I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
58 percent of New Mexico teachers are white, despite minorities constituting an overwhelming majority of the state’s student body.
The findings come out of a set of reports published by a Washington, D.C. think tank that examined the dearth…
Over a hundred religious leaders in New Mexico have released an open letter to lawmakers asking them not to end a 2003 law permitting undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.
At the Florida tea party debate on Monday, GOP presidential candidate and Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann criticized policies allowing undocumented immigrants to receive in-state tuition for public universities by hearkening back to a previous era.
Secretary of State Dianna Duran placed the staffer responsible for what a liberal-leaning PAC described as “racist jokes” on a disclosure form on leave.
A PAC that supported Diane Denish in the 2010 gubernatorial election is accusing Secretary of State Dianna Duran of “racist jokes” and is calling for her resignation.
A new measure, signed into law by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer Tuesday, allows the biological father of a fetus — or the mother’s parents, if the mother is underage — to press charges against the person who administers the procedure if it was sought because of the fetus’ race or sex.
The U.S. Justice Department has announced it will send agents to monitor some polling places in Texas after tea party and Republican Party-certified poll challengers allegedly harassed dozens of early voters and poll officials.
Tea party activists are fanning out across…
Republican Party operatives from Texas have been training Albuquerque tea party activists as poll challengers for more than two weeks, GOP officials told The Independent Wednesday evening. The Democrats are training challengers of their own. But such “ballot security” efforts do more harm than good, a new study suggests, rarely catching fraudulent voting but frequently discouraging legitimate voters from casting ballots.
According to the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal Washington D.C. think tank, the Latino vote will be key in New Mexico and several other states with close electoral races looming in November. New Mexico has the highest…
New Mexico has the second-highest rate of teen pregnancy in the nation, a ranking consistent with years past, shows a new report released yesterday. The report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses preliminary data from 2008 to…
Despite having one of the worst childhood poverty rates in the U.S., only 81.1 percent of New Mexico children who qualify for the Medicaid State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) were enrolled in the program in 2009, according to a new report by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
That’s below the national average of 81.9 percent enrollment—but most of New Mexico’s neighboring states have lower rates. Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Texas had all enrolled fewer than 79.2 percent of eligible children in SCHIP, according to the 2009 data. Oklahoma enrolled 81.4 percent of eligible children, roughly matching New Mexico’s enrollment.
SCHIP was established by Congress in 1997 to provide health insurance to children in families at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. More …
More than three-quarters of children in New Mexico (78.6 percent) live below 200 percent of the poverty level, and the state has the 7th highest percentage of uninsured children, according to a new report (Uninsured Children: Who Are They and Where Do They Live?) from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. That’s despite a 20-year trend in increasing rates of health care coverage for kids. More …
New Mexico has of the highest rates of suicide in the nation but improving rural access to the Internet might change that, according to Radford University psychologist James Werth Jr.
Suicide rates in New Mexico and across the nation are higher in rural areas than urban areas, Werth said in a recent story in Mental Health Law Weekly. Better access to broadband could provide better access to suicide prevention and behavioral medicine resources for both patients and rural physicians and school officials, Werth suggested.
“Even though people live farther apart, there may be stronger connections — they need to rely on one another,” Werth said. More …
New Mexico ranks 47th among states in the number of 25 to 34 year olds with an associate’s degree or higher and 48th when it comes to students who graduate with a bachelor’s degree within six years, according to a new report from the College Board‘s Advocacy and Policy Center.
According to the organization’s 2010 Progress Report, roughly 28.5 percent of New Mexicans aged 25 to 34 possess an associate’s degree or higher, which compares unfavorably to the national average — 41.6 percent. Likewise, 41.8 percent of New Mexicans graduate college with a bachelor’s degree within six years, again substantially lower than the national average of 56.1 percent. More …
The Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission has published a report about race relations in towns bordering the reservation. The commission conducted 25 listening sessions over the course of a year, hearing from anyone who chose to speak about racism and discrimination. Of the 25 towns highlighted in the report, 12 are in New Mexico. The process was described as an opening of “forbidden doors” against candid discussions of racism and discrimination, which the commission says will thrive among mankind until it’s collectively acknowledged and eliminated.
