Each weekday, Seven Days scans the news across the Vermont media landscape to find the smartest, best and most compelling stories. We bundle them up in an email and send them out to our subscribers early each afternoon. It's called the Daily 7.

So which Vermont news stories are you reading? And which should you be reading? Here are the stories you clicked on most from this week's editions of the Daily 7:

 

Schumacher Begged Police for Help for Two Days Before Husband Killed Son
By Laura Collins, the Daily Mail — Wednesday, February 12

Christina Schumacher says she attempted to get full custody of her son, believing him to be in danger, just before he was killed by his father in December. She says her estranged husband had been abusive for years.

Homicide Victims Identified as West Haven Father and Son; Suspect Arrested
Staff report, Rutland Herald — Thursday, February 13

A man was arrested Thursday morning in connection with the murder of a father and son in Hubbardton Wednesday.

The Republican Governors Association took Gov. Peter Shumlin to task Friday for presiding over what it called a health insurance exchange "in shambles." But despite the provocative and hyperbolic rhetoric, a spokesman for the organization conceded that it's not currently planning to target Shumlin as he seeks reelection this November.

In a rare hit piece against the Green Mountain gov, RGA communications director Gail Gitcho emailed reporters excerpts from a controversial Newsweek story published last week accusing a state contractor of deception and state officials of incompetence.

Since December 2012, Shumlin has served as chairman of the RGA's counterpart, the Democratic Governors Association.

"[DGA] chair and Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin may want to stop spending so much time helping other Democrats get elected and start paying attention to the problems in his own state," Gitcho wrote. "As we continue to see in states across the country, Vermont is the latest to face an ObamaCare state exchange disaster. Despite being home to some of Obama's biggest supporters, as Newsweek's Lynnley Browning puts it, if ObamaCare 'can't' make it there, some argue, it can't make it anywhere.'"

On Thursday morning, a couple hundred University of Vermont employees packed Carpenter Auditorium to express their concerns about potential increases in the amount they pay for benefits.

UVM currently offers health care and retirement benefits to faculty and staff, as well as tuition remissions for their children and other dependents. But to make up for lower revenues and increasing costs, the administration is considering shifting some of the cost of those benefits to the employees. The plan, known as “cost sharing,” would take effect July 1, 2014.

“There’s a pretty significant gap that we had to address,” UVM Vice President for Finance and Treasurer Richard Cate said at the outset of the town-hall-style meeting (which was preceded by a similar forum on Monday). “Some people favor tuition remission more, some favor health insurance more, but in no case is this about having a benefit going away.” The college hasn't made any decisions yet about adjusting benefits, Cate added, and is accepting feedback during the month of February. 

Jan Carney, an associate dean in the UVM College of Medicine and chair of the University Benefits Advisory Council, then provided some background on the cost-sharing plan and put a question to the employees: Which benefits could be adjusted that would have the least — and most — negative impact on them?

In response, about 20 employees spoke into microphones that were passed around the room. Some identified individual benefits. Others refused to indicate a preference and expressed frustration about what they perceived as an unfair distribution of the costs.

Vermont has a tough row to hoe if it's going to make any meaningful difference in the state of an increasingly polluted Lake Champlain. 

That was the word at the Statehouse Wednesday when Stephen Perkins, with the office of ecosystem protection in the federal Environmental Protection Agency, testified before lawmakers from nine different legislative committees. The legislators had gathered in a packed meeting room to hear the latest developments in a years-long effort to rewrite regulations aimed at reducing phosphorous pollution in Lake Champlain. 

Perkins had good news and bad news to share. The bad? Even if the state went "full bore" on its plan to clean up Lake Champlain, there are two sections — the Missisquoi Bay, and a section of the south lake — which would still see phosphorous levels deemed too high for healthy water.

The good news? "In those remaining segments there's a prayer of getting there," Perkins said — but only if Vermont is aggressive in its approach to improving water quality in the years ahead.

The EPA says Vermont needs to cut the amount of phosphorous it is dumping into Lake Champlain by 36 percent. 
It's been three years since the EPA revoked Vermont's former "TMDL" — or Total Maximum Daily Load — a technical standard for how much phosphorous the lake can safely absorb. The EPA stepped in to rewrite the TMDL and officials from the Agency of Natural Resources and the Agency of Agriculture collaborated with EPA on a plan to meet those goals.  But now the EPA is pressing Vermont — hard — for more specifics on how it will meet the new target. 

An audience of about 200 college students listened raptly at United Nations headquarters in New York on Tuesday as Jody Williams recounted her life journey from small-town Vermont to international activism and acclaim.

