Bad Bill of the Week: Bad Things Come in Threes
AK HEADLAMP by Client ServicesHeadlamp is offering up three Bad Bills of the Week today:
HB 169: An Act establishing a program for tours of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for certain members of the United States Congress.
HB 173: An Act establishing the Alaska Climate Change Response Commission.
HB 175: An Act ratifying an interstate compact to elect the President and Vice-President of the United States by national popular vote.
House Majority Leader Chris Tuck wants the Legislature to coordinate tours of ANWR. At face value, HB 169 is not a terrible idea, however, having the State pay for it is! Unfortunately, Rep. Tuck hasn’t released his sponsor statement which might give us more insight into his thinking behind the bill. We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume he wants these tours to take place to help encourage the responsible resource development of ANWR. Headlamp likewise believes in the responsible development of ANWR, but we’d rather see the private sector take the lead on this to show members of Congress the prospect of ANWR. If government is going to get involved in coordinating tours of ANWR, it would seem to make more sense, given that ANWR is on federal land, for Alaska’s federal delegation to take up this cause.
Finally, we bring you HB 175. Rep. Fansler wants to change the way we vote for President of the United States. In essence he’d like to nullify the Electoral College and put the fate of the Presidency in the hands of large states like Texas, California and New York. Did we mention he wants to change how we elect the President by changing Alaska State Statute? We’re just going to leave you with that. [Read the rest]
Good herring hauls at Sitka; Updates for Craig, Kodiak, Togiak
by Laine WelchSitka Sound always kicks off Alaska’s roe herring fisheries – this year starting with a three hour and 20 minute opener on March 19 that yielded 3,500 tons. . That followed with a 15 minute opener on the 22nd, bringing the total catch to about half of the 14,600 ton quota. By all accounts the fish were plentiful and looking good. The herring are valued for their roe as a percentage of body weight – the Sitka fish were averaging good roe counts of 11 to 12%. Another opener could occur on Friday.
A herring pound fishery could be the next to go near Craig. Fishermen can catch 349 tons this year and put them in enclosures called pounds. The structures contain blades of kelp to hold the herring spawn and sold to Asian markets.
No word yet on any other Southeast roe herring fisheries.
Fish and Game’s area manager, Tim Sands, summed up the problem last year.
For us the bigger impact is that we can’t produce a forecast for Togiak herring next year because we didn’t do the sampling. The data gap will cycle through our whole population estimate. Even if we were to start sampling again next year, Togiak herring live up to 12 plus years age classes so we’ll have that gap for 8 years at least. [Source]
Soft Boiled Egg with Asparagus on Toast
by alaskafromscratch
[Read the Recipe Here]
Erdogan warns Europeans 'will not walk safely' if attitude persists, as row carries on
If that is not war talk I don't know what is!
President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that Europeans would not be able to walk safely on the streets if they kept up their current attitude toward Turkey, his latest salvo in a row over campaigning by Turkish politicians in Europe.
Turkey has been embroiled in a dispute with Germany and the Netherlands over campaign appearances by Turkish officials seeking to drum up support for an April 16 referendum that could boost Erdogan's powers.
Ankara has accused its European allies of using "Nazi methods" by banning Turkish ministers from addressing rallies in Europe over security concerns. The comments have led to a sharp deterioration in ties with the European Union, which Turkey still aspires to join.
If you don't know what's going on, in April, Turkey is having a 'democratic' vote on a referendum that will essentially make Erdogan a dictator of Turkey into 2029. Also, it's ironic that Turkey (a nation that allied with the Nazis) is accusing Netherlands that was invaded by Nazis as being 'Nazis...that's some Grade A logic.
The Union of European Turkish Democrats, which organizes events in Europe, said on Tuesday that Turkish leaders would no longer hold campaign rallies in Germany after an ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel said they were not welcome.
Germany, home to some 1.4 million Turks eligible to vote in the referendum, has been angered by the Nazi comparisons and Merkel has demanded that Ankara halt the rhetoric. Erdogan, however, has repeated the message in speech after speech.
The Netherlands, also home to a large ethnic Turkish diaspora, has been embroiled in a similar row with Turkey. [Read the rest]
Authorities think a 19-year-old US-Israeli citizen and his father are behind most of the Jewish community center bomb threats
An 19-year-old man has been arrested in Israel over a series of bomb threats made to Jewish community centers worldwide over a six-month period, according to The Jerusalem Post.
