By AUDREY McAVOY

HONOLULU (AP) — Lawmakers on Maui passed legislation Thursday aimed at eliminating a large percentage of the Hawaiian island’s vacation rentals to address a housing shortage exacerbated by the wildfire that destroyed most of Lahaina two years ago.

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It’s the latest action by a top global tourist destination to push back against the infiltration of vacationers into residential neighborhoods and tourism overwhelming their communities. In May, Spain ordered Airbnb to block more than 65,000 holiday listings on its platform for having violated rules. Last month, thousands of protesters in European cities like Barcelona and Venice, Italy, marched against the ills of overtourism.

The Maui County Council’s housing committee voted 6-3 to pass the bill, which would close a loophole that has allowed owners of condos in apartment zones to rent their units for days or weeks at a time instead of a minimum of 180 days. The mandate would take effect in the West Maui district that includes Lahaina in 2028. The rest of the county would have until 2030 to comply.

The council still needs to vote on the bill, but the committee’s result is a strong indication of the final outcome because all nine council members sit on the housing panel. The mayor is expected to sign the bill, which he proposed.

“Bill 9 is a critical first step in restoring our commitment to prioritize housing for local residents — and securing a future where our keiki can live, grow, and thrive in the place they call home,” Maui Mayor Richard Bissen said in a statement, using the Hawaiian word for children.

Vacation rentals take up one-fifth of Maui’s housing

Vacation rentals currently account for 21% of all housing in the county, which has a population of about 165,000 people.

An analysis by University of Hawaii economists predicted the measure would add 6,127 units to Maui’s long-term housing stock, increasing supply by 13%.

Opponents questioned whether local residents could afford the condos in question, noting that many of the buildings they are in are aging and their units come with high mortgages, insurance payments, maintenance and special assessment costs.

Alicia Humiston said her condo is in a hotel zone so it won’t be affected. But she predicted the measure will hurt housekeepers, plumbers, electricians and other small business owners who help maintain vacation rentals.

“It’s not what’s best for the the community,” said Humiston, who is president of the Rentals by Owner Awareness Association.

Bissen proposed the legislation last year after wildfire survivors and activists camped out on a beach popular with tourists to demand change.

Mayor says tourism will continue but must not ‘hollow out our neighborhoods’

The University of Hawaii study said only about 600 new housing units are built in the county each year so converting the vacation rentals would be equivalent to a decade’s worth of new housing development. Condo prices would drop 20-40%, the study estimated.

The report also predicted one-quarter of Maui County’s visitor accommodations would vanish and visitor spending would sink 15%. It estimated gross domestic product would contract by 4%.

The mayor said such economic analysis failed to tell a full story, noting families are torn apart when high housing costs drive out relatives and that cultural knowledge disappears when generations leave Maui.

The mayor told the council the bill was one part of a broader housing strategy that would include building new housing, investing in infrastructure and stopping illegally operated vacation rentals. He said there were limits to how much new housing could be built because of constraints on water supplies and sewer infrastructure.

Tourism would continue on Maui but must do so in a way “that doesn’t hollow out our neighborhoods,” the mayor said.

The mayor’s staff told council members that visitor spending would decline with the measure but most of the drop would be on lodging. Because 94% of those who own vacation rentals in apartment zones don’t live on Maui, they said much of this income already flows off-island. They predicted the county budget could withstand an estimated $61 million decline in annual tax revenue resulting from the measure.

BOSTON — A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from ending birthright citizenship for the children of parents who are in the U.S. illegally, issuing the third court ruling blocking the birthright order nationwide since a key Supreme Court decision in June.

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U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin, joining another district court as well as an appellate panel of judges, found that a nationwide injunction granted to more than a dozen states remains in force under an exception to the Supreme Court ruling. That decision restricted the power of lower-court judges to issue nationwide injunctions.

The states have argued Trump’s birthright citizenship order is blatantly unconstitutional and threatens millions of dollars for health insurance services that are contingent on citizenship status. The issue is expected to move quickly back to the nation’s highest court.

New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who helped lead the lawsuit before Sorokin, said in a statement he was “thrilled the district court again barred President Trump’s flagrantly unconstitutional birthright citizenship order from taking effect anywhere.”

“American-born babies are American, just as they have been at every other time in our Nation’s history,” he added. “The President cannot change that legal rule with the stroke of a pen.”

Lawyers for the government had argued Sorokin should narrow the reach of his earlier ruling granting a preliminary injunction, saying it should be “tailored to the States’ purported financial injuries.”

Sorokin said a patchwork approach to the birthright order would not protect the states in part because a substantial number of people move between states. He also blasted the Trump administration, saying it had failed to explain how a narrower injunction would work.

