Biden addresses UAW concerns amid EV transition

President Joe Biden dipped a toe into the contract talks between automakers and the UAW on Monday, reaffirming his support for electric vehicle jobs as a path to the middle class while urging the companies to address the union's concerns over the transition.

"I support a fair transition to a clean energy future," Biden said in a statement timed exactly a month before the United Auto Workers contract with Detroit automakers is set to expire Sept. 14.

He went on to list things that are key union priorities, including honoring the right to organize unions, providing jobs "that can support a family," and ensuring that industry "transitions are fair and look to retool, reboot, and rehire in the same factories and communities at comparable wages, while giving existing workers the first shot to fill those jobs."

The talks pose a delicate balance for Biden and Democrats between their priorities of transitioning the nation to electric vehicles and courting support of the UAW, which has expressed anxiety about a range of economic concerns, including federally subsidized work going to non-union battery plants.

The union has yet to make a presidential endorsement, despite a flood of other labor support for Biden.

A senior administration official told POLITICO last week the UAW has no expectation Biden would discuss specific demands but that the union would like to see the president's support of their perspective in the transition to a clean energy economy.

"Companies should use this process to make sure they enlist their workers in the next chapter of the industry by offering them good paying jobs and a say in the future of their workplace," Biden said in his statement, referring to the transition away from fossil fuels.

The UAW's economic demands, released publicly this month, specifically ask for protections in the case of plant closures, as well as major pay raises.

The union has also said it wants workers at jointly owned battery plants, key in the EV transition, to be brought up to comparable wage and safety standards as union workers. A recent letter from Senate Democrats suggested the automakers include those facilities in national contracts; the UAW hasn't explicitly made that demand.

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Behind Trudeau’s standoff with Big Tech

OTTAWA, Ont. — Canada’s Liberal government picked a fight with two U.S. tech giants by passing legislation forcing Meta and Google to pay news publishers for content. But the battle hasn’t gone quite as expected.

Now, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says big Silicon Valley firms want to make an example out of his country as Meta, fronted by two of Ottawa’s brightest political minds hailing from opposing parties, blocks Canadian news from its platforms.

The company started permanently removing Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram this month, and Canadian media publishers fear the move could deal a massive blow to an industry already gutted by layoffs and closures, teetering on the edge with 60 outlets closing in the past two years alone and CTV, a major television news network, closing its foreign bureaus.

The standoff, closely watched by some congressional representatives and California legislators with similar laws in the works, isn’t just government versus industry. It has plunged Trudeau into a high-stakes public brawl with two veteran political operatives now leading the charge on behalf of Meta — including a top aide to the Conservative prime minister that Trudeau unseated in a landslide. It’s also an unexpected turn for the social-media-friendly prime minister, who actively wooed tech companies to Canada with subsidies, friendly immigration policies, and even socks with geeky references, when meeting Silicon Valley executives.

But nearly eight years in, he finds himself locked in battles on multiple fronts — from new measures to have streaming platforms fund and promote Canadian content, to Canada planning to move ahead on implementing a digital sales tax despite state-side warnings it could sink President Joe Biden’s push for a global tax. And there's more to come: a promised controversial online harms bill that could pull even more tech companies into conflict with Ottawa.

As tensions rise, Trudeau has painted this conflict in existential terms.

Facebook made the “wrong choice” deciding to “attack” Canada, and his government will “defend democracy” like it did in the Second World War, he said in French when talking to reporters near Montreal, Quebec, on July 5. “I know that Canadians will not be bullied by billionaires in the U.S.”

Not a bluff

News companies were supposed to be the beneficiaries of a new law called the Online News Act, introduced April last year, designed to force two big tech companies the government says are dominating Canada’s ad market, Meta and Google, to the bargaining table with media companies to negotiate payments for using their content. If not, they’d face baseball-style arbitration.

