Vi Waghiyi grew up in the village of Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island, where meat from walrus, seal and bowhead whale sustained her family through long winters. 

“My people continue to live off the land and ocean like we have for millenia,” Waghiyi said. “Our elders call the Bering Sea our farm.”

Today, as an elder herself, Waghiyi wants her grandson to have access to the same traditional foods. But food security in the Arctic is increasingly threatened.

The burning of fossil fuels is heating the region four times faster than anywhere else on the planet. Warming waters are disrupting the food chain, and melting sea ice is erasing animal habitat and making hunting more dangerous.

“And we are some of the most highly contaminated people on the planet because of our reliance on our subsistence foods,” Waghiyi said.

Because plastic waste piling up across the planet is making its way up to the Arctic. Plastics contain toxins that have been linked to long-term health problems like cancer, hormone disruption and damage to the heart, liver and kidney, which threaten Alaska Native communities. That’s according to a new report from Alaska Community Action on Toxics and the International Pollutants Elimination Network. 

Waghiyi, who is the director of environmental health and justice for Alaska Community Action on Toxics, is a co-author on the report, along with other scientists and Alaska Native leaders who are calling for an end to new plastic production worldwide. They’ll represent Alaska’s Arctic communities at a meeting of the United Nations later this month. 

Pamela Miller, a long-time Alaska scientist who works with both organization, is also a co-author. She said strong currents in the ocean and the atmosphere naturally move from lower latitudes to the poles, carrying plastic and other pollutants along with them. 

“We now know that there are microplastics in fish, in walrus, in ring seal, bearded seal, spotted seal, and many different whale species,” Miller said. “These are the animals that have been relied on for centuries for sustenance.”

The accumulation of plastics in the Arctic is made worse by climate change.

“We also know that with climate warming happening so rapidly that the highest concentrations of microplastics are found in those areas where there’s the most rapid melting of sea ice,” Miller said.

The melting of sea ice, permafrost and glaciers also release plastics and chemicals that have long been bound in ice. 

In 2022, the United Nations set out to write a treaty on how to deal with growing plastic waste. They’ve held several meetings to hash out the terms, including one happening later this month in Ottawa, Canada. There, the authors of the new report will join representatives from more than 170 other countries. 

Miller says there’s only one real solution to the plastics problem. 

“The first thing is to curb the production of chemicals and plastics,” she said. “Since they’re reliant on fossil fuel production, that also means curbing fossil fuel production.”

But not everyone agrees with her. 

Most plastic is created with chemicals derived from fossil fuels. And as demand for oil and gas in transportation or home heating drops with the switch to cleaner energy, many in the fossil fuel industry see plastics as a way to support their future business.

At a treaty meeting last fall, representatives from oil and gas producing companies and countries pushed for recycling and cleanup solutions instead — despite years of research suggesting that only a small fraction of recycled plastic gets transformed into new items.

Waghiyi says she hopes that Arctic Indigenous communities are able to push back against those industry interests. 

“Our people have done all we could to make sure our land, airs and waters are protected,” Waghiyi said. “These multinational corporations do not take human health into account.”

She says she’s headed to Ottawa to fight to protect the health and food of her grandson. 

The vast Tongass National Forest just grew a little bit larger, with the addition of five acres to the Kootznoowoo Wilderness on Admiralty Island. 

The property, known as Wheeler Creek, was privately owned until the Southeast Alaska Land Trust and the Wilderness Land Trust teamed up to buy it. Then they transferred ownership to the Forest Service.

The swath of land is tiny compared to the 17 million acres that make up the Tongass. But Margosia Jadkowski, director of marketing and communications for the Wilderness Trust, said protecting it is still important.

“It has some important habitat contained on the property itself, on those five acres,” she said. “It has an abundant pink salmon run, its important king spawning habitat as well. And its habitat for a number of important land species including brown bears.”

Jadkowski said Wheeler Creek has boat access, which made it a prime target for building cabins or even a commercial lodge. But with the new wilderness designation, it can’t be developed for building projects, mining claims or timber sales. 

More than 35% of the Tongass is protected as wilderness, but across the forest there are still a lot of small private properties leftover from the mining camps. Groups like the Wilderness Land Trust have been working to purchase them for conservation. 

“When you have these private inholdings within wilderness, they sort of act as tears in the fabric of wilderness protection,” Jadkowski said. “They’re kind of weak spots, because they don’t carry any of the protections of the surrounding wilderness.”

The trust works with willing sellers to buy up those private properties and transform them into public lands. Their efforts have also added more than 180 acres of land to the Chuck River Wilderness, which sits about 70 miles south of Juneau at the head of Windham Bay.

And their partners at the Juneau-based Southeast Alaska Land Trust have purchased and conserved an addition 3,600 acres of wetland, wildlife habitat and open spaces, both in and outside of wildness areas.

Jadkowski said the Wilderness Trust is working to acquire another property in Chuck River. And it’s researching other properties they might want to protect.

“We’re also developing a data-driven analysis tool where we can look at things like biodiversity, climate resilience and wildlife migration corridors,” Jadkowski said.

Once finished, Jadkowski said, the tool will help to showcase the many benefits of growing conservation areas in Southeast Alaska.

This month, Anchorage residents voted down a $4.1 million bond that would’ve fulfilled supporters’ yearslong goal to get two cemeteries built in two communities on opposite ends of the municipality — Eagle River and Girdwood. Right now, neither community has a public cemetery.

Tommy O’Malley said he’s been working on getting a cemetery in Girdwood for so long that when the bond failed, people reached out to him in sympathy. 

“The people that have called me up that know that I’ve been doing this a long time, they’ve been giving me condolences, like, you know, my mom died or something,” O’Malley said.

Fifty-six percent of voters rejected the bond to help fund the Girdwood work and two other cemetery projects. It was one of just two bonds to fail in this year’s city election. But supporters of the projects, O’Malley included, say they’re not giving up on the cemeteries just yet. They say they’ll look for other funding and work on improving messaging on the projects’ importance.

“The inertia is making sure that people understand the need,” said Tom Looney, one of the drivers of the other major cemetery project, in the Eagle River-Chugiak area.

In Girdwood, O’Malley said the land for the proposed cemetery, uphill from the Double Musky Inn, is already owned by the city, and the $1.75 million in bond money would’ve gone to developing the essential parts of his vision. 

“Even without the driveway, even without the trails, you could go back with a grid and pick your grave site and bury a person or put their cremains in the ground,” O’Malley said. “And the grid would keep track of where the bodies are buried.”

On the other side of the municipality, up north, Looney said it’s important for the Eagle River area to have its own public cemetery. It’s a symbol of any community, he said.

“You go and visit a community in the Lower 48, how many of those communities don’t have cemeteries?” he said.

Like Girdwood, Eagle River and Chugiak are separate towns that are part of the Municipality of Anchorage. Looney said a big reason he began thinking about establishing a cemetery was to help uphold the towns’ histories, independent of the big city.

“Some of our community leaders, when they pass away, they end up shipping the body to the Lower 48 or Palmer or whatever,” Looney said. “We have no identity as a community, of who our founders were.”

Like the Girdwood project, the Eagle River cemetery would’ve received $1.75 million from the bond. The location for that cemetery would be on Wolf Den Drive, across from Eagle River High School. 

Unlike the Girdwood project, Looney said the bond money would’ve likely covered the full cost of the Eagle River project, including a small maintenance shelter and a small roofed area for inclement weather.

“Bad weather, people would be able to stand under a shelter, as they were having a ceremony out there,” Looney said. “Really no frills for the Chugiak-Eagle River cemetery. It was pretty bare bones.”

The remaining half a million dollars in the bond would’ve gone towards maintenance at the Anchorage Memorial Cemetery. Cemetery director Rob Jones said the city got a large donation of 2,000 grave markers about 20 years ago, but they were installed directly into the ground, instead of into concrete like the city does now. 

“So out of the 2,000 markers that we got donated, 80% of them are overgrown and functionally not marking graves anymore,” Jones said.

He said most of the bond money, about $350,000, would’ve gone to fixing those markers. The rest would’ve been for upgrades to make the cemetery more ADA compliant and to build a new columbarium for urns.

Supporters say it’s unclear why so many voters rejected the bond, but Jones said lumping the three projects together may have turned people off. 

“I wasn’t confident that it would pass,” Jones said. “It had such a big price tag on it.”

While the bond didn’t directly address capacity in the Anchorage cemetery, Jones said it’s a looming issue. He anticipates the cemetery will run out of plots for the public by July. 

“Yeah, we’re down to like 20,” Jones said.

Jones, Looney and O’Malley said they still plan on pursuing the funding to get their projects done, whether it’s through donations, grants or trying to get another bond together.

The Biden administration is making two big decisions this week that block resource extraction in Alaska and the state’s U.S. senators are fuming.

They, along with a flock of other Republican senators, said President Biden is boosting the mineral-rich countries like Russia and Venezuela while driving down American industry. 

“He is destabilizing our security as a nation in a way that most didn’t think possible in such a short time period,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski told reporters at a press conference Thursday.

The decisions are expected to be announced Friday, but the New York Times and Bloomberg have already spilled the beans: The administration intends not to allow a road in Northwest Alaska that’s crucial to the development of mining in the Ambler area. And it will adopt a rule that will add environmental protections to sensitive areas of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, to the west of Prudhoe Bay.

Both Ambler and the NPR-A have massive tracts of undeveloped land that are important to migrating birds, wildlife and subsistence harvests. Environmental groups and indigenous opponents of drilling and mining are preparing their responses to celebrate the expected news. But the GOP senators aren’t waiting for the official announcements.

Murkowski said shutting down oil and mineral extraction in the U.S. will just drive the business overseas.

“We’d rather take it from Iran, from Russia, and all the other places where they really don’t care about us. And they love the fact that we’re being crippled by our own administration,” she said.

Sen. Dan Sullivan, who organized the Senate press conference, said he wants to get the word out, because he thinks the American voters won’t tolerate the assaults on Alaska mining and drilling.

“The most important thing we can do is retake the Senate, retake the White House,” he said. “That’s going to be the ultimate revenge here.”

Congress could pass a resolution to overturn the environmental rule in the National Petroleum Reserve, Sullivan said. President Biden would certainly veto that resolution, but Sullivan said if the rule is delayed a bit, the decision could be left to a Republican president.

In a 17th-floor conference room with a dominating view of downtown Anchorage, Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor laid out what he sees as the impact of a recent court ruling that threw out two laws underpinning the state’s homeschool system.

“In light of the vague broad nature of the court’s reasoning, it is very difficult to determine what type of program would actually be permitted under this decision,” Taylor told reporters on Wednesday. “In fact, it draws into question spending that has taken place in public schools for decades,” including public schools’ textbook purchases, cafeteria contracts and music lessons, he said.

One of the laws Anchorage Superior Court judge Adolf Zeman found unconstitutional creates the framework for homeschool curriculum called individual learning plans. The other statute provides cash payments known as “allotments” to homeschool parents, who use them for things like textbooks and materials. 

Plaintiffs told the judge that parents were using their allotments on private school classes. They argued that’s a violation of the Alaska Constitution, which forbids using public money “for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution.”

Taylor and Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy say they’re planning to appeal the ruling on an expedited basis to the Alaska Supreme Court. 

And Dunleavy said the ruling, if it stands, will have far-reaching consequences.

“Part of the interpretation of the ruling that just occurred is that the homeschooling correspondence laws are thrown out. In other words, the programs are gone, potentially,” Dunleavy said.

Others say it’s not so clear.

“That is one million percent false,” said Scott Kendall, an attorney representing the four plaintiffs who challenged the correspondence school allotment program after noting an uptick in private schools advertising that parents could pay tuition with the state-funded allotments.

Kendall said he was frustrated watching the governor’s news conference.

“They kept repeating, ‘The judge said correspondence schools are unconstitutional. We can’t have this anymore.’ And that is fundamentally incorrect,” Kendall said. “The judge said, ‘You have constructed the correspondence school statute in a way that’s blatantly unconstitutional. I can’t fix it. I’m not a legislator. I’m the court. The Legislature can fix it.'”

And that’s basically what the judge said in the final words of his ruling: “If the legislature believes these expenditures are necessary—then it is up to them to craft constitutional legislation to serve that purpose—that is not this Court’s role.”

Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage and chair of the Senate Education Committee, said correspondence schools existed before the 2014 law that Judge Zeman’s ruling invalidates. 

“The rest of the authorizing regulation continues to exist even without those particular statutes,” Tobin said in a video on social media. “There may need to be some propagation of emergency regulation or there may need to be some tweaks to some of our regulation, but we still have the ability to continue to operate correspondence programs for our homeschool parents.”

Dunleavy, on the other hand, argues a favorable court decision or constitutional amendment is necessary to make sure the correspondence program continues.

The House Judiciary Committee chaired by Republican Rep.  Sarah Vance of Homer came out with their own proposed solution on Thursday: a constitutional amendment that would remove the language about private and religious schools. 

The measure would need a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate to advance to a public vote, though it’s not clear that even a simple majority of the House would support it. And Senate leaders say they don’t support spending on private or religious school classes.

The judge’s decision is likely to be put on hold at least through the end of June, and perhaps longer. An appeal could take months or years to resolve.

The U.S. Interior Department on Friday essentially rejected the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority’s proposal to build the Ambler Road, a 211-mile industrial road that would have cut through Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve to access copper and zinc deposits in Northwest Alaska.

The Interior’s Bureau of Land Management chose a “no action” option in its environmental analysis, effectively ensuring AIDEA would not receive a right-of-way to build the road across federal lands. The Biden administration said the road, also known as the Ambler Access Project, would cause irreparable damage to wildlife including caribou, which many local people rely on for food.

The administration also announced stronger protections for 13 million acres inside the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a vast swath of oil-rich — but environmentally sensitive — federal land in the Arctic.

Both of Alaska’s U.S. senators, Republicans Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski, expressed outrage even before the decisions were formally announced. They said the decisions hamper the state’s economy and domestic resource development.

“It’s more than a one-two punch to Alaska. When you take off access to our resources, when you say you cannot drill, you cannot produce, you cannot explore,” said Murkowski in a press conference on Thursday. “This is the energy insecurity that we’re talking about.”

Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, a pro-development advocacy group comprised of Indigenous leaders and funded in part by the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and North Slope Borough, called the NPR-A decision “insulting.”

“We deserve the same right to economic prosperity and essential services as the rest of this country and are being denied the opportunity to take care of our residents and community with this decision,” North Slope Borough Mayor Josiah Patkotak said in a statement.

But other Indigenous people applauded the decisions, as did environmental groups.

“That caribou were heard over cash is a really big deal,” said China Kantner, an activist from an anti-road group called Protect the Kobuk.

Evansville Chief Frank Thompson said his tribe has been fighting the Ambler Road proposal for a decade. He thanked the Bureau of Land Management and the Interior Department for listening to them and protecting traditional hunting and fishing.

“Today is a great day,” he said. “Our future looks bright without the threat of 168 trucks driving by per day. Without increased pressures on our subsistence resources.”

RELATED: Murkowski and Sullivan rail at federal moves to block Ambler Road and preserve parts of NPR-A

This story has been updated with additional comment.

The Israeli military has conducted missile strikes against Iran, a senior U.S. military official told NPR on Thursday. There are also reports of explosions in Iraq and Syria.

The strikes appear to be the response Israel vowed to carry out after an Iranian attack on Sunday, when Tehran fired hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel. Most of Iran’s volleys were intercepted or caused little damage. The U.S. military official spoke on condition of anonymity Thursday.

The extent of Israel’s strikes and the weapons used weren’t clear.

Iran state news agency IRNA reported a military official in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, Brigadier General Mihan Dost, as saying loud sounds heard east of the city were the sound of air defenses intercepting what he called a “suspicious target” and that no damage was reported in the area.

Other Iranian news agencies had not reported any such strike and have concluded the sounds reported near Isfahan were the interception of one or more drones.

Israel’s military and prime minister’s office have not yet responded to NPR’s request for comment.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed on social media that there is no damage to Iran’s nuclear sites.

Meanwhile, Israel’s hardline National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, wrote on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, that Israel’s latest apparent strike against Iran was “weak” and too limited.

Commercial flights continue in and out of Israel, and the country’s Home Front Command system, which is responsible for issuing threat alerts to civilians during tense military times, didn’t change its threat level.

In Iran, flights were temporarily grounded in the morning, but resumed just a couple of hours later.

The U.S. and other western allies had been urging Israel to forego a military strike to avoid a regional conflict springing out of the Israel-Hamas war.

Those concerns rose when an air strike – which Iran blamed on Israel – killed two Iranian military commanders in the country’s consulate in Damascus, Syria, on April 1.

Iran said Sunday’s attack on Israel was in response to that.

The region has been on the edge of wider conflict since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, which Israel says killed 1,200 people, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, which has killed more than 33,000 people, according to Gaza health officials.

Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah have traded frequent fire over the northern Israel border. Houthi militants, also backed by Iran, have been going after international commercial vessels passing through the Red Sea in recent months. The group’s leaders claim they’re targeting ships with links to Israel in response to the country’s ongoing invasion of Gaza.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

On a Friday in March, the Kodiak Public Library was filled with people perusing video game and movie merchandise during Fan Con, the town’s popular annual culture convention. Some folks sold earrings or stuffed toys but Guy Bartleson’s table was full of comic books.

He has been collecting comics for about 48 years. Bartleson was at Fan Con to show off some of his most valuable books. Bartleson works at the farm in Port Lions for his day job, but selling comics is a lucrative side-hustle. 

“Knowledge is power,” he said. “And so when you’re dealing with a collection like mine, you have to know what you’re doing. You have to know how to grade books. You have to know how to view the grade of a book.”

Superheroes have become household names in large part thanks to comic-based movies like the “Avengers” series, “Shazam,” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”  That rise in popularity has contributed to a thriving collectibles market. 

There are a few ways a comic could be considered valuable, but one standard is to consider the condition of a book. Books being traded or sold without hard plastic cases are called raw copies, but can be sent to be professionally graded and sealed to preserve them. 

They’re rated on a scale from 0.5 up to 10.0 – with the latter being the best. A 10.0 grade means there are no flaws in a print, looking for even the slightest discoloration or fringes on edges. 

Bartleson often has books shipped to him through freight on a small plane. He said  the best places to find good deals on comics are the same as when he was a kid. 

“Flea Markets, garage sales, second hand stores, used book stores, those are probably your four best places to go to find treasure,” he said. “If you go to Amazon or eBay or a comic store – you’re going to pay full retail.” 

When it comes to retail there are only a few options in Alaska. But Bosco’s Cards, Comics, and Games in Anchorage is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. 

Eric Helmick manages the store’s Spenard location. Bosco’s has another store in the Dimond Mall. He says the comic market is booming right now, and has been growing for the last 20 years. 

