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The Tulalip Heritage Hawks will play the Lummi Blackhawks for the second time this season, after a last minute upset first game January 7th, losing by three points. Be sure to wear white and cheer for the Heritage boys tonight at 7:oo p.m. Tulalip Heritage High School. You can also catch the game on Tulaliptv.com.
Gov. Jay Inslee on Friday signed a proclamation that returns almost all civil and criminal authority over tribal members on the reservation back to the Yakama Nation. The next required step, before this can take effect, is federal approval.
OLYMPIA, Wash. — In what tribal leaders call a historic development, Gov. Jay Inslee on Friday signed a proclamation that returns almost all civil and criminal authority over tribal members on the reservation back to the Yakama Nation.
Tribal Council Chairman Harry Smiskin said the signing is not only “historic” but the first of its kind in the country.
“The biggest benefit is that we have the right to determine our own destiny and our own laws,” Smiskin said earlier this week.
But the deal is not done yet. The proclamation needs federal approval, which Smiskin said will probably take another year or so working with the government on final details, including financial support for both law enforcement and civil authority over social issues like school truancy and child and family services.
The Yakama Nation is a sovereign nation that has the authority to govern itself under the treaty signed in 1855 with the federal government. The Nation already has its own police department and jail and has always had some criminal authority over tribal members.
In 1953, under Public Law 280, Congress gave states the authority to take more civil and criminal control over Indian lands. In 1963, Washington’s state government asserted jurisdiction over school attendance, domestic relations, mental illness, juvenile delinquency, adoption, public assistance, and motor vehicle operation on tribal lands.
In 2012, the Legislature created a process for tribes to apply to get that lost authority returned. The proclamation is the result of the Yakama Nation’s petition. A busload of tribal members travelled to Olympia for the ceremony.
The Yakama petition, which was filed in 2012, asked the state to retain authority over mental illness as it arises in the courts and civil commitment of sexually violent predators, but return the rest of the authority taken in 1963.
The state retains jurisdiction over criminal or civil cases that involve non-Indians, even if a tribal member is also involved.
Yakima County Commissioner Kevin Bouchey said that was the county’s main concern, and he was pleased that to see the state retained that authority.
Smiskin said he encouraged the tribe to pursue the move — known as retrocession — because he’d seen the benefits when he worked with the Colville Tribe on the issue in the 1980s.
Criminal jurisdiction was returned by the Legislature for the Colvilles and several other tribes then, but Smiskin said that he used what he learned from that process to improve the Yakamas’ move to regain authority, including civil jurisdiction.
Now that Inslee has signed the proclamation, it goes to the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs for review before it will take full effect.
In preparation, the Yakamas already signed memorandums of understanding with the cities and counties that overlap the reservation.
For example, if a tribal member is pulled over on the reservation for speeding by a sheriff’s deputy, the officer will transfer the driver over to a tribal officer, Bouchey said.
Yakima County Sheriff Ken Irwin called the retrocession a “work in progress” and said that he still doesn’t know the final details about how the BIA and the Yakama Nation are going to handle some issues, including major crimes, but he respects the process.
“They have some steps left,” Irwin said. “In the meantime, it’s business as usual and we are working together very well.”
A spokeswoman for the Department of Social and Health Services referred questions about the retrocession process to the governor’s office.
A governor’s office spokeswoman said the state doesn’t intend to start planning for the transition in jurisdiction until after the retrocession secures federal approval.
January 16, 2014 Martha Mendoza AP
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) – Brian Otis gingerly holds what looks like a typical contact lens on his index finger. Look closer. Sandwiched in this lens are two twinkling glitter-specks loaded with tens of thousands of miniaturized transistors. It’s ringed with a hair-thin antenna. Together these remarkable miniature electronics can monitor glucose levels in tears of diabetics and then wirelessly transmit them to a handheld device.
“It doesn’t look like much, but it was a crazy amount of work to get everything so very small,” he said before the project was unveiled Thursday.
