Free Republic

Monday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said she had “many questions” about the success of President Donald Trump’s military strike on three Iranian nuclear facilities. Cooper asked, “You’re somebody in Washington who’s, you know, people on both sides of the aisle consider a straight shooter. You have your what you believe in and you stand by it, sometimes it’s out of favor, sometimes it’s in favor with your own party. Do you think it was the right move by President Trump to order air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities given what we have seen now as...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — For the first time ever, parts of Alaska will be under a heat advisory — but you can put an asterisk at the end of that term. It's not the first instance of unusually high temperatures in what many consider the nation's coldest state, but the National Weather Service only recently allowed for heat advisories to be issued there. Information on similarly warm weather conditions previously came in the form of "special weather statements." Using the heat advisory label could help people better understand the weather's severity and potential danger, something a nondescript "special weather statement" didn't...

Aseismic shift has occurred in the Trump administration’s new defense spending plan that is just emerging when it comes to the USAF’s airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) predicament. The service’s E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft are dwindling in number and rapidly aging into unsupportability. The proven and in-production E-7 Wedgetail, based on the Boeing 737 and serving with multiple allies, was supposed to bridge the gap between the E-3’s retirement and pushing the sending part of the mission to space-based distributed satellite constellations. You can read all about this here. Now, if the administration gets...

Anchorage Daily News reports that an underwater archaeological team identified and mapped a shipwreck involved in one of Alaska's most tragic maritime disasters. The Star of Bengal was traveling from Wrangell to San Francisco when it went down on September 20, 1908, near Coronation Island in southeastern Alaska's Alexander Archipelago. The 264-foot ship, which was built in the same shipyard as the Titanic, was carrying around 140 people when it sank. Of the 110 souls that perished, the vast majority were seasonal Asian workers hired to work in local Alaskan canneries. The wreck was found to be scattered across nearly...

Deadhorse, Alaska It’s unusual to find a cabinet-level official—much less three—standing on a makeshift platform amid barren permafrost, enduring “balmy” 20-degree weather, 4,650 miles by road from the White House. It’s a show of commitment to an overlooked yet central theme of this Trump administration—setting free the private economy. That plank of the Trump agenda has been eclipsed by drama over tariffs and the Republican tax bill, though it is economically as important and moving far faster. Leading it are Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin. Joe Biden instituted a “whole...

A cargo ship carrying 3,000 cars, including 800 electric vehicles, caught fire off the coast of Alaska and continues to burn. The Coast Guard says that all 22 crew members escaped the ship and were picked up by two nearby freighters. The ship, a Liberian-registered car-carrier named "Morning Midas," was on its way to Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico, from Yantai, China.. ... the Coast Guard is going to let the ship burn, since trying to put out a lithium-ion fire is nearly futile. ... In 2022, the Felicity Ace, a car carrier slightly larger than Morning Midas, sank in the Atlantic...

If fire departments on land have problems unleashing the torrent of water needed to extinguish a single burning EV, the crew of a ship doesn't stand a chance against hundreds of flaming lithium-ion batteries. A cargo ship carrying around 3,000 vehicles across the Pacific Ocean caught fire on Tuesday. The Morning Midas, a 600-foot cargo ship, was in the middle of a voyage from Yantai, China to Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico when the fire broke out. Zodiac Maritime, the ship's London-based operator, noted that smoke was first spotted on a deck carrying 800 electric vehicles. Once the blaze got out of...

The crew of a cargo ship carrying 3,000 vehicles to Mexico, including 800 electric vehicles, abandoned ship after they could not control a fire in waters off Alaska's Aleutian island chain. Smoke was initially seen coming from the deck loaded with electric vehicles Tuesday, according to a Wednesday statement from the ship’s management company, London-based Zodiac Maritime. There were no reported injuries among the 22 crew members of the Morning Midas.

With the Trump administration back in the White House, America has an opportunity to restore commonsense energy and manufacturing policies after years of radical environmental overreach. One of the most glaring examples of this overreach is the electric vehicle (EV) push -- a movement championed by progressive elites that, under the guise of sustainability, threatens to undermine national security, weaken domestic industry, and entangle our economy further with the Chinese Communist Party.The EV revolution is not a grassroots innovation born out of market demand. It is a politically engineered shift, heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars and driven by mandates from...

The proposal is regarding 13 million acres of government-owned Arctic land that is part of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.. The Interior Department on Monday proposed the restoration of oil and gas drilling in the Arctic after it had previously been restricted by the Biden administration. The proposal is regarding 13 million acres of government-owned Arctic land that is part of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, which is a total area of 23 million acres that former President Warren G. Harding set aside in 1923 as an emergency supply of oil for the Navy. The Naval Petroleum Reserves...