“More people are just becoming more comfortable with their nerd hobbies, whether it’s Dungeons and Dragons or reading comics and knowing stuff about Lord of the Rings – they don’t hide it anymore,” he said. 

Helmick said at his store, customers will pick up even the most expensive comics quickly. 

“When we have hot comics or magic cards or sports cards, they don’t sit on the shelf,” he said. “People are in here right away, snatching things up, just because things don’t come in as often.”

Helmick guesses the market for print media and collectibles will probably keep growing, despite the rise of digital media. 

“There’s been a lot of doom and gloom about the comic industry and print media – things are going digital,” he said. “And every time there’s something on the horizon like digital comics, it’s like ‘Oh no, people aren’t going to read real comics,’ we find the exact opposite happens.”

He says as more people are exposed to comics from movies and TV shows, they want to learn about the source material.

Robert Wagner has been collecting comics seriously since he was about 14. He has a room in his Kodiak house dedicated to storing and displaying collectibles, with Spider-Man posters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures, multiple models of the Batmobile, and countless comic books and graphic novels.

Wagner says his love for science fiction and fantasy began when he was a kid reading and watching movies with his dad. 

“I remember him taking me to ‘(The) Empire Strikes Back,’” he recalled. “I was about five years old, I think, and that blew my mind. From that moment, it was like a whole new world.”

He’s a stay-at-home dad and works as an artist, but Wagner describes selling some of his books as a major part of his income. Wagner grew up in Kodiak and says he used to get ostracized for being a “geeky kid” wearing fandom T-shirts and memorabilia. Now his collection has grown so much in value it’s become a kind of retirement plan for him. 

Wagner said he watches for rumors about characters that might appear in movies or TV shows. That could drive demand for any comics they’re in. He cited one rumor that Taylor Swift might play an obscure X-Men character named Dazzler in the upcoming movie “Deadpool & Wolverine.”

“It’s just a rumor, and that rumor took a $1 book and has made it a couple hundred dollars for the last year. If I had one I would have sold it!” he said.

Wagner said he sees that growth and his collection for more than just the money. 

“I love movies and I love comic books – they’re both a passion of mine,” he said. “And if a comic book movie gets one kid to go pick up a comic book and read – that’s great, y’know?”

Wagner occasionally gives away some of his cheaper books to kids to get more people into reading comics – especially when superhero movies make their way to the Orpheum theater in Kodiak. It’s an investment in both the future of the industry, and in promoting the stories he loves.

Three Bears Alaska has begun work at the site of its latest acquisition: The Wasilla-based retail chain is now planning to build a grocery store in Delta Junction.

A Three Bears crew began working earlier this month on the 3.5-acre site in downtown Delta where the Buffalo Center Service gas station/convenience store was located.

Three Bears Vice President for Business Development Joan Travostino says the company intends to demolish a building on the east side of the property this summer and begin work on a 28,000 square foot grocery store there.

Travostino said in an interview that the company also plans to tear down another building on the site that houses the convenience store and garage. Workers also will relocate fuel tanks and gas pumps over to the south side of the property.

She said the company is still developing its plans, so the project timeframe is not yet firm.

When the work is completed, the Three Bears store in Delta will be the company’s 22nd retail outlet. All but one are located in Alaska; that one is in Butte, Montana.

Three Bears has been acquiring new properties around the state ever since the company entered into a deal two years ago with a Seattle-based private-equity firm that provided capital for investment. Last year, Three Bears opened gas station/convenience stores last year in Ester and North Pole.

Meanwhile, the company continues developing a retail complex with a full-service grocery store and other retail outlets off Buzby Drive on the south side of North Pole.

Alaskans are facing a spike in electric and heating costs within a few years because of declining supplies of Cook Inlet natural gas, but research suggests the cheapest path forward for consumers is a transition to more renewable energy. On this Alaska Insight, host Lori Townsend is joined by Chris Rose, Executive Director of the Renewable Energy Alaska Project, and Jenn Miller, CEO of Renewable Independent Power Producers, to discuss how realistic a transition to renewable energy is, and how long it could take.

Related:

• The Cook Inlet gas crunch | Alaska Insight
• Cook Inlet gas production and railbelt energy | Talk of Alaska

This Week’s Headlines:

• A judge has thrown out a key part of Alaska’s homeschool system. Here’s what to know.
• Army Corps of Engineers affirms denial of permit for Pebble Mine
• Anchorage’s Alissa Pili selected 8th in WNBA draft

Anchorage police have arrested a man in a deadly cold-case shooting that happened nearly 15 years ago, after officers say he confessed last week. 

Court records show John Patrick Dahlquist, 56, charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder in the Dec. 14, 2009 shootings of Sang Chun and Monte Howell at the now-demolished Inlet Inn downtown. Chun died in the shooting, and Howell was severely wounded.

The shooting was among hundreds of crimes reported at or near the inn, at the corner of 6th Avenue and H Street, leading to its closure in 2013.  

In a charging document against Dahlquist, police said Howell had told them at the time that he had been working at the inn’s front desk at about 2 a.m. He said a man who first entered the hotel to use the bathroom returned and demanded money from the cash register at gunpoint, taking about $500. The suspect then ordered him and Chun to lie down, then shot each of them once from behind and left.

The bullets recovered from both victims were consistent with being fired from a Hi-Point 9mm pistol, a detail investigators never released to the public. Police also got a description of the suspect from Howell – a Hispanic man standing about 5 feet, 8 inches tall with black hair and facial stubble.

“(A detective) had a deposit sketch done of the suspect, which provided more tips,” police wrote in the charging document. “(H)owever eventually the tips stopped coming in, all leads were exhausted, and the case went cold.”

On April 9, police were called to Tudor Bingo, where Dahlquist had told employees he wanted to speak to police, the charges say. In a series of subsequent interviews, police say, Dahlquist told them he remembered emerging from the bathroom, robbing the register wearing a bandana and shooting at the men with a Hi-Point 9mm pistol. Police had never publicly identified the make and model of weapon used in the shooting.

The charges say Dahlquist told police he left the scene by taxi, just after seeing officers arrive.

“John said he saw the police (K-9) track and that they had been using German shepherds, but the snow was too thick and high,” police wrote in the charges.

During the interviews, police say, Dahlquist said that he had taken drugs and was suffering from paranoia, at one point asking an officer not to shoot him. He told police that said people he knew had asked that he confess to the shooting, charges say.

“He also told detectives that he was scared, but that he could not explain why,” police said. “He asked what he could say to make a wrong right.”

Investigators say they didn’t consider Dahlquist a suspect when the shooting took place. But police were able to find a DMV photo of him from the time, which an officer said “appeared very similar to the suspect sketch done at the time.”

Police ultimately arrested Dahlquist on murder charges. He was being held Friday at the Anchorage Correctional Complex.

The Alaska Senate has proposed a new aid package for the state’s fish processing companies — some of which have been teetering among a crash in prices that’s caused an industry-wide crisis.

The Senate, in its capital budget passed last week, included the $7.5 million grant to a nonprofit organization called SeaShare. Most of the cash would go toward buying out what SeaShare calls an “oversupply” of seafood from last year’s harvest, which it says is costing processing companies money to store in freezers.

The program would add to more than $100 million in salmon and Alaska pollock purchases — more than 1,500 truck loads — announced earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

SeaShare would use the state money to support smaller Alaska processingcompanies that couldn’t match the scale of the federal purchases, said Hannah Lindoff, the organization’s executive director.

The seafood purchases would then be donated to Alaska food programs and food banks, she said. A smaller share of the grant would also pay for the purchase of new freezers in communities around the state that could store more fish in the future.

“The seafood industry is hurting right now,” Lindoff said. “Just making some cash sales is very vital.”

Sitka Republican Sen. Bert Stedman, one of the co-chairs of the Senate Finance Committee, said the proposal is without precedent in his two decades in the Legislature. But it comes in response to what he described as an “unprecedented market collapse in price across virtually all fisheries.”

The SeaShare program is one of dozens of grants, totaling tens of millions of dollars, recently proposed by the Senate as part of the chamber’s capital budget.

Other proposed line items include $750,000 for the struggling Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, $15 million to support construction of an Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium skilled nursing facility and $700,000 to help replace a failed roof at the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward.

The Senate’s overall proposal would boost capital budget spending to $450 million in state unrestricted general funds, $133 million higher than Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s latest proposal.

To take effect, the Senate’s proposals still have to be approved by the state House, then survive Dunleavy’s veto pen.

But the inclusion of the $7.5 million SeaShare program in the Senate’s proposal is the latest indication that the seafood industry’s appeals for assistance are getting traction.

Alaska’s congressional delegation last year also successfully persuaded the Biden administration to block U.S. imports of Russian fish, which processing companies said was undercutting American prices. And the state Legislature is also considering up to $10 million more in this year’s budget to support the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.

The seafood industry does need help eliminating the big backlog of inventory that’s built up, said Theresa Peterson, fisheries policy director at the Alaska Marine Conservation Council. But, she added, she’d like to see requirements in aid programs that the benefits flow not just to processing companies but also to harvesters and fishing communities.

“I don’t know quite how you’d go about that,” she said, adding: “All three are critical aspects of the seafood industry.”

Peterson was irked when the processing company that long bought fish from her family’s Kodiak salmon setnet site recently announced that it would stop its purchases — leaving fishermen scrambling to find a new buyer. Around the same time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that it would be purchasing more than $65 million in salmon from the same processing company.

Stedman said that it’s hard to directly subsidize individual fishermen given the differences between them — some may face loan payments, while others have their boats and permits paid off.

But the Senate hopes their proposal will trickle down from processors by “getting rid of the inventory,” so that they can buy more fish this year, he said.

Lindoff, from SeaShare, said that her organization hasn’t yet identified the companies that would benefit from the new $7.5 million program. But one of the businesses that she spoke with during the process of drafting the proposal was fisherman-owned.

“They’re sitting on a lot of inventory that’s going to hurt them in the upcoming season,” she said. “In that case, it would be helping fishermen and processors.”

Nathaniel Herz welcomes tips at natherz@gmail.com or (907) 793-0312. This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Herz. Subscribe at this link.

A unique policing agreement in a part of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough will allow tribal police to enforce some state laws.

The idea is that, with state authorization, the Chickaloon Native Village’s tribal police will fill a policing gap in the Sutton area, east of Palmer in a part of the borough that often does not have a meaningful Alaska State Trooper presence.

As the Anchorage Daily News reports, that’s because only five troopers are typically on patrol in all of the Mat-Su — an area the size of West Virginia — and they tend to focus on the more populated areas adjacent to Palmer and Wasilla.

ADN reporter Amy Bushatz was at a meeting in Sutton last week to brief the community about the proposed agreement. And Bushatz says it would only apply to a specific area and for specific laws.

Listen:

Amy Bushatz: Yeah, so the agreement will let Chickaloon’s police force enforce laws in this 68-square-mile region that’s off the Glenn Highway and is northwest of what you might think of as Sutton, plus those village properties that are in actual Sutton. It would allow them to police misdemeanors. It would allow them to police felony drug and misdemeanor drug crimes, and it would allow them to police sex trafficking, either misdemeanor or felony. So I think it’s important to note that the other side of this, that the reason that Chickaloon says this is important, Chickaloon wants to have the ability to police those crimes against their citizens when they are committed by a non-Alaska Native citizen.

Casey Grove: So if you live in Palmer or Wasilla or Fairbanks, I mean, a number of different cities, there’s a tax base there. They’ve got their own police force. They pay for that police force with the tax base. And I know that’s a kind of a simple version of that, because there’s money that comes from other places, too. But how does this work? I mean, who actually pays for this?

AB: So one of the reasons the Department of Public Safety says that they are interested in doing this is because of that funding. There is a variety of high-dollar grants available to tribal police forces right now through federal programs that are equipping these tribal police forces with officers and training and equipment, actual physical equipment, that you need to do policing, and really setting them up to be able to fill this need. And so the Department of Public Safety is looking at this and saying, “These police forces have the funding, and they have the training to meet our standards that we require for people who are having partnerships like this with us. So we should use them, because they are already equipped and funded by somebody outside of the state, by the federal government.”

CG: And I mean, as far as the Chickaloon police in this agreement, what are they doing to, I guess, adjust to maybe an extra workload? Are they adding officers and equipment like that?

AB: Yeah, so they have received about $4.3 million in federal grants. That’s gone towards that police training I was talking about and equipment and other tribal justice programs. They have three officers that they have equipped and that they will be submitting to the state to participate in this program. And I should mention that the state has an agreement, so it’s like a memorandum of understanding, with the tribal police force. But it is individual officers who are commissioned under this special agreement to be that extension of state law. So Chickaloon has three officers for this right now. They’re planning to add a fourth, you know, and as far as like funding for that, it’s all from the federal government.

CG: Back to this meeting last week, how did that go? It sounded like it was like three hours long, people were giving public testimony, and it was maybe a lot of different points of view on that. But what did you hear from people there?

AB: Yeah, so this meeting was held in the Sutton Elementary School. It was certainly well attended, and it was actually a fairly calm meeting. People asked very thoughtful questions. They were each given an opportunity by the meeting organizer, which was representatives from Sutton’s Community Council, to ask a question and a follow-up question. Sometimes that went into two follow-up questions, as meetings are wont to do sometimes. They had to do with, like, how is this set up? What are the practical implications for this? What does this look like from, “I’m a citizen here, and I’ll be interacting with these police officers,” perspective. And then there were also concerns, you know. The Department of Public Safety made sure to tell everybody that the Chickaloon police would not be empowered under this agreement to do any traffic stops, which is a hot button topic there.

CG: In terms of how the state’s looking at this, how the Department of Public Safety is looking at this, there was something in your story kind of along the lines of, “You could maybe expect more of this in the future,” right?

AB: The Department of Public Safety expects more tribal police forces to be applying to them for similar memorandums of understanding and special commissions for officers, because they are receiving this federal funding for police training and equipment and tribal justice programs. And so they are planning to use this as sort of a template, if you will, for future applications. So they have already been through how to decide what this looks like and what parameters the tribe has and those sorts of things. And so yes, they expect more of these applications in the future and that this is really just the start.

The Yup’ik village of Newtok, perched precariously on thawing permafrost at the edge of the rapidly eroding Ninglick River, is the first Alaska community to begin a full-scale relocation made necessary by climate change.

Still, the progress of moving to a new village site that is significantly outpacing relocation efforts at other vulnerable Alaska communities, remains agonizingly slow, say those who are in the throes of the transformation.

“There is no blueprint on how to do this relocation,” said Carolyn George, one of those still living in Newtok. “We’re relocating the whole community to a whole different place, and we did not know how to do it. And it’s been taking too long — over 20 years, I think.”

George, who works at the Newtok school, was one of the self-described “Newtok mothers” who made comments at a panel discussion at the recent Arctic Encounter Symposium in Anchorage. The river waters, once at least a mile away, have edged closer and closer, and the village, once sitting high on the landscape, continues to sink as that permafrost thaws, she said.

Plans to move Newtok started to solidify in 2006 with the formation of the local-state-federal Newtok Planning Group, but that followed many years of debate and study that led to the decision to relocate. according to the Alaska Division of Community and Regional Affairs. The new site, about 9 miles away on the south side of the Ninglick River, is called Mertarvik, meaning “getting water from the spring.”

In 2019, the first Mertarvik residents settled into their new homes. As of now, more than half of the residents have moved to Mertarvik.

The latest count is 220 in Mertarvik and 129 still at Newtok, said Christina Waska, the relocation coordinator for the Newtok Village Tribal government.

The goal is to have everyone in Mertarvik by the fall, even if that means some people will be living in temporary housing, like construction work camps.

“Our ultimate goal is to not leave anyone behind,” she said.

With a single local government, a single Tribal government and unified services like mail delivery, Newtok and Mertarvik technically make up a single community. But often it does not feel that way.

George is among those coping with a sense of limbo.

Her five daughters and their father have moved to a new house in Mertarvik, but she remains in Newtok because of her job. That is a hardship, she said. “Being alone, I get anxiety, and I miss my girls, you know. Especially at night,” she said.

And the school where she works, and which is set to be demolished this summer, is in dire shape.

The four classrooms are heated by a small generator. There is no food cooked on-site for the kids. There is no plumbing – a situation that, for now, is being addressed with a “bathroom bus” that shuttles kids to their homes as needed.

Conditions are notably better at Mertarvik, said speakers at the conference.

Lisa Charles, another panel member, described the difficult conditions her family left behind in Newtok. The family was packed into a too-small, two-bedroom house with thawing permafrost below and mold growing inside. It took a toll on their physical well-being, she said.

But once the family settled in at Mertarvik, things improved, she said.

“After moving over to the new village site, we noticed all of our health improved, especially for my daughter that grew up with asthma,” Charles said. “After we moved over to our new home, she grew out of her asthma problem.”

There have been complications, like power outages affecting the school, attributed to demand that outstripped capacity.

Among the challenges is a timing mismatch. Waska and new Tribal administrator Calvin Tom started their jobs only recently, too late for them to place summer barge orders, and as a consequence, no building materials are expected to be barged in 2024 and no new houses will be built this summer in Mertarvik, Waska said.

There is still plenty of work to be done aside from construction, she said. And construction is seen as a process that will continue long after all residents are settled at Mertarvik, she added.

“It’ll never be done. If you look at every village, even Anchorage, Fairbanks, it’s always under construction,” she said.

While Newtok is the first Alaska village to relocate, others will follow.

Even two decades ago, 31 communities were identified as facing imminent threats that would make their locations potentially unlivable in the near future. Of those, nearly half were planning or considering some form of relocation.

Next after Newtok to relocate entirely may be Kivalina, an Inupiat village on the Chukchi Sea coast that is facing numerous climate stressors along with rapid erosion. The community now has a new evacuation road, completed in 2021, that can better enable movement to a new site.

But plans hit a snag after a study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers revealed that the originally chosen relocation site, called Kiniktuuraq, is also vulnerable to the same climate change stressors that are expected to make Kivalina uninhabitable in the relatively near future.

Napakiak, a Yup’ik village perched on a section of eroding land along the Kuskokwim River that is being quickly eaten away in large chunks, has also made progress. The community is now engaged in a partial relocation, a strategy known as “managed retreat.” Some families have already moved from vulnerable sites to safer ground upland, and there is state money available for a new school to replace the erosion-threatened building.

There is no single source of money to pay for relocation work, even for the Newtok-Mertarvik transformation, the most advanced of the projects.

The Newtok-Mertarvik move has been funded through various allocations over time. Among the recent infusions were $25 million through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and another $6.7 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Napakiak received a similar $25 million grant through the infrastructure law and a $2.4 million infusion earlier this year from FEMA.

