April 2: Juneau's cocaine pipeline

The drug business was financed, at least in part, by check forgery and mail fraud endeavors, which have also yielded charges. The story notes that at least one informant fears for her family’s safety after she received phone calls that alarmed her.

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Anchorage election. It might be a little early in the day to expect bloggers to be weighing in on Anchorage’s elections Tuesday, which changed the political bent of the city’s Assembly. (Click here to get to ADN’s package of material on the election results.) But Progressive Alaska, for one, got off a posting applauding “Anchorage progressives and moderates.”

“You’ve just shown your town, the state of Alaska and the country that we are moving toward sanity here in the far north far quicker than any other red state,” he writes. The posting notes that the “further to the left a candidate ran, the better she or he did.”

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Pig book. Citizens Against Government Waste has issued what it calls “The 2007 Congressional Pig Book,” which is its enormous listing of pork-barrel projects in the federal budget. Alaska tops the list at $555.54 in per capita spending — two and a half times as much as runner-up Hawaii. And the introduction to this year’s listing had this to say about the two states and their senators:

“While only two (pork) bills were enacted, the states of Alaska and Hawaii, which have been the top two states in pork per capita every year but one since 2000, were served more then their fair share of bacon by Sens. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii). In the defense appropriations bill alone, Alaska received $209,900,000, a 127 percent increase over the total of $92,425,000 in 2006.”

The listing singles out Stevens for “The Cold Hard Cash Award,” which he earned for getting $165.7 million in “defense pork,”

The web site includes a link to searchable Microsoft Excel file listing all 2,600-plus projects on the list.

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New rules for fishing vessels on the table. The Coast Guard offered new regulations this week “designed to make sweeping safety changes in the commercial fishing fleet,” according to Kodiak Daily Mirror story. The proposed changes, which add to a list of proposals the agency has put forth in recent years, come in the wake of the sinking of the Alaska Ranger, which killed five crewmen.

The new rules deal with stability, watertight integrity, maintenance, inspections and the availability of safety equipment and immersion suits, according to the story. Forty-two members of the Alaska Ranger crew were rescued, primarily because of the availability of survival suits, and the Daily Mirror story notes a Coast Guard report that found “fishermen survive nearly twice as often when survival equipment is used.”

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Murder charge tossed. A Fairbanks judge has dismissed a murder charge against a man accused of cutting the throat of a mental health worker. A Fairbanks Daily News-Miner story says Superior Court Judge Robert Downes threw out the charge against Brian Galbraith because “the prosecution did not provide reasonable evidence that Galbraith was competent to stand trial,” the story says.

Galbraith, who has a history of schizophrenia and has been receiving psychiatric care since the 1980s, killed 32-year-old Genine Holznagel-Leary outside a mental health facility last March. Prosecutors must act by this afternoon to begin the process of committing Galbraith to a mental health hospital, according to the News-Miner story.

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No fan of Gravel. Mike Gravel, former Alaska senator and now a persistent, if remote, candidate for president, has a fierce foe of his candidacy in Ralph Nader, who is himself running for president. Here’s some of the ire Nader directed at Gravel as quoted on the Borowitz Report web site:

“Mike Gravel should get out of the race, and get out now. … The longer he stays in, the greater risk he runs of making a fool of himself. … The last thing you want to be thought of is as some tiresome old gas-bag who likes seeing himself on TV.”

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How a dead Alaska bear led to a worldwide campaign. The Mail Tribune from southern Oregon reports on a beach clean-up campaign that has involved thousands of people worldwide and how it was born when a Eugene, Ore., woman was reading about the death of a bear in Alaska. Judie Hansen was thumbing through an Alaska Department of Fish and Game magazine when she came across a story about a brown bear that died after eating 13 plastic foam cups.

The article stirred her to organize the first statewide volunteer beach cleanup in October 1984, according to the Mail Tribune story. “The first cleanup was ‘such an immediate hit that other coastal states ... copied the model and within a few years all of the coastal United States and many foreign nations were drawn into the efforts,’ wrote Bill Monroe of The Oregonian, who covered the first beach cleanup for that newspaper.”

Hansen herself later wrote: “I honor that Alaskan brown bear. If it hadn’t been for him, I might never have had such a wild and crazy idea.”

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30 cents more per gallon of gas. A KTUU Channel 2 story takes note of the price of gas on the Kenai Peninsula, where the station found fuel was about 30 cents a gallon more than in Anchorage. Why? According to the story: “People say the cost comes from the fuel's circumventive journey to the Peninsula's pumps. The gas refined in Nikiski is fed into a pipeline to Anchorage and then driven back to the Kenai and Nikiski's Tesoro station, which sits a few miles from the refinery.”

Tesoro, however, doesn’t necessarily buy that. Taxes have something to say about the price, according to Kip Knudson of Tesoro. And then there’s the market: “It’s a commodity and it’s sold in a market and every market is different, so again, market determines the price,” Knudson said.

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“We’ve been Googled.” A Fairbanks Daily News-Miner story notes that the Interior city has joined Anchorage and Juneau as Alaska communities that are part of Google’s Street View, which lets computer users take virtual, ground-view tours of geographical areas.(Click here to read the ADN story from last weekend.)

The innovation, which has been expanding since Google introduced it last spring, has drawn criticism for what some see as privacy intrusions. But Google intends to press on with it, according to the News-Miner. “As you can imagine, it’s just about every major metropolitan area (that) we’d like to have included in Street View,” a corporate spokesman told the newspaper.

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We should have known. April Fool's postings, messages and stories were spinning through the web yesterday, and one of them came, as many suspected, from the Kodiak Konfidential blog. Turns out the blogger’s announcement that he was calling it quits was, in fact, a prank. “Not only am I not shutting it down, I dare say, after the words of encouragement, I’m just getting started,” he writes today.