Sorted by date Results 1426 - 1450 of 1731
ANCHORAGE (AP) - An Alaska prison that was closed for about five years reopened Aug. 16 after a nearly $17 million renovation, corrections officials said. The reopening of the Palmer Correctional Facility in Sutton will add about 300 beds to the state’s current prison capacity of about 5,200. The prison closed in 2016 because of a declining inmate population and as the state wanted to cut costs. The state estimates it will cost about $15 million a year to operate the prison. The number of people incarcerated in Alaska increased over the past t...
JUNEAU (AP) - Alaska law enforcement agencies failed to collect DNA samples from more than 21,000 people arrested for or convicted of certain crimes over the past 25 years, in part because of confusion caused by changes to state law, officials said. The state Department of Public Safety identified 21,577 individuals who were required to have a DNA sample on file but did not. Of those, 1,555 are dead, the report states. Gov. Mike Dunleavy on Aug. 10 announced plans for the state to pursue samples in the remaining cases. It’s not clear, t...
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) - About 96,000 farmed salmon are believed to have died when a leak in a tank sent 4,000 gallons of chlorine into a fjord in Arctic Norway. Roger Pedersen, a spokesman for the salmon farming company Grieg Seafood, said the leak happened at one of its fish slaughterhouses in the town of Alta and the fish were in a waiting cage nearby at the time. “We are connecting this to a chlorine leak,” Pedersen told Norwegian broadcaster NRK, adding the company was now handling the dead fish “in a responsible way and was inves...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) - The second sighting of a so-called murder hornet this year was reported by a person in Whatcom County this week, the Washington state Department of Agriculture said Aug. 12. Entomologists confirmed the sighting. The resident’s report included a photograph of the hornet attacking a paper wasp nest in a rural area east of the town of Blaine, about two miles from where state workers eradicated the first Asian giant hornet nest in the United States last October. The world’s largest hornet can sometimes be lethal to hum...
Canada on Monday is lifting its prohibition on Americans crossing the border to shop, vacation or visit, but the United States is keeping similar restrictions in place for Canadians, part of a bumpy return to normalcy from COVID-19 travel bans. U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents must be both fully vaccinated and test negative for COVID-19 within three days to get across one of the world’s longest and busiest land borders. Travelers also must fill out a detailed on application on the arriveCAN app before crossing. The Canada Border S...
JUNEAU (AP) - Efforts to recover the wreckage of a sightseeing plane that crashed in Southeast Alaska last week, killing six people, were stymied again Monday by poor weather conditions, a National Transportation Safety Board official said. Clint Johnson, chief of the agency’s Alaska region, said low clouds and fog continued to delay wreckage recovery efforts. “They are ready to go as soon as they get a weather window,” he said of the team that will handle the work. The wreckage is in a rugged, steep area that is heavily forested, at 1,800...
MIAMI (AP) - A federal judge has temporarily blocked a Florida law that prevents cruise lines from requiring passengers to prove they’re vaccinated against COVID-19, saying the law appears unconstitutional and won’t likely hold up in court. The “vaccine passport’’ ban signed into law in May by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis appears to violate the First Amendment rights of Norwegian Cruise Lines, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams wrote. In a nearly 60-page ruling issued late Sunday, the judge said Florida failed to “provide a valid evidentiary...
The 1,094-foot-long Norwegian Encore made history on Aug. 4 as it emerged from a cloudy curtain of rain to tie up in Ward Cove, about a 7-mile drive north of Ketchikan's downtown cruise ship dock. Before the ship pulled in, workers hurried to finish preparing the 57,000-square-foot cruise ship terminal for visitors, screwing smoke detectors into a restroom ceiling and drilling holes to install the last few rows of cable guardrails. As the first throng of passengers walked into what had been the...
Can slicing a 100-mile trench into the bed of the Columbia River be good for the environment? The answer is a big yes, says a team of energy developers that proposes submerging power cables in the riverbed. The developers say the cables could deliver “clean’’ energy that will be crucial for getting the most densely developed areas of the Pacific Northwest off fossil fuels. A proposal by energy developer Sun2o Partners and transmission developer PowerBridge would insert the cables into the Columbia at The Dalles in Oregon. This electrical on-ra...
JUNEAU (AP) - The federal Bureau of Land Management announced Aug. 3 it is moving ahead with a new environmental review of oil and gas leasing in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge after the Interior secretary said she found “multiple legal deficiencies’’ in an earlier review. That prior review, under the administration of then-President Donald Trump, provided a basis for the first lease sale on the refuge’s coastal plain, held in the final days of Trump’s presidency. A state of Alaska agency was the main bidder in the January lea...
ANCHORAGE (AP) - Gov. Mike Dunleavy has urged Alaskans to get vaccinated, amid a spike in COVID-19 cases driven by the Delta variant. “There is a safe, free and widely available tool to put COVID-19 in the rearview mirror,” Dunleavy said in a statement Aug. 4. “That tool is the vaccine.” Alaska has reported hundreds of new COVID-19 cases a day since mid-July, with several more deaths bringing the state close to 400 since the pandemic started 18 months ago. Infection rates and hospitalizations have been trending up. As of Monday, the vaccina...
The Alaska Supreme Court has upheld the $20,000 fine imposed on a Metlakatla commercial fisherman who took coho salmon in 2014 in a closed area, without a state fisheries permit. In a 4-0 ruling, the justices rejected the appeal filed by the fisherman and the Metlakatla Indian Community, which had argued the state lacked jurisdiction in the waters around Alaska’s only Indian reserve. John Scudero Jr. was cited for three commercial fishing violations and fined $20,000 after a one-day trial in 2015. The U.S. Coast Guard in 2014 reported the v...
JUNEAU (AP) - Gov. Mike Dunleavy has delayed until Aug. 16 the start of the next special session of the Legislature, following a request by legislative leaders for more time to find a compromise on the state’s fiscal future. The special session had been set to begin Monday. Special sessions can last up to 30 days. The letter requesting that the governor postpone the session was signed by Senate President Peter Micciche, House Speaker Louise Stutes, Senate Minority Leader Tom Begich and House Minority Leader Cathy Tilton. The Republican and D...
JUNEAU (AP) - A divided federal appeals court panel has struck down several campaign contribution caps in Alaska, including a $500-a-year limit on what an individual can give to a candidate for the Legislature or governor. The decision, released last Friday, also struck down a $500-a-year limit on individual contributions to non-party groups and the $3,000-a-year cap on total nonresident donations a legislative candidate can raise. It upheld as constitutional a $5,000 limit on what political parties can contribute to municipal candidates. A...
JUNEAU (AP) - An assistant state attorney general identified by a news outlet as the person behind a social media account that posted racist and antisemitic comments no longer works for the state Department of Law, an agency spokesperson said. Grace Lee said that Matthias Cicotte’s last day with the department was July 27. She declined to say if he resigned or fired. The department last week said it had assigned Cicotte’s cases to other employees while it investigated the matter. Attorney General Treg Taylor, in a statement, cited con...
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...