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Walking a tightrope

Reopening tourism must feel like walking a tightrope to state and county leaders. Their bid to restart Hawaii’s economic engine balances on the health of its residents and visitors. The void the governor and mayors find themselves inching across is home to all sorts of challenges and potential negative outcomes, including COVID-19 surges, overfilled hospitals and freezer truck morgues. They may be leading the way, but we’re all in on the balancing act. Last weekend a small vehicle demonstration held at Kahului Airport called for stricter virus prevention measures for air ...

Depressingly predictable

One of the more distressing parts of the COVID-19 pandemic, besides the obvious toll on lives and health, is how easy to predict the whole mess was at the very beginning. Sure, we might not have understood the instant that cases appeared in the United States. But fairly soon afterward it became clear that this was an infectious virus that needed to be handled with extreme care. It also was clear that it spread when people came together in close quarters for extended periods of time, and that large numbers of folks could become infected quickly. But here in Kansas, many of us, ...

Courts have been packed

Former Vice President Joe Biden is asked, over and over, whether he will pack the U.S. Supreme Court if he is elected president. The better question is why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has been allowed to spend the last six years packing the lower courts. With Republicans feeling no shame about the hypocrisy of filling a Supreme Court vacancy at warp speed in the middle of an election after righteously blocking even a vote on former President Barack Obama’s nominee for almost a year, fuming Democrats said they might increase the number of Supreme Court justices ...

Tourism gates have reopened

Ready or not, here they are. As Hawaii’s economic engine sputters back to life, we are once again welcoming visitors to our beaches, businesses and roadways. Maui’s October arrival numbers are a small fraction of pre-COVID-19 totals, but screening lines at Kahului Airport confirm that even during a global pandemic there is demand to vacation here. Over the decades, Maui’s reputation as a world-class travel destination has helped it attract world-class travelers. These are not only people willing to pay extra for outstanding service and quality, but also guests who embrace ...

Challenging Big Tech

The internet has been a powerful source of innovation and opportunity in the half-century since the first electronic message was sent between experimental nodes at UCLA and Stanford. And in some industries, it remains a great equalizer — giving upstart creators and service providers the sort of access that used to be the exclusive province of big corporations. That’s why policymakers in the United States have been loath to intervene online, worried that any rules they set would be counterproductive or quickly rendered obsolete by the rapid pace of change. “Don’t regulate the ...

Reduce the risk of breast cancer

This is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Maintaining that focus is important since breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide, regardless of race, contributing more than 25 percent of new