Alaska: Alaska Fire/Smoke - On Tuesday, June 27, Fairbanks was directly in the path of smoke blown in from fires just north of Eagle. In the following days, smoke blanketed the entire Interior, which led to an air quality alert issued for the region by the Division of Air Quality of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (ADEC). - More...
Thursday - June 30, 2005

National: The GOP's new Social Security overhaul By MARY DEIBEL - If you liked President Bush's private Social Security accounts, you'll love the sequel - top Republicans want to tap the system's surplus to finance individual accounts.

Democrats won't sign onto any plan to shore up Social Security's long-term solvency so long as individual accounts stay on the table.

They know that the more Bush campaigns for Social Security accounts, the more their appeal seems to fade, as exemplified by a new USA Today-CNN-Gallup poll that found 64 percent of the public disapproves of the way Bush has handled the issue. - More...
Thursday - June 30, 2005

National: Poll shows support for Medicaid funding By LAWRENCE M. O'ROURKE - Even as elected officials in Washington and state capitals look for cuts in health and nursing home care for the poor to reduce budget deficits, the public is reluctant to cut Medicaid, according to a poll released Wednesday.

About three-fourths of Americans oppose cuts in Medicaid as a step toward balancing state budgets, according to the poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

"The poll shows that Americans across the political spectrum value the role Medicaid plays in our health care system," said Diane Rowland, executive director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. - More...
Thursday - June 30, 2005

National: Despite restrictions, teens still dying on highways By LANCE GAY- Graduated licenses and other restrictions on teen drivers in the past decade have failed to decrease fatal highway crashes involving young people, according to government statistics.

While drivers ages 16 to 20 make up 6 percent of all drivers on U.S. highways, statistics show they are involved in 20 percent of all fatal motor-vehicle accidents. In 2003, younger drivers were involved in 8,455 fatal crashes. - More...
Thursday - June 30, 2205

Alaska & National: Residents rallying across country to save military bases By LISA HOFFMAN - Grand Forks, N.D., welcomed visiting military base-closing commissioners with an arcing spray of red, white and blue water spewed by three fire hoses.

In Fairbanks, Alaska, 3,000 residents - many wearing "America Needs Eielson" Air Force Base T-shirts - showed up two hours early for seats at a hearing to show commissioners their devotion to the base. - More...
Thursday - June 30, 2005

Alaska: Ice man monitors frozen seas for danger By DOUG O'HARRA - A change in wind and current rammed the frozen Bering Sea into the Alaska coast. The collision shattered the ice attached to shore. In an hour or two, a ragged ridge of ice, with chunks as large as Zambonis, tumbled into glacial rubble on a Nome street.

"That was two miles of ice that got creamed and got pushed up on shore," Russ Page said. "It comes (in) like a freight train." - More...
Thursday - JUne 30, 2005

Alaska: Growth secrets of Alaska's mysterious field of lakes - The thousands of oval lakes that dot Alaska's North Slope are some of the fastest-growing lakes on the planet. Ranging in size from puddles to more than 15 miles in length, the lakes have expanded at rates up to 15 feet per year, year in and year out for thousands of years. The lakes are shaped like elongated eggs with the skinny ends pointing northwest.

How the lakes grow so fast, why they're oriented in the same direction and what gives them their odd shape has puzzled geologists for decades. The field of lakes covers an area twice the size of Massachusetts, and the lakes are unusual enough to have their own name: oriented thaw lakes. - More...
Thursday - June 30, 2005

