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Soldier dies after bear attack in Alaska training area

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Soldier dies after bear attack in Alaska training area


ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A U.S. Military soldier died of accidents sustained in a bear assault Tuesday in Alaska.

The soldier was a part of a small group in a coaching space west of the Anchorage Regional Landfill when the bear attacked.

The identify of the soldier was being withheld pending next-of-kin notification.

The 673d Safety Forces Squadron initially responded to the incident.

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Alaska Wildlife Troopers have been trying to find the bear within the space, which is closed to the general public for all recreation exercise.

No different info was instantly obtainable.



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Alaska

A Christmas & Hannukah mix of winter weather

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A Christmas & Hannukah mix of winter weather


ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – A variety of winter weather will move through Alaska as we go through Christmas Day and the first night of Hannukah.

A high wind warning started Christmas Eve for Ketchikan, Sitka, and surrounding locations for southeast winds 30-40, gusting to 60 miles per hour. Warnings for the combination of strong winds and snow go to the west coast, western Brooks Range, and Bering Strait.

Anchorage is seeing a low-snow Christmas. December usually sees 18 inches of snow throughout the month. December 2024 has only garnered a paltry 1.5 inches. Snow depth in the city is 7 inches, even though we have seen over 28 inches for the season. A rain-snow mix is likely to hit Prince William Sound, mostly in the form of rain.

A cool-down will start in the interior tomorrow, and that colder air will slip southward. By Friday, the southcentral region will see the chances of snow increase as the temperatures decrease.

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The hot spot for Alaska on Christmas Eve was Sitka with 48 degrees. The coldest spot was Atqasuk with 23 degrees below zero.

See a spelling or grammar error? Report it to web@ktuu.com



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Santa catches a ride with troops to bring Christmas to Alaska village

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Santa catches a ride with troops to bring Christmas to Alaska village


YAKUTAT, Alaska — Forget the open-air sleigh overloaded with gifts and powered by flying reindeer.

Santa and Mrs. Claus this week took supersized rides to southeast Alaska in a C-17 military cargo plane and a camouflaged Humvee, as they delivered toys to the Tlingit village of Yakutat, northwest of Juneau.

The visit was part of this year’s Operation Santa Claus, an outreach program of the Alaska National Guard to largely Indigenous communities in the nation’s largest state. Each year, the Guard picks a village that has suffered recent hardship — in Yakutat’s case, a massive snowfall that threatened to buckle buildings in 2022.

Santa and Mrs. Claus talk to a child in Yakutat as part of the Alaska National Guard’s Operation Santa program Wednesday. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)

“This is one of the funnest things we get to do, and this is a proud moment for the National Guard,” Maj. Gen. Torrence Saxe, adjutant general of the Alaska National Guard, said Wednesday.

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Saxe wore a Guard uniform and a Santa hat that stretched his unit’s dress regulations.

The Humvee caused a stir when it entered the school parking lot, and a buzz of “It’s Santa! It’s Santa!” pierced the cold air as dozens of elementary school children gathered outside.

In the school, Mrs. Claus read a Christmas story about the reindeer Dasher. The couple in red then sat for photos with nearly all of the 75 or so students and handed out new backpacks filled with gifts, books, snacks and school supplies donated by the Salvation Army. The school provided lunch, and a local restaurant provided the ice cream and toppings for a sundae bar.

Student Thomas Henry, 10, said while the contents of the backpack were “pretty good,” his favorite item was a plastic dinosaur.

Another, 9-year-old Mackenzie Ross, held her new plush seal toy as she walked around the school gym.

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“I think it’s special that I have this opportunity to be here today because I’ve never experienced this before,” she said.

Yakutat, a Tlingit village of about 600 residents, is in the lowlands of the Gulf of Alaska, at the top of Alaska’s panhandle. Nearby is the Hubbard Glacier, a frequent stop for cruise ships.

Some of the National Guard members who visited Yakutat on Wednesday were also there in January 2022, when storms dumped about 6 feet of snow in a matter of days, damaging buildings.

Alaska National Guard soldiers and airmen shovel the roof of a building in Yakutat. (Dana Rosso/U.S. Army National Guard via AP)

Operation Santa started in 1956 when flooding severely curtailed subsistence hunting for residents of St. Mary’s, in western Alaska. Having to spend their money on food, they had little left for Christmas presents, so the military stepped in.

This year, visits were planned to two other communities hit by flooding. Santa’s visit to Circle, in northeastern Alaska, went off without a hitch. Severe weather prevented a visit to Crooked Creek, in the southwestern part of the state, but Christmas was saved when the gifts were delivered there Nov. 16.

“We tend to visit rural communities where it is very isolated,” said Jenni Ragland, service extension director with the Salvation Army Alaska Division. “A lot of kids haven’t traveled to big cities where we typically have Santa and big stores with Christmas gifts and Christmas trees, so we kind of bring the Christmas program on the road.”

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After the C-17 Globemaster III landed in Yakutat, it quickly returned to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, an hour away, because there was nowhere to park it at the village’s tiny airport. Later, it returned to pick up the Christmas crew.

Santa and Mrs. Claus, along with their tuckered elves, were seen nodding off on the flight back.



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Trump Wants Denali Renamed

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Trump Wants Denali Renamed


Opposition to President-elect Trump’s renewed suggestion to change the name of Alaska’s 20,310-foot mountain back to McKinley includes many Alaskans, including Indigenous people, and the state’s two Republican senators. Sen. Lisa Murkowski advocated for years to remove the name of the nation’s 25th president, who never visited the mountain or had any connection to it, the Anchorage Daily News reports. “There is only one name worthy of North America’s tallest mountain: Denali—the Great One,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski wrote on X.

Trump brought up the idea in a speech Sunday at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, where he praised William McKinley as a fellow supporter of protective tariffs. “We’re going to bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it,” Trump said. In 2016, Trump had said he might change the name back, a notion he dropped when Alaska’s senators objected, per the AP. Denali is the Koyukon Athabascan name that was used by Indigenous people for centuries. It translates to “the high one” or “the great one.”

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The federal government named it Mount McKinley in 1896, which stood until Barack Obama’s administration in 2015. That switch came after years of effort by state officials and Native groups. Sen. Dan Sullivan once told an Alaska Federation of Natives conference that Trump made the same suggestion when he and Murkowski met with him at the White House in 2017. The senators objected vehemently, he said. An aide texted the Daily News that “Sen. Sullivan like many Alaskans prefers the name that the very tough, very strong, very patriotic Athabaskan people gave the mountain thousands of years ago—Denali.” (More President-elect Trump stories.)





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