Invitation to Local Candidates: The Ketchikan Regular Election will be held on October 02, 2018. As in the past, SitNews invites all local candidates to provide a candidate's statement and include the reason you are running, experience, and issues you would like to address. Photographs are also requested. No word limits. Absentee in-person voting begins on Sept. 17, 2018. SitNews deadline to recieve statements will also be Sept. 17, 2018 - the date voting begins. Statements will be published as received. As always, this media exposure is provided as a free service to local candidates. Questions for the Candidates: Click Here to Participate in the SitNews Online Forum. Ketchikan City Council Candidates 3-Year Term, 2 Seats to Fill Janalee L. Gage Filed 08/01/18 Candidate's Statement 09/03/18   Sam Bergeron Filed 08/23/18   Dragon London Filed 08/24/18   Spencer Strassburg Filed 08/27/18 Ketchikan City Mayor 3-Year Term, 1 Seat to Fill   Robert (Bob) Sivertsen Filed 08/01/18 Ketchikan Assembly Candidates 3-Year Term, 2 Seats to Fill Dan Bockhorst Filed 08/01/18 Candidate's Statement 09/11/18 Austin Otos Filed 08/02/18 Candidate's Statement 09/09/18   Danielle "Dani" Pratt Filed 08/22/18   Sven Westergard Filed 08/24/18   James Montgomery Filed 08/24/18   Felix Wong Filed 08/27/18 Ketchikan School Board 3-Year Term, 3 Seats to Fill   Matt Eisenhower Filed 08/10/18 Sonya Skan Filed 08/13/18 Candidate's Statement 09/11/18 Rachel Breithaupt Filed 08/17/18 Candidate's Statement 09/07/18   Bridget Mattson Filed 08/20/18   Lana Boler Filed 08/21/18

Ketchikan: Gubernatorial Forum Luncheon at Southeast Conference at Noon - Sept. 12, 2018, Cape Fox - Open to Public. Participants: Gov. Bill Walker, Sen. Mark Begich, Sen. Mike Dunleavy (Luncheon required early registration - limited seats, standing room only)

Alaska: Alaska Superior Court Orders DOT&PF to clarify campaign sign laws - On Sept. 10, 2018, the Alaska Superior Court ordered the Alaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities (DOT&PF) to clarify how laws restricting outdoor advertising will be applied during the current campaign season to political signs within and outside of state highway rights of way.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska (ACLU), independent expenditure group Dunleavy for Alaska, and Alaska resident Eric Siebels jointly filed suit against the State of Alaska in August seeking to immediately block enforcement of a state statute barring political signs near roadways and asking for those rules to be struck down as unconstitutional. 

“There is no right more fundamental to a democracy than the right of an individual to express their personal political views,” said ACLU of Alaska Executive Director Joshua A. Decker when filing the suit in August. “That is why the U.S. Supreme Court has afforded political speech special protection. If the government wants to seize that right by barring Alaskans from displaying political signs on their own property, they need a more compelling reason than ‘because somebody might see it.’”

The Alaska Superior Court directs:

• Unauthorized signs within state highway rights of way, including both commercial and political signs, remain illegal under AS 19.25.75-180. DOT&PF will continue to enforce this ban; any sign placed within a state highway right of way may be removed by DOT&PF crews without prior notice.

• Small, temporary, political campaign signs no larger than 4’ x 8’ may be displayed on private property adjacent to state highway rights of way by the owners or occupants of that property, provided they have not been paid to display the signs.

• DOT&PF will continue its current practice of not removing small, temporary, political campaign signs from private property outside highway rights of way.

• All signs that pose a safety concern to roadway users will be subject to removal by DOT&PF regardless of the content of the signs or whether they are located on private property. - More...
Tuesday PM - September 11, 2018

Alaska - Hawaii: Humpback Whales Are Navigating An Ocean of Change By ELIZABETH WEINBERG - Each year, thousands of humpback whales migrate between Alaska and Hawaii. However, in late December 2015, Ed Lyman started getting calls from whale watching companies on the island of Hawaii. “Ed, how are the whales off Maui?” tour operators were asking. “We’ve never seen them arrive this late.”

Lyman is the large whale entanglement response coordinator for Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. While the sanctuary coordinates and leads the effort to free whales from life-threatening entanglements, it relies heavily on tour operators, fishermen, researchers, and other members of the on-water community to help find and monitor them. That same on-water community plays a major role in monitoring the overall health of and risks to humpback whales throughout Hawaii. Lyman works closely with these groups.