The law, which takes effect in December, was modeled after a similar effort in Australia, which led to payment agreements with the platforms. Parliament’s budget watchdog estimated it would yield $249 million for Canadian media companies and balance the bargaining power between tech giants and struggling Canadian news outlets.

Canadian legacy media, newspapers in particular, had pushed for the controversial measures and hailed the bill’s passage in June as a step toward fair compensation for their journalism.

But Meta showed it wasn't bluffing when it began to slowly pull news from its platforms in Canada over the law. More and more Canadians are hitting dead space and a message explaining why they can’t access the news content — something Meta started publicly testing months earlier and officially started rolling out Aug. 1.

“It has the potential really to devastate a number of Canadian media outlets,” said University of Ottawa e-commerce law professor Michael Geist, the earliest and sharpest of critics of the new law.

He tells POLITICO that Canadian news media face a triple threat: “The loss of new revenue as anticipated from the legislation, the loss of existing revenue from deals [with the tech companies] that get canceled, and the loss of referral traffic that will simply disappear.”

The battle has slowly escalated during the past year. And it’s giving Trudeau’s opponents ammunition.

“It’s like Nineteen Eighty-Four [George Orwell’s dystopian novel],” Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre told reporters outside Parliament on Aug. 1. “You have a prime minister passing a law to make news articles disappear from the internet.”

Although, the law itself doesn’t remove any news content and his party even ran in the last election under a different leader promising a vaguely similar policy with an arbitration process.

Political rivals, united

Leading the fight for Meta is no run-of-the-mill lobbyist. Rachel Curran once served as top policy adviser to former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who held power for just shy of a decade until 2015 when Trudeau displaced him in a landslide.

As the senior policy lead in the prime minister’s office in 2011, Curran had her hands on every major file — from dealing with defense and anti-terrorism to agricultural and transport issues. She was involved in Cabinet discussions and had the last say on Harper’s daily briefing material — making her one of Ottawa’s most influential behind-the-scenes players at the time. She worked on the party’s policy platform during the 2015 fight against Trudeau. And she continued to work with Harper after the election, along with doing TV punditry, before becoming a university instructor and then joining Meta in 2020 as public policy manager for Canada.

Her one foray into the culture wars was during Ottawa’s convoy occupation of 2022 — she sparked outcry after tweeting about the festive atmosphere around town, and then deleted her account for a time.

In her new role heading up Meta’s public policy arm for Canada, she's facing off against a familiar adversary and striking an uncompromising tone.

In an interview, Curran said the prospect of mandated payments for links was hard for Meta to swallow from day one.

“The reality is, [news] doesn't have a great deal of commercial value for us,” she tells POLITICO. “We think the value transfer flows the other way, and that it just makes no sense. It's not workable for us to compensate news publishers for links and for material that they're placing on our platform.”

It’s also easily replaceable. Users are seeking information about friends and family, and trending away from news anyway, she said.

“We've made our decision. It's a business decision.”

Meta is also represented by another political veteran of another stripe: Kevin Chan, senior director of global policy and campaign strategies for the company.

Known as a “renaissance” man with a love of classical music, Chan was policy director for former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, the Oxford and Harvard academic who briefly held the Liberal leadership before Trudeau. Ignatieff quit the post after taking an election beating at the hands of Harper in 2011, and was one of many prominent Liberals who was eclipsed when Trudeaumania took over the party.

While Curran has fronted a lot of the media in this fight, Chan previously tussled with Liberal lawmakers at hearings over privacy rights, making his appearance in Parliament earlier this year a rematch of sorts.

Battle hardened, well-connected and smart, the strategists are proving formidable foes for the governing Liberals.

Trudeau reshuffled his ranks mid-battle, attempting to give his government a facelift. Its full-court press on tech companies was until recently led by Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, a gregarious charmer of a retail politician full of swagger who adopted a hard-line stance on the bill. He was moved out of the portfolio in a July Cabinet shuffle, from one problem-plagued file to another. The standoff now falls to up-and-comer Pascale St-Onge, another Quebec parliamentarian, sending Rodriguez off to a more desirable posting overseeing transport — although even in that role, Rodriguez still finds himself defending the new law.

