A promising plan, aimed at doubling the area of protected watershed over the next 10 years, has been launched by Gov. Abercrombie and state water officials.
“What’s all the commotion over here?” said a grumbling Hawaii Circuit Court employee to a bailiff directing cameramen toward the end of the hallway. “Oh, that State Department guy,” said the bailiff, also oozing Monday morning morose and getting his work week started with the relative circus that accompanied a preliminary arraignment for 27-year-old Christopher Deedy, a special agent with the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
Pacific Biodiesel (PB), a Hawaii company founded in 1996, by Bob and Kelly King, is one of seven recipients nationwide of the Green Jobs Award for 2011. The Kahului/ Honolulu enterprise operated the first retail biodiesel pump in America, and now produces and sells approximately one million gallons annually in Hawaii.
“Nice house,” said Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to Punahou president James Scott during a Nov. 11 APEC dinner.
APEC meetings in other countries (even othercities) have resulted in protesters turning out by the thousands. “Vietnam hosted APEC in 2006,” said Trinity Pham, who came to Honolulu’s APEC week from California along with many other Vietnamese Americans.
In a nutshell, it wasn’t too crazy, at least not compared to what my fellow employees [at the hotel] and I were dreading. Interaction between Australians and New Zealanders was mostly nonexistent, other than that, I exchanged smiles with the Australian Prime Minister during a brief press conference.
The State Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs (DCCA) recently fined rail car seller Ansaldo for doing business as a contractor without having acquired a contractor’s license. The DCCA set the fine arbitrarily at $150,000.
As many as 50 people from the Occupy Honolulu (OH) movement congregated at Thomas Square, the site of OH’s proposed encampment, on Saturday night, Nov. 5.
In 1972, when Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai welcomed President Richard Nixon at Beijing airport, the American extended his hand first, deliberately overriding protocol to get the historic visit off to a spontaneously amicable start. On Friday, at an event they characterize as “un-APEC,” Zhou’s great-niece Xiao Fang Zhou and her husband, Michael North, will announce the launching of the non-profit Zhou Enlai Peace Institute, based in Beijing with a mission that includes awarding annual peace fellowships to Chinese and non-Chinese individuals.
Billboards promoting special economic interests were outlawed on the island of Oahu in 1927, and it is illegal to post signage promoting political agendas on public property. Nonetheless, the UH administration saw it fit to erect a 4 x 16-foot billboard announcing “E KOMO MAI–WELCOME, APEC” on the corner of University and Dole–the gateway to the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperative (APEC) conference is just a week away. But what do leaders of 21 “member economies” in the Pacific region and CEO’s from all over the world plan to accomplish at the summit?
A close look at the Occupy Honolulu (OH) web forum alludes to the group gaining momentum. According to information obtained in the minutes before one of OH’s General Assemblies–where activists meet to voice their opinions and decisions are made using a completely democratic (albeit, lengthy) consensus system–a representative from World Can’t Wait has encouraged OH to take advantage of their permit site surrounding the APEC conference.
Can’t the bus benches be used for bus riders?” asks 77-year-old Ruth Freedman, a retired RN and Honolulu resident who rides the bus as her sole means of transportation. “Some individuals have really taken over the bus benches,” she adds.
Last fall, Kona coffee farmer Paul Uster came across Safeway Select “Kona Blend” on the shelves of a Safeway store in California. Although the front of the Safeway-brand coffee packaging claimed to be a Kona-coffee blend, the back read “100 [percent] Arabica coffee.” When several appeals to Safeway and even to the Hawaii Department of Agriculture (HDOA) chair Russell Kokubun proved fruitless, the Kona Coffee Farmers Association (KCFA) took matters into their own hands, calling for a boycott of Safeway’s 1,700 stores nationwide in July.
In a crowded room downtown, the state Land Use Commission (LUC) resumed hearings on Thursday, Oct. 20 to decide the fate of 1,500 acres of Oahu’s most fertile farmland–the long debated site of the proposed Hoopili development, a 12,000 home “master planned” community.
Occupy Honolulu (OH), has some organizing to do if they want to continue sharing the limelight of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) spinoffs in Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco and Seattle. During a public potluck event held Saturday from 12-4pm at Magic Island, OH followers attempted to boost public support by encouraging passersby to join in; enticing them with food, drinks and a message: The richest one percent of the population writes the rules of an unjust global economy and the other 99 percent of us aren’t going to take it anymore.
When the Weekly heard that the Occupy Honolulu chapter spent four hours deciding that they would use “jazz hands” as a way of clapping to avoid public disturbance, we decided to experience it for ourselves. “Over here,” says a participant from NYC’s Occupy Wall Street, “we call them twinkle fingers.” Hmm.
Don’t bother changing your bait, if you’re not getting any nibbles in Moanalua Bay. The problem, according to researchers who presented their findings at a recent science symposium, hosted by Malama Maunalua (MM) and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administation (NOAA), say there just aren’t enough fish available.
Last month, on Sept. 21, the Hawaii State Public Library’s eBooks, digital audiobooks and online music collection, which includes nearly 50,000 titles, was made accessible to all Kindle users.
Since all of the reports prepared for the city’s Honolulu Rail Transit Project have acknowledged the high probability of encountering burials in Urban Honolulu, also known as Phase 4, there has been controversy over how to proceed. The city began its Archaeological Inventory Survey (AIS) work this month and will continue through Summer 2012 at locations along the Phase 4 rail route from Kalihi to Ala Moana Center.
