Breaking News

Editorial

Moderns’s ‘show trial’

No good treatment goes unpunished for pharmaceutical companies these days, and Bernie Sanders will offer another example on Wednesday when he holds a political show trial of Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel. His offense? Cooperating with the government to produce life-saving COVID vaccines. The subject of the Vermont senator’s hearing is Moderna’s plan to quadruple the price of its COVID vaccine to $110 to $130 per dose when U.S. government purchases stop. Pfizer has said it will charge a similar price after vaccines move to the commercial market, which is expected later this ...

Plenty to chew on in speech

From the way he roamed the crowd greeting friends and colleagues beforehand, to the finishing touch of borrowing an ukulele and leading everyone in singing “Hawaii Aloha,” Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen Jr. delivered a State of the County address unlike any we remember. Held Tuesday afternoon on the lawn fronting the county building, Kalana O Maui, it was a pared-down affair open to everyone. There was no grand entrance or screens scrolling images of the administration’s many accomplishments. Some State of the County addresses we have attended sounded a lot like reelection ...

Running out of time on climate change

Anew United Nations report comes to a definitive but familiar conclusion: We’re not doing nearly enough to prevent disastrous levels of climate change. The report, released Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warns that the planet is on track to blow past 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, a critical threshold virtually every nation on Earth agreed to work to avoid. We can expect to overshoot that within about a decade unless we immediately switch to renewable energy and slash planet-warming pollution in half by 2030. More than a century of ...

Record budget leaves gaps in US defense

The White House is touting President Biden’s U.S. military budget for fiscal 2024 as a record, and Mr. Biden is betting busy Americans won’t look past the headlines. The truth is that he’s asking for a real defense cut, even as the U.S. is waking up late to a world of new threats. The Pentagon’s budget request may seem large at $842 billion. But the figure is only a 3.2 percent increase over last year, and with inflation at 6 percent it means a decline in buying power. Compare the 3.2 percent growth with the double-digit increases for domestic accounts: 19 percent for the ...

Caught in the crosshairs of climate change

Former Hawaii governor and Maui County mayor, Linda Lingle, was still an up-and-coming Maui County Council member when she angrily shook a copy of The Maui News over her head while grilling the developers of the proposed Fairmont Kea Lani Hotel. The developers did not appreciate Lingle’s opposition at the time, but she helped prevent them from making a grave mistake. This was in the 1980s when major hotels were sprouting like mushrooms on Maui. Kea Lani’s developers sought permission to build their Mediterranean-style hotel right on Polo Beach. They claimed there was adequate ...

Too big to fail

Over the weekend, the United States suffered the second- and third-largest bank failures in the country’s history. This wasn’t supposed to happen. A slew of protections were put in place after the financial crisis 15 years ago to prevent a repeat of big banks collapsing and nearly taking down the whole banking system with them. But, once again, the federal government had to step in on Sunday evening with what amounted to a bailout of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — along with a bazooka of aid to prevent more banks from collapsing on Monday. It’s welcome news that the ...