The combined costs of full and partial relocations for all the villages that need them are expected to be staggering.

Of 144 Alaska Native villages with damages from flooding, erosion, permafrost thaw or some combination of those impacts, costs for protecting infrastructure are expected to mount to $3.45 billion over the next 50 years, according to a 2020 report by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. An additional $833 million is needed to protect the hub communities of Utqiagvik, Nome, Bethel, Kotzebue, Dillingham and Unalaska, said the 2020 BIA report, which was produced in cooperation with the Denali Commission and other agencies.

The sources for the needed funding remain unclear, and bureaucratic hurdles are delaying progress toward necessary relocations, a recent report from the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium said.

There are fundamental obstacles in rural Alaska that make it extremely difficult for Alaska communities to work through the federal system, said Jackie Qataliña Schaeffer, ANTHC’s director for climate initiatives.

She cited an example during the Arctic Encounter Symposium forum. “Every federal agency requires you to have some type of reporting and in most of the cases you have to apply for the federal funding online. If you don’t have stable internet, how do you do that?” she said.

The ANTHC report recommends an overhaul to streamline a process that is a poor fit for remote Alaska villages.

In some ways, the Newtok-Mertarvik residents said, their split community has successfully overcome difficult challenges, making their relocation a possible example for other threatened communities in Alaska and elsewhere in the United States.

But those successes can also be bittersweet.

Relocation is absolutely necessary because the old village site is now an unhealthy place to live, Waska said. Nonetheless, she feels conflicted about abandoning the hometown she loves.

“Newtok is my home. It’s kind of sad. It kind of breaks my heart that Newtok is no longer going to be there,” she said.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The Air National Guard has delayed its plan to downgrade the status of about 80 members of its Alaska unit, a move that would have threatened national security and civilian rescues in the nation’s most remote state.

The Alaska Air National Guard confirmed the delay in an email to The Associated Press on Friday.

Efforts by the state’s politicians and Alaskans “have been instrumental in getting this delay which will allow everyone involved the time to conduct more thorough research and analysis,” wrote Alan Brown, an Alaska guard spokesperson.

The Air National Guard headquarters in Virginia did not respond to emails from the AP seeking comment.

The changes to balance top-earning positions among the other 53 state and territorial units will still be completed by Oct. 1.

Alaska was slated to convert 80 of the highly paid Active Guard and Reserve members — who are essentially the equivalent of full-time active-duty military — to dual status tech positions, a classification with lower wages, less appealing benefits and different duties.

Many say they will quit rather than accept the changes, which could include seeing their pay cut by more than 50%.

Local guard leaders argued Alaska needed the personnel in the higher classification to fulfill its requirements to conduct national security missions that other units don’t have, such as monitoring for ballistic missile launches from nations such as Russia, North Korea and China.

The Alaska guard also said its ability to fly refueling tankers to accompany U.S. and Canadian fighter jets when they intercept Russian bombers that come close to Alaska or Canada would be greatly curtailed.

The guard also plays a vital role in conducting civilian search-and-rescue missions in Alaska, sending military helicopters and cargo planes through violent storms to rescue people from small Alaska Native villages when weather prevents air ambulances from flying.

Last year, the guard conducted 159 such missions, including flying to an Alaska island just 2 miles from a Russian island to pick up a pregnant woman with abdominal pains. In one recent rescue, two paramedics parachuted into an Alaska Native village because that was the fastest way to reach a critically ill woman with internal bleeding. Another involved flying to a western Alaska village to pick up a pregnant woman who began bleeding when her water broke and delivering her to a hospital in Anchorage, more than 400 miles (644 kilometers) away.

If the staff conversions went through, the guard estimated the number of rescues would drop to about 50 a year.

The downgrades in Alaska have been delayed until Sept. 30, 2025, giving the service more time to study how the changes would affect its Alaska operations and if the changes should be made at all, according to a joint statement from the state’s congressional delegation.

“The strain this uncertainty put on Alaska Air National Guard members –- who Alaskans depend on in the most dire of emergencies –- for them to worry about their jobs, their benefits, their ability to provide for their families, is unacceptable,” U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, said in the statement.

“Delaying the implementation of the misguided directives is a win -– but it should never have come to this,” she said.

Anchorage police say they are continuing to investigate the deaths of three people in two separate incidents Thursday, with few details available on either case.

In a brief statement, police said a person was brought to a local hospital and later died Thursday morning. Police were informed about the death at about 6:30 a.m. Thursday, and subsequently examined a home on the 100 block of Rusty Allen Place in Northeast Anchorage.

“The circumstances of the incident are under investigation, but officers have cause to believe this is an isolated incident and there is no public safety concern,” police said in the statement.

Hours later, police responded at about 11 a.m. Thursday to a home on the 8100 block of Jewel Lake Road where they say they found a man and a woman dead. Police investigated the deaths, but said only that they “have cause to believe this is an isolated incident.”

Anchorage police have not released the names of anyone involved in either case. Police spokeswoman Renee Oistad declined to answer questions Monday about the incidents due to the ongoing investigations. She said neither case posed a wider concern for public safety.

The causes of all three deaths are being determined by the state medical examiner’s office, according to police.

WASHINGTON — Twice in a week, an airline pilot was forced to abort a takeoff because other jets were entering an active runway.

A pair of incidents last week — one at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, the other at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport — join a growing list of close calls on runways across the country, adding to concerns about aviation safety.

The head of the Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged that the agency must do more to reduce fatigue among air traffic controllers amid an ongoing staffing shortage.

“We need to address that fatigue risk,” said FAA administrator Mike Whitaker during a virtual briefing with reporters on Friday.

“Coming into this position, it was pretty clear to me that fatigue was an issue. It’s something I heard about at every facility I visited. It was usually one of the first issues I heard about,” Whitaker said.

In response, the FAA is increasing the amount of rest time required between shifts to 10 hours, up from nine, and 12 hours of rest before an overnight shift. The changes will take effect in 90 days.

That announcement came as the FAA released a report on air traffic controller fatigue. A three-person panel of fatigue experts recommended the new rest requirements, along with a host of other suggested changes.

But the new policy could have unintended consequences, warns the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

“NATCA is concerned that with an already understaffed controller workforce, immediate application of the Administrator’s new rules may lead to coverage holes in air traffic facilities’ schedules,” the union said in a statement. “Requiring controllers to work mandatory overtime to fill those holes would increase fatigue and make the new policy nothing more than window dressing.”

There are 1,000 fewer certified air traffic controllers working today than a decade ago, according to NATCA. As a result, many air traffic facilities are short-staffed, union president Rich Santa told a Senate subcommittee in November. Mandatory overtime — including six-day workweeks and 10-hour shifts — are routine, he said.

The FAA has been working to address the staffing shortage of air traffic controllers, Whitaker said on Friday.

“We also know that we’re understaffed throughout the population of controllers,” Whitaker said. “So we have been doing everything within our power to increase controller hiring. We met our goal last year of 1,500 controllers, and will meet our goal this year of 1,800 controllers. And we’re continuing to do everything we can to increase the numbers.”

Two close calls on runways last week underscore the strain on the aviation system.

On Wednesday, a tower controller at New York’s Kennedy Airport cleared a SWISS Airbus A330 jet for takeoff. At the same time, a ground controller on another frequency cleared four other jets to cross the runway, according to audio from LiveATC.net.

The SWISS jet aborted its takeoff after the pilot saw the other planes on the runway.

There was a similar close call the following day at Reagan National Airport in Virginia. An air traffic controller instructed a Southwest Airlines jet to cross runway 4, while another plane operated by JetBlue Airways was starting its takeoff on the same runway. Both jets eventually arrived at their destinations, and no serious injuries were reported.

The FAA says it is investigating both incidents.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Earlier this month, the Denver Post reported that Lingít tribal members have been requesting cultural items back from the Denver Art Museum in Colorado for years — to no avail. 

The museum holds many Lingít items that may qualify to be returned under federal law. 

Investigative reporter Sam Tabachnik says delegates from the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska sought the return of five items, including a 170-year-old clan house partition featuring the Naanya.aayí clan crest. 

One Tlingit and Haida cultural resource officer told Tabachnik that the Denver Art Museum was “probably the worst museum” they had dealt with. And Tabachnik says the museum has a history of denying repatriation requests.

Listen:

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity. 

Sam Tabachnik: With the passage of NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Repatriation Act in 1990, American museums were required to compile inventories of all their Native American objects that may be subject to the act. This includes ancestral human remains. It includes associated funerary objects, objects of cultural patrimony, and a few other categories. And so these museums had to go through their collections and try and figure out what might be subject to the law.

The Lingít tribe had sort-of, off-and-on conversations with the Denver Art Museum over the years. They submitted three formal claims for various objects in the early 2000s. But it was really this meeting in 2017 that kind of, I think, really put the relationship between the tribe and the museum into, kind of, stark focus. 

It was a three-day set of meetings here in Denver. There were about a dozen tribal members who came from Alaska to talk with the museum. 

It was on this third day, you know, from talking to people who were in this meeting, that the tone really started to shift. Now, the museum says this shift occurred when museum officials were talking about the necessary process that the tribe would have to go to, in order to comply with NAGPRA, in order to file an official claim that might be accepted by the museum. 

Tribal members told me that they viewed this meeting in particular, as incredibly, uh — Denver officials were incredibly condescending, insensitive, and seemingly intransigent. Unwilling to really budge.  

Yvonne Krumrey: And what has taken place in the last seven years since it’s happened?

Sam Tabachnik: You know, it’s unclear. There has not been a lot of movement here. The museum says the tribe has not submitted formal claims for a couple of the pieces I talked about in the article. And so the museum says, “Hey, you know, we’re just waiting on a formal claim.” 

The tribe says, “Well, the museum has been quite clear in their discussions that even if we submitted a formal claim, that they would not return these objects.” So I think the tribe has sort of taken the impression that this is just not gonna happen.

Yvonne Krumrey: And from your reporting, and speaking with tribal members and the museum officials, what are some of the barriers to the process of submitting these formal claims? Is it fairly straightforward? Or are there, kind of, hoops to jump through to do it?

Sam Tabachnik: There are a number of different qualifications or categories that tribes are supposed to fill out, or they’re supposed to show evidence to check off certain boxes. 

ProPublica published a really impressive project about NAGPRA in the last year called the Repatriation Project, and it essentially showed how museums — 33 years after the lawʼs passage in 1990 — still half of these funerary objects and human remains are still in some of America’s most prestigious universities and museums. 

It is that museums really hold the cards here. They have control of these objects, and they can make it as easy or difficult as they want.

Yvonne Krumrey: And you said that there are still a couple items that there hasn’t been a formal request process for. What has happened with the ones that have been formally requested?

Sam Tabachnik: Yeah, so the museum told me there were three formal claims from the Lingít tribe. Two were rejected for not having enough information — for not checking all the boxes of, you have to prove that a single individual could not give up the rights to an object, that it had to be collective ownership. There are several other categories you have to hit. And the museum said the tribe wasn’t able to prove certain things. And so they rejected them. The third one, they said they didn’t get even enough information from the tribe in the claim. They were unable to initiate a formal evaluation process. So in all essence, they rejected three claims from the tribes.

Yvonne Krumrey: How do Denver Art Museum’s actions compare to other museums that have had this experience or have gone through this process?

Sam Tabachnik: Yeah, so Colorado has generally been viewed as a national leader in complying with NAGPRA, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science has been incredibly proactive. History Colorado has been also cited by some national folks as really leaders in the field. They kind of went above and beyond. A lot of museum folks talk about the difference between complying with the letter of the law and complying with the spirit of the law. And several of these Colorado institutions really wanted to comply with the spirit of the law. And people have spoken about how the Denver Art Museum has not been a part of that. They have not been as proactive as other museums.

Yvonne Krumrey: You’ve reported on Denver Art Museum’s ownership of contested items before. Can you tell me a bit about that reporting?

Sam Tabachnik: Sure, I’ve been writing about the Denver Art Museum and repatriation requests or claims for about three years. I spent a long time — wrote a long series about a former now deceased museum consultant and board member named Emma Bunker, who was tied in with the antiquities trafficking and organization essentially. And she helped the museum acquire a host of Southeast Asian antiquities that the Southeast Asian countries — Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam — said were looted from their ancient temples.

Yvonne Krumrey: In your understanding of this landscape with the Denver Art Museum, how does the story fit into a broader pattern of them holding items that are contested or maybe weren’t acquired in honest means?

Sam Tabachnik: Yeah, what the Lingít tribe reported to me jives with what other countries have told me about the reluctance of the museum to give up objects in their collection. I thought it was telling — the curator of Native American arts who I interviewed I sat down with as part of this latest story said, “We’re not in the business of just giving away our entire collections.” And I thought that quote was an interesting quote and spoke volumes.

Nunam Iqua, in the Yup’ik language, means the “land’s end” – a place on the Bering Sea coast that is so flat it’s hard to tell where the land meets the sea. But when it comes to spelling, this community stands tall.

Once again, the champion for this year’s statewide Yup’ik Spelling Bee hails from Nunam Iqua. In the 12 years of competition, it was one of the first communities to participate.

This year’s tournament, on April 13, was held at the University of Alaska Anchorage at the home of the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Acceleration Program. The site is symbolic because it gives high-school students a leg up on earning a college degree, and also incorporates Native language and culture.

Families and coaches streamed into the building to fill about 50 seats, along with students from nine school districts across the state.

“Please keep to yourselves and be quiet,” said one of the judges, as the Yup’ik competition got underway.

Spelling bees aren’t necessarily the best of spectator sports, but the silence in the room doesn’t mean there’s no excitement.

“I’m happy for the students. Nervous at the same time, and I have butterflies in my stomach,” Marina Barner whispered.

Although she can’t cheer out loud, Barner came to support a student from Bethel. And like everyone else in the, room, she understands that quiet is necessary to help the students concentrate. But the sense of pride that families feel, speaks volumes.

“To be here, to be watching my daughter. I cannot express how it makes me feel,” Thomas Carl said. “I am proud of her.”

Carl is from Toksook Bay, a village where the Yup’ik language, or Yugtun, is still strong. But he married into a family in Akiak, on the upper Kuskokwim River, where the language struggles to survive.

Carl’s daughter Megan is only a fifth grader, but like the many of the kids here, she’s a shining star of hope in her community to keep Yugtun alive.

Despite her young age, she’s finished close to the top in the past two years. Each time the competition grows.

The 2024 Yup’ik Spelling Bee drew 21 students from five districts and eight schools. The Lower Yukon School District added two new teams, in addition to the one at its award-winning Nunam Iqua school.

“Well, we saw the benefits,” said Janet Johnson, who directs language and culture programs for the district, which has seen gains in Nunam Iqua test scores for language and reading.

It’s not clear if there’s a direct correlation, but Johnson says there’s a noticeable difference in the Nunam Iqua students.

“They were becoming stronger in their identities,” Johnson said.

She says pride in culture seems to fuel their desire to learn to read and write in Yugtun, something that isn’t easy when you consider that until about 60 years ago, the language was almost never written, only spoken—and had to borrow from an English alphabet that is poorly suited for the sounds of Yugtun.

Essie Beck, in her job as principal at the Alakanuk school, sees firsthand why spelling in Yugtun doesn’t come naturally and takes more work to master.

Although Beck is originally from Alabama, she’s learned quite a few words – and her son, Kian, now in the fifth grade, has taken Yup’ik language classes since he was small. Kian’s pronunciation is very authentic, and he says learning Yup’ik has helped him make friends and be a part helps of the culture. But after watching his progress, his mother says she can vouch for the difficulty of learning to spell in Yugtun, compared to English.

“Oh, harder words,” she says, that go beyond a simple alphabet to represent the sounds. “The apostrophes, the dashes, the brackets, everything. It’s a lot more challenging.”

During the competition, Pinlinguasta Brennan Paje, a seventh grader from Stebbins, asked a judge for clarification before spelling a word. A number of students before him were very close but missed one thing.

“What do you call that curve on top of the letter?” he asked.

The curve is called a ligature, which designates how two letters are combined to produce a sound that’s not in English.

Brennan won the round, after he included the word “ligature” when he spelled it out. The word also had an apostrophe, something the other contestants had missed.

There’s another big challenge. Although English has a few extremely long words, like “antidisestablishmentarianism,” Yugtun has a lot more. That’s because it’s a polysynthetnic language, a term for languages in which one word can be used to make a complete sentence.

For example, there’s “angyangqertuq,” which means “He has a boat.”

Often it would take about six to eight tries for contestants to arrive at the correct spelling. The judge would say “Assirtuq” to signal that the speller had the right answer.

Assirtuq means “It’s good.” And even though Ian Agayar, a seventh grader from Alakanuk didn’t hear “assirtuq” very much, he still feels like a winner.

 “You get to learn new things. Period,” he said. “It’s a new experience to everybody.”

Nunam Iqua’s principal, Samantha Afcan, says the students involved in the program learn to be persistent.

“They’re awesome. The way their brains can connect it,” she said.

Last year, Nunam Iqua swept the top three places in the spelling bee, but this year they won two. Kirstin Manumik, a seventh grader, won the championship and Jaylynn Strongheart, a fifth grader, finished third.

They spent hours and hours every week to prepare for the competition. One of the benefits was a trip to Anchorage, an exciting change of pace for students who live in a land where there’s not so much as a hill.

“You should hear the kids while driving around,” Afcan said. “’Oh, look at that car. Oh, look at that truck. Look at that tree.’”

A group of Native language students from the University of Alaska Fairbanks were on hand to provide support. They also performed dances to help students relax during the breaks, including a crowd-pleaser called the Polar Bear Shake.

While the Yup’ik competition has had a steady supply of competitors, the Inupiaq spelling bee is still slow to catch on. Only two students from Sitka competed, but those students got most of their words correct. Organizers hope that in time, the Inupiaq bee will draw more interest.

The Ketchikan Gateway Borough Assembly voted last week to enact a disaster declaration for the recent station fire that devastated the South Tongass Fire Department. Mayors from the borough and cities of Saxman and Ketchikan issued the disaster declaration on April 12.

South Tongass Fire Chief Steve Rydeen choked up as he took the podium at the Assembly’s April 15 meeting. 

“Normally, you see a grumpy old guy with no emotion. Tonight, it’s a little different. For the last 12 years I have poured my heart and soul into this department, only to have what happened happen,” Rydeen told the Assembly.

Rydeen was traveling out of Ketchikan when the fire broke out in the early morning of April 9. He said he received a series of calls from the company that manages the department’s fire alarm system just before 2:30 a.m. By the time the first firefighter arrived on the scene, the heat and smoke were too much to access the building. Rydeen said that one of the South Tongass fire engines, which was not in the building when the fire broke out, was able to respond at about 4 a.m.

