Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, speaking at an Anchorage event on Thursday, had harsh words for much of her Republican Party but praise for a rare GOP member who, like her, is willing to criticize President Donald Trump: Alaska’s senior U.S. senator.

“I can’t be here in Alaska and not mention the incredible courage of Sen. Lisa Murkowski,” Cheney said near the start of her event, held at a packed theater in the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts.

“You see it almost every day. There are very few Republicans who will be consistently counted on to do the right thing. And she’s one of a very small group,” Cheney said.

The former U.S. House member from Wyoming – and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney – spoke at a lecture hosted by the University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska World Affairs Council. She took questions from veteran journalist Elizabeth Arnold, who teaches at UAA.

Like Murkowski, Cheney voted to impeach Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and opposed him in other ways.

Unlike Murkowski, who was reelected in 2022 over a Trump-backed challenger, Cheney lost her seat in the GOP primary to a Trump loyalist, Harriet Hageman, who now represents Wyoming’s single House district.

That was after Cheney co-chaired the congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and Trump’s role in it, and after she had been stripped of her GOP leadership role by fellow House Republicans because of her opposition to Trump’s actions.

She is aghast that Trump, now back in the White House, has pardoned those rioters, including those who attacked police officers – and that Republicans in office have gone along with those pardons.

“When you hear the Republicans, any Republicans, saying that they are the party that supports law enforcement, you know, please go back and look at the videos of Jan. 6,” Cheney said. "Remind those Republicans that Trump watched the events unfold on television for three hours without trying to stop the riot."

"He watched police officers get brutally beaten by people who were carrying his flag; they were doing it in his name … And then, when he came into office, he pardoned all of those people,” she said.

The Republican Party as a whole — with a few exceptions like Murkowski – has betrayed its convictions and even the U.S. Constitution to become “a personality cult” loyal only to Trump, Cheney said.

Today’s GOP is “something we haven’t seen in this country before,” she said. “The party has walked away from the Constitution,” said the former House member, who noted that she grew up as a Republican and cast her first vote for President Ronald Reagan.

Cheney spent much of her speech calling out House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republican leaders of Congress who she said have enabled Trump’s attacks on the rule of law and other bad actions.

“The problem with Mike is that he’s fundamentally dishonest,” she said.

And they have enabled rank incompetence and corruption in the Trump administration, the most serious of which is Trump’s attack on the rule of law.

Voters should take action to counter the cult-like devotion that has given Trump and his administration ”carte blanche,” Cheney said.

“That’s why it’s crucially important that in 2026, the Republicans lose the majority in the House and the Senate,” she said.

She also called on the audience and public at large to continue protesting Trump administration actions, writing letters to the editor, contacting members of Congress and state legislators and even consider running for office to replace bad officials.

It was a message embraced by the event audience. Many of those attending Cheney’s address had walked over to the theater after attending a May Day anti-Trump protest held a few blocks away on downtown Anchorage’s Park Strip. Several times during the event, the audience erupted in applause and cheers.

Cheney herself has continued to be politically active since losing her House seat.

She started a political action committee and has been supporting candidates she believes will counter the Trump movement – most notably, former Vice President Kamala Harris, who wound up losing the 2024 presidential election. She wrote a book, titled “Oath and Honor,” that details the confrontations she had with fellow congressional Republicans over the efforts to overthrow the 2020 election results. She has also been teaching at the University of Virginia and traveling the country to speak at events like that held Thursday in Anchorage.

Returning to elective office remains a possibility, she said. “I don’t know if I will end up being a candidate again myself. But it’s certainly not something that I’m ruling out,” she said.

That statement was greeted with enthusiastic audience applause, and some follow-up back-and-forth quips to close the evening.

“Clearly, I should move here to Alaska,” Cheney said in response to the applause.

“We have ranked choice voting,” Arnold said.

“And you have one good senator,” Cheney replied.

“We have room for one more,” an audience member called out.

Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com.

A new plan by President-Elect Donald Trump to undo one of President Barack Obama’s legacies has sparked a backlash in Alaska.

Trump, in a speech on Sunday, said he wants the name of North America’s tallest peak, Denali, to revert to Mount McKinley to honor the 25th president. William McKinley.

“They took his name off Mount McKinley, right? That’s what they do to people,” Trump said in a speech in Phoenix to the conservative group Turning Point USA

“That’s one of the reasons that we’re going to bring back the name of Mount McKinley, because I think he deserves it. . . That was not very gracious to somebody that did a good job.”

