ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – A second Pennsylvania man has agreed to plead guilty to making harassing telephone calls to an attorney representing former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, court documents filed on Wednesday showed.

Craig Christy, 48, submitted an agreement to an Anchorage court to plead guilty to the charges a day after his 20-year-old son, Shawn, agreed to a similar arrangement.

The father and son, from McAdoo, Pennsylvania, were charged with making hundreds of harassing and threatening telephone calls to Fairbanks attorney John Tiemessen and to his law-firm colleagues and their family members.

The pair were transferred to Alaska shortly after their August arrest in Pennsylvania and have been held since then in an Anchorage jail.

Under the terms of the plea agreement, Craig Christy would serve five years of probation in Pennsylvania and complete a mental-health treatment program. He would be barred from any computer or internet access except to seek employment or manage credit card accounts.

He would be allowed to communicate with his defense attorney and, through legal proceedings, other designated legal officials, but not with any other individual in Alaska.

Terms are similar to those agreed to by his son in the plea deal filed on Tuesday. U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Burgess has scheduled change-of-plea hearings later this month for both men.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Forget pepper spray. anti-Wall Street demonstrators in Alaska have a different challenge — bitter cold that tests their commitment to around-the-clock protests.

Groups backing the nationwide Occupy movement are protesting in Anchorage and Fairbanks, often defying sub-zero temperatures and the risk of frostbite to protest against economic inequality and excesses of the financial system.

In Anchorage, protesters rotate in and out of their tent camp, making sure that at least a couple of people are always keeping vigil at the site established in Town Square, a downtown park.

Participants believe they have an obligation to continue their protest, now a month long, in solidarity with their counterparts in the Lower 48, said John Heuerman, a university student and waiter taking part in the demonstration.

“We’re out here supporting the rest of the country. And you know they know about us,” Heuerman said.

A hardier contingent in Fairbanks has been camped for two months in a local park, withstanding temperatures dropping to about minus 40 degrees, record cold for this time of year.

“I think that a sense of patience and endurance is happening here, if we hang in there and we endure, that things are going to change,” said Brent Baccala, a self-described Christian street minister and a software designer.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – A Pennsylvania man will be sentenced to five years of criminal probation after he pleads guilty to harassing the family attorney of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, under a plea agreement filed on Tuesday.

Details on the plea deal were provided in court filings in U.S. District Court in Anchorage in which Shawn Christy, 20, said he would plead guilty to making harassing telephone calls to Palin’s Alaska attorney, John Tiemessen of Fairbanks.

Under other terms of the plea deal, Christy would not “communicate in any manner” with any individual in Alaska other than his defense attorney, absent court permission.

The court papers said Christy’s criminal probation would be served in his home state of Pennsylvania, and that he must complete a mental treatment program in either an inpatient or outpatient setting.

He would also be barred from possessing a computer or cellular telephone with online access and from using computers in public facilities, terms that could be modified by the court or by his probation officer.

Christy, 20, and his father, Craig, were accused of making at least 500 hostile and threatening phone calls to Tiemessen and the attorney’s colleagues, according to court documents.

The calls, made “repeatedly and continuously,” came mostly between August 1 and August 9, according to the plea agreement. Shawn and Craig Christy were arrested in Pennsylvania later in August. They were ultimately sent to Alaska and have been held since then in jail in Anchorage.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – A Pennsylvania man has agreed to plead guilty to a charge that he harassed an attorney for former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, actions that authorities said followed his similar goading of Palin herself, according to court documents filed on Monday.

Shawn Christy, 20, is charged with a single federal count of making harassing interstate phone calls, an offense that carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

He and his father, Craig, are accused of making hundreds of hostile telephone calls to Fairbanks, Alaska, attorney John Tiemessen, who represents the Palin family, and his colleagues.

Attorneys for Shawn Christy, who is in jail in Anchorage on the charge, submitted a change-of-plea motion in U.S. District Court on Monday.

“Defendant, Shawn Richard Christy, by and through counsel … notifies this court that he intends to plead guilty,” the filing stated.

Representatives from the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Shawn Christy’s lawyers could not be reached for comment.

Shawn Christy is scheduled to enter his guilty plea officially and be sentenced on December 1, the court papers state.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – A top college runner from Kenya who spent two days lost in an Alaska snowstorm earlier this month had to have both of his feet amputated due to frostbite, the University of Alaska, Anchorage said on Monday.

Marko Cheseto, a two-time NCAA All-American runner, disappeared on November 6 after leaving the university campus during a heavy storm. He walked into a campus hotel more than 48 hours later severely hypothermic and suffering from frostbite.

Both of the 28-year-old star athlete’s feet later had to be amputated because of severe frostbite, the university said.

Cheseto, in his first public statement since he was found, thanked the university, city and volunteers who searched for him during his “troubled times”.

“As some may know, I’ve been going through a lot of personal issues,” the runner said in a statement released through the university.

“While I am still recovering, both physically and emotionally, I will do my very best to give back to the community that has helped me so much and to my home country, Kenya,” he said. “I sincerely apologize for any problems that I may have caused.”

