As befits a veteran diplomat, the Palestinian Liberation Organization's chief representative to the United States knows how to work an audience.

Maen Rashid Areikat began his speech at Champlain College on Tuesday night by thanking Vermonters for their “warmth of hospitality.” He also showed he'd done some historical homework as he cited Vermont's period as an independent republic committed to democratic rights.

From there, Areikat segued smoothly into his main message to 150 attentive listeners: “My people are fighting for equality, social justice and to live a life of dignity and freedom.”

For the next 40 minutes and during a polite, 30-minute question-and-answer session, he presented a narrative counter to the pro-Israel point of view that he said prevails in the United States. Areikat depicted the Palestinians as victims of relentless and brutal oppression who nevertheless seek a peaceful political resolution to a conflict in which they are a blameless party.

“It is not easy for me to say I'm keeping my hand extended to the Israeli government, the Israeli people,” Areikat said. He suggested that Israel, enabled by the United States, has spurned all efforts by the Palestinians to make peace on the basis of a two-state arrangement.

When President Barack Obama outlined a new strategy last week to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Vermont's Senate delegation appeared to offer their full-throated support.

While Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) emphasized the need to act in concert with other nations and warned against the deployment of ground troops in the region, both said in written statements last Wednesday that they backed Obama's two-pronged strategy.

"He has authorized air strikes against ISIS and further support for Syrian rebels opposing ISIS, many of whom have been targeted by the cruel regime of [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad," Leahy said in his statement. "I support the President because I believe that ISIS must be stopped, that U.S. leadership is urgently required, and that he has no intention of allowing the United States to become entangled in another large-scale war in the Middle East."

Calling ISIS a "brutal and dangerous organization that must be defeated," Sanders said in his own statement that the U.S. must be joined in its efforts by "the international community" and "the people of Iraq and Syria."

"U.S. ground troops should not be sent back into combat," Sanders continued. "I support the president's airstrike campaign and help for the Syrian opposition."

But when the Senate voted Thursday night on whether to authorize the U.S. to train Syrian rebels, Leahy and Sanders joined eight liberal Democrats and 12 conservative Republicans in opposing the measure, which was attached to a larger spending bill. The vote was 78 to 22 in favor.

Interrupted repeatedly at a town hall meeting last weekend, an irate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) yelled at disruptive audience members: "Shut up!"

The meeting, at Cabot's Willey Building Auditorium on Saturday, grew so heated that Sanders' outreach director, Phil Fiermonte, called the cops, according to Vermont State Police spokeswoman Stephanie Dasaro. Four troopers arrived partway through the event, but took no action.

"They basically were just there as a presence," Dasaro said. "Other than that, we didn't get involved. There was no disorderly conduct. No one was arrested."

A seven-minute video of the meeting was posted to YouTube Sunday by Marie Countryman, a Montpelier activist:
  

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.

Find these news and politics stories in this week's Seven Days...

• In Burlington, one resident has kept up her fight against a neighbor's backyard guitar-building shop for a year and a half. The case could reach the Vermont Supreme Court.
• The Department of Homeland Security has dropped plans to run an "internal checkpoint" 100 miles from the Vermont/Quebec border — though it's too late for one man who faces deportation. 
• University of Vermont researchers are working on technology to allow maple farmers to harvest sap from young saplings rather than the less-plentiful mature trees.
• As part of the love and marriage issue, here's a look back at the path to marriage equality for same-sex couples.
• In Fair Game: How one soldier's allegations of sexual assault changed the Vermont National Guard. Plus, find out who's giving big bucks to Gov. Peter Shumlin's Democratic Governors Association, and why the Committee on Committees isn't a committee — at least when it comes to letting the public and press inside. 