Trump’s action would undo a 2015 order by Obama’s secretary of the Department of the Interior that granted the state’s long-standing request for the federal government to formalize Denali as the official name of the 20,310-foot peak.

The name Denali derives from the language of Interior Alaska’ s Koyukon Athabascan people and translates to “The High One.” The Obama administration action was considered a highlight in the broader movement to restore traditional Indigenous names to geographic sites.

Alaska politicians reacted swiftly to Trump’s McKinley-renaming proposal.

“You can’t improve upon the name that Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans bestowed on North America’s tallest peak, Denali – the Great One,” Sen Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said in a statement. “For years, I advocated in Congress to restore the rightful name for this majestic mountain to respect Alaska’s first people who have lived on these lands for thousands of years. This is an issue that should not be relitigated.”

State Sen. Scott Kawaski, D-Fairbanks had a terse response. On social media, he posted a photo of the mountain. “Nope! It is Denali!” he said on the site Bluesky. He had a similar message on the social media site X.

Ivan Moore, an Anchorage-based pollster and political consultant, also had a brief message. “This mountain will always be called Denali,” he said in a Bluesky post that featured a photo of the snow-capped peak in autumn.

A statement on behalf of Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, reiterated his past support for the Denali name, but it stopped short of suggesting any action to counter Trump’s move.

“Senator Sullivan like many Alaskans prefers the name that the very tough, very strong, very patriotic Athabascan people gave the mountain thousands of years ago – Denali,” said a statement sent by a spokesperson, Amanda Coyne. She said no further comment was expected for now.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who like Sullivan has been a staunch Trump supporter, did not release any statement. His spokesperson did not respond to queries on Tuesday.

Trump’s mountain-renaming plan reopens a debate that had appeared to be settled in 2015.

The Denali name has long been preferred by climbers. Hudson Stuck, leader of the first party to summit the mountain, titled his 1918 book about the expedition “The Ascent of Denali,” though the title had Mount McKinley in parentheses.

The Denali name was formalized as the official state name in 1975 by the Alaska Board of Geographic Names. That year, the Alaska Legislature asked the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, part of the U.S. Geological Survey, to follow suit. It was the first of many official attempts to get the federal government’s name for the mountain to match the state’s formal name.

The U.S. government’s use of the McKinley name has long been a sore point for many Alaskans.

McKinley, who was from Ohio, never visited Alaska. His name was attached to the mountain after a gold prospector working in Alaska in 1896 celebrated the news that Mckinley, a supporter of the gold standard, had won the Republican nomination for president.

For decades, the state government and members of Alaska’s congressional delegation petitioned the federal government to use the name Denali. But that federal name change was stymied by opposition from Ohio’s congressional delegation. The U.S, Board on Geographic Names did not have the authority to override objections from any member of Congress.

Ultimately, the Obama administration took action to grant the state’s request for the mountain’s name. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell’s order was issued just before Obama made a historic trip to Alaska in 2015 to highlight climate change and Arctic issues.

Aside from being the common name for the mountain, Denali is a prominent name throughout Alaska. The 6-million-acre land unit where the mountain is located is Denali National Park and Preserve. Denali is a commonly used name elsewhere in Alaska, for an Interior borough, schools, businesses, a highway and various neighborhood locations. An animated PBS Kids show, Molly of Denali, pays homage to the name and the Indigenous culture that is its source. Denali is even a name that parents in Alaska sometimes choose for their babies.

The Denali-McKinley switch was not the only controversial proposal Trump made on Sunday concerning circumpolar Indigenous people.

Trump also said he wants the United States to buy Greenland, a plan he floated in his first term. Greenland is a self-governing territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, with its own parliament and administrative branch. The vast majority of the island’s 56,000 residents are Inuit, referring to themselves as Kalaallit. The Indigenous name for the island, which is the largest in the world, is Kalaallit Nunaat.

When he proposed the purchase the first time, in 2019, some Greenlandic and Inuit treated it as a joke, while some viewed it as an insult, according to press coverage at the time.

Among those who treated it seriously was Sara Olsvig, who is currently international chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council.

“To talk about buying a whole nation and the people is, I think, extremely imperialistic and should not be something that we hear world leaders say in 2019,” Olsvig, a former Greenlandic parliament member, told National Public Radio at the time. “It shows that we are still living in a world where indigenous peoples, or self-governing nations even within states, are seen as something that can be bought and sold.”

Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com.

The loss of an estimated 4 million common murres during the marine heatwave known as the “Blob” was the biggest bird die-off in recorded history, and seven or eight years later, the population has not recovered, biologists report.

