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.
Game wardens don't need a warrant to stop cars: The U.S. Supreme Court today granted California game wardens the authority to stop and question motorists on the way out of hunting or fishing grounds to check on what they've bagged.
The justices denied review of a California Supreme Court ruling in June that upheld the vehicle stops without requiring a warrant or evidence of lawbreaking. The National Rifle Association had joined a defense lawyer in asking the high court for a hearing.
The case comes from San Diego, where a warden patrolling a fishing pier through a telescope in August 2007 saw fisherman Bouhn Maikhio reeling in either a lobster or a fish and putting it in a black bag.
- Bob Egelko, sfgate
Editor's Note: As one of the commenters said about the NRA, "Why is the NRA getting involved to protect poachers? The law abiding hunters should be up in arms [figuratively speaking] over this.
This has nothing to do with the right to carry arms." -- BentLiberal
Salmon win in 9th circuit court: California salmon and salmon fishermen won in federal court Friday when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the federal water project is obliged to provide enough water to double the salmon population. You can read the decision here.
Under the ruling, only surplus water from the bay-delta water system can be delivered to water users in the San Joaquin Valley, not water from the 800,000 acre-foot allotment promised to fish under a 1992 federal law.
- Lois Kazakoff, sfgate
Parkinson's drug helps those with brain injuries: Daily doses of a drug used to treat Parkinson's disease significantly improved function in severely brain-injured people thought to be beyond the reach of treatment, scientists reported Wednesday, providing the first rigorous evidence to date that any therapy reliably helps such patients.
The improvements were modest, experts said, and hardly amounted to a cure, or a quick means of "waking up" someone who has long been unresponsive. But they were meaningful, they said, and if replicated would give rehabilitation doctors something they have never had: a standard treatment for injuries that are not at all standard or predictable in the ways they affect the brain.
New York Times via sfgate.com
Connecting unused drugs, uninsured patients: Seven years ago, a group of Stanford students realized that a tremendous amount of medicine was being wasted and that it could help uninsured patients.
Their idea has grown into a nonprofit that helps health care centers and drug companies donate unused prescriptions to pharmacies that then supply uninsured patients.
In redistributing the medicines, the startup - Supporting Initiatives to Redistribute Unused Medicine, or Sirum - not only helps those needy and poor patients but reduces the environmental hazards of incinerating or otherwise destroying the unexpired drugs.
An estimated $9 billion in unused medicine and medical supplies is wasted in the United States every year
Victoria Colliver, sfgate
Rainforest home to vast treasury of life: Both Brazil and Indonesia have embarked on programs to protect their tropical rainforests, which contain a rich treasury of life.
Although many millions of species are known to inhabit this ecosystem, quantifying precisely how many plants and animals rely on the rainforest is difficult.
David Ainsworth of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity told CNN: "It is estimated that at least two-thirds of all Earth's terrestrial species are found in tropical forests.
"The exact number of species which depend on tropical rainforests is not known -- but they are very old ecosystems that have survived ice ages and allowed uninterrupted evolution over millions of years."
Dave Gilbert, CNN, photo credit: CNN
Can German business ideas revive the UK economy?: With a fragile economy, falling living standards and austerity biting, British politicians are in search of a new model of economic growth - does Germany have the answers?
"Which European country sells most to China?" asked Labour leader Ed Miliband in a recent speech to the Social Market Foundation.
"It's Germany. Winning on the basis of high-value production where quality counts."
Hardly a week goes by without UK politicians or think tanks using Germany's success to advocate a new policy.
By Matthew Taylor Presenter, Radio 4's Analysis - via BBC
New technology for sharing old memories: For Rudy Adler and Brett Huneycutt, the future of social networking is the past.
The co-founders of the San Francisco startup 1000memories are trying to turn the world's smartphones into tools to digitalize the estimated 1.8 trillion fading and yellowing snapshots that people have lying around in their attics, garages and picture albums -- often among the most prized, and least seen, of people's possessions. The goal of the two friends since third grade is to add the past tense to the up-to-the-minute stream of social networks.