At his first transport announcement on Aug. 9, clad in a fluorescent yellow safety vest to talk about a new C$22-million cargo facility at Ottawa’s airport, he was asked if he regrets how he handled the news media law, now that outlets are experiencing social media traffic loss and Canadians have watched news drain from their feeds.

“Not at all. We did the right thing and we're not the only ones in the world,” Rodriguez said. “Status quo is not an option. Newsrooms are closing their doors.”

St-Onge has a background in fighting for media jobs and represents an area in Quebec. A former bassist in a Montreal-based rock band who worked at a newspaper before her time in national politics, she headed the province’s largest union for the media and cultural sectors where she pushed the Trudeau Liberals to address the jobs crisis in Canadian media.

She doubled-down on the bill after taking over for Rodriguez late July and called Meta “irresponsible” for removing news on Aug. 1.

“Facebook is trying to send a message, not only to Canada but to other countries like New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States,” she said. “We’re going to keep standing our ground.”

Copped from Australia's playbook

The Trudeau government’s law follows a similar law passed in Australia in 2021, considered a great success.

Rod Sims, former head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, pushed for the law. After some huffing and puffing from the tech companies, he said they were cajoled to the bargaining table.

Speedy deals between the tech platforms and media outlets followed — to the tune of $140 million a year. The number of journalists surged, and The Guardian newspaper increased its workforce to 150 from 100 in Australia, bringing along with it an unheard of line about print journalism in modern times: “There are too many job vacancies to fill.”

“Facebook took down all news and emergency information and a whole lot of other stuff for a week and got a huge backlash against it. Google threatened to take Google search out of Australia,” Sims said. “In the end, both Facebook and Google caved in.”

The standoff lasted all of eight days in Australia before the platforms agreed to pay, heralding a new playbook for the tech companies and governments worldwide. But the standoff has gone on far longer in Canada, and shows no signs of turning around anytime soon.

Hardball approach

A Google official said the two situations and laws are not comparable.

“The Australian law put us on a pathway where we have voluntary commercial agreements with Australian publishers,” said Mark Isakowitz, Google's vice president of government affairs and public policy for the U.S. and Canada. “We would have liked to achieve something like that in Canada. That's what we talked to the government about.”

Instead, the Canadian Liberals took a hardball approach, he said.

“We have the opposite of that here, where you have two targeted companies on a pathway to being designated to make payments, with a process that’s completely unclear.”

Google met with the Canadian government more than 100 times over the bill and testified four times, but “frankly, until the very end,” there was “little or no dialogue on how the law was made.”

The government painted a contrast between the two companies, suggesting Meta is stubborn and not negotiating, while Google remains at the table.

“We don’t negotiate in public but we’re deeply convinced that Google’s concerns will be resolved through regulations,” Rodriguez said on July 5, the day the Canadian government pulled its advertising from Facebook and Instagram in retaliation. Those regulations are still being hammered out.

But talk to Google, and the company appears yet unmoved.

“This whole situation was avoidable,” Isakowitz said, and “when the law goes into effect, we are going to have to remove Canadian news.”

Other countries and jurisdictions poised to move on similar legislation are watching closely as Canadian’s conflict with Facebook stretches on and media groups appeal to the country’s competition watchdog to intervene.

California state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) has this same battle brewing over her Journalism Preservation Act, also loosely modeled on Australia’s code, which passed the lower house in a bipartisan 55-6 vote in June.

It was put on hold following tech industry backlash, but is set to come up next year for consideration in the upper chamber. And she’s taking notes on Canada.

“Part of me believes the threats that are happening in Canada are happening also strategically to impact policy in California and in other parts of the world,” she tells Politico. “I think what they want to do is scare folks enough by making big threats towards Canada.”

But she doesn’t see how a company like Google can block news, at least not in the long run.

