ANCHORAGE (Reuters) – A Pennsylvania father and son have pleaded guilty to making harassing phone calls to a lawyer for former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, court documents show.

Shawn Christy, 20, and his father Craig Christy, 48, each pleaded guilty during a hearing in U.S. District Court in Anchorage on Monday to a single count of making harassing interstate telephone calls, according to the court documents.

The Christys’ guilty pleas came after an agreement with prosecutors that would have called for each to serve five years’ probation rather than prison time was rejected U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Burgess in December.

In rejecting that plea deal, Burgess said, he was concerned that the Christys seemed “undeterred” in their behavior.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Retta-Rae Randall said on Tuesday she would seek the same sentence as that proposed in the plea deal. But she said the judge will have the opportunity to impose his own sentence.

The maximum penalty for the felony of making harassing interstate telephone calls is two years in prison, Randall said.

According to court documents, prosecutors said the two made near-continuous and threatening calls to Palin attorney John Tiemessen, his law-firm colleagues and their family members

ANCHORAGE (Reuters) – A former Army soldier who was convicted of killing his wife and baby daughter shortly after returning from combat in Afghanistan was sentenced on Friday to 80 years in prison for the crimes.

Kip Lynch, 22, was found guilty last summer of first degree murder in the April 2010 shooting death of his 19-year-old wife Racquell and second-degree murder of their 8-month old baby, Kyirsta.

Lynch shot his wife numerous times in the back, head and neck while she was holding their infant daughter, according to police reports.

The bullets passed through her body, killing both mother and child, according to police reports. Lynch then turned the gun on himself in an apparent suicide attempt, but survived.

The bodies of his wife and baby remained in the family’s Anchorage apartment for a weekend before they were discovered.

Lynch was found in critical condition but recovered.

At the two-day sentencing hearing at a state superior court, Lynch’s public defender said the former soldier had served valiantly in combat but struggled with post traumatic stress upon returning home.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – A Russian tanker finished pumping an emergency shipment of 1.3 million gallons of fuel to shore in the ice-bound port of Nome, Alaska, on Thursday and prepared to head home, officials said.

Alaskans contracted the Renda, a 370-foot ice-class tanker owned by the Russian company RIMSCO, after a missed autumn fuel delivery left Nome short on fuel in the dead of winter, when the port freezes over.

The Russian vessel and its U.S. Coast Guard escort, the icebreaking cutter Healy, were expected to depart Nome on Friday, a Coast Guard spokesman said.

“They are done offloading,” Coast Guard spokesman David Mosley said. “The anticipated departure is scheduled for tomorrow.”

It will be up to the ships’ captains to determine when to disembark, a task that involves breaking the Renda out of ice that has enclosed the tanker during the fuel transfer at Nome’s harbor, Mosley said.

Once free of the frozen port, the Healy will lead the Renda through some 360 miles of sea ice to the open waters of the Bering Sea, the Coast Guard said.

The Nome area, home to less than 10,000 people, is about 200 miles from the nearest point in Russia.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – A Russian tanker was expected to finish offloading 1.3 million gallons of fuel in Nome as early as Wednesday night, officials said, easing an energy shortage in the ice-bound Alaskan port city.

The Renda, a 370-foot ice-class tanker sent to Nome from its home port in Vladivostok, has already pumped its gasoline cargo to shore and is now finishing the delivery of diesel, said Jason Evans, board chairman of the Sitnasuak Native Corp., the company that arranged for the unusual icebreaking mission.

The Renda, escorted by a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker, is making the first-ever winter marine delivery of fuel to northwestern Alaska.

Fuel is typically barged in to Nome, which lacks outside road access, during summer and fall. The last scheduled delivery was canceled after one of the worst storms to hit the region in decades swept the Bering Sea town of 3,600.

