This week’s crop was looking a little thin until I visited The Manchester Journal’s website and found not one, not two, but three stories worthy of note. One of them was actually published on September 4, and I managed to miss it last time. But it remains relevant, and The Journal has since published a meaningful follow-up.

The Journal is one of three southern Vermont newspapers owned by Paul Belogour, an international financier type who originally hails from Belarus, one of the most corrupt and press-unfriendly dictatorships this side of Kim Jong Un. His 2021 acquisition of The Journal, The Bennington Banner and The Brattleboro Reformer raised many an eyebrow at the time, including mine. So far his stewardship seems to be fairly benign, at least by contemporary oligarchical standards. (Although I doubt that The Reformer will be doing any more overviews of Belogour’s wide-ranging acquisitions like it did before he bought the papers.) And this week, at least, one of his outlets occupies the top spot in Vermont’s incredible shrinking news pantheon.

ICE detainee whisked out of state. The Journal’s Cherise Forbes and Michael Albans were first to report that Davona Williams, the Manchester resident seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month, had been secretly moved to the North Lake Processing Center in rural Michigan. This story ought to reverberate in Montpelier’s corridors of power; last spring, when leading lawmakers were looking to limit Vermont’s cooperation slash complicity in the ICE crackdown, the Scott administration successfully argued that people detained in Vermont were better off in Vermont prisons than elsewhere. Huh, turns out that ICE can move people around willy-nilly no matter where they live or where they were first detained. Which puts us back on the “complicity” side of the ledger.

There’s also a fascinating little Vermont connection with the North Lake facility itself, but that’s beyond the remit of this post.