Government

It’s that season: time for snow, holiday shopping and, of course, end-of-year top 10 lists. Last week, Spotify’s Wrapped and Apple Music’s Replay gave users their top songs, artists and genres of the year.

That got us wondering — what did state lawmakers have on their playlist this year? We asked a few.

Rep. Genevieve Mina, D-Anchorage: Feminine angst and ennui

For some people — maybe, a lot of people — music is one of those things that helps you get in touch with what you’re feeling. At least, that’s what Democratic Anchorage state Rep. Genevieve Mina said she got out of the more than 19,000 minutes she spent listening to Spotify this year.

“I guess my relationship with music is, being able to just tap into emotions that I love, to feel and to process,” Mina said. “I think that’s important, especially, you know, in a role where you have to present yourself in a specific way.”

At the top of Mina’s list is the song “Juna” by Clairo — a little indie pop with some R&B undertones. She said she loves the way the song swells in the middle.

 

“I definitely put that album on repeat a lot at the beginning of the year,” she said. “I mean, all of the songs are just like, they’re very romantic. They’re very lovey-dovey. And so it’s just, like, a good, easy listening album.”

Looking back at her top songs and artists of the year — Adrianne Lenker, Clairo, some of the more introspective Charli XCX songs — Mina said something of a theme emerged.

“It’s a bit of, I’m about to turn 30, feminine angst and ennui,” she said.

Sen. Mike Cronk, R-Tok: Comforting classics

For Tok Republican Sen. Mike Cronk, what Spotify calls “honky tonk” and “southern rock” were at the top of his Spotify Wrapped. He said he listens to all kinds of music but consistently returns to some familiar favorites.

“A lot of, like, the Eagles’ greatest hits, Bob Seger’s greatest hits,” Cronk said. “I guess it’s kind of soothing, in a way.”

He said the music he listened to the most this year calls back fond memories — like time at the family cabin after a long day tending traps.

“We had, like, four cassette tapes,” he said. “The Eagles’ Greatest Hits was one and Alabama was one.”

Grunge also makes an appearance on Cronk’s list. Chris Cornell, the late vocalist of Soundgarden and Audioslave, had two songs in Cronk’s top 5 — a cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” took the top spot.

Rep. Ashley Carrick, D-Fairbanks: Whimsical pump-ups

There’s a bit of that in the Fairbanks Democratic Rep. Ashley Carrick’s playlist. There are some familiar millennial anthems — you know, some Neon Trees, a little Florence and the Machine, Lady Gaga, Kesha — but also some newer songs, like “Yes, I’m A Mess” by the band AJR.

“There’s just like, this note of whimsy in these otherwise pretty serious, kind of power-you-up kind of songs,” she said.

 

Perfect, she said, for going to the gym, walking into work, and starting the day.

“I’m a huge fan of, like, turning my volume up all the way and going outside and just running,” she said. “You do that for 20 minutes to an hour, and you feel like a different person. And I just love that music lets me do that.”

This reporter: Danger Zone

I suppose, it’s only fair that at this point I share my own top song of the year — the Kenny Loggins classic “Danger Zone.” You know, the one from Top Gun.

It’s not because I’m really into the ’80s. I just flew a lot this year.

Stay with me: If you press “play” right as the engines on a 737 power up for takeoff, you leave the ground right around the time the chorus hits. You know, just like in Top Gun.

 

It’s a little moment — on every takeoff — that reminds me exactly how cool it is that humans can fly. And this year, I flew enough to push Loggins above Kendrick Lamar, Dua Lipa and Lake Street Dive on my Apple Music Replay.

What that says about me, that’s up to you.

Republican officials in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough have proposed a field of six conservative Alaskans for two vacant seats in the Alaska House of Representatives.

On Sunday, local Republican Party officials delivered their suggestions to replace Cathy Tilton and George Rauscher, whom Gov. Mike Dunleavy appointed to fill two vacancies in the Alaska Senate.

Those Senate vacancies occurred when Sen. Mike Shower, R-Wasilla, resigned to run for lieutenant governor and Sen. Shelley Hughes, R-Palmer, resigned to run for governor.

To replace Tilton, the Republican leaders of House District 26 nominated Chickaloon tribal police chief Donna Anthony, veterinarian Sean McPeck, and a former Tilton aide, Steve St. Clair.

Anthony, McPeck and St. Clair have each filed to run for the seat in next year’s elections.

For Rauscher’s former seat, Republican leaders for House District 29 picked Chikaloon tribal police officer Lucas Howard, local community council member Gerald Garret Nelson, and former police officer John James.

Nelson had previously filed a letter of intent to run for the seat next year.

The nominations are advisory only; Dunleavy may pick anyone who is a Republican, lives in the appropriate district and meets the constitutional requirements for state House.

