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A day after judges blocked the merger, the grocery chain Albertsons on Dec. 11 backed out of its $25 billion merger with Kroger and sued its bigger rival for failing to push hard enough for federal regulatory approval of the deal. Albertsons is the parent company of Safeway in Alaska; Kroger is the parent company of Fred Meyer in Alaska. Albertsons’ decision to sue came the day after two judges halted the merger in separate court cases. U.S. District Court Judge Adrienne Nelson issued a preliminary injunction blocking the merger Dec. 10 a...
Butter clams, important to many Alaskans’ diets, are notorious for being sources of the toxin that causes sometimes-deadly paralytic shellfish poisoning. Now a new study is providing information that might help people harvest the clams more safely and monitor the toxin levels more effectively. The study, led by University of Alaska Southeast researchers, found that the meat in larger butter clams have higher concentrations of the algal toxin that causes PSP, than does the meat in smaller clams. “If you take 5 grams of tissue about one... Full story
The five men lost in the sinking of a commercial fishing boat west of Hoonah early Dec. 1 had just delivered a load in Juneau and were making a last run before the fishing season ended. The Sitka-based Wind Walker was transiting out to North Pacific fishing grounds when the boat capsized about 25 miles southwest of Juneau, according to several fishing industry representatives. The National Weather Service had forecast gale-force winds in the area, as well as freezing spray and snow. The Coast Guard said the boat issued a VHF radio mayday call...
The average hourly wage in Alaska was $33.60 in 2023, putting the state in 11th place among all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Alaska Department of Labor. The median hourly wage — which is calculated in a way that reduces the influence of the highest and lowest numbers — was $26.99. Alaska has been among the top states for wages since the oil pipeline boom almost 50 years ago, and was No. 1 as recently as 2013, but has been falling and was eighth in 2022. Wage and job statistics were detailed in a pair of articles by...
Nobody was injured in a small landslide in Ketchikan that dropped from a Hillside Road property on Dec. 1, unearthing approximately 4,000 square feet of a family’s backyard and sweeping about 200 feet down a steep, forested slope into Carlanna Creek. The landslide did not cause any structural damage to the family’s home or outbuildings, but yanked a kayak, a canoe and some fishing buoys from their yard to the creek below. Portions of unstable land on the family’s Hillside Road property continued to fall Dec. 2 and 3, although the house appea...
Mexico’s Senate has voted to charge cruise ship passengers $42 per person for port calls, drawing sharp criticism from the tourism industry. Mexican business chambers say the immigration charge — from which cruise passengers used to be exempt — may hurt the country’s half-billion-dollar-per-year cruise industry. The measure approved Dec. 3 has already been passed in the lower house and will go into effect in 2025. The changes were part of a bill that also increases airport immigration charges and entry fees for nature reserves. Mexico...
The shrinking size of Alaska salmon, a decades-long trend linked in part to warming conditions in the ocean, is hampering the ability of chinook in Alaska’s two biggest rivers to produce new generations needed to maintain healthy populations, a new study shows. The University of Alaska Fairbanks-led study shows how the body conditions of chinook salmon, combined with extreme heat and cold in the ocean and freshwater environments, have converged in the Yukon and Kuskokwim river systems to depress what is termed “productivity” — the success... Full story
Hilcorp is set to host a new project that will test the idea of using plentiful natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope oil fields to generate electricity for data centers — the digital infrastructure that keeps the internet running and is essential to the emerging artificial intelligence economy. Privately owned Hilcorp, one of Alaska’s biggest oil producers, is working with a Texas-based firm to place a small, pilot data center at its Endicott field, inside a shipping container on a gravel pad, according to a permit application filed recen... Full story
Alaska’s minimum wage workers will get a tiny bump in pay starting on Jan. 1 before a larger increase becomes effective six months later. The state’s minimum wage will increase by 18 cents to $11.91 an hour at the start of the new year, the result of a ballot measure passed 10 years ago, the Alaska Department of Labor said on Nov. 21. The bigger increase will be on July 1, when the minimum wage is set to rise to $13 an hour, the result of a ballot measure approved by voters in November. The minimum wage is set to increase again in 2026 to $14 a... Full story
Seven out of 10 Alaska adults are overweight or obese, and large percentages of adults in the state have chronic conditions like high blood pressure and high cholesterol that are linked to the leading causes of death, according to a report by the state Department of Health. The 2024 Alaska Chronic Disease Facts summary, published by the department’s Division of Public Health, also showed that 33% of high school students were overweight or obese. Large percentages of adults and teenagers are sedentary, according to the report. Among adults, 2... Full story
Gov. Mike Dunleavy said he isn’t planning to take a job with President-elect Donald Trump’s administration at the start of his second presidential term in January. Dunleavy, in the middle of his second term as governor, was mentioned by political observers and in media reports in the days after the Nov. 5 election as a candidate to lead the Department of Interior. When Trump selected North Dakota’s governor for the job, Dunleavy was listed by some as a possible Cabinet member for the departments of energy or education. But the governor, durin...
"The only thing that exists is that edge and the wood that it's moving through," Haines luthier Rob Goldberg said as he worked with a chisel, carving the braces that will hold a guitar's sound boards together. "You can't be thinking about what you're going to have for dinner or thinking about your girlfriend or thinking about anything else." He speaks from decades of experience, building world-class custom instruments at his Mud Bay workshop, several miles south of downtown Haines. That attentio...
