Announcement Ketchikan: To Send Condolences To The Freeman Family - In response to the many requests for contact information for the Freeman family, cards of condolences may be mailed to the following company address for Major Stephen Freeman's family.. - More.... Saturday - January 28, 2006 News Ketchikan: Ketchikan borough annexation draws ire of neighbors By Lisa Phu - Ketchikan's recent action toward expanding their borough an additional 4701 square miles, including Meyers Chuck but excluding Hyder, has put pressure on Southeast towns who are currently part of the unorganized borough to move forward with their own borough proposals. - Read this story... Petersburg Pilot www.petersburgpilot.com Top Stories U.S. News U.S. Politics Alaska Ketchikan

Alaska: Ameriquest to Pay $325 Million and Reform its Lending Practices - Alaska Attorney General David Márquez announced this week that Ameriquest Mortgage Company, the nation's largest sub-prime lender, has agreed to pay $295 million to consumers and make sweeping reforms of practices that states alleged amounted to predatory lending. Ameriquest also will pay a total of $30 million to the 49 states and the District of Columbia that are participating in the settlement agreement for costs of the investigation and consumer education and enforcement. - More...
Saturday AM - January 28, 2006

International: 'Earthquake' in Middle East challenges U.S. policies By ANNA BADKHEN - While the Bush administration scrambled to find a silver lining in the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections, many Middle East experts said the development has dealt a major blow to prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace and is likely to force a revision of the administration's strategy of promoting democracy as an alternative to militant Islam in the region.

"This is an earthquake in the Middle East," said David Makovsky, an expert on Arab-Israeli relations at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "It's hard to see any negotiations now between anybody." - More...
Saturday AM - January 28, 2006

The Week In Review By THOMAS HARGROVE - Hamas wins Palestinian elections -Hamas, the militant Islamic group that sponsors suicide bombings in Israel, won a landslide victory in Palestinian elections to the consternation of world leaders who'd hoped stalled peace negotiations would resume. "A political party that articulates the destruction of Israel as part of its platform is a party with which we will not deal," President Bush said. - More...
Saturday AM - January 28, 2006

National: Scientists uncover genetic mystery afflicting Lincoln kin By MAURA LERNER - For years, Terry Smith knew that he was distantly related to Abraham Lincoln.

But he didn't know about the illness that ran in his family - what relatives called "Lincoln's Disease."

Now, researchers at the University of Minnesota have uncovered a genetic secret that has plagued the Lincoln family for at least 11 generations: a mutation that causes a form of ataxia, a crippling neurological disease.- More...
Saturday AM - January 28, 2006

The Boundary Fire of 2004 swept through the Wickersham Creek watershed in the White Mountains National Recreation Area north of Fairbanks. Photo by Dale Haggstrom, Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Alaska: Fire breaks down and builds up boreal forest By NED ROZELL - "In the last two summers, fire has ravaged 10.5 percent of Interior Alaska."

I wrote that sentence a few weeks ago in this column, and a wildlife biologist thinks I chose a bad verb. A dictionary definition of ravage is "to devastate." Tom Paragi chooses words that are more positive when he looks at a burned forest.

Paragi works with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Fairbanks. His specialty is the ecology of disturbances to the boreal forest, among them logging and the effects of wildland fires. I told him "ravaged" came to mind when I walked through a burned spruce forest and saw the charred bones of red squirrels. He said that red squirrels have the unfortunate tendency to seek shelter in spruce trees when something threatens them. Other small mammals, such as voles on the forest floor, might survive a fire because the soil around them is wet enough not to burn. Larger animals move fast enough to escape slow-moving wildfires typical of the boreal forest, he said. - More...
Saturday AM - January 28, 2006

Science: Studies: Mountain ranges rise faster than once thought By LEE BOWMAN - Two new studies by researchers at the University of Rochester suggest that some mountain ranges rise to their full height much faster than geologists have always thought, pushing up by more than a half-mile in a million years.

Each of the studies - one appearing Friday in the journal Science, the other next week in Earth and Planetary Science Letters - used new and different methods for measuring ancient mountain elevations, but the results are in close agreement. - More...
Saturday AM - January 28, 2006