“That is, they have never addressed what renders a proposal feasible or workable, how the defendant agencies might implement it without imposing material administrative or financial burdens on the plaintiffs, or how it squares with other relevant federal statutes,” the judge wrote. “In fact, they have characterized such questions as irrelevant to the task the Court is now undertaking. The defendants’ position in this regard defies both law and logic.”

Sorokin acknowledged his order would not be the last word on birthright citizenship. Trump and his administration “are entitled to pursue their interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, and no doubt the Supreme Court will ultimately settle the question,” Sorokin wrote. “But in the meantime, for purposes of this lawsuit at this juncture, the Executive Order is unconstitutional.”

The administration has not yet appealed any of the recent court rulings. Trump’s efforts to deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily will remain blocked unless and until the Supreme Court says otherwise.

An email asking for the White House’s response to the ruling was sent Friday.

A federal judge in New Hampshire issued a ruling earlier this month prohibiting Trump’s executive order from taking effect nationwide in a new class-action lawsuit. U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante in New Hampshire had paused his own decision to allow for the Trump administration to appeal, but with no appeal filed in the last week, his order went into effect.

On Wednesday, a San Francisco-based appeals court found the president’s executive order unconstitutional and affirmed a lower court’s nationwide block.

A Maryland-based judge said this week that she would do the same if an appeals court signed off.

The justices ruled last month that lower courts generally can’t issue nationwide injunctions, but it didn’t rule out other court orders that could have nationwide effects, including in class-action lawsuits and those brought by states. The Supreme Court did not decide whether the underlying citizenship order is constitutional.

Plaintiffs in the Boston case earlier argued that the principle of birthright citizenship is “enshrined in the Constitution,” and that Trump does not have the authority to issue the order, which they called a “flagrantly unlawful attempt to strip hundreds of thousands of American-born children of their citizenship based on their parentage.”

They also argue that Trump’s order halting automatic citizenship for babies born to people in the U.S. illegally or temporarily would cost states funding they rely on to “provide essential services” — from foster care to health care for low-income children, to “early interventions for infants, toddlers, and students with disabilities.”

At the heart of the lawsuits is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1868 after the Civil War and the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision. That decision found that Scott, an enslaved man, wasn’t a citizen despite having lived in a state where slavery was outlawed.

The Trump administration has asserted that children of noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore not entitled to citizenship.

Associated Press reporter Mark Sherman in Washington contributed.

By BARBARA ORTUTAY

Intel Corp. is shedding thousands of workers and cutting expenses as its new CEO works to revive the fortunes of the struggling chipmaker that helped launch Silicon Valley but has fallen behind rivals like Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

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In a memo to employees Thursday, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said Intel plans to end the year with 75,000 “core” workers excluding subsidiaries, through layoffs and attrition. That’s down from 99,500 core employees at the end of last year. The company previously announced a 15% workforce reduction.

“I know the past few months have not been easy. We are making hard but necessary decisions to streamline the organization, drive greater efficiency and increase accountability at every level of the company,” Tan wrote.

In addition, Intel will scrap previously planned projects in Germany and Poland and also move assembly and test operations in Costa Rica to larger sites in Vietnam and Malaysia. Costa Rica will remain a “home to key engineering teams and corporate functions,” Tan said in the memo.

In the U.S., the company said it will “further” slow construction of a semiconductor plant in Ohio.

Founded in 1968 at the start of the PC revolution, Intel missed the technological shift to mobile computing triggered by Apple’s 2007 release of the iPhone, and it’s lagged more nimble chipmakers. Intel’s troubles have been magnified since the advent of artificial intelligence — a booming field where the chips made by once-smaller rival Nvidia have become tech’s hottest commodity.

The Santa Clara, California-based company’s market cap was $98.71 billion as of the market close on Thursday, compared with Nvidia’s $4.24 trillion.

Tan said Intel is focusing on its “core product portfolio” and artificial intelligence offerings to better serve customers.

“There are no more blank checks,” Tan wrote. “Every investment must make economic sense.”

For the second quarter, Intel reported a loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, down from a loss of $1.6 billion, or 38 cents per share, a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, the company posted a loss of 10 cents a share.

Revenue was flat at $12.9 billion. Analysts, on average, were expecting adjusted earnings of 1 cent per share on revenue of $12 billion, according to a poll by FactSet.

BY MELISSA GOLDIN

As his administration faces mounting pressure to release Justice Department files related the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case, President Donald Trump is highlighting a different criminal justice issue — cashless bail.

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He suggested in a Truth Social post this week that eliminating cash bail as a condition of pretrial release from jail has led to rising crime in U.S. cities that have enacted these reforms. However, studies have shown no clear link.

Here’s a closer look at the facts.

