Cumberland County | featured news

ATHENS, Greece — Greek authorities said Thursday there were serious indications that a deadly wildfire that gutted a vacation resort near Athens was started deliberately, while experts warned that the devastated coastal town had been built like a “fire trap,” with poor safety standards and few escape routes.
The death toll from Monday’s blaze east of the Greek capital rose to 82 as rescuers and divers continued to search for more bodies in burnt-out homes and at sea, where hundreds fled to try to escape the inferno.

BEMIDJI, Minn. — An amateur photographer’s patience paid off with a stunning photo of a female duck followed by dozens of ducklings on a northern Minnesota lake.
Brent Cizek of Bemidji, Minnesota, says he took his tiny boat out on windy Lake Bemidji in late June when he spotted “a big blob of birds.”
Cizek later returned and saw the birds grouped in a circle. As the ducks headed out, Cizek took close to 50 shots – the best showing a common merganser, a freshwater duck, trailed by 56 ducklings in a row.

NEW YORK — More than a century after Albert Einstein proposed it, his theory of general relativity has passed another test.
With giant telescopes pointed at the center of our galaxy, a team of European researchers observed a fast-moving star that got close to a monstrous black hole.
They saw that the black hole distorted the light waves from the star in a way that agrees with Einstein’s theory.
The result was reported Thursday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

In this tropical air, when it rains, it pours, and it poured for about two hours in the wrong location at the wrong time Thursday afternoon.
We call it ‘flash’ flooding for a reason. In a matter of minutes, Lewiston streets and underpasses were covered in up to three feet of water.
Flash flooding is most common in cities, where water runs off on pavement and concrete and pools in low-lying areas.
At 2:30 p.m., it was completely dry in the city.

RUMFORD — Less than a week after Bridgton Hospital medical staff passed a no confidence vote in Central Maine Healthcare CEO Jeff Brickman, Rumford Hospital medical staff have voted no confidence as well.
Staff members who were at the meeting but asked to remain anonymous said about 15 to 20 people participated in the vote Tuesday night. A few abstained. The rest voted no confidence.

Biddeford’s Pepperell Mill Campus, a sprawling former mill complex that includes residential units, plans to install the largest privately-held solar energy project in Maine, according to a news advisory.
The large-scale solar array will produce enough electricity to more than meet the needs of the campus’s residential units, according to an announcement from U.S. Sen. Angus King’s office. King, a Maine independent, will be in Biddeford on Friday to tour the campus and formally unveil the project.

Maine needs to increase the size and skill level of its workforce to keep businesses in the state and attract new companies, three development groups said Thursday.
A report issued jointly by the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, the Maine Development Foundation and Educate Maine said the state’s quality of life, its workforce and its natural resources are all important factors that keep businesses in the state and attract others.

A Farmingdale man saw his drunken driving conviction upheld stemming from a Jan. 4, 2016, crash in Chelsea that left three people — including him — with serious injuries.
Rowe L. Palmer, now 39, had appealed the conviction to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, also known as the Law Court, saying the blood drawn for an investigator at the hospital was illegal because it was done without a warrant.
In an opinion published Thursday, the court that it was legal under a “now or never” situation because Palmer was scheduled for immediate surgery.

The first comprehensive mapping of ocean wilderness revealed that no part of the ocean is untouched by humans, and only 13 percent could be classified as “wilderness.”
“Nowhere is safe,” said James Watson of the University of Queensland, an author on the study, in a video abstract for the report.
The exhaustive analysis of human impacts in all global marine ecosystems, published Thursday in Current Biology, categorized and mapped all the ways humans have changed the ocean, such as fishing, shipping and pollution.

A suit challenging the Commerce Department’s decision to ask U.S. residents about their citizenship status as part of the census will go forward, even though a judge found that the question has been properly used in the past.