KTOO: Alaska Legislature’s new social media policy nixes banning and blocking. “If Alaska’s state legislators remove constituents’ comments or block them on social media, they may forfeit state-paid legal protection, according to a new social media policy adopted Friday. A House-Senate panel voted 8-3 in favor of adopting the new policy on behalf of the entire Legislature.”
Anchorage Daily News: OPINION: A new tool to help understand Alaska’s historic Native land claims act. “To provide future generations insights into this groundbreaking law, the Alaska Historical Society (AHS) has just completed the first-ever comprehensive guide to historical sources about ANCSA. The three-volume, nearly 1,200-page Guide to Sources for the Study of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act identifies the vast majority of documents, located in archives, libraries, personal collections and online.” The guide is freely available and searchable online.
KINY: Alaska Online Checkbook Act becomes law. “Last legislative session, Senate Bill 25, sponsored by Anchorage Senator Bill Wielechowski, passed unanimously in both chambers of the legislature. According to a release, the bill establishes a searchable online database so the public can easily view details on state government spending and revenues.”
KYUK: KYUK to receive $350,000 grant to digitally preserve and catalog decades of archival material. “The KYUK station, our humble building in the center of town, is responsible for the largest collection of video and audio footage documenting the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta. For decades, that collection was entirely physical: old tapes and VHS lining rows of shelves in the back of the building. Now, thanks to a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, KYUK is bringing that archive into the 21st century and protecting it for future generations.”
University of Maryland: Who Owns the Sounds and Images of Native People’s Pasts?. “The last known fluent speaker of the tribe’s native Western dialect died in 2010, and the remaining tribal citizens–who traditionally don’t count their members but are estimated to number about 350 speak an amalgam of Ahtna’s Western and Central dialects. Audio recordings of Western Ahtna exist, but many are kept in mainstream archives that don’t belong to the Chickaloon tribe. Now, two University of Maryland faculty members are part of a new effort to bring those recordings, and other pieces of history, back to the Native people who lived the stories within them.”
Raven Radio: Southeast Native Radio aired for just 16 years, but its voices will live on in a new digital archive . “Southeast Native Radio was broadcast over KTOO in Juneau for 16 years, from 1985 to 2001. The volunteer-produced show played as current affairs at the time, but twenty-one years later it’s become a window into the lives of the people and events that shaped Native culture in the region over the last century.”
KUCB: Preserving Aleutian history: collection of 1970s audio reels finds new home online. “The recordings were part of a school project that started in 1977 when a group of Unalaska students and their teacher Ray Hudson started collecting texts about the culture, language and history of the Aleutians. They called themselves the ‘Cuttlefish Class’ – a name they picked out together – and they called their project the ‘Cuttlefish Series.’”
Route Fifty: States With the Most and Least Cybercrime. “Alaska has the highest amount of cyber fraud per person every year while West Virginia has the least, according to a recent report.”
Alaska Public Media: Alaska’s COVID hospitalizations have hit a new high . “The state of Alaska logged 1,024 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, continuing its ranking as the state with the highest case rate in the nation. The state is also seeing its highest number of COVID-19 hospitalizations since the pandemic began. On Thursday, there were 242 patients with the coronavirus in Alaska hospitals, 30 of them on ventilators. Roughly 1 in 5 patients in Alaska has COVID-19. On a Zoom call with reporters, Alaska Chief Medical Officer Dr. Anne Zink noted that the hospitalizations aren’t necessarily all Alaska residents, some are nonresidents hospitalized in the state.” That seems very low compared to many other states, but remember Alaska’s population is less than 750,000.)
Daily Beast: Anti-Masker Alaska Pol Gets COVID, Boasts About Taking Unproven Meds. “Two Republican state senators in Alaska have tested positive for COVID-19 and one has been leveraging her platform on Facebook to tout a cocktail of vitamins and ivermectin as a miracle cure while railing against recommendations by public health officials. ‘Its my turn to battle Covid head on… game on!’ Republican state Sen. Lora Reinbold wrote on Facebook on Tuesday night. ‘When I defeat it, I will tell you my recipe.’”
Anchorage Daily News: Anchorage Assembly set to vote on override after mayor vetoes emergency ordinance requiring masks. “After a bitter, weeks-long debate, the Anchorage Assembly passed an emergency ordinance late Tuesday night requiring people in the city to wear masks in indoor public spaces — and Mayor Dave Bronson on Wednesday followed through with his vow to veto it.”
New York Times: In Alaska’s Covid Crisis, Doctors Must Decide Who Lives and Who Dies. “…with some pockets of the state wary of taking vaccines — only about half the state’s residents are fully vaccinated — and Gov. Mike Dunleavy resisting restrictions to curtail the virus, the state’s isolation has become a growing liability as the Delta variant sweeps through. The state’s surge has continued even as the virus has receded nationwide, with new daily cases down by about a third and hospitalizations by about a quarter since Sept. 1.”
NBC News: Delta variant surge pushes Alaska’s sparse health care infrastructure to the brink. “Seven days a week, Stephannie Christian puts on a gown, gloves, an N95 mask and a face shield to travel across rural Alaska, bringing oxygen tanks to the homes of patients with severe Covid-19 cases. Christian, 41, is a physician assistant for Tanana Chiefs Conference, a tribal consortium that works to meet the health needs of 42 Native Alaskan villages in interior Alaska. Since the delta variant became the prominent strain in the state, Christian has been working at a breakneck pace, always on call.”
Anchorage Daily News: Amid COVID-19 overload, Alaska’s largest hospital is now prioritizing care under crisis standards. “Alaska’s largest hospital is now implementing crisis standards and rationing medical care amid a crush of COVID-19 patients and staff shortages that have forced providers to prioritize patients most likely to recover. Providence Alaska Medical Center’s chief of staff announced the decision in a two-page letter Tuesday that urges Alaskans to wear masks regardless of their vaccination status, get tested, get vaccinated if eligible and avoid potentially dangerous activities or situations that could result in hospitalization.”
Alaska Public Media: Hospitals say a disaster declaration would help Alaska cope with record hospitalizations. “More Alaskans are now hospitalized with COVID-19 than at any other time in the pandemic: 152. Hospitals in Southcentral Alaska are in crisis, and the head of the state hospital association wants Gov. Mike Dunleavy to issue a disaster declaration to help ease the pressure.”
The ResearchBuzz Firehose is regular RB content presented as individual posts.
For digest-type posts a couple of times a day, please visit ResearchBuzz.
Want to know how to best use the Firehose for content discovery?
Check out this handy article.