News Round Up [August 1, 2017]

Murkowski's First Interview In Sitka After Her Healthcare Vote:

P/V Enforcer Plucks Two from Prince of Wales Island Early Sunday

Alaska Native News

At 22:35 pm Saturday night, the Alaska Public Safety vessel P/V Enforcer was anchored seven miles distant from the West Island area, when they received an alert that two men in a 16-foot Lund were missing and had not been heard from in ten and a half hours in the Whale Pass area.

With weather conditions of 25 knot winds, gusting to 35 knots, and five-to-seven foot seas, the P/V Enforcer began searching the area around West Island.

An hour and 45 minutes into the search, the patrol vessel caught sight of “a faint light in the distance on the Prince of Wales shoreline directly across from West Island,” troopers reported.

The two mariners, identified as 68-year-old William Davidson of Virginia and 70-year-old Henry Davidson of Oregon reported to the officers that they had been fishing in the West Island area when the weather picked up, prompting them to pull anchor, and attempt to return to the Whale Pass area at approximately 12 noon on Saturday. But as the weather increased in severity, the two decided against braving the seas, and instead beached their skiff on Prince of Wales to wait out the weather. [Full Source]

PeaceHealth, Cedars Lodge partner to bring seafood to seniors

Posted by Emma Atkinson

Edward Waterstraat started out as a law student in Chicago and ended up a fisherman in Ketchikan. He built his own boat and set out to study oceanography, and eventually the riches of the Pacific Ocean led him to harvest its fruits rather than study them.

Waterstraat’s days on the high seas are over now. He lives in the long-term care unit of PeaceHealth Ketchikan Medical Center. He pointed to several photographs pasted to the wall of his room.

“That’s a – I put it up there so everybody would know what a red snapper looked like,” he said. “Those are a couple prize-winners. That’s an Alaskan red snapper; the official name for it is a Pacific rockfish.”

This man knows his fish – the good, the bad, and the ugly. When he heard that PeaceHealth had partnered with Cedars Lodge to bring fresh, locally-caught fish to residents of the long-term care facility, he was relieved.

Cedars Lodge general manager Russell Thomas said the lodge partnered with Ketchikan Pioneer Home a few years ago on a similar initiative, which Thomas describes as having been successful.

He said he hopes the people of Ketchikan will seriously consider supporting the New Horizons program.

“Our hope is just that we’ll get a lot of people who respond; either people go out and donate some excess fish, or that people will take a little out of what they might’ve taken home and be willing to donate it,” he said. [Full Story]

MEGATSUNAMI reaching 300 foot high and set off by landslide gives warning to scientists

The giant tsunami crashed into the defenceless village of Nuugaatsiaq, destroying 11 homes and washing four people away on June 17.

Data from a reconnaissance mission revealed the size of the wave that had previously been unknown due to the remote location and alerted locals to the fact another could be on the way.

The mega–tsunami was caused by a landslide and scientists have acknowledged that landslides in bays can rise to incredible heights, travel at devastating speeds, and cause massive destruction.

Authorities in Greenland are now preparing for the likelihood of a further landslide could crumble into the bay at any time.

As a result of the ongoing hazard, three villages remain evacuated.

Georgia Tech professor Hermann Fritz said: “The second adjacent landslide remains a hazard, with an open back scarp and wide cracks a thousand meters above the water.

“But with global warming and sea level rise, such landslides are going to be far more common.”

Professor Fritz travelled to the area to assess the devastation from the tsunami wave.

His team found evidence that the tsunami wave was more than 90 meters high. For comparison, the 2011 tsunami off the coast of Japan, which killed 16,000 people and caused the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, was no taller than 40 meters [131 feet].

Professor Fritz added: “At these depths, tsunami waves travel about the length of a football field every second, so the tsunami wave arrived very fast – probably on the order of five minutes for this village 30 km away.

“That left very little time to react. [Source]

Facebook AI Invents Language That Humans Can't Understand: System Shut Down Before It Evolves Into Skynet

Facebook was forced to shut down one of its artificial intelligence systems after researchers discovered that it had started communicating in a language that they could not understand.

