Longest-serving U.S. congressman, Alaska's Don Young, dies at 88

U.S. Republican Representative Don Young, who was first elected to Congress in 1973 and was its longest-serving current member, died on Friday, his office said in a statement.

The 88-year-old congressman died while traveling home to Alaska, his office said.

"Don Young's legacy as a fighter for the state will live on, as will his fundamental goodness and honor. We will miss him dearly," the statement said.

His office did not give the cause of death. The Anchorage Daily News reported that Young lost consciousness on a flight from Los Angeles to Seattle and could not be resuscitated. The newspaper report cited Jack Ferguson, who had served as Young's chief of staff.

Young was Alaska's only member in the House of Representatives. The longest-serving member of the current U.S. Congress, according to his website, he represented Alaska for 25 terms and last year he filed to enter this November's election.

"I'm incredibly saddened to hear of the passing of Don Young," U.S. Representative Steve Scalise, the No. 2 Republican in the House, said in a statement.

"He was a passionate champion of his home state of Alaska, but he was also a mentor who, as the Dean of the House, had more institutional knowledge of Congress than anyone I know," Scalise said.

U.S. Representative Dean Phillips, a Democrat from Minnesota, said on Twitter: "His fiercely independent voice for Alaska and one of a kind wit and character will be missed."

Young was born in California in 1933 and moved to Alaska in 1959, shortly after statehood.

In Congress, he was known for directing billions of dollars of federal money to Alaska, the largest state in the country but with one of the smallest populations.

In late 2020, Young was diagnosed with COVID-19 after he had earlier ridiculed the disease as a "beer virus."

US pays $2M a month to protect Pompeo, aide from Iran threat

The State Department says it’s paying more than $2 million per month to provide 24-hour security to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a former top aide, both of whom face “serious and credible” threats from Iran.

The department told Congress in a report that the cost of protecting Pompeo and former Iran envoy Brian Hook between August 2021 and February 2022 amounted to $13.1 million. The report, dated Feb. 14 and marked “sensitive but unclassified,” was obtained by The Associated Press on Saturday.

Pompeo and Hook led the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran and the report says U.S. intelligence assesses that the threats to them have remained constant since they left government and could intensify. The threats have persisted even as President Joe Biden's administration has been engaged in indirect negotiations with Iran over a U.S. return to a landmark 2015 nuclear deal.

As a former secretary of state, Pompeo was automatically given 180 days of protection by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security after leaving office. But that protection has been repeatedly extended in 60-day increments by Secretary of State Antony Blinken due to “a serious and credible threat from a foreign power or agent of a foreign power arising from duties performed by former Secretary Pompeo while employed by the department,” the report said.

Hook, who along with Pompeo was often the public face of the Trump administration's imposition of crippling sanctions against Iran, was granted the special protection by Blinken for the same reason as Pompeo immediately after he left government service. That has also been repeatedly renewed in 60-day increments.

The latest 60-day extensions will expire soon and the State Department, in conjunction with the Director of National Intelligence, must determine by March 16 if the protection should extended again, according to the report.

The report was prepared because the special protection budget will run out in June and require a new infusion of money if extensions are deemed necessary.

Current U.S. officials say the threats have been discusses in the nuclear talks in Vienna, where Iran is demanding the removal of all Trump-era sanctions. Those sanctions include a “foreign terrorist organization” designation of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that Pompeo and Hook were instrumental in approving.

The Vienna talks had been expected to produce an agreement soon to salvage the nuclear agreement that President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from in 2018.

But the talks have been thrown into doubt because of new demands made by Russia and a small number of unresolved U.S.-Iran issues, including the terrorism designation, according to U.S. officials.

Falun Gong organizer eligible for political asylum, Ninth Circuit rules

An organizer of the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong who fled to California is eligible for political asylum because he is likely to be arrested and imprisoned if returned to China, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

Chunguo Liu’s application for asylum had been rejected by an immigration judge and the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals, who both concluded he had failed to show he faced persecution if deported. But the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Liu’s testimony, and a U.S. government report on China’s treatment of Falun Gong members, demonstrated a likelihood of persecution.

“Liu’s testimony established that government agents sought to arrest him for practicing and organizing Falun Gong and did in fact arrest, detain, and imprison all of the people with whom he regularly practiced,” the three-judge panel said. The court said Liu had also testified credibly that police in China had often come to his home to look for him since he left the country.

Falun Gong, a meditation practice, grew rapidly in China in the 1990s before it was outlawed by the government in 1999. Its followers have marched in San Francisco and elsewhere to protest China’s treatment of the movement.