Williams, 63, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her leadership of a grassroots campaign that led to a global treaty banning production and use of landmines.

It was schoolyard bullying in Putney that first provoked her to confront the harmful exercise of power, Williams recalled. She said she stood up to “the stud of fourth grade who was being mean to a little, nonathletic kid.” And that boldness arose, Williams explained, from having earlier seen her parents defend her older brother, Steve, whom “kids nearby loved to torture” because he was deaf.

Seat number nine in the Vermont Senate has been vacant for the last month, a visible reminder of the absence of the late senator Sally Fox. On Tuesday morning, her husband of 35 years, Michael Sirotkin, was sworn in, filling the seat in her stead.

The ceremony was poignant but efficient, and moments later, Sirotkin was voting “aye” on the first bill to come before him. The legislation — on the regulation of malt beverages — had been introduced by his wife.

Gov. Peter Shumlin appointed Sirotkin to the position shortly after Fox died of cancer in January, but encouraged him to take several weeks before reporting for duty at the bustling Statehouse. Sirotkin is one of six senators representing Chittenden County.

On Tuesday, the Village of Essex Junction Board of Trustees will consider proposed changes to its land development code that would make it more difficult to open massage parlors that allow criminal activities on their premises. The measure, introduced by village trustee Elaine Sopchak, comes in response to revelations last year by Seven Days that at least three Chittenden County massage parlors, including the now-defunct Seiwa Spa in Essex Junction (seen right in a May 2013 photo), were allegedly offering sex for money, possibly by female workers who were the victims of human trafficking.

The proposal, scheduled for discussion at the board's February 11 meeting, would create a new section of the village's land development code that specifically targets massage establishments. According to Sopchak, the new code would define what constitutes a massage parlor and would require a public hearing before one may open, as well as routine inspections and an annually renewable business permit.

The new code would also place physical restrictions on such businesses, such as prohibiting sleeping quarters on the premises, banning locks on massage room doors and not allowing customers to enter and exit from the rear of the building. Sopchak, who's been working closely on the new code with Essex Police Chief Brad LaRose, said that many of the proposed changes are borrowed from a model ordinances developed by the Polaris Project, an international anti-human-trafficking group based in Washington, D.C.

Gov. Peter Shumlin made his Sunday morning talk show debut this weekend with an appearance on ABC's "This Week."

The topic? You guessed it: Vermont's "full-blown heroin crisis."

Shumlin appeared with guest host Martha Raddatz, ABC News correspondent Dr. Richard Besser and journalist Seth Mnookin, who wrote last week in Slate about his own struggle with heroin addiction. The segment segued from actor Philip Seymour Hoffman's death by heroin overdose last week to Shumlin's State of the State address, in which he focused on Vermont's "growing epidemic" of opiate abuse.

Here's the video (and here's the transcript):

Shumlin and Health Commissioner Harry Chen spoke at a Burlington press conference Friday

Gov. Peter Shumlin said Friday that while in Las Vegas this week, he "made a couple of fundraising visits" to potential donors to the Democratic Governors Association. But he would not say whether he raised any gold for his own reelection campaign while on his trip to the Silver State.

Shumlin traveled to Vegas on Wednesday to attend the National Association of Home Builders' annual meeting and trade show, at which the gov said he "spoke with the home builders about jobs and the work we're doing in Vermont to try to boost housing." The two-day trip was paid for by the DGA, a partisan electoral organization of which he is chairman. 

As Seven Days reported this week, the organization's nonprofit advocacy arm and its super PAC raised $28 million last year. Most of that came from five- and six-figure contributions from special interest groups, including labor unions and the pharmaceutical, insurance, telecom and tech industries.

Neither the DGA nor the governor's office responded to questions posed by Seven Days over the past week about whether Shumlin would be taking part in any fundraising activities while out-of-state. But Shumlin confirmed at a Friday press conference at Burlington's Community Health Center that he had.

Updated below with comment from Department of Vermont Health Access Commissioner Mark Larson, who says the Newsweek story is inaccurate and "inflammatory."

How bungled was the rollout of Vermont Health Connect, the state's trouble-plagued health insurance exchange?

In a word, argues veteran reporter and New York Times alum Lynnley Browning, very. But Browning takes a full 3,400 words to make that point in a brutal new story published on Newsweek's website Thursday evening. 

In it, Browning writes that Vermont state officials "glossed over ominous warning signs and Keystone Cops-like planning" as they worked with contractor CGI Federal to build the federally mandated exchange.