Kirk Johnson

The most troubling part, teachers, professors and administrators across Alaska say, is that things could get much worse — not least for morale.

So dangerous is this city’s biggest homeless camp, called the Jungle — three ragged miles stitched along the underbelly of Interstate 5 — that if a fire broke out there today, firefighters would not be allowed in without an armed police escort. State lawmakers are considering a razor-wire fence around the camp, separating it from the city at a cost of $1 million.

Hours after the jailed leader of the occupation at a remote Oregon wildlife refuge called on his followers to "stand down," three occupiers at the refuge - now encircled by a swarm of law enforcement officials - were arrested after turning themselves in to authorities late Wednesday.

A day after a leader of the armed occupation of a federal wildlife refuge was killed and eight other anti-government activists were arrested, law enforcement officials called on those who remained at the refuge to go home, saying they had only themselves to blame for what had happened.

An armed group that is occupying a wildlife reserve in Oregon has called for Washington to hand control of federal lands to ranchers and local governments.

A state budget that was a point of Alaskan pride — and envy from around the nation — lies in tatters as revenue that flowed from selling crude oil from Prudhoe Bay over the past four decades has been swept away.

A man from Baghdad showed up in Oregon and said that he had won $6.4 million in a Megabucks lottery drawing — without ever having visited the state.

Though the circumstances from other recent police-involved shootings around the nation are different — including that all the parties involved here are white — the alienation from authority echoes in a way that feels much the same.

The judgment call that students are being asked to make, social and fashion experts said, is how far to go in pretending to be someone else, and whether the effect is flattery or mockery.

In Oregon, the divide between urban places, which are booming — especially the state’s largest city, Portland — and rural ones, which are largely struggling, has often shaped the debate over guns and other social issues.

Oregon was not the first state to legalize recreational marijuana. But in preparing to begin retail marijuana sales next month, it is nonetheless blazing a profoundly new trail, legal experts and marijuana business people said.

Alaskans cherish the state's image of wild purity in a landscape so vast it can sometimes seem barely touched by people. But the roughly 600 military installations across Alaska tell a different story, in polluted sites that were never fully cleaned up, and the related health problems that have lingered and festered.

What is billed as the first race of its kind -- a human-powered dash to Alaska -- set off Thursday morning from Port Townsend, Washington, heading north to Ketchikan.

The standoff between Royal Dutch Shell, which proposes to lease a terminal in the Port of Seattle for its Arctic drilling fleet, and the opponents who want to block the company’s plans for environmental and other reasons, is going aquatic. The various groups organizing a “ShellNo Flotilla” for Saturday hope to attract 1,000 kayaks or other small boats and are arranging temporary housing for people coming from elsewhere to train and participate.

Residents of Anchorage say the city has come a long way since the dark days of the mid-1980s when oil prices plummeted and left the local economy reeling. But despite the optimism, it's hard to say for certain what the recent oil crash means for the city.