Under state law, the governor has until Dec. 29 to make his picks. Anyone he chooses must be approved by a majority of the House’s 21 Republicans in order to be seated.

The governor is expected to act well before the deadline in order to allow time for that confirmation vote and for the new legislators to hire staff and prepare to move to Juneau for the five-month regular legislative session, which begins Jan. 20.

House Minority Leader DeLena Johnson, R-Palmer, is in charge of the House’s all-Republican minority caucus.

Through a spokesperson, Johnson said the timing of a confirmation vote is dependent upon the governor, but that she is tentatively planning a vote for the upcoming weekend.

The Alaska Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s child support system has first priority when a foreclosed property is sold to pay multiple debts.

The court issued its opinion on Nov. 28, resolving a long-running lawsuit brought by Global Federal Credit Union (formerly Alaska USA) against the state and several other defendants.

“This is a pretty important case from my client’s perspective,” said Jonathan Clement, a senior assistant attorney general who represented Alaska’s child support system.

“This is the first time that a court has actually decided that child support gets priority over all other judgment lien holders, even liens recorded earlier, when there’s surplus funds at issue,” he said.

The case decided by the court involved property in Eagle River that was mortgaged by Wells Fargo. In 2017, Global levied a lien against the property for unpaid debt. Shortly afterward, the state’s child support division recorded another lien against the property for unpaid debt.

Typically, liens are repaid in chronological order: First filed, first paid.

In 2018, a law firm sold the property through foreclosure and paid off the remaining Wells Fargo mortgage. There was money left over, but not enough to pay both Global and the state.

The state protested the law firm’s plans to pay Global first, and the firm complied with a state order that required it to pay the state first.

Global sued in state court, but a district court judge and a superior court judge each ruled against the credit union before it appealed to the supreme court.

Writing on behalf of the court, Justice Jude Pate concluded, “Our interpretation of (state law) provides an effective priority for CSSD liens over competing judgment liens.”

Alaska’s Child Support Services Division (CSSD) is now known as the Child Support Enforcement Division (CSCD).

That priority doesn’t put the state above a bank holding a mortgage or “deed of trust” but it does give the state priority over other liens on the property.

“The important thing for this case is that it gives CSCD another tool where they can try to collect money that’s owed by the obligors,” Clement said.

“I would say of all the cases I’ve worked on, this is the one that will have the most impact in my career going forward,” he said.

An attorney representing Global declined comment on behalf of the credit union.

In a footnote attached to the case, Pate wrote that the court’s ruling could cause people to behave differently during foreclosure auctions.

He suggested that if the Legislature disagrees with the court’s interpretation, it might want to pass a law clarifying two conflicting statutes interpreted by the court.

“If our interpretation is contrary to the legislature’s intent,” he wrote, “amendments to the relevant child support statutes could clarify the interaction between child support liens, other liens, and mortgages.”

Western Alaska, where almost all the residents are Indigenous, used to have the world’s highest rate of childhood liver cancer caused by Hepatitis B. After decades of screenings and vaccinations, that problem has been eliminated; since 1995, only one person under the age of 30 has been diagnosed with hepatitis-caused cancer.

Now the Trump administration is seeking to end one of the key tools credited with accomplishing that goal: Hepatitis B vaccinations of newborns.

The federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Friday voted to drop a longstanding recommendation for universal hepatitis vaccines for newborns. That is in accordance with the controversial views of U.S. Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who fired all members of the previous committee and appointed like-minded members to replace them.

Current federal childhood Hepatitis B vaccination guidelines recommend one dose of the vaccine at birth, followed by additional doses at intervals through 18 months. The recommendation for newborn vaccinations has been in place since 1991.

The advisory committee, part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, determined that children under 2 months should not be vaccinated unless their mothers are infected or could be infected by Hepatitis B.

Some vaccine critics in the administration, including Kennedy and President Donald Trump themselves, argue — contradicting medical experts and years of medical research — that Hepatitis B vaccines for young children are unnecessary, claiming that it is spread primarily or exclusively through adult behavior like sex and sharing of needles for illegal drug use.

“Hepatitis B is sexually transmitted. There’s no reason to give a baby that’s almost just born Hepatitis B. So I would say wait till the baby is 12 years old and formed and take Hepatitis B,” Trump said at a Sept. 22 news conference.

Those claims are false, said Dr. Brian McMahon, medical and research director of the liver and hepatitis program at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.

There is no credible evidence of a link between the vaccine and autism of any other health problem, McMahon said.

And sexual transmissions accounted for only a tiny percentage of Alaska’s Hepatitis B cases, he said.