“If you want to be the search engine that has everything under your tent for people to search, then have everything under your tent,” she said. “ It will have a negative impact on their own business model because people will then go on to other places to get content.”

A similarly named bill has been re-introduced in the U.S. Senate, promoted by Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who has called on Canada to stay strong in its fight, and Republican Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.).

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What Elon Musk can learn from Mark Zuckerberg’s Washington flop

Mark Zuckerberg has a lesson to offer archrival and potential cage-match opponent Elon Musk: Beware of Washington when trying to build an “everything app.”

Lawmakers are warning that Musk could face scrutiny if he pushes ahead with plans to turn X, the social media giant once known as Twitter, into a financial services provider. It’s a key step to achieving Musk’s long-held goal of building a mega-app that serves as a hub for messaging, payments and more.

Musk, the world’s richest man, will need to avoid the political and regulatory pitfalls that killed Zuckerberg’s plan to launch a cryptocurrency payments system alongside Facebook. Zuckerberg and his partners scrapped the project following resistance from Capitol Hill, banking regulators and European officials.

“As a big company, you have a bullseye on your back — from the average consumer, from politicians,” said Morgan Beller, who co-created the failed Facebook crypto venture first known as Libra. “You have to ask for permission, not forgiveness.”

And that’s just not Musk’s style, as evidenced by his plan to face off with Zuckerberg in hand-to-hand combat.

“You have a cowboy at the helm of a big company,” Beller said. “So, who’s to say what he will try to do or not do?”

Zuckerberg’s experience revealed broad concerns in Washington and Brussels about the intermingling of social media and finance that still linger. He faced fatal opposition even as he pledged to delay the project and address officials’ objections. It’s questionable whether Musk, who has long taken a more combative approach to dealing with regulators — and who has also become a political lightning rod — would fare any better.

“My guess: He’d run into the same situation that Zuckerberg ran into,” said Rep. Bill Foster, an Illinois Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, in an interview.

Musk’s exact vision is just now taking shape. He wrote last month that the app will soon move to add “comprehensive communications” and become a conduit for “your entire financial world.” X has secured money-transmission licenses in some states and is reportedly eyeing stock trading features.

It would expand an empire that — unlike Zuckerberg’s — also includes dominant businesses in private space travel and satellite communication, which have helped make him a singular geopolitical force.

“It’s possible to become the biggest financial institution in the world,” Musk said of X in March.

It would be a second act in financial services for Musk, who cut his teeth in business with the online payment platform PayPal. The company was formed out of a merger between Musk’s earlier X.com and Confinity, a startup co-launched by billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel. He briefly led PayPal before being ousted as CEO in 2000.

Zuckerberg turned to another PayPal alum, David Marcus, to help develop and roll out the plan for Facebook’s Libra digital currency in 2019. The company, now known as Meta, touted the crypto venture as a powerful new payments system that would give consumers around the world a better way to move their money. The project, which was rebranded as Diem, folded in 2022.

The scope of Zuckerberg’s ambition — the potential creation of a private money system linked to one of the world’s largest social networks — spooked lawmakers and regulators at the highest levels.

Aaron Klein, a former Treasury Department official who now serves as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said he suspects that Musk “will be more careful and surgical” in how he approaches expanding X into finance.

But “Musk’s history is to think pretty big,” he said. “The bigger you think, the more regulatory tripwires there are.”

If Musk opts to follow Zuckerberg into crypto, he is likely to face the same reception, according to lawmakers.

“That would receive its share of scrutiny,” said Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.), who leads a House subcommittee on digital assets. “Just like you witnessed back four years ago when Zuckerberg and David Marcus were here talking about their failed Libra project.”

Spokespeople for X did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk’s potential move into financial services could also garner opposition from traditional banks, which urged lawmakers to crack down on Libra in 2019. They have fought for years to fend off the encroachment of big tech companies into banking.

