A federal judge on Thursday blocked Vermont from forcing the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor to shut down when its license expires in March, saying that the state is trying to regulate nuclear safety, which only the federal government can do.

The judge, J. Garvan Murtha of United States District Court in Brattleboro, Vt., also held that the state cannot force the plant’s owner, Entergy, to sell electricity from the reactor to in-state utilities at reduced rates as a condition of continued operation, as Entergy asserts it is now doing.

The nuclear operator filed a lawsuit last year challenging the constitutionality of a state law giving the Vermont Legislature veto power over operation of the reactor when its original 40-year license expires.

In an extensive review…

In what he described as “both an opportunity and an obligation,” Vermont Gov. Pete Shumlin has signed the country’s first single-payer law, setting the state on a course to be first with a publicly financed healthcare system.

Shumlin, who campaigned for governor on promises to pursue a single-payer system for the state, took little more than four months since his January inauguration to set the state on that course.

“We gather here today to launch the first single payer system in America, to do in Vermont what has taken too long – to have a healthcare (system) that is the best in the world that treats healthcare as a right and not a privilege, where healthcare follows the individual not the employer,” he said at the bill signing, held…

The President on Wednesday may have reassured Americans that the state of the Union is “strong,” but, just the week before, a group of Vermont secessionists declared their intention to seek political power in a quest to get their state to quit the Union altogether.

On Jan. 15, in the state capital of Montpelier, nine candidates for statewide office gathered in a tiny room at the Capitol Plaza Hotel, to announce they wanted a divorce from the United States of America. “For the first time in over 150 years, secession and political independence from the U.S. will be front and center in a statewide New England political campaign,” said Thomas Naylor, 73, one of the leaders of the campaign.

A former Duke University economics professor, Naylor heads up the Second Vermont Republic, which he describes as “left-libertarian, anti-big government, anti-empire, antiwar, with small is beautiful as our guiding…