News Stories Mon., Apr. 30, 2018

A magnitude-4.0 earthquake struck about 120 miles west of Bandon off of the Oregon Coast Sunday evening.  Six miles deep, it was the second mini-quake to strike off the coast since Thursday, when a magnitude 3.8 earthquake jostled the earth about 80 miles west of Coos Bay.

The U.S. Senate has pushed through a bipartisan resolution that will officially make May 5 the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls. Republican Senator Steve Daines from Montana, sponsored the measure and said in a statement on Thursday that he put it forth in memory of a Northern Cheyenne tribe member named Hanna Harris, who was found murdered in 2013 after having gone missing. May 5th was her birthday. According to the resolution, although there isn’t much data on how many native women and girls are missing, a U.S. Department of Justice study found that murder rates for Native American women are more than 10 times the national average on some tribal lands.

Seventeen U.S. senators submitted a letter to U.S. Department of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Thursday urging the Bureau of Land Management to stop developing management plans for national monuments in Utah until courts have considered President Donald Trump’s decision to reduce the size of the parks. The group of senators, led by U.S. Senator Tom Udall, D-N.M., wrote the letter to urge the BLM to postpone the plans for the Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The senators also said they wrote the letter out of concern that the BLM does not intend to consider nearly three million public comments submitted to the DOI in support of the monuments and has no plans for tribal consultation regarding the DOI’s decision to move forward with a rushed planning process.