During years of soldering hair-thin wires to miniaturize electronics, Otis burned his fingertips so often that he can no longer feel the tiny chips he made from scratch in Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, a small price to pay for what he says is the smallest wireless glucose sensor ever made.
Just 35 miles away in the beach town of Santa Cruz, high school soccer coach and university senior Michael Vahradian, 21, has his own set of fingertip callouses, his from pricking himself up to 10 times a day for the past 17 years to draw blood for his glucose meter. A cellphone-sized pump on his hip that attaches to a flexible tube implanted in his stomach shoots rapid-acting insulin into his body around the clock.
“I remember at first it was really hard to make the needle sticks a habit because it hurt so much,” he said. “And there are still times I don’t want to do it _ it hurts and it’s inconvenient. When I’m hanging out with friends, heading down to the beach to body-surf or going to lunch, I have to hold everyone up to take my blood sugar.”
The idea that all of that monitoring could be going on passively, through a contact lens, is especially promising for the world’s 382 million diabetics who need insulin and keep a close watch on their blood sugar.
The prototype, which Google says will take at least five years to reach consumers, is one of several medical devices being designed by companies to make glucose monitoring for diabetic patients more convenient and less invasive than traditional finger pricks.
The contact lenses were developed during the past 18 months in the clandestine Google X lab that also came up with a driverless car, Google’s Web-surfing eyeglasses and Project Loon, a network of large balloons designed to beam the Internet to unwired places.
But research on the contact lenses began several years earlier at the University of Washington, where scientists worked under National Science Foundation funding. Until Thursday, when Google shared information about the project with The Associated Press, the work had been kept under wraps.
“You can take it to a certain level in an academic setting, but at Google we were given the latitude to invest in this project,” Otis said. “The beautiful thing is we’re leveraging all of the innovation in the semiconductor industry that was aimed at making cellphones smaller and more powerful.”
American Diabetes Association board chair Dwight Holing said he’s gratified that creative scientists are searching for solutions for people with diabetes but warned that the device must provide accurate and timely information.
“People with diabetes base very important health care decisions on the data we get from our monitors,” he said.
Other non-needle glucose monitoring systems are also in the works, including a similar contact lens by Netherlands-based NovioSense, a minuscule, flexible spring that is tucked under an eyelid. Israel-based OrSense has already tested a thumb cuff, and there have been early designs for tattoos and saliva sensors.
A wristwatch monitor was approved by the FDA in 2001, but patients said the low level electric currents pulling fluid from their skin was painful, and it was buggy.
“There are a lot of people who have big promises,” said Dr. Christopher Wilson, CEO of NovioSense. “It’s just a question of who gets to market with something that really works first.”
Palo Alto Medical Foundation endocrinologist Dr. Larry Levin said it was remarkable and important that a tech firm like Google is getting into the medical field and that he’d like to be able to offer his patients a pain-free alternative from either pricking their fingers or living with a thick needle embedded in their stomach for constant monitoring.
“Google, they’re innovative, they are up on new technologies, and also we have to be honest here, the driving force is money,” he said.
Worldwide, the glucose-monitoring devices market is expected to be more than $16 billion by the end of this year, according to analysts at Renub Research.
The Google team built the wireless chips in clean rooms and used advanced engineering to get integrated circuits and a glucose sensor into such a small space.
Researchers also had to build in a system to pull energy from incoming radio frequency waves to power the device enough to collect and transmit one glucose reading per second. The embedded electronics in the lens don’t obscure vision because they lie outside the eye’s pupil and iris.
Google is now looking for partners with experience bringing similar products to market. Google officials declined to say how many people worked on the project or how much the firm has invested in it.
Dr. David Klonoff, medical director of the diabetes research institute at Mills-Peninsula Health Services in San Mateo, worked with Google to see whether glucose is present in tears and whether the amount of glucose is proportional to the amount of glucose in blood. He’s still analyzing but optimistic about his findings and warns there are many potential pitfalls.
“Already this has some breakthrough technologies, but this is a moonshot, there are so many challenges,” he said.