“So that’s quite a long time. That fire burned in there for a long time,” Rydeen explained.

Rydeen said there were parts of the station where the temperature likely reached upwards of 1,500 degrees. The damage is extensive. Much of the gear that didn’t melt or burn up was ruined by smoke damage. 

Rydeen said that the investigation is still ongoing, though they believe the fire started in the vehicle bay around one of their engine trucks. It was one of five vehicles damaged in the blaze.

“That truck is where we think the fire may have originated but we don’t know for sure what started it. We had no lithium ion batteries, we had no battery equipment on it. So we’re trying to figure that out,” Rydeen said.

The fire chief informed the Assembly that the recovery from the fire isn’t going to be quick. He said it’s going to carry on for at least a couple of years. But he added that with his team behind him, it’s possible.

“I have the best of best volunteering, giving their time, they’re giving their sacrifices to this community. And I couldn’t have asked for better. That’s the bottom line,” Rydeen said through tears.

After Rydeen concluded his presentation of the damage, Borough Mayor Rodney Dial told him that the community feels his pain and that the borough stands behind him.

The vote to ratify the mayors’ disaster declaration passed unanimously. The State Fire Marshal’s investigation into the origins of the fire is still ongoing.

Romig Middle School principal Carrie Sumner pointed to a pair of floor plans in her office in Anchorage last week showing where classrooms will be in the fall when hundreds of sixth-graders join the school.

“We’re utilizing, as you can see, all classroom space, all space — period,” Sumner said.

Across the Anchorage School District, thousands of sixth-graders and dozens of teachers will move from elementary schools to middle schools in the fall. District leaders say the change could help consolidate elementary schools as the district deals with budget uncertainty and a shrinking number of students. Some, including Sumner, also say sixth-graders will benefit socially and academically by spending an extra year in middle school.

“Two years is a quick stopover,” Sumner said. “The opportunity to have them for three years and really get to know them well, support them well, I think it’s going to be a huge benefit.”

Principals and district administrators have been preparing for the influx of 2,000 sixth-graders into middle schools for two years. The idea was first brought up prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

There’s still a lot of work to do.

Sumner said staff are reorganizing nearly the entire school. Just eight teachers will keep their same classrooms next fall, 42 others will move elsewhere in the building or to one of four new portable, relocatable classrooms. Adding about 400 more sixth-graders next year will make Romig the largest middle school in the district. It already enrolls about 700 seventh- and eighth-graders.

Sumner said she’s excited about the change.

It’s among three major changes the district is making to the way it delivers education next school year. School start times will also shift for all grade levels and high school freshmen will start workforce-centered courses as part of the district’s rollout of career academies.

Sumner said the new start times seem to have generated the most conversation.

“It is a lot of change. We will do it. But it is a lot of change,” Sumner said. “I hear more about start time concerns than I do about sixth grade moving to middle school.”

Sumner said she has to hire 22 teachers to work with the sixth-graders who will attend Romig. She has interviewed more than 100 candidates and still has a half-dozen positions to fill.

Senior Director of Middle School Education Joe Zawodny said moving sixth-graders out of elementary schools and into middle schools could save the district some money in the long-term, but the change is more about academic impacts than budget cuts.

“The real purpose for moving sixth-graders to middle school is to provide equity across the district,” Zawodny said. “We already have three schools where sixth-graders get to enjoy certain electives and extracurricular opportunities that sixth-graders at other schools don’t, right? And so really, it was bringing the whole district in line with opportunities for students more than it was a way to save money.”

Sixth-graders already attend Begich, Clark and Mirror Lake middle schools. The other seven middle schools, Romig included, just have seventh- and eighth-graders right now. The middle school change does not apply to the district’s alternative and optional schools.

This year, weekly meetings of middle school principals in the district have focused on preparing for the upcoming change. Zawodny said the two biggest concerns are space and staffing.

“In some situations, like Romig, we know that at least for the next few years, we’re going to have more students than the school can provide space for,” Zawodny said. “So we’re actually adding four relocatables to that school.”

Zawodny said that about 80 new teaching positions will be added to the seven middle schools, most of the positions shifting from elementary schools. The district will relocate nine portable classrooms to four middle schools to make enough room. At Romig, eighth-graders will primarily use the relocatable classrooms to allow sixth- and seventh-grade classrooms to be grouped together in the same parts of the school.

“We went out, we toured every school several times to make sure not only do they have the space they need for the projected enrollment, but that they have the technology they need,” Zawodny said.

Sumner graduated from the Anchorage School District, and has spent two decades working as an educator in Alaska. She said even with two years of preparation, she still worries issues may arise next fall that the district has not considered.

“We’re trying to think of everything, but we’re human beings,” Sumner said. “It’s a huge lift to move an entire — you know you think of it being a class like my sixth-grade class is moving — but it’s hundreds and thousands of kids. So it’s quite a logistical matrix.”

But Sumner is confident that middle schools will be able to quickly fix any issues that pop up and provide a smooth transition for sixth-graders in the fall.

In a major case on homelessness, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday appeared to side with an Oregon city’s crackdown on sleeping in public. The decision could have sweeping implications for the record number of people living in tents and cars, and the cities and states struggling to manage them.

The Supreme Court had declined to hear a similar case out of Boise, Idaho, in 2019. But since then rates of homelessness have spiked. An annual federal count found more than 250,000 people living in parks, on streets, and in their vehicles. Sprawling street encampments have grown larger and expanded to new places, igniting intense backlash from residents and businesses.

The current case centers on the small city of Grants Pass, Ore., which has a population just under 40,000 and is a symbol of just how widespread the homelessness problem has become. A slew of other cities and states — led by Democrats and Republicans alike — urged the justices to take up this issue.

Cities say the courts have hamstrung efforts to address homelessness

In both the Boise and Grants Pass cases, lower courts said that under the Eighth Amendment it’s cruel and unusual to fine or jail someone for sleeping on public land if there’s no adequate shelter available. But Grants Pass and many other cities across the West say those rulings have tied their hands as they try to keep their public spaces open and safe for everyone.

Grants Pass has no public shelter. But its local law essentially banned people from sleeping with a blanket or pillow on any public land, at any time.

During Monday’s arguments, the Supreme Court’s more liberal justices suggested this amounts to unlawfully targeting people simply because they’re homeless. “You don’t arrest babies who have blankets over them. You don’t arrest people who are sleeping on the beach,” said Justice Sotomayor.

Justice Kagan said sleeping is not a criminal act. “Sleeping is a biological necessity. It’s sort of like breathing. … But I wouldn’t expect you to criminalize breathing in public.”

But the court’s conservative justices said it can be hard to draw the line between someone’s conduct — which can be legally punished — and a status they are unable to change — which cannot be punished. “How about if there are no public bathroom facilities?” Justice Gorsuch asked. “Do people have an Eighth Amendment right to defecate and urinate? Is that conduct or is that status?”

Over and over, conservative justices also said homelessness is a complex policy problem and questioned whether courts like theirs should “micromanage” it.

“Why would you think that these nine people are the best people to judge and weigh those policy judgments?” Chief Justice Roberts asked.

Whatever the decision, this case won’t solve the homelessness problem

States and cities across the U.S. have struggled to manage record rates of homelessness. Some in the West have found ways to limit encampments and even clear them out without running afoul of the 9th Circuit rulings. Elsewhere, several states have taken a more sweeping approach with camping bans. Florida’s governor recently signed a law that seeks to move unhoused people off public property altogether and into government-run encampments.

Some worry that a decision in favor of Grants Pass will lead to more such moves or even a worst-case scenario of a “banishment race” if communities seek to push people out of their jurisdiction. Justice Sotomayor raised that concern during the arguments.

“Where do we put them if every city, every village, every town lacks compassion?” she said.

Grants Pass and other cities argue that the 9th Circuit’s ruling has fueled the expansion of homeless encampments. But whichever way the case is decided, it’s not likely to dramatically bring down the enormous number of people living outside in tents and vehicles. Many places simply don’t have enough shelter beds for everyone. And more importantly, they don’t have nearly enough permanent, affordable housing. The city of Grants Pass is short by 4,000 housing units; nationally, the deficit is in the millions.

That shortage has pushed rents to levels many cannot afford, which advocates say is a main driver of rising homelessness. Even where places are investing heavily to create more affordable housing, it will take a while to catch up. This Supreme Court case won’t solve any of that, but it could dramatically shape the lives of those forced to live on streets, parks and back alleys for years to come.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

To address a surge in mental health problems among young Alaskans, the Alaska Senate is considering whether to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to seek therapy without their parents’ permission.

On Wednesday, the Senate is scheduled to vote on Senate Bill 240, a proposal introduced by Gov. Mike Dunleavy and amended by Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage.

Giessel’s amendment, adopted by a 3-2 vote in the Senate Health and Social Services Committee last month, would lower to 16 years old the age at which teens can get therapy — but not medication — without permission from an adult.

Thirty-three states allow residents younger than 18 to independently obtain mental health care, and four states — California, Illinois, Maryland and Nevada — allow it as young as 12.

“In real life, I’m an advanced nurse practitioner,” Giessel told members of the committee in March. “I volunteer in schools, in school-based clinics. In that venue, I screen for behavioral and mental health issues … It is astonishing to me the things that our young people today are having to deal with.”

Nationwide, surveys have found a surge in the number of teenagers and young adults experiencing mental health problems. A 2021 national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the latest available — found 42% of high school students “experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” almost double the figure from 10 years before.

More than one in five high school students said they considered attempting suicide.

Speaking about Alaska’s leading causes of death in 2022, state health data experts wrote, “Intentional Self-Harm (Suicide) was the LCOD for teens and young adults aged 15-24 years.”

Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage, said she supports the bill.

“We have heard from many of our students about the crisis they are experiencing, and that crisis stems from a lack of support for mental health services,” she said on Monday.

Giessel said that in her work at school-based clinics, she frequently hears requests from students for mental health care, but when they learn that they need a parent’s permission, “Commonly, the child’s face falls.” 

Often, they’re being cared for by a grandparent, or a single parent working multiple jobs, Giessel said, and that permission never comes. 

Over the past two years, Giessel said, she’s frequently heard from behavioral health organizations. 

“Every one of those organizations, every one, has agreed that we need to lower the age of consent so that a 16-year-old would be able to say that yes, I need help, and I am consenting to those services,” she said.

Trevor Storrs, president and CEO of the Alaska Children’s Trust, is one of those organizations. 

“We do support it. We support the concept, whether it goes with this bill or not,” Storrs said. 

“We see this amendment strengthening behavioral health. We have heard from providers and parents and most specifically, youth, that one of the barriers accessing and asking for help is first having to go through parents.”

Not everyone likes the idea of lowering the age to independently receive therapy.

After Giessel’s amendment was adopted in committee, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District School Board passed a resolution opposing it.

The Mat-Su Frontiersman newspaper, which covered the local debate, reported that school board members were concerned about whether the idea sets a precedent for school districts offering services without parents’ approval. 

“I’m glad this is being looked at, but the family and parents need to be involved,” said Sen. Mike Shower, R-Wasilla, speaking on Monday.

Giessel’s amendment does require some parental involvement: The bill says that after a teenager starts therapy, the behavioral or mental health professional “shall contact the minor’s parents and offer to provide services to the family,” unless doing so would clearly be harmful to the teenager.

The bill also forbids medication without parental approval and doesn’t apply to hospital treatment, only outpatient care.

Those clauses didn’t assuage all critics.

Sen. Shelley Hughes, R-Palmer, asked the Senate on Monday to consider a different version of the bill, one without Giessel’s amendment, but that failed on a 13-7 vote, setting up the amended proposal for a final Senate vote on Wednesday, and a successful vote would send the bill to the House for further work.

The bill doesn’t deal with other problems, including payment for services that teens might request. SB 240 was originally written to allow school districts to bill Medicaid if they treat a Medicaid-eligible student, but the state Department of Health said it believes that billing wouldn’t be possible without parental consent. 

That suggests a student operating without that consent might have to navigate health care billing on their own, but the situation regarding payment is evolving and might change, a Giessel aide said.

Legendary aviator Orin Seybert, perhaps best known as the founder of regional airline Peninsula Airways, died of natural causes Friday morning in Anchorage at the age of 87.

Seybert started the airline in 1955, just after graduating high school in the Southwest Alaska town of Pilot Point.

“The first year after high school, I brought an airplane to Pilot Point in Bristol Bay,” Seybert told KUCB in 1999. “I spent my whole career flying up and down the chain and Bristol Bay.”

Seybert led PenAir to become the largest regional airline in Alaska, operating more than 30 aircraft in 45 communities.

Seybert was perhaps best known in Unalaska for recognizing the amphibious Grumman Goose’s potential for operating along the steep coastlines of the Aleutian Islands, where coastal communities built below mountainous terrain pose particular difficulties for constructing runways.

“It’s a flying boat. The hull is actually a boat, as opposed to a float plane…so this thing can handle the rough water around Dutch Harbor,” Seybert said. “We have communities like Akutan, 40 miles from here, which is extremely mountainous, and they’ll never be able to build a runway there.”

Seybert is survived by six children and over 50 grandchildren, great grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren.

Conservatives hoping to defeat Alaska Congresswoman Mary Peltola in November dread a replay of what happened in 2022, when Republican candidates Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III spent most of their campaign energy attacking each other, right up to the general election, and Republican voters were split between the two. 

This year, the leading Republicans are Begich, again, and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom. Begich has a plan to avoid a similar split.

“Should I finish behind Nancy Dahlstrom in the primary, I will step out of the race,” he said in a recent phone interview with Alaska Public Media. “And I would hope that others on the right side of the aisle would do the same.” 

If other Republicans would make the same pledge to dropout, it could effectively create a Republican primary. That way, Begich said, GOP voters could line up behind a single candidate. 

Another way Republicans could avoid a split would be to make use of ranked choice voting. But Begich said his way has more appeal to Republican voters.

“For those who are not a fan of ranked choice voting — and I consider myself one of those people — we can self-impose a primary among the Republicans, if we make that commitment,” Begich said.

Juli Lucky questions why a candidate would want to do that. She’s the executive director of Alaskans for Better Elections, which defends ranked choice, open primaries and the other parts of the voting system Alaskans adopted in 2020. There’s nothing wrong with Begich’s pledge, Lucky said, but dropping out after the primary would leave his fans with fewer options.

“I would encourage people to stay in the race and encourage your supporters to rank,” Lucky said. “Why would you want to deprive folks that support you — and really believe in your platform — that ability to vote for you first?”

Many ranked choice opponents feel that Peltola only won because Republicans were split. If you add the votes of the two Republicans together, they got about 2,000 more first-round votes than Peltola did. (Peltola got just under 49% of first-choices votes. The two Republicans combined got just over 49%.)

But Lucky said combining the Republican vote doesn’t tell the real story of how those voters felt. She points out that thousands of Begich voters ranked Peltola, a Democrat, as their second choice.

“What we saw is that the electorate is very complex,” Lucky said. “We saw a lot of combinations where somebody would rank somebody first, and then their second choice might not be somebody that you would think would be their second choice. Because I think that voters are complex, and this system allows them to express that.”

In any case, Dahlstrom isn’t making a pledge to drop out if she finishes behind Begich in the primary. 

“Our campaign is focused on defeating Mary Peltola and returning a Conservative Alaskan leader to Washington,” a Dahlstrom campaign spokesman said in response to an email asking whether she’d take Begich’s pledge.

While Begich has a lot of support from Republican leaders in-state, Dahlstrom has the support of several national Republican powerhouses, notably U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson. The speaker’s videotaped endorsement played at the Alaska Republican convention last weekend.

Kurt Whitehead lives in Klawock on Prince of Wales Island, and every summer, he said, as the humpbacks and herring and salmon return, so too do the island’s seasonal residents.

“They’re basically tourists,” he said by phone Monday. “You can be nice and call them seasonal residents, but really, they only come to our state just for the hunting and the fishing, and sometimes they stay as little as one week, and sometimes they stay as much as maybe four or five months, but their whole intent is just to harvest as much as possible.”

Unlike most tourists, they’re able to buy fishing and hunting licenses reserved for residents. That’s because of the state’s eligibility requirements, Whitehead said — once you’re in Alaska for a year, basically all you have to do is keep a home in the state, plan to come back and not claim residency anywhere else. 

“Some of them do have homes, but there’s a large majority of them that just have an RV parked on somebody’s lot,” Whitehead said.

Whitehead wants that to change. He’s been pushing for lawmakers to close the residency loophole, and on Monday the Alaska Senate passed a bill that would do just that.

In a 15-5 vote, senators approved Senate Bill 171, which would tie residency to PFD eligibility — and that means that in most cases, you can’t leave the state for more than 180 days during the year and remain eligible. There are exceptions for people in the military, college students and some others, though there’s some debate about how consistently those are applied in practice.

Tribes, Fish and Game committees and municipalities from around the state submitted letters in support of the bill.

Retired New York police officer David Egleston of Thorne Bay told lawmakers he’d reviewed license sales for his community and found many seasonal residents and fishing lodge owners had received resident licenses.

“None of them owned a snow shovel in Alaska,” Egleston wrote.

A deputy director of the Alaska Wildlife Troopers told a House committee earlier this year that the loose definition of residency makes it difficult for officials to prosecute people who take advantage.

Resident licenses typically have higher daily catch limits and allow folks to participate in resident-only personal use fisheries, like dipnetting on the Copper or Kenai rivers. Or, take king salmon — in Southeast, nonresidents are limited to between one to three kings a year. But residents this summer can catch two per day. Resident licenses are also a lot cheaper — often four to five times less expensive than what nonresidents pay.

Clinton Cook leads the Craig Tribal Association, not too far from Klawock on Prince of Wales Island, and he said people who spend most of their time out of state shouldn’t benefit from the breaks the state cuts its residents.

“They’re a citizen when it’s convenient for them,” Cook said by phone Monday. “That’s not OK.”

Sen. Jesse Bjorkman, R-Nikiski, sponsored the bill in the Senate.

“When people who do not live permanently in Alaska capitalize on Fish and Game laws meant for residents, they diminish harvest opportunities for year-round residents, the people who shovel snow and stick it out throughout the entire course of the year in our great state,” Bjorkman said.

Sen. Mike Shower, R-Wasilla, said he’s concerned the new requirements could exclude some retirees who leave Alaska for extended periods despite a long history in the state.

“There were some concerns from a number of individuals about what this may impact, especially on those that may leave the state for the wintertime, which a lot of us do as you get older, go out and visit family and things like that,” Shower said.

He said he was also concerned it could violate the Alaska Constitution’s guarantee of equal access to fish and game resources.

