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.
Lawmaker blasts Title IX, Brandi Chastain winces - If Brandi Chastain could have cried foul, she would have.
The world-famous U.S. women's soccer player was in Sacramento on Monday with her Brazilian counterpart Sissi to be honored by the California Assembly as it recognized the 40th anniversary of Title IX.
The occasion prompted Assemblyman Chris Norby to reveal that he wasn't a fan of the 1972 federal law chiefly known for mandating gender equity in high school and collegiate sports. The Fullerton Republican said he thought Title IX had come at the expense of male athletes, particularly those who depend on sports scholarships.
--LISA LEFF, AP via sfgate
Photo Credit: Rich Pedroncelli, AP
Alabama farmers scale back as immigrant help flees -Some Alabama farmers say they are planting less produce rather than risk having tomatoes and other crops rot in the fields a second straight year because of labor shortages linked to the state's crackdown on illegal immigration.
Keith Dickie said he and other growers in the heart of Alabama's tomato country didn't have any choice but to reduce acreage amid fears there won't be enough workers to pick the fruit.
Some farmers lacked enough hands to harvehttp://www.dailykos.com/... crops because immigrants fled the state after Gov. Robert Bentley signed the immigration law last fall, and some said they fear the same thing could happen this year.
--sfgate.com
GOP kills civil unions in Colorado special session - A last-ditch effort by Colorado's governor to give gay couples in the state rights similar to married couples failed Monday after Republicans rejected the proposal during a special legislative session.
Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper had said the special session was needed to address a "fundamental question of fairness and civil rights."
The bill's demise was expected by Democrats, who have begun using the issue as a rallying cry to topple Republicans in the November elections. Republicans assigned the bill to the House State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee, which voted 5-4 along party lines to kill the measure.
"My family is the same as every one of yours," said Rep. Mark Ferrandino, the Democrats' leader in the House and a gay lawmaker who co-sponsored the civil unions bill, moments before it was defeated.
Though the ending came as no surprise, the lead-up was emotional.
--IVAN MORENO and KRISTEN WYATT, Denver Post
Hands-On Medical Education in Rwanda - The success of Rwanda in providing health care to its poor has drawn the attention of the international community and has inspired a new program at Harvard University.
Rwanda was one of the poorest countries in the world in 1994, after a genocide claimed more than 500,000 lives and left the country with little or no access to medical services. In 2005, it began to rebuild its infrastructure. Now, according to the Rwandan Ministry of Health , the country provides health care and insurance to more than 90 percent of its population, inspiring medical leaders from around the globe to visit the African country to study its transformation.
Now, the Harvard School of Public Health is working with the Rwandan Ministry of Health to teach a course called Global Health Delivery in the village of Rwinkwavu twice a year.
“Rwanda is honestly starting to change the face of global health,” said Dr. Paul Farmer, one of the founders of Partners in Health , a nongovernmental organization that works in Rwanda and other poor countries. He is also the chairman of Harvard’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and one of the faculty members for its course in Africa.
--STEPHANIE NOVAK, nytimes.com
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
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Lakota Farmers Reluctantly Join Loggers In Beetle-Infested Forest: The last thing Joe Shark (
Oglala-Lakota) wants to be doing is cutting down trees in the forests of the Black Hills sacred to the Lakota. In fact, he has been opposed to logging there for a long time. But the Pine Beetle has killed many trees throughout the West, and the Black Hills are no exception. Left uncut, the infested trees provide an incubator for another generation of the destructive pests. So now Shark and other Oglalas have joined the Lakota Logging Project to cut the infested trees as a means of rescuing the still-healthy ones. Dave Ventimiglia, who co-founded the Lakota Logging Project, said he hopes to eventually raise $150,000 to build a saw mill on the Pine Ridge reservation. Oglala loggers could take the downed trees there and perhaps replace the run-down mobile homes occupied by so many of the tribe.
—Meteor Blades
• Government Cannot Satisfy Indian Need for Eagle Feathers: Officials at the National Eagle Repository in Denver say they cannot keep up with the demand for carcasses needed by American Indians for bald and golden eagle carcasses used in ceremonies. The repository is the only place Indians can legally obtain the carcasses because the birds are heavily protected and their killing outlawed. Nobody can keep eagle feathers or other parts of the birds without a federal permit.
—Meteor Blades
• Federally Recognized Tribes Worry About State-Recognized Tribes: Kerry Holton, president of the Delaware Nation (aka Western Delaware) based in Anardarko, Okla., fears that state recognition of tribes could hurt tribes that are only recognized by the federal government. About half the states, mostly east of the Mississippi, give recognition to tribes based on widely varying rules. At an Indian business group luncheon recently, Holton said of federal aid to the tribes from Washington: “They're taking some of our pie. That's our money.” The problem, he said, is that “nobody has defined what that means, to be state-recognized. There are 800 to 1,000 unrecognized entities out there,” he said. He noted that the Lumbee, a state-recognized tribe in North Carolina, recently got $13 million through an Indian Housing Block Grant. The Western Delawares, on the other hand, only received $87,051 for that purpose. The Lumbee population is 55,000; the Western Delawares have 1440 enrolled members, which means that on a per capita basis the Lumbees got four times what the Delawares received. At the request of U.S. Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.), the Government Accountability Office drafted a report on the issue of state-recognized tribes. Boren has seen it, but it hasn't been released to the public. The Lumbees have protested, saying the GAO report was written from the point of view of opponents to state recognition.
