Sorted by date Results 1520 - 1544 of 1769
JUNEAU (AP) - The federal government has announced plans to “repeal or replace” a decision by the Trump administration that intended to lift restrictions on logging and road building in Southeast Alaska. Conservationists cheered the announcement as a positive step, while Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy criticized it and vowed to use “every tool available to push back.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plans were announced on a federal regulatory site with little detail last Friday. They were described as consistent with a January executive...
JUNEAU (AP) - A former Republican Alaska legislator was indicted on new felony charges alleging voter misconduct related to her 2018 election, according to an indictment released by the state Department of Law. Gabrielle LeDoux pleaded not guilty June 10, the department said. She represented an Anchorage House district at the time of the alleged criminal acts. LeDoux told the AP by text message she is “completely innocent of all charges. I have done absolutely nothing wrong. I look forward to clearing my name at trial.” The department, in Mar...
SEATTLE (AP) - Federal officials are proposing to curtail nontribal salmon fishing in the Pacific Northwest in especially bad years to help the area’s endangered killer whales. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries division is taking public comment on the plan, which calls for restricting commercial and recreational salmon fishing when chinook salmon forecasts are especially low. The southern resident killer whales — the endangered orcas that spend much of their time in the waters between Washington state and Briti...
KENAI (AP) - A Seward City Council member has apologized for making an antisemitic comment during a council work session last week. Council member Sharyl Seese said she was “embarrassed” and “very sorry” for the comments made June 7, the Peninsula Clarion reported. The council was discussing possible negotiations over the price of a building. “Maybe we can Jew them down,” Seese said, according to a YouTube stream of the work session, as reported in the Anchorage Daily News. Council members nervously laughed at the comment and the mayor adjou...
ANCHORAGE (AP) - Alaska Wildlife Troopers do not intend to issue a citation to a man who was seen lifting a baby moose over a guardrail in Southcentral Alaska, though it is illegal to “handle any wild animal in a similar fashion,’’ an Alaska State Troopers spokesperson said June 10. An Anchorage man, Joe Tate, was driving home June 3 from a fishing trip with friends when saw a line of cars and a moose on the highway about 20 miles south of Soldotna on the Kenai Peninsula. Tate said a mother moose was pacing in the road, and a young calf strug...
An agreement between an Alaska Native village corporation and conservationists would restrict development on lands in the Bristol Bay region where the Pebble Mine developer has proposed a road, a move that could create another obstacle for the project. The Conservation Fund said June 8 it has launched a fundraising campaign to buy the land easements on more than 44,000 acres from the Pedro Bay Corp. for $18.3 million. Terms call for the money to be raised by the end of 2022, said Ann Simonelli, a spokesperson for the Virginia-based...
JUNEAU (AP) - A proposed 500-mile hiking trail from Southcentral Alaska to Fairbanks aimed at drawing more adventurers to the state has garnered support from the governor, tourism officials and others, and it could get a funding boost to help begin stitching it together. The state budget, under debate this month in a special legislative session, includes $13.2 million toward beginning to build the Alaska Long Trail, similar in concept to grand treks such as the Pacific Crest Trail or Appalachian Trail, the Anchorage Daily News reported. Funds...
ANCHORAGE (AP) - Officials in Anchorage have reported that the city’s sewer system is clogging up because people are flushing wipes and other items — a problem worsened by the pandemic as people continue to spend more time at home. Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility spokesperson Sandy Baker said up to 6,000 pounds of wipes entered the sewer system daily since the coronavirus pandemic started. “We saw a small uptick in wipes when the pandemic started,” Baker said last month. “But this is a year-round problem for us.” The wipes combine wit...
The Petersburg borough is offering $10,000 in prizes during June to encourage residents who are unvaccinated against COVID-19 to get the shot. The Sleeves Up Petersburg drawing is sponsored by the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, with money distributed through the Alaska Chamber of Commerce. It’s part of a campaign to increase the state’s vaccination rate by 25%. “That’s the drive from the start, to increase our vaccination rate and get out of this pandemic,” said Petersburg Incident Commander Karl Hagerman. “Let’s ge...
MIAMI (AP) - Royal Caribbean International said it will require vaccinations for passengers 16 and older on cruises to Alaska, and that crew members on all of its ships will be vaccinated against COVID-19 before it restarts cruise operations __next month to Alaska and from ports in Texas and Florida. The vaccination requirement will be expanded to cover Alaska-bound passengers 12 and over starting Aug. 1. Royal Caribbean is the latest of most other major cruise operators to Alaska - in...
JUNEAU (AP) – The state of Alaska has begun offering free COVID-19 vaccines at airports, a move that was planned a month ago for the start of the summer travel season as an additional enticement for visitors to come to Alaska. The state health department said vaccine eligibility was expanded June 1 to include anyone in Alaska who is at least 12 years old, including visitors from other states or countries. In addition to airport vaccination sites in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau, the state has opened up all its other sites around the state for...
WASILLA (AP) - An Alaska bride-to-be mailed out her wedding invitations last month and eagerly waited for friends and family to respond. And kept waiting. ``We were kind of wondering why we weren’t receiving any RSVPs, but we really didn’t think much of it,’’ Crystle Lewis, of Wasilla, told news station Anchorage KTUU-TV. It turns out, they had incorrect postage on their invitations. Their style of invitation, with a wax seal on the back of the envelope, required extra postage. A notice had been sent to the post office box on the return...