“The banking industry is on high alert from this,” Foster said. “They see the huge natural advantage of any organization with a big user base for social media trying to leverage that user base for payment transactions.”

Another fundamental takeaway from Zuckerberg’s failure: Don’t wait to lobby Washington on your vision.

Zuckerberg and Facebook were forced to engage in extensive political damage control after their Libra rollout left policymakers with numerous questions. At the height of the uproar, Zuckerberg himself testified before Congress to allay concerns but it was too little, too late.

“The big lesson from Mark Zuckerberg’s failed Libra experiment was that they didn’t do any of the upfront work in Washington, D.C., getting regulators or lawmakers comfortable with their idea,” said former SEC Commissioner Michael Piwowar, now with the Milken Institute think tank. “The Silicon Valley approach of ‘move fast and break things’ does not work once you get into anything related to financial services.”

It may require an approach that’s uncharacteristic for Musk, who has ridiculed the agencies that oversee his companies, including Tesla, often skirting federal regulations with minimal consequences.

Musk paid $20 million to settle securities fraud charges brought by the SEC — Wall Street’s top cop — but is now in a legal battle with the agency over the terms of the deal. He plans to appeal to the Supreme Court.

"I do not respect the SEC,” Musk said following the 2018 settlement, later calling the agency “bastards.”

Beller, the Libra co-creator, said Facebook tried to lay the groundwork with regulators but securing approval from entities around the globe led to “death by a thousand paper cuts.”

“Can he brute force his way?” Beller said of Musk. “Maybe.”

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Hawaii's churches offer prayers for the dead and the missing after Maui wildfires

LAHAINA, Hawaii — Parishioners mourned the dead and prayed for the missing Sunday in Hawaii churches as communities began looking ahead to a long recovery from last week’s wildfire that demolished a historic Maui town and killed more than 90 people.

Maria Lanakila Church in Lahaina was spared from the flames that wiped out most of the surrounding community, but with search-and-recovery efforts ongoing, its members attended Mass about 10 miles up the road, with the Bishop of Honolulu, the Rev. Clarence “Larry” Silva, presiding.

Taufa Samisoni said his uncle, aunt, cousin and the cousin’s 7-year-old son were found dead inside a burned car. Samisoni’s wife, Katalina, said the family would draw comfort from Silva’s reference to the Bible story of how Jesus’ disciple Peter walked on water and was saved from drowning.

“If Peter can walk on water, yes we can. We will get to the shore,” she said, her voice quivering.

During the Mass, Silva read a message from Pope Francis, who said he was praying for those who lost loved ones, homes and livelihoods. He also conveyed prayers for first responders.

Silva later told The Associated Press that the community is worried about its children, who have witnessed tragedy and are anxious.

“The more they can be in a normal situation with their peers and learning and having fun, I think the better off they’ll be,” Silva said.

Meanwhile, Hawaii officials urged tourists to avoid traveling to Maui as many hotels prepared to house evacuees and first responders.

About 46,000 residents and visitors have flown out of Kahului Airport in West Maui since the devastation in Lahaina became clear Wednesday, according to the Hawaii Tourism Authority.

“In the weeks ahead, the collective resources and attention of the federal, state and county government, the West Maui community, and the travel industry must be focused on the recovery of residents who were forced to evacuate their homes and businesses,” the agency said in a statement late Saturday. Tourists are encouraged to visit Hawaii’s other islands.

Gov. Josh Green said 500 hotels rooms will be made available for locals who have been displaced. An additional 500 rooms will be set aside for workers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Some hotels will carry on with normal business to help preserve jobs and sustain the local economy, Green said.

The state wants to work with Airbnb to make sure that rental homes can be made available for locals. Green hopes that the company will be able to provide three- to nine-month rentals for those who have lost homes.

As the death toll around Lahaina climbed to 93, authorities warned that the effort to find and identify the dead was still in its early stages. The blaze is already the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.

Crews with cadaver dogs have covered just 3% of the search area, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said Saturday.

