Alaska Dispatch News

• Looking for climate change’s big picture, rural Alaska communities gather to compare notes December 12, 2019
  Heat waves. Coastal erosion. Shortened salmon runs. Across Alaska, there are clear signs that the climate is changing.What’s not always so clear is how different regions and individual communities will be affected, or how they should prepare for the changes still to come.At the 2019 Alaska Tribal Conference on Environmental Management, known as ATCEM, in […]
• White House defends withholding aid to Ukraine December 12, 2019
  WASHINGTON - The White House budget office asserts in a new legal memo that it withheld military aid to Ukraine as a temporary move to study whether the spending complied with U.S. policy - and not as a political effort to block Congress’ spending decisions.The office first began reassessing whether to release the aid on […]
• Sea-Tac is first airport to resist federal push for facial recognition and other biometric technologies December 12, 2019
  SEATTLE – At least for now, controversial facial-recognition technology won’t be installed at boarding gates at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, making the airport the first in the country to resist the rollout of a federal biometric identification program.After hours of impassioned public comment Tuesday, much of it from people calling facial recognition intrusive and dangerous, the […]
• Weinstein reaches tentative $25M deal with accusers December 12, 2019
  NEW YORK (AP) — A tentative $25 million settlement revealed Wednesday to end nearly every sexual misconduct lawsuit brought against Harvey Weinstein and his former film studio's board was praised by a plaintiff and some lawyers but criticized by others who say those who opt out are punished.Louisette Geiss, a plaintiff in a Manhattan federal […]
• More Americans are dying at home rather than in hospitals December 12, 2019
  For the first time since the early 1900s, more Americans are dying at home rather than in hospitals, a trend that reflects more hospice care and progress toward the kind of end that most people say they want.Deaths in nursing homes also have declined, according to Wednesday's report in the New England Journal of Medicine. […]