Sorted by date Results 1441 - 1465 of 1731
JUNEAU (AP) – Absent an appeal and reversal by the state Supreme Court, Alaskans next year will select candidates for governor, Legislature and Congress without partisan primary elections. A state court judge on July 29 upheld a new voting process set to take effect for next year’s elections. Superior Court Judge Gregory Miller said, “that the voters in November 2020 chose one system over the other does not make the new law … unconstitutional.” Voters last year approved a system that will end party primaries and institute ranked-ch...
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Baby salmon are dying by the thousands in one California river, and an entire run of endangered salmon could be wiped out in another. Fishermen who make their living off adult salmon are sounding the alarm as blistering heat waves and extended drought in the U.S. West raise water temperatures and imperil fish from Idaho to California. Hundreds of thousands of young salmon are dying in Northern California's Klamath River as low water levels brought about by drought allow a...
Alaska Airlines said it was not aware that a passenger who boarded Flight 73 in Sitka the morning of July 20 had tested positive for COVID-19 a day earlier “We would never allow someone to travel that is COVID-positive, knowing they were COVID-positive,” Alaska Airlines spokesman Tim Thompson said July 21. “Our priorities are for the safety of staff and employees.” State public health Denise Ewing said a visitor from outside Alaska who was in Sitka on vacation tested positive for COVID-19 on July 19 and was provided test results, includi...
It’s funny how life works out sometimes — how people often are in the right spot, at the right moment. Danielle Wakefield, the assistant coach for the Nunaka Valley Little League softball team from Anchorage, was in Ketchikan for the Junior Division state softball tournament last week. And it was shortly after her plane landed on July 15 at the Ketchikan airport that she realized the diamond from her ring was missing. The diamond has special meaning, as it’s the only thing Wakefield has from her late father. “I had nothing else from him,” she s...
JUNEAU (AP) - The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced plans Monday to review whether the Southeast Alaska wolf population merits Endangered Species Act protections. In 2016, the Fish and Wildlife Service determined the wolf did not warrant such protections. The agency said Monday that a petition from conservation groups to protect the Alexander Archipelago wolf included information indicating protections may be warranted due to potential threats associated with logging, illegal and legal trapping and hunting, climate change impacts and...
TURNER, Ore. (AP) - The heat wave that recently hit the Pacific Northwest subjected the region’s vineyards to record-breaking temperatures nine months after the fields that produce world-class wine were blanketed by wildfire smoke. But when temperatures began climbing close to 120 degrees Fahrenheit in late June, the grapes in Oregon and Washington state were still young, as small as BB’s, many still shaded by leaf canopies that had not been trimmed back yet. The good news for grape growers, wineries and wine lovers is the historic heat wav...
JUNEAU (AP) - Updated maps add 200 homes and other buildings to hazard zones for landslides and avalanches in Alaska’s capital city, bringing to about 550 the total number of structures that would be considered at moderate to severe risk of being damaged or destroyed if disaster struck. The new maps, finished this year, used technology to chart the risks and are meant to update hazard maps made in the 1970s. The area reviewed includes downtown Juneau. The Juneau Planning Commission is expected to review the maps next month before they a...
“I don’t know, somehow you kind of get addicted to it, I guess,” Matt Nore said. Nore, volunteering with the Parks and Recreation Department, will be hosting jiu jitsu classes starting next month. Nore has grown up enjoying combat sports, he said, starting with wrestling in high school. He also participated in mixed martial arts through the Alaska Fighting Championship before he was first deployed to Iraq around 2004. He started getting back into jiu jitsu early this year, he said, and wants to begin teaching others the basics so he can keep...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration said July 15 it is ending large-scale, old-growth timber sales on the nation’s largest national forest — the Tongass National Forest in Alaska — and will instead focus on forest restoration, recreation and other non-commercial uses. The announcement by the U.S. Forest Service reverses a Trump administration decision to lift restrictions on logging and road-building in the Southeast Alaska rainforest, which provides habitat for wolves, bears and salmon, and encompasses several communities totalin...
OTIS, Ore. (AP) - Wildfire smoke was thick when Tye and Melynda Small went to bed last Labor Day, but they weren't too concerned. After all, they live in a part of Oregon where ferns grow from tree trunks and rainfall averages more than six feet a year. But just after midnight, a neighbor awakened them as towering flames, pushed by gusting winds, bore down. The Smalls and their four children fled, as wind whipped the blaze into a fiery tornado and trees exploded around them. When it was over, th...
While growing up in the First City, Emilio Torres always knew he was going to make a movie. A recent graduate of New York University's film school, Torres arrived back in Ketchikan early in July to work with a cast of local actors and friends from film school to bring his debut short film, "The Ladder," to life. Torres, who moved to Seattle from New York City, described the project as a philosophical sci-fi short film about a fisherman who is confronted with a choice to change his life forever....
JUNEAU (AP) - U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski ended the latest quarter with a big cash-on-hand advantage over conservative Republican rival Kelly Tshibaka, according to fundraising reports released July 15. Murkowski, a Republican who has not officially announced plans for reelection next year, came into 2021 with about $1 million in her campaign coffers. She reported bringing in about $1.1 million during the most recent fundraising quarter and having $2.3 million available as of June 30, her report shows. Tshibaka, a former state Department of...
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) - Pandemic restrictions on Florida-based cruise ships will remain in place after a federal appeals court temporarily blocked a previous ruling that sided with a Florida lawsuit challenging the regulations as burdensome. The one-paragraph decision by a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was filed at 11:50 p.m. Saturday, just minutes before a Tampa judge's previous ruling against the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention restrictions was set to take effect. The judges' issuance of a...