The missed barge shipment meant Nome could face sparse fuel supplies and, if fuel had to be flown into town, extremely high prices by late winter, Sitnasuak warned. Gasoline currently costs about $6 a gallon in Nome, Mayor Denise Michels said.

Michels said caution was more important that speedy fuel flow from the Renda, which arrived in town on Friday and began sending fuel to onshore storage tanks late Monday.

“We’re not pushing. We want to make sure this transfer is done safely. If it takes another 24 hours, so be it,” she said.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Workers pumped emergency fuel supplies into the ice-bound Alaskan port of Nome on Tuesday to ease an energy shortage after a Russian tanker braved ice-choked seas and cut through red tape to deliver the cargo, a Coast Guard official said.

The Russian tanker Renda was dispatched to Nome with a Coast Guard icebreaker escort after the town’s last scheduled barge delivery of fuel was cancelled in the fall when one of the worst storms in decades swept the northwest coastal town.

The fuel delivery is the first ever made by marine vessel to northwestern Alaska in winter, when the ocean and rivers in the region are choked with ice, Coast Guard officials said.

Emergency deliveries by air, an expensive undertaking, would have been needed if the Renda had failed to get to Nome, a town with a population of about 3,600 residents over 500 miles northwest of Anchorage.

The Renda arrived off the coast of Nome on Friday, but officials said at the time they wanted to position the ship and make all necessary arrangements to ensure a safe delivery of fuel without any spills.

Workers on the tanker and on shore began transferring the fuel late on Monday. By Tuesday morning, about 365,000 gallons of the 1.3 million gallon fuel cargo had been delivered to storage tanks on shore through hoses laid over half a mile of ice, Coast Guard spokesman Chief Petty Officer Kip Wadlow said.

The transfer process was expected to take two to three days.

ANCHORAGE (Reuters) – Alaska’s record-breaking winter snowstorms have achieved a new milestone — school closures in Valdez, a snow-tough Prince William Sound port that is on pace to beat its own season snowfall record.

This winter marks the first time in decades that Valdez schools have closed because of snow volumes, city and school district officials said. Potentially dangerous loads of snow on school roofs prompted the closures, which will be in effect until next week, officials said.

“We looked at snow loading and we looked at the need to get the snow off the roof, and it was better to close the school because things were close to that critical point,” Mayor Dave Cobb told Reuters.

The last time Valdez schools shut down because of too much snow was in the 1989-90 academic year, although there was a high-wind closure earlier this winter, Valdez School Superintendent Jacob Jensen said.

Valdez, a seaside town famous for big snow dumps each winter, is on pace to break its season record of 560.7 inches, said Bob Hopkins, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s Anchorage office.

Snowfall to date in Valdez is 321.5 inches, according to city officials, which already matches the season average for a town so used to snow its building code requires roofs to be extra-strong.

“They’re so prepared down there,” Hopkins said, adding that the town’s residents were usually able to shrug off massive amounts of snow. “They’re Alaskans, you know.”

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – A fuel-laden Russian tanker and its U.S. Coast Guard escort struggled through treacherous, ice-choked seas on Wednesday to reach the frozen Alaska port of Nome with an emergency gasoline and diesel delivery, Coast Guard and shipping officials said.

The unusual mission to ice-bound Nome, now facing a fuel shortage, is the first-ever attempt at a marine delivery of fuel to western Alaska in winter.

It was organized last month after the city missed its last scheduled barge delivery of fuel, which had been slated to arrive in the fall, in a cancellation blamed on bad weather, including the worst storm to hit Alaska’s northwest coast in decades.

As of Wednesday morning, the ice-class tanker Renda, carrying 1.3 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel, and the Coast Guard’s only functioning icebreaker, the cutter Healy, were plying the Bering Sea about 100 miles south of Nome, said Stacey Smith, manager of the Anchorage-based Vitus Marine company that chartered the Russian vessel.

After traveling a combined 68 miles on Sunday and Monday, the two ships actually “lost a little bit of ground” on Tuesday as shifting ice pushed the vessels back, Smith told Reuters.

