Sorted by date Results 830 - 854 of 1731
PHOENIX (AP) - The Indian Health Service announced last Thursday that all tribal members covered by the federal agency will be offered a vaccine at every appointment when appropriate, under a new vaccine strategy. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, American Indians and Alaska Natives have had some of the highest COVID-19 vaccination rates across the country. But Indigenous people are especially vulnerable to vaccine-preventable illness, and IHS officials recently noticed fewer patients have be...
Leaders in the Western Alaska community of Kipnuk say the principal of nearly a decade bullied Native school staff members, put residents in jeopardy by ignoring COVID-19 restrictions and oversaw a decline in education quality. That’s why in October, according to documents obtained through a public records request, they voted to banish her from the community. School officials and tribal leaders involved in the banishment order and subsequent search by tribal police officers at the Chief Paul Memorial School at the end of last month have largely...
A top official with ConocoPhillips said the company expects to start working early next year on the $8 billion Willow oil prospect in Alaska, an effort that could lead to more than 2,000 construction jobs in the coming years. The project is located in the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska on the North Slope. The reserve is home to migratory birds, polar bears and calving grounds for the Teshekpuk Lake caribou herd. Willow could potentially produce 600 million barrels of oil over a 30-year life, according to estimates. Peak produ...
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Environmental groups have hailed a decision by the Biden administration to resume studying whether grizzly bears should be restored to the remote North Cascades mountains in Washington state. The National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said they would jointly prepare an environmental impact statement on restoring the endangered bears to the North Cascades ecosystem. Humans killed the bears off from the ecosystem long ago and restoration there will contribute to the general recovery of the endangered a...
Alaskans may have decided to re-elect Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Mary Peltola to Congress, but the final outcome will not be known until the last ballots are tallied next week and, in one or both races, ranked-choice voting is factored into the decision. Murkowski, a Republican who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump, has been the target of ire from Trump and from hard-liner conservatives. She trailed conservative Republican challenger Kelly Tshibaka by a small margin, 91,205 to 94,138, as of Monday (42.84% to 44.22%). But the...
State and federal fishery managers are forecasting a commercial harvest of about 19 million pink salmon in 2023 in Southeast Alaska, which would be a “significant drop” from the parent-year harvest of 48.5 million pinks in 2021, according to last week’s announcement from the federal NOAA Fisheries and Alaska Department of Fish and Game. A 19-million fish harvest would be at the high end of the “weak” range (11 million to 19 million fish), according to the announcement, which added that a harvest of that size would be only about 39% of the avera...
Fairbanks Democratic Sen. Scott Kawasaki does not live in his mother’s basement. She doesn’t even have one. And yet, in the final days of his closely fought re-election race against Republican Jim Matherly, Kawasaki had to defend himself and answer questions from constituents who read satirical ads sent through the mail by a group called Alaska Policy Partners Inc., which lists Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor among its founding directors. Alaskans’ mailboxes were flooded with mailers as campaigns typically send their sharpest attack ads imm...
Gov. Mike Dunleavy appears on pace for re-election to a second four-year term, based on preliminary numbers from last week’s election. Dunleavy, a Republican, held a substantial lead over challengers Democrat Les Gara, independent Bill Walker and Republican Charlie Pierce, taking 52% of the 217,769 first-choice votes counted after the Nov. 8 statewide election. That tally was as of Monday this week, with updated numbers expected this week as more absentee, mail-in and questioned ballots are counted. If Dunleavy’s vote share stays above 50% by...
Republicans almost certainly will win a majority of the 60 seats in the Alaska Legislature after the Nov. 8 election results are certified later this month. But whether they will control the state House and Senate will come down to which Republicans win. This year, as has been the case for much of the past decade, the party’s candidates are split. There are many differences, but they tend to fall into two groups: One group eschew compromise as they pursue conservative positions on social issues and seek a Permanent Fund dividend larger than any...
In the days following last Tuesday’s election, U.S. Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka joined other Trump-endorsed Republican candidates around the country casting unfounded doubt on election results, despite the fact that Alaska election officials are still counting thousands of absentee ballots and have not reported widespread problems in voting. “Our war is not over yet,” Tshibaka said last Wednesday in a podcast interview with Steve Bannon, who previously advised then-President Donald Trump. “This might come down to things like recount...
The U.S. Department of Justice dispatched officials to 64 election jurisdictions in 24 states to ensure compliance with federal voting rights laws in last week’s midterm elections — including Sitka, Bethel, Dillingham and the Kusilvak Census Area in Western Alaska. The election monitors included lawyers from the Justice Department civil rights division and U.S. attorney’s offices across the nation. Federal authorities said such monitoring is a regular occurrence around election day, but this year especially civil rights groups and others have...
As they’ve done every 10 years since 1972, Alaska voters on Nov. 8 again overwhelmingly rejected the ballot measure to convene a convention to rewrite the state’s founding document. Advocates on both sides had expected the outcome to be closer this time because of the annual deadlock in the Legislature over the size of the Permanent Fund dividend, an issue that convention supporters said they wanted to resolve with changes to the Alaska Constitution. But as of the Nov. 9 count, 70% of voters had voted against the measure (146,092 to 63,...
WASHINGTON — William Smith, of Valdez, an Alaska Native veteran who served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, joined hundreds of veterans from around the country in Washington, D.C., last Friday to attend the dedication ceremony for the National Native American Veterans Memorial. Speaking on Thursday night at a gathering at the U.S. Capitol, Smith said, “To me, I’m here with veterans. I got my Alaska veterans here. But when you see us tomorrow, you’ll see how strong the veterans are and how much they appreciate this.” “It’s all part of t...
