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Vatican, the "miracle" needed to propel a 17th century Native American, Kateri Tekakwitha, on to sainthood. Kateri will be canonized on Sunday along with six other people, the first Native American from what is now the U.S. to receive the honor.
• Jake is fully convinced, as is the Catholic Church, that the prayers his family and community offered to God through Kateri's intercession, including the placement of a Kateri relic on Jake's leg, were responsible for his survival.
• Jake, now 12 and an avid basketball player and cross-country runner, will be present at the canonization, along with hundreds of members of his own Lummi tribe from northwest Washington state and indigenous communities across the U.S. and Canada who have converged on Rome to honor one of their own. It's a ceremony the Catholic Church hopes will encourage Native Americans to keep to their Christian faith amid continued resentment among some that Catholicism was imposed on them by colonial-era missionaries centuries ago.
• "I believe everybody has a purpose on this earth," Jake's mother Elsa Finkbonner said this week soon after the family arrived in Rome for the ceremony. "I think this Sunday Jake will define his purpose, and that's to make Kateri a saint."
• ___

• RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) -- Palestinians voted for mayors and local councils in 93 communities across the West Bank on Saturday, their first chance to cast ballots in six years.
• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party hope the election will revive flagging popular support in an ostensibly fail-proof environment, with Fatah rival Hamas boycotting the West Bank vote. Hamas also blocked elections in Gaza, the territory it seized from Abbas in 2007.
• Abbas' party could still walk away bruised, however, if turnout is particularly low or if Fatah renegades competing in several of the larger communities defeat candidates formally endorsed by the movement.
• The election is also overshadowed by widespread voter apathy and a general sense of malaise.
• Abbas' Palestinian Authority, a self-rule government in parts of the Israeli-controlled West Bank, is mired in a chronic cash crisis. Efforts to heal the Palestinian political split have failed. And prospects are virtually nil for resuming meaningful negotiations with Israel's hardline government on setting up a Palestinian state in

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