Top stories developing across the region at the noon hour:
the Vermont House debates the issue of drug re-importation and is expected to approve the measure by a wide margin; the Douglas administration rolls out its plan for accelerating the shut-down of the state hospital in Waterbury; the state panel that regulates judges’ conduct has dismissed a complaint alleging that Supreme Court Justice John Dooley violated the code of judicial conduct; Senator Jim Jeffords says the president’s budget is a fiscal time bomb that does not include either the costs of the war in Iraq or the cost of the Social Security revisions the president wants; the New York Legislature agrees to a plan that would pay life insurance premiums for deployed National Guard members; a former guard at a private prison in Kentucky has been arrested on charges that he sexually abused two inmates transferred from Vermont.
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