Lylas Kanemoto is awaiting word about the fate of her cousin, Glen Yoshino.

“I’m afraid he is gone because we have not heard from him, and he would’ve found a way to contact family. We are hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst,” Kanemoto said Sunday. Family members will submit DNA to help identify any remains.

The family was grieving the death of four other relatives. The remains of Faaso and Malui Fonua Tone, their daughter, Salote Takafua, and her son, Tony Takafua, were found inside a charred car.

“At least we have closure for them, but the loss and heartbreak is unbearable for many,” Kanemoto said.

As many as 4,500 people are in need of shelter, county officials said on Facebook, citing figures from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Pacific Disaster Center.

J.P. Mayoga, a cook at the Westin Maui in Kaanapali, is still making breakfast, lunch and dinner on a daily basis. But instead of serving hotel guests, he’s been feeding the roughly 200 hotel employees and their family members who have been living there since Tuesday’s fire devastated the Lahaina community just south of the resort.

His home and that of his father were spared. But his girlfriend, two young daughters, father and another local are all staying in a hotel room together, as it is safer than Lahaina, which is covered in toxic debris.

Maui water officials warned Lahaina and Kula residents not to drink running water, which may be contaminated even after boiling, and to only take short, lukewarm showers in well-ventilated rooms to avoid possible chemical vapor exposure.

“Everybody has their story, and everybody lost something. So everybody can be there for each other, and they understand what’s going on in each other’s lives,” he said of his co-workers at the hotel.

Hawaii Island Mayor Mitch Roth warned that the recovery effort will be a “marathon not a sprint.” In order to keep the effort “coordinated and thoughtful,” Roth urged Hawaii residents to contribute money to established nonprofits and hold off on donating physical items because there is not yet a reliable distribution system in place.

The latest death toll surpassed that of the 2018 Camp Fire in northern California, which left 85 dead and destroyed the town of Paradise.

The cause of the wildfires is under investigation. The fires are Hawaii’s deadliest natural disaster in decades, surpassing a 1960 tsunami that killed 61 people. An even deadlier tsunami in 1946 killed more than 150 on the Big Island.

Fueled by a dry summer and strong winds from a passing hurricane, the flames on Maui raced through parched brush covering the island.

The most serious blaze swept into Lahaina on Tuesday and destroyed nearly every building in the town of 13,000, leaving a grid of gray rubble wedged between the blue ocean and lush green slopes.

Elsewhere on Maui, at least two other fires have been burning: in south Maui’s Kihei area and in the mountainous, inland communities known as Upcountry. No fatalities have been reported from those blazes.

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RFK Jr. backs 15-week federal ban on abortion, then reverses himself

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday said he would support a federal ban on abortion after the first three months of pregnancy, but his campaign later said he "misunderstood" the question.

Speaking to NBC from the Iowa State Fair, Kennedy said, “I believe a decision to abort a child should be up to the women during the first three months of life,” but also said: “Once a child is viable, outside the womb, I think then the state has an interest in protecting the child.”

He said he would sign a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks or 21 weeks of pregnancy if he were elected president.

But his campaign subsequently said Kennedy did not mean to support any federal limits on abortion.

"Today, Mr. Kennedy misunderstood a question posed to him by a NBC reporter in a crowded, noisy exhibit hall at the Iowa State Fair," his campaign said. "Mr. Kennedy’s position on abortion is that it is always the woman’s right to choose. He does not support legislation banning abortion."

A longtime advocate of what he calls “medical freedom,” Kennedy has been in the public eye in recent years largely for discussions about public health issues, in particular his stated doubts about mandates for vaccinations and some conspiracy theories about Covid-19, including widely condemned suggestions that the virus could have been engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

In June in a town hall in New Hampshire, he called himself “pro-choice” and spoke in favor of legal abortion.

“I’m not going be in a position, put myself in a position, where I am going to tell a woman to bring a child to term,” he said at the time.