Aside from mother-to-infant transmissions, which occur during childbirth, Hepatitis B was predominantly spread in Western Alaska through normal daily activities. That is because, unlike the HIV virus or other hepatitis viruses, the Hepatitis B virus can live for seven days on surfaces in schools and homes, like tables and personal-grooming items.

“The virus can be found all over, on school luncheon tabletops, counters and homes,” McMahon said. “Kids have open cuts and scratches from bug bites or anything else, and then they shed millions of particles of the virus on environmental surfaces. And then another kid comes along with an open cut or scratch.”

Such risks are exacerbated in rural Alaska, he said, where homes can be crowded and people pursue traditional subsistence lifestyles with a lot of outdoor activities.

“They’re hunting, fishing, cutting up meat, etcetera, and mosquito bites are real prominent,” he said.

Nationally, only 12.6% of chronic Hepatitis B cases recorded from 2013 to 2018 were attributable to sexual transmission, according to a 2023 CDC study. Transmissions of all forms of hepatitis, including Hepatitis B, are possible through contact sports like football, rugby and hockey, researchers have found.

Alaska’s disease and vaccination success

Before the past decades of vaccination and screening, Hepatitis B was so prevalent in Western Alaska that it was classified as endemic there. It was the only part of the United States with such a classification. In some villages, 20% to 30% of the residents were infected, McMahon said.

Geography and ancient migration patterns accounted for historically high rates of the disease in Western Alaska, as well as other Indigenous regions of the Arctic.

Various strains have been carried from Asia to Alaska over millennia, according to scientists. And the remoteness of Indigenous communities meant isolation from medical services, making early diagnosis difficult in the past, allowing infections to linger and be passed down through generations, according to scientists.

In Alaska, children infected with the virus early in life had a high likelihood of winding up with chronic infections that caused serious complications later, such as liver failure. The worst cases resulted in cancer, and even death.

For McMahon, now in his 80s, treating cancer-stricken children in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region, where he worked in the 1970s, was harrowing.

One of his patients was a 17-year-old high school valedictorian. A few months earlier, she started having abdominal pains, but she ignored them.

“She was really busy with school, and she’d gotten a full ride scholarship and was excited about going to the University of Alaska, representing her community,” McMahon said.

The pains turned out to be cancer, caused by a hepatitis B infection that she had not known she had. Too sick to be flown home, she died in the Bethel hospital.

“It was horrible,” McMahon said.

Another patient was an 11-year-old boy, also diagnosed after he complained of similar abdominal pain. McMahon visited him at home, where the boy was “in horrible pain” and yellow from jaundice.

“He was just crying. He said I know I’m going to die. Just help me with my pain,'” McMahon said.

“My wife was with me. She was a public health nurse. She was in tears. The community health aid practitioner was in tears. I was fighting my tears and pulling everything I could out of my bag to try to help this patient sedate. It was just something I’ll never forget. Never.” McMahon said.

He has relayed these and other experiences to the vaccine advisory committee in hopes of persuading members to keep the infant recommendations in place.

“I said, ‘Do you want to be responsible for children getting liver cancer because of this decision?'” McMahon said. “So I’m probably not very popular right now.”

Alaska was one of the first places in the world where the Hepatitis B vaccine was used as soon as it became available in 1981.

The pilot vaccination project was at the insistence of Alaska Native organizations, along with the state government and the Alaska congressional delegation. Under that pilot program, according to newly published study by McMahon and other researchers from the ANTHC and the CDC’s Arctic program, tribal health organizations and their partners screened 53,860 Alaska Native people for infection and gave vaccines to 43,618 Alaska Native people who tested negative, along with starting the universal newborn vaccinations.

Health officials have followed the outcomes since then, and the new study lists several achievements 40 years after universal newborn vaccination started.

Since 1995, according to the study, there have been no new symptomatic cases of Hepatitis B among Alaska Natives under 20 anywhere in the state. Since 2000, no new cases of hepatitis-related liver cancer have been identified among Alaska Natives of any age in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, a region where prevalence was concentrated in the past, the study said. And follow-up surveillance has revealed that childhood Hepatitis B vaccinations remain effective for at least 35 years, the study said.

Successes are also reflected in the trend of acute hepatitis, the form of infection that is short-lived and can be cleared from the body.

There have been no identified cases of acute hepatitis among Alaska Native children since 1992, according to Johns Hopkins University. The rate of acute hepatitis among Alaskans of all ages and ethnicities dropped from 12.1 cases per 100,000 people to 0.9 per 100,000 in the 2002-2015 period, according to the state Department of Health’s epidemiology section.

Alaska’s rate of chronic hepatitis B – the long-term and persistent infection that can lead to serious liver problems – remains higher than the national average. As of 2020, Alaska’s rate of chronic Hepatitis B was 14.2 cases per 100,000 people, nearly triple the national rate of 5 cases per 100,000 people, according to a report by the state Department of Health’s epidemiology section.