Despite bucking a national trend of increasing child poverty and a reduction in school drop-out rates, New Mexico ranks last or near-last in seven of 10 measures of child welfare, from teen deaths to proportion of children living in poverty, according to a report released today by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Overall, the 2010 Kids Count Data Book shows that New Mexico lost ground, slipping to 46th place from 43rd in last year’s report.
Only for infant mortality did the state rank better than the national average, at 13th place, with 6.3 babies dying per 1,000 live births, compared to a U.S. average of 6.7 deaths per 1,000 births. Here are some of the other major findings:
NM teen birth rate is highest in the nation
New Mexico continues to rank worst in the nation for teen birth rates, with 2007 numbers (the most recent available data) showing no change from 2000 in New Mexico; 66 girls aged 15 to 19 gave birth for every 1,000 girls in New Mexico, compared to 43 per 1,000 nationwide.
Teen death rate also high
The state continues to have one of the worst teen death rates in the U.S. Although New Mexico’s teen death rate dropped slightly — 3 percent — between 2000 and 2007, at 96 deaths per 100,000 teens, the state’s rates are markedly higher than the national average of 62 per 100,000.
Single-parent families growing faster than average
The percentage of children in single-parent families grew seven times as much from 2000 to 2008 in New Mexico as the rest of the U.S., the report states. The percent of New Mexico children living in single-parent families grew from 33 percent in 2000 to 40 percent by 2008, compared to 32 percent nationwide in 2008.
The Kids Count report includes single-parent households as an indicator of child welfare because children in households with one adult do not have access to the same economic or human resources as children in two-parent families, the report states. In 2008, nearly a third of single-parent families lived in poverty, compared to just 7 percent of children in households run by married couples, according to the report.
Poverty affects one-fourth of NM kids
Nearly a quarter of New Mexico children, 24 percent, live in poverty (defined in 2008 as a four-member household income below $21,834). The situation is much worse for the state’s Native American (39 percent) and Hispanic children (30 percent), according to the report.
Nationwide, 18 percent of children live in poverty, according to the study.
Drop-out rate dips, but NM still ranks 47th
The percent of 16 to 19 year-old New Mexicans who were not in school dropped from 16 to 10 percent between 2000 and 2008, but that still placed the state in 47th place nationwide.
The U.S. average drop-out rate was 6 percent in 2008, the report states.
Child death rates rise while national rate drops
New Mexico’s number of deaths per 100,000 children under age 15 increased between 2000 and 2007, while the U.S. average child death rate declined. For 2007, New Mexico’s child mortality rate was 24 deaths per 100,000 children, compared to a U.S. average of 19 deaths per 100,000 according to the report.
The new report comes on the heels of a report in May that New Mexico children rank low on reading ability and school performance.
Republican Congressional candidate Tom Mullins once again drew attention to his campaign for the wrong reasons — this time reportedly making a comment that “There weren’t too many white faces there in the room” at a religious ceremony at…
Delegates at a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People voted this week to adopt a resolution calling on tea party organizers to denounce racists in their ranks. The NAACP cited the claims of three…
The YWCA Middle Rio Grande and prominent Hispanic Democrats gathered Wednesday in downtown Albuquerque to condemn and call for the firing of a prosecutor who sent an e-mail they called racist. Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish said Wednesday afternoon…
Republican candidate for governor and Doña Ana County District Attorney Susana Martinez reprimanded a prosecutor in her office for sending an anti-immigrant joke from a state e-mail account, Chief Deputy District Attorney Susan Riedel told The Independent Tuesday. The e-mail contained a joke about a “New Mexican girl” shooting a Mexican and an Arab with a .45 after saying “In New Mexico, we have so many illegal aliens that we don’t have to drink with the same ones twice.”