The company's iPhone app, called ShoeBox, allows users to photograph their old snapshots with the camera in their smartphone, upload the digital image to the Internet, and share it with anyone they choose. The same day ShoeBox launched in late October, Adler got an email from an interested partner. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted to impart a pep talk.
Mike Swift, mercurynews.com
'Passion & Purpose' gives insight into today's business students: "Passion & Purpose: Stories from the Best and Brightest Young Business Leaders" is a new book from Harvard Business Review Press that draws on a survey of 500 U.S. business school students. It allows dozens of them to tell their story in the first person — the result being a carefully crafted insight into the zeitgeist of business education, a snapshot of what motivates MBA participants and why.
Although traditionally an accurate answer to that question might simply have been money (or perhaps power), authors John Coleman, Daniel Gulati and W. Oliver Segovia say that times have changed, and that today's business students are a far cry from those born of economic boom. Young MBAs, we are told, "aren't entering business solely for financial gain, but as a way to find meaningful work and make a positive difference in the world."
Emmanuelle Smith, latimes.com
Five urban garden programs that train inmates and help communities: Prisons receive billions of dollars each year in government funding, yet national recidivism rates continue to hover at around 66 percent. Following the economic recession, budgets have been slashed, forcing penitentiaries and post-release programs to cut spending.
Considered nonessential and expensive, garden programs are often the first to be cut, yet they have proven to be successful in not only reducing recidivism rates and improving rehabilitation, but also providing fresh healthy food to inmates and surrounding communities.
Emily Gilbert
Christian Science Monitor
Photo Credit: DKOS Photo Coop
Carter Camp Tells Why Wounded Knee Siege of 1973 Still Matters Today
Ah-ho, My Relations,
I ask you to remember that our reasons for going to Wounded Knee still exist and that means the need for struggle and resistance also still exist. Our land and sacred sites are threatened as never before. Even our sacred Mother herself is faced with unnatural warming caused by extreme greed.
Wounded Knee takeover leaders were upset by the Nixon
White House's response to the siege and asked for
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to visit.
Here an interviewer asks Carter Camp if that's really
necessary. Camp asks, "Why not? Indians are just as
important as any other issue the U.S. has, like Vietnam."
In some areas of conflict between our people and those we signed treaties with, it is best to negotiate or "work within the system." But, because our struggle is one of survival, there are also times when a warrior must stand fast even at the risk of one's life. I believed that in 1973 when I was 30 and I believe it today at 70. But to me Wounded Knee '73 was really not about the fight, it was about the strong statement that our traditional way of living in this world is not about to disappear and our people are not a "vanishing race" as
wasicu (white) education would have you believe. As time has passed and I see so many of our young people taking part in a traditional way of living and believing, I know our fight was worth it and those we lost for our movement died worthy deaths. [...]
Carter Camp posts at Daily Kos as cacamp
First Totem Pole in a Century Raised in Seattle for Victim of Police Shooting
A large mural of
folk hero John T. Williams
is at 11th Avenue
between Pike and Pine
The strength of a First Nations community
came together on Feb. 26 when a 33-foot-tall, 5,000-pound totem pole was ceremoniously carried a mile-and-a-half from its carving site on the shoulders of scores of supporters and erected near the 50-year-old Space Needle. It was the first totem pole erected in Seattle in nearly 100 years.
Conceived and carved in the traditional manner, the cedar totem pole honors John T. Williams (
Ditidaht), himself a master carver, who was shot and killed by Seattle police officer Ian Birk in August 2010. After months of protest by Indians and their supporters, the shooting death was found
not justified. Officials said Birk took actions that were "outside of policy, tactics and training."
—navajo & Meteor Blades
First Nations News & Views is posted every Sunday.