One of the major issues that President Trump ran on in the 2024 election was energy. "Drill, baby, drill" was the motto (even if Trump did borrow it from a famous Alaskan), and when he was back in office, the president set about putting our energy policy to rights When you're talking energy and mineral resources, you have to talk about Alaska. In the energy front, much of our development is and will be on the North Slope. On Monday, several key Trump administration members visited "the Slope" to see things for themselves. Three Trump Cabinet members began a tour...

Is it going to blow — or blow over? Seismic activity levels on Alaska’s Mount Spurr soared to March levels earlier this week, sparking fear that an eruption could be on the horizon. “Earthquake activity beneath Mount Spurr remains elevated,” the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) warned in a May 28 report. “Following a steady decline from late March through April, shallow earthquake activity has increased in the past two weeks to March levels of about 100 events per week.” And while the advisory assured that the “likelihood of an eruption continues to gradually decline,” the 11,000-foot volcano remains at an...

A former Democratic senator will take the reins of a company that makes marijuana products for recreational and health purposes. Cannabis Sativa Inc., this week announced that 84-year-old former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel will head its subsidiary, Kush, which develops and markets cannabis products including “Kubby” a marijuana-based throat lozenge. Gravel ran for president in 2008 and served between 1969 and 1981 in the U.S. Senate, where he was a vocal critic of the war on drugs. "We need to decriminalize drugs and treat them as a health problem," Gravel told Reuters on Wednesday. "You should go see a doctor...

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) defended the House GOP’s proposed changes to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on Sunday, arguing that states will better administer food stamp benefits if they have to shoulder more of the costs. “The states are not properly administering this because they don’t have enough skin in the game,” Johnson told CBS’s Margaret Brennan in an interview on “Face the Nation.” The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the GOP-controlled House narrowly passed early Thursday morning after an overnight session, calls for the federal share of SNAP costs to drop from the current 100...

Alaska’s indigenous women and their unborn babies are increasingly vulnerable to abortion, according to the latest comprehensive data from the state. For decades, the abortion industry and its allies have worked to make the killing of pre-born babies more palatable among Alaska Native communities. Well-funded leftist groups like Planned Parenthood, Native Movement and others now employ activist tactics and community organizing to increase abortion accessibility and change cultural perceptions, especially among the youth. Last year, a total of 1,224 unborn babies were killed in Alaska through abortion, up slightly from 1,222 the year before. While the annual total has remained...

The Democrat and RINO effort to blow up Trump’s global tariffs suffered an embarrassing failure in the Senate this evening after two senators failed to vote. As The Gateway Pundit reported, Senator Rand Paul (RINO-KY) had sponsored a resolution that would have terminated ALL of Trump’s tariffs, including those on America’s top adversary, China. The vote deadlocked 49-49, meaning it failed by one vote. But there were three Republicans who voted to stab Trump in the back and end the global tariffs: Rand Paul of Kentucky Susan Collins of Maine Lisa Murkowski of Alaska Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Senator...

A former opinion page editor of the New York Times broke down in tears and apologized to Sarah Palin while testifying in court over a 2017 editorial that she says was defamatory. James Bennet testified on Thursday that he “blew it” when he falsely claimed in the editorial that the former Alaska governor’s political action committee had contributed to an atmosphere of violence in the weeks and months leading up to the 2011 assassination attempt on then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.). The Times has acknowledged the editorial was inaccurate but said it quickly corrected the “honest mistake.” Bennet got choked up...

Establishment anti-Trump Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said she is “anxious” about using her voice, claiming that “we are all afraid” because “retaliation is real.”When asked what she would say to people who are afraid or who represent people who are afraid, Murkowski took on an incredibly somber tone. “We are all afraid,” she said, pausing dramatically. “It’s quite a statement.”“But we are. … We’re in a time and a place where I don’t know, I certainly have not — I have not been here before,” she said.“And I’ll tell you I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice...

Former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave himself high marks for his work in implementing former President Joe Biden’s policy on China during a talk at Harvard University on Tuesday, boasting of the “many, many hours” he spent with the Chinese Foreign Ministry and predicting there is no “end” to the U.S.-China competition. Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, relied heavily on Sullivan to advance Biden’s China policy, which was largely conciliatory towards the genocidal communist regime. Sullivan joined Blinken during one of the most embarrassing moments of the Biden presidency: a summit in Anchorage, Alaska, with Chinese...

Russian military activity was also detected near Alaska in February and in December. The North American Aerospace Defense Command said Tuesday that Russian warplanes were flying off the coast of Alaska and were being tracked by the U.S. military. NORAD made it clear that the planes were not a threat and that they did not go into Canadian or American airspace, according to CBS News. The number of planes was also not made clear. "NORAD employs a layered defense network of satellites, ground-based and airborne radars and fighter aircraft to detect and track aircraft and inform appropriate actions," the aerospace...