PORTLAND

Defendant will plead guilty in robbery of Sanford bank

A man who robbed a Sanford bank in February and was later Tasered by police when he tried to elude arrest is scheduled to plead guilty today in federal court in Portland.

Dane Bosley, 21, faces up to 20 years in prison for robbing $3,600 in cash from a Maine Bank & Trust branch.

Bosley, who lived just a few blocks away, went into the bank carrying a dark backpack on Feb. 25. He opened his jacket, revealing what appeared to be the butt of a handgun, and told a teller that the employees had 45 seconds to give him $25,000 or he would start shooting.

Police arrested Bosley after stopping his vehicle on March 24. Police said Bosley ran from several officers, and struggled with them after they caught up with him. Police fired several shots with Taser stun guns in their efforts to subdue Bosley.

 

Investigators blame fire on oily rags combusting

Investigators have determined that a fire that badly damaged a garage and upstairs bedroom in a Portland home Tuesday morning was started when rags soaked in linseed oil spontaneously ignited.

Such rags need to be kept outside in a fireproof container, officials said.

City officials said a garage smoke detector and fire-resistant walls helped prevent injury and contain the damage.

Firefighters were called to 17 Bartley St. at about 1:30 a.m. When they arrived, all the occupants had escaped safely, having been alerted by the smoke detector, said city spokeswoman Nicole Clegg.

The fire severely damaged the garage and bedroom above it, which had been occupied, but fire-resistant walls prevented the fire from spreading to the connected house, she said. The house suffered only minor smoke damage.

The fire is not considered suspicious but the cause remains under investigation.

BANGOR

Website to add more data for all Maine school districts

A conservative think tank has unveiled an updated education website to include test score and graduation rate data for every school district in Maine.

The Maine Heritage Policy Center created its education website, GreatSchoolsForME.org, earlier this year. The site showed spending and performance data for every Maine school and district.

At a news conference Tuesday in Bangor, the center presented the site’s latest application.

The center’s Stephen Bowen said the new data being added includes standardized test score data for every Maine school district, graduation rate data for every high school, and tools to compare schools and districts to one another.

ORONO

UMaine again makes list of ‘The Best 373 Colleges’

The Princeton Review again has named the University of Maine in its annual directory of the best undergraduate institutions in the United States and Canada.

For the seventh year in a row, UMaine is among “The Best 373 Colleges” listed in the annual guide, which went on sale Tuesday.

Other schools on the green list include Arizona State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard College, Northeastern University, Yale University and University of California, Berkeley.

Robert Franek, the guide’s author, said the guide is based on institutional data collected about schools, visits to schools over the years and feedback from students attending the schools. The guide also incorporates the opinions of the review’s staff and its 28-member National College Counselor Advisory Board.

Only about 15 percent of America’s 2,500 four-year colleges and two Canadian colleges are profiled in the book.

The review doesn’t rank the colleges academically or from 1 to 373 in any category. The lists are based on a survey of 122,000 students.