Alaska Public Media

The White House has selected Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson for Friday’s meeting of President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, multiple media outlets are reporting. The reports don’t mention what time the leaders will meet.

The Trump administration has announced few details so far, but White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that the meeting will be a “listening exercise” for Trump and that the two presidents are expected to meet one on one to discuss Russia’s war with Ukraine.

“Only one party that’s involved in this war is going to be present,” Leavitt said. “And so this is for the president to go and to get, again, a more firm and better understanding of how we can hopefully bring this war to an end.”

Meanwhile, progressives in Anchorage are planning demonstrations. Stand UP Alaska and Alaska March On, among other groups, announced they plan to demonstrate Thursday at 4:30 in Midtown and Friday at noon outside the Anchorage offices of Alaska’s U.S. senators.

Former Revenue Commissioner Adam Crum is throwing his hat in the ring for the 2026 Alaska governor’s race as a Republican. Crum filed paperwork on Monday allowing him to begin raising money for the campaign.

He’s running to replace his former boss, Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who is term-limited. Dunleavy first appointed Crum to lead the Department of Health and Social Services when he took office in 2018. He tapped Crum to lead the Department of Revenue in 2022.

In a brief interview, Crum said his experience in senior government roles, as well as in the private sector, gives him an edge in a crowded field.

“I understand the function of government, the function of the Legislature, the important things to the private sector, so I’ll have a functioning government up and running faster than anybody else,” Crum said.

Crum describes himself as a “conservative Christian” but said he’s willing to work across party lines. He said he’d like the state to diversify its economy and that his work as revenue commissioner would help him attract businesses to the state.

“One of the benefits of this role at Revenue is meeting with outside investors and actually talking to them about what are the issues they see, about why they don’t invest in Alaska, and what could be done to improve that,” Crum said.

Echoing Dunleavy, Crum also said he would like to reform the state’s public school system, which has languished near the bottom of national rankings. He said he hopes to work collaboratively with the Legislature on ways to improve education in the state.

“I think it’s very clear that there does need to be a level of investment, but there also has to be some change in policies,” he said.

Crum said he also wanted to work toward a new Permanent Fund dividend formula that’s predictable for residents and affordable for a state struggling with declining resource revenue.

“The reality is right now is there is not enough funds available to pay statutory dividends across the board, and I think we need an honest conversation about what is the dividend going forward, what level is appropriate and what is consistent,” he said.

The Department of Revenue faced criticism from legislative leaders earlier this year as lawmakers struggled to obtain data on oil and gas taxes in a format they could understand. The dispute led lawmakers to pass a bill bolstering the legislative auditor’s authority and override a veto from Dunleavy. Crum says on his last day in office on Friday, he directed department officials to cooperate with legislators’ requests.

“It’s going to be very costly in order to put it in this particular format, but they’re going to do that, and then everybody will see that there is no information that is being lost,” he said.

Crum is the eighth Republican to announce their campaign for governor. No Democrats or independents have formally joined the race. The filing deadline isn’t until next June.

Dunleavy announced Friday that Janelle Earls would take over as acting revenue commissioner. She had been the department’s administrative services director.

Early Sunday morning, Sasha Calvey awoke to a roar.

“I look out of the tent, and then I see a massive wave coming, like, inches away,” Calvey said.

Calvey was camped with two friends, Billy White and Nick Heilgeist, on Harbor Island, an uninhabited islet in Holkham Bay. It’s at the convergence of two of Southeast Alaska’s most-visited fjords, Tracy Arm and Endicott Arm.

Calvey, White and Heilgeist had spent the past 78 days kayaking the Inside Passage from Washington. The three hoped to spend the final two weeks of their trip making their way to Glacier Bay.

It was 5:45 a.m. Sunday when their plans abruptly changed.

Calvey scrambled to wake up White and Heilgeist. The three are professional guides who have been taking a summer off from leading trips through the San Juan Islands. They’d pitched their tent in the woods, far from the high tide line.

They emerged to find much of their gear had vanished, swept away by the rush of water. Calvey’s kayak was floating a quarter mile off shore. White’s rested on a cliff. Heilgeist’s was in a tree.

“It was just pure chaos out of nowhere,” Heilgeist said. “All of it was just gone.”

