Forrest Jenkins, 68, was initially arrested for the hit and run incident in Nov. 2024, hours after responders found 48-year-old Jesse Frank on the side of Chief Eddie Hoffman Highway near the Bethel airport.

On the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks have worked with Alaska Native villages to build suicide prevention programs focused on community strengths, rather than just mitigating risks. The approach has shown such promise it’s now being piloted in a totally different group: the U.S. military.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation unanimously passed a seafood bill on April 30 to fight illegal fishing. The legislation would rely on efforts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which Sen. Dan Sullivan said is already struggling to complete key fisheries surveys.Sullivan co-sponsored the Fighting Foreign Illegal Seafood Harvest, or FISH, Act with seven other senators, including Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Sullivan said he hopes it will help fight unfair trade practices and give a boost to Alaska’s fishing industry.

An innovative program built around Yup’ik culture is helping to lead the way in the national conversations around the issue of suicide prevention. Financial and logistical obstacles have made implementation difficult in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, where suicide rates have remained high.

The 2025 Kuskokwim Ice Classic tripod tripped the breakup clock on Monday, May 5, deciding one jackpot winner and four minute madness victors. But in an unusual twist of events, three of the five winners are related. The occurrence is far from a conspiracy — it just all comes down to a lucky number.

In the last few years, seasonal transitions in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta have become more disruptive. Now every spring, when the region undergoes a great thaw and chunks of ice break free from frozen rivers, residents find themselves living in high water.

For decades, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta has been home to the nation’s highest rates of suicide. In the 1980s, the backlash to a Pulitzer Prize-winning series helped prompt decades of work from Indigenous leaders to build innovative prevention programs from within the region focused on community strengths.

For many in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, the crisis of unsolved missing and murdered Indigenous people’s cases is personal. And on Monday, May 5, a group of 50 residents marched along Bethel’s main highway in honor of the national day of awareness for missing and murdered Indigenous people.

UPDATE: The National Weather Service has canceled the flood warning for Kalskag.While the river ice in front of Bethel has officially broken up, a flood warning remains in place until the evening of May 7 roughly 90 miles up the Kuskokwim River at Kalskag. An ice jam has sent water over the road connecting the lower and upper sections of the community.

Seventeen-year-old James J. McMillen died in Bethel after police say a snowmachine he was driving sank in a pond and he was unable to swim to safety late Saturday evening (May 3).