Word: vermont
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...April 18, the Vermont state senate passed historic legislation that legalized "civil unions" for gay and lesbian couples. The bill, which created what has been called "the closest thing to gay marriages," granted these couples approximately 300 of the rights and benefits associated with traditional marriage, including inheritance rights, tax breaks, family leave benefits, the power to make medical decisions for a spouse and immunity from testifying against a spouse in court. There is no Vermont residency requirement to obtain such a license, so although the partnership will not be recognized in other states, out-of-state couples can symbolically...
California and Hawaii offer limited recognition of "domestic partnerships," but Vermont's new policy is the most liberal in the country. In fact, the state, where, according to Gov. Howard Dean, equal treatment is a "long-standing tradition," stops short at just of one thing: Actually calling it marriage...
...read this, one out of every 140 U.S. citizens is behind bars. More people live in prison than in each of the following states: West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Nebraska, Maine, Idaho, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Montana, South Dakota, Delaware, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming...
...country to which they returned was a wasteland. Rwanda, a landlocked nation squeezed between Tanzania and the Republic of the Congo, has always been among the most crowded countries on earth--6.7 million people packed into a country the size of Vermont, not a good thing for an agrarian society whose primary economic unit is the family farm. The overpopulation is among the first things a visitor notices--and it has been cited as a sociological cause for the genocide. Rwanda is one of those countries, like India, where you are almost never out of sight of another human being...
...middle-aged and marginally successful author, Ted Swenson can summon up only limp enthusiasm for the creative-writing course he teaches at a second-rate college in remote Vermont. Suffering through classes with unimaginative students and dinners with pedantic colleagues, the disgruntled professor of Francine Prose's abrasively comic new novel, Blue Angel (Harper Collins; 314 pages; $25), can't wait to rush home so he can avoid writing his overdue third novel. In addition to battling ennui, Swenson must also contend with a forbidding campus environment fraught with race and gender minefields...