Anchorage Daily News

Abortion measure wins Senate approval. An Alaska Journal of Commerce story reports that a controversial measure prohibiting the Indian Health Service from paying for an abortion except under limited circumstances quietly passed the U.S. Senate late last month. The amendment dealing with abortion, which was part of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act reauthorization bill, received little attention in the state and did not get a public hearing but easily passed the Senate as part of the larger act, the story notes.

Sens. Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski, both Republicans, voted for the measure. The amendment would prohibit the Indian Health Service, which provides health services to American Indians and Alaska Natives, from paying for abortions except in cases of rape, incest against a minor, or to save the life of the mother.

A handful of other abortion measures are also before the Alaska Legislature, though lawmakers have questioned whether they’ll get to them in the shortened session this year.

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Aniak backs off demand that troopers get out. Aniak villagers, who last month called for Alaska State Troopers to leave (click here to read the ADN story), are backing off their demands, according to an APRN story. Some villagers had accused the troopers in the Kuskokwim River community of harassing locals, including setting up checkpoints, conducting unlawful searches and making needless arrests for minor infractions.

But now Aniak Traditional Council Chief Wayne Morgan says the four troopers posted in the village can stay, even though community leaders are looking at other law enforcement options, including hiring their own officers. “That is in the works,” Morgan said. “Also in the works is trying to get our own tribal courts.”

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Young sees easy ride. Rep. Don Young, campaigning in Fairbanks this week, said he doesn’t expect a difficult struggle in the Republican primary against Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell, according to a Fairbanks Daily New-Miner story. “I don’t consider it a real challenge right now,” Young said of Parnell, who jumped into the race against the veteran congressman last week.

Young also suggested negative media reports are the biggest factor contributing to an economic downturn in the country and wondered why Alaska doesn’t dip into the Permanent Fund to pay for alternative energy sources. “We have that $40 billion in a coffee can,” he said. “It does us no good there.”

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And speaking of Don Young … Talking Points Memo blog, which doesn’t miss a chance to get in on Alaska politics, has a video featuring editor Josh Marshall summing up his views of some of Young’s foibles. The federal investigations, the Florida earmark, the famed mink biting remarks on the House floor — they’re all there.

When it comes to Young, “there’s so much scandal going on, it’s almost like a one-person mud-wrestling match,” Marshall says.

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Rotten through and through. An Eagle River teenager, sporting a pair of sneakers that would make any kid proud, walked away the champion in the Odor-Eaters Rotten Sneakers Contest in Montpelier, Vt. An Associated Press story says that Ben Russell, 15, beat seven other contestants from around the country as the guy who brought the most foul sneakers to the contest.

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Lisa pans father’s former chief of staff. “I’m angry; I’m upset,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski is quoted as saying in a Juneau Empire story in the first Murkowski public family reaction to the guilty plea involving former Gov. Frank Murkowski’s chief of staff. Jim Clark, who pleaded guilty to fraud, said he acted on his own.

“Jim broke the public trust, and that was wrong,” Lisa Murkowski said. She also said she spoke to her father about the plea and that he, too, was “deeply disappointed. … This was a man he’s known for years and trusted.”

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Bethel City Council fireworks. Tundra Medicine Dreams blog, the source of some excellent writing from Bethel, has taken to looking in from time to time on the Bethel City Council, where it finds a situation “rife with subtle elements that continue to underscore the sad state this council is in, and the continued importance to the citizens of ousting the Block of Four. They are still thugs, they are still working against the best interests of the citizens of Bethel, and they still don’t get it.”

Maybe you have to live there to appreciate it fully, but the blogger — she says she’s involved in health care in the region — writes that part of the problem is where the Block of Four sit when the council is meeting. They are grouped together and perched high above others at the meeting and they “are all sitting on that dais purely to serve their own egos, their own sense of power and their own pride.”

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“Over a barrel.” An editorial in The Nome Nugget is furious that rural Alaskans find themselves in such a spot that they have to get help with their heating fuel from Venezuela. “The Alaska Legislature hasn’t a clue, and the 90-day wonders would rather debate the merits of moving the capital than tackle the reality of poverty, an economy going to hell in a hand basket, and the cost of fuel in a lunar orbit.”

But the opinion piece says rural residents will take help where they can get it, even from Venezuela. “(One hundred) gallons of fuel oil per household. Wow! That’s a gift of at least $400-500 per household from a country whose president had called our president a bad name. Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth when we are on our lips over an oil barrel.”

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About those polar bears. We’re still waiting on a federal decision on whether polar bears will win a threatened listing, but a story at Salon’s web site leaves no doubt where a handful of big game hunters stand on the question.

“If your idea of a good time is paying $25,000 to journey to the frozen north in Canada to shoot a polar bear — making you one of the more than 50 American ‘sportsmen’ who do so every year — you’re not happy about the lawsuits and recriminations over whether the Bush administration should grant new protections to polar bears. After all, those darn regulations could interfere with your bringing home a furry white rug for your living room floor.”

And the potential of new protections also worries Canadian Inuit who profit from the hunters, according to the story. This has put the Inuit in conflict with their traditional environmental allies.

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Bishop’s supporters stand by him. A Kodiak Daily Mirror story this week notes that Bishop Nikolai Soraich’s supporters are “slowly” coming forward to back the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska. One fan quoted in the story says that the bishop, who has refused to step down from his position despite pressure from national leaders to do so, “is a good bishop and has done amazing things for Alaska and has many friends and a few enemies.”

The story also notes that more and more Soraich backers are posting their feelings on Web sites, and at least one former bishop — Bishop Tikhon, once the leader of the church in San Francisco, Los Angeles and the West — has rallied to his support. Soraich can only be removed by disciplinary procedures involving “stated charges, and their specification,” Tikhon wrote.

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Wind power goes remote. SitNews web site has a story looking at some of the advances that wind power is making in rural Alaska communities. Kasigluk and Delta Junction are two communities that have embraced the technology to help meet their power needs.

Alaska Village Electric Cooperative has installed wind-generating capacity in four communities, and Alaska Environmental Power is planning a 320-acre wind farm in Delta Junction, according to the story.

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China is “new kid on the block” in Arctic. Here comes another country vying for what is believed to be huge oil and gas reserves in the Arctic: China. The magazine Oilweek says in a story that experts believe China will join the nations eyeing the Arctic — including the United States and Russia — and trying to figure out how to make use of the energy supplies that could become available as global warming opens up more areas.

“One of the more embarrassing facts is, as Canadians, we have to recognize that the Chinese now have a more substantial and vigorous scientific program than Canada has for research in polar regions,” University of Calgary political scientist Rob Huebert is quoted as saying. The story notes that while it is impossible currently to deliver natural gas across the Pacific Ocean to China, new technology could make such a process reality.

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Todd Palin’s charms. The raves over Gov. Sarah Palin’s charms are showing up everywhere you look anymore — who hasn’t heard the phrase “America’s hottest governor”? — but who knew Alaska’s First Gentleman, Todd Palin, would win his share of glory. Yet a Glamour magazine web site posting of the “Top 10 Reasons We Need More Female Politicians” lists, as No. 5, this:

“The more women like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin who get elected, the better the chances become that we'll get more political spouses that look like Todd Palin.”

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