So when more tour operators on other islands throughout Hawaii let Lyman and the sanctuary know that the whales seemed to be late that season, Lyman started calling around. He wanted to know if the lower sightings were just on a few of the islands, or in other areas in the Hawaiian Islands as well. But every island was reporting the same thing. Even Mexico’s disentanglement network reached out to Lyman, telling him that they were seeing low numbers. “It wasn’t just us,” says Lyman. “Something was happening.”

In parts of Alaska, like Glacier Bay National Park, they feed on huge swarms of small fish and krill throughout the summer. Then, in the winter months, they travel to the warm, shallow waters off Hawaii to mate, give birth, and raise their calves.

While in Hawaii, humpback whales do not eat. There are a few good reasons for them to forgo the feasts of Alaska during the winter. Primarily, expectant mothers migrate to Hawaii‘i to reduce the risks of predation on their newborn calves. While not much will try to eat an adult humpback whale, calves are at risk of predation from orcas. In Hawai‘i, orcas are uncommon. Additionally, whales are born with a relatively thin layer of fat, or blubber. In Hawai‘i, humpback whale calves can stay warm while they nurse and produce the blubber they’ll need to survive the cold waters of Alaska.

Humpback whales range throughout the world’s ocean, migrating between feeding grounds near the poles and calving grounds in tropical waters. In 1973, they were placed on the Endangered Species List, as commercial whaling had significantly reduced their numbers. 

The protection appears to have worked. Between 2004 and 2006, 400 researchers from 10 different countries around the world came together to establish population size and migratory patterns for the North Pacific population of humpback whales, and, as a subset of that, the Hawai‘i population. The SPLASH study (Structure of Population, Level of Abundance, Status of Humpback Whales) survey estimated that as of 2006, approximately 10,000 humpback whales utilize Hawai‘i as their breeding and calving area. The survey also indicated that the population was growing at an annual rate of 5.5 to 6.0 percent.

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In 2016, thanks to that recovery, the Hawai‘i distinct population segment of the North Pacific population of humpback whales – those whales that feed in Alaska and breed in Hawai‘i – was removed from the Endangered Species List. (Other North Pacific population segments, including the Mexico and Central American distinct population segments, remain on the Endangered Species List.)

The SPLASH growth estimate seemed to be pretty spot-on in the ensuing years. Dr. Rachel Cartwright, emeritus faculty at California State University, Channel Islands, and lead researcher with the Keiki Kohola Project, conducted transect surveys in the ?Au?au Channel between Maui and L?na?i to determine where mother and calf whales were spending their time. “We had a really nice climb from 2008 to 2013,” she says, with the number of mother and calf pairs increasing over the years. What they observed tracked “with what we would have expected based on that five to six percent” estimate.

But then, everything changed.

A mysterious silence

As the 2015 season progressed, it became more clear to Lyman, Cartwright, and other researchers that the changes in whale sightings weren’t just a temporary fluke. Several researchers shifted their efforts and attention to investigate and quantify the changes in order to help determine what might be going on.

Cartwright, for one, revisited the transects she had surveyed for the first time between 2008 and 2010 and again in 2013 and 2014. “We have random fluctuations,” she acknowledges. “But by the time we got to 2017, we were over 50 percent down from 2014” in terms of the number of different mother and calf pairs they had seen. By 2018, her team was recording an additional 35 percent drop in sighting rates for mother-calf pairs. While she was sighting adult humpback whales in similar numbers as in past surveys, she simply wasn’t seeing many new calves.

Work by Dr. Marc Lammers helps fill in gaps in data about male adult whales in Maui waters. Lammers is now the research coordinator at Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, but in 2015 he was was president of the Oceanwide Science Institute and an associate research professor at the University of Hawai‘i. Lammers studies whale acoustics, placing underwater microphones called hydrophones in the water and listening in to whale song. - More...
Tuesday PM - September 11, 2018

Analysis: How the pain of 9/11 still stays with a generation By DANA ROSE GARFIN - The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were the worst acts of terrorism on American soil to date. Designed to instill panic and fear, the attacks were unprecedented in terms of their scope, magnitude and impact on the American psyche.

The vast majority (over 60 percent) of Americans watched these attacks occur live on television or saw them replayed over and over again in the days, weeks and years following the attacks.