The findings, in a newly published study led by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Heather Renner, show that the toll on common murres killed 4 million, about half the Alaska population.

It was not only the largest bird die-off in the modern era but also appears to be the largest wildlife die-off, said the study, which described the effect as “catastrophic” for the species.

Renner said the murre die-off indicates wider changes triggered by the extraordinarily intense heatwave.

“The thing about the Blob was that it was so big in geographic area, and also so long-lasting, and those two things combined to make it really just reset the whole ecosystem,” she said.

Common murres, black-and-white seabirds that somewhat resemble penguins in appearance, are among the most plentiful seabirds in Alaska. Prior to the marine heatwave that lingered in the North Pacific from 2014 to 2016, about 8 million of them were in Alaska, about a quarter of the world’s population.

The loss of about half of those birds happened quickly, in about a year’s time, Renner said.

The study is based on annual observations at 13 key bird colonies in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea, sites that have been monitored for half a century. Annual monitoring is done by the Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the sprawling Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge that stretches from the Gulf of Alaska to the central Bering Sea, and the service’s partners. Renner is a supervisory wildlife biologist at the refuge and is based in Homer.

The new study updates a previous study, published in 2020, that estimated a loss of 1 million murres. Even then, it was seen as the biggest Alaska bird die-off on record.

“Now we have data from the breeding colonies, and we realize it was so much worse than we thought it was at the time,” Renner said.

During the peak years of the Blob, the carcasses of dead common murres and other seabirds littered Alaska beaches. Some were found even in inland sites distant from their normal ranges, like Fairbanks and Glennallen. The bodies were emaciated, indicating that starvation was the cause of death.

Animals other than birds also fell victim to the Blob heatwave, the new study notes. Humpback whale numbers dropped by about 20%, and Gulf of Alaska Pacific cod stocks crashed, forcing a closure of the commercial fishery there, it noted.

But for reasons yet to be fully understood, common murres were particularly hard-hit, and especially so in the Bering Sea, Renner said.

There are some theories as to why that is, she said.

Those birds have “high energetic demands,” she said. “Because they’re like tremendously deep divers and they’re pretty big seabirds, they have to eat about half of their body weight every day,” she said. Biologists think common murres depend on certain forage fish that school in dense groups, and those forage fish were not available during the intense heatwave. “As the conditions changed, they weren’t able to adapt,” she said.

There were other species that were less affected by the 2012-2016 heatwave or its aftermath. Among those that appear to have been more resilient are thick-billed murres, which are related to common murres but identifiable by their thicker necks and other features. Thick-billed murres are a bit more flexible in their prey, Renner said. “They were maybe able to just switch to other sources,” she said.

There are lingering effects of the die-off that are hindering the common murres’ recovery, even though waters have cooled and forage fish appear to be readily available.Colonies are now so thinly populated that the normal murre defense against predators like egg-eating eagles – massing together shoulder-to-shoulder to protect nests – is no longer possible, Renner said. “They’re jumpy and they’ll flush really easily, and that makes them more vulnerable to things like predators,” she said.

Alaska’s population of common murres took a big hit in 1989 from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It is estimated that the spill killed 250,000 birds, and most were common murres. The common murre population recovered from that disaster, according to the federal-state trustee council that manages money paid by Exxon Corp. to settle the federal and state governments’ spill damages.

But this time around, the opportunity for Alaska’s common murre population to recover may be limited.

“Our fear is that because heat waves are becoming more common that they may not even have time to recover before the next heat wave,” Renner said.

Scientists have predicted that climate change will set up repeat occurrences of the heatwaves that struck the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea in recent years. A recently published study by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists forecast that in the Northern Bering Sea, conditions that led to an unprecedented scarcity of sea ice in 2018 will be repeated one to three times a decade through the 2030s.

Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com.

An elderly man on the Kenai Peninsula has died from Alaskapox, making him the first person to be killed by the viral disease that was identified only nine years ago, state health officials reported on Friday.

Aside from being the first fatal human case, it is the documented first human infection outside of the Fairbanks area, indicating that the virus, which is known to be harbored by small mammals, has spread beyond the wildlife populations in that Interior community.

The patient, who had an immune system that was compromised because of treatment for cancer, first reported signs of the infection in September when a tender lesion appeared in his armpit area, according to a bulletin issued by the state Division of Public Health’s epidemiology section. The infection worsened, and after six weeks of emergency-care visits, he was hospitalized locally. As the situation deteriorated and his arm movement became impaired, he was transferred to an Anchorage hospital. There, numerous tests were needed to identify the infection, the bulletin said.

