Things You Need to Know Today: Gardiner Gets a Grant + Closed Door Meeting with LePage

Here are the things you need to  know today......
Gardiner will receive a $12,000 grant from the Bicycle Coalition of Maine to expand the Cobbossee corridor for cyclist and walkers. According to WABI, a trail will be expanded to make things more welcoming.

A Corinna man with a making threats and with knife was responsible for the lockdown at Corinna Elementary school yesterday. According to WGME, police requested the school go on locked down because it was close to the man’s home.

From the Associated Press:

Republican leaders had a closed-door meeting with GOP Gov. Paul LePage, who sparked outrage last week by leaving an obscenity-laced voicemail for a Democratic legislator and threatening violence. LePage apologized Friday to "the people of Maine" but not to Democratic Rep. Drew Gattine, the target of his voicemail. LePage said his outburst was justified because Gattine called him a racist — something Gattine denied.

A new study says Maine had the second highest average increase in personal income in the country over the last year at 4.6 percent. The average yearly increase had been 1 percent in Maine from the end of 2007 to the beginning of 2016. Experts say Maine will have to — among other things — attract people to the state to continue seeing personal income growth.

Madawaska is backing off a proposal to drug test welfare recipients. The town manager said new rules could apply to the town's use of state General Assistance money. He said on Monday that he is not moving forward with a random drug testing policy. The ACLU had raised questions about the legality of the plan to drug test welfare recipients.

As the summer driving season comes to an end, gas prices have been on the rise, including in northern New England. GasBuddy shows the biggest rise is in Maine, where the average retail price is $2.22 a gallon, up 3.7 cents from last week.

Mass graves created by the Islamic State group may contain hundreds of bodies scattered across Iraq and Syria. The Associated Press has documented and mapped 72 of those graves, the most comprehensive survey so far. And more are expected to be uncovered as the Islamic State group's territory shrinks.

Forecasters expect a tropical depression to become a tropical storm before brushing the North Carolina coast Tuesday, bringing heavy rain and high winds to the barrier islands. And the National Hurricane Center in Miami says another tropical depression in the Gulf of Mexico could hit northern Florida as a tropical storm later in the week and possibly head toward the Atlantic coast.

A typhoon is about to barrel into northern Japan, threatening to bring floods to an area still recovering from the 2011 tsunami. Typhoon Lionrock has already paralyzed traffic, caused blackouts and prompted officials to urge residents to evacuate. It's off the Fukushima coast, packing winds up to 78 miles per hour and it's expected to make landfall later Tuesday.

The head of the Los Angeles children's services department says the family of a severely malnourished 11-year-old boy whose body was found in a closet had been the subject of six prior reports to the department. Department director Philip Browning says some of the reports came before Yonatan Aguilar was born, and involved at least one of his siblings. Browning says Yonatan's teachers and a hospital social worker also reported possible abuse or neglect, but the county determined the child hadn't been abused.