442nd would wear masks

April 3, 2021

Charging straight into enemy fire, Private First Class Sadao “Spud” Munemori had just knocked out a pair of gun emplacements with grenades and was withdrawing under withering fire when an enemy grenade bounced off his helmet and rolled toward a bomb crater where two of his comrades sheltered. In one final heroic act, Munemori dove on top of the grenade to smother its blast and save the lives of his fellow soldiers. Monday marks the 76th anniversary of that World War II battle in the mountains above Seravezza, Italy. A Nisei, or second-generation Japanese American, Munemori was part ...

Trans girls not a threat

April 2, 2021

Judging from the news coming out of half the legislative halls of America, you would think that the biggest problem facing women’s sports hasn’t been athletes being sexually abused but girls who were born with penises taking all the glory from those born with vaginas. Out of all the things that give one student-athlete an advantage over another — more athleticism, better equipment, talented older siblings, more money for private training — these legislatures are focused on only one: whether transgender girls and women are unfairly beating other females in various school ...

GOP men, get the shot

March 30, 2021

According to a recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll, 49 percent of GOP men said they are not planning to get vaccinated. That number, higher than any other demographic, is in contrast to only 6 percent of Democratic men saying no. The vaccine naysayers apparently are unmoved by the fact that they’re not only risking their own health, but also the health of family, friends and the broader community. If Republican men have dismissed Dr. Anthony Fauci, maybe they will listen to Houston’s local, plainspoken and trusted vaccine scientist, Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine. Both ...

Traffic tells a tourist tale

March 27, 2021

Ask a local resident how long a Maui drive is and you’ll likely get your answer in minutes, not miles. The question requires them to consider not just distance, but also time of day and corresponding traffic. Will this trip be late on a Friday afternoon after 10 Mainland flights have arrived? Is it a pleasure drive with many stops or a fast run? How about before, during or after a global pandemic? We may have no idea what the route numbers of our highways are, but once the parameters are set, we can tell you within a handful of minutes how long it will take to drive from point A to ...

Violence not inevitable

March 26, 2021

The grocery store shooting that killed 10 people in Boulder Monday has driven home what we’ve long suspected: Today America is a country where every resident must be prepared at all times for a deadly assault. Americans once enjoyed domestic peace. The Columbine High School massacre in 1999 was an anomaly of such historic proportions that the entire world watched in horror. Too much evil has occurred since then, and Colorado has received more than its share of senseless violence. On Monday when shoppers heard gunfire in the King Soopers in Boulder, it was as though the inevitable ...

Politics don’t help at border

March 23, 2021

As politicians hurl blame and lies about the unrelenting surge of migrants, the Biden administration is engaged in an unprecedented effort to transform a broken immigration system. The U.S. Border Patrol apprehended nearly 100,000 refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border in February, the 10th consecutive month of increased apprehensions and a return to levels last seen in mid-2019. During a hostile grilling in a House committee hearing Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas predicted the southwest border was on pace to see more refugees than in the past 20 ...