Breaking News

Editorial

Misinformation erodes trust

“Freaking miracle.” That’s how health journalist Helen Branswell recently described the vaccines that have saved millions of lives in the coronavirus pandemic. The vaccines, offered to the U.S. population, have proved to be 90 percent effective against infection. Ready within a year of the outbreak, they have proved to be safe. And they are widely available and free. There is no parallel in modern times. Yet, some people chose to believe otherwise. In a just-published nationwide survey of 18,782 people across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the Covid States Project ...

Crime up after police funds cut

Democrats elsewhere may be fleeing the defund the police movement, but it lives on in Seattle. Business owners told the City Council last week what the resulting breakdown in law and order means in daily life, and it deserves more attention. Wednesday’s hearing came days after the Seattle Police Department released its 2021 year-end crime report, which showed a 20 percent surge in violent crime to the highest levels in 14 years. Aggravated assaults rose 24 percent in 2021 from 2020, and robberies 18 percent. The official statistics show a 9 percent increase in property crime, but ...

A legacy in shreds

When news first broke earlier this month of bribery charges against former state Senate Majority Leader J. Kalani English, we thought maybe federal prosecutors got the wrong guy. English has always struck us as a man of intelligence and integrity. How could the Hana legislator be guilty of such an act? It quickly became clear the feds had an open and shut case. English was caught red-handed. The description of him allegedly trying to hide an envelope stuffed with money under a car floor mat as FBI special agents closed in will be hard to forget. English pled guilty in Honolulu ...

Media attacked in Mexico

Mexico is experiencing one of the deadliest periods on record for journalists, with five killed so far this year. But instead of addressing these dangers, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador devoted much of his regular news conference on Friday to attacking one of the country’s most prominent media figures, Carlos Loret de Mola. Mr. Loret de Mola, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post’s Spanish-language Post Opinion section, is a household name in Mexico, reporting for print, radio and television. A frequent critic of the government, he recently released an ...

Phasing out detention centers

The Trump administration was great for business — if your business happened to be running private detention centers for migrants. Although deportations under the previous president were more sluggish than he might have liked, the number of asylum seekers who languished in for-profit prisons soared before the pandemic. Over Donald Trump’s four years in office, his administration oversaw the establishment of more than 40 new migrant detention centers. President Biden ran on a pledge to close them, but his administration’s confused messaging on migration and the border overtook that ...

Making headlines rarely a good sign

In baseball, there is a surefire way to tell if umpires are doing a good job: nobody's talking about them. A solid game means umps had no bad calls, no conflicts with players or managers, no misinterpretations of the rules. Things ran so smoothly they went unnoticed. The same can be said of police chiefs and police departments. When those two are making headlines, it is rarely a good sign. Last week, this paper ran a story about a “steady exodus” of officers leaving the already undermanned Maui Police Department. It came on the heels of an article about the Maui Police Commission ...