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Editorial

Impossible abortion law

A horrendous new Texas law that took effect last week bans abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected — typically around six weeks of gestation — and turn individuals into antiabortion vigilantes by empowering them to file civil suits against anyone who provided an abortion or helped procure one. Lawyers for a group of abortion clinics, doctors and advocates asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the law, at least temporarily, pending a legal challenge. The high court should do so. The law, adopted in May, is a breathtaking subversion of the constitutional right to a safe and ...

Isle drought past, future

During the past 121 years, The Maui News has covered many one-of-a-kind stories. The “miracle landing” of Aloha Airlines Flight 243 on April 28, 1988 leaps to mind, as do the banner headlines generated after a Japanese submarine shelled Kahului on Dec. 15, 1941. Other stories tend to appear like clockwork, whether it is elections every two years or the yearly price of sashimi in the days leading up to New Year’s Eve. Before the global pandemic, coverage of high school sports, Maui Fairs, Fourth of July parades and Halloween hijinks cycled through as regular as the seasons. In ...

Pakistan hails Taliban success

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan was the first world leader who wholeheartedly welcomed the Taliban’s capture of Kabul on Aug. 15 — before its fall, Pakistan had maintained that it had little leverage on the Taliban to force them to accept a ceasefire and that it backed a political solution in Afghanistan. However, on Aug. 16, he said Afghans have “broken the shackles of slavery,” leaving little doubt on where Pakistan stands on the Taliban’s return. This is hardly surprising. Pakistan not only played a central role in the Taliban’s rise to power in the 1990s but was ...

Déjà vu all over again

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The 1905 quote by Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana has been on our mind as major news unfolds near and far. History is doing an encore in Afghanistan with yet another messy retreat. And just as there were “mask wars” during the 1918 flu pandemic, we have protests against their mandate in Hawaii and around the world. The British Army’s 1842 retreat from Kabul was a disaster. An article in Historic UK magazine offers a brief list of what doomed the occupation and led to the eventual annihilation of ...

Taxes, online filing fees

Many Americans who pay the online do-it-yourself tax-preparation giant TurboTax may not even know the company offers a free version of its services, under an agreement with the federal government. Critics say that lack of knowledge is intentional—that after agreeing two decades ago to provide free filing services in exchange for a promise that the federal government wouldn’t offer its own free filing system, the company has downplayed its free service and steered users toward its paid services at every turn. TurboTax now says it’s getting out of the government’s free-filing ...

Ban punishing good landlords

Last December, when COVID-19 vaccines were just beginning to be made available, we urged Congress to help both renters and landlords, because while the pandemic was preventing some renters from working and thus crippling their ability to pay the rent, the costs to maintain rental properties weren’t going away for the property owners. Eight months later, the federal eviction moratorium remains in place in areas with high COVID transmission rates. But the maintenance costs for the property owners aren’t going anywhere. We have sympathy for renters still reeling from the ...