KUCB - Unalaska

Starting next year, Unalaska retailers won’t be allowed to distribute single-use plastic bags to their customers. If they do, they’ll be hit with $100 fines each time.

Federal investigators concluded that F/V Destination, which sank in the Bering Sea last winter, likely capsized after the vessel became coated in hundreds of thousands of pounds of ice.

Seafood buyers from Ukraine are visiting Unalaska later this month. The country was a once-modest market for Alaska fish that’s slowly reemerging after political upheaval and economic crisis.

In 1942, there were 44 people living on Attu Island, nearly all Alaska Natives. They were taken as captives to Japan, where half of them died. And after the war, the federal government forbade them from returning. In August, a group of 11 descendants finally visited their ancestral home for the first time.

Seventy-five years ago, Japan and the United States were locked in one of the bloodiest battles fought on American soil: the Battle of Attu. In 1943, American troops were streaming into Alaska in preparation for one of the deadliest battles of World War II. One year earlier, Japanese soldiers had bombed Dutch Harbor, seized Attu Island and took the Alaska Native people who lived there as prisoners of war.

Ringed seals — an Arctic species that typically lives far north of the ice-free Aleutian Islands — are showing up.

Now, scientists are monitoring the unusual visitors to find out why they’re near Unalaska..