Things You Need to Know Today: Downtown Augusta Has New Stone Sculpture

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

The Augusta Downtown Alliance has purchased a  stone sculpture that has been  placed at the top of Water Street, across from the Hartford Fire Station. According to centralmaine.com the Augusta Downtown Alliance is looking to focus on art in the downtown community.

The Augusta Warming Center open Thursday for the season.  Centralmaine.com reports over three thousand people signed in to the center last winter. The warming center is in lower level of St. Mark’s Parish Hall at 9 Pleasant St. , is open daily from 9-4 and will to open until the end of March.

The Maine Children’s Home for Little Wanderers received the community support it needed for its Christmas Program for kids. According to centralmaine.com last month they put out the word donations were down for the items needed to fill the boxes.

From the Associated Press:

Maine's congressional delegation is visiting a factory that's going to benefit from a "Made-in-USA" provision for sneakers for military recruits. Rep. Bruce Poliquin and Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King are going to the New Balance factory in Skowhegan on Wednesday to celebrate the passage of a defense spending bill that includes the provision.

Some hospitals under MaineHealth's umbrella are raising questions about a proposal to combine a dozen health systems into one nonprofit entity. The Portland Press Herald reports one board would make decisions for the entire system. Hospital budgets would also be combined into one spending plan. Some hospital officials say it's difficult to see how unification benefits high-performing systems that are already in the black.

New transcripts show crew members aboard a doomed cargo ship expressed increasingly dire concern _ occasionally tinged with gallows humor _ as a hurricane gained strength. That concern culminates in one crewman lamenting "I'm a goner" as the crew scrambles to abandon the listing ship. The 500 pages of transcripts provide a new glimpse at the final hours for the crew of 33, all of whom died when El Faro sank in October 2015.

The pullout of Syrian rebels from their last holdout in the city of Aleppo may be on hold. Pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV is reporting that the pullout has been delayed for a couple of hours, but buses are prepared to move 5,000 fighters and their families to an opposition-held town in the countryside outside Aleppo. On Tuesday, the rebels reached a cease-fire deal to evacuate in what is effectively a surrender.

A report published by an arms research group says the Islamic State group was manufacturing weapons in and around Mosul, Iraq, on an industrial scale with products largely bought in bulk from Turkey. The London-based Conflict Armaments Research says the findings show that IS maintained a "robust and reliable" supply chain between Turkey and Iraq that allowed the fighters to produce tens of thousands of weapons.

Arctic cold temperatures are expected to spread across the northeastern United States Wednesday. The National Weather Service says it'll stay cold for the next couple of days in much of the northern Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states, as the arctic air remains stuck over the northern Appalachians. And up to half a foot of snow also could fall from the Upper Mississippi Valley to the Northeast on Friday and Saturday.

Sydney, Australia is experiencing its hottest December night in 148 years. Forecasters have recorded a low of 80.8 degrees Fahrenheit. And Sydney is expected to reach 100 degrees during the daytime Wednesday. Beaches, rivers and swimming pools have been crowded with people cooling off.

A New Jersey state trooper has been criminally charged and suspended without pay after investigators learned he was pulling over women to ask them out on dates. Thirty-seven-year-old Marquice Prather was arrested last Friday on charges that he falsified and tampered with public records to cover up his behavior. State police began looking into the three-year veteran after several women complained about his conduct.