Alaska is losing its residents to Texas, Oregon, Washington state and Florida. That’s according to 2023 American Community Survey results, an annual demographics survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. From 2022 to 2023, Alaska lost more residents than it gained, continuing a trend that has existed since 2012. Though Alaska has long led the nation in annual population turnover — typically, about 45,000 people moved both into and out of the state annually, said Alaska Department of Labor demographer Eric Sandberg — “what has changed is that...
The U.S. Coast Guard on Monday morning suspended the search for survivors from a Sitka-based commercial fishing boat that capsized early Sunday morning with five people aboard. The Coast Guard said the search for the 52-foot seiner Wind Walker continued for nearly 24 hours and covered more than 108 square nautical miles. The boat’s crew issued a mayday call at 12:07 a.m. Sunday “reporting they were overturning,” the Coast Guard said. Watchstanders in Juneau received no additional response, but the boat’s emergency beacon signal broadca...
A giant female chinook salmon flips on her side in the shallow water and wriggles wildly, using her tail to carve out a nest in the riverbed as her body glistens in the sunlight. In another late-October moment, males butt into each other as they jockey for a good position to fertilize eggs. These are scenes tribes have dreamed of seeing for decades as they fought to bring down four hydroelectric dams blocking passage for struggling salmon along more than 400 miles of the Klamath River and its tributaries along the Oregon-California border. Now,...
State officials and industry leaders trying to rescue the ailing Alaska seafood industry are facing daunting challenges, recently released numbers show. The industry lost $1.8 billion last year, the result of low prices, closed harvests and other problems, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Direct employment of harvesters last year fell by 8% to the lowest level since 2001, when counts of harvesting jobs began, the Alaska Department of Labor said. The monthly... Full story
Alaska seafood processors hired fewer people in 2023 but paid them more and relied more on nonresidents to fill the jobs, a state analysis shows. The employment trends are what would be expected in an industry struggling to find workers, said Dan Robinson, the state economist who wrote the analysis for the Alaska Department of Labor’s monthly magazine. “I do think the reason for that is just they’ve had to work harder to get workers and to pay workers more to come there,” said Robinson, the department’s research chief and author of the artic... Full story
A final ballot count on Nov. 20 cemented the narrow lead for supporters of Alaska’s ranked-choice voting and open primary system, who defeated a ballot measure that would have done away with the state’s 4-year-old voting process. After 6,074 additional ballots were counted, bringing the total to 340,110 ballots in the decision, the repeal initiative, Ballot Measure 2, was on track to narrowly fail in a 49.9% to 50.1% split. Its losing deficit after the Nov. 20 final count was 664 votes. Supporters of the ballot measure argued that the open pri...
Republican Nick Begich has won Alaska’s sole U.S. House seat, flipping it from Democratic to Republican control. Results of the final ballot count Nov. 20 showed Begich defeating Democratic incumbent Rep. Mary Peltola, who first won the seat in a special election in 2022 after the death of Republican longtime Rep. Don Young. Peltola was the first Alaska Native woman elected to Congress, and the first Democrat to hold the seat since Begich’s grandfather, Nick Begich, won the seat in 1972. Begich captured 48.4% of first-choice votes in Ala...
Restarting Alaska state ferry service to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, is contingent on the state receiving a long-sought federal waiver for renovations to the leased terminal at Prince Rupert and waiting at least until 2026 when the Kennicott returns to service. That’s according to Alaska Marine Highway System staff presentations at the Oct. 23 Alaska Marine Transportation Operations Board meeting. Shirley Marquardt, chair of the advisory board, said there is a strong push to restore service to Rupert, just 90 miles south of Ketchikan, w...
Alaska’s most commonly reported infectious diseases, aside from respiratory illnesses such as influenza, are from sexually transmitted infections, according to the state’s most recent annual report. There were 5,118 cases of chlamydia in Alaska in 2023, the largest number among sexually transmitted diseases in the annual infectious disease report issued by the Alaska Department of Health. The infectious disease annual reports are issued each year by the epidemiology section of the department’s Division of Public Health. The secon... Full story
The ballot measure to repeal open primary elections and ranked-choice voting in general elections saw its lead narrow last week and then disappear on Monday, with a final vote count scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 20. As of Monday afternoon, the repeal effort was behind by 192 votes out of more than 332,000 ballots cast on the measure. State elections officials estimated there were about 5,000 ballots still to count this week, an assortment of early votes and mail-in absentee ballots. The repeal initiative led by more than 4,100 votes after the...
The Petersburg borough assembly is considering an ordinance that would impose requirements — including storage fees, a marine condition survey and proof of insurance — on vessels that don’t leave their moorage stall in the harbor for 12 consecutive months. The ordinance aims to discourage using stalls for vessel storage, especially for boats that may be inoperable. An inactive or inoperable boat may deteriorate as its condition worsens; removing derelict vessels is expensive and historically burdensome for the borough, officials said. The o...
A five-member state commission has approved plans for a new borough centered on the Southeast Alaska town of Hoonah. Approval sets the stage for a local election on the proposed Xunaa Borough. If voters approve the borough’s creation, Hoonah will be dissolved as a town and reincorporated as a city-borough with governmental authority over a wide swath of northern Southeast Alaska, including much of Glacier Bay National Park. It would be the state’s 20th borough and the first new borough since Petersburg created a city-borough in 2013. Wra... Full story
A federal judge in Alaska has dismissed a legal challenge filed by the Bering Sea bottom-trawl fleet against stricter halibut bycatch limits. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, or NMFS, approved a new halibut bycatch quota system in December 2021 based on annual surveys of the valuable flatfish. Instead of fixed limits, the new abundance-based system means that when halibut stocks are low, bycatch caps can be cut by up to 35%. The lawsuit challenging those caps was filed by Groundfish Forum, a Seattle-based trade association...