‘Something was really different, and wrong’

Miles away, anchored near the entrance of a fjord known as Fords Terror, Christine White saw water moving backwards. She knew the area well — she’d been taking clients there aboard her small cruise ship, the David B., for nearly two decades. On Sunday, she saw the tide quickly rise and fall by roughly 10 feet.

“When we started seeing the water rising again on what should have been a falling tide, we knew something was really different, and wrong,” she said.

Smith reached out to a seismologist she knew, who consulted with colleagues at the Alaska Earthquake Center and the U.S. Geological Survey.

Smith was onto something. Seismometers across North America had rattled just a few minutes before.

“Honestly, I think of it as the side of a mountain collapsing,” said Michael West, the Alaska state seismologist.

Details of the remote landslide were uncertain in the immediate aftermath, but West said early indications are that a truly impressive amount of rock and debris tumbled down — tens or hundreds of millions of cubic meters.

“We’re talking about a cube of rock, that is, you know, a couple football fields on each side,” West said.

A truly colossal tsunami

Southeast Alaska has seen a growing number of fatal landslides near populated areas in recent years. But Sunday’s landslide was something quite a bit different. Rather than a top layer of soil giving way, in this case, large masses of bedrock came down, West said.

When all that rock fell near the end of Tracy Arm, where South Sawyer Glacier reaches tidewater, West said it set off a truly colossal tsunami. One photo, taken by Heilgeist after the trio was rescued by a charter yacht, shows an island deep in the fjord scoured of almost all vegetation.

“We’ll get better height estimates in the days to come, but even posts floating around on social media make pretty clear it was at least 100 feet tall in some areas near the source,” West said.

The wave continued to resonate for hours, he said, not unlike water sloshing in a bathtub. It even showed up on a tide gauge in Juneau, 75 miles north and around a few corners, with fluctuations of a foot or so evident several times in the hours after the landslide.

Smith, the captain, said she saw downed trees and scoured shorelines as the David B. made its way up Tracy Arm on Monday. Allen Marine tour boats had to turn around on trips up the fjord on Monday, according to Juneau-based operations manager Stuart MacDonald, though nearby Endicott Arm was free of debris.

Scientists are still trying to put together exactly what happened, and why, West said. He said he expects scientists around the world to study the “quite rare geologic event” for years to come. He compared it to a landslide and 630-foot tsunami that struck Taan Fiord, an arm of Icy Bay 65 miles northwest of Yakutat, in 2015, and said Sunday’s slide was substantially larger than a landslide and tsunami that struck in Kenai Fjords National Park last year.

West spotlighted one early, intriguing piece of evidence — a series of small tremors before the bigger slide.

“Modest earthquakes, but hundreds or thousands of very small ones,” West said. “This landslide had a very clear precursory sequence, and that is not something we have often observed.”

Alaskans were lucky the slide happened when it did, West said. It was early in the morning — around 5:30 a.m. local time — so there weren’t tour boats or cruise ships in the fjord when the mass of rock fell.

“It is hard to imagine that, in front of the landslide itself, anything would survive,” West said.

Tsunamis like this ‘won’t always be in remote places’

West said the incident gives scientists a chance to learn more about how massive landslides like Sunday’s happen and what havoc they can wreak.

“We are in the rare position of being able to have these events that don’t have truly catastrophic impacts, sometimes just because we can tuck them away in remote places. But they won’t always be in remote places,” he said. “What they do present is a phenomenal opportunity to learn and better understand how these things work, so that when it’s in Whittier or Seward or Hoonah or Elfin Cove or wherever else, we’re better prepared for that.”

For the kayakers, the episode is a reminder that “sometimes, stuff just happens,” Heilgeist said.

The trio was rescued by a charter yacht, the Blackwood, which heard their distress call on a marine radio. A tender fought strong currents as the kayakers loaded what remained of their belongings onto the vessel. The crew welcomed them with blankets and showers, even taking them up Tracy Arm to see the damage the tsunami had left behind.

“Sawyer Island only had one tree left on it,” Heilgeist said.

For White, the entire experience feels “surreal,” she said, but she said the group is holding up well. More than a dozen Juneauites reached out to offer housing or logistical support. And while the group is raising money to replace the lost kayak and gear, White said she’s grateful they escaped any physical harm.

“I’m just glad that we’re all healthy and safe,” White said.

President Donald Trump said he will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Aug.15 in Alaska. Trump made the announcement on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Friday.