Limits on abortion have been widely discussed in the Republican presidential field. Former Vice President Mike Pence, for instance, has called for his fellow GOP presidential candidates to support a 15-week national ban.

Kennedy’s remarks come only days after voters in Ohio rejected a ballot measure that would have made it harder for the state’s voters to codify abortion rights in the state constitution in November.

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Police challenged over Kansas newspaper raid in which computers, phones seized

MARION, Kan. — A small central Kansas police department is facing a firestorm of criticism after it raided the offices of a local newspaper and the home of its publisher and owner — a move deemed by several press freedom watchdogs as a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s protection of a free press.

The Marion County Record said in its own published reports that police raided the newspaper’s office on Friday, seizing the newspaper’s computers, phones and file server and the personal cellphones of staff, based on a search warrant. One Record reporter said one of her fingers was injured when Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody wrested her cellphone out of her hand, according to the report.

Police simultaneously raided the home of Eric Meyer, the newspaper’s publisher and co-owner, seizing computers, his cellphone and the home’s internet router, Meyer said. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother — Record co-owner Joan Meyer who lived in the home with her son — collapsed and died Saturday, Meyer said, blaming her death on the stress of the raid of her home.

Meyer said in his newspaper’s report that he believes the raid was prompted by a story published last week about a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell. Newell had police remove Meyer and a newspaper reporter from her restaurant early this month, who were there to cover a public reception for U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, a Republican representing the area. The police chief and other officials also attended and were acknowledged at the reception, and the Marion Police Department highlighted the event on its Facebook page.

The next week at a city council meeting, Newell publicly accused the newspaper of using illegal means to get information on a drunken driving conviction against her. The newspaper countered that it received that information unsolicited, which it sought to verify through public online records. It eventually decided not to run a story on Newell’s DUI, but it did run a story on the city council meeting, in which Newell confirmed the 2008 DUI conviction herself.

A two-page search warrant, signed by a local judge, lists Newell as the victim of alleged crimes by the newspaper. When the newspaper asked for a copy of the probable cause affidavit required by law to issue a search warrant, the district court issued a signed statement saying no such affidavit was on file, the Record reported.

Newell declined to comment Sunday, saying she was too busy to speak. She said she would call back later Sunday to answer questions.

Cody, the police chief, defended the raid on Sunday, saying in an email to The Associated Press that while federal law usually requires a subpoena — not just a search warrant — to raid a newsroom, there is an exception “when there is reason to believe the journalist is taking part in the underlying wrongdoing.”

Cody did not give details about what that alleged wrongdoing entailed.

Cody, who was hired in late April as Marion’s police chief after serving 24 years in the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department, did not respond to questions about whether police filed a probable cause affidavit for the search warrant. He also did not answer questions about how police believe Newell was victimized.

Meyer said the newspaper plans to sue the police department and possibly others, calling the raid an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment’s free press guarantee.

Press freedom and civil rights organizations agreed that police, the local prosecutor’s office and the judge who signed off on the search warrant overstepped their authority.

“It seems like one of the most aggressive police raids of a news organization or entity in quite some time,” said Sharon Brett, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas. The breadth of the raid and the aggressiveness in which it was carried out seems to be “quite an alarming abuse of authority from the local police department,” Brett said.

Seth Stern, director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement that the raid appeared to have violated federal law, the First Amendment, “and basic human decency.”

“This looks like the latest example of American law enforcement officers treating the press in a manner previously associated with authoritarian regimes,” Stern said. “The anti-press rhetoric that’s become so pervasive in this country has become more than just talk and is creating a dangerous environment for journalists trying to do their jobs.”

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As Maui rescue continues, families and faith leaders cling to hope but tackle reality of loss

For scores of families in Hawaii still hoping to reunite with loved ones, it was not yet time to give up — even as the staggering death toll continued to grow, and even as authorities predicted that more remains would be found within the ashes left behind by a wildfire that gutted the once-bustling town of Lahaina.

