NIKISKI — A group of Nikiski High School students are spearheading an effort to get more books into the hands of Kenai Peninsula middle school students.
The Peninsula Clarion reports that the club, called T-books, works to fundraise and purchase reading materials suitable for middle school students and then personally drop them at school sites in the area.
The club has been operating for three years but this year expanded their reach all the way to the Hope School at the edge of the Kenai Peninsula. Before books only went to students in Nikiski, Kenai and Soldotna.
Group founder and high school senior Savannah Rizzo chose to target middle school students because they are at the age where a love of books can really take hold, she said.
ANCHORAGE — Police in Alaska’s largest city are looking for a man on a bicycle who is accused of pepper-spraying at least four people.
Anchorage police say they began getting calls about the assaults shortly before 6 p.m. Sunday.
One of the victims was taken to a hospital, police say.
According to police, Town Square Park downtown was the site of the first reports. Police say later reports came from the area around Sullivan Arena.
The bicyclist is described as a white man who was wearing blue jeans, bright red shoes and a black shirt with a gold emblem on it. Police say the man also had a black backpack and might have also had a camouflage-colored backpack.
ANCHORAGE — Anchorage police are investigating the deaths of two men whose bodies were found near each other in a local park.
Police say they were called to the Valley of the Moon Park shortly before 2 a.m. Sunday by someone who found one of the bodies on a bike path.
According to police, officers found the other man’s body in the park nearby as they were searching the area.
The men’s identities were not immediately released.
Police say they are treating the deaths as homicides, but have not disclosed how the men died. Anchorage television station KTUU-TV reports that area residents heard shots fired earlier.
A longtime pilot and flight instructor from Alaska has died after his biplane crashed during an air show in central Oregon.
Sixty-one-year-old Marcus Bruce Paine appeared to be attempting a very low-altitude loop when his Boeing Stearman plane went down at about 3 p.m. Saturday.
Jefferson County Sheriff Jim Adkins says officials with the Federal Aviation Administration were attending the Airshow of the Cascades at Madras Airport when the crash occurred. He says the agency is investigating, along with the sheriff’s office and the Madras Police Department.
The airshow’s website says Paine lived in Anchorage, had extensive military experience and was a pilot for more than 20 years. It says Paine’s flight school teaches aerobatic flight, stall and spin awareness and other topics.
Poet Max Ritvo who chronicled his long battle with cancer has died. He was 25. Judith Eigen Sarna/AP
Max Ritvo, a poet who chronicled his long battle with cancer in works that were both humorous and searing, has died. He was 25.
Ritvo died Tuesday morning at his home in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, his mother, Ariella Ritvo-Slifka, said Friday.
Ritvo was diagnosed at 16 with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare cancer that affects bones and soft tissue in children and young adults.
Treatment brought about a remission that permitted Ritvo to finish high school and attend Yale University, where he performed in an improv comedy group. His teachers included Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Gluck.
Ritvo’s cancer returned in his senior year, but he completed Yale and this year earned a master’s degree from Columbia University.
Ritvo’s battle with the disease informed his works. A June poem in The New Yorker discussed an experiment where cells from his tumors were used in cancer drug treatment experiments with mice.
“I want my mice to be just like me,” Ritvo wrote. “I don’t have any children. I named them all Max. First they were Max 1, Max 2, but now they’re all just Max. No playing favorites.”
Ritvo’s first book of poetry, “Four Reincarnations,” is scheduled to be published this fall.
In radio and podcast interviews, Ritvo spoke about his suffering. But he rejected any idea that he was a victim of the disease – especially a heroic one.
At their wedding last summer, Ritvo and his wife, Victoria, banned words such as “inspirational” from the speeches, his mother said.
“He was about love and compassion, human and animal rights and about writing and sharing himself with the world,” she said. “He didn’t want people to see him as an invalid.”
Ritvo saw humor not as a coping mechanism but as an intrinsic part of dealing with his illness.
“You know, we imagine in our hysteria that it’s disrespectful for the sadness. But when you laugh at something horrible, you’re just illuminating a different side of it that was already there and it’s not a deflection, it makes it deeper and makes it realer,” he said last month in the WNYC Studios podcast “Only Human.”
Ritvo also inspired people with his attitude, his wife said.
“Max said ‘I love you’ to everyone. He hugged everyone. He just wanted there to be more love and laughter,” she said.
Ritvo was writing until several days before his death and had told his family that the end would be near when he was no longer able to write.
The day before his death, he told his mother and wife: “I can’t write anymore, I can’t speak, I can’t breathe … I’m not me … You guys have to be OK with me going,” his mother said.
Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
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