Liu’s case is long-running — he appealed the immigration board’s ruling in 2015 in Los Angeles and has remained in the United States since then. The timing and circumstances of his flight from China were not described in the court ruling, and his lawyer could not be reached for comment.

Federal appeals courts seldom overturn deportation rulings, generally deferring to the findings of the immigration courts, a branch of the U.S. Justice Department. But the panel in Liu’s case said there was “no substantial evidence” to support the board’s conclusion.

The court said a 2012 report by the U.S. State Department, cited by Liu, found that Falun Gong practitioners in China “have been subjected to involuntary commitment to psychiatric facilities, physical and psychological coercion to renounce their beliefs, and assignment to reeducation-through-labor camps.”

The court returned the case to the immigration appeals board for further review, but said the record in the case “compels the conclusion that Liu is eligible for asylum.”

The panel consisted of Judges Sidney Thomas, M. Margaret McKeown and Ronald Gould.

Mike Pence knocks Trump and lays the groundwork for possible presidential run

Former Vice President Mike Pence has spent the past week outmaneuvering Donald Trump, his old boss and potential 2024 primary opponent.

Shortly after the plane Trump was flying on last weekend was forced to land due to an engine failure, Pence flew to Israel on the private jet of the GOP’s most prized donor, Miriam Adelson. And while Trump was avoiding criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin in a call-in interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Pence and his wife, Karen, flew to the border between Ukraine and Poland to distribute relief aid to refugees.

In perhaps the most telling indication that the political dynamic between the two men has shifted, Pence implicitly hit Trump at a Republican National Committee speech last Friday, saying the GOP should not include any “apologists for Putin.”

“Welcome to the front end of the Pence boomlet,” said veteran Republican pollster Michael Cohen, who has no relation to the former Trump lawyer. “Who had a better week or past few weeks than Pence? I mean, it’s not even close.”

When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, he not only resolidified the old Western alliances formed in the wake of World War II, he also shook up the Republican Party’s power dynamics, at least temporarily.

The longtime center of power on the right, Trump has been struggling to garner attention for himself after six years of almost unilaterally controlling the national stage. And Pence, who’s best known for being stiff, boring and deferential to the former president, has walked into the center of the vacuum created by Trump's absence.

Pence has even grabbed prime slots on Fox News, making news in an interview with one of Trump’s favorite hosts, Maria Bartiromo. Bartiromo pressed Pence repeatedly on his plans for 2024, and whether he would run against Trump if the former president enters the race. But Pence played coy, brushing away the questions.

“I’m confident the Republican Party will nominate a candidate who will be the next president of the United States of America, and at the right time, my family and I will reflect and consider how we might participate in that process,” Pence said.

The burst of attention for Pence comes after more than a year of laying groundwork behind the scenes, making campaign-style trips to early-voting states like New Hampshire and Iowa and courting Republican donors who have bankrolled successful White House bids.

Trump remains the leader in early polls for the 2024 party nomination, but despite his popularity with the Republican grassroots, a number of GOP lawmakers are mulling runs of their own. All are trying to develop their own unique brands, whether through Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s culture-war broadsides or Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton’s appeal to unite the pre- and post-Trump wings of the GOP.

Yet despite his very public falling out with Trump, Pence's backers see him as a figure uniquely suited to bring together the warring factions within the GOP. An evangelical Christian originally elected to Congress in 2000, he steadily climbed the ranks of the House Republican caucus. In 2012, Indiana voters elected him governor, a position he left to become Trump’s running mate and shore up the erstwhile TV host’s conservative bona fides.

Since the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, in which Trump-backed rioters threatened to hang Pence for not helping the then president overturn the 2020 election results, Pence has been slowly and steadily hitting the campaign trail — even though he has yet to announce his intentions for 2024. A Pence spokesman did not respond to Yahoo News’ request for comment.

But the real break in the dam seemed to come almost immediately after Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine. Trump and his backers, who just days earlier had been touting Putin’s “genius,” suddenly looked outdated and perhaps out of touch with the GOP.

“The McCain wing of the GOP is back and stronger than ever, truth-telling about Mr. KGB,” said longtime Republican strategist Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole’s campaign for president in 1996.

But Republican operatives, like the candidates they advise, are still trying to game out whether the turn from Trump-style populism, at least in matters of foreign policy, is permanent or merely a passing fluke.

“It’s too soon to tell, but I still think Americans don’t want U.S. troops over there, and a lot don’t want to even send money there,” said former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. “This could be an issue in the midterms.”

Pence, meanwhile, is doing what he has always done, plodding forward steadily and waiting for his moments to grab the spotlight.