Viewpoints Opinions/Letters Port Renovation Project By Chris Parks - Sunday PM Thank you Ketchikan By Carolyn Pedison - Sunday PM Dear People of Ketchikan By Doyle Cowart - Sunday PM Major Stephen Freeman By Jerry Sandel - Sunday PM Steve Freeman By Leslie Whitmire - Sunday PM The 'bridge' and alternatives to it. By Dave Rettke - Saturday AM Smells Like Rotten Fish By Wayne Sanger - Saturday AM Alaska Missing the Boat on Baby Boomer Retirement By Mark Neckameyer - Saturday AM Local Family Needs Help By Jennifer Brewer - Saturday AM Monies From Ward Cove Sale? By Dave Rettke - Saturday AM Tragic to lose a fellow flyer By Jim McClain - Saturday AM Where to send a card? By Jodi Goffinet - Saturday AM The Consolidation Myth By Rodney Dial - Friday AM A true Hero By Richard Wuensche - Friday AM Disaster Ready By Cindy Taylor - Friday AM Respectful Story By Chris Rose - Friday AM Slow Down Folks By Wanda Pew - Friday AM Passionate and compelling By Aftan Zink - Friday AM Compliments By Diane Stittgen - Friday AM Imagine By Susan White Hoff - Friday AM Respectful article By Tom Mabrey - Friday AM They were wearing their seatbelts By Susan Bachant - Friday AM Seatbelts, please use them! By Chief Dave Hull - Wednesday Thank you Coach Craig By Debra and Michael Dundas - Wednesday Weaning ourselves from "feel good liberal" programs? By Charlotte Tanner - Wednesday The children are watching By Susan Walsh - Wednesday Finding ways to "reorganize" By Neil Gray - Wednesday More Viewpoints/ Letters Publish A Letter Political Cartoonists Political Cartoons Ketchikan Monday, January 30, 2006, noon - Ketchikan City Council Special Meeting - City Council Chambers Agenda & Information Packets Thursday February 02, 2006, 5:30 - 7:30 pm - North Tongass Volunteer Fire Dept. Open House and Board of Directors meeting - Ribbon cutting ceremony for new building and more... Agenda Teleconference meetings - Legislative Information Office - Check the Calendar January Calendar Today's Forecast Current AK Weather Map City Police Report AK Troopers Daily Dispatch Classifieds & Announcements January 2006 Click on the date to read the stories published on that day. S M T W T F S 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31         Front Page Archives

Preston MacDougall: Chemical Eye on Degrees of Learning - "The toe bone is connected to the foot bone. The foot bone is connected to the ankle bone." So went your first class on human anatomy, which, if you are like me, you mastered by singing the material over and over while sitting on the teacher's lap.

You didn't have to take any notes, just hit the right ones.

If you have had a second course in human anatomy, you would have learned about phalanges, metatarsals, and so on, although much less lyrically. In between, the acclaimed Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget, would have said that your cognitive development advanced from the pre-conceptual stage to one of concrete operations. - More...
Saturday - January 28, 2006

Bob Ciminel: Snow Day - Atlanta has been lucky so far this winter; we've not had any snow or sleet, and only one day with freezing rain, and that was cleared up by mid-morning. You don't want to be in Atlanta when it snows.

The denizens who inhabit metropolitan Atlanta panic at the mere mention of snow, which is surprising because many of them - and all the ones who drive - came down here from the North, including places where "winter" means nine months of snow and ice followed by three months of poor sledding. - More...
Saturday - January 28, 2006  

Linda Seebach: Why you need a spellchecker inside your head - I suppose I'll alienate everyone in sight, but I have to confess that I liked spelling tests in grade school.

Spelling was so easy; you knew what words looked like, because you'd seen them in books, so you wrote them the way they looked. And the way they looked made perfect sense.

It was quite a lot later in my academic career that I discovered a lot of people had trouble with spelling because they tried to write words the way they sounded. That had never occurred to me. - More...
Saturday - January 28, 2006  

Marsha Mercer: The Oval Office optimist - Only a year ago, a triumphant President Bush was flush with political capital and big plans to overhaul Social Security. That was then.

Now, he's trying to remind people why they voted for him.

National security was the issue in the last election, and it's the issue now.

"I understand we're at war with an enemy who wants to hit us again," the president declared at a news conference last week. "I take my responsibility to protect the American people very seriously." - More...
Saturday - January 28, 2006  

John Hall: Spy flap could have been avoided - If national security and survival depend on it, it is hard to understand who would want to deny President Bush the authority to order wiretapping of cell phones or e-mails of al-Qaeda suspects with or without a court warrant, open or secret.

Limited ways can be found in a free society to do what needs to be done. They have before.

The issue, however, now has become the subject of a major constitutional collision. Several Democrats claim Bush broke the law. The president has launched a counteroffensive, claiming sweeping authority to conduct domestic surveillance as part of the war on terrorism. - More...
Saturday - January 28, 2006  

Dale McFeatters: Hamas must now govern - The problem with free and fair elections is that there's always a chance the wrong people will win. And from the standpoint of the United States and Israel, the wrong people did win - and win convincingly - in Wednesday's Palestinian elections.

Hamas took 76 seats in the 132-seat parliament with 60 percent of the vote, ousting the corrupt and inefficient Fatah government with a praiseworthy platform of honest government, improved public services and law and order. Politics the way it's supposed to be.

Unfortunately, Hamas - full name, Islamic Resistance Movement - is committed to the destruction of Israel and has tried to bring that about through terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings on Israelis. The United States and Europe classify Hamas as a terrorist organization and, with respect to Israel, Hamas has never claimed that it isn't. - More...
Saturday - January 28, 2006