I was really worried for Senator John McCain and his family when I heard he’d undergone emergency surgery for a blood clot in his brain. It’s not a simple operation, no matter the cause or prognosis.

Implicit or unconscious bias is increasingly used to explain and address racist behavior in this country, like the disproportionate use of deadly physical force against Blacks by the police. In Vermont, Act 147 establishes deadlines for completing fair and impartial policing initiatives, and the Legislature is seeking funds to implement its own training on implicit bias.

Among June’s Supreme Court releases was a short per curium ruling in Hernández v. Mesa . It didn’t get much coverage – the Justices basically sent everything back to the lower court. But, the case itself raised some of the most controversial questions of the term … and the Court’s attempt to avoid answering them spoke volumes.

With all the talk in the news today about alternative facts and untrue statements, I’ve been reminded that before Google and Wikipedia , the best source of accurate information was usually the local reference librarian. And I’ve been wondering what librarians might say was the oddest question they’d ever been asked.

My state representative Lee Oxenham recently asked me to sign a petition calling on the town select board to commit to the goals of the Paris Climate Accords. I gave it a quick look.

The drive took me about ten miles west of St. Albans, through the pastoral countryside of Fairfield, surrounded by rolling fields of corn, lush pastureland, red barns and distant mountains.

The kerfuffle between the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity and Vermont’s Secretary of State has me thinking about privacy, secrecy and transparency.

This month, Vermont joined forty-three other states and the District of Columbia in defying a federal government request for personal data on millions of American voters. Republican and Democratic election officials from across the country are saying ‘no’ to an order that would turn over birthdays, partial social security numbers, voter history, and much more.

The flow from the July 1st downpour had jumped two streambeds and overwhelmed two culverts, trisecting Thetford’s Five Corners Road into three unequal lengths, scouring out a pair of nearly forty-foot wide spillways into the woods. It had left skirts of debris fixed to tree trunks and draped from low limbs, some more than a foot above the ground. I’d missed the storm. By the time I returned home, our town road crew had already repaired both culverts temporarily. But beyond the road, the

When Eric suffered a painful hockey injury during high school, the doctor prescribed painkillers. This started a life-long addiction that led to his death last year, just five months after marrying his long-time girl-friend.