The Martha’s Vineyard Hospital ended its fiscal year with a sharp drop in operating profits, although with year-end gains well north of $600,000, the institution remains comfortably in the black, defying predictions early this year of an operating deficit.

And like virtually every person and institution with money invested in stocks and bonds this year, on paper the hospital lost an enormous amount of value — more than $3 million — on its protected endowment monies.

The chairman of the board of trustees for the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital is mired in controversy at another hospital in Hackensack, N.J., where he has resigned his position.

John P. Ferguson, the longtime president and chief executive officer at the Hackensack University Medical Center, stepped down last week amid an unfolding scandal and federal corruption investigation.

Hospice of Martha’s Vineyard announced this week that it will join forces with a leading Cape Cod hospice organization, a move that will lead to expanded services including those covered by Medicare, Medicaid and other insurance carriers.

The plan calls for Hospice & Palliative Care of Cape Cod to become affiliated with the Vineyard hospice, which will retain its independence. An independent nonprofit based in Hyannis, Hospice & Palliative Care of Cape Cod is the largest hospice organization on the Cape, with a $12 million annual operating budget.

It is a violation of the Massachusetts Ethics Law for a member of a town community preservation committee who also sits on a private nonprofit board to participate in a decision that grants Community Preservation Act funds to the nonprofit.

This is the opinion of Edgartown town counsel Ronald H. Rappaport, who was recently asked by the town administrator to research the question.

A budding plan to allow two Aquinnah concert promoters to build a summer outdoor performance center at the Gay Head Cliffs has begun to draw more darts than the P.A. Club on a Friday night.

A public hearing was set for last evening and Aquinnah selectmen moved the location to the old town hall because they were expecting a crowd.

Money to rebuild stone walls and jump-start building design for the Middle Line housing project, shared spending on health care access and rodent control, and a $6.6 million annual town budget are the central items that will come before Chilmark voters at their annual town meeting Monday night.

The 32-article warrant reads much like a profile of Chilmark itself: spare and threaded with Yankee thrift. The annual operating budget is a slight decrease from last year, making Chilmark the only town on the Island to see its budget go down instead of up this year.

Scores were released this week for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), the annual testing in commonwealth public schools that measures student performance in math, reading and science.

Trading democratic squabbles for efficiency, Edgartown voters marched resolutely through a 52-article annual town meeting warrant in just over two hours on Tuesday night, stopping briefly along the way to debate the merits of renovations to the free public library and adding a finance director to the town employee roster.

Voters said yes to the library improvements and no to the finance director.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the senior Senator from Massachusetts whose broad vowels were synonymous with Boston and whose liberal legislative record towered over all others, died late Tuesday night at his home in Hyannisport after a 14-month battle with brain cancer. He was 77 and had served in the U.S. Senate for 46 years. And he had long been a familiar presence on the Vineyard, where he is both credited for the infamy of Chappaquiddick and for the pioneering federal land trust bill that ultimately led to the creation of the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court last week upheld the town of Aquinnah and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission in a key leg of a complicated and long-running property rights case that will ultimately decide whether a large swath of rare coastal heathland along Moshup Trail remains forever wild or is opened up to private development.