One is figuring out how to correlate glucose levels in tears as compared with blood. And what happens on windy days, while chopping onions or during very sad movies? As with any medical device, it would need to be tested and proved accurate, safe, and at least as good as other types of glucose sensors available now to win FDA approval.
Karen Rose Tank, who left her career as an economist to be a health and wellness coach after her Type 1 diabetes diagnosis 18 years ago, also is encouraged that new glucose monitoring methods may be on the horizon.
“It’s really exciting that some of the big tech companies are getting into this market,” she said. “They bring so much ingenuity; they’re able to look outside the box.”
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Follow Martha Mendoza at https://twitter.com/mendozamartha
Peter Yarrow’s “An Evening of Love and Laughter,” a concert benefiting Portland-based Wisdom of the Elders
Salem-News.com Jan-13-2014
(PORTLAND, OR) – Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul & Mary fame, will perform a concert for Wisdom of the Elders, a Native American nonprofit in Portland, at 7:30 p.m., Feb. 14, at Augustana Lutheran Church, 2710 NE 14th Ave., Portland. For tickets, visit www.wisdomoftheelders.org/wisdombenefit.
Peter Yarrow, of the famed 1960s folk group Peter, Paul & Mary, will perform “An Evening of Love and Laughter” to benefit Portland-based Wisdom of the Elders, a Native American nonprofit, 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 14, at Augustana Lutheran Church, which donated use of its facility at 2710 NE 14th Ave.
Yarrow, who wrote some of the trio’s hits, including “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and “Day is Done,” has merged music and social activism in recent decades.
Since 1993, Wisdom has served the Native American Community through cultural programs, including a Northwest Indian Storytelling Festival and a collection of video oral histories of Native elders.
Recently, the organization has begun to focus on the effects of climate change on Native communities; its Wisdom Radio for this season focuses on the issue. Joining Yarrow will be his son Christopher, who will sing and play the washtub base. The younger Yarrow, a Portland resident, plays with local bands Baby Gramps, KingniK and Tevis Hodge Jr.
Tickets, which range from $5 to $60, can be purchased through www.wisdomoftheelders/wisdombenefit. The $60 sponsor ticket includes a meet-and-greet with Yarrow and book signing.
What: Peter Yarrow ‘s “An Evening of Love and Laughter,” a concert benefiting Portland-based Wisdom of the Elders
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 14
Where: Augustana Lutheran Church, 2710 NE 14th Ave., Portland
Tickets: $20 general admission; $15 seniors and students, $60 sponsor tickets, $5 children 14 and
Younger
Contact: Daniel Dixon, Daniel@wisdomoftheelders.org, 503-775-4014
By Ned Rozell | Geophysical Institute
Jan 15, 2014 AlaskaNativeNews.com
Clues from a crater-like sinkhole on the island of Kauai point back to a giant wave that came from Alaska at about the time European explorers were pushing west, seeing the Mississippi River for the first time.
The Makauwahi Sinkhole on the southeast shore of Kauai holds the mysterious equivalent of about nine shipping containers full of rocks, corals and shells from the Pacific Ocean. For the material to breach the amphitheater-like limestone walls of the feature required a wave about 25 feet high, said Rhett Butler of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology in Honolulu. Butler gave a presentation on the subject at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union held in San Francisco in December 2013.
That wave probably came from a great Aleutian earthquake, Butler said. The tsunami probably struck between the years of 1540 and 1660, according to dating of the organic materials within the sinkhole.
The great tsunami story starts with David Burney’s explorations of caves within the limestone complex. While Burney, an archaeologist, ecologist and director of conservation with the National Tropical Botanical Garden of Kauai, was trowling for and finding evidence of ancient people, he also discovered the layer of ocean materials about six feet below the surface.
Butler noticed Burney’s work and wondered how large a tsunami needed to be to breach the most vulnerable eastern wall of the sinkhole. He dialed up tsunami-generating earthquakes on a computer model until he found one that was plausible.
“A magnitude 9.25 in the eastern Aleutians gives us an 8-meter (about 25-foot) wave,” Butler said. “It gets (the sinkhole) wet. Smaller events do not get it wet.”
