Clarise Larson

In this newscast: Alaska is well into the start of respiratory disease season. And with it, Alaskans are getting coughs, colds, COVID-19 and cases of flu.  And physicians are seeing a few things that make this year stand out; The Hecla Greens Creek mine near Juneau plans to break ground on an expansion sometime next year. That’s because on Thursday the U.S. Forest officially permitted its project on Admiralty Island. The move will extend mine operations for up to 18 years, but it will be subjected to some new environmental mitigation and oversight along the way; Unofficial results from the Division of Elections showed one Southeast Alaska precinct seemed to overwhelmingly choose a peculiar candidate for the U.S. House earlier this week — a man currently imprisoned in New York. But, those results confused voters who said that didn’t line up with how they voted. And it turns out — they were right. The Division of Elections has since updated its error; There are still tens of thousands of votes across the state left to be counted, and some key races remain undetermined. But in the Alaska Legislature members of bipartisan coalitions in the House and Senate are wasting no time in announcing their leadership and organizing their caucuses. 

In this newscast: Some key races across Alaska remain too close to call with tens of thousands of votes yet to be counted. Ballot Measure 2, repealing ranked choice voting and open primaries, leads by less than two percentage points. A Fairbanks state Senate race and an Anchorage House race are each on a knife’s edge; Next week marks the beginning of wolf-trapping season on Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska. But on the island – and the smaller islands surrounding it – getting an accurate count of the local wolf population has been a huge challenge. Now, managers are trying some interesting new counting techniques. Last summer, they hired a dog named Barley to sniff out an important source of data for tracking and understanding wolves – their poop;
Bipartisan majorities will control both the Alaska House and Senate following the election, lawmakers said Wednesday evening.