Welcome to the Overnight News Digest
(graphic by palantir)
The OND is published each night around midnight, Eastern Time.
The originator of OND was Magnifico.
Current Contributors are ScottyUrb, Bentliberal, wader, Oke, rfall, JML9999 and NeonVincent who also serves as chief cat herder.
Pew: immigration from Mexico drops to net zero - Immigration from Mexico has reached a net zero, with as many Mexicans moving back to Mexico as are entering the United States, according to the Pew Research Center’s Jeffrey Passel, a highly regarded demographer who used data from both countries.
The report released Wednesday cited several possible reasons, including, “the weakened U.S. job and housing construction markets, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, the long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates and changing economic conditions in Mexico.”
--Carolyn Lochhead, sfgate
Tussle between preservationists and UC Berkeley ... erupted into a pitchfork protest Sunday - A tussle between preservationists and UC Berkeley over a decadelong development project in Albany erupted into a pitchfork protest Sunday, when activists planted a renegade farm on a plot of land known as the Gill Tract in an effort to keep it agriculturally pristine.
Timing their action to Earth Day, about 200 members of Occupy the Farm to Take Back the Gill Tract broke a lock on a gate, rototilled the soil and planted carrot, broccoli and corn seedlings on part of the 10-acre site at Marin and San Pablo avenues. The Albany tract is owned by UC Berkeley, which has plans for further housing and commercial development nearby.
Police were on hand not long after the activists broke in at mid-afternoon and informed them they were breaking the law, but no arrests were made.
--Benny Evangelista, Carolyne Zinko, sfgate
Eddie Madril, a Yaqui Indian, is an artist in residence
who teaches American Indian culture at
Tenderloin Community School.
Photo: Brant Ward / The Chronicle
Effort afoot to restore art in California schools - As it turns out, business leaders hiring the workforce of tomorrow don't want applicants who are really good at filling in bubbles on standardized tests.
Creativity is key, more than 1,500 executives said in a 2010 survey.
Yet California, like many states, long ago deemed creative arts a luxury, one that few schools could afford.
And so, with the backing of business, state officials have formed Create CA, a statewide initiative they hope will restore art in schools, so that paintbrushes and even pirouettes are once again as important as No. 2 pencils.
The idea is to bring together those who have labored independently for arts education. Participants want to pass legislation, increase funding and raise public awareness.
--Jill Tucker , sfgate
Earth Day technology: the spray-on solar panel? - The solar energy industry is thinking beyond the roof. Instead of those large flat rooftop solar arrays, some companies are trying to convince architects and builders to use windows to generate electricity using nearly transparent plastic film that can be sprayed on or rolled on with an adhesive.
How about inside the building? The same technology can be used to collect juice from ceiling. As the world celebrates Earth Day, the solar industry is trying to capture energy in places never considered before.
“It puts energy harvesting everywhere,” says Ken McCauley, a senior vice president at Konarka, a Lowell, Mass., company that is producing electricity from solar cells printed onto thin plastic film.
(photo by Alfredo Sosa, CSM staff)
--Ron Scherer, Christian Scientist Monitor
In Euorpe: Call for Growth Rises to Counter German Push for Austerity — With political allies weakened or ousted, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s seat at the head of the European table has become much less comfortable, as a reckoning with Germany’s insistence on lock-step austerity appears to have begun.
“The formula is not working, and everyone is now talking about whether austerity is the only solution,” said Jordi Vaquer i Fanés, a political scientist and director of the Barcelona Center for International Affairs in Spain. “Does this mean that Merkel has lost completely? No. But it does mean that the very nature of the debate about the euro-zone crisis is changing.”
A German-inspired austerity regimen agreed to just last month as the long-term solution to Europe’s sovereign debt crisis has come under increasing strain from the growing pressures of slowing economies, gyrating financial markets and a series of electoral setbacks.
Spain officially slipped back into recession for the second time in three years on Monday, after following the German remedy of deep retrenchment in public outlays, joining Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. In the Netherlands, Prime Minister Mark Rutte handed his resignation to Queen Beatrix on Monday after his government failed to pass new austerity measures over the weekend.
The political upheaval drove stock markets on the Continent sharply lower ...
--NICHOLAS KULISH, nytimes
Wal-Mart Stock Falls Nearly 5% - Wal-Mart’s stock fell almost 5 percent on Monday, accounting for about one-fifth of the losses in the Dow Jones industrial average, as investors reacted to a bribery scandal at the retailer’s Mexican subsidiary and a report that an internal investigation was quashed at corporate headquarters in Arkansas.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that Wal-Mart investigators had found credible evidence that the subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico, had paid millions of dollars in bribes to support expansion in Mexico, where the retailer has one in five of its stores. Told of this evidence in 2005, top executives in Bentonville, Ark., shut down the investigation, The Times reported.
On Monday, politicians from Washington to Mexico City called for outside investigations into Wal-Mart’s conduct.
The fallout for Wal-Mart could be significant. A settlement of any sort would very likely include large fines by both the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission ...
--STEPHANIE CLIFFORD, nytimes
Editorial
The Undocumented and the Unborn - The Nebraska Legislature took a strange road to a good result last week. It overrode Gov. Dave Heineman’s veto of a bill to provide free prenatal care to undocumented immigrant women.
Mr. Heineman agreed that government-financed health care for poor women was an acceptable thing, unless the women were in violation of immigration laws, in which case it was a terrible waste of taxpayer dollars. “Providing preferential treatment to illegals while increasing taxes on legal Nebraska citizens,” he said, “is misguided, misplaced and inappropriate.”
