Citing demand for more local news programming, WCAX-TV announced Wednesday it's expanding its coverage to Saturday and Sunday mornings. Starting September 7, the station will air an hour of local news at 8 a.m. both days.

"The public has asked us to do it," says WCAX news director Anson Tebbetts. "News is, as you know, seven days a week."

The station will be the first in the Burlington-Plattsburgh television market to offer locally produced programing weekend mornings, which WCAX owner Peter Martin says are growing more and more essential.

"Morning news — not just here, but around the country — has become almost a center of gravity. People want it and watch it in surprisingly large numbers," Martin says. "There is a set of advertisers — for instance, automobile companies — who are anxious to reach people who watch news."

The move is also the first local broadcast news expansion in Vermont since September 2010, when WCAX added a 5 p.m. weekday newscast and a 5:30 p.m. interview show. The station's primary competitor, WPTZ-TV, began airing a 5 p.m. show in 2002 and a 5:30 p.m. show in 2005.

"We're going to wish them well," WPTZ news director Sinan Sadar said. "More news is better for everybody."

Neither Tebbetts nor Martin would say precisely how many new hires the station would make to staff the shows, though Martin said, "There will be at least several." Tebbetts said some existing on-air staff might also shift to the weekend time slots.

Here's what's news in this week's print edition of your friendly neighborhood weekly, Seven Days:

• For our cover story, Megan James and Corin Hirsch spent 36 hours in Newport ... Vermont, a city on the brink of something big.
• Burlington is holding hostage the liquor licenses of several businesses, including Bove's Restaurant, to force them to address code violations and unpaid taxes.
• Many of Vermont's undocumented farmworkers live in substandard housing without much notice from the outside world. But one Vermont town is fighting a farm to improve housing conditions for Latino laborers.
• As Washington considers federal immigration reform, a Burlington lawyer has taken the helm of a national organization that could influence the debate.
• And in Fair Game, Paul Heintz presses Sen. Patrick Leahy on whether Egypt's military takeover is a "coup", and whether that means the U.S. must yank foreign aid to that county. Plus, how the F-35 is splitting South Burlington, and the Burlington Free Press hires a new, younger staff.

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As we wrote in this week's Fair Game, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) believes U.S. law clearly states that foreign aid "is cut off when a democratically elected government is deposed by military coup or decree." And, according to spokesman David Carle, he believes the toppling of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi last week constitutes a coup.

But asked whether that means Leahy believes the U.S. should cut off $1.3 billion in annual aid to the Egyptian military, Carle wasn't quite so clear.

"It's a fluid situation at the moment and he understands the Administration wanting to wait for some clarity," Carle told us. "The situation in Cairo is cloudy, but the law itself is clear."

We focused on Leahy's stance in the column because the guy plays a central role in the debate: As chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the Department of State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs (phew, now that's a name!), he writes the budget for U.S. foreign aid programs.

But where does the rest of Vermont's congressional delegation stand?

Congressman Peter Welch's (D-Vt.) position is pretty straightforward.

"The Egyptian military removed from office the democratically elected — if failed — leader of Egypt," he said in a written statement. "By any definition of the word, this was a coup and it appears, under current law, that future American assistance to Egypt is prohibited."

As for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), his answer to our first question — whether Morsi's toppling constituted a coup — was crystal clear.

"Yes," he said in a written response. "When the military overthrows a democratically-elected government it is called a coup."

But asked in a follow-up email whether that means the U.S. should withdraw its aid to Egypt, as the law stipulates, Sanders declined to answer.

"I'm not sure we're going to have any more at this point," Sanders' spokesman, Michael Briggs, responded.

Oh. Okay.

Opponents of the F-35 made emotional appeals Monday night in a failed attempt to persuade the South Burlington city council to reject local basing of the fighter jet. On Tuesday night they summoned scientific data to reinforce their argument that noise from the planes is harmful to human health.