On Friday, Oct. 7, councilmember Elle Cochran introduced a resolution during the Maui County City Council meeting that seeks to include a revamped genetically modified organism (GMO) labeling bill.
We are conscious every day of getting by with more than a little help from our friends, since the Weekly was rescued last month thanks to reader contributions that helped pay off a printing debt to the Star-Advertiser’s owner. Two recent events, hosted by small local businesses on the Weekly’s behalf, gave yet more cause for celebration: At Diamond Head Cove “Health Bar”, owner Ann Marcos and producer Leni Knight threw an ‘awa-some party with musicians Imua Garza, John Cruz, Randy Allen, Brian Sanchez, Seann Caroll, Alika Kalauli and Lehua Kalima.
The largest beach cleanup in the state reaches from Kahuku to Haleiwa and covers more than 15 miles of roadway, bike path and beach park during the Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii North Shore Beach Cleanup on Saturday, Nov. 19, at 8am.
Alas, despite predictions by the nascent Hawaii Symphony board of an October resurrection, no opening date for the next season has been set. A town-hall type meeting is projected this month, at which time more definitive word is to be handed down.
A new study led by John N. Kittinger, a graduate fellow in the Dept.
There’s a swell on the horizon. Listen closely and you’ll hear it…AUDIO INVASION 2012.
It’s been a while, but a man donning dresses and surgical gowns, spouting rap-rock assaults over a bed of crunchy guitars, has drifted back into the sunbeam of MTV like a forgotten fleck of light. With the spastic delivery of a fallen patient from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Matt Shultz, lead singer of Cage The Elephant, is channeling the preeminent poster-child of grunge–Kurt Cobain.
Boys, beaches, bags of weed. In 2010, Best Coast blazed onto the music scene with a sealed Zip-lock of 7” singles that led the indie pop duo to roll out a fatty debut record called Crazy For You.
So what do you do if you’re a band who made it big in the L.A. hardcore-punk scene with several critically acclaimed self-titled albums under your belt?
Last Thursday, Foster the People sent news through their publicist that they won’t be performing at Audio Invasion 2012 due to “unforeseen circumstances.” (They’ll return to Hawaii on March 18.) Rumors are their two Grammy noms for Best Alternative Album and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance led to their cancellation. What a let down.
On Jan. 26, members of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) Finance Committee mostly sat in silence while listening to an earful from Wynnie Joy-Hee of Mililani, who said that she had taken the bus all the way into town at 7am to address the issue of how her tax money is being spent.
HART intends to hire an executive director as early as March 1, 2012. The semi-autonomous agency is currently headed by interim executive director Toru Hamayasu, who is also a candidate for the permanent position The ED’s salary has been estimated to be within the range of $150,000 to $350,000, and HART has allotted $300,000 for the position thus far, Vice Chair Ivan Lui Kwan told the City Council Committee on Transportation on Jan.
Poor communication between the union and the teachers themselves, on top of a general sense of mistrust, were blamed for the overwhelming rejection of the Hawaii State Teacher’s Association (HSTA) contract last week–an unprecedented two-thirds voted against the union-backed contract. The president of the teachers’ union, Will Okabe, quickly took the blame, stating in a Jan.
The “war on terror” has taken a bite out of beach access on Kauai, where the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) has kept five miles of westside shoreline off-limits since Sept. 11, 2001.
A bill that would require bags of roasted coffee sold in Hawaii to list the place where each type of coffee it contains was grown, and its percentage by weight in descending order, was introduced to the state legislature by Sen. Josh Green.
In September of 2011, the Weekly ran a piece highlighting one of Hawaii’s most dangerous invasive threats: the dreaded brown tree snake. Following up on Gov.
HART Board: The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit will meet and take public testimony before convening an executive session. For more info, contact the project hotline at 566-2299 or e-mail [email: info].
[Jan. 18: “Cheap Advice”] Robert Kiyosaki did not talk, or attend.
[Dec. 21: “Underground Railroad”] The anti-rail pundits are right of course.
I propose that President Obama devote the remainder of his presidency to doing something useful, which would be to seek out all the crooks on Wall Street and Washington who have contributed to the sorry state of the economy in this country. Obviously he has not lived up to the expectations of a president and continues to perform as if Saul Alinksy was a member of his cabinet and the United Nations was his political platform.
[Dec. 21: “Underground Railroad”] Traffic follows commercial development.
[Dec. 21: “Underground Railroad”] To all those opposed to the “rail.” You are the very people who will be in gridlock on the freeway, not able to move.
I was delighted to read the new USDA guidelines requiring schools to serve meals with twice as many fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, less sodium and fat and no meat for breakfast. The guidelines were mandated by the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act signed by President Obama in December of 2010 and will go into effect within the next school year.
[Jan. 25: “Kyo-Ya-Ya”] Making an exception on zoning sets a dangerous precedence that will undoubtedly be followed by other properties.
The protests last year of Turtle Bay’s expansion plans highlight the challenge facing us in Hawaii. We need to find a way to balance the need for new, upgraded hotel and timeshare offerings that visitors are increasingly seeking with the desire by nearly all residents to protect the remaining undeveloped areas of the island.
[Jan. 25: “Gridlock”] If the plan is to create a second city in West Oahu, I would consider that to be an urban center.
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