Lawmakers got around that problem by taking women out of the equation. “The Legislature finds that unborn children do not have immigration status and therefore are not within the scope” of a Nebraska law that denies benefits to people who cannot prove they are here legally.
--nytimes
Dutch prime minister resigns over budget cuts - Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte tendered his government's resignation on Monday in a crisis over budget cuts, creating a political vacuum in a country which strongly backed an EU fiscal treaty and lectured Greece on getting its finances in order. Video by Deborah Lutterbeck.
-- Reuters
Cuba plans massive shift to "non-state" sector - Cuba will move nearly 50 percent of the state's economic activity to the "non-state" sector, a senior Communist party official said at the weekend, the latest signal the island is headed toward a mixed economy.
Cuban President Raul Castro has hammered away at the need for the state to become more efficient and get out of secondary economic activity such as farming and retail services since taking over for his ailing older brother, Fidel, in 2008.
China and Vietnam adopted similar measures in the last few decades of the 20th century as they began to shift to what is known as market socialism.
-- Marc Frank, Reuters
The First Nations News & Views Sunday weekly series is one element in the "Invisible Indians" project put together by navajo and Meteor Blades, with assistance from the Native American Netroots Group. The OND periodically prints excerpted items on Monday nights.
First Nations News Bullets
• Beer Bill Dies in Nebraska Legislature: A bill that would have created "alcohol impact zones" to curtail sales of booze in Whiteclay, Nebr., to Indians from just across the state boundary on the Pine Ridge Reservation has died in a legislative committee dominated by recipients of campaign money from the alcohol industry. Oglala Lakota leaders say beer sales there are a plague on their people. They filed a lawsuit against two major brewers, their distributors and the owners of four beer shops in the unincorporated town, which the 2010 Census showed has a population of 44. The equivalent of 4.3 million 12-ounce cans of beer was sold in Whitelclay in 2011, most of it to Indians. The suit says the businesses encourage the illegal possession, transport and consumption of alcohol on the reservation, where booze is banned. Whiteclay is little different than the "whiskey ranches" set up in the 19th Century to move illegal alcohol onto what was then called Pine Ridge Agency. Alcohol, Oglala leaders say, is behind 90 percent of the crime on the reservation and causes serious health problems.
—Meteor Blades
Asa Carter (alias: Forrest Carter)
•
PBS Program Shows How Klansman Hoaxed His Way to Becoming an 'American Indian' Best-selling Novelist: PBS is airing "The Reconstruction of a Asa Carter: His Greatest Story Was the One He Never Told" throughout April. Carter was a Klansman and George Corley Wallace's speechwriter, the guy who reportedly invented the Alabama governor's most famous incantation: "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" He transformed himself into Forrest Carter, claimed to be Cherokee, and wrote
The Education of Little Tree, , published in 1976. The book allegedly is about his childhood experiences. Well after his death in 1979, the book took off and sold more than a million copies. It won the 1991 American Booksellers Association Book of the Year (ABBY) award. Oprah Winfrey praised it to the skies. But it was an elaborate, well-written fabrication. The book clashes with the linguistic and cultural realities of the Cherokee. Noted Native author Sherman Alexie (
Coeur d'Alene/Spokane/Flathead)
has said: "
Little Tree is a lovely little book, and I sometimes wonder if it is an act of romantic atonement by a guilt-ridden white supremacist, but ultimately I think it is the racial hypocrisy of a white supremacist." A movie of the same name has also been made.
—Meteor Blades
• North Dakota's Oil Boom Disastrous for Many Indians: For the Three Affiliated Tribes—the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nations—the phenomenal explosion in oil wealth from the Bakken shale has not trickled down. In fact, for poor Indians in the area, it's been the opposite. Many are being evicted in New Town to make way for oil-field workers. The lack of housing in the area, a long-term product of failures by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, means there is no place to live for workers coming from outside the area. Solution? Evict people already living there, about 70 percent of whom are tribal members. So who gets evicted? The poorest people. That's what has happened in a mobile home park that was purchased by a housing developer tightly linked to one of the major oil operations. The housing corporation claims it is both difficult to find housing and difficult to find land suitable for building new housing. So it plans to build new housing after it destroys the park. The eviction deadline is Aug. 31.
—Meteor Blades
Molalla High School mascot
•
Oregon Town's Residents Fight to Keep Racist Mascot: Some citizens of Molalla have signed a petition to reject the Oregon Board of Education's
threat to cut off funding for schools that do not abandon Indian mascots within five years. As is so often the case, ignoring sociological studies, including those by Indians with both cultural and academic credentials, the petitioners in Molalla, a town of 6000 in northwest Oregon, say their high school mascot is all about honoring the Indians of the area, the Molale. But, in the common fashion of many such mascots, the depiction is stereotypically Plains style, the head of an Indian dressed in full "war bonnet" and looking a good deal like the composite Indian of the Buffalo nickel. Not as grotesque as Cleveland's Chief Wahoo, but nothing to do with honor either. The Molale were forced off their land in the 1800s and are now a part of the Grand Ronde Tribe. (
Here's how they traditionally dressed.) The board started the mascot removal effort in 2006. State Superintendent Susan Castillo says six years of gathering evidence have increasingly made it clear that this is a civil rights issue.
—Meteor Blades
• Spirit Lake Tribe Suit for 'Fighting Sioux' Nickname Gets Court Hearing: Archie Fool Bear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux) and the Spirit Lake Tribe of North Dakota took their argument to federal court last week to keep in place the disputed "Fighting Sioux" nickname of sports teams at the University of North Dakota. Some details of the argument are here. See our previous coverage here and here.
—Meteor Blades