But many others are already confronting a painful reality. Their loved ones did not make it out alive.

Kika Perez Grant wasn’t sure what would become of the remains of her uncle, Franklin Trejos, who was found in a charred car, his body shielding a friend’s dog.

“We knew he was happiest out there, and so we’re allowing his best friends, who he’s been with for over 30 years out there, do whatever they think he would be happy with,” said Grant, who lives with her mother and family in Maryland.

Specific plans have yet to be decided, she said, partly because it was unclear who had possession of his remains.

Thus far, the remains of more than 90 people have been pulled from flattened homes, blackened cars or on streets just a few strides from their front doors — unable to outrun the smoke and flames that were just too fast and too ferocious.

On Saturday, Gov. Josh Green told residents to brace for more grim news. Crews and cadaver-sniffing dogs will certainly find more of the missing within the destruction, he said. He predicted the tragedy could rank as Hawaii’s deadliest natural disaster ever.

It was an ominous signal of the anguish to come in the months ahead. Mourners will file into houses of worship, then somberly gather at gravesites to say final goodbyes. The scenes will be repeated over and over — though how many times no one yet knows.

Maui officials declined to respond to phone calls, text messages and emails requesting information about how and where the county are sheltering the recovered remains. Nor did they answer questions about whether the county has the facilities and resources to handle the rising number of fatalities.

With just one hospital and three mortuaries, it remains unclear where all those corpses will be temporarily stored and how soon they will be released to family.

Pope Francis acknowledged the tragedy during his Sunday address to people gathered at the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square, saying that he “desires to assure my prayers for the victims of the fires that devastated the island of Maui.” Locally, amid the gloom, faith leaders were focused on providing community and spiritual hope for congregants who lost homes and livelihoods. Some vowed to hold services on Sunday.

“We’re hoping our church can be a beacon of hope when the time comes,” the Rev. Barry Campbell said from Kihei, where his family has stayed since escaping Lahaina.

He plans to hold services as soon as it’s possible at Lahaina Baptist Church, which remained standing, even if buildings around it were razed down to their slabs.

“That’s the thing our people really need,” Campbell said. “To be together.”

Amid Lahaina’s devastation, the Maria Lanakila Catholic Church suffered smoke damage, but the convent and school were destroyed, said the Most Rev. Clarence “Larry” Silva, the Bishop of Honolulu.

“Funerals are not yet on the horizon,” he told The Associated Press. “Even in the best of times, Hawaii has the custom on having funerals anywhere from a month to six months after the death.”

For now, many faith leaders are mounting relief efforts, including turning houses of worship into temporary shelters. They are also delivering supplies to those in need, and doing their best to help families connect with friends and relatives across an area with intermittent power and without reliable cellphone services.

The Church of Latter-day Saints in Maui said five of its members died in the fires, including four from the same family. In the fire’s aftermath, the church has transformed two meeting houses into shelters.

The Rev. Jay Haynes, the pastor at Kahului Baptist Church, said recovery will take many years.

“Our people just need to keep going,” he said.

The Chabad of Maui — which was under evacuation orders — was spared and is now sheltering evacuees, said Rabbi Mendy Krasnjansky. As the fire raged, some of the faithful stood ready to move the temple’s holy scrolls to safer grounds.

“We don’t know why things happen, but we believe we have the strength to soldier on,” he said.

That was the case for Zac Wasserman who has been frantic about finding his uncle, David Hawley. Now in his 70s, his uncle uses a wheelchair after a stroke left him mostly immobile more than a year ago.

“We just don’t know where he is, which is definitely scary,” said Wasserman, who lives in Southern California.

Even before the fires, he wasn’t always good about keeping in touch. Maybe it was just another one of those cases.

Phone call after phone call from Wasserman, his siblings and cousins have gone unanswered.

“I still have hope,” he said, “unless somebody tells me otherwise.”

Then after sharing his anguish, his family tried once more.

This time there was an answer. Their uncle was alive.

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