VPR News

Voters in the Democratic primary delivered an electoral mandate on Tuesday. Now, Sue Minter will try to use it to become Vermont’s first female governor in 25 years.

This election season, I did something I’ve done many times in the past for various causes: I made phone calls. Lots of phone calls. And I was reminded that phonebanking can be both energizing and disheartening; you have to be ready for anything.

Hospital report cards come from all kinds of sources these days, online and in news headlines. But the criteria for judgment vary, and scores can be wildly different, even for the same hospital, depending on who’s doing the inspection.

As debate continues over Syrian refugees resettling in Rutland, we're taking a look at the history of immigration into Vermont. We'll look at waves of immigration into the state throughout the past centuries, and how the pre-existing population has received new Vermonters: Irish, French Canadians, Jews, and more. And we'll talk about how immigration is tied to internal debates about our identity as a state.

Central Vermont residents might remember Happy Herb the plumber. He spent 45 years climbing under sinks and fixing leaky pipes. But a decade ago, Herb Heath closed his business.

Trying to explain today’s divisiveness, some pundits point to an information revolution permitting us to choose news that mirrors our own beliefs and gives us our own facts. Others suggest the roots of incivility lie in income inequality and its ripple effects.

Secretary of State Jim Condos is expecting strong voter turnout for Tuesday's primary election. Condos says the use of early ballots has surged across the state because of a number of highly-competitive contests.

Miranda Gallagher of Fairfax is a rising fourth-grader at BFA-Fairfax who also happens to have written a recipe, had it published in a cookbook and was a guest of honor at the White House. She was chosen as the 2016 winner from Vermont for the "Healthy Lunchtime Challenge," which invited children ages 8 to 12 to create a recipe that's healthy and made with local ingredients.

Long before guns were invented, humans developed other approaches to hunt wild prey. The art of falconry is believed to have originated in China some 4,000 years ago. For our "Summer School" series, we took a trip to the Green Mountain Falconry School in Manchester to learn about this ancient art of hunting for game using a hawk.

When I turned 18, my stepfather drove me to Hyde Park to apply for my draft card. When it came, I looked at it and asked him why I was 4-A unlike all my friends who were 1-A. He explained that I was the sole surviving son of a veteran killed in action and therefore was fit for service but couldn’t be drafted. I burst into tears and hid my draft card from my friends who all bore theirs proudly. A few years later when I was in college and all my friends were drawing lots to see who’d be sent to

"The exercise started out with the plague," says Chris Herrick, Vermont director of the Division of Emergency Management & Homeland Security, "then we had earthquakes." Herrick is describing the limit-testing scenarios that Vermont emergency responders managed during a massive 10-day drill that just concluded.

The Rutland Herald is dealing with fallout from a story that called its own financial status into question. Not long after the Herald ran a story that staffers and freelancers hadn’t been getting paid, the newspaper’s publisher, John Mitchell, fired news editor Alan Keays.

The Rutland Herald may be facing serious financial trouble. On Friday, the paper ran an article that reported bounced paychecks for some of the news staff. That same day, longtime news editor Alan Keays was fired for approving a follow up story.

The Public Service Board has released its interim sound standards for commercial wind projects.After setting standards on a case-by-case basis, the board, for the first time, established uniform limits on how loud wind turbines can be.

Within days of its release, Pokémon Go was already a cultural phenomenon. And I’m pretty psyched about that, because I often talk about Pokémon the way some men talk about sports.