“The highly anticipated meeting between myself, as President of the United States of America, and President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, will take place next Friday, August 15, 2025, in the Great State of Alaska,” Trump wrote in the post.

Trump’s post did not specify where in Alaska the meeting would take place and said more details would come soon.

The meeting comes amid frustration from the Trump administration over continued fighting between Russia and Ukraine, more than three years after Russia’s invasion in 2022. The Associated Press reports that the president said he will meet with Putin before any sit-down meeting involving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

This will be Trump’s first trip to the state since being reelected last year, but it won’t be his first time in the state as president. In 2019, he visited Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson while flying back to the U.S. from a summit in Vietnam. He also held a campaign rally in Anchorage in 2022 to show support for U.S. Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka and U.S. House candidate Sarah Palin.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Medicaid coverage throughout the country will change starting in 2027 due to President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which the U.S. Congress passed in July. But in Alaska, experts say those changes will look very different from other states.

Emily Ricci, the deputy commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Health, spoke about what the state can expect with the new Medicaid rules Wednesday on the program “Line One.” She said Alaska’s federal match for funding the insurance program won’t change because it doesn’t rely on two funding mechanisms impacted by the bill.

“Alaska is not impacted by reductions to those programs that were contained in the reconciliation bill,” Ricci said. “And that’s important to understand, because every other state will likely experience some form of reduction in the kind of federal share of Medicaid dollars that is going to their state associated with those two programs.”

In 2024, the federal government paid about three-quarters of Medicaid spending in Alaska overall. It’s health insurance for people who are low-income or disabled.

Ricci said one major change is that some able-bodied adults on Medicaid will need to fulfill so-called “community engagement requirements” to keep their coverage. She said a variety of activities will be allowed.

“They include things like education, so being a student, being in a vocational school or technical school,” she said. “They involve volunteering, and they also involve employment. There’s also opportunities that are in the bill for individuals who engage in seasonal employment.”

She said community engagement requirements won’t apply to several groups of people like pregnant people, people who are Alaska Native or American Indian or parents with young children under 13. She said communities will also be able to apply for “hardship exemptions” if they have high enough unemployment rates.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday canceled projects worth nearly $500 million for vaccine development using mRNA technology. He defended that action while speaking at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.

“The mRNA vaccines, we know from COVID, don’t work against upper respiratory infections,” he told reporters. “They don’t work very well — Let me put it that way.”

Kennedy is a long-time skeptic of the scientific consensus on vaccines. Reports published in peer-reviewed journals have found COVID-19 vaccines, using mRNA technology, to be highly effective. Kennedy said mRNA vaccines might be useful for cancers and diseases other than respiratory infections.

Alaska’s U.S. senators flanked Kennedy as he spoke. Both voted to confirm him in February, though Sen. Lisa Murkowski said at the time she was concerned about his “selective interpretation of scientific studies.” She said Tuesday she didn’t agree with some of his actions, such as dismissing the entire Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices and installing new members, some with controversial views.

“I am a strong believer that vaccines save lives,” Murkowski said, “as I believe the secretary himself has stated.”

Kennedy, as secretary, has sometimes spoken of vaccines as a crucial public health tool but also undermined their credibility.

He just happened to be in Anchorage on the day his agency announced he was canceling mRNA vaccine development contracts. It’s the season for cabinet secretaries to visit Alaska, and the secretaries of Homeland Security, Housing and Transportation are coming next week, Sen. Dan Sullivan explained.

“We have a lot of people — a lot of cabinet officials, sub-cabinet officials, admirals, generals — that we’re going to be hosting in Alaska in August,” he said. “It’s an exciting time.”

Unlike most cabinet members, Kennedy has visited Alaska many times. He came in years past to campaign for environmental causes. He also says he feels committed to carry on the work of his father and uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, to improve the lives of Indigenous people.

Outside the building, Susan Soule was among several dozen people who came to protest Secretary Kennedy.

“My sign says, ‘Respect the science. Vaccines save lives.’ That’s why I’m here,” she said. Kennedy, she said, “has not given any sign that he respects science. He’s killing people by what he’s doing to vaccines and the research.”

The medical campus where Kennedy spoke has for years championed vaccines to improve community wellness. In late 2020, the Alaska Native health care system led the rest of the state on COVID-19 vaccination.