The disappearance of Cheseto triggered an intensive search in the woods and trails surrounding the University of Alaska and Alaska Pacific University campuses.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Alaska state officials on Friday were considering a controversial plan to shoot wolves in an effort to boost moose populations in one of the state’s top tourist and recreation areas.

An estimated 90 to 135 wolves range across the Kenai Peninsula, south of Anchorage, where under the proposal hunters would shoot the animals from aircraft.

Officials have not settled on the number of wolves they might kill under the plan, which was on the agenda for discussion at a meeting on Friday of the Alaska Board of Game.

By decreasing attacks on moose from a major predator, the proposal would allow for a rebound in the moose population, which now stands at about 5,000 and is well below targets, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Ted Spraker, an Alaska Board of Game member from the region, said on a statewide public radio program recently that the public is “disgusted” with the low number of moose.

“They want the board to start doing something,” he added.

But the practice of killing wolves to boost moose populations, especially through aerial shooting, has long been hotly debated in Alaska.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Residents of remote Alaska towns and tiny Native villages were working on Friday to tally up damages from a near-record storm that lashed the state’s west coast, officials said.

“Thirty-seven villages have reported some type of damage, whether that is wind damage or minor flooding or power outages. It’s really kind of a mixed bag,” said Jeremy Zidek, spokesman for the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

The Inupiat village of Point Hope, with about 675 residents, on Friday became the last of the communities to get power restored, Zidek said. A local shelter that housed residents on Thursday night is now scheduled to close.

The storm, with a pressure system and wind and wave conditions that meteorologists likened to a Category 3 hurricane, had passed by Thursday.

It was followed by a more typical Bering Sea storm, hitting southwestern Alaska instead of northern Alaska, and prompting new winter-storm and coastal-flooding warnings from the National Weather Service.

The larger storm was considered particularly damaging because of its northern trajectory and the lack of sea ice in coastal areas that could have acted as a buffer against surging waves.

A sea surge as high as 10 feet was measured in Nome, the western town that bore much of the storm’s brunt, according to the National Weather Service.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – An 80-year-old former mayor of Ketchikan, Alaska, was charged on Thursday with 80 new counts of possessing child pornography, in addition to 10 filed against him last week, police said.

John “Jack” Shay, a well-known political figure in the southeast Alaska community, was ordered by a state judge to turn himself in to the local jail on Thursday afternoon, the Ketchikan Police Department said in a statement.

Bail for Shay was set at $100,000, the police department said.

Shay was arrested last Friday after police said child pornography images were found on a computer printer that he had dropped off for repair. Shay spent Friday night in the local jail but was released Saturday, with his bail set at $30,000.

Shay was a member of the Ketchikan city council when he was arrested but has since resigned his seat, according to the city’s website.

The new charges against Shay resulted from a search of his home, the police department said.

Two of them concern a homemade video that includes a scene of Shay and an unidentified girl, the department said. The rest concern printed images found in the home, the department said.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – The worst was over on Thursday for an “epic” winter storm that pounded Alaska’s west coast with wind and snow and left one man missing after a 10-foot surge of seawater into Nome, officials said.

The storm, considered the strongest to hit western Alaska in several decades, has largely moved northwest toward the Russian Arctic, said Don Moore, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

A second, smaller Bering Sea storm is now brewing, and will send additional surges into the coastal towns and villages during high tide later in the day, said Moore, who has been working at the state’s emergency operations center.

The surges will not be as dramatic as those from the first storm but could cause more flooding, he said.

“If the water levels were not elevated from the storm that had just passed, this other storm would not be a major issue,” he said. “Once this passes off, this is when we’ll see conditions start returning to normal.”

One person was missing in the storm. Authorities in Teller, a small community north of Nome, were searching Thursday for 26-year-old Kyle Komok, said the Alaska State Troopers.

Komok was last seen Wednesday evening driving a four-wheel vehicle toward a small local jetty, trooper spokeswoman Megan Peters said.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – A storm experts compared to a Category 3 hurricane lashed the western coast of Alaska on Wednesday, ripping roofs from buildings and pushing water and debris into communities, authorities said.

The storm, which began hitting Alaska late on Tuesday after building over the northern Pacific Ocean, brought winds measured at up to 89 miles an hour and flooded parts of some Native villages along the coastline.

There were no reports of deaths or injuries as of Wednesday evening, and damage tallied so far was caused largely by wind and included reports of tin roofs flying off and power lines down, authorities said.

Alaska opted out of participating in a nationwide emergency-broadcast test on Wednesday due to the storm, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said.

“This is a storm of epic proportions as it’s being described,” said Jeff Osiensky, a meteorologist and regional warning coordinator for the National Weather Service. “This is kind of ratcheted up to a level much higher than we’ve been accustomed to.”

“I think this would probably be about a category 3 type hurricane if we were to do some sort of a similar comparison,” he said. “It’s on the line of a pretty destructive hurricane.”

Orsiensky said that by Wednesday evening wind speeds were diminishing but water levels would remain high and new surges of floodwaters were expected.