Free Republic

A government meeting in Alaska opened with a prayer to Satan after a Satanic Temple member won the right to deliver the invocation, prompting about a dozen officials and attendees to walk out. The invocation was the first given by the Satanic Temple since the Kenai Peninsula Borough — 75 miles south of Anchorage — changed a policy in November after the Alaska Superior Court said that policy violated the state’s constitution’s establishment clause. The new policy allows for anyone in the borough to offer an invocation, no matter their religion. In her invocation, Iris Fontana, who is a member...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Two employees of an Alaska backcountry lodge startled an adult grizzly bear while running on a trail in Alaska's Kenai Peninsula. The bear stepped out of thick brush and mauled one woman while the other ran for help. Gabriele Markel, 20, was recovering Wednesday at an Anchorage hospital. Her wounds, which authorities described as bites and scratches on her head, back and arm, weren't considered life-threatening. She was upgraded to good condition from fair on Wednesday, authorities said. Markel and a co-worker, Kaitlyn Haley, 26, of California, were running Tuesday afternoon on the Cottonwood Creek Trail near...

More than three years after a land deal with a political supporter blew up in her face, Sen. Lisa Murkowski said there's little she would change about the real estate transaction. The controversy began when Murkowski and her husband, Verne Martell, in 2006 bought Kenai riverfront property from Bob Penney, a longtime friend and major contributor to Alaska political campaigns. After a watchdog group filed an ethics complaint and the purchase caused an uproar, she sold the land back to Penney for its $179,400 purchase price. At the time, Murkowski called her decision to give it back a heart-wrenching one,...

A man awakened by a bump in the night went to investigate and found an intruder, but it wasn't a burglar. Instead, Blaine Harling found himself face to snout with a black bear that had come in through an open window. Harling, 19, has been staying at the cabin belonging to his grandparents... "He thought it was the blinds flopping in the window from a two feet wide, by five feet high, crank-out window that he had left open for ventilation," ... The screened window was open just 18 inches, but that was enough for the adult black bear to...

AL TAMAL, Iraq (Jan. 14, 2006) -- Seaman Bryan W. Stocks, a 20-year-old Kenai, Alaska, native and platoon hospital corpsman for 3rd Platoon, Company A, 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, had a tough choice to make when he was considering enlisting into the Navy: nuclear physics or medicine. One involves high mathematics and accounting for the behavior of atoms; the other, calculating medicinal dosages and accounting for the behavior of human beings. Two equally demanding and difficult jobs suitable for only the most trustworthy and intelligent of enlistees. Ultimately, though, the decision came down to a question of what Stocks...

KENAI NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Alaska - The moose were impatient for their supper. As soon as the four ungulates saw biologist Tom Lohuis, they began stomping around in their stables, letting out occasional guttural moans. It was time for their final experimental meal in a five-day research project carried out next to Lohuis' log-cabin office. "Hey, hey, hey," he said as 7-year-old Melody shoved her snout into the dish as soon as he set it down. "They know exactly what's coming." What goes in, of course, must come out. And those droppings are of great interest at the Kenai Moose...