Shower joined Sens. Shelley Hughes, R-Palmer, Robb Myers, R-Fairbanks, Scott Kawasaki, D-Fairbanks, and Kelly Merrick, R-Eagle River, in voting no on the bill.

It now heads to the House, where its prospects are unclear — lawmakers have just about three weeks until all legislation dies at the end of the regular session. 

The Unalaska City School District is predicting a deficit and is asking the city for nearly $6 million to fund its fiscal year 2025 budget. That’s about half a million dollars more than last year’s ask, and includes the maximum allowable contribution from the city’s general fund.

Superintendent Kim Hanisch said at a recent city council meeting that the school is projecting an $8.2 million budget and a significant deficit.

“We anticipate being in the deficit by $485,000,” Hanisch told council members. “Our fund balance will be zero, if not just a little bit below zero by the end of this year.”

That balance is projected to drop to around $30,000 in the red, according to information presented to the Unalaska City Council. It’s not uncommon for the district to dip into its fund balance to make up for losses in the budget, but that sum of money has dropped significantly over the last few years. In fiscal year 2023, the district accumulated a final deficit of more than $500,000 mainly due to major increases in energy costs, which dropped the fund balance to just under $400,000.

School administrators have said in the past the district can’t sustain such large deficits.

Still, Hanisch said the district and budget committee worked hard trying to build a conservative budget.

“The revenues that we anticipate for this upcoming year will decrease by 5.66%,” she explained. “So our projected revenue is approximately $7.7 million. Our projected expenditures will increase only 2.2%.”

Unalaska schools get the majority of their funding from the state and city. The state’s funding is built mainly around the student population. This year, the budget committee projected an enrollment of 350 students.

Hanisch said they built the status quo budget around the assumption that per-student state funding would remain close to where it has been for several years, at about $6,000. That puts the state’s estimated contribution at roughly $3.2 million.

“They aren’t inflation proofing the budget — they’re not increasing to go along with inflation, which puts us in the situation that we’re at right now,” she said. “So we built our projected budget that they’ll flat fund because that’s what they’ve been doing.”

Schools across Alaska have been asking for more money from the government for years, and Legislators passed an education bill that would have increased the state’s per-student contribution by nearly $700, but Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed the bill last month. The Legislature failed to override the veto by one vote.

Hanisch told council members she doesn’t think Dunleavy will be providing any extra money for education this year.

However, he did approve a broadband assistance grant, which gives the district an unexpected boost of about $125,000.

Hanisch said they built the budget to be status quo.

“With that, we had to take into consideration that we can avoid some increases — increases just due to inflation, as well as our movement on the salary schedule,” Hanisch said. “So we built a budget with a 3% known increase in salary, 5% anticipated increase in insurance, and then a 2% increase in student travel due to inflation, not extra trips.”

She said the budget committee brought the administration a list of places the district could decrease spending.

“Reduce the purchase of library books, not eliminate, but just reduce,” Hanisch said. “Look at supplies in all departments, professional development and maintenance projects. They asked us to consider, very last, any reduction in staff or technology supports.”

While state funding has decreased steadily over the past several years, the city’s contribution has continued to grow. Still, Hanisch told the city council she understands that these are tough economic times for everyone.

“So when we ask this, it is coming with that recognition that it may not be possible to fund everything that we need,” she said.

The state establishes caps for municipal funding for public school districts based on an assessment of the value of local properties. The City of Unalaska caps out at $4.4 million, which comes from its general fund. But the school can accept funding beyond that limit for additional programs. For Unalaska, those include community schools, food services, student activities and preschool, and this year, total almost $1.9 million in requested funding from the city. One area within those programs that is seeing a major increase in funding requests is community schools. That’s shot up more than $700,000 in the last year.

“In the past, the district has, in their operating fund, paid 60% of those costs and the city has contributed approximately 40%,” Hanisch said. “Staying there has been bringing us into the red in that fund balance.”

She said the district believes that deficit has been caused by drastic increases in swimming pool use as well as more community school activities being held at school buildings. She said this request puts the district and the city close to a 50/50 split.

The city generally gives the district full funding, including requests beyond the state’s cap. Several council members spoke at the recent work session in favor of granting the district its full request.

Council member Thom Bell said it’s money well spent.

“In my opinion, the school is probably the very last place we would look at cutting anything in our budget,” Bell said. “And I don’t see why we can’t fund the schools at what the ask is, but once we get into the budget, we’ll have a better idea.”

Council members have until May 1 to determine how much funding they will give to the district. They’re scheduled to make a decision at their meeting Tuesday.

Whistle Hill, the complex of businesses just east of Soldotna including a coffee shop, restaurant and frame store, is now accompanied by a large assortment of solar panels. The final phase of the two-stage project, which will be completed this summer, was just awarded a $460,000 grant from the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP.

The solar array consists of inverters, batteries and 600 solar panels and will generate enough electricity to meet the energy needs of all of Whistle Hill’s businesses.

“There’s a misconception that solar doesn’t work in Alaska,” said Henry Krull, the owner of Whistle Hill and Peninsula Solar, a local solar panel design and installation company. “It’s dark up here, and it’s cloudy, and it rains and it snows, and all of those things are true, but the fact is that solar does work up here. In fact, solar works as well as many places in the Lower 48, it’s not as efficient or capable as a solar array in Arizona or California where they get sunshine 90% of the time.

“We don’t nearly get that degree of sunshine up here, but when the sun does shine, particularly in the summertime, you can create a huge amount of renewable energy,” Krull added.  

Krull originally wanted solar panels on Whistle Hill to provide an environmentally friendly way to offset high electricity costs incurred from fresh365, his indoor garden that sells locally grown produce. After receiving REAP funding for phase one of the project, 224 solar panels were installed in 2022 to meet the garden’s electricity needs, and then some. Not long after, phase two added another 376 solar panels to the property.

Krull says the latest Department of Energy grant will pay for 50 percent of the project costs associated with phase two.

“It just makes it more affordable, it makes it more reasonable, and the return on investment is quicker as a result,” Krull said. “I would’ve done this phase two project even without a USDA grant, so it just helped to make it more feasible.” 

“This project is a prime example of how the REAP grant program helps small businesses thrive in their communities by offsetting their energy costs,” said Misty Hull, a business program specialist with the Department of Agriculture. “It’s a place that I frequent when I go down to the peninsula, in fact, last month I enjoyed a French press coffee made by the power of the sun. It was just a great experience, and I really feel like this is a program that has really helped these businesses thrive.”

Although the solar array will power all of Whistle Hill, the businesses will remain on the power grid when solar energy is not feasible. Krull says the solar batteries can only hold a few days of energy supply at a time.

“I think it’s important that the community, or really the whole state, realizes that solar is a viable option,” he said. “It’s not the only option, it doesn’t work 100% of the time, but it is feasible to do solar in Alaska, it’s possible to save money on your electric bill.” 

Alaska gets more than 50% of its energy generation from natural gas. Krull hopes local utility companies will vet for more renewable energy options in the future.

Amazon’s new facility in Anchorage is speeding up delivery times in Alaska, according to the online retail giant. 

The ground-delivery station opened in November and, since then, delivery times have cut in half, Amazon spokeswoman Leigh Anne Gullett said.

“That’s going to continue to speed up and improve as we move towards that 100% operational state,” she said.

The ground-delivery station is Amazon’s first in Alaska, and it’s the last stop before packages are delivered to customers. Gullett said the facility is still in a “ramp up” period and they’re hiring. She said there’s a particular need for what’s called a delivery service partner owner or DSP. 

Amazon delivery vans aren’t operated by Amazon. Instead, DSP owners are responsible for delivering packages, managing a fleet of vehicles and hiring employees. 

Tamas Komuves is a senior business development manager with the program. He said DSP owners typically manage up to 30 routes and 50 employees. He said they’re looking to hire in the Anchorage area because there’s been a significant increase in Amazon orders.

“The state of Alaska is kind of our last frontier in many ways,” said Komuves. “We will be looking to expand the DSP program further out to some other locations as well.”

He said the Anchorage warehouse delivered their millionth package the weekend of April 13.

Komuves said startup costs for a DSP owner range from $10,000 to $30,000 and there’s available grants to offset that cost.

Alaska State Troopers say no survivors have been found after a large cargo plane crashed near Fairbanks Tuesday with two people aboard.

The Douglas DC-4 plane crashed along the Tanana River, shortly after taking off from Fairbanks International Airport around 10 a.m., according to a report from troopers.

“The aircraft slid into a steep hill on the bank of the river where it caught fire,” the report said. “No survivors have been located.” 

Numerous agencies responded to the scene including troopers, police and local fire departments.

Authorities have not yet named the two people aboard the plane. 

Clint Johnson, with the National Transportation Safety Board, said the cause of the crash remains under investigation. Several details of the flight, including the plane’s operator, are also still being determined.

“At this point right now, we don’t know where the airplane was headed to,” Johnson said. “We’re assuming that there was a load of fuel onboard. We don’t know that for sure, but there was a significant post-crash fire.”

The Division of Forestry did not initially have an estimate on the size of the fire that was burning in a heavily forested area along the riverbank. But a Forestry spokesperson said it was reported under control by mid-afternoon.

Mike Emers, owner of the Rosie Creek Farm across the Tanana from Fairbanks, said he saw the plane go down Tuesday morning. He was at the farm when he heard an explosion and looked out of a window.

“And right over the farm field, there was a four-engine plane – one of the engines was on fire,” Emers said. “Probably 10 seconds later, there was a big explosion that rocked the ground. And then explosions happened after that.”

Emers said he used a ranch hand’s phone to try to call 911 but couldn’t get through. Then, he called troopers. After that, he and his son approached the crash site, at the base of a hillside near the river.

“There was a large flame right at the base of the hill,” he said. “There was debris all the way up the hill, maybe 100, 150 feet. Everything was torched there. The forest was on fire.”

According to Emers, troopers and other responders soon reached the scene by all-terrain vehicle and helicopter.

A video from near the crash site, taken by Emers, shows smoke and sporadic patches of flames rising from the hillside.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Editor’s note: KUAC reporter Tim Ellis contributed to this story.

House lawmakers on Monday removed an amendment from a bill that would have raised the age of consent from 16 to 18 in some situations.

The main bill requires the state to screen children for signs of sex trafficking when they interact with state agencies like the Office of Children’s Services. Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer and chair of the House Judiciary Committee, sponsored the bill. She said Tuesday she’d like to keep the bill focused squarely on that goal.

“From my perspective, raising the age of consent is a very deep issue, and there is a bill, a 23-page bill, that addresses that that I think deserves its own attention,” Vance said.

The House Rules Committee greenlit the removal Monday evening.

Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage, proposed raising the age of consent with a handwritten amendment during a floor debate last month. More than three quarters of the House supported it at the time. That’s despite the fact that as written, it would have only changed the age of consent in a few specific situations.

But Gray said he isn’t giving up. He plans to introduce another amendment to raise the age of consent to 18 more broadly when the child trafficking bill comes up again.

“If you actually talk to the stakeholders, if you talk to the organizations that work with folks who are victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, child sex trafficking, they would say the biggest bang for our buck is to raise the age of consent,” Gray said.

It’s not clear when the bill will come up for another round of debate in the House, but Gray said he’s confident the chamber will support adding the amendment back in.

The crash of a large cargo plane southeast of Fairbanks Tuesday shook the neighborhood with several explosions. Witnesses reported their windows rattling and the ground trembling.

Both people on board the plane died in the crash, according to a report from the Federal Aviation Administration. Authorities have not yet identified the two people killed, and say the cause of the crash is also still under investigation.

Officials say the Douglas C-54 — a version of the DC-4 airliner — crashed along the Tanana River, shortly after taking off from Fairbanks International Airport around 10 a.m. Tuesday. Troopers said Wednesday that thin ice and open water hindered recovery efforts.

The plane was listed as being operated by Alaska Air Fuel. The company could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

RELATED: Troopers say no survivors found after plane crashes near Fairbanks with 2 aboard

Mike Emers was among those who witnessed the crash Tuesday. He said he was at his home office at Rosie Creek Farm when he heard the first boom.

“I was just getting some orders together. So, I sat here, and I heard an explosion, and I followed it across the sky,” he said.

Emers said he called first responders.

“Yeah, and then I — fumbling around trying to find my phone — called 911, and couldn’t get through,” he said. “And I did get through to the troopers’ dispatch.”

His son ran down from the house and the two of them ran on their trail several hundred yards through the trees to the crash site above the river.

“We were running, yeah, and ran out to the river there to see, and then there was big black smoke and I was really worried,” he said.

Emers said troopers and firefighters were there in about 15 minutes. The dirt road in the neighborhood became choked with a muster of vehicles from the troopers, police and local fire departments.

They were able to get to the hillside on ATVs and got the fire under control, and it didn’t spread into the forest.

Emers said he checked his security video when he returned to his farm. He scrolled through, looking for the right timestamp. One camera that looks across the farm, caught the plane, flying toward the airport.

“It comes from here,” Emers said, pointing at a computer screen.

A moment later, the plane appears on the screen at 10 a.m.

“Oh, there it is. There it is. There, it burst into flames,” he said.

It was 10 seconds from the time of the explosion of one of the plane’s engines to when it crashed, off the screen. In the video, a huge shadow blocked the sun shining on the greenhouses, as the smoke billowed up.

Emers choked up. He didn’t know who was on the plane, but everyone in Alaska knows someone who flies.

On the trail walking back to the crash site hours later, there was a faint smell of fuel. And farther down the slope, a heavy smell of smoke.

And then a tight acre, maybe acre and a half, of charred ground and spruce trunks on the steep hillside above the river. The hillside was scattered with debris and plane parts.

“It’s still burning a little bit here. There’s a hot spot here. It’s smoking,” Emers called to fire crews at the scene.

Emers is not on his own land. The plane crashed on uninhabited property owned by the Binkley family. But it’s all the same to him.

Fire technicians Billy Morrow and Josh Chiles were among a crew from the state Division of Forestry and Fire Protection laying out long hoses on the charred ground Tuesday afternoon.

“There’s a lot of snow pack and everything behind it, but we’re gonna butt it up with some sprinkler kits connecting from that flank down on it, connecting to the river, all the way up here and then down to this side,” Chiles said.

They didn’t know how long the operation would take – the rest of the day, or overnight. They were placing the hoses around debris up and down the slope.

One of the plane’s engines was in the broken land-fast ice on the shore of the river. It was still on fire. Another big piece was out on the firmer river ice. A third big piece had already melted through and disappeared under the ice.

A drone flew along the river. Just off the burned zone, in the green trees, was the Emers’ family canoe.

 “Well, we felt like this was our secret little place and now, you know…” Emers trailed off.

President Biden on Wednesday signed a law that would ban Chinese-owned TikTok unless it is sold within a year.

It is the most serious threat yet to the video-streaming app’s future in the U.S., intensifying America’s tech war with China.

Still, the law is not expected to cause any immediate disruption to TikTok, as a forthcoming legal challenge, and various hurdles to selling the app, will most likely cause months of delay.

The measure was tucked into a bill providing foreign aid for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. The law stipulates that ByteDance must sell its stake in TikTok in 12 months under the threat of being shut down.

The move is the culmination of Washington turning the screws on TikTok for years.

Chinese tech giant ByteDance, in 2017, purchased the popular karaoke app Musical.ly and relaunched the service as TikTok. Since then, the app has been under the microscope of national security officials in Washington fearing possible influence by the Chinese government.

Despite concerns in Washington, TikTok has soared. It has become the trendsetter in the world of short-form video and is used by 170 million Americans, which is about half of the country. It is where one-third of young people get their news, according to Pew Research Center.

Yet lawmakers and the Biden administration argue that as long as TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, it is beholden to the dictates of China’s authoritarian regime

“Congress is not acting to punish ByteDance, TikTok, or any other individual company,” said Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, in remarks on the Senate floor Tuesday afternoon.

“Congress is acting to prevent foreign adversaries from conducting espionage, surveillance, maligned operations, harming vulnerable Americans, our servicemen and women, and our U.S. government personnel.”

TikTok plans to take Biden administration to court over the law

If not sold within a year, the law would make it illegal for web-hosting services to support TikTok, and it would force Google and Apple to remove TikTok from app stores — rendering the app unusable with time.

It marks the first time the U.S. has passed a law that could trigger the ban of a social media platform, something that has been condemned by civil liberties groups and Constitutional scholars.

TikTok has vowed to take the Biden administration to court, claiming the law would suppress the free speech of millions of Americans.

“We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and we will ultimately prevail,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement.

Critics of the law, including Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Free Expression Project, say the law is unconstitutional and a blow to free expression in the U.S.

“Congress shouldn’t be in the business of banning platforms,” Ruane said. “They should be working to enact comprehensive privacy legislation that protects our private data no matter where we choose to engage online.”

Selling TikTok won’t be so easy

Any company, or set of investors, angling to purchase TikTok would have to receive the blessing of the Chinese government, and officials in Beijing have strongly resisted a forced sell.

In particular, ByteDance owns the engine of TikTok, its hyper-personalized algorithm that pulls people in and keeps them highly engaged with their feed.

Chinese officials have placed content-recommendation algorithms on what is known as an export-control list, meaning the government has additional say over how the technology is ever sold.

Law took TikTok by surprise

By almost any measure, the law passed rapidly, and it caught many inside TikTok off guard, especially because the company had just breathed a sigh of relief.

Last month, the House passed a bill to compel TikTok to find a buyer, or face a nationwide ban, but the effort stalled in the Senate.

The legislation gave TikTok a six-month window to find a buyer, which some Senators said was too little time.

A new push, this time attaching the divest-or-be-banned provision to foreign aid, fasted-tracked the proposal. It mirrors last month’s attempt, but it extends the sell-by deadline, now giving TikTok nine months to find a buyer, with the option of a three-month extension if a potential acquisition is in play.

Sen. Markey: ‘American companies are doing the same thing’

Lawmakers from both parties have argued that TikTok poses a national security risk to Americans, since the Chinese government could use the app to spy on Americans, or influence what U.S. users see on their TikTok feeds, something that has gained new urgency in an election year.

But some have pushed back, including Democratic Sen. Edward Markeyof Massachusetts. He said on the Senate floor on Tuesday that there is “no credible evidence” that TikTok presents a real national security threat just because its parent company is based in China.

National intelligence laws in China would require ByteDance to hand over data on Americans if authorities there requested it, but TikTok says it has never received such a request.

Markey said concerns about digital security, the mental health of young people and data privacy should be addressed with comprehensive legislation encompassing the entire tech industry, not just TikTok.

“TikTok poses a serious risk to the privacy and mental health of our young people,” Markey said. “But that problem isn’t unique to TikTok and certainly doesn’t justify a TikTok ban,” he said. “American companies are doing the same thing, too.”

