Cumberland County | featured news

The death of a 22-year-old man who crashed his car Saturday afternoon remains shrouded in mystery.
Patrick Lobor, a former Deering High School basketball player, struck a vehicle that had stopped for a red light at Brighton Avenue and Riverside Street. After the accident, police said, Lobor got out of his car, stumbled to the middle of the intersection and collapsed.

RUMFORD — A woman and her teenage daughters were attacked Wednesday by a neighbor’s pit bull and treated at Rumford Hospital, police said.
Police got a call at 10:25 a.m. from an Erchles Street resident who said a pit bull was attacking a neighbor and not letting go of her leg, Chief Stacy Carter said in a news release.
He said a preliminary investigation revealed the dog had gotten out of its house and was running loose.

It’s a sweet victory for Maine maple syrup and honey producers. An amendment preventing a confusing labeling requirement from moving forward was approved Wednesday by the U.S. Senate.
The amendment, authored by Republican Sen. Susan Collins and co-sponsored by Sen. Angus King, an independent, puts an end to an FDA proposal that would require maple syrup and honey labels to indicate the products contain “added sugar.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning Maine author Elizabeth Strout is among this year’s five New York Public Library Lions, the institution’s highest honor given to cultural icons.
The other recipients are Oscar-winning filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, Grammy-winning opera singer Jessye Norman, poet Claudia Rankine and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow.

Maine State Police have arrested the driver of a pickup truck who allegedly attacked a couple and their two children Sunday in Sedgewick.
Troopers were called to a home on Graytown Road around 7 p.m. to investigate what they are calling a road rage incident, state police said in a release posted on their Facebook page.
The family reported that a man in a black pickup truck engaged in a “physical confrontation” with them in their driveway before driving away, according to troopers Owen Reed and Hunter Belanger.

Gov. Paul LePage slammed the state employees’ union Wednesday in his weekly radio address, accusing it of trying to take credit for reforms his administration is proposing in the child protection system after the deaths of two children.
LePage’s attack on the Maine State Employees Association came just two days after he said he was listening and responding to the concerns raised by front-line caseworkers in the Department of Health and Human Services.

LEWISTON — Central Maine Healthcare’s board of directors is backing CEO Jeff Brickman even though he received no confidence votes from medical staff at all three of its hospitals. However, the board also said it is making changes to increase physician input.

WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve on Wednesday left its benchmark interest rate unchanged while signaling further gradual rate hikes in the months ahead as long as the economy stays healthy.
The Fed’s widely expected decision kept the central bank’s key short-term rate at 1.75 percent to 2 percent – the level hit in June when the Fed boosted the rate for a second time this year.

AWARDS and RECOGNITIONS
n Gordon Clark, MD, MDiv was elected as a Fellow by the American College of Psychiatrists.
Dr. Clark is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He was the founding president of the American Association of Community Psychiatrists, and works part-time in his private practice, SelectPsych, LLC, in Yarmouth.

n Humor columnist Kathy Eliscu received her second National Society of Newspaper Columnists award for humor.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — President Trump’s former campaign chairman spent more than a million dollars on suits and luxury clothes – much of it paid with money from undeclared foreign accounts that he did not report to the IRS, federal prosecutors told a jury Wednesday.
The second day of the trial of Paul Manafort in Alexandria, Virginia, detailed the free-spending ways of the political consultant, from buying some of the most expensive suits in the world, to buying his daughter a nearly $2 million home, paid for with cash.