Viewpoints Opinions/Letters Arts, Health... By Charlotte Glover - Thursday RESPONSIBILITY By Marie L Monyak - Thursday Fourth of July By Mary Hemli - Thursday Axe Throwing By Neil Gray - Thursday Penniless By Linda Burger - Thursday Rush to Judgement & Thanks By Todd Miller - Thursday AX Thrower By Karen S. Hollywood - Wednesday Kids afoot or abike on road By M.I. Henrikson - Wednesday Ketchikan Roads By Charles Moon - Wednesday Astounding By Glen Thompson - Wednesday Transportation From Airport By Wieslaw Czajkowski - Wednesday Timber Folks By George Miller - Tuesday Philadelphia Boys Choir By Sarah Corporon - Tuesday Airport Ferry Fee By Linda Burger - Tuesday More Viewpoints/ Letters Publish A Letter Heartland Soldier Sandy Huffaker, Cagle Cartoons Distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Political Cartoonists Ketchikan Calendar, Meetings, Events Today's Forecast City Police Report 06/30/05 AK Troopers Daily Dispatch Classifieds & Announcements June 2005 Click on the date for stories and photos 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     Front Page Archives

Jason Love: Feng Shui - I have bad feng shui. I just found out yesterday, when a friend visited my home. He acted like he had never entered a house through the bathroom before.

Over the course of the afternoon, I learned about the laws of feng shui, which regulate every aspect of existence. It was like having another, more neurotic God. - More...
Thursday - June 30, 2005

Will Durst: Scoundrel City - Okay, get this and get this straight. Criticizing our government is not the same as criticizing our armed forces. Okay? The same way that criticizing our government is not the same as criticizing our postal workers. Or criticizing our zookeepers or our ceramic mosaic tile grout installers. And let me make this clear, I am not in any way suggesting that any of these groups be criticized. Especially the postal workers. - More...
Thursday - June 30, 2005

Steve Brewer: Speechless? Stick out your tongue - This time of year, when children are out of school and the long, hot summer days stretch before us like asphalt parking lots, many housebound parents find themselves going mildly insane.

Isolation, a hunger for intellectual stimulation and the all-day demands of parenting merge into a deadly combination called Adult Conversation Starvation. - More...
Thursday - June 30, 2005

Betsy Hart: Rewiring neighborhoods - I recently had a friend mention to me a problem she'd had with one of my kids. Two of my daughters were playing at her home, and when one was told to give a turn on a swing to another child she obstinately refused. Worse, she kept at her refusal until the mother was able to lure her away with a cold treat.

Ouch. (I mean, I've just written this book on parenting, right?) - More...
Thursday - June 30, 2005

Deroy Murdock: Stop raiding Social Security - President Bush still may wrangle a Social Security victory from the jaws of defeat.

While Democrats "just say no" to his voluntary personal retirement accounts, Republicans are making them an offer they may be unable to refuse: Help the GOP stop raiding the Social Security Trust Fund, or vote to continue Uncle Sam's biggest swindle. - More...
Thursday - June 30, 2005

Jay Ambrose: The lesson of 9/11 - The attacks of 9/11 have nothing to do with the war in Iraq, say some congressional critics of President Bush's speech this week urging the citizenry to have patience with efforts to quell an insurgency so that a liberated people can govern themselves.

But, of course, the main reason we are in Iraq and the main thing keeping us there is what we learned through the dramatic, murderous foreshadowing of the attacks four years ago - that Islamic-fascist terrorists could bring an end to American civilization. - More...
Thursday - June 30, 2005

Michael Fumento: Fear-mongering over childhood vaccinations - If you have small kids, you may have heard dire warnings about the perils of childhood vaccinations. The clamor has been driven lately primarily by an article from Natural Resources Defense Council (inventors of the Alar scare) attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A new book called Evidence of Harm, Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism makes similar hysterical claims. Ignore them. The life you save may be your child's - or somebody else's.

Some of these fear mongers mean well but are woefully ignorant. Others are so obsessed with bringing others into the conspiracy-theory fold that they will say and do anything. - More...
Thursday - June 30, 2005

Dale McFeatters: A hard-earned July Fourth - Looking back over our history, our arrival at this July Fourth - free, secure and prosperous and celebrating Independence Day with fireworks and flags - now seems like an inevitable historical progression.

But the American republic was never inevitable and it was probably least inevitable 229 years ago on the day when the Founding Fathers signed it into existence, as historian David McCullough usefully reminds us in his marvelous new book on that perilous and pivotal year, "1776." - More...
Thursday - June 30, 2005