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Congresswoman Mary Peltola has joined Alaska’s U.S senators on a legal brief in support of the proposed Donlin Creek Mine in Peltola’s home region of the Kuskokwim River.

Tribal and subsistence advocates in the region are shocked that Peltola, whose campaign slogan was “Fish, Family, Freedom,” would take this position. Sophie Swope, executive director of a Bethel-based tribal coalition called Mother Kuskokwim, described herself as heartbroken.

“I do feel slightly betrayed right now,” she said. “My heart —  it’s like, I don’t think I’ve felt this heavy in a little while,” Swope said.

Peltola was against the mine when she ran for Congress in 2022. She’d been a community manager for Donlin Gold for six years. But in 2014, after a dam at the Mt. Polley mine in British Columbia burst and sent millions of gallons of contaminated material into lakes and rivers, Peltola quit Donlin Gold and became a fish advocate. She was executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission until just before she ran for Congress. Her campaign staff confirmed to reporters in 2022 that the Mt. Polley disaster was her turning point.

In the amicus —or “friend of the court” — brief filed late Tuesday, Peltola and the U.S. senators said the mine  “will be an economic engine for the region and provide significant employment opportunities in one of the most impoverished regions of Alaska.”

Peltola’s office hasn’t released a statement yet to explain her change of position and her staffers were not available for an interview.

Donlin would be an open-pit gold mine 10 miles north of Crooked Creek, on lands owned by Alaska Native Corporations. The mine is projected to produce a million ounces of gold a year and be productive for 27 years. Among its components is a 470-foot high dam to hold back tailings, chemical-laced mining byproducts that would look like silt or wet clay.

Six tribes in the region filed a lawsuit last year against federal agencies, claiming the environmental studies underpinning permission for the mine were inadequate. Among other things, they claim that the agencies only considered the impact of a small leak of contaminated materials from the dam. The tribes say a mining disaster like the Mt. Polley dam breach would contaminate the Kuskokwim, where salmon runs are already diminished. 

The congressional delegation’s brief says the tribes are trying to stop development on land Congress intended to be developed for the economic wellbeing of people in the region. Congress, they said, set other lands aside for conservation.

“Respect for this balance is necessary for Alaska to exist,” the brief says, “and to allow the Alaska Natives living in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region to continue their traditional way of life and pursue both beneficial development and self-determination, as promised to them” in the 1971 Native land claims settlement law.

Donlin maintains that its polyethylene-lined dam — 1.75 miles long and a mile wide — would be safe and designed to withstand all environmental conditions of the area. When the mining is done, the company also says it would cover the tailings with soil and vegetation to blend in with the surrounding terrain.

Alaska’s Republican U.S. senators often weigh in with amicus briefs, to support Alaska’s resource development projects from environmental lawsuits. But word that Peltola was considering adding her name to the brief has alarmed mine opponents in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta for days.

Gloria Simeon, a founder of Mother Kuskokwim, was part of a contingent from the Bethel region that flew to Washington, D.C. last week hoping to persuade Peltola not to side with the mine.

“I was disappointed because her campaign promises led us to believe that she would do everything she could to protect our river and protect our people and … our salmon,” said Simeon, a member of the Bethel-based Orutsararmiut tribe, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Climate change and other factors are already endangering Kuskokwim salmon runs, she said. Simeon believes a mine could threaten not only a food source but the continuation of culture. Simeon’s voice drops to a whisper as emotion takes over.

“When people talk about fish camp, it’s not an activity. It’s a frame of mind,” she said. “It’s where we go — the values for our people. The oral traditions. Our genealogy. Our relationships. Our History … is all woven into that experience.”

The mine would create hundreds of jobs, and organizations in the region are split. Calista, the for-profit regional Native corporation for the delta, owns the subsurface rights and has put its political weight behind the project. Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corp, which runs the Bethel hospital, opposes the mine. The Association of Village Council Presidents, representing 56 area tribes, withdrew its support for the mine in 2019. Bethel Native Corp. is officially neutral.

Bev Hoffman, a Bethel elder, wishes the for-profit enterprise wasn’t neutral. Personally, Hoffman worries that even normal operation of the mine would be detrimental to the river. She worries, for instance, that extra barge traffic would distrub young salmon just emerging from their gravel nests. Hoffman said she thought Peltola shared her “fish first” values.

“For many of us that voted for her, that mine is not compatible to a life the way we live on the Kuskokwim,” Hoffman said. “So yeah, I’m really sad.”

The Federal Trade Commission narrowly voted Tuesday to ban nearly all noncompetes, employment agreements that typically prevent workers from joining competing businesses or launching ones of their own.

The FTC received more than 26,000 public comments in the months leading up to the vote. Chair Lina Khan referenced on Tuesday some of the stories she had heard from workers.

“We heard from employees who, because of noncompetes, were stuck in abusive workplaces,” she said. “One person noted when an employer merged with an organization whose religious principles conflicted with their own, a noncompete kept the worker locked in place and unable to freely switch to a job that didn’t conflict with their religious practices.”

These accounts, she said, “pointed to the basic reality of how robbing people of their economic liberty also robs them of all sorts of other freedoms.”

The FTC estimates about 30 million people, or one in five American workers, from minimum wage earners to CEOs, are bound by noncompetes. It says the policy change could lead to increased wages totaling nearly $300 billion per year by encouraging people to swap jobs freely.

The ban, which will take effect later this year, carves out an exception for existing noncompetes that companies have given their senior executives, on the grounds that these agreements are more likely to have been negotiated. The FTC says employers should not enforce other existing noncompete agreements.

The vote was 3 to 2 along party lines. The dissenting commissioners, Melissa Holyoke and Andrew Ferguson, argued that the FTC was overstepping the boundaries of its power. Holyoke predicted the ban would be challenged in court and eventually struck down.

Shortly after the vote, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it would sue the FTC to block the rule, calling it unnecessary, unlawful and a blatant power grab.

For more than a year, the group has vigorously opposed the ban, saying that noncompetes are vital to companies, by allowing them to better guard trade secrets, and employees, by giving employers greater incentive to invest in workforce training and development.

“This decision sets a dangerous precedent for government micromanagement of business and can harm employers, workers, and our economy,” wrote Suzanne P. Clark, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber, in a statement.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

The United States military has become more focused on training in Alaska, as Russia and China have looked to expand into the resource-rich and increasingly ice-free Arctic.

And that goes not just for conventional forces, but also for Special Operations forces like Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets. Both were training in Alaska this past winter by parachuting into frigid water off Kodiak or skiing through the woods around Fairbanks, among other exercises.

That was the subject of a story this month by the Washington Post, which was given rare access to Special Operations training in Alaska.

Washington Post reporter Alex Horton wrote the story and says the unforgiving environment is unique for such training.

Listen:

Alex Horton: In the Arctic, just surviving is the important part. You know, the extreme cold can have such an impact on you and your equipment that the first mission, really, is just to stay alive. And then the second mission is to conduct whatever you’re doing, right, whether it’s a patrol, an attack or a recovery operation. That survivability piece is, like, amped up more than any other environment on Earth.

Let’s just say, for example, you’re a Green Beret, and you’ve been shot. And you’re probably wearing big pants, coats, you know, the big thick boots. And the first thing that happens when you are wounded and a medic comes to help you is they open up your coat, they open up your pants, and all that heat just goes rushing out. And if you’re bleeding, that’s another way for your body to lose warmth. And even an IV bag that has blood in it, if they’re giving you a transfusion, the act of them giving you a transfusion is going to lower your body temperature even more. So the threat of hypothermia, the threat of water making you hypothermic, it’s an ever-present looming danger everywhere you operate in the Arctic.

Casey Grove: We’re talking about, you know, the importance of this training and what the military says about that and the whole, you know, sort of the geopolitical situation that we find ourselves, in this day and age. What did you hear from, you know, the military about that, about why it would be important for the special operations folks to be training in Alaska?

AH: You know, it’s important for Special Operations forces to be ready in any kind of environment and terrain where conflict can happen. And as climate change makes the ice recede, and there’s ships and all kinds of operations. You know, there’s energy exploration, there’s cruise ships, you know, they’re up in the Arctic, and that invites what the Pentagon calls “competition” (from) Russia and China, because there are resources to exploit, there are shipping routes to claim. You know, the sort of northern part of Russia, the way to get that energy to markets in Asia is going through the Bering Sea, around Alaska, to, you know, where Japan and Korea are. So it’s an important route for them. And it’s important route for China as well.

Why it’s important for Special Operations, specifically, too, is, you know, for the last 20 years, the command has really been focused on what they call “direct action” in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s going on raids, doing high-profile stuff like the SEAL raid to kill Osama bin Laden. That’s what they’ve been doing, and that’s what they’ve been focused on. So now, once the Pentagon has started looking to Russia and China as more of a strategic threat and as strategic competitors, they have to find a role for Special Operations. That means they have to change. They have to focus on places like the Arctic, to operate in a climate where they didn’t have to work in, you know, 5, 10, 15 years ago.

CG: Yeah, we’ve talked kind of about like, shipping lanes opening up and exploration and that kind of thing. But every once in a while, some Russian parliamentarian, you know, says, “We should take back Alaska,” and sort of puts this idea in Alaskans’ heads that maybe somebody’s going to invade mainland Alaska. From, you know, the individual Special Operations members to the commanders, did anybody that you talked to, like, even allude to something like that?

AH: It was interesting, because, you know, the folks who were helping coordinate the trip, Northern Command, which is the the military authority that oversees, you know, North America and also NORAD, like the missile command and defense of the country, their primary mission is homeland defense. When I asked them about how they view Alaska, it’s like, you know, as you said, it has a lot of bases, has a lot of training ranges. And I asked them, like, “Do you view Alaska as, not just a place to go train, but a place to go fight? You know, maybe you will be in the same places in the future, but shooting real rounds at real enemies?” They stopped short of saying that.

And, you know, they made the point that a lot of the training includes, you know, side-by-side with NATO partners. There were Norwegians in Alaska. There were the Danish soldiers training. So a lot of it is relevant to Northern Europe, you know, all those Arctic nations, because they have similar challenges up there that you find in Alaska. There’s glaciers, there’s extreme weather, and they’re right next to Russia, and Russia has substantial Arctic infrastructure. And it’s growing, too. They’re starting to turn the lights back on in some of those Soviet, Cold War-era bases. So yeah, I think they think of this in kind of two slices. One, this kind of exercise helps you, the U.S., get strong and competent in the Arctic, in extreme cold-weather training that they can apply if something were to happen in Europe. But I think what’s left unsaid is, this could also happen in the theoretical scenario of Russia or China invading through what the military calls the “Northern Approach,” which is through Alaska.

CG: Was it difficult to get access to this, to these training exercises? Or was the Pentagon, you know, the military, like, “Please, come do a story about this?”

AH: I gotta say, it was an unusual amount of access for Special Operations Command. You know, this is something that we were invited to, and it was very limited media availability, just because of the infrastructure, you know, like seats on aircraft and cold weather equipment to go around. Like, it was just logistically difficult to have any media there. So, you know, the Special Operations Command North facilitated this trip, and, you know, all the things we saw.

And yeah, it was fairly remarkable. You know, I was just a regular Army soldier in an infantry unit, and I served on a combat deployment in Iraq. And some of the teams and the aircraft that I saw, I’d only read about, I’ve never even seen in person, like the Special Operations variant of the Chinook (helicopter) is something I saw in movies, you know, so it was kind of cool to see that stuff. The soldiers are being flown around by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which is the unit that flew SEAL Team Six on the mission to kill Osama bin Laden. So they’re a very storied unit. And they were just, you know, the nicest, most professional folks you could meet. So, it was unusual, I would say, for reporters to meet with folks in that unit, and to be in those aircraft and to witness some of the training. It was a rare opportunity.

A new University of Alaska research project will look at how human-caused climate change affects fishing, farming and harvesting in the Gulf of Alaska to build resilience for communities that rely on the ocean.

Twenty million dollars of funding from the National Science Foundation will support the work of 23 researchers at all three University of Alaska campuses in Fairbanks, Juneau and Anchorage.

Jason Fellman of the Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center is one of the principal investigators on the Interface of Change project. He says warming from the burning of fossil fuels is changing the weather across Southeast Alaska, bringing more extreme rainfall and less winter snow.

It’s also rapidly accelerating glacial melt, which creates a steady trickle of freshwater, sediment and nutrients. 

“What’s running off the landscape potentially ends up in the nearshore marine,” Fellman said. “So these connections — land ocean connections — could be changing quite rapidly.”

Understanding those changing connections is important because the Gulf of Alaska supports vital commercial and subsistence harvests. 

The five-year project will examine important marine foods like red seaweeds, kelp, oysters, clams, mussels and salmon to see how they might be responding to the changing environment.

It will also focus on questions about mariculture. The industry is booming in Alaska, but it’s still young. 

“There’s still a lot to learn about this type of farming in the Gulf of Alaska,” Fellman said. “Maybe glacial runoff is driving places that are more suitable, or less, to growing seaweeds or kelps or something like that. Those are the types of questions we don’t know.”

Davin Holen, a coastal community resilience specialist with Alaska Sea Grant and one of the project’s five principal investigators, says the research will support the harvesting of traditional foods, too.

The goal is to create tools that people can use to adapt the timing and location of their subsistence harvests to keep up with a changing climate. There will also be projects focused on diversifying which species are gathered, and reconnecting younger generations to traditional foods.

“You can kind of build resilience, so that when the environment impacts one species, you still have lots of other species and the knowledge of how to harvest all those other species as part of your toolkit,” Holen said.

The researchers will work closely with industry partners, local science centers, and tribes in Juneau, Haines, Klukwan, Seldovia, Halibut Cove, Homer, Cordova and Valdez. 

Research efforts will kick off this summer.

The skin is our body’s largest organ, making up about 15% of our body weight. It’s our first line of defense, shielding us from environmental toxins, regulating our body temperature, and helping to get rid of waste through sweat. It’s also a mirror of our overall health; changes in its appearance can often signal underlying health issues. Join host Dr. Jillian Woodruff on this Line One, as she and her guest discuss the science of skin.

HOST: Dr. Jillian Woodruff

GUESTS:

• Dr. Courtney Bagayoko, MD, FAAD – Board Certified Dermatologist and owner of Anchorage Dermatology & Cosmetics.

RESOURCES:

• Anchorage Dermatology and Cosmetics
• Skin conditions by the numbers | American Academy of Dermatology
• Burden of skin disease | AAD
• What is a dermatologist? | AAD

LIVE BROADCAST: Wednesday, April 24, at 10 a.m. AKDT
REPEAT BROADCAST: Wednesday, April 24, at 8 p.m. AKDT

LINE ONE’S FAVORITE HEALTH AND SCIENCE LINKS:

• Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic offer extensive health information libraries
• MedlinePlus has a guide to finding reliable health information on the internet
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (ACAAI)
• Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit and common logical fallacies

SUBSCRIBE: 
Get updates on Line One: Your Health Connection and other Alaska Public Media podcasts here.

The Alaska House of Representatives is weighing in on a court decision that threatens key elements of the state’s homeschool system. 

Anchorage Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman ruled earlier this month a law authorizing cash payments to homeschool parents that can be spent on private or religious schooling violates the state Constitution. The judge called on lawmakers to draft a legislative fix.

The two-page “sense of the House” approved by a 20-18 vote Wednesday directs the Legislature’s lawyers to file a brief supporting a stay of the judge’s ruling through the end of June 2025. Rep. Craig Johnson, R-Anchorage, who sponsored the measure, said it’s an effort to give lawmakers some breathing room.

“This is simply asking the court for that time,” Johnson said. “It says, please give us time to inform those … 22,000 students and 261 teachers, to come up with some resolution so we don’t pull the rug out from under those people.”

The plaintiffs have also requested that the decision be put on hold, but only until the end of this June. 

Members of the House’s predominantly Democratic and independent minority caucus spoke out against a longer stay. Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, I-Sitka, cited a memo from the Legislature’s lawyers saying the state Board of Education is able to issue regulations that preserve the homeschool system while complying with the court decision.

“I would submit to this body that we have recourse right now to stabilize the system. We do not need another year,” she said. “A stay until the end of this fiscal year would help a whole lot, but we can take action right now — not us, the Legislature, but bodies within this state have the power to actually resolve this issue right now for the coming school year.”

Minority members argue a longer stay would allow unconstitutional spending to continue unabated.

Rep. Bryce Edgmon, a Dillingham independent who caucuses with the Republican-led majority, voted against the measure, saying he doesn’t want the Legislature to delay a fix.

“I don’t want to see this go towards the end of next session. I want to deal with this issue in a prudent manner in a prudent period of time,” Edgmon said.

Parties in the lawsuit are due to submit briefs on a stay by Friday. A ruling on whether the judge’s decision should be put on hold is expected the week of April 29.

Federal officials say the pilots of a cargo plane carrying thousands of gallons of fuel reported a fire just after taking off from Fairbanks Tuesday, then tried to turn back before they died in a fiery crash along the Tanana River.

The Federal Aviation Administration said in an incident report Wednesday that both pilots of the Douglas C-54, a four-engine propeller plane, were killed at about 10 a.m. Tuesday in the crash roughly seven miles south of Fairbanks International Airport.

Officials have not yet identified the two people killed in the crash or the cause of the onboard fire.

The flight was operated by Alaska Air Fuel, according to Clint Johnson, the National Transportation Safety Board’s Alaska chief. The Wasilla-based company could not be reached for comment Wednesday. 

According to Johnson, the C-54 was carrying 3,200 gallons of fuel oil bound for Kobuk, a small community roughly 300 miles away in the Northwest Arctic Borough. The plane had an additional 1,300 gallons of aviation gas in its own fuel tanks. 

A NTSB review of the pilots’ recorded radio calls with air traffic controllers, posted online by aviation data website FlightAware, offered additional details on the flight’s final moments.

“Shortly after departure, the crew reported to departure control that they had a fire on board — they weren’t specific as far as where that fire was, they just said they had a fire on board,” Johnson said. “They needed to return immediately to Fairbanks International. And shortly thereafter, we lost all ADS-B (tracking data), radar and also radio communications from the accident airplane.”

Johnson said investigators are interviewing witnesses like farmer Mike Emers, who said he saw one of the plane’s engines burning just before it crashed. They were also trying to reach pilots of other planes in Tuesday’s busy airspace around Fairbanks, in case they had seen other details prior to the crash.

RELATED: Fairbanks-area neighborhood shaken by fatal cargo plane crash

On the ground, Johnson said, conditions on the Tanana River pose challenges for search crews.

“This airplane crashed on a bluff, downhill on a bluff,” Johnson said. “Once the impact took place, a lot of the wreckage or some of the wreckage ended up in the river and on top of the rotten frozen ice. Right now, obviously, we’ve got some higher temperatures in the Fairbanks area; that ice is days from going out. So a lot of that stuff will probably eventually go through the ice.”