The incident evokes images of the rise of Skynet in the iconic Terminator series. Perhaps Tesla CEO Elon Musk is right about AI being the "biggest risk we face."

What is the harm in allowing AI agents to communicate with each other in a language that they invented?

First and foremost, with AI systems using their own language, humans will not be able to follow just what exactly the AI agents are talking about. Humans are not able to understand how complex AI systems think due to their hidden thought processes, so the secrecy of AI agents will be made even worse when their conversations are made in an unknown language.

If AI agents are allowed to speak in a language that they created, they might no longer even need human intervention. [Source]

Paris 2024 Olympics nearly assured as Los Angeles agrees to 2028 Games

Paris moved within a hair's breadth on Monday of formally being chosen to host the 2024 Summer Olympics after rival candidate city Los Angeles agreed to accept the consolation prize of the 2028 Games in a rare two-way contest between the cities.

Both cities were competing for the 2024 Summer Games after several other contenders withdrew, and the stage was set for Paris to win its bid when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) confirmed that Los Angeles had officially embraced the later date of 2028.

The decision, subject to formal ratification by the IOC at a meeting in Peru in September, paves the way for Los Angeles and Paris to join London as the only cities ever to host the Games - summer or winter - three times since the modern Olympics began more than a century ago.

The United States last hosted the Olympics for the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. Its first was the Summer Olympiad III, staged in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904, coinciding with the World's Fair held there that summer.

The United States has hosted the Olympics 9 times - 5 Summer Games and 4 Winter Games. France has hosted 6 times, three each in summer and winter.

The IOC's unprecedented move of essentially awarding two Games in tandem turned the spotlight on security challenges facing the French capital while giving Los Angeles, which last hosted the Olympics 33 years ago, ample time to upgrade its public transportation system. [Source]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the 2024 Olympics simply won't happen. You heard it here first folks. Europe is in the midst of a migrant crisis with nearly daily minor terrorist attacks (these go mostly unreported in the MSM). Racial and Cultural tensions are rising in Europe and Paris is nearly one big "No-Go Zone." In fact, the migration crisis is getting so bad that the EU is now forcing other countries to accept them because there is simply not enough room for all of them:

The European Commission has initiated infringement procedures against Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic for refusing to take in refugees

EU Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, the man responsible for the bloc’s migration issues, said that the commission was sending an official note to the three countries, which signals the start of proceedings in connection with the quota mechanism.

At a news conference on Tuesday, Avramopoulos said

I regret to see that despite our repeated calls to pledge to relocate, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland have not yet taken the necessary action. For this reason, the commission has decided to launch infringement procedures against these three member states … I sincerely hope that these member states can still reconsider their position and contribute fairly.

If Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic continue to refuse to cooperate with the EU, the matter could be referred to the European Court of Justice, and the three Central European countries could be slapped with heavy fines.

The news of the infringement procedure comes on the heels of last month’s resolution in the European Parliament to launch Article 7 procedures against Hungary due to what Members (MEPs) see as “serious deterioration of rule of law and democracy” in the country.

Echoing similar language by PM Orbán, Hungary’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó described the European Commission’s move as an attempt to “blackmail” member states that refuse to implement the EU’s migrant quota redistribution scheme by launching infringement procedures against them.

He expressed his view that the Commission was overstepping its authority, and added that the Hungarian government would not allow anyone to cross Hungary’s border illegally. “Not even the EC can take away member states’ right to decide whom they want to let into their country and whom they want to live together with,” he said.

Szijjártó said Europe’s migrant crisis must be tackled at its roots, namely by defeating the Islamic State. He noted the service of 500 Hungarian soldiers in the fight against ISIS since 2015.

The Foreign Minister also claimed that no country had fully implemented the EU decision. Countries such as Hungary at least have stated clearly why they refused to, he added.

The minister said the EC plan was “extremely dangerous” given the grave threat of terrorism hanging over the continent.

It was impossible, he said, to know who is who among the 1.5 million illegal entrants to Europe. [Full Source]