Another week, another Wednesday, another Seven Days. Here's this week's lineup of news and politics stories:

• In response to employment-status changes that could strip them of some benefits, several Sodexo food-service workers at local colleges are considering a union drive.
• Norman Stevens is the first Vermonter sentenced to life without parole for a crime that wasn't murder. Twelve years later, he's appealing to the Vermont Supreme Court.
• AT&T has plans for new "stealthy" cell towers in Richmond. Nearby residents say the way telecoms are allowed to skirt town planners is also stealthy.
• One way Vermonters can help the Philippines after Super Typhoon Haiyan: crisis mapping, an act of crowdsourced digital cartography to help relief workers on the ground.
• In this week's cover story, big changes are afoot for JDK Design, the influential creative firm that's called Burlington home for years.
• And in Fair Game: Too soon? Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger is already collecting cash for a potential reelection bid, and some of his top donors are real-estate developers with eyes on projects in the city.

Pick up this issue in print, online or on the iOS app.

In the fourteen months since Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in a terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has become an epicenter of outrage over the incident.

Its Republican members have criticized the Obama administration for failing to keep U.S. diplomatic personnel safe and, they allege, for covering up details of the attack.

Last weekend, four committee members — including Congressman Peter Welch (D-Vt.) — traveled to Libya to review the State Department's progress in implementing security improvements to American embassies. It was a rare chance, Welch says, to put aside the partisan rancor and focus on substantive changes.

"The Oversight Committee, I think, unfortunately politicized what happened in Benghazi," he says. "But this trip, I thought, was an opportunity for two Republicans, two Democrats to start looking at this in a broader perspective and hopefully bring that back to the committee."

Joining Welch on the four-day trip to Libya, Egypt and Malta were U.S. Reps. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.). Chaffetz, a conservative Republican who chairs an oversight subcommittee focusing on national security and foreign operations, has been particularly critical of the administration's handling of the embassy attack.

South Pomfret resident Bill Arkin isn't shocked by recent revelations about the worldwide and domestic spying operations of U.S. intelligence agencies.

That's because he and colleague Dana Priest reported extensively on privacy invasions by U.S. espionage agencies in an investigative series, "Top Secret America," published in the Washington Post more than three years ago.

Arkin and Priest showed how the national-security state had expanded exponentially in the years following the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. They reported, for example, that more than 3000 government organizations and private companies are engaged in "homeland security" activities in 10,000 locations around the United States, six of them in Vermont.

Arkin will update and analyze his findings as they relate to Vermonters and millions of other Americans at a conference on Wednesday in Montpelier. He's the featured speaker at the free, day-long event in the Pavilion Auditorium sponsored by the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Arkin's talk will focus on "the big national picture and how Vermont fits into it," he said in a telephone interview on Monday. He'll also be touting his newly published book, American Coup: How a Terrified Government Is Destroying the Constitution.

The Obama administration's partial freeze of U.S. military aid to Egypt doesn't go far enough, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said late Wednesday. 

By failing to fully cut off funding to the U.S. ally after its democratically elected president was overthrown in a July coup, Leahy said, the administration is thwarting the will of Congress and sending a "muddled" message to Cairo.

"Our law is clear," Leahy said in a written statement. "When there is a military coup, U.S. aid to the government is cut off."

On Wednesday, administration officials confirmed to national news outlets that the U.S. would freeze delivery of $260 million in aid and a certain pieces of military equipment. They said the country would continue to provide counter-terrorism funding, military training and spare parts for Egypt's arsenal. 

It's a big news week in Vermont with the long-awaited launch of the state's health care exchange. We've got stories about that and more in this week's Seven Days.

• Republican political operative Darcie Johnston is devoted to stopping health care reform in Vermont. How's it going?
• No dancing in Burlington restaurants? A puritanical "rule" in the Queen City could be overhauled soon.
• In this week's Fair Game: Vermont pols rail against the federal shutdown, Vermont Health Connect launches, Leahy wines and dines some big-bucks donors and the Free Press sells its HQ.
• In the cover story, Paula Routly profiles Captain Richard Phillips, the Underhill merchant mariner whose ordeal with Somali pirates is the subject of a new Tom Hanks film, Captain Phillips. The real captain is back in the same waters where he was taken hostage in 2009.

Read these stories and more in print, online or on our iOS app.

Cover photo of Captain Phillips by Oliver Parini