The tsunami Butler modeled had some collaborating evidence revealed at the same conference in San Francisco. The subject of last week’s column was a revealing hole on Alaska’s Sedanka Island first dug by Gary Carver of Kodiak. That research pit, inspired by a tsunami-carried driftwood log high above tideline, shows the sandy evidence of six big tsunamis, each spaced about 300 years apart. One of those sand deposits dates to the late 1500s. The wave that carried that sand might be the same tsunami that surged more than 2,000 miles and topped the wall of the Kauai sinkhole.
Butler, who lives in Honolulu, sees the evidence for a past great tsunami as a warning sign.
“Could an event like that happen here?” he said. “What are the ramifications for Hawaii?”
Current Hawaii tsunami inundation maps underestimate the water that would come from an earthquake similar to the one that soaked the sinkhole, Butler said.
“The beach (on Oahu) where President Obama spends Christmas gets entirely flooded,” he said. “(Oahu’s main) power plant is at 7.3 meters above sea level, and we could get run ups to 15 meters.”
His modeled epicenter for the earthquake that would have sent the tsunami to Kauai was in the Aleutian trench somewhere between Adak and Unimak islands.
“It was (located) between the 1946 and 1957 events, in an area focused right at us,” he said. “It looks like this one has happened before. There’s potential there and we have to confront that. This doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, but no one likes a surprise. A lot of people were surprised by Tohoku (Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami).”
Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute. A version of this column first appeared in 2006.
By Chris Lehman
Jan 10 2014 nwNewsnetwork.org
Oregon’s state treasurer says he won’t approve bonds for a new I-5 bridge across the Columbia River without a guarantee: that Oregon can collect tolls from Washington drivers.
The statement Friday is a response to a new analysis that says tolls will be enough to pay off the bonds for the project.
Oregon Treasurer Ted Wheeler says it’s not that he doubts enough drivers will use the proposed bridge, dubbed the Columbia River Crossing. It’s that he’s not sure enough of those drivers will actually pay the toll.
The new I-5 bridge would rely on electronic tolling. The money is either collected from a vehicle-mounted transponder or by scanning license plates and sending the driver a bill.
Here’s the thing: the majority of bridge commuters live in Washington. So the state of Oregon would need to work out an agreement with its cross-river neighbor to collect tolls from Washington drivers. Talks are under way between the states but no deal has been reached yet.
Wheeler says without such a deal, he’s not sure whether toll money would be enough to pay the debt on building the bridge.
Lawmakers in Olympia are wary of turning over control of tolling to Oregon. But Washington lawmakers have not approved any funding from their state to help build the bridge.
By Brett Israel | Georgia Tech
January 13, 2014 Alaska Native News
Scientists studying the atmosphere above Barrow, Alaska, have discovered unprecedented levels of molecular chlorine in the air, a new study reports.
Molecular chlorine, from sea salt released by melting sea ice, reacts with sunlight to produce chlorine atoms. These chlorine atoms are highly reactive and can oxidize many constituents of the atmosphere including methane and elemental mercury, as well activate bromine chemistry, which is an even stronger oxidant of elemental mercury. Oxidized mercury is more reactive and can be deposited to the Arctic ecosystem.
The study is the first time that molecular chlorine has been measured in the Arctic, and the first time that scientists have documented such high levels of molecular chlorine in the atmosphere.
“No one expected there to be this level of chlorine in Barrow or in polar regions,” said Greg Huey, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
The study was published January 12 in the journal Nature Geoscience and was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), part of the international multidisciplinary OASIS program.
The researchers directly measured molecular chlorine levels in the Arctic in the spring of 2009 over a six-week period using chemical ionization mass spectrometry. At first the scientists were skeptical of their data, so they spent several years running other experiments to ensure their findings were accurate.
The level of molecular chlorine above Barrow was measured as high as 400 parts per trillion, which is a high concentration considering that chlorine atoms are short –lived in the atmosphere because they are strong oxidants and are highly reactive with other atmospheric chemicals.