Alaska State Troopers said in an online dispatch that searchers were continuing to recover the pilots’ remains Wednesday. Troopers spokesman John Dougherty said by phone that the crash victims will not be named until they have been positively identified by the state medical examiner’s office.

State wildland firefighters said they responded to the crash site Tuesday and were able to prevent flames from spreading to trees in the area. Officials with the state Department of Environmental Conservation were still evaluating the crash site for the extent of any spill from the plane’s cargo overnight Tuesday.

KUAC’s Robyne and Tim Ellis contributed information to this story.

The Alaska House of Representatives is considering a bill that would require adult websites to verify users are 18 or older.

The bill would require sites that, as the bill puts it, “contain a substantial portion of pornography” to use a “commercially reasonable age verification method.” Similar bills have passed in more than a dozen other states. Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer, is sponsoring the effort in the House.

“This is simply trying to safeguard our children, because we do know that pornography is used as a grooming tool by predators on our children, and that’s what I’m seeking to prevent,” Vance told reporters on Tuesday.

Advocates say children are accessing adult content in their early years, sometimes unintentionally. In a 2014 study of adult men who had watched pornography in the last six months, the average age at which participants had first viewed adult content was around 12. 

And Vance says electronic age verification is a reasonable restriction — no different than showing an ID at a liquor store. 

But opponents say keeping minors from accessing inappropriate content isn’t so simple. Mike Stabile is with the Free Speech Coalition, a California-based adult content industry group lobbying against the bill.

“There’s no value in having minors come to our site. It’s a detriment to our site, both ethically and financially,” Stabile said. “But the legislation that’s been drafted is drafted with magical thinking. It’s not the way that consumers work, and it’s not the way that websites work.”

For one thing, Stabile said, age verification is ineffective, pushing users to sites based overseas that don’t have to comply with the law — or numerous other laws and regulations aimed at safeguarding performers and consumers. And consumers don’t want to comply, Stabile said, whether that’s over fears of data leaks or simply delays in accessing content. In states that have passed similar laws, Stabile said domestic adult sites saw traffic drop 95% as consumers took their traffic elsewhere.

Similar efforts in other states and at the federal level have also come under First Amendment scrutiny. A 1997 Supreme Court case struck down a federal law requiring age verification on adult sites. The court found that the requirement effectively suppressed a large amount of speech protected by the Constitution.

But more recent results in court have been mixed. Since a Louisiana law set off a flurry of state-level age verification efforts in 2022, courts have largely upheld age verification laws. Industry groups and First Amendment advocates are pushing the Supreme Court to step in. 

The Alaska age verification bill is due for amendments and a final House vote in the coming days. If passed, it’ll head to the Senate.

Anchorage’s incumbent Mayor Dave Bronson is facing an uphill battle against frontrunner and former Anchorage Assembly Chair Suzanne LaFrance in the upcoming runoff election. 

“We got a lot of doors to knock. We got a lot of calls to make, texts to send, postcards to write and votes to win over,” LaFrance told about 40 supporters at a campaign event on April 12 at an Anchorage labor union hall. She counts a lot of labor interests among her endorsements. 

“I’m excited about working with you all to build a better future for our community, and I’m ready to get to work,” she told her cheering audience. 

The Anchorage Assembly just certified the results of the regular election. Ballot packages for the runoff will be mailed next Tuesday and residents can cast their vote through Election Day, May 14.

LaFrance has outperformed Bronson, who’s seeking a second term as mayor of Alaska’s biggest city, in campaign fundraising, the regular election results and a post-election poll. 

Her lead in the regular election wasn’t huge, just 473 votes, which is less than 1%. But it was a crowded ballot, and a few days after the regular election from April 5 to 7, Alaska Survey Research polled 1,408 Anchorage adults and found that among the likely voters in an either-or runoff, LaFrance led Bronson about 56% to 44%. 

And that was before the third-place finisher in the regular election, Bill Popp, endorsed LaFrance. Popp got nearly 17% of the vote. 

Neither campaign would share much about their strategy to win the runoff. 

“There’s targeting and there’s strategy,” LaFrance said in an interview last week. “And, you know, we’ll be focusing our efforts on those folks who are likely to be supportive. And, you know, we’ll be taking a broad look from, you know, south of Girdwood there, all the way to north of Eagle River as we get out our message.”

The Bronson campaign would not comment on the poll or address questions about its path to victory for this story. In a text message, campaign manager Blake Stieren said, “While LaFrance and friends are measuring the drapes the Bronson campaign is working hard to earn votes. We don’t have any comment beyond that.” 

Since its second-place finish in the regular election, the Bronson campaign appears to be ramping up its advertising around one specific theme: balance. 

“This election is about balance,” Bronson says in one video. “A choice between Suzanne LaFrance and a far left Assembly who are in complete lockstep on every single issue, or a balanced government that represents and respects both sides of the political spectrum. I stand for balance and I think most Anchorage residents do, too.” 

The city’s elections are nonpartisan, but nine out of 12 current Assembly members identify as Democrats or politically left-of-center. LaFrance is a nonpartisan, endorsed by the local chapter of the Alaska Democratic Party. Bronson and a few members who often align with him on controversial issues are Republicans or conservatives. 

The Democrats also endorsed the fourth-place candidate for mayor, Chris Tuck. 

Tuck, who got about 8% of the vote, said he’s holding off on an endorsement. He’s watching the campaigns for what he said Anchorage needs: civility. Some of his supporters have alleged that some LaFrance supporters have tried to bully or intimidate his backers. 

Tuck doesn’t think his voters will fall cleanly into the Bronson or LaFrance camps for the runoff.

“Man, it’s a really tough one due to the fact that I had a lot of people that voted for Bronson originally, that ended up voting for me this last time around,” Tuck said. “I think it’s pretty well split.”

He said his campaign concentrated on people who turn out for primary elections and general elections, but tend to miss municipal elections. 

“It was still surprising to me with all of our efforts, the difficulty we had in getting people to vote,” Tuck said. 

Tuck said he had several supporters tell him recently that they were planning to vote for him or work on his campaign. He didn’t have the heart to tell them the election was already over. 

“People are unaware,” he said. “They don’t know. I think that’s just the nature of our municipal races, our municipal elections, is just very low voter turnout.” 

Anchorage switched to a vote-by-mail system in 2018. Since then, about 1 in 3 registered voters has turned out for mayoral elections. This year’s regular election had the lowest mayoral election turnout since the switch, at 30.4%. 

Longtime friend, former Democratic legislator and Tuck campaign co-chair Tom Begich is backing LaFrance. He thinks it’s unlikely an endorsement from Tuck will swing the outcome of the runoff.

He said Bronson has virtually 100% name recognition in the city. But across multiple polls, Begich said he has “horrific” approval ratings. 

“He’s sitting incumbent mayor, and he didn’t even get the most votes,” he said. “And I even thought he’d get a few more votes than Suzanne LaFrance. But I didn’t expect him to be in second position. That is a terrible deficit to come back from.”

Bronson is Anchorage’s ninth elected mayor since the city and borough unified in 1975. So far, only one has failed to win a second term. That was George Wuerch, who, like Bronson, is a Republican. He lost to Mark Begich (who is Tom’s brother) in 2003. Mark Begich, like LaFrance, was a liberal challenger and also a former Anchorage Assembly chair at the time. 

This cycle, Wuerch has endorsed Bronson.

Anchorage youth homeless service provider Covenant House is receiving a $1 million federal grant aimed at supporting young Alaskans as they age out of the foster care system. 

Jeff Hild is principal deputy assistant secretary for the federal Administration for Children and Families. He announced the funding during a tour of Covenant House on Wednesday.

“You guys are one of 11 around the country that’s part of this demonstration project,” Hild said. “And so, as you heard, the goal is to get the intervention upstream before a young person is in crisis.”

Exact figures for the number of homeless youth in Anchorage are spotty, though Covenant House officials say the total is in the thousands. Last year, the organization had 957 young people use its services. More than half of them were Alaska Native. 

Heidi Huppert, chief program officer with Covenant House, said the federal funding will be used to help assist children before they age out of the foster care system at 18. 

“Young people that are on that cusp of transitioning out — maybe six months or a year before they’re out of that care — and provide that extra level of support,” Huppert said. “Because we know a lot of them end up with us after a year anyway.”

Covenant House began as a youth homeless shelter more than 30 years ago, but has now expanded into temporary and full-time housing with focuses on youth job training as well.

The federal grant will be dispersed over a three-year pilot period. Huppert said some of the money will go toward hiring two staff members to help the young people navigate the program, but most of it will go directly to the youth. 

“The rest of the money is going to be direct cash assistance, and then all the other [things] like transportation, picking young people up, you know, those kinds of costs,” Huppert said.

Hild said this is the first-ever federal program aimed at giving direct cash assistance to young people who are homeless or using homeless services, which he said helps to eliminate barriers to resources that sometimes occur through other voucher programs. 

He said he hopes to present the findings of the 11 pilot programs to Congress after three years to help facilitate more funding for homeless youth nationwide.

WASHINGTON — In an effort to crack down on airlines that charge passengers steep fees to check bags and change flights, the U.S. Department of Transportation has announced new regulations aimed at expanding consumer protections.

One of the final rules announced Wednesday requires airlines to show the full price of travel before passengers pay for their tickets. The other will force airlines to provide prompt cash refunds when flights are canceled or significantly changed.

“Passengers deserve to know upfront what costs they are facing and should get their money back when an airline owes them – without having to ask,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a statement announcing the new rules.

Surprise junk fees have become a large and growing source of revenue for airlines in recent years, according to the DOT.

“Today’s announcements will require airlines to both provide passengers better information about costs before ticket purchase, and promptly provide cash refunds to passengers when they are owed — not only saving passengers time and money, but also preventing headaches,” Buttigieg said.

The airline industry is unlikely to welcome the new rules. At a hearing on the proposed fee rule in March 2023, an industry lobbying group representing American, Delta and United said it would be too difficult for airlines to disclose their charges more clearly.

“The amount of unwanted and unneeded information forced upon passengers” by the new policy would only cause “confusion and frustration,” warned Doug Mullen, the deputy general counsel at Airlines for America. “Very few, if any, need or want this information, and especially when they are initially trying to understand schedule and fare options.”

But the DOT insists its new rule will give consumers the information they need to better understand the true costs of air travel.

“I believe this is to the benefit of the sector as a whole,” Buttigieg said in an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, because passengers will have “more confidence in the aviation sector.”

The new rules require airlines to disclose all baggage, change, and cancellation fees, and to share that information with third-party booking sites and travel agents.

The regulation also prohibits bait-and-switch tactics, the DOT says, that disguise the true cost of flights by advertising a low base fare that does not include all mandatory fees.

“This is really about making sure that we create a better experience for passengers, and a stronger aviation sector in the United States,” Buttigieg said in the NPR interview.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

A new campus slated for Juneau will be dedicated to immersing children in Alaska Native culture and languages, according to the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska.

Tlingit and Haida President Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson announced the plans last week during his State of the Tribe address at the 89th Annual Tribal Assembly. The 12-acre tribal education campus would serve students from early childhood into college.

“We’re trying to build a village. To bring land back isn’t just a social movement — it’s our way of life,” he said. “It’s bringing the lands that were traditionally ours, and taking them and making them ours again, and giving our people the space to thrive.”

A walking path weaving through the property would connect the campus buildings. Current Tlingit and Haida education programs will come together on the site, and so will a new tribal college and K-12 school program. Last year, Tlingit and Haida was one of five tribal organizations to receive a state-tribal education compacting grant.

Education compact agreements allow tribes to develop their own K-12 curriculum and schedule. But, unlike charter schools, they’d be independent of existing public school districts. 

Peterson says the goal of the campus and the tribal schools program is to improve education outcomes for Alaska Native students by providing culturally relevant, place-based lessons.

“What we’re trying to do is give us a sense of ourselves. That our children can be grown up and raised surrounded by our own art, our own languages. That our languages float through the air every day,” he said. 

The campus will also have a space for a new event center. Peterson says he hopes it can be a gathering place for major events like Celebration, the Gold Medal Basketball Tournament and Native Youth Olympics. 

And there’s room to expand. The 12-acre property — located behind Fred Meyer — is just a portion of 42 acres of land on Glacier Highway that the tribe recently acquired. 

“Our goal is to grow it out. We’ve already gotten some feedback,” he said. “Classrooms need to be a little bigger, we need more parking — but we have the space for that.”

The tribe likely won’t break ground on the project for at least a few years, with fundraising happening over the next three to four years. Peterson says a lot could still change about the plan during that time. 

During the assembly last week, the tribe also unveiled a plan for a cultural immersion park on more than 450 acres of land near Tee Harbor. That project is in partnership with Allen Marine Tours.

Three men are charged in federal court with illegally transporting Alaska crab to sell in Washington. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Alaska says Kyle Potter and Justin Welch caught crab in Southeast Alaska this spring and moved them to Seattle at the direction of Potter’s dad, Corey.

The federal indictment says Corey Potter owns the two fishing vessels involved, which were run by his son, Kyle, and Welch. One of the boats is the 97-foot Arctic Dawn, which has been docked in Petersburg this spring but is registered to a Kodiak residence.

The two captains participated in the Southeast Tanner and golden king crab fisheries in February and March, harvesting over 7,000 pounds. Corey Potter allegedly directed the two captains to transport the crab to Seattle to fetch a higher price.

By the time they arrived, according to the charges, a lot of the king crab was already dead and about 4,000 pounds of Tanner had to be thrown out because of bitter crab syndrome. Bitter crab is a common parasite and is sorted out at Alaska ports when fishermen sell their catch. It causes the crab to taste bad but isn’t harmful.

The federal indictment says Kyle Potter and Welch never recorded their harvests at an Alaska port, which is required by state law. And they took the undocumented crab through Canadian and Washington waters, which violates a federal law called the Lacey Act.

All three men are charged with unlawfully transporting fish or wildlife, with Corey Potter facing two counts and the others facing one count each. Their first court appearance is set for May 2 in U.S. District Court in Anchorage.

In February, Justin Welch was fined $1,000 in state court for using king crab pots that don’t allow smaller crabs to escape. He was put on probation for one year. Corey Potter and his family, including Kyle, were rescued in 2016 from their 74-foot tender boat, the Ambition, when it sank near False Pass in the Aleutian Islands.

Attorneys for the men are not listed in the federal indictment. The U.S. Attorney’s office declined to comment further on the case.

A few years ago, a set of 20,000-year-old human footprints in a dry lakebed in New Mexico set scientists reeling. Those fossilized footprints, originally discovered in 2009, called into question what we thought we knew about when people first showed up in North America. Archaeologists thousands of miles away in Alaska felt the scientific impact especially strongly.

A recent paper published in the journal Nature attempts to set a new timeframe of when the first humans might have appeared along the coast of Southeast Alaska, using cave remains and animal fossils from the region.

But it’s just one piece of a much bigger puzzle.

The Nature article caught the attention of Nick Schmuck, an archaeologist with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources. He said how and when people showed up in Alaska and the Americas is a debate that may never be settled in the scientific community.

“It doesn’t take long getting into the literature on this topic to realize that this is really a heated debate,” Schmuck said. “You’ve got folks who are diehards for one idea. You can think about it as paradigms, you know, we all think about a topic in a certain way for a while.”

According to Schmuck, there are many theories in this debate but currently, the most commonly held belief is in the Coastal Migration Theory.

Remember learning about the Bering land bridge in middle school? That’s part of the Coastal Migration Theory, which suggests that after the last Ice Age, early humans migrating from Asia crossed the land bridge between Russia and Alaska in search of food. Then they traveled, either by foot or by boat, down along the coast of Alaska and into the rest of the Americas.

“These people coming into the Americas – doesn’t matter how far back we go – they’re just as capable as you and I. So, they can figure out how to use boats. They were no strangers to rivers and things like that, so, why not the coast?” Schmuck said.

For his own part, Schmuck is a bit of a pluralist. He believes this is one of many potential routes early humans took. 

The recent Nature article, “New age constraints for human entry into the Americas on the north Pacific coast” by Martina Steffen, attempts to tighten the parameters of the coastal migration debate. The paper looks at gaps in dates of animal fossils and archaeological sites, including 18 caves and sites in Southeast Alaska.

During the iciest part of the last Ice Age, a massive ice sheet advanced across the western part of the continent and over Prince of Wales Island, the largest island in Southeast. All of that now dry land, buried under thousands of tons of ice. Archaeologists believe that at its peak — known as the “glacial maximum” — about 18,000 years ago, that giant wall of ice would have blocked off any land routes down the coastline. Think of it like a gate that closed for over 1,000 years. 

So, the commonly held belief is that people showed up after that, as the glaciers melted from the outside in, revealing land and food to eat.

For Schmuck, it isn’t just the fossil record that supports this post-glacial theory, it’s the spoken record of the descendants of these first people. 

“They sound like people coming to an early post-glacial Southeast Alaska,” Schmuck said, describing oral histories. “They talk about coming to a land that’s just a narrow strip of land between the ice and the sea. Like, holy cow! That’s what Southeast Alaska would have been before the trees came in.”

“I think the important thing to remember is that we know that we have been here for at least 12,000 years. We know that from DNA science,” said Kaaháni Rosita Worl, a Lingit anthropologist and president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute. 

Worl is a descendant of those first people.

“To me, it affirms our oral traditions that say we’ve been here since time immemorial,” she said.

If the carbon dating was done correctly, and most archaeologists now agree it was, the New Mexico footprints are much older than the signs of human life found in Southeast Alaska. That means the footprints were from someone who was in North America before those giant ice sheets sealed the land shut, which, in turn, means that either the humans that left the New Mexico footprints didn’t cross the Bering land bridge at all or people were here much earlier than Western scientists had thought.

“There had to be another route,” said Worl. “And the coastal route – it opens up and you have resources available that people could live on.”

The footprints changed everything, according to Bryn Letham, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. And of course, he says, there were skeptics. Some made a plausible argument that the carbon-dating was wrong. But as time went on, that didn’t seem to be the case. The White Sands team kept testing the fossils and every time got the same result: that footprint was from someone 21,000-23,000 years ago.

In a 2024 article for PaleoAmerica, Letham wrote that it was breathtaking, but it also raised an existential question for him and his colleagues: “What have we been spending our careers doing?”

Had they been searching in the wrong places? The wrong times?

The footprints in New Mexico started a race among those studying the Pacific Northwest coast. Most of the geologists and archaeologists are united by a common goal — to find the oldest sites of human occupation.

Currently, the earliest signs of life in Southeast Alaska is Shuká Káa – a human skeleton and set of tools from about 10,300 years ago in a cave on Prince of Wales Island.