McMahon said that is partly because of the legacy of infections in the older Native population, people whose childhood predated widespread vaccination, and prevalence among foreign-born residents who come from countries without widespread vaccination.

Debate over Hepatitis B risks

This year, vaccine skeptics who are members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, however, along with people who are advising the committee, have argued that the risks of Hepatitis B among children are too low to justify universal infant vaccination.

One of the officials making that argument at Thursday’s committee meeting was Dr. Cynthia Nevison, a vaccine skeptic hired as a CDC consultant. She contradicted McMahon’s description of children spreading the virus through casual contact with contaminated surfaces – a process known as “horizontal transmission.”

“There’s very little evidence that horizontal transmission has ever been a significant threat to the average American child, and the risk probably has been overstated,” she said at the meeting. Also overstated, she said, are the risks of “vertical transmission,” the viral transmission between mothers and their newborns.

The committee’s new recommendation must be approved by the CDC administrator before it becomes federal policy.

McMahon said that no matter how national policy might change, Alaska Native tribal health organizations will continue administering Hepatitis B vaccines to newborns.

“I know they’re not going to stop. Even if they have to pay for it. They’re so aware of this,” he said.

His fears, he said, are for low-income families who depend on free vaccinations through state programs that might lose funding and for parents who are getting conflicting messages that may lead to conclusions that the vaccine is not necessary.

“It could be a real mess,” he said.

The state approved a contract on Monday agreeing to pay Juneau’s new hydroelectric utility $1.3 million to power the controversial Cascade Point Ferry Terminal — a project that has yet to be finalized.

That money will pay for a transformer and engineering for a submarine cable required to connect the Alaska Department of Transportation’s proposed ferry terminal to the Sweetheart Lake hydroelectric project that Juneau Hydropower plans to bring online in 2028. 

According to the contract, the state will pay Juneau Hydropower whether or not the ferry terminal project proceeds.

“If they live up to their part of the bargain, we would be responsible to pay for that,” said Christopher Goins, southcoast regional director at the department.

Goins said one major reason the state signed this contract now is because the cost would rise if the department decides to electrify later on, after Juneau Hydropower designs its system without this addition. 

Duff Mitchell, the managing director of Juneau Hydropower, said the other main reason is that the equipment takes a long time to get here. 

“We’re looking at between 52 weeks to over three years, depending on the manufacturer,” he said. 

Mitchell said the transformer wouldn’t be used for anything else if the ferry terminal project doesn’t get built. 

“If, in fact, it goes forward, then we would use it,” he said. “Otherwise, it will be sitting there waiting for the future.”

The department plans to break ground on the first phase of the ferry terminal project in the summer, which will establish an access road and staging area, but not the terminal itself. The state extended the public comment period on the proposed Cascade Point Ferry Terminal to Jan. 9. 

Correction: This story has been updated to clarify that the funds will pay for engineering of the submarine cable, not the cable itself.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she was deeply troubled by a Washington Post report alleging that the military launched a second strike on Sept. 2 to kill survivors clinging to the wreckage of their suspected drug boat.

“That effectively makes you a war criminal,” she said. “I mean, there are rules of war. We don’t do that.”

Some of her colleagues on Thursday viewed a video of the Sept. 2 attack. Murkowski said the situation is far from clear.

“I have heard from two different individuals who viewed that same video, that they viewed it differently,” she said.

The White House and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed this week that there was a second strike, though they say it was legal and dispute key parts of the Post story. Hegseth said he watched the first strike live and then left the room.

“I did not personally see survivors but I stand – because that thing was on fire,” he told reporters after a White House Cabinet meeting. “It was exploded. Fire and smoke … This is called the fog of war.”

The Pentagon Law of War Manual says “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack.”

Hegseth and President Trump say they stand by the commander of the operation. Adm. Frank Bradley was at the Capitol Thursday to brief a select group of Congress members, which did not include the Alaska delegation.

Several Republicans watched the video in a closed-door briefing and emerged sounding confident the strikes were legal and justified. But Democrats had a different take. One House member called the footage “one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen in my public service.”

The chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee is calling for an inquiry into the “double-tap” incident, and this could prove to be a rare moment when a number of Senate Republicans publicly disagree with Trump.

Murkowski is already there. She has been critical of the strikes and voted with Democrats in October on a measure that would have curtailed military attacks on suspected drug boats without congressional approval. She also crossed the aisle to vote on a similar war powers resolution last month. The strikes, she said, have now killed more than 80 people without trials.

“I have questioned the legality, and I wanted to know specifically, what’s the end goal here,” she said.

Sen. Dan Sullivan declined an interview request this week but his office sent a statement saying he’s seeking more information.