Molecular chlorine concentrations peaked in the early morning and late afternoon, and fell to near-zero levels at night. Average daytime molecular chlorine levels were correlated with ozone concentrations, suggesting that sunlight and ozone may be required for molecular chlorine formation.
Previous Arctic studies have documented high levels of oxidized mercury in Barrow and other polar regions. The major source of elemental mercury in the Arctic regions is coal-burning plants around the world. In the spring in Barrow, ozone and elemental mercury are often depleted from the atmosphere when halogens — chlorine and bromine — are released into the air from melting sea ice.
“Molecular chlorine is so reactive that it’s going to have a very strong influence on atmospheric chemistry,” Huey said.
Chlorine atoms are the dominant oxidant in Barrow, the study found. The area is part of a region with otherwise low levels of oxidants in the atmosphere, due to the lack of water vapor and ozone, which are the major precursors to making oxidants in many urban areas.
In Barrow, snow-covered ice pack extends in every direction except inland. The ultimate source of the molecular chlorine is the sodium chloride in sea salt, Huey said, most likely from the snow-covered ice pack. How the sea salt is transformed into molecular chlorine is unknown.
“We don’t really know the mechanism. It’s a mystery to us right now,” Huey said. “But the sea ice is changing dramatically, so we’re in a time where we have absolutely no predictive power over what’s going to happen to this chemistry. We’re really in the dark about the chlorine.”
Scientists do know that sea ice is rapidly changing, Huey said. The sea ice that lasts from one winter to the next winter is decreasing. This has created a larger area of melted ice, and more ice that comes and goes with the seasons. This seasonal variation in ice could release more molecular chlorine into the atmosphere.
“There is definite climate change happening in the Arctic,” Huey said. “That’s changing the nature of the ice, changing the volume of the ice, changing the surface area and changing the chemistry of the ice.”
This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under award number ATM-0807702, ARC-0806437 and ARC-0732556. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF.
Staff reports The Post and Courier January 16, 2014
Contempt of court charges against Dusten Brown, Veronica’s birth father, have been dropped, according to an Oklahoma newspaper.
Veronica, now 4 years old, was caught in the middle of an internationally publicized custody dispute involving her Native American heritage.
Brown, who lives in Oklahoma, faced contempt charges for refusing to comply with a Charleston County Family Court order to return Veronica to her adoptive parents, Matt and Melanie Capobianco of James Island.
The court dropped that charge Thursday, according to the Tulsa World.
Brown still faces a criminal complaint of custodial interference in South Carolina.
Gov. Nikki Haley dropped efforts to extradite him, but the warrant is still active.
Brown also remains part of an Oklahoma civil case in which the Capobiancos’ attorneys are seeking to recoup more than $1 million in fees and legal expenses incurred during the custody battle.
Veronica’s birth mother gave her up for adoption to the Capobiancos shortly after she was born in September 2009.
Brown, who is part Cherokee, said his daughter was given up without his knowledge when he was getting ready to deploy to Iraq. Veronica’s mother argued he wasn’t involved in her life.
With the help of attorneys from the Cherokee Nation, Brown sued for custody under the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was designed to keep Native American families intact. Brown gained custody in December 2011, when Veronica was 27 months old.
The Capobiancos appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and were reunited with Veronica last September, when she was 4.
BY Tim Haeck on January 15, 2014 MyNorthwest.com
A public electric utility in Everett could be among the first in the nation to generate power from the tides.
Scientists at the University of Washington have determined that Admiralty Inlet, in Puget Sound, is an excellent place to test tidal turbines.
“Admiralty Inlet stacks up pretty well, worldwide, in terms of its actual tidal energy resource,” said Craig Collar, assistant general manager at Snohomish County Public Utility District No. 1. Currents have been clocked at 6-7 knots, he said.
The PUD is pledged to maintain carbon-free power sources. It has wind power and is exploring geo-thermal energy, as well.
“We’re highly dependent on the Bonneville Power Administration,” said Collar. “That’s a lot of eggs in one basket and it only makes sense to diversify.”
