town’s books had been neglected. Voters acted retroactively on expenditures and appointments — and set a date in April for the 2016 meeting.

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