As we reflect on the anniversary of this tragic event, a question to consider is: How has this event impacted those individuals who are too young to remember a world before 9/11?

As an applied social psychologist, I study responses to natural and human-caused adversities that impact large segments of the population – also called “collective trauma.” My research group at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) has found that such exposures have compounding effects over the course of one’s lifespan. This is particularly relevant for children who have grown up in a post-9/11 society.

Many of the outcomes on which my team and I focus involve mental health, such as post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTS) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Post-traumatic stress symptoms include feeling the event is happening again (e.g., flashbacks, nightmares), avoiding situations that remind individuals of the event (e.g., public places, movies about an event), negative feelings and beliefs (e.g., the world is dangerous) or feeling “keyed up” (e.g., difficulty sleeping or concentrating).

In order to meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD, an individual must have been directly exposed to a “traumatic event” (e.g., assault, violence, accidental injury). Direct exposure means that an individual (or their loved one) was at or very near the site of the event. It might be somewhat obvious that people directly exposed to a collective trauma like 9/11 might suffer from associated physical and mental health problems. What is less obvious is how people geographically distant from the epicenter or “Ground Zero” might have been impacted.

This is particularly relevant when considering the impact of 9/11 on children and youth across America: Many reside far from the location of the actual attacks and were too young to have experienced or seen the attacks as they occurred. The point is people can experience collective trauma solely through the media and report symptoms that resemble those typically associated with direct trauma exposure.

The events of 9/11 ushered in a new era of media coverage of collective trauma, where terrorism and other forms of large-scale violence are transmitted into the daily lives of children and Americans families. - More...
Tuesday PM - September 11, 2018

Analysis: 'Treason' is now a popular word – here's what it really means By ROBERT A. SEDLER - In the furor over the anonymous New York Times op-ed by a Trump administration “senior official,” the word “treason” has been used by a variety of people.

President Trump tweeted “TREASON?” in an apparent reference to the op-ed’s author. Trump’s supporters have likewise used the word in attacks on the author – and the newspaper for printing it.

Trump’s opponents have likewise bandied the word about by saying that the op-ed was not “treasonous.” Instead, they say that Trump himself is guilty of “treason” by trying to obstruct the investigation into the claimed Russian interference in the 2016 election. Earlier this year, Trump opponents also claimed he committed treason at his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

As a constitutional scholar, I’d like to remind people there is a precise definition of “treason” set forth in the Constitution. None of the recent charges of treason remotely fit that definition. The claims that one side or the other have committed treason are ignorant of the law.

Nothing worse

Treason is the only crime specifically defined in the Constitution. It is a heinous crime, the worst crime that can be committed by an American citizen. It is a betrayal of the nation and of values embodied in the American constitutional system.

It can be punished by death.

When the framers defined “treason” in Article III, Section 3, they were determined to avoid the use of “treason” as it had been used in English law to punish opponents of the king.

In English law, “treason” meant acts of disloyalty to the king. A person convicted of “treason” was not only executed, but all of his property was “attained” – or confiscated by the government.

This was not the way the crime of treason would operate in the United States, which was founded by those who had rebelled against the British king. The framers of the constitution made sure of that.

Here’s how the framers defined treason: - More...
Tuesday PM - September 11, 2018

TOM PURCELL: Recalling 9/11: We're Not So Divided After All - On Sept. 11, 2001, I was driving along the Beltway to a Falls Church, Va., office building when a radio announcer said a plane had flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. 

"What a horrible accident," I remember thinking. 

I was doing communications work for a big technology company. I parked my car and just as I was getting situated in my cubicle inside the office building, I heard the television blaring in my client's office.

He told me a second plane had flown into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Soon, we learned that a third plane had flown into the Pentagon. 

We took the elevator to the top floor with several others. Only 9 miles from the Pentagon, we could see smoke billowing into the sky.

Radios and TVs were turned up. Local announcers were relaying reports of additional attacks, many of which would turn out to be untrue. 

Dulles International Airport was under attack? Reagan National Airport? The White House? The Capitol? How many more hijacked planes were out there? Where would they strike next?

It was total chaos. Here I was in an impersonal office building as people cried, called loved ones, even prayed aloud. 

We all experienced the horrific events of 9/11 in different ways and there was nothing special about my experience - except that I was living in the Washington, D.C., region when it happened.- More...
Tuesday PM - September 11, 2018