We’re introducing a new nightlife columnist this week, though her byline will be familiar to many of you. Christa Wittmier, known to her thousands of online readers, followers and fans as “Super CW,” will be writing on the entertainment and nightlife scene in Social Lite, in the space formerly known as Nightshift.
At some point in the next 36 hours, a final effort will be made in the Hawaii Senate to bring House Bill 444, the civil unions bill, to a vote. The move will likely come either in the form of a motion by Sen.
Regular readers may recall with some sadness the recent arson that destroyed the hale at Hoa ‘Aina O Makaha, the Waianae organic farm and community center which serves students and visitors from the area and from around the island every day. Sadly, March’s blaze was not only not the first for the hard-scrabble organization—it was the third such incident in as many years.
No one ever accused a newspaper of being above self-promotion—just look at the New York Times coverage of its five Pulitzer Prize awards this week—and Honolulu Weekly is game, especially when it’s for a good cause. If you’re reading this on Wednesday, we really hope you’ll come down to Fort Street Mall and check out the Honolulu Weekly Green Market.
This week we offer our Sustainability Guide, Honolulu Weekly’s annual look at people, organizations and institutions working to make our community more, well, sustainable. In the past, that’s often meant a focus on environmentalism specifically, but as we all come to understand just how untenable, across the board, our society has become, we’re trying to take a little bit of a broader view.
Against long odds, it appears the civil unions fight will go at least one more round. The Honolulu Advertiser reported this week that senators are considering an amendment put forward by gay rights advocates to remove the word “marriage” from House Bill 444 and offer civil unions—with the same rights and responsibilities as marriage—to all consenting adults regardless of how many people of which gender a couple consists of.
Guessing at the outcome of U.S. Supreme Court cases is a fool’s errand.
On Monday, a group of interfaith clergy and lay leaders gathered at the foot the Capitol’s Queen Liliuokalani statue to make their case for the equality of same-sex partnerships. Rabbi Peter Schaktman of Temple Emanu-El was first to speak.
Good to see Local 5’s Eric Gill taking a stand on civil unions this week. The treasurer of Hawaii’s powerful hotel and restaurant workers union led a group of community leaders in calling for the Senate to pass HB 444.
The pono police are at it again, and this time they’ve got badges. “We cannot let such distortions go unchecked,” Lt.
Here we are again, Hawaii, arguing once more over who gets to love whom. One of the women profiled in our cover story this week, UH-Manoa American studies professor Kathleen Sands, has more patience for this stuff than I do, which is really something when you consider that she is one of the thousands of Hawaii residents whose right to equal protection under the law has lately been compared to some of the most vile stuff imaginable.
Editor's Notes / It wasn’t a surprise, but then again it’s always a surprise, isn’t it? No matter how many three-dot items or nostalgic columns you read over the past couple of years, if you had a television in Hawaii during the 1970s and ’80s, the news that Bob Sevey died over the weekend had to jolt you a little.
Like many of us, I’ve been fooling around with social networking sites for a while now. Somehow, though, I never really got the whole Web 2.0 thing.
Given the city’s crumbling infrastructure and rail controversy, it’s hard to believe anyone would want to be the next mayor of Honolulu. But a few do want the job, including the incumbent, Mayor Peter Carlisle, the former Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney who won a 2010 special election to fill the remainder of Mufi Hannemann’s term.
I’d never been to a Honolulu City Council meeting until a few weeks ago. Features, not politics, was my beat.
Victoria Holt Takamine is a kumu hula, a cultural activist and a teacher and has an impeccable pedigree to back up all these titles. Born of an alii family whose kuleana was in Moanalua, she graduated as a hula teacher under the legendary Auntie Maiki Aiu Lake and taught hundreds of students in her own halau (Pua Alii ‘Ilima) and at the University of Hawaii.
On April 25, a state judge dismissed trespassing charges against a Kauai man after finding that he had been exercising traditional native Hawaiian rights hunting wild pigs on private land. Kui Palama, 28, was arrested on Jan.
The city plans to dish out $3.5 million from its Affordable Housing Fund and either purchase or renovate a structure to provide transitional housing for Honolulu’s special needs homeless population. “Our community has invested considerable effort and resources in addressing homelessness,” Mayor Peter Carlisle said in a statement, “but there remains a population whose disabilities or chronic conditions make it difficult for them to participate in traditional shelter programs.” Carlisle is referring to those homeless with mental illnesses, addictions and physical disabilities.
Makaweli Poi faces an uncertain future after its owner, a corporate subsidiary of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) ordered the West Kauai mill to suspend operations May 23. Mona Bernardino, chief operating officer of the corporation, Hiipoi LLC, says the move to shut down Makaweli Poi was prompted mainly by financial concerns.
A resolution adopted by the City Council will solidify an agreement between the City and County of Honolulu and the University of Hawaii Water Resources Research Center (UH-WRRC) to conduct an analysis of impacts from ocean sewer outfalls on the marine environments off of Oahu. The city will pay UH-WRRC as much as $2.5 million for biological and sediment studies in portions between now and June 30, 2017 .
Along with the deep, verdant growth of spring sprouts an unyielding desire to spend more time in the open air. That’s why it should come as no surprise that National Bike Month falls in the sun-drenched time of May.
Of the many letters you publish against rail, how many offer an alternative that won’t send us into further economic demise? Billions of gallons of oil are imported for us from every oil-producing nation on this planet so that we can buy billions of gallons of gasoline.
TheBus is taking a back seat to rail. At the May 3 Downtown Neighborhood Board meeting, an audience member asked city Transportation Director Wayne Yoshioka when we could expect the bus route cancellations and changes to be reversed.
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