Current Events

Current Events

Iditarod 2025 winner Jessie Holmes First-time Champion Holmes Wins Longest-ever Iditarod
March 15, 2025
Jessie Holmes won the 53rd running of the Iditarod Sled Dog Trail Race, claiming the honor of first across the line after five top-10 finishes. The 43-year-old finished the 1,128-mile course in 10 days, 14 hours, 55 minutes. It was not a best time because the course was the longest ever. Racers started at Pike's Waterfront Lodge in Fairbanks and, after embarking on a loop at Kaltag, had a halfway checkpoint at Grayling before heading home to Nome on a route changed by poor trail conditions. Holmes, who spent much of the race as the front-runner, won $57,200 as part of an overall purse of $500,000.

Opposition Party Tops Voting in Kalaalit Nunaat (Greenland)
March 12, 2025
The Demokraatit Party has won the most votes in Kalaalit Nunaat's parliamentary election. The center-right, pro-business party won 29.9 percent of the total, outclassing the ruling Ataqatiglit Party, which garnered 21.1 percent of the vote. The Inuit Ataqatiglit Party had partnered with the Siumut Party in 2021 and together gained 66.1 percent of the vote. This year, that combined total was just 36 percent. >The island, known for centuries as Greenland, is large but also largely uninhabited. It has 72 polling stations, and 40,500 people are eligible to vote. The island's total population is about 57,000. Significantly, the Demokraatit Party favors a slow path to independence from Denmark. The party with the second-highest vote total was Naleraq, who favor a quick pivot to independence. Naleraq's total was 24.5 percent.

American Woman Wins International Pancake Day Race
March 5, 2025
Pamela Bolivar 2025 Pancake Day Race The Pancake title is back across the Pond. Pamela Bolivar (right), an American, won this year's international Pancake Day race, finishing in a time of 1 minute, 3 seconds. The winner in Olney, England, was Eloise Kramer, who finished in 1 minute, 7 seconds. The Liberal race is part of a multi-day affair, involving other races (including a 5K running race that involves not one pancake), other contests (among them a timed test of pancake flipping), a parade, a talent show, a shriving church service, and (of course) a pancake breakfast. In Olney, the turnout was a record high 25 individual runners and eight three-legged teams. A children's race was also on offer.

Archaeologists Find Tomb of Hatshepsut Co-ruler Thutmose II
February 19, 2025
A team of archaeologists have discovered the tomb of Thutmose II, the fourth pharaoh of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty and spouse of the famed female ruler Hatshepsut. The archaeologists, a team of both English and Egyptians, discovered the tomb in late 2022, in the Wadi Gabbanat el-Qurued in the Western Wadis, west of Luxor; they labeled the tomb C4. Because the tomb was found near the tombs of Hatshepsut and of wives o Thutmose III, the team thought that the tomb was of a royal consort. They were right, just not in the way they thought. Among the discoveries in the tomb were alabaster fragments with inscriptions referring to Thutmose II, as a "deceased king"; significantly, also on those inscriptions was Hatshepsut's name. Also found was funerary furniture.