A US-Israeli citizen, the man is reportedly suspected of carrying out bomb threats and other threats across the US as well as in Europe, in Australia, and in New Zealand. The man is Jewish, the Associated Press reported Thursday.
"Sources indicate that most of the cases of threats against Jewish communities and organizations, though not all, led investigators back to Israel," The Jerusalem Post reports.
The court found that the father made "many of the threatening phone calls," according to Bob, and that the mother is not a suspect.
Israel reportedly intends to indict the 19-year-old in the country's courts and, according to The Jerusalem Post, it's unknown whether the US or other countries will look to extradite the suspect. The investigation was led by Israel with the help of the FBI and police officers from other countries, according to the AP. [Full Story]
Belgian police stop suspected car-ramming attack in Antwerp
A person has been detained in Antwerp, Belgium, after he was believed to be attempting to drive his car into a busy shopping street at high speed, according to police.
"A vehicle with French plates has tried to drive at high speed into the Meir [shopping street] so that pedestrians had to jump aside," Antwerp police chief Serge Muyters told a news conference.
"Our army colleagues forced the driver to stop but he pulled away and ran a red traffic light. We sent a special forces team and the car and the driver were stopped."
"A man in camouflage was taken away."
The car was intercepted at nearby port docks, according to the federal prosecutor's office.
Authorities said they found knives, a gun, and a gas can with an unknown liquid in the car, Reuters reported.
"Different arms were found in the boot, bladed weapons, a pump-action rifle and a container of as yet unidentified liquid," Belgium's federal prosecutor said in a statement, as quoted by AFP.
The prosecutor said the man has been identified as 39-year-old Mohamed R., a Tunisian national who resides in France. [Full Source]
Archaeologists unearth statue of Queen Tiye in Egypt's Luxor
A unique statue, possibly of Queen Tiye, the wife of King Amenhotep III and grandmother of King Tutankhamun, has been unearthed at her husband's funerary temple in Kom El-Hittan on Luxor's west bank.
The exciting find was made by the European-Egyptian mission, working under the umbrella of the German Archaeological Institute.
Minister of Antiquities Khaled El-Enany who visited the site to inspect the discovery, described the staute as "unique and distinghuised".
She said the statue was found accidentally while archaeologists were lifting up the lower part of a statue of king Amenhotep III that was buried in the sand. [Story]
Dinosaur family tree poised for colossal shake-up
The longstanding division of dinosaurs into 'bird-hipped' species including Stegosaurus and their 'lizard-hipped' counterparts such as Brachiosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex may no longer be valid, a study published on 22 March in Nature contends1. Among the other proposed changes to the dinosaur family tree, the long-necked herbivorous and often gargantuan sauropods such as Brachiosaurus are no longer as closely related to bipedal, meat-eating theropods such as T. rex as they were under previous schemes.
“This is a textbook changer — if it continues to pan out,” says Thomas Holtz, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. “It’s only one analysis, but it’s a thorough one.”
Most of the species considered in the analysis lived within the first 100 million years of dinosaurs' reign. The oldest known dinosaur fossil dates from about 243 million years ago, and the last dinosaurs — along with myriad other creatures — died en masse around 66 million years ago, leaving the birds as their only descendants, after an asteroid slammed into the sea just north of what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
Hans-Dieter Sues, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, says...The discovery of new dinosaur species or more complete specimens of those already known might also drive future analyses back toward more currently accepted arrangements of dinosaur lineages, Sues says. In recent years, South America has yielded a flurry of new dinosaur discoveries. And, he says, North American rocks laid down during the dinosaurs’ earliest days have yet to be explored as thoroughly as South American rocks of the same age.
“For many regions of the world, there’s so much we don’t know about the fossil record,” he notes. [Source]
Movie of the Week:
My youth is showing! I absolutely loved, loved! These books growing up! A bit of nostalgia for me here---perhaps the Craig Movie Theatre will show it one of these days ;-)
Read More: The #1 Rule of Phlight Club....Don't Talk About Phlight Club! But We live Dangerous on POW...So Here's Everything You Need to Know!
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