Results will be slow, even in races that don’t use ranked-choice voting, Lt. Gov. Kevin Meyer and Gail Fenumiai, head of the Alaska Division of Elections, said at a press conference last week. Through Sunday, just two days before the election, more than 64,000 Alaskans had already cast early or absentee votes, according to figures published by the Division of Elections. Many of those votes, plus others that come in before Election Day on Nov. 8, won’t be counted until after polls close. Meyer said Alaskans should be prepared. “I know that...
Bill Sheffield, who served as Alaska's fifth governor and survived a brush with impeachment during a decades-long career in public service, died Nov. 4 at his Anchorage home after a long illness. He was 94. Sheffield was born in 1928 to a poor family on a small farm in Spokane, Washington, and he grew up during the Great Depression. After serving as a radar technician with the U.S. Army, he got a job with Sears Roebuck and was sent to the territory of Alaska. "So that's how I got here in 1953,"...
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Fishing regulators and the seafood industry are grappling with the possibility that some once-profitable species that have declined with climate change might not come back. Several marketable species harvested by U.S. fishermen are the subject of quota cuts, seasonal closures and other restrictions as populations have fallen and waters have warmed. In some instances, such as the groundfish industry for species like flounder in the Northeast, the changing environment has made it harder for fish to recover from years of o...
The principal and several school staff members left the community of Kipnuk in Southwest Alaska two weekend ago in two chartered planes following reports of a banishment order, occupation of a school building and a brief blockade during a visit by Alaska State Troopers. As of Nov. 1, the Chief Paul Memorial School in Kipnuk remained closed for the second day in a row, with plans to switch to remote learning Nov. 2, according to the Lower Kuskokwim School District, which cited “the concern for the physical safety for students and staff” in a w...
Green might surround the Southeast Alaska village of Angoon, but it’s not that common inside the community grocery store. However, despite the challenges, students and faculty at Angoon’s Chatham School District are taking steps to change that. Angoon agroscience hydroponic cultivation class Haa Aani’: Haa Yaasi’ Haa (Our Land, Our Harvest) is in its second year of operation. Its goal, according to Ryan Smith, the teacher and project manager, is to teach the students how to cultivate healthy and sustainable foods to eventually provide to the...
The top official in the U.S. Census Bureau, Robert Santos, was in Sitka last month to talk with city and Sitka Tribe of Alaska officials about ways to improve the accuracy of Alaska’s population numbers in the national census held every 10 years. The official figures are used to determine congressional districts and some forms of federal funding, and there was a significant undercount of Alaska Natives in the 2020 census, Santos said. Ever since the census count was released, Wrangell borough officials have complained that the tally u...
The wolf hunting and trapping season for Prince of Wales Island will be the same as last year — Nov. 15 to Dec. 15 — though a number of individuals who trap wolves in the area criticized the Alaska Department of Fish and Game last week for its wolf management decisions. The department announced the limited season last Friday, just two days after a teleconference to review with the public wolf population estimates and harvest levels. Several people described seeing more wolves than deer in the area, arguing that a longer season and higher harves...
Seven months after an earthquake swarm beneath Mt. Edgecumbe led volcanologists to determine that the Sitka-area volcano is active, data collection and research are continuing. Since August 2018, magma has risen beneath the formerly dormant volcano and caused almost 3 inches of deformation annually, University of Alaska Fairbanks associate professor of geodesy Ronni Grapenthin said. An eruption is not imminent, he added. Since April’s quakes, seismic activity on the mountain has subsided, he noted, but the mountain is deforming more quickly t...
The state sued the federal government one week before Election Day, seeking ownership of part of Alaska’s most-visited tourist destination. Filed Nov. 1 at U.S. District Court in Anchorage, the case asks a federal judge to award ownership of the land beneath Mendenhall Lake and Mendenhall River to the state. Located in Juneau’s residential Mendenhall Valley, the lake rests at the base of the Mendenhall Glacier, within the Tongass National Forest, and is seen by more than 700,000 tourists annually, more than Denali National Park and Pre...
TRES RIOS, Brazil (AP) - Sometimes you start something and have no idea where it will lead. So it was with Eduardo Filgueiras, a struggling guitarist whose family worked in an unusual business in Rio de Janeiro: They farmed toads. Filgueiras figured out a way to take the small toad skins and fuse them together, creating something large enough to sell. Meanwhile miles away in the Amazon, a fisherman and a scientist were coming up with an innovation that would help save a key, giant fish that...
The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments this Wednesday on the most significant challenge to a law that gives preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings of Native children. The outcome could undercut the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which was enacted in response to the alarming rate at which Native American and Alaska Native children were taken from their homes by public and private agencies. Tribes also fear more widespread impacts in the ability to govern themselves if the justices rule against...
SEATTLE (AP) — Big ships entering and leaving Puget Sound will be asked to slow down to reduce underwater noise this fall in an effort to help the Pacific Northwest's critically endangered orca whales. Washington state is importing the voluntary slowdown from British Columbia for container ships, tankers, freighters, cruise ships and car carriers coming from the Canadian province, Northwest News Network reported. The optional slowdown started Oct. 24 and is scheduled to run to Dec. 22 and covers the shipping lanes from Admiralty Inlet by P...