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Editorial

Native women deserve better

Despite a groundswell of awareness of the alarming epidemic of violence against Native American women, federal law enforcement has been slow to step up to the crisis. U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell this week called on U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to get moving on implementing changes designed to help federal, tribal and local law enforcement agencies better respond to reports of missing or murdered Indigenous women. They should hasten to do so. In October 2020, federal lawmakers passed the Not Invisible Act and Savanna’s Act, named for Savanna ...

Weaponizing the vulnerable

It is no surprise that a man who treats his own citizens so brutally should use others ruthlessly. Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, has jailed opposition leaders and arrested tens of thousands for protesting against last year’s highly dubious election; many were beaten and tortured. Even in exile, his opponents fear him. Now, in retaliation for the resulting European Union sanctions on his regime, he is “weaponising” vulnerable people. The European Commission has accused him of gangster tactics, encouraging people from the Middle East and Africa to come to Minsk in ...

Back to the bleachers

Locked out, but too excited to sit at home, families were parking outside Maui Interscholastic League venues while games were played earlier this season. Faces lit by phone screens, some watched livestream feeds of the action. Others paced the asphalt, straining to hear distant public address announcers or to listen to the call on the radio. The MIL permitted no fans the first week of play and only home team parents on the second week. Last week, each participating student-athlete was allowed four guests. This week, the phased-in approach has been expanded to include a limited number ...

Youth demand climate justice

Wearing a bird feather headdress fashioned for going into battle, Txai Surui, a young Indigenous woman from the Brazilian Amazon, stood at the podium at the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow on Monday delivering a message that met the moment’s gravity. “The Earth is speaking,” Surui said. “She tells us that we have no more time.” At 24 and delivering an eloquent speech that could shame most politicians, Surui powerfully demonstrated the urgency and moral clarity so many young people bring to the climate crisis, recognizing as they do that the planet their children ...

Reefs vital to ecosystems

Most people have a vague awareness that huge swaths of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil are either on fire or being clear-cut by farming and lumber industries. We also know that much of the scrubbing of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is accomplished by that same massive rainforest, a region that has been poetically but accurately described as the “lungs of the world.” Just as the Amazon helps us land creatures to breathe, coral reefs provide a similar function for the fragile ecosystems beneath the world’s oceans. For the millions of sea creatures living in proximity to the ...

What will recall accomplish?

With Maui’s next mayoral election just a year away, what do organizers of the effort to recall Maui County Mayor Michael Victorino hope to accomplish? Let’s suppose they get the required 21,586 in-person signatures of registered voters in 30 days to force a recall election. Even if Victorino were to lose that election, it’s not like it would bring major change to the county building’s ninth floor. By law, Victorino would step down and his next in charge, Managing Director Sandy Baz, would take over as mayor and finish the term. Baz is his own man and has his own leadership ...