Upright pianos in Skagway bars dating from the Gold Rush. Grand pianos worth tens of thousands of dollars in Anchorage and Sitka. Bob Hope's piano while he was on a USO tour in Alaska. Plus private, church and school pianos in Wrangell. Virgel Hale has tuned them all in his 51-year career traveling around Alaska. But now, at age 81, he's retiring, and will be staying home with his wife, Patsy, who has health problems, in Mountain Grove, Missouri, closer to kids and grandkids. "I hate to call it...
A former co-chair of the Alaska Federation of Natives, former board president of the Sealaska Corp. and a retired Democratic state legislator died last Friday at his home in Angoon. Albert Kookesh was 72. Kookesh was fighting prostate cancer. Alaska public radio reported that after being treated at a hospital, he made the decision to return to his home village on the coast of Admiralty Island. In remembrances posted online and shared on social media, he was praised for his work with Southeast Alaska’s regional Native corporation, his efforts t...
The Southeast Alaska Power Agency plans to begin an eight-day process July 1 of removing a damaged submarine electrical cable and replacing it with a new line between Woronkofski and Vank islands, SEAPA CEO Trey Acteson told the Petersburg borough assembly May 17. Crews will lay about 3.5 miles of new cable. The manufacturing and installation of the cable is estimated to cost about $13.4 million, Acteson said SEAPA board member Bob Lynn told the assembly at an earlier meeting that the regional power agency would likely need to raise its rates t...
TORONTO - Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday it's not an isolated incident that more than 200 children were found buried at a former residential school in British Columbia. Trudeau's comments come as Indigenous leaders are calling for an examination of every former residential school site - institutions that held children taken from families across the nation. Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc First Nation in British Columbia said the remains of 215 children, some as...
Biden administration attorneys are defending a decision made during the Trump administration to approve a major oil project on Alaska’s North Slope. Critics say the action flies in the face of President Joe Biden’s pledges to address climate change. U.S. Justice Department attorneys, in a filing May 26, wrote that opponents of the ConocoPhillips-led Willow project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska were seeking to stop development by “cherry-picking” the records of federal agencies to claim environmental review law violations. The fil...
ANCHORAGE (AP) - Telecommunications company GCI has resumed carrying three major TV channels after ending a months-long dispute with Alaska television network owners. An agreement was reached May 22-23 and the channel blackout was lifted for GCI customers, said Josh Edge, a GCI spokesperson. GCI cable customers lost access to ABC, FOX and The CW in January, when a prior programming agreement expired. The Alaska operators for the three channels are Coastal Television Broadcasting and Vision Alaska. The dispute was over how much GCI should pay...
JUNEAU (AP) - A bill that protects the graves of Unangax people in Southeast Alaska awaits a signature from Gov. Mike Dunleavy after both chambers of the Alaska Legislature approved the measure. The Unangax cemetery holds more than 30 graves of people who died at Funter Bay during World War II. They were relocated to two internment camps there from the Aleutian Islands by U.S. forces after the Japanese military invaded. They spent much of the war at the remote spot on the western side of Admiralty Island, about 20 miles west of Juneau, and, mor...
A tall, thin man wearing a hood and a mask was caught on a security camera plastering Nazi stickers on a Jewish museum in Anchorage on May 25. He drove a scooter to the Alaska Jewish Museum, placed one sticker on the door and jumped to place three more symbols of hate on windows before driving off, Rabbi Yosef Greenberg, the president of the museum’s board of directors, said of what their video cameras showed happening at 2 a.m. About 45 minutes later, another sticker was placed on the main entrance door to Mad Myrna’s, a gay bar in dow...
HONOLULU - "Ghost nets'' from unknown origins drift among the Pacific's currents, threatening sea creatures and littering shorelines with the entangled remains of what they kill. Lost or discarded at sea, sometimes decades ago, this fishing gear continues to wreak havoc on marine life and coral reefs in Hawaii. Now, researchers are doing detective work to trace this harmful debris back to fisheries and manufacturers _ and that takes extensive, in-depth analysis on tons of ghost nets. The...
SAN RAMON, California (AP) - The Google Earth app is adding a new video feature that draws upon nearly four decades of satellite imagery to vividly illustrate how climate change has affected glaciers, beaches, forests and other places around the world. The tool is being billed as the biggest update to Google Earth in five years. Google says it undertook the complex project in partnership with several government agencies, including NASA in the U.S. and its European counterpart, in hopes that it will help a mass audience grasp the sometimes...
Norwegian Cruise Line was the first operator to resume ticket sales for voyages to Alaska after Congress passed a bill that could help save the state’s annual summer pilgrimage of cruise ship visitors. Norwegian’s sailings will start the first week of August. A few hours after the House approved the measure last Thursday, following earlier passage by the Senate, Carnival Corp. joined Norwegian on the calendar. Carnival’s three largest cruise lines said they would run one ship each between Seattle and the bigger ports in Southeast Alaska start...
ANCHORAGE (AP) - Alaskans could soon access their vaccination records through their phones and other devices. The state health department is working to adopt technology that would give residents easy access to immunization records, which could also provide proof of COVID-19 vaccinations. The state plans to use the consumer-access portal MyIR Mobile. The technology is already available in Arizona, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Dakota, Tennessee, Washington, West Virginia, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Registration will be...
JUNEAU (AP) - Alaska had 19,100 more jobs in April than it did the same month in 2020, but the numbers still lagged what they were before the pandemic, the state labor department reported last Friday. There were an estimated 297,200 nonfarm jobs in Alaska last month, compared to 278,100 in April 2020 but down from 322,400 in April 2019, the report shows. The unemployment rate in Alaska was 6.7% in April versus the national rate of 6.1%. The unemployment rate in Wrangell was 7.6%, a big improvement from 12.9% a year ago. The report provides a...