“I’ve decided to stop using the Washington team nickname. It’s a name you won’t see me use anymore. The simple reason is that for the last two or three years, I’ve been uneasy when I sat down to write about the team and had to use the nickname. In some stories I’ve tried to use it sparingly. But this year, I decided to stop entirely because it offends too many people, and I don’t want to add to the offensiveness. Some people, and some Native American organizations—such as the highly respected American Indian Movement—think the nickname is a slur. Obviously, the team feels it isn’t a slur, and there are several prominent Native American leaders who agree. But I can do my job without using it, and I will.”
And just to prove it, King pointed to a 2,400-word feature on Washington’s offensive coordinator, Kyle Shanahan, that never once mentions the team’s name.
For his part, Redskin’s owner Daniel Snyder has said repeatedly that he has no intention of ever changing his team’s name, despite protests from Native American groups and a growing legion of sports journalists, who like King, will not say or write the team name.
Snyder has emphasized the word “never” when ruling out such a name change, instructing reporters to print the word in all-caps.
A judge finds that the city failed to turn over emails requested by Cedar Grove Composting as public records.
September10, 2013
By Bill Sheets, Herald Writer
EVERETT — The city of Marysville was ordered Monday by a judge to pay more than $143,000 to Cedar Grove Composting for violations of the state public disclosure law.
The Everett composting company last year sued Marysville in Snohomish County Superior Court over the city’s withholding of emails between it and a consultant.
In an unusual move, Judge Richard T. Okrent also ruled that the city should have disclosed emails related to Cedar Grove that were sent internally at the consulting firm, Strategies 360.
Cedar Grove officials did not respond Monday to an email seeking comment.
The city of Marysville, the Tulalip Tribes and many who live in Marysville and Everett have been battling Cedar Grove for several years over allegations that the company’s Smith Island plant has been emitting offensive odors in the area.
Strategies 360 was performing public relations work for Marysville related to the issue.
The consulting firm already had been hired by the city to lobby on transportation and other issues and had been paid a flat rate of $7,500 per year for all the combined work, according to city administrator Gloria Hirashima.
Last year, Cedar Grove filed a public disclosure request with the city for all written communications with Strategies 360 related to the composting company. The city supplied most of the emails but withheld a number of them, claiming they were exempt from public disclosure because of attorney-client privilege. The emails contained discussions of legal strategy, Hirashima said.
Okrent ruled that 15 of those emails did not meet that standard. Though Marysville released the emails before Cedar Grove filed the lawsuit, the city should have released them sooner, the judge ruled.
The emails contained possible strategies and approaches, some of which the city used and some it didn’t, Hirashima said. For example, the city acted on the consultants’ suggestion to have city and Tulalip tribal leaders send letters to elected officials, she said.
The emails also revealed that the city and Strategies 360 helped residents write letters to newspapers and with other activities, such as applying for grants, according to the original complaint by Cedar Grove.
Hirashima said there’s nothing wrong with that in itself.
“We had literally hundreds of citizens asking us for help on this issue,” she said.
Mike Davis, leader of the Cedar Grove opposition group Citizens for a Smell Free Snohomish County, acknowledged he had help with letter writing but said he took the initiative.
“Any implications that we were created by the city of Marysville or that they ran the citizens group is not true,” he said. “I went to my elected officials as any citizen should. We were offered and gladly accepted help from the city. Fix the smell, I go away, it’s that simple.”
Also, Okrent ruled the city was negligent in failing to track down 19 other emails in response to Cedar Grove’s disclosure request.
Marysville also should have released internal Strategies 360 emails pertaining to Cedar Grove, the judge wrote in the ruling signed on Monday. The firm was acting as an employee of the city on the matter, he said.
“Marysville knew what Strategies was doing, paid them for those activities, was generally aware that there were documents in Strategies’ possession created during those activities, and discussed the contents of some of those documents with Strategies,” Okrent wrote.
The attorney working on the case for Marysville, Jeff Myers of Olympia, said the ruling broke new legal ground.
“I think it caught everyone by surprise that the court did what we thought was an unprecedented extension of the public records act to records the city never had,” Myers said. “Those were things the city never saw, didn’t possess and some of it was done for other clients.”
Myers said he’s specialized in public disclosure law for nearly 10 years and “it’s the first time to my knowledge it’s been done anywhere,” he said of the ruling.