FAIRBANKS (AP) - It has been a record-breaking year for sockeye salmon catches in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region this year, an official said. “We’re approaching 27 million total run,” Tim Sands, a state Department of Fish and Game area management biologist said of the Nushagak District. “Our average run would be 9 million, so to be triple the average is amazing.” The region has experienced numerous record-breaking days. The all-time record for catch in the Nushagak District on one day was more than 1.7 million set on June 30. “Then the very next d...
JUNEAU (AP) - A Utah man who was sentenced to 30 years in prison last month in the beating death of his wife on an Alaska cruise has died, the Alaska Department of Corrections said. Kenneth Manzanares was in the department’s custody, at its prison in Juneau, when he was found unresponsive in his cell July 14, the department said in a statement. Lifesaving measures were attempted but he was later pronounced dead, the department said. Manzanares is the seventh person to die in the department’s custody this year, according to the department, whi...
The owner of the former sawmill property at 6-Mile Zimovia Highway has been working with the borough since last year on an application to develop the site into an industrial subdivision, offering more than 32 acres for sale as individual lots. The property would include 24 lots, ranging in size from 0.36 to 2.36 acres, with 60-foot-wide roads and utilities serving the subdivision, which is zoned for waterfront development. “The preliminary (subdivision) plat has been conditionally approved,” said Carol Rushmore, borough zoning adm...
State officials say the highly contagious delta variant is likely driving the increase in COVID-19 cases reported in Alaska, plus the fact that more than 40% of Alaskans over the age of 12 still had not received at least their first vaccination shot as of last week. Sitka has reported its worst outbreak in seven months, with 20 new cases reported Tuesday. There were 51 active cases in the community and at least 15 people hospitalized as of Monday evening. Almost all of the recent cases in the community were among unvaccinated people. Sitka...
A group seeking Gov. Mike Dunleavy's ouster has yet to gather enough signatures to force a recall election, nearly two years after getting started and with just over a year before the 2022 primary election. Recall Dunleavy Chair Meda DeWitt said the organization was slowed by the pandemic last year but still continues to gather signatures. She said its leaders are expected to meet soon, though she declined to say when. The last update on the recall group's website is dated April 26 and showed 57,897 signatures collected. DeWitt said the group...
NEW TOWN, N.D. - On oil well pads carved from the wheat fields around Lake Sakakawea, North Dakota, hundreds of pump jacks slowly bob to extract 100 million barrels of crude annually from a reservation shared by three Native American tribes. About half their 16,000 members live on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation atop one of the biggest U.S. oil discoveries in decades: The Bakken shale formation. The drilling rush has brought the tribes unimagined wealth - more than $1.5 billion and...
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) - Washington state’s death toll from last month’s record-breaking Pacific Northwest heat wave has risen to 78. A year earlier, Washington had just seven heat-related deaths from mid-June to the end of August, the state Department of Health said last week. From 2015 to 2020, there were a total of 39 deaths. Oregon on July 7 reported 116 deaths following temperatures that shattered previous all-time records during the three-day heat wave. Of the 116 deaths recorded in Oregon, the youngest victim was 37 and the oldest was 97. I...
LEWISTON, Idaho (AP) - Sockeye salmon at risk from high water temperatures are being captured at an eastern Washington dam to save as many of the endangered fish headed for Idaho as possible, wildlife managers said. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game said workers started trapping the salmon July 5 at Lower Granite Dam on the Snake River and trucking them to hatcheries to be artificially spawned or to Redfish Lake in central Idaho for release. Lance Hebdon of Fish and Game said water temperatures in the Snake and Salmon rivers have been as...
ANCHORAGE (AP) - The leaders of Alaska’s Republican Party on Saturday endorsed a Trump-backed conservative challenger to incumbent U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who has been one of the GOP’s most outspoken critics of the former president. The Alaska Republican State Central Committee endorsed Kelly Tshibaka in the 2022 race for the U.S. Senate seat held by Murkowski. The committee approved Tshibaka’s endorsement in a 58-17 vote during a meeting in Fairbanks. Tshibaka, who ran the Alaska Department of Administration for Gov. Mike Dunleavy, annou...
Sealaska Heritage Institute has released the first children's book in the Haida language Xaad Kil through its Baby Raven Reads program. "Nang Jaadaa Sgaana 'Laanaa aa Isdaayaan," or "The Woman Carried Away by Killer Whales," is a story carried down through generations orally and published through the work of a team of artists and linguists. "It's the first book I ever illustrated, and now it's the first children's book in the Haida language," said Haida illustrator Janine Gibbons. "I had to...
CRANBROOK, British Columbia (AP) - A Canadian Indigenous group said June 30 a search using ground-penetrating radar has found 182 human remains in unmarked graves at a site near a former Catholic Church-run residential school that housed Indigenous children taken from their families. The latest discovery of graves near Cranbrook, British Columbia, follows reports of similar findings at two other such church-run schools, one of more than 600 unmarked graves and another of 215 bodies. Cranbrook is 520 miles east of Vancouver. The Lower Kootenay B...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy used his veto power to thwart a legislative effort to boost the state ferry system budget. The governor cut almost $8.5 million from an overall appropriation of $190.7 million intended to cover the next 18 months of Alaska Marine Highway System operations. The veto scales back the budget closer to last year’s level on a 12-month basis and frustrates legislative attempts to restore some of the service cuts under the governor’s administration. This is the third budget Dunleavy has signed since he took office in December 201...