A magnitude 5.6 earthquake shook Sand Point and King Cove early Wednesday morning. Residents felt the tremor, but the local police departments say there have been no reports of damage or injuries.

The quake struck 55 miles southwest of King Cove. Alaska Earthquake Information Center seismologist Natasha Ruppert says so far, there haven’t been any aftershocks from the event. 

U.S. Senator Mark Begich announced Tuesday that he and his staff are heading out on a community tour of Alaska this month to discuss economic growth and job creation.

Although the Senator will only visit a handful of places, he’s sending staff to almost 60 communities, including remote villages like Kiana, Angoon, and St. Michael. But notably absent from the Senator’s tour are any Aleutian communities.

A year after the Coast Guard seized the stateless fishing vessel Bangun Perkasa and brought it back to Unalaska, the agency is in pursuit of another suspected pirate vessel.

Details are sparse, but during a press conference yesterday, Coast Guard Commandant Robert Papp said the cutter Rush had intercepted a vessel suspected of high seas drift netting. A United Nations moratorium on high seas drift netting is enforced by member states, including the U.S. According to the Associated Press, the Coast Guard found 40 tons of illegal fish on board the vessel.

The community development quota groups, or CDQ groups, were created in 1992 to bring impoverished Western Alaska communities into the lucrative Bering Sea fisheries. Today, the six nonprofit corporations split roughly ten percent of various fish quotas and collectively own more than $700 million in assets.

The state’s review is supposed to increase accountability. For the CDQ groups, it's familiar territory. The state is asking them to evaluate their own financial performance, and the jobs and educational opportunities they’ve provided to their member villages. They’ll have to determine whether they’ve met goals they outlined in their own, individual community development plans.

The Air Force has grounded a squadron of F-16 fighter jets in Japan after one of their pilots crashed in the North Pacific this Sunday.

The pilot was on his way to Alaska when his jet crashed about 250 miles off the Japanese coast. He safely ejected from the plane and spent six hours in the water before being picked up by a commercial cargo ship transiting the Aleutians. He was transferred to the Coast Guard cutter Monro and then dropped off in Cold Bay on Tuesday.

The Alaska Department of Transportation is accepting bids to refurbish the M/V Tustumena. The ferry, which travels through the Aleutian Islands on the Alaska Marine Highway System, was first commissioned in 1964.  The DOT estimates the repairs and upgrades will cost 5 to 7 million dollars, which will be paid for by the federal government. Construction is planned for this winter and set to finish in April 2013.

A month-long saga that left a handful of Sand Point residents banned from PenAir’s facilities -and consequently their flights - ended on Tuesday.

The row started on June 27, when a letter signed by PenAir CEO Danny Seybert was posted in the company’s Sand Point terminal. The subject was “Denied Access,” and the letter listed 15 residents, all affiliated with the Qagan Tayagungin tribe, who were no longer welcome on PenAir property. The letter didn’t specify a reason for the ban, but QT tribal executive Tiffany Jackson said in an interview Friday that it was obvious.

(Lauren Rosenthal/KUCB)

By the time he pulled up the mine, Jimmy Berg had caught as much metal as fish.

Berg is a deckhand on the Aleutian Sable, and he was hauling black cod pots just outside Unalaska one day in late June. He’d already found a 35 millimeter shell in his pot, so he wasn’t particularly surprised when he spotted this thing stuck to another pot a few hours later.

It was a hunk of rust the size, and color, of a brick. It seemed harmless enough – until it shocked him.

One of Shell's drill ships has arrived in Unalaska and the other is expected by the end of the week. The Noble Discoverer pulled into port on Saturday, accompanied by a small flotilla of support vessels. While the ships were originally scheduled to bypass Unalaska on their way to Arctic, persistent sea could keep them around for a while. 

“We are obviously watching the ice very closely because it has so far delayed our entry into both theatres," says Shell Alaska spokesperson Curtis Smith. "We couldn’t legally be on site until July 15, but it looks now like we’ll be on site and start drilling sometime in the first week of August. And that’s disappointing, because that’s time, of course, that we will not get back. But we will make the most of the time that we do have.”