World
As flames swallowed Maui, survivors made harrowing escapes
An immigrant cook building a new life. A widow preparing to say goodbye. And a couple taking their vows.
All were caught in the crossfire, forced to flee as flames swallowed parts of Maui, that drop in the Pacific where roads wind past waterfalls, turtles glide through gem-blue waters and a volcano towers overhead.
These are the stories of the survivors:
___
By the time Marlon Vasquez heard the alarms, there was only time to run.
The 31-year-old cook shouted for his brother and opened the door of their Lahaina rental home to thick smoke and intense heat.
“The fire was almost on top of us,” he said.
The two sprinted. And, running on for what felt like an eternity, a hellscape unfurled. Day turned to night as smoke blotted out the sun, occasionally bared as a red orb. Roads clogged with cars. People dove into the Pacific. At one point, the flames chased him as strong winds blew them down a mountainside. The air was so black he vomited.
“We ran and ran. We ran almost the whole night and into the next day because the fire didn’t stop,” Vasquez said.
The brothers kept running down the coast until they came upon a motorist who drove them to a shelter where they joined about 200 others in a gymnasium.
The restaurant Vasquez worked at was destroyed. He only managed to grab his passport, wallet, a few bottles of water and a can of sardines.
He arrived in the U.S. from Guatemala at the start of 2022. Now, his car and everything he worked for has been torched.
He isn’t sure if the roommates he and his brother lived with made it out. He wonders about the people they passed who were unable to run as they did. He doesn’t know where they will go next. They will look for work in whatever state or country that has jobs for them.
There seemed to be only one certainty for Vasquez.
“We’ll keep struggling,” he said.
___
Tracey Graham was due to spend her last week on Maui snorkeling with sea turtles, dining with friends, and reminiscing about the eight years she called the “beautiful, wonderful piece of paradise” home.
Instead, she fled the fires, is sleeping in a shelter and wondering what became of the places she loved.
“It’s scary,” says 61-year-old Graham. “It’s devastating — that’s the only word I keep coming back to.”
Graham, who was staying with a friend north of Lahaina, was about to take an afternoon nap Tuesday when she noticed the smell. She went outside, saw flames and smoke, and heard popping noises.
She fled with friends, grabbing her passport, her journal and a framed photo with a button that played a recording of her husband, Cole Wright, telling her how much he loved her.
He died of prostate cancer four months ago.
Authorities kept directing her and her friends to different points. Once she made it to the shelter set up at the Maui War Memorial, rumors of the devastation raged, with many unsure whether their homes and loved ones were safe. She hasn’t been able to reach one of her close friends.
“It’s disorienting,” she says. “You just don’t know what’s what.”
Graham is departing Saturday to start a new life in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Her plan was already made after her husband’s death, but the tragedy of the wildfires cemented the need to leave.
“It’s just been too sad,” she says.
___
It wasn’t exactly how Cindy and Bob Curler envisioned their wedding night.
Unable to get back to their Lahaina hotel Tuesday as wildfires swallowed the town, their driver was forced to take them to the garage where he parks his limousine. The newlyweds shared a couch for the night, her in her strapless lace gown, him in his crisp blue suit.
Just hours earlier, the Pittsburgh couple had strolled Lahaina’s streets, passing the 150-year-old banyan tree and popping in quaint shops.
There were hiccups as they prepared for their ceremony, but nothing that alarmed them. The power had been knocked out at Lahaina Shores Beach Resort, where they were staying, and they could see flames in the mountains. Winds were “hellacious,” 46-year-old Bob said, but flames did not appear close.
The two heard no warnings, so they pressed forward with their elopement plans, driving south to a beach just past Wailea, where they exchanged vows under perfect blue skies. There was still no word of disaster, so they celebrated with a dinner at a nearby resort.
“We didn’t know that the town was burning,” Bob said.
Their driver tried to get them back to Lahaina, but roads were choked with traffic. Inching along, seeing fire spreading by the highway, they changed course, heading for the garage at 2 a.m.
It wasn’t until morning that they saw photos of Lahaina’s destruction and realized they were blessed to have escaped. Their hotel appears to have been spared the worst, but they haven’t been able to return. They know it’s nothing compared to the losses others are suffering.
“Yes it was our wedding day and night but that’s only one night for us,” Cindy said. “These people are impacted for the rest of their lives”
___
Associated Press writers Andrew Selsky in Bend, Oregon, and Beatrice Dupuy in New York contributed to this report.