Hirashima said the ruling sets an ominous precedent in terms of how the city and other government agencies must respond to disclosure requests in the future.
“This is a distraction from trying to get the (odor) issue addressed,” she said. “There are tools Cedar Grove has to inflict punishment back.”
Cedar Grove two years ago was fined $119,000 by the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency for odor violations at its plants in Everett and Maple Valley in King County.
That amount was applied toward Cedar Grove’s $200,000 contribution to a $375,000 study of odors in the Snohomish River Delta run by the Clean Air Agency.
The city of Seattle and King County, both of which send yard and food waste to Cedar Grove, put up $100,000 and $50,000, respectively. The Clean Air Agency is spending $25,000.
Northern Spotted Owl Photo source: WikipediaBarred Owl Photo Source: Wikipedia
September 10, 2013 @ 9:14 am
GRANTS PASS, Oregon (AP) – Federal wildlife officials are moving ahead with an experiment to see if killing a rival owl will help save the northern spotted owl from extinction.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday it gave final approval to a plan to send trained hunters into the woods to shoot barred owls.
Barred owls migrated from the East and arrived in spotted owl territory in 1959. The agency says they have since become the biggest threat to spotted owl survival.
Plans are to kill or capture barred owls in four study areas in Washington, Oregon and Northern California over the next four years.
The spotted owl forced big changes in management of national forests when environmentalists won lawsuits to protect the old growth forests where the owls live from logging.
(Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
A server at Famous Dave’s in Bismarck, North Dakota, is out of a job after posting a photo on Facebook that implied Native Americans are bad tippers.
Over the weekend, Bismarck was the site of the 44th Annual United Tribes International Powwow. On Facebook, an unidentified server posted a photo of herself holding a sign that reads:
Spare change? Help I’m a server at Famous Dave’s on Pow Wow weekend! Anything helps! 5¢ 25¢! Its more than my tips
Last Real Indians publicized the unpleasant image by posting it to the site’s official Facebook page. That post (which appears to have been deleted) suggested Natives boycott the restaurant and sparked hundreds of comments from angered American Indians.
Famous Dave’s founder Dave Anderson is Choctaw and Ojibwe, and is a former Assitant Secretary for Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior.
Both Anderson and the Bismarck restaurant’s manager, Mike Wright, posted comments about the incident on Facebook.Wright’s comment reads, in part, “When an employee decides to make an ass of him or herself they can now do it for all to see. Sadly, for reasons unkown to me, often times bitter employees also try to embarass the employers and taint the businesses where they work. Clearly a recent post by a now former employee fits this description.”
09/05/2013
FARMINGTON , NM— U.S. Marshals arrested an accused rapist in the town of Navajo on Thursday.
Courtesy of San Juan County Adult Detention Center (null)
Peter Andrew Ernst, 26, was arrested on suspicion of five counts of criminal sexual penetration, assault, aggravated battery, kidnapping and failure to register as a sex offender, according to a San Juan County Sheriff’s Office news release.
Ernst allegedly raped a woman at a home in Aztec. The victim reported the rape to sheriff’s office investigators at an Aztec gas station last month.
When police learned of the attack, Ernst left the area for Navajo, about 100 miles south of Aztec.
Ernst is a convicted sex offender, and he last registered in Arizona in 2012, according to the news release.
A U.S Marshals Service fugitive apprehension team went to Navajo and arrested Ernst on Thursday.
He is being held at the San Juan County Adult Detention Center.
Bridget Perrier, who worked as a child prostitute in Thunder Bay, Ont., says police need to do more to keep indigenous women safe. (Jody Porter/CBC)
An Anishinabe woman who worked as a child prostitute in Thunder Bay, Ont., is speaking out after reports from an American researcher saying indigenous women are being sold on ships in Lake Superior.
The researcher, Christine Stark, said her ‘exploratory’ research includes interviews with First Nations women who say they were trafficked on ships between Thunder Bay and Duluth, Minnesota.
Bridget Perrier recalls working as a prostitute on ships in Lake Superior. She said police need to do more to keep indigenous women safe.
“I’m sure if these ships were bringing in big amounts of drugs [the police] would be on it,” the 37-year-old said. “But what about the girls that disappear?”
“First Nations girls are targeted and that’s my biggest concern is that there are bull’s eyes put on them and no one is doing anything,” she added.
