Things You Need to Know Today: Heating Oil Price Up in Maine

Here are the things you need to  know today......

Maine Early Learning will get a $300,000 grant from W.K. Kellogg Foundation for the  Elevate Maine-Somerset project.  According to centralmaine.com the project is expanding quality early-childhood education for low-income kids in rural Maine.

The Somerset County Sheriff’s Office is the latest department to be dealing with a fake Facebook situation. According to centralmaine.com they have alerted Facebook and have to wait for them to take action.  The fake page has a fake story about a murder.

From the Associated Press:

Our string of winter storms is taking a break and we have a lot of snow. Eastport recorded 69 inches of snow in a 10-day period and Andover, in western Maine, had 79 inches on the ground, the second-highest level recorded in the state.

The Governor's Energy Office says the price of heating oil in Maine has up slightly from two weeks ago. The average cash price for No. 2 heating oil was $2.30 per gallon this week, 2 cents more than it was in early February. Kerosene and propane prices were up too.

Prosecutors say a Norwegian man has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for making threats against Maine police while in Portland as a tourist. Twenty-nine-year-old Espen Brungodt, of Bergen, was sentenced on Thursday. He pleaded guilty to making threatening interstate communications in September.

Maine Sen. Angus King is among a group of lawmakers backing a proposal to eliminate a tax penalty that is currently levied on student loans forgiven for families after the death or disability of the borrower. King, an independent, says the federal government forgives some student loans in the case of death or disability, but the IRS treats the cancelled debt as income. That can result in tens of thousands of dollars in tax liability.

Maine legislators are looking to put new restrictions on the harvest of marine worms. Legislators are considering a proposal called "An Act To Protect the Marine Worm Industry." The proposal states that a person would no longer be able to fish for or take marine worms from Dec. 1 to March 31.

His resume includes time as a Navy Seal and deputy commander of U.S. Central Command. But Vice Admiral Robert Harward is passing on a job offer from President Donald Trump to serve as national security adviser. Harward says his decision is purely personal. The slot is open because Trump dismissed Michael Flynn on Monday. The White House says Flynn misled the vice president and others about what he said in conversations with a Russian ambassador.

NATO defense ministers have decided to beef up the military alliance's naval presence in the Black Sea in response to an increasingly aggressive Russia. Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg  says NATO will hold more war games and training in the strategically important sea, which borders allies Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania, but also Russia, Ukraine and Georgia.

Senate Democrats are pulling another all-nighter against a Trump nominee, this time the president's pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Scott Pruitt currently serves as Oklahoma's attorney general, where he repeatedly sued the EPA over what he has called the agency's "activist agenda." An Oklahoma judge ruled Thursday that Pruitt must hand over thousands of emails in which he communicated with coal, oil and natural gas corporations. An advocacy group sued.

The same federal appeals court that upheld the freeze on President Donald Trump's travel ban says it will hold off on deciding whether to have a larger panel of judges reconsider the ruling. Word of the delay by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals came after Trump said he planned to issue a new travel ban next week. The ban was challenged by Washington state and Minnesota.