World
In Augustinian Order, Pope Leo XIV Found Unity, Charity and ‘Eternal Friendship’

The cellphone of the leader of the Order of St. Augustine, the Rev. Alejandro Moral Antón, buzzed for what seemed like the hundredth time, and he jumped. He had been up since 2:30 a.m. fielding calls, trying to explain to people across the globe how his order, the one that formed Pope Leo XIV, would shape the papacy.
This time, it was his dentist. He had missed an appointment.
“You know what’s happening?” he told the dentist on Monday afternoon in Rome. “The new pope is an Augustinian!”
The world’s sudden interest in the small order of fewer than 3,000 members had forced Father Moral Antón, an affable, 69-year-old Spaniard, to distill Augustinians’ principles and spiritual ideals to their essence. Charity, truth and unity, he recited in Latin and translated into Spanish.
Pope Leo, formerly Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, is an American with Peruvian citizenship, but his identity may have been most deeply molded by his connection to the Augustinians, which began when he was 14 and led to his ordination in 1982 as an Augustinian priest. He moved to Peru as an Augustinian missionary and eventually ran the order for 12 years from Rome. In that position, he developed extensive international connections that helped raise his profile last week in the conclave of cardinals who elected him.
As the first Augustinian friar to become pope, Leo is expected by Augustinians to emphasize missionary outreach and the importance of listening widely before making decisions, both central to the Augustinian way of life.
“The Holy Father will certainly be inspired by this search for communion and dialogue,” said Pierantonio Piatti, a historian of Augustinians with the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, a Vatican office. That would mesh with the concept of “synodality,” fulfilling Francis’ vision of a church that brings bishops and lay people together to make big decisions.
“The other great element of Augustinian spirituality,” Dr. Piatti added, is a “search for balance between action and contemplation, between contemplation and action.”
In part because of their small size, Augustinian priests are a tight-knit community around the world, and many have encountered Leo over the years.
“Even when we disagree on something like politics, we have no trouble talking to one another,” said Father Allan Fitzgerald, 84, an Augustinian priest and longtime professor at Villanova University northwest of Philadelphia, which Leo graduated from in 1977. “I think we are, in some ways, an image of the U.S. There is certainly a whole swath of us that is to one side and to the other. Even if we can’t talk directly about politics, we are still able to talk about things that matter.”
The order was founded in 1244, when Pope Innocent IV united groups of hermits in service to the church as a community of friars. The group committed to a lifestyle of poverty, along with a mix of contemplation and pastoral service.
Augustinians take their name from one of Christianity’s most important early theologians, Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, who was born in what is now Algeria in the fourth century. He is perhaps most famous for an autobiographical work called “Confessions,” which in part details his conversion to Christianity after an immoral youth.
The order’s place in the broader Roman Catholic Church was threatened by one of its most prominent 16th-century members, Martin Luther, whose calls for reform in the church ended up leading to the Protestant Reformation.
Augustine also wrote a guide to religious life that became the cornerstone of the Augustinian order. Its members commit to “live together in harmony, being of one mind and one heart on the way to God.” Leo’s new coat of arms reflects that heritage, displaying the Latin motto “In illo uno unum,” or “In the One, we are one.”
Augustinians are generally far less known compared with larger groups like the Jesuits and Franciscans. Part of that has to do with the personality and style of the orders, Father Fitzgerald said.
“If you are a Jesuit, you are very good at telling people who you are,” he said. “Augustinians are not great at telling people who we are. I think it is unusual for us to be self-promoting.”
In the years after he became head, or prior general, of the order in 2001, Leo tried to share on a global stage the ideas and practices for missionary outreach that he had developed in Peru.
He outlined his theological underpinnings in a speech in Rome in 2023. Mission is a means of carrying out the church’s fundamental duty of evangelization, he said. Without this perspective, charity work by the church becomes little more than “humanitarian action,” which, while important, will not be distinctively Christian.
“On the contrary, when we help each other to constantly remind ourselves that our primary mission is evangelization, it does not matter whether our resources are small or large because the fundamental thing is already given,” he said.
“To evangelize means, among other things, to be willing to leave the comfort zones, the comfortable bourgeois life,” he said, in an apparent nod to his life-changing decision to leave his life in the United States for a missionary posting in northwestern Peru in 1985. That background appears to have figured in the cardinals’ deliberations during the conclave, since missionary outreach was a key element of Francis’ vision.