It’s possible archaeologists just haven’t found older evidence yet, because of the challenges of searching in the forest-covered region.

“I mean, you’ve been in the Tongass, it’s big trees. It’s hard to see very far ahead of you and it’s hard to imagine what the landscape looked like,” said Nick Schmuck, adding though that the technology is improving. Specifically, a method called LiDAR that can map the earth’s topography using pulsed lasers.

“It takes all the trees off and gives you a new map based on the surface. All of the sudden, beach terraces pop out like you wouldn’t believe. And you can just look at the image and say, ‘Oh, there’s an ancient shoreline right here.’ And you can hike right to it. And boom, there’s your 10,000 year old beach with a 10,000 year old site on it.”

Another factor in Southeast Alaska is what one scientist refers to as almost a tectonic seesaw effect. During that glacial maximum, the massive ice sheet that covered the mainland was so heavy that it literally pushed the land down. That caused the outlying islands and land masses further off the mainland to rise up above sea level, like a seesaw.

What this means for Southeast Alaska is that a lot of the oldest evidence of humans is probably either at the top of a mountain or the bottom of the ocean — which is where Kelly Monteleone, an underwater archaeologist with Sealaska Heritage Institute, comes in.

“There’s this huge, vast area that we haven’t explored yet. And so there’s so much we can find,” Monteleone said.

According to Monetleone, her profession is pretty much the same thing as a regular archaeologist. It just involves some extra work.

“Nothing changes between the terrestrial answer and the underwater answer, we just have a much more complicated step every step of the way,” she laughed.

What Monetleone and her team have found on the seafloor, including a fish weir that would have been at sea level more than 10,000 years ago, changes the “when” of coastal migration.

“I see myself as having the resources to help answer the questions of the Indigenous people of Southeast Alaska. So I have the skills as an underwater archaeologist to go out and look in areas to help them learn about their past,” she said.

As Bryn Letham put it, the current people of the coastal First Nations are the descendants of those first post-glacial humans.

Schmuck agreed, saying that in Southeast Alaska, “we’re talking about the ancestors of people who’ve been here for a really long time.”

He acknowledged that archaeology as a profession hasn’t always been a positive force in that regard.

“We don’t want to get too abstract about the people in the past,” he said. “We don’t want to get back into the old faults of archaeology, where we’re just looking at rocks and forgetting to think about people. These are people’s ancestors.”

Letham, Worl, Schmuck, and Monteleone all point out that the Indigenous peoples along the Northwest Coast are strikingly diverse. There are so many languages and cultures in such a condensed area and they are so isolatedly different from each other that it seems like people would’ve had to have been here a lot longer than other parts of the Americas. In other words, it takes a lot of long, sustained time in one place for entire languages and cultures to develop.

On the northwest Pacific coast, there are dozens in close proximity, each distinctly different from the next, which tells anthropologists that people got to Southeast Alaska after the last Ice Age and stayed, splintering off into tribes and isolate cultures over many thousands of uninterrupted years. 

These origins are older than people can generally comprehend, predating known forms of agricultural civilization.

“The concept of time at 12,000 years is not a concept that humans can usually digest,” said Moneteleone. “Time immemorial, the beginning of time: 12,000 years ago, 16,000, 20,000 years ago – those are all the beginning of time.”

And while the rest of the world chases after New Mexico’s footprints, Monteleone says that understanding the history of the people of the Northwest Coast is an archaeological field of study that is still in its infancy.

Get in touch with the author at jack@krbd.org.

The Alaska House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a proposal that would bar children under 14 from creating social media accounts. The measure came as an amendment to an otherwise unrelated bill that would require adult websites to verify users are 18 or older.

Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage, said he drew inspiration for the social media measure from an unlikely source — a conservative Republican governor thousands of miles away.

“This amendment is based almost verbatim on a bill signed into law last month in Florida drafted by Gov. Ron DeSantis,” Gray told colleagues during the late-night session. “Verbatim” might be a stretch — the 20-page Florida bill came to the Alaska House as a three-page amendment.

But the concept is the same. The amendment would ban kids under 14 from creating accounts on social media platforms. If the amendment survives the remainder of the legislative process in the House and Senate and is signed into law, 14- and 15-year-olds would need written parental consent to create an account. People under 14 would have their existing accounts deleted.

“According to the US Surgeon General, nearly 40% of children eight to 12 years old, and 95% of children 13 to 17 years old, use social media apps,” Gray said, referencing a 2023 report from the nation’s top doctor. “Teens who spend more than three hours a day on social media double their risk of depression and anxiety.”

And his colleagues agreed. The Alaska House of Representatives approved the amendment in a 27-11 bipartisan vote Wednesday night.

The amendment is attached to a bill that the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer, listed as a priority for the last few weeks of the legislative session — a measure that would require adult websites to use a “commercially reasonable age verification method” to ensure users are 18 or older. Similar age verification bills have passed in more than a dozen other states.

Gray is a member of the mostly Democratic and independent House minority caucus, making the sequence of events fairly unusual — typically, when a bill comes to the floor, members of the 23-person Republican-led House majority caucus line up to defend the bill as written.

But every so often, an issue emerges that exposes cracks in the facade. And the social media ban for kids quickly picked up steam. 

Soon after Gray introduced the amendment, Rep. Jesse Sumner, R-Wasilla, stood up to support it — it’s similar to a bill sponsored by the House Labor and Commerce Committee, which Sumner leads.

And then, one after another, Democrats and independents came out in favor of the social media limits.

“I think that kids need to be given their lives back and to get to know one another in their own neighborhoods, and to have their innocence restored,” said Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage.

“As a mom, I am horrified thinking about my kids being on social media or the internet one day. I think looking out for our kids is not a partisan issue,” said Rep. Jennie Armstrong, D-Anchorage, who also praised DeSantis for “taking the lead on this” issue.

Some of the youngest House lawmakers, though, were split. Rep. Geneveive Mina, D-Anchorage, age 28, recalled encountering troubling content on the bizarro imageboard 4chan as young as 10 years old. She spoke in support of limiting kids’ social media use. 

“I don’t usually say that I’m an expert on anything, but I feel like I’m an expert on being a girl on the internet,” Mina told her House colleagues. “I’ve lived this, right? And I think there’s a really important nuance in this conversation when we’re talking about social media and the role that it plays in young women and young girls and the impacts on mental health.”

But Alaska’s youngest sitting lawmaker spoke out against the ban. Twenty-six-year-old Rep. CJ McCormick, D-Bethel, recalled how social media helped him keep in touch with family — and played a key role in pressuring rap star Kendrick Lamar into following through on a promise to visit Bethel after students won a college-prep contest.

“Unfortunately, Kendrick Lamar didn’t want to come out to Alaska, so all we got was a Skype call. But thanks to some rambunctious student council members, we decided to make quite a media storm on Twitter,” McCormick said. 

The social media campaign “caught the attention of Taco Bell, who then brought us [NBA star] James Harden, [MTV personality] Sway Calloway, and then it just turned out that Kendrick Lamar was performing at the State Fair, and he actually surprised us and showed up,” he continued.

Rep. David Eastman, R-Wasilla, raised free speech concerns, saying he was concerned the limits on social media were written so broadly that they would keep kids off broad swaths of the internet that allow user-generated content, from Amazon reviews to Google Docs to comments on news websites. Eastman also said age verification requirements could lead websites that don’t want to comply to exclude Alaskans of any age.

Federal judges have blocked similar laws targeting children’s use of social media in Arkansas and Ohio.

Others speaking against the bill, including Vance, the sponsor of the underlying age verification bill, said they were concerned the social media limits hadn’t been studied closely enough by lawmakers.

“The idea may be merited, but the details of the bill have great importance,” Vance said. “We’re not here to pass ideas. We’re here to pass good laws.”

But many of her colleagues rebuffed Vance’s request for more time and the amendment passed with significant bipartisan support. The House is, for now, scheduled to take a final vote on the combined age verification/social media measure on Friday.

A majority of the Supreme Court appeared skeptical of granting a president blanket immunity from prosecution for criminal acts. But it was unclear whether the court would act swiftly to resolve the case against former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

The justices pushed lawyers for Trump and the special counsel prosecuting him over the limits of presidential immunity, but much of their questioning appeared to center on broad implications for the presidency — rather than what it would mean for Trump.

“We’re writing a rule for the ages,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said.

Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, asked whether a president might curtail his own actions if he could be prosecuted for actions taken while in office.

“If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” he asked.

The question of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution after leaving office has never been decided by the Supreme Court, making Thursday’s arguments at the Supreme Court genuinely historic. Specifically, Trump claims that the steps he took to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election were part of his official duties and that he thus cannot be criminally prosecuted for them.

John Sauer, Trump’s attorney, said charging a president might make that president more hesitant about making consequential decisions.

“If a president can be charged, put on trial and imprisoned for his most consequential decisions as soon as he leaves office, that looming threat will distort the president’s decision-making, precisely when bold and fearless action is most needed,” he said.

When pressed by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, Sauer acknowledged that many of the actions the former president is charged with were private in nature — not official — and hence not subject to immunity.

But several of the justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, appeared concerned that lower courts that have ruled on the matter did not distinguish between Trump’s official and private actions.

“What concerns me is, as you know, the court of appeals did not get into a focused consideration of what acts we’re talking about or what documents we’re talking about,” Roberts said.

Michael Dreeben, the lawyer for the special counsel, told the justices that blanket immunity would allow a president to commit “bribery, treason, sedition, murder.”

“The Framers knew too well the dangers of a king who could do no wrong,” he said.

But he was subject to intense questioning from the court’s conservatives.

A decision in the case is expected by the summer and could affect the timeline — and indeed the fate — of the federal prosecution against Trump. After Thursday’s argument, it appeared that any Trump trial will be held — if it is held at all — after the presidential election.

Basics and background on the case

President Richard Nixon, while in office, was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Watergate scandal, but he was not prosecuted then because the Justice Department concluded that under the Constitution, a sitting president could not be criminally prosecuted. Once Nixon resigned in 1974, however, and was no longer protected as a sitting president, he accepted a pardon from President Gerald Ford rather than face criminal charges.

Trump is making a far broader argument for immunity. He contends that he cannot be prosecuted — ever — for his “official acts” as president unless he is first impeached, convicted by the Senate and removed from office. He was impeached twice, but the Senate was not able to muster the two-thirds vote needed to convict. So, were the Supreme Court to embrace Trump’s argument, it would mean, given modern political realities, that he and future presidents would likely be immune from prosecution after leaving office.

Trump’s definition of a protected official act is a broad one, as illustrated by an exchange between Sauer, his lawyer, and Judge Florence Pan during arguments at the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., earlier this year.

“Could a president order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?” Pan asked, noting that an order given by the commander in chief to the military would be an official act.

Sauer replied that a former president could not be charged for giving such an order unless he had been “impeached and convicted first.”

The three-judge appeals court panel, including two Democratic and one Republican appointee, ruled unanimously against Trump on the immunity question in February. Trump then appealed to the Supreme Court, though the former president was not there Thursday because he is required to be at his New York trial on charges that allege that he falsified New York business records in order to conceal damaging information to influence the 2016 presidential election.

A test for the high court

Although four criminal indictments are pending against Trump, only one was before the Supreme Court on Thursday: special counsel Jack Smith’s case alleging that Trump knowingly and falsely sought to prevent Biden, the duly elected president, from taking office.

The high court case is more than a test for presidential immunity. It is also something of a test for the Supreme Court itself, on both substance and timing. After all, even if the court were to rule against Trump, if the justices drag their feet or send the case back to the trial court for significant further findings, a Trump trial would be almost certainly impossible before the November election. And if he is elected for a second time, Trump could try to dismiss the case against him — or even pardon himself if he were convicted.

Trump lawyer William Scharf maintains that everything the former president is accused of doing was an official act and that after leaving office, Trump cannot be prosecuted for those acts. “What President Trump was trying to do was investigate election fraud in the aftermath of the 2020 election,” Scharf says.

Without presidential immunity, Scharf contends, “you end up in a scenario where presidents will be paralyzed by the fear of post-election criminal prosecutions, and the ability of the president to discharge his duties in a vigorous and effective way will be forever crippled.”

Not so, counters Peter Keisler, who served as a top Justice Department official in President George W. Bush’s administration: “You don’t protect the presidency by immunizing somebody who tries to steal it.”

Keisler has joined with several dozen high-ranking former Republican officeholders in filing a Supreme Court brief opposed to Trump’s position.

“The text of the Constitution has no provision granting this immunity. No court decision has ever recognized this immunity. The historical understanding in our country has always been exactly the opposite,” Keisler says. “Fundamentally, Trump’s argument’s just at war with the basic precept of our system that says that no one’s above the law.”

New York University law professor Trevor Morrison also pushes back at Trump’s claim that his actions surrounding the 2020 election were part of a president’s official duties. “The Constitution gives the president no role whatsoever in the administration of federal elections,” says Morrison, adding that the states, Congress and even the vice president play a role. But there is no mention in the Constitution of the president playing a role.

As for Trump’s claim that no president can be prosecuted unless he has first been impeached, convicted and removed from office, Morrison calls that argument “preposterous.”

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell clearly rejected that idea when he voted against conviction in the second Trump impeachment. “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office,” McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor. “We have a criminal justice system in this country … and former presidents are not immune.”

But Trump lawyer Scharf contends that if the Supreme Court doesn’t put a stop to presidential liability now, “you’ll have an endless cycle of recriminations and prosecutions at the end of every presidency.” If Trump can be prosecuted after leaving office for what he did in seeking to void the election results, he says, then why not Biden for his handling of the border, Barack Obama for ordering drone strikes that resulted in American casualties and George W. Bush for starting the Iraq War?

Trump rests much of his argument on a 1982 Supreme Court decision holding that presidents have absolute immunity from civil lawsuits for their official acts. But the court majority in that case emphasized that it was not deciding whether a similar immunity exists when it comes to criminal prosecutions.

The Trump briefs don’t include any significant discussion of the Nixon tapes case

In that landmark decision, the court ordered Nixon to turn over to prosecutors specific White House tape recordings in which Nixon, then still president, plotted to cover up various campaign crimes, including the attempted bugging of the Democratic National Committee offices. When the White House tapes eventually became public, they led inexorably to a House committee vote to approve articles of impeachment and then Nixon’s ultimate resignation.

Still, Thursday’s case is not a slam dunk for the prosecutors. NYU’s Morrison says it’s “significant” that three members of the court — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan and Brett Kavanaugh — previously served in the White House and were “responsible for attending to questions of presidential prerogatives and presidential power.”

Kavanaugh has been on both sides of these issues. He played an important role in the special counsel’s investigation of the sex scandal involving President Bill Clinton, but more importantly, he served first as associate counsel and then, for three years, as staff secretary for President George W. Bush.

With that in mind, the brief filed by the group of former Republican officeholders has advanced something of a middle ground. It rejects presidential immunity for federal crimes undertaken by a president on or after Election Day in order to usurp the legitimate results of a democratic election.

On “the particular facts of the case, where the charge is that he unlawfully tried to seize the presidency after losing the election, it’s sufficient to say there’s certainly no presidential immunity … for crimes like that,” says Keisler.

That would leave undecided tricky immunity questions involving presidential decisions centered on foreign relations or use of the military abroad.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

The city of King Cove is worried about the future after its seafood processor announced earlier this month that it will cease operations. The plant, formerly owned by Peter Pan Seafood Company, is the economic engine of the community on the Alaska Peninsula. 

A new owner will take over the processing plant, but it’s unclear when the facility will reopen. Kirsten Dobroth is the Alaska reporter for Undercurrent News, which is a commercial fishing and seafood industry trade magazine. She’s been reporting on what this means just ahead of salmon season.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ava White: Why is this plant closing- at least for now? 

Kirsten Dobroth: The seafood industry has been struggling with this historic slump in wholesale and dockside prices. Back in December, Trident Seafoods announced it would sell four of its shoreside processing plants in Alaska because of this market situation. At the time that was kind of a bombshell that got a lot of attention outside the industry.

And within a few weeks of that announcement Peter Pan Seafood Company also said it would temporarily close its facility in King Cove for winter. That’s noteworthy for a number of reasons – it’s the company’s biggest plant, it processes a number of species year round. But at the time Peter Pan said it would reopen for the summer salmon season. 

AW: And it sounds like now that’s not happening.

KD: Right. It was pretty widely reported as time went on that Peter Pan was in some serious financial trouble. And then fast forward to just a few weeks ago – it comes out that Silver Bay Seafoods, which is also a major processor in the state, will take over all four of Peter Pan’s plants as part of this major restructuring plan that’s still being finalized. Silver Bay says in the announcement that it will operate all the Peter Pan plants for the summer – except for King Cove. 

Meanwhile, Peter Pan really wasn’t saying anything about what it planned to do with King Cove. But there were some signs that things weren’t looking good – for instance, some fishermen I spoke with were already signing on with other buyers for summer. 

And then about two weeks ago the company posted on Facebook that the plant would stay closed and encouraged people to apply to Silver Bay for work. And since then Silver Bay has also confirmed that – at least for now – it doesn’t have plans to open the facility.

AW: Okay, so a lot has happened. Why is this Peter Pan news such a big deal in this whole picture?

KD: There are a few things that are notable about this announcement between Silver Bay and Peter Pan. One is that it’s a major deal between two of the state’s biggest and more recognizable shoreside processors – and one is effectively ending operations altogether less than two months before the start of salmon season, which is the peak time for most processors and fishermen.

Another noteworthy point to the Peter Pan side of this – the current owners only bought the company back in 2021. One of the financial backers of that sale was McKinley Capital Management, which was using money from the Permanent Fund Corporation’s in-state investment program at the time. I don’t know what the implications of that are. But I think when you look at how quickly this company is halting operations – it’s really indicative of how quickly things have changed for one of the state’s biggest industries.

AW: Okay, so let’s go back to King Cove, what does this mean for that community?

KD: The implications for the city of King Cove are huge. I’ve talked to city officials there pretty frequently since early this year and this is a big financial hit for them. More than half King Cove’s general fund budget comes from fishing landing taxes. And I think the ambiguous timeline for reopening has people there worried. 

Some hurdles to reopening quickly, though, are deferred maintenance at the facility that need to be addressed. Silver Bay has also said it’s prioritizing absorbing as much of Peter Pan’s fleet as possible, including up in Bristol Bay, where Silver Bay will now operate two processing plants because of this Peter Pan deal. So, that will likely eat up some of the company’s more immediate expenses. 

But keeping King Cove closed will have a regional impact, too. Fishermen outside of that local fleet have historically delivered to the King Cove plant depending on the species and price at any given point. So, I think there’s a lot of people that are anxiously awaiting word on when things will be back up and running.