For someone in the midst of both a public-health and fiscal emergency, Davis is surprisingly calm — a quality she might have inherited from her doctor dad, who was the inspiration for the Hawkeye character on “M*A*S*H.”... Read more

Everybody who follows the news makes the logical connection between job layoffs and state unemployment benefits. But it may come as a surprise that the current system allows “furloughed” workers to collect, too, as well as those who are only off the job for a day.... Read more

The federal government is quietly carrying out the slow-motion destruction of a large swath of a South Burlington neighborhood. More than 100 homes and a few commercial buildings have been razed in the past 15 years in response to higher levels of noise pollution from the much-expanded Burlington International Airport. Ten more houses are earmarked for elimination this year, and plans call for another 40 to be flattened in the following two years.... Read more

Edmunds Middle School can’t accept students with limited mobility because the 111-year-old building doesn’t have an elevator. By sending handicapped children to Hunt, the district’s other middle school, the Burlington School District maintains that it’s in compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act.... Read more

A Vermont attorney who visited the Gaza Strip in February to investigate allegations of Israeli war crimes, including two Middlebury College-connected shooting deaths, rejected Israel’s recent exoneration of its conduct, saying the investigation was “lacking in credibility.”... Read more

J.R. Adams spends most of the day in the freezer working for Rhino Foods, a Burlington-based maker of specialty ice-cream products. But last fall he found himself in another, slower-moving production line: His company “loaned” him to Autumn Harp.... Read more

Barack Obama isn’t the only one offering an economic stimulus package these days. Bobby Miller, Vermont’s leading commercial developer, has echoed the president by exhorting: “Let’s get this economy moving again.”... Read more

Even though he calls himself a registered Republican, former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston sounds a lot like Bernie Sanders when he rails about economic inequities.... Read more

Most everyone agrees the U.S. health-care delivery system is ailing. An estimated 50 million Americans don’t have any coverage, and millions more are under- insured. In Vermont, roughly 136,000 people went without health care last year. About 85 percent of those people have jobs.... Read more

Bankruptcy filings by Vermonters are on the rise — and the curve is steeper than in the rest of the country. Statistics provided by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court’s Vermont district show that the number of cases in the state doubled over the past three years — from 623 to 1254, a 101 percent increase — while the national increase during the same period measured 81 percent.

“There’s no typical case,” says Middlebury bankruptcy attorney Kathleen Walls. “Every story is different.”... Read more