Leo once told the Italian broadcaster RAI that he had met “my religious family, the Augustinians,” as a teenager, prompting his decision to leave Chicago for an Augustinian junior-seminary boarding school in Michigan. There, he said, he got to learn about “the importance of friendship, the importance of life in community.”
“I believe it is very important to promote communion in the church,” Leo explained in 2023 to Vatican News. “As an Augustinian, for me promoting unity and communion is fundamental.”
On Saturday, Leo made an unannounced visit to Our Lady of Good Counsel in Genazzano, an Augustinian sanctuary outside Rome. On Monday, he invoked St. Augustine in remarks to journalists gathered in Vatican City, saying that the present times were challenging, difficult to navigate and not easy to recount to the public.
“They demand that each one of us, in our different roles and services, never give in to mediocrity,” he said. “St. Augustine reminds of this when he said: ‘Let us live well and the times will be good. We are the times.’”
He cited one of the saint’s sermons that alluded to how people can choose to make the most of tough circumstances, Father Moral Antón said: “We are the ones who have to live a good life to change the times.”
“We need to stop and reflect,” he added. “Because we live well, we eat well, we have pleasures, but are you happy? And people say, ‘I’m not happy.’ Let’s look, then, at where happiness lies — within — and then change.”
Father Moral Antón, who missed his dental appointment on Monday, was sitting in a small room in the Augustinian College of St. Monica, on a hillside across the street from St. Peter’s Basilica, where the new pope has played tennis for years on a court with a view of the iconic dome. Father Moral Antón and Leo, who are the same age, studied together in the college decades ago; the father was Leo’s deputy when he ran the order and succeeded him in the top job.
In the days since Leo became pope, Augustinian friars have shared stories of meeting him during his past travels. One vicar in Kenya sent Father Moral Antón photos of a trip he and Leo took to the African country many years ago.
“Being an Augustinian means being pretty open,” Father Moral Antón said, adding that, compared to other orders, theirs does not have “very rigid norms.”
“It’s about eternal friendship, friends, wanting to walk with friends and find truth with friends,” he said. “Wanting to live in the world, to live life — but with friends, with people who love you, with whom you love.”
“It is not always something you find,” he added, “but, well, that’s the ideal.”
Emma Bubola, Elizabeth Dias and Jason Horowitz contributed reporting.
World
In Pictures: From Chicago priest to new pope, the historic rise of Leo XIV

Published
World
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,174

These are the key events on day 1,174 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Here is where things stand on Tuesday, May 13:
Ceasefire
- Moscow has yet to say whether Russian leader Vladimir Putin will attend direct talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy slated for Thursday in Istanbul and proposed by Kyiv over the weekend. The leaders have not met since December 2019.
- United States President Donald Trump said he is “thinking about flying over” to Istanbul to join the potential Putin-Zelenskyy talks.
- “I don’t know where I’m going to be on Thursday – I’ve got so many meetings – but I was thinking about actually flying over there. There’s a possibility of it, I guess, if I think things can happen,” Trump said. “Don’t underestimate Thursday in Turkey.”
- US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he held a joint call with Ukrainian and European officials to discuss a “way forward for a ceasefire” on Monday.
- Europe will reportedly push the White House for new sanctions on Moscow if Putin either fails to attend the Istanbul meeting, or fails to agree to an “immediate and unconditional ceasefire”, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
- Germany said it is also preparing sanctions against Moscow if the talks stall.
Fighting
- Ukraine says that Russia is “completely ignoring” calls for a 30-day ceasefire made over the weekend by the US and Europe. It was due to begin on Monday.
- “Russian shelling and assaults continue,” Zelenskyy said in a nightly address. “Moscow has remained silent all day regarding the proposal for a direct meeting. A very strange silence.”
- Ukraine’s military said that there had been 133 clashes with Russian forces along the front lines up to Monday night.
- The heaviest fighting continues in the Donetsk region on Ukraine’s eastern front and Russia’s western Kursk region. Ukraine’s military said the intensity remains unchanged since the ceasefire was supposed to begin.
- Moscow called the 30-day ceasefire an excuse by Europe to “provide a breather for Kyiv to restore its military potential and continue its confrontation with Russia”.
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