The Department for Children and Families is charged with protecting the state’s most vulnerable population – abused and neglected children.

Yet the department has seen intense scrutiny in recent months because two toddlers that had been in state custody died after alleged physical abuse.

Chittenden County State's Attorney T.J. Donovan asked the Vermont state police to investigate the latest case: the death of 15-month old Peighton Geraw of Winooski who died hours after being seen by a DCF caseworker.

When you think of the Mafia and organized crime, your mind might drift to New York, Chicago or even Sicily. Montreal, not so much.

But the Mafia and organized crime presence in Quebec’s largest city has been leaving a mark since as far back as the 1950s. And the role of organized crime in the awarding of provincial transportation and construction contracts prompted a recent and ongoing government inquiry.

Paul Cherry is the crime reporter for the Montreal Gazette. He provided Vermont Edition with background on the Mafia presence in Quebec.
 

Vermont is on the hunt for a technology firm to help with a massive overhaul of the state’s human services system. And state officials are hoping to deliver better living through computer science.

The new request for proposal is for a “Medicaid Management Information System.” It’s part of a broader project called the Health and Human Services Enterprise, which is among the biggest, and most costly system overhauls in the history of the state.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has taken the first step to amend the U.S. Constitution to allow Congress to regulate the flow of money in political campaigns. Sen. Patrick Leahy is the chairman of the committee and he strongly supports the proposed amendment.

It’s not easy to amend the U.S. Constitution in this way. First, a proposed amendment must be approved by a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate. Then it must be ratified by three-quarters, or 38 of the 50 states.

Baseball heads into the All-Star Break with the Red Sox fading, the Yankees staying afloat and World Series dreams very much alive in Los Angeles, Oakland and Milwaukee. Milwaukee?

State Representative Kurt Wright and VPR's Mitch Wertlieb assess the season so far, size up the second half and surmise what trades might be made. We also check in with the Vermont Mountaineers of the NECBL and the New York-Penn League's Vermont Lake Monsters.

The company rumored to be on the verge of buying IBM’s chip manufacturing business announced Thursday that it has hired a former senior plant executive at an IBM facility in East Fishkill, New York.

Vermont’s 14 hospitals have submitted budgets for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1 that increase by just 2.6 percent over the current year’s budgets, the smallest annual increase for the Vermont health care delivery system in four decades.

Proposed spending for fiscal year 2015 came in at $2.229 billion, compared to the $2.172 billion approved by the Green Mountain Care Board for the current fiscal year. The 2.6 percent increase amounts to just under $57 million in new money.

If you live and drive in rural Vermont, you probably already know that some roads are in disrepair, and may even be unsafe.  Take heed — but take comfort, too, because a new report shows that Vermont’s rural byways are not the worst in the northeast. 

The report was released by a national transportation research group called TRIP:

What might start out as simple collecting or the inability to throw something out, can eventually lead to overloading a home or apartment with stacks of unwanted junk. And that can eventually result in isolation, unsafe conditions and even squalor.

You may have grown up eating Wonderbread, but if you’re inclined to expand your bread horizons, there are a LOT of bakers here in Vermont making loaves by hand. And it’s not just Vermont. Artisinal bread baking has taken off in cities like Seattle, New York, and San Francisco.