Headline Reads
3 Compelling Stories from Home and Away
By Robert Foran III
Associate Editor
ALASKA – From abcnews.go.com
A commercial fisherman who faked his death to avoid incarceration for a sexual assault has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Federal prosecutors say the Coast Guard spent $384,261 searching for Ryan Meganack, 35, after his girlfriend, who was part of the scheme, reported him missing.
Meganack in 2016 faced state charges of sexually assaulting an incapacitated woman.
Investigators determined he swamped his skiff, returned to Port Graham and hid out near his mother’s home. He planned to flee Alaska when the search ended. The plan went awry when Meganack’s girlfriend confessed to his grieving parents that Meganack was not dead.
U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason ordered Meganack to serve 15 months in prison consecutive to his 15-year state sentence.
NATIONAL — From Foran Brand Journalism
The President recently named who will be granted Presidential Medals of Freedom—the nation’s highest civilian award. The electric mix consisted of Elvis Presley; Miriam Adelson: physician and wife of prominent Republican donor and casino tycoon, Sheldon Adelson; Orrin Hatch: longtime Republican Senator from Utah; and Justice Antonin Scalia: a deceased and esteemed member of the Supreme Court.
Adding some athletes to the mix of people who will be recognized are Babe Ruth, Hall of Fame football player; Alan Page, who later became the first black judge on Minnesota’s Supreme Court; and Roger Staubach: a Hall of Fame quarterback and Vietnam veteran.
INTERNATIONAL – From npr.com
An iceberg recently spotted by NASA scientists looks like it was carefully cut into a perfect rectangle, and it’s getting a lot of attention because of those unexpected angles and straight lines. This iceberg probably recently calved from an ice shelf, NASA says. And the portion above the surface is likely just ten percent of the total iceberg, sea ice specialist, Alek Petty says.
“It’s a kind of formation called a tabular iceberg, which forms in Antarctica,” Petty said, “where we have these really wide floating ice shelves connected to land.”
The iceberg is about a mile wide and considerably smaller than another well-known iceberg found near the Larsen C ice shelf. After years of anticipation by scientists, a formation the size of Delaware broke off from Antarctica last year, which is where the iceberg likely broke free.