At a forum entitled "Last Call for Kids," three Vermont medical experts warned that the F-35 will have potentially acute physical and mental consequences for those living in areas subject to the highest decibel outputs.

Citing a 2011 World Health Organization study, University of Vermont nursing school professor Judith Cohen listed some of the possible impacts: "headaches, tiredness, irritability, impaired intellectual function, inability to complete tasks." Noise levels produced by the likes of the F-35 can cause "cognitive impairment" in children, Cohen added, saying "reading, attention span and learning" may all be adversely affected.

Dr. John Reuwer, an emergency and occupational medicine practitioner in South Burlington, reduced the data to a simple formulation: "The F-35 is bad for our children's health." The effects are such, Reuwer added, that "allowing this plane to come here is like encouraging our children to smoke."

Updated below with comment from Pam Mackenzie explaining her vote.

South Burlington grandmother Carmine Sargent, an opponent of the plan to base F-35 fighter jets at the airport near her home, lamented recently that so few of her neighbors were speaking out against the plane.

Dozens of them spoke out on Monday night.

Well over half of the 80-plus South Burlington residents addressing a special city council meeting urged the five-member body to reaffirm its earlier stand against the F-35 "bed-down." Despite those occasionally emotional pleas, the council voted 3-2 in support of the basing plan at the chaotic conclusion of a three-and-a-half-hour meeting in the Chamberlin School gymnasium initially attended by about 250 local residents.

A few of the roughly 150 attendees still present in the uncomfortably warm gym at 9:30 p.m. shouted objections as council chair Pam Mackenzie refused to explain her decisive vote on the divisive issue. Mackenzie also would not explain why she alone among the councilors declined to state the reasons for her vote. 

Mackenzie sided with councilors Pat Nowak and Chris Shaw, both of whom had soundly defeated F-35 opponents in local elections in March. Council members Rosanne Greco and Helen Riehle opposed the basing plan.

Prior to voting "hell, no," Greco said she was "shocked" that her colleagues would want to bring the plane to South Burlington "after all we've heard tonight." Greco, a retired Air Force colonel, drew a standing ovation after declaring that "blind acceptance is not patriotism."

After two hours of public discussion overwhelmingly opposed to basing F-35s in Vermont, it remained unclear how the Winooski City Council will vote on the issue — or whether it will submit additional comments to the Air Force before a July 15 deadline for public feedback.

The council delayed any action until Wednesday after hearing from more than 50 Winooski residents, only five of whom voiced explicit support for the basing. The vast majority said the warplanes, which would replace F-16s currently based at Vermont Air National Guard base at Burlington International Airport, threatens health and quality of life in the city.

Even as Winooski residents testified, the South Burlington City Council was voting Monday evening to reverse a previous vote and officially support basing F-35s at BTV, over the objections of many city residents.

Arica Bronz, who co-owns a duplex in Winooski and has children in JFK Elementary School, told the council she was extremely happy to have her children in the school system, but wouldn’t accept the change.

“If the F-35s come to Winooski,” she said, “I will find a way to leave.”

Another resident, Dan Treinis, also said he would leave Winooski if the jets were based at BTV.

Many others were vehemently against the F-35s and encouraged the City Council to send a strong message to the Air Force on their behalf.

Resident Greg Premo said he worried the value of his home would fall with the increased noise from the new jets.

“I urge you not to be a laissez-faire city council,” he said to a panel of three city councilors and Mayor Michael O’Brien.

Abe may have been honest, but he was a snooper too. In an op-ed piece appearing in Saturday's New York Times, St. Michael's College journalism professor David Mindich blows the whistle on Lincoln's extensive domestic spying operation.

The communications-interception program approved by Lincoln in 1862 was similar in scope, if not in technology, to the systematic surveillance undertaken by President Obama's National Security Agency. Mindich notes that while the current operation may be alarming, it is not — despite what many commentators have claimed — "unprecedented" in American history.

Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's secretary of war, got the go-ahead from the 16th president for a plan to take complete control of the nation's telegraph lines, Mindich relates. Stanton was thus able to "keep tabs on vast amounts of communication, journalistic, governmental and personal," the prof writes. And the head of the Department of War "ultimately had dozens of newspapermen arrested on questionable charges."

But Mindich adds that he wasn't appalled by Stanton's requests to Lincoln for sweeping powers of surveillance. Upon unearthing these documents in the Library of Congress in the 1990s, Mindich recalls, "I accepted his information control as a necessary evil." Given the cause for which the Union was fighting, "the benefits of information monitoring, censorship and extrajudicial tactics, though disturbing, were arguably worth their price," Mindich tells his Times readers.

There's a kicker, though. 

"Part of the reason this calculus was acceptable to me," Mindich continues, "was that the trade-offs were not permanent. As the war ended, the emergency measures were rolled back. Information — telegraph and otherwise — began to flow freely again."

Moral of the story: To protect privacy, put an end to the wars that the government cites as justification for its snooping activities. "If you are a critic of the NSA's surveillance program," Mindich reasons, "it is imperative that the war on terror reach its culmination."

Read Mindich's op-ed here.

Notice anything different about Seven Days' print edition this week? There are a lot fewer words — and a lot more cartoons.

This week, we decided to give our keyboards a rest and tell stories in graphic form. As co-editor Pamela Polston explains, we weren't quite sure how to do an all-cartoon issue at first. But we figured it out along the way, and we think the results are pretty fantastic (thanks mostly to the excellent cartoonists.)

This is an issue you'll want to pick up in print. But if you can only read it online, here's what's in news:

• Vermont's best-known undocumented migrant is a 23-year-old Mexican named Danilo Lopez. He's made quite a splash in Vermont, but the feds want to deport him by July 6.
• Chittenden County currently ships its sewer sludge to New York. But do we really know what's in that stuff?
• Who knew, but state Sen. Mark MacDonald (D-Orange) is the quite the political cartoonist, and we've collecting a sampling of his drawings from the 2013 session.
• And in Fair Game, Paul Heintz and Tim Newcomb team up to examine Macadam Mason's Taser death one year later — and whether Vermont will ever change its stun-gun policy.

New rules set to go into effect on July 15 will dramatically slash the number of homeless Vermonters receiving state benefits to stay in motels, a practice that came under fire from lawmakers this winter after emergency assistance spending on motel stays spending skyrocketed to $2.2 million fiscal year 2012 and roughly $4 million in 2013. 

The legislature cut its funding for that program to $1.5 million in this year's appropriations bill — and officials at the Vermont Agency of Human Services say the new eligibility rules will keep that spending in check. But advocates for the homeless are raising the alarm that the new rules are too strict, and will leave vulnerable Vermonters without any place to turn if homeless shelters are full. 

Chopping motel benefits before other relief programs are in place is like "pulling away the life raft before people know how to swim," says Rita Markley, who directs the Committee on Temporary Shelter (COTS) in Burlington.  

When Sen. Patrick Leahy made the surprise announcement last December that he'd turned down a promotion to chair the Senate Appropriations Committee, his explanation went something like this: With immigration reform and gun legislation on the Judiciary Committee's agenda — not to mention a possible Supreme Court nominee or two — that's where the action would be.

Turns out he was right.

Just minutes before the Senate passed sweeping immigration reform legislation Thursday afternoon by a vote of 68 to 32, Leahy paused to reflect on the role his committee played in the bill's passage.

Over the course of three weeks, he said during a speech on the Senate floor, the Judiciary Committee spent 37 hours debating and amending the bill.

"We considered 212 amendments from Democrats and Republicans and approved 136 amendments in a room filled with spectators on both sides of the issue," Leahy said. "Of the amendments approved in committee, 47 were Republican amendments and all but three were adopted with bipartisan support. Even the staunchest opponents of this legislation have praised the Judiciary Committee's process for consideration of this bill."

Well, if I don't say so myself!