TRUMP: “Crime in American Cities started to significantly rise when they went to CASHLESS BAIL. The WORST criminals are flooding our streets and endangering even our great law enforcement officers. It is a complete disaster, and must be ended, IMMEDIATELY!”

THE FACTS: Data has not determined the impact of cashless bail on crime rates. But experts say it is incorrect to claim that there is an adverse connection.

“I don’t know of any valid studies corroborating the President’s claim and would love to know what the Administration offers in support,” said Kellen Funk, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies pretrial procedure and bail bonding. “In my professional judgment I’d call the claim demonstrably false and inflammatory.”

Jeff Clayton, executive director of the American Bail Coalition, the main lobbying arm of the cash bail industry, also pointed to a lack of evidence.

“Studies are inconclusive in terms of whether bail reforms have had an impact on overall crime numbers,” he said. “This is due to pretrial crime being a small subset of overall crime. It is also difficult to categorize reforms as being ‘cashless’ or not, i.e., policies where preventative detention is introduced as an alternative to being held on bail.”

Different jurisdictions, different laws

In 2023, Illinois became the first state to completely eliminate cash bail when the state Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law abolishing it. The move was part of an expansive criminal justice overhaul adopted in 2021 known as the SAFE-T Act. Under the change, a judge decides whether to release the defendant prior to their trial, weighing factors such as their criminal charges, if they could pose any danger to others and if they are considered a flight risk.

Loyola University of Chicago’s Center for Criminal Justice published a 2024 report on Illinois’ new cashless bail policy, one year after it went into effect. It acknowledges that there is not yet enough data to know what impact the law has had on crime, but that crime in Illinois did not increase after its implementation. Violent and property crime declined in some counties.

A number of other jurisdictions, including New Jersey, New Mexico and Washington, D.C., have nearly eliminated cash bail or limited its use. Many include exceptions for high-level crimes.

Proponents of eliminating cash bail describe it as a penalty on poverty, suggesting that the wealthy can pay their way out of jail to await trial while those with fewer financial resources have to sit it out behind bars. Critics have argued that bail is a time-honored way to ensure defendants released from jail show up for court proceedings. They warn that violent criminals will be released pending trial, giving them license to commit other crimes.

A lack of consensus

Studies have shown mixed results regarding the impact of cashless bail on crime. Many focus on the recidivism of individual defendants rather than overall crime rates.

A 2024 report published by the Brennan Center for Justice saw “no statistically significant relationship” between bail reform and crime rates. It looked at crime rate data from 2015 through 2021 for 33 cities across the U.S., 22 of which had instituted some type of bail reform. Researchers used a statistical method to determine if crime rates had diverged in those with reforms and those without.

Ames Grawert, the report’s co-author and senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, said this conclusion “holds true for trends in crime overall or specifically violent crime.”

Similarly, a 2023 paper published in the American Economic Journal found no evidence that cash bail helps ensure defendants will show up in court or prevents crime among those who are released while awaiting trial. The paper evaluated the impact of a 2018 policy instituted by the Philadelphia’s district attorney that instructed prosecutors not to set bail for certain offenses.

A 2019 court decree in Harris County, Texas, requires most people charged with a misdemeanor to be released without bail while awaiting trial. The latest report from the monitoring team responsible for tracking the impact of this decision, released in 2024, notes that the number of people arrested for misdemeanors has declined by more than 15% since 2015. The number of those rearrested within one year has similarly declined, with rearrest rates remaining stable in recent years.

Asked what data Trump was using to support his claim, the White House pointed to a 2022 report from the district attorney’s office in Yolo County, California, that looked at how a temporary cashless bail system implemented across the state to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks in courts and jails impacted recidivism. It found that out of 595 individuals released between April 2020 and May 2021 under this system, 70.6% were arrested again after they were released. A little more than half were rearrested more than once.

A more recent paper, published in February by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, also explored the effects of California’s decision to suspend most bail during the COVID-19 pandemic. It reports that implementation of this policy “caused notable increases in both the likelihood and number of rearrests within 30 days.” However, a return to cash bail did not impact the number of rearrests for any type of offense. The paper acknowledges that other factors, such as societal disruption from the pandemic, could have contributed to the initial increase.

Many contributing factors

It is difficult to pinpoint specific explanations for why crime rises and falls.

The American Bail Coalition’s Clayton noted that other policies that have had a negative impact on crime, implemented concurrently with bail reforms, make it “difficult to isolate or elevate one or more causes over the others.”

Paul Heaton, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies criminal justice interventions, had a similar outlook.

“Certainly there are some policy levers that people look at — the size of the police force and certain policies around sentencing,” he said. “But there’s a lot of variation in crime that I think even criminologists don’t necessarily fully understand.”

Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.