Daybreak Thursday 9/24/20

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

And warmer... As warm air continues to flow into the region, we'll see temps bump up a few degrees from yesterday into the mid-70s, with partly sunny skies after a foggy start. Winds from the west this afternoon, and lows tonight getting into the lower 50s. Hanover school bus driver has "medical event" during morning ride, dies. A school bus headed south on Route 10 with middle- and elementary-school students around 7:40 am yesterday crossed the centerline near Kendal Riverfront Park, scraped a guardrail, and came to a stop facing northbound traffic. The driver, Heather Billingham, of Canaan, was taken to DHMC, where she was pronounced dead. No students were hurt, but they were transferred to a second bus—which then collided with a car that had been stuck in traffic and was attempting to turn around. No injuries there, either. (VN)Canaan resident sues town, police officer for 2017 incident. The case of Crystal Wright has actually been in court already, as the VN and the ACLU of NH seek the release of a 2018 outside review of her arrest by Canaan police officer Samuel Provenza; Provenza has moved on to the state police. Now NHPR reports Wright has filed her own federal suit alleging that Provenza used excessive force after a traffic stop; his dashboard cam wasn't activated.Leb school board opts for return to full in-person classes. After rejecting lobbying last month by a group of parents to abandon its pre-return plans for a hybrid teaching model with a mix of remote and in-person learning, the board last night shifted course. Reassured by Grafton County's low caseload and social distancing during the first two weeks of school, it's asked Supt. Joanne Roberts to plan for five-day-a-week classroom instruction, reports the VN.Springfield Hospital files plan to leave bankruptcy. It calls for the hospital itself to split from its clinics in six towns around the region, and relies on writing off nearly $5 million in taxes owed to VT and an injection of $6 million in new state aid that Gov. Phil Scott has included in his proposed budget. The plan is in bankruptcy court in Burlington and debt-holders will have a chance to respond before the court issues its decision, reports the VN's Nora Doyle-Burr."Every single earthworm in Vermont is an alien invasive; fourteen European species, two Asian." Thetford writer and naturalist Ted Levin has been contemplating his compost heap and beseeching robins to eat their fill. "The pedigree of every worm ever laced on a fishhook, every worm ever yanked by a robin or a woodcock, can be traced to England or France. Even Japan," he writes. And they're not innocuous. Invasive earthworms digest leaf litter more rapidly than our hardwood forests evolved for, and they boost soil emission of greenhouse gases. "Earthworms and fossil fuel . . . who knew?" “All of us out there are going to break barriers we didn’t think possible." Jason Mosel, a network engineer at Dartmouth, is an Iraq War vet (in the Marines), an ex-alcoholic, a survivor of a suicide attempt... and now an ultra-runner who's organizing the Devil’s Den Ultra Run on Wright’s Mountain in Bradford, VT in a couple of weeks. It's a benefit for a fund started by the mother of a Vermont Guard member who died by suicide. The VN's Greg Fennell profiles Mosel and his efforts.Supermassive black holes spin really fast. That's the conclusion of a new paper by Dartmouth postdoc Tonima Ananna and a team at Yale (where she got her PhD). Their research helps peg a chief mechanism by which black holes grow—their spin pulls in gas—and gives cosmologists a "precise prescription," Ananna says, for how much energy black holes inject into their surrounding galaxies. There are burn bans now in Lebanon, Hanover, and Enfield. They've all gone into effect in the last week and a half or so. "I think the burn ban is just prudent to keep us from running around in the woods chasing things, and you know, for those that have backyard fire pits, chimneys, anything that burns wood, that ban is applicable," Leb Fire Chief Chris Christopoulos tells NBC5.Small forest fires breaking out in NH, too. That underground blaze in Killington has company. NHPR's climate reporter Annie Ropeik talks to VPR's Henry Epp about forest fires around the region: There's one on an island in the Merrimack near Concord, and there have been others in the Whites, started by inadequately extinguished campfires. Low snowpack in the spring and drought during the summer have led to tinder-dry conditions both in the woods and in the soil, she explains. Which may be one reason Chris Sununu is moving on an emergency law prohibiting outdoor fires near public woodlands. Including smoking. Yesterday, NH's governor asked members of the Executive Council to be prepared to vote by phone on the measure—the first of its kind in 23 years—when it's ready. Backyard fire pits and attended fires at campgrounds would be okay. "It’s really about making sure we put some limitations on public fires in public spaces," he said.USDA yanks VT food box contract from VT company, gives it to out-of-staters. Instead of the Abbey Group, which sourced locally and worked with the VT Foodbank to distribute the first round of Farmers to Families food boxes, the federal agency has given the next contract to Boston-based Costa Fruit & Produce—which will use apples from NY and potatoes from ME—and, in Orange and Windsor counties, to Houston food giant Sysco. "We had a whole distribution plan set with the Abbey Group. Now we will have to scramble to create a whole different plan," the Foodbank's John Sayles tells Seven Days.Proper ventilation "more an aspiration than a reality" in VT schools. The evidence that it's critical to fighting the spread of the coronavirus is plain, writes VTDigger's Lola Duffort, but even as kids and teachers go back to school, it's equally plain that some schools' HVAC systems are inadequate. Schools are spending money on standalone air cleaners or relying on open windows. Part of the problem: There are neither federal nor state standards, so no one's quite sure what to aim for.New VSO head is "a total badass." That, at least, is what the Vermont Symphony Orchestra's creative-projects chair Matt LaRocca thinks of Elise Brunelle, who took over running the orchestra in May. She's already looking at experimenting with adding visuals (dance, projections), though she admits it might not work with Brahms. She plans to launch a series of live-streamed chamber concerts and engage with the music of refugee communities in VT. "I'm not an artist," she tells Seven Days' Amy Lilly, but "I love running an organization that allows artists to pursue what they do best.""Do not speak to the media. Please tell anyone you see engaging with the media to stop." For weeks, Burlington has been transfixed by nightly protests against the city's police department. Seven Days' Chelsea Edgar, who makes a habit of going deep on complex stories, dug into this one, too. She wanted "to tell, through their eyes, the story of Vermont's largest public manifestation of the national reckoning with racism, white supremacy and the systems designed to uphold the status quo." Instead, she wrote a story about not getting the story... that still manages to tell more of it than you've seen anywhere else.It was a postcard evening out there yesterday... Something about the soft light of the setting sun etching each tree and bringing out the brilliance of the leaves. Even better from on high. Here's a still from William Daugherty's drone.Making birdflight visible. Xavi Bou is a Catalan photographer who for the last decade has been illuminating the flight paths of birds. He films them as they fly, then digitally stitches individual frames together into a composite image that looks almost like pointillist light trails, or dust storms, or—in the case of turkey vultures over Jackson Hole—whirligigs. Molly Glick has the story (and lots of examples) in Sierra magazine. 

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Hmm... How about "Bohemian Rhapsody"... though not quite Queen's version. Fittingly,

, who clearly plunked down for an ace production team. Talk about bringing visuals to music...

(Thanks, KRH!)

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