Ketchikan: Clover Pass School Named To The National Register of Historic Places - Ketchikan's historic Clover Pass School has been named to the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places.

Clover Pass School File Photo by Dick Kauffman

The nearly 50-year-old one-room school house on Potter Road in the Knudson Cove area was tentatively named to the national register late this summer but the official notification was just made the first week in October, according to Historic Ketchikan Executive Director Dave Kiffer.

Historic Ketchikan has owned the school building since it received title from the Pond Reef Volunteer Department in February of 2004. The two acre parcel of land under the building is owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management. Historic Ketchikan is currently working with the BLM on a long-term management lease for the property. - More...
Monday PM - October 10, 2005

National: GOP congressional agenda stalls By MARGARET TALEV - President Bush and the Republicans who control Congress were counting on their partisan strength this year to overhaul Social Security, reshape immigration policy, bring spending under control, make permanent various tax cuts, drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and push a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Some also were pushing for more or less embryonic stem-cell research, a fund for people with asbestos-related illnesses, private pension fund protections and anti-abortion bills including one telling women that fetuses can feel pain. - More...
Monday PM - October 10, 2005

National: Energy efficiency back in spotlight By DAVID R. BAKER - Can America conserve its way out of its energy crunch?

Fuel prices stuck at record highs have forced government officials to broach topics many have avoided for years: energy efficiency and conservation.

The very words used to conjure images of Jimmy Carter bundled in a sweater, imploring his oil-shocked nation to use less. Mindful of the one-term president's fate, politicians have focused ever since on increasing America's supply of energy, not cutting its use. - More...
Monday PM - October 10, 2005

Viewpoints Opinions/Letters Salmon-Thirty-Salmon and Funding By Mark Vinsel - Monday PM Airport name change? By Rick Grams- Monday PM Open Letter to Rep. Young: Save the US Merchant Marine By Norbert Chaudhary - Monday PM Maybe we should play the "Kurd card"? By Mark Neckameyer - Monday PM Schoenbar By Diana Chaudhary - Monday PM Salmon Thirty Salmon By Mark Gatti - Monday PM Anti-Bush T-shirt Hits No-fly Zone By Morgan Doubleday - Monday PM No-fly T-shirt By Carol Ann Faulkner - Monday PM Naming public facilities By Samuel Bergeron - Saturday More Viewpoints/ Letters Publish A Letter Political Cartoonists Democratic Doormat ©Jeff Parker, Florida Today Distributed exclusively to subscribers by Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Political Cartoonists E-mail a political cartoon Ketchikan Calendar, Meetings, Events Today's Forecast City Police Report AK Troopers Daily Dispatch Classifieds & Announcements October 2005 Click on the date for stories and photos published on that day... S M T W T F S 25 26 27 28 29 30 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

National: Influenza researchers resurrect a viral nightmare By JOHN KRIST - When the virus most likely to launch the next global pandemic finally makes its way to North America, the first warnings may come not from doctors or epidemiologists but from an unexpected source: Alaskan duck hunters.

For the past eight years, public health experts around the world have been warily monitoring events in Southeast Asia, where a strain of influenza virus - identified as H5N1, for the variants of two proteins (hemagglutinin and neuraminidase) found on its surface - has shown a propensity to jump the species barrier from birds to humans.

It was just such a trans-species leap, made possible by the remarkable mutability of viral genes, that many researchers believe launched the deadliest global influenza pandemic in recorded history. From 1918 through 1920, that outbreak killed 50 million to 100 million people worldwide, nearly 700,000 in the United States.- More...
Monday PM - October 10, 2005

National: Bush refines venerable art of presidential cronyism By JAMES ROSEN - The fading furor over former FEMA chief Michael Brown and the fresh consternation over President Bush's Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers have reignited an age-old American debate over cronyism in the White House.

Brown and Miers join a long and colorful line of political hacks, presidential pals and White House hangers-on extending far back in U.S. history - to the constitutional framers who tried to guard against future presidents giving friends or relatives cushy jobs by requiring Senate confirmation of "principle officers" of the government.

"Administration jobs are a way of rewarding campaign workers and, in more recent years, people who raise a lot of money," said David Lewis, a political-science professor at Princeton University and expert on bureaucracies. "All presidents appoint cronies. The difference is that not all of them are publicly exposed the way Michael Brown was."

Brown, whose previous expertise had been in promoting Arabian horses, made a hasty exit from his perch atop the Federal Emergency Management Agency last month in the wake of a national outcry over the government's sluggish response to a storm of biblical fury. - More...
Monday PM - October 10, 2005

Alaska: Two Aleutian volcanoes rumble with ash cloud By DOUG O'HARRA - Two remote Aleutian Island volcanoes grumbled to life this week, one spitting an ash cloud almost three miles high and the other shaking its uninhabited island with a growing swarm of little earthquakes.

Both Cleveland and Tanaga volcanoes lurk beneath one of the world's major airline highways, connecting North America with Asia through dozens of flights per day. Volcanic ash from an eruption could damage or destroy jet engines.

Cleveland Volcano blasted a small amount of ash from its summit early Friday morning, producing a cloud detected by satellites as it drifted 90 miles east-southeast of Dutch Harbor.

The 5,676-foot volcano, about 940 miles southwest of Anchorage, was listed as code orange, meaning it could produce an eruption without warning. - More...
Monday PM - October 10, 2005

National: 10 Foiled al-Qaida Plots Released; Foiled plots targeted U.S. government, tourists - In a major address outlining his strategy on the war against terrorism delivered to the National Endowment for Democracy last week, President Bush said that 10 major al-Qaida plots were disrupted since September 11, 2001 - two involving a plan to use commercial airliners to attack targets on the East and West Coasts of the United States.

The president said the United States and its partners had also foiled at least five additional al-Qaida efforts to case potential U.S. government sites and locations frequented by tourists. - More...
Monday PM - October 10, 2005