The advantage of tidal power: tides are reliable and predictable.
The disadvantage is you have to pick the right spot.
The utility wants to place two turbines, each about 20-feet in diameter, on the bottom of Admiralty Inlet, 200 feet below the surface. The more than $20 million pilot project, funded in half by the U.S. Energy Department, is at least six years in development. It’s been delayed, in part, by a challenge from a California company that owns two trans-ocean fiber optic telecommunications cables.
“The turbines, as currently proposed, are dangerously close to our cable,” said Kurt Johnson, chief financial officer of Pacific Crossing. He’s worried that turbine deployment and maintenance could damage the cables.
“Pacific Crossing is not against tidal energy, or even this specific project. All we’re really asking is that the PUD locate the turbines a safe distance from our cable.”
“In fact, we have done that,” said Collar. “This project is now several hundred feet away from their cable, so the crux of the matter is our project simply doesn’t represent any risk whatsoever to their cable.”
Collar said an environmental review by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), draws the same conclusion.
“The facts are they’ve got a six-inch wide lease, we’re several hundred feet away, we have a deployment accuracy of less than ten feet, we won’t use any anchors at all in the deployment operation or maintenance of these devices,” said Collar.
Tribal and environmental groups have also challenged the project out of concern for fish and orcas.
“But the truth is these turbines rotate quite slowly, more the speed that we’d visualize for a turnstile, taking several seconds just to make a single revolution,” Collar explained.
The utility is awaiting approval of a license from FERC and some state and local permits. The soonest the turbines could be deployed would be 2015.
It’s not known if tidal power will prove effective around here.
The Snohomish County PUD No.1 will hook up the turbines to the power grid but Collar said this pilot project is more about collecting data than generating electricity. If approved, the turbines will operate for three-to-five years and be removed.
by JOHN LANGELER / KING 5 News
Bio | Email | Follow: @jlangelerKING5
January 16, 2014 at 10:38 PM
SNOQUALMIE — One day after being accused of running Snoqualmie Casino illegally by replacing its gaming commission with the Tribal Council, Tribal Chairwoman Carolyn Lubenau said a new commission has been selected and is being directed, in the interim, by the tribe’s police chief.
Lubenau said the selection of three new Snoqualmie Gaming Commissioners was made Thursday, and had no connection to a lawsuit filed last Friday or a report on accusations included in the litigation by KING 5 the day before.
The lawsuit, filed by former SGC Chairman William Papazian, outlines a deteoriating relationship between the commission and the Snoqualmie Casino staff it is required by law to oversee.
According to federal law, tribal gaming agencies/commissions must be independent from the casinos and tribes they watch.
Lubenau said Thursday the problems between the SGC and the casino had nothing to do with Papazian, but the Executive Director and Manager he hired.
“We want professionals,” she explained, “You have to be above reproach. You can’t have tantrums.”
Lubenau said commission staff frequently threatened to pull gaming licenses from casino personnel “for no reason”. The tribe, she said, conducted two independent investigations.
“It was very clear, if we wanted to have our gaming commission functioning in the way we want to go, we need to terminate those two positions,” said Lubenau.
Papazian refused to go along, according to Lubenau and court documents, and resigned.
“It was very amicable,” recalled Lubenau, “He said in the resignation it was a family matter.”
Beyond what led to his departure is what Papazian alleged has happened in the interim, the SGC being filled with the Tribal Council.
Just one day after the situation became public, Lubenau said changes have been made. Thursday, three commissioners were appointed under an interim Executive Director, police chief Gene Fenton.
None of the commissioners have gaming experience, which is not required by law. Fenton is handling background checks for all casino employees, a task usually handled by the SGC.
“We won’t be caught by surprise when things are not working right,” said Lubenau, “We can fix things before they get to this point where they unravel so quickly like they did.”
As for why Papazian would file a lawsuit against his former employer, accusing it of “fraud”, “racketeering”, and “money laundering”, Lubenau thinks the answer is simple. Money.