Smith said it remained unclear when the ships would reach Nome, a city of 3,600. “That’s the question of the hour. Nobody’s able to answer that as of yet,” she said. “Each day is very, very different.”

Bringing the Renda and Healy to port is only “half of our mission,” Coast Guard spokesman David Mosley said. “We’ve got to get two ships to Nome, then we’ve got to ensure the safe transfer of oil. … And then we have to get both ships back out to the open water.”

ANCHORAGE (Reuters) – Alaska state officials closed the sole highway leading south out of Anchorage on Tuesday because of high winds, avalanche dangers and blowing snow, temporarily isolating two small communities.

Closures of the Seward Highway from Alaska’s largest city and the Whittier Tunnel, a passage used alternatively by cars and Alaska Railroad trains, blocked access to the ski resort community of Girdwood and the Prince William Sound port town of Whittier.

The move was due to two avalanches along the highway and avalanche-control work, said Rick Feller, spokesman for the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities.

The department will reopen the highway if weather and avalanche conditions allow, he said. No injuries were reported from the avalanches.

In Girdwood, a community of about 2,200, the highway problems forced cancellation of school bus service and Alyeska Resort’s ski lifts and trails were closed due to high winds, said Bill Chadwick, chief of the local fire department.

There has been no request for a shelter to house stranded travelers, Chadwick said. Anyone stuck in Girdwood can take refuge at the high-end resort hotel, he said.

“They’ve got warm rooms and food and they take a whole lot better care of you than we can sleeping on the floor of the elementary school,” Chadwick said.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – National Guardsman were helping residents of the Prince William Sound fishing town of Cordova dig out on Monday following weeks of storms that have left parts of the town buried in more than 10 feet of snow.

More than 50 Guardsmen helped shovel snow off roofs, while heavy equipment barged in Sunday on night was being put to work moving and disposing of the snow, state officials said.

Following several slides, avalanche experts were also on their way to assess those dangers, the officials said.

Officials in the town of 2,200 people last week declared the snowbound city a disaster, triggering the state assistance.

“In Cordova, they’ve just been at this for two, three solid weeks of hitting one storm after another,” said Jeremy Zidek, an Anchorage-based spokesman for the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services. “They’re worn out. They don’t have a lot of places to store snow.”

The major safety hazards in Cordova are collapsed roofs and avalanches, though there are other issues such as clearing snow away from heating systems to avoid a build-up of carbon-monoxide, Zidek said.

Roofs have collapsed at three commercial buildings, including a restaurant.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – The chief executives of BP and ConocoPhillips, two of Alaska’s three major oil producers, said on Thursday that the only viable way to commercialize the vast but stranded quantity of Alaska’s North Slope natural gas is to export it to Asian Pacific markets.

The BP and ConocoPhillips CEOs said they will work with Exxon Mobil, the third major North Slope oil producer, to develop an LNG project that would export to Asia, a dramatic change from decades-old plans to send North Slope natural gas by overland pipeline to domestic U.S. markets.

BP CEO Bob Dudley and ConocoPhillips CEO Jim Mulva made the comments to reporters after an unprecedented meeting in Anchorage of the chief executives of all three major North Slope oil producers.

Exxon, whose CEO Rex Tillerson also attended the meeting, said the parties are in early discussions on an export plan, but added that the pipeline plan through Canada is still under consideration.

North American producers and LNG shippers are scrambling to develop export plants after a sudden surge in domestic natural gas production, thanks to shale gas, swamped the market and pushed gas prices way below global levels.

Once expected to be a major importer, the United States now has up to a century’s worth of supply, prompting plans to ship the cheap fuel to thirsty markets in Europe and Asia where prices are up to five times higher.

Five projects across the United States and two in western Canada have applied for construction and export licenses, seeking long term deals predominantly with buyers in Asia.