Even with treatment, the patient suffered renal failure, respiratory failure, malnutrition and other problems, the bulletin said. He died in late January, the bulletin said.

Related to more dangerous diseases

Alaskapox is a disease caused by a virus in what’s known as the orthopox group. It is related to more dangerous viruses that cause monkeypox and smallpox. Like the other orthopox viruses, the virus causing Alaskapox is maintained in and spread by populations of small mammals. Voles, which live nearly everywhere in Alaska, have been found to be especially prominent carriers.

The first case of a human Alaskapox infection was detected in 2015 in the Fairbanks area. The next case emerged in 2020; there were two more in 2021, one in 2022 and one last year, according to state officials. The Kenai Peninsula case is the seventh to be identified.

A common thread in the prior cases, all involving Fairbanks-area patients, was the wooded nature of their homes. Another thread was contact with household pets – cats or dogs – that appeared to have mingled with small mammals.

“All 6 prior cases were identified in an outpatient setting and involved mild illnesses that were largely resolved within a few weeks without hospitalization. None of these patients had significant prior medical history, including immunocompromising conditions,” Rogers said by email.

Like the Fairbanks patients, the Kenai Peninsula patient lived in a forested area, the epidemiology bulletin said. He could have had at least indirect contact with small mammals in the wild, as he reported caring for a stray cat that might have been hunting those mammals, the bulletin said.

Alaskapox, like the monkeypox to which it is related, is among a vast number of zoonotic diseases, which are diseases that can spread between animal species, including humans. Such diseases demonstrate the link between human and wildlife health.

Yet to be determined is how long Alaskapox has been in the environment. But signs are emerging that it has been circulating in populations of small mammals for decades

In the past, Rogers said, research into wildlife diseases focused on large mammals, not small animals like voles.

But in 2015, after the first Alaskapox case was identified, researchers tested a few rodents near the patient’s home but did not find any that were infected with the virus, Rogers said. Wider testing of small mammals that were trapped in the Fairbanks area after the 2020 case emerged did show the first evidence of the infection in those animals, she said.

New evidence

Link Olson, curator of mammals at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, said on Friday that tests have now discovered the virus in a 25-year-old vole specimen in the museum’s collection.

“We know this is not a last-10-years-thing,” he said.

Scientists at the museum, in cooperation with the state epidemiology section and other organizations, have now started a testing program using its vast collection of Alaska animal specimens, he said. Later on, when the weather allows it, there will be more field work to trap small mammals in the wild, he said.

There is a good chance that Alaskapox will be found in animal populations well beyond the state’s borders and even beyond North America, Olson said.

“I fully expect that this will be detected across the boreal forest,” he said.

Biologist calls for more preventive approach to disease research

Falk Huettmann, a University of Alaska Fairbanks biologist who studies wildlife diseases and the environmental factors that shape them, also said he believes that Alaskapox has been circulating in the wild for years – and that there may have been serious human infections in the past that went undetected.

Understanding how Alaskapox may be spreading among small mammals is “a big topic because we have so many of them,” and thus difficult, he said.

Policy responses tend to be reactive, especially when there are serious or “spectacular” cases, Huettmann said. But preparation for disease spread is lacking, he said. There should be more information sharing from hospitals and health care providers, locally and regionally focused monitoring to help identify hot spots of higher risks, and lab experiment work to identify genetics of different strains and create models for different disease-spread scenarios, he said.

The role of small mammals in Alaska’s ecosystems in general and the spread of disease in particular is often overlooked, said Huettmann, who recently published a book about squirrels.

But they are big players. Tiny animals like mice spread hantavirus, for example, as do rats, which are invasive in Alaska. On the larger side of the small-mammal spectrum are squirrels, known to spread bubonic plague, which was known as the Black Death when it killed 25 million people in Europe in the 14th century.

It makes sense that Alaskans would be exposed to a zoonotic disease like Alaskapox, Huettmann said, notably in Fairbanks, where there is a long tradition of outdoor lifestyles that include activities like biking, mushing, trapping and use of rustic cabins.

What should change, he said, is a different tradition, “the idea that the past dictates the future,” he said.

Alaskapox, now shown to be potentially fatal, is an example of evolving diseases that demand a more open-minded approach to research, he said.

“I totally appreciate that that’s a new case, that people are surprised. But then, if you know the reality of diseases and the history of diseases, we shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “Everything is possible by now.”

Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on Facebook and Twitter.