—Meteor Blades
(Photo by Kent Eanes)
•
Independent Film on Native Lacrosse Players Debuts: It took six years to get made, but
Crooked Arrows opened in a few theaters this past week and will get a wider audience June 1. It's the story of a troubled team of Indian lacrosse players whose coach is determined to help them win against a better equipped prep-school team. Finding enough Indians who could also play lacrosse and act was the task of Neal Powless. He is a member of the Eel Clan of the Onondaga Nation and director of Native Student Program at Syracuse University. “I was told if I did this movie I was no longer Neal Powless of the Onondaga Nation,” he said. “I was no longer Neal Powless of Syracuse University. I was on my own.” None of the eight players eventually chosen had ever been in front of a movie camera before. Lacrosse is a tradition of the Haudenosaunee nations (also known as the Iroquois Confederacy), which include the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca and Tuscarora nations. The film tells the history of lacrosse as well as a more or less familiar feel-good tale of a team that starts out without a chance and proves itself capable of more than the individuals in it thought possible. Some of the actors talk about the movie
here.
—Meteor Blades
Sanford "Redskin" logo
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School Committee in Maine Town Dumps 'Redskin': After several meetings and extensive community discussion, plus the demands of a state commission, the governing body of the schools in Sanford, Maine, voted May 7 to stop using the racist slur "Redskin" for its high school sports teams. The vote was 4-1. The Maine Indian Tribal-State Commission has been working for years to get all schools in the state to replace offensive Indian nicknames, logos and mascots with more neutral team names. As we reported in the 11th edition of
First Nations News & Views, only about 40 percent of the faculty, students and staff at the Sanford High School favored getting rid of the "Redskin" name and a logo depicting an Indian wearing a "typical Plains Indian headdress, nothing like the traditional attire of Maine's Indians. At a public meeting in April, Richard Silliboy, tribal councilor of the local Aroostook Band of Micmacs, said the "R" term is just as insulting as "squaw," a word that has been removed from all public place names in Maine. Silliboy said he'd taken many insults in his life: "Dirty Indian, stinkin' Indian, drunken Indian" and a "no-good-for-nothing Indian" and "the only good Indian's a dead Indian." Meanwhile, the other Sanford in the news, the one in Florida, continues to use a racist mascot by the name of "Sammy Seminole."
—Meteor Blades
• Boston-Area Indian Center Asks Elizabeth Warren to Come Visit: The head of the North American Indian Center of Boston has extended an invitation to Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren to come visit the center in Jamaica Plain, an historic urban area of the city where she has made many campaign stops. Warren came under fire two weeks ago after it was revealed she listed herself as Native American in a widely circulated law school directory starting in the 1980s. Also, Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania both listed her as a minority professor. No record exists of her objecting to this claim. The right-wing Boston Herald, Republican Sen. Scott Brown and several conservative political pundits have attacked Warren, who is campaigning for Brown's seat. The attacks have included racial slurs and stereotypes and displayed profound ignorance about Indians. But the critics' implications that Warren may have used her Indian heritage to gain a hiring or matriculation advantage over other students have not been borne out by records from several universities she attended or was employed by, including Harvard. A reference to Warren's great-great-great grandmother being listed on a 19th Century marriage certificate as Cherokee was found by a genealogist. But no copy of the marriage certificate itself has been uncovered. "We’ve never heard from Elizabeth Warren, unfortunately,” said NAICOB Executive Director Joanne Dunn in an interview. “We would like to see her. It would be nice if she reached out to us. She can come on down. We’ll make her some frybread.”
—Meteor Blades
Francois Hollande to be sworn in as France president - Francois Hollande is set to be sworn in as French president - and will immediately be plunged into tackling Europe's swirling debt crisis.
...
Within hours he will be in Germany to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The trip underscores the importance of the German-French relationship in Europe at a tumultuous time.
It comes amid a political vacuum in Greece and predictions that it may be forced out of the euro, stoking fears that caused the euro to tumble in trading on Monday.
Mr Hollande has criticised the German-led focus on austerity as the way out of the crisis.
--, BBC
California Proposal Would Give Work Permits to the Federally Undocumented
California immigration plan to legalize workers faces hurdles - In the past two years, Arizona and five other red states made national waves and raised constitutional questions by passing laws designed to crack down on illegal immigration. Now, lawmakers in the biggest blue state are poised to focus the immigration spotlight in another direction.
A bill quietly moving through California's Legislature would grant state work permits to tens of thousands of illegal immigrants who are already harvesting fields, cleaning offices and preparing fast-food.
Frustrated that comprehensive immigration reform is a nonstarter in Congress, proponents say the bill would allow California to solve a problem worsened by federal inaction.
"We believe we can become the model," said Manuel Pérez, a Democratic Assembly member who represents the Coachella and Imperial valleys. "The state of California, up until this point, really has been silent on this issue."
-- Matt O'Brien - Bay Area News Group