All Things Considered on WAMC

A new report assesses the visitation policies of acute care hospitals across New York.

The report: “Sick, Scared and Separated from Loved Ones” scored the flexibility and amount of visiting hours and the website information about visitation at the hospitals.  St Peter’s Hospital in Albany ranked highest overall. St Peter’s Health Partners Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer Kathy Brodbeck.

The report found  that eleven hospital websites posted information on a patient’s right to choose their visitors.

The Vermont Public Service Board has once again rejected arguments that ratepayers should get a $21 million refund when the state's two largest utilities merged.

Vermont Public Radio reports the board this week upheld a key provision of its June order that allowed Green Mountain Power to merge with Central Vermont Public Service Corporation.

The deal was panned by the consumer group AARP, which had raised an alarm over a payback provision for extra money CVPS customers were ordered to pay the company a decade ago to pull it back from the brink of bankruptcy.

Federal prosecutors in Vermont say a Virginia pastor worked with a number of other people to help a woman flee the United States with her daughter rather than share custody of the girl with the mother's former lesbian partner.

The trial of 46-year-old Kenneth Miller of Stuarts Draft, Va., opened Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Burlington. In his opening statement, Miller's lawyer said he will prove his client believed Lisa Miller had full custody of daughter Isabella.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's decision not to release more of his past tax returns has fueled countless attacks and counterattacks.

The former Massachusetts governor has released his 2010 tax return and promises that his 2011 return is forthcoming. He says that's enough.

But that's not enough for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The result is an increasingly ugly fight.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has acknowledged that he had money in a Swiss bank account until 2010. Romney says he wasn't trying to hide the money, since he reported the account to the government.

Even so, he closed the account at a time when the federal government was in the middle of a major crackdown on offshore tax havens — a crackdown that has made it harder for Americans to hide their money overseas.

Pete Simi says that when he heard it was Wade Michael Page who police said killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin on Sunday, he felt "sick to my stomach."

Simi, a professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and co-author of American Swastika, realized that he had talked to Page at length during his research on the white power movement in the United States.