More than a decade ago, she worked as a prostitute on about 20 different ships at Thunder Bay’s port, the first time at the age of 12, she said.
Sailors often had limited time when they were allowed off their vessels, so they’d come to the bars and pick up groups of girls to take back to their quarters, Perrier said.
“I remember going on the ship and I had a bad feeling,” she said. “And I remember the one guy taking me and showing me they had jail cells in the boat and I thought, ‘Oh God, this is it. Who is going to look for me?'”
“And then he made the comment about Lake Superior being so deep and cold that they would never find one of them,” she added. “And at that point I knew we were in trouble.”
Didn’t disclose her identity
The ship left the Thunder Bay port and ended up in Minnesota. She was able to make her way back home, but she said many others never did.
“I never disclosed that I was First Nations when I did sex work,” she said. “Because First Nations girls get paid less, and I didn’t want to get hurt.”
She dyed her hair blonde and her fair skin allowed her to pass.
Now, working as a counsellor and advocate, Perrier said sex trade workers in Thunder Bay have told her the so-called ‘ship parties’ are still going on.
But police on both sides of the border deny that. Thunder Bay police say they are unaware of any prostitution at the ports in that city. The Duluth Police Department is skeptical that it’s possible to smuggle women off ships in America.
“Ever since 9/11, our ports have been tighter and tighter,” said Duluth police Sgt. Jeremiah Graves. “I can look over the hill and see the ships out in the bay, they’re not parked at the docks like they used to be.”
Graves said he’s looking into Christine Stark’s research on sex trafficking and believes they refer to historical accounts.
The chair of indigenous governance at Ryerson University in Toronto says it’s time officials find out for sure. Pam Palmater said a full inquiry into the trafficking of indigenous women in North America is urgently needed.
The Native Women’s Association has documented the cases of 600 missing or murdered indigenous women in Canada in the past 30 years. Some of them may have disappeared on a ship into the United States. But no one knows for sure because no formal investigations have been done, Palmater said.
“The fact that you have murdered and missing women in this country and a real lack of response from the police, what kind of indirect message does that send to Canadians?” she asked.”That they’re [indigenous women] not worthy, they’re not worthy of protection.”
The federal government said it is addressing concerns about the trafficking of First Nations women. Public Safety Canada is launching an awareness campaign in partnership with the National Association of Friendship Centers later this fall.
Palmater said that’s not enough, but it’s up to non-aboriginal Canadians to create change.
“Politicians and government expect First Nations to be concerned about this and to advocate on their own behalf,” she said. “But when non-First Nations people say this is a massive injustice and we wouldn’t want this happening to our kids, politicians are more likely to listen.”
PHOENIX (Reuters) – A dude rancher in a bitter dispute with a Native American tribe over access to a Grand Canyon tourist attraction was briefly arrested after confronting crews building a road near his property, a tribal spokesman said on Thursday.
Nigel Turner, the British owner of the Grand Canyon Resort dude ranch in Arizona, was taken into custody on suspicion of one count of trespassing by a Hualapai Tribe police officer on Tuesday. He was accused of entering the site despite earlier warnings, said tribal spokesman Dave Cieslak.
The tribe is paving the road on federal land adjacent to Turner’s property to provide easy access to its Skywalk project, a glass-bottom viewing platform that juts out over the crimson-hued canyon’s West Rim and attracts upwards of 1,000 tourists a day.
Turner is a Nevada businessman and ex-British Army helicopter pilot who a decade ago bought his property which today provides visitors with the experience of living on a Western ranch. He has been in a dispute with the tribe stemming from a four-year easement to his property he granted in 2007.
The fight escalated in May when Turner began charging tourists to enter the road that runs briefly through his property and later blocked access to the road altogether.
Tribal officials then built a new stretch of road that bypasses his property, and were working to complete a bigger project to finish a paved road to the Skywalk.
Cieslak said Turner was warned by security personnel not to enter the site, but did so anyway and began yelling at workers. He was arrested by a tribal officer on scene.
He complained of chest pains while en-route to a local county jail, and was treated and released at the Kingman Regional Medical Center, Cieslak said. He was cited but not taken to jail.
“He was treated with the utmost respect and all statewide police policies and procedures were followed,” Cieslak said.
Turner disputes the tribe’s account of the incident, saying he was concerned about crews using explosives so close to where his resort guests were staying. He said he asked politely to speak to the construction foreman and was quickly handcuffed.
He said he was then placed in a small space in the back of a car without air-conditioning, and that he asked to be flown to the hospital, but was taken by ground ambulance instead.
“My own cowboys would be arrested for treating animals the way they treated me,” Turner told Reuters. “What they did to me violated my civil rights.”
There was no immediate decision on whether charges would be filed by the Mohave County Attorney’s Office.
People are now used to long-term weather forecasts that predict what the coming winter may bring. But University of Washington researchers and federal scientists have developed the first long-term forecast of conditions that matter for Pacific Northwest fisheries.
By Hannah Hickey | University of Washington News and Information
“This is an experiment to produce the first seasonal prediction system for the ocean ecosystem. We are excited about the initial results, but there is more to learn and explore about this tool – not only in terms of the science, but also in terms of its application,” she said.
A school of sardines. The tool will soon produce a months-long outlook for Pacific Northwest sardine habitat.Image-Wikimedia / Alessandro Duci
In January, when the prototype was launched, it predicted unusually low oxygen this summer off the Olympic coast. People scoffed. But when an unusual low-oxygen patch developed off the Washington coast in July, some skeptics began to take the tool more seriously. The new tool predicts that low-oxygen trend will continue, and worsen, in coming months.
“We’re taking the global climate model simulations and applying them to our coastal waters,” saidNick Bond, a UW research meteorologist. “What’s cutting edge is how the tool connects the ocean chemistry and biology.”
Bond’s research typically involves predicting ocean conditions decades in advance. But as Washington’s state climatologist he distributes quarterly forecasts of the weather. With this project he decided to combine the two, taking a seasonal approach to marine forecasts.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration funded the project to create the tool and publish the two initial forecasts.
“Simply knowing if things are likely to get better, or worse, or stay the same, would be really useful,” said collaborator Phil Levin, a biologist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center.
Early warning of negative trends, for example, could help to set quotas.
“Once you overharvest, a lot of regulations kick in,” Levin said. “By avoiding overfishing you don’t get penalized, you keep the stock healthier and you’re able to maintain fishing at a sustainable level.”
The tool is named the JISAO Seasonal Coastal Ocean Prediction of the Ecosystem, which the scientist dubbed J-SCOPE. It’s still in its testing stage. It remains to be seen whether the low-oxygen prediction was just beginner’s luck or is proof the tool can predict where strong phytoplankton blooms will end up causing low-oxygen conditions, Siedlecki said.
The tool uses global climate models that can predict elements of the weather up to nine months in advance. It feeds those results into a regional coastal ocean model developed by the UW Coastal Modeling Group that simulates the intricate subsea canyons, shelf breaks and river plumes of the Pacific Northwest coastline. Siedlecki added a new UW oxygen model that calculates where currents and chemistry promote the growth of marine plants, or phytoplankton, and where those plants will decompose and, in turn, affect oxygen levels and other properties of the ocean water.
The end product is a nine-month forecast for Washington and Oregon sea surface temperatures, oxygen at various depths, acidity, and chlorophyll, a measure of the marine plants that feed most fish. Coming this fall are sardine habitat maps. Eventually researchers would like to publish forecasts specific to other fish, such as tuna and salmon.
The researchers fine-tuned their model by comparing results for past seasons with actual measurements collected by theNorthwest Association of Networked Ocean Observing Systems, or NANOOS. The UW-based association is hosting the forecasts as a forward-looking complement to its growing archive of Pacific Northwest ocean observations.
Siedlecki’s analyses suggest the new tool is able to predict elements of the ocean ecosystem up to six months in advance.
Researchers will present the project this year to the Pacific Fishery Management Council, the regulatory body for West Coast fisheries, and will work with NANOOS to reach tribal, state, and local fisheries managers.
If the forecasts prove reliable, they could eventually be part of a new management approach that requires knowing and predicting how different parts of the ocean ecosystem interact.
“The climate predictions have gotten to the point where they have six-month predictability globally, and the physics of the regional model and observational network are at the point where we’re able to do this project,” Siedlecki said.
This Oct. 11, 2012 file photo shows a basket of medical supplies await storage in Brookhaven, Miss. The No. 1 question about President Barack Obama’s health care law is whether consumers will be able to afford the coverage. Now the answer is coming in: The biggest study yet of premiums posted publicly by states finds that the sticker price will average about $270 a month if you’re a 21-year-old buying a mid-range policy. That’s before government tax credits that will act like a discount for most people, bringing down the cost based on their income. ROGELIO V. SOLIS, FILE — AP Photo
WASHINGTON — The No. 1 question about President Barack Obama’s health care law is whether consumers will be able to afford the coverage. Now the answer is coming in.
Published: September 4, 2013
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR — Associated Press
The biggest study yet of premiums posted by states finds that the sticker price for a 21-year-old buying a mid-range policy will average about $270 a month. That’s before government tax credits that act like a discount for most people, bringing down the cost based on their income.
List-price premiums for a 40-year-old buying a mid-range plan will average close to $330, the study by Avalere Health found. For a 60-year-old, they were nearly double that at $615 a month.
Starting Oct. 1, people who don’t have health care coverage on their job can go to new online insurance markets in their states to shop for a private plan and find out if they qualify for a tax credit. Come Jan. 1, virtually all Americans will be required to have coverage, or face fines. At the same time, insurance companies will no longer be able to turn away people in poor health.
The study points to the emergence of a competitive market, said lead author Caroline Pearson, a vice president of the private data analysis firm. But it’s a market with big price differences among age groups, states and even within states. A copy was provided to The Associated Press.
The bottom line is mixed: Many consumers will like their new options, particularly if they qualify for a tax credit. But others may have to stretch to afford coverage.
“We are seeing competitive offerings in every market if you buy toward the low end of what’s available,” said Pearson, a vice president of Avalere.
However, for uninsured people who are paying nothing today “this is still a big cost that they’re expected to fit into their budgets,” Pearson added.
The Obama administration didn’t challenge the study, but Health and Human Services spokeswoman Joanne Peters said consumers will have options that are cheaper than the averages presented. “We’re consistently seeing that premiums will be lower than expected,” she added. “For the many people that qualify for a tax credit, the cost will be even lower.”
With insurance marketplaces just weeks away from opening, the Avalere study crunched the numbers on premiums filed by insurers in 11 states and Washington, DC.
Eight of them are planning to run their own insurance markets, while the federal government will run the operation in the remaining four. There were no significant differences in premiums between states running their own markets and federal ones.
The states analyzed were California, Connecticut, Indiana, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia and Washington. No data on premiums were publicly available for Texas and Florida — together they are home to more than 10 million of the nation’s nearly 50 million uninsured people — and keys to the law’s success.
However, Pearson said she’s confident the premiums in the study will be “quite representative” of other states, because clear pricing patterns emerged. Official data for most other states isn’t expected until close to the Oct. 1 deadline for the new markets.
The study looked at premiums for non-smoking 21-year-olds, 40-year-olds and 60-year-olds in each of the 11 states and the District of Columbia.
It compared four levels of plans available under Obama’s law: bronze, silver, gold and platinum. Bronze plans will cover 60 percent of expected medical costs; silver plans will cover 70 percent; gold will cover 80 percent, and platinum 90 percent.
All plans cover the same benefits, but bronze features the lowest premiums, paired with higher deductibles and copays. Platinum plans would have the lowest out-of-pocket costs and the highest premiums.
Mid-range silver plans are considered the benchmark, because the tax credits will be keyed to the cost of the second-lowest-cost silver plan in a local area.
The average premium for a silver plan ranged from a low of $203 a month for a 21-year-old in Maryland to a high of $764 for a 60-year-old in Connecticut.
The silver plan premiums for 40-year-olds were roughly $75 a month higher than for 21-year-olds across the states. But the price jumped for 60-year-olds. The health law allows insurers to charge older adults up to three times more than younger ones. That’s less of a spread than in most states now, but it could still be a shock.
“It’s striking that the curve increases quite dramatically above age 40,” said Pearson. “As you get older and approach Medicare age, your expected health costs start to rise pretty quickly.”
But older consumers could also be the biggest beneficiaries of the tax credits, because they work by limiting what you pay for health insurance to a given percentage of your income.
For example, an individual making $23,000 would pay no more than 6.3 percent of their annual income — $1,450 — for a benchmark silver plan.
That help tapers off for those with solid middle-class incomes, above $30,000 for an individual and $60,000 for a family of four.
The study also found some striking price differences within certain states, generally larger ones. In New York, with 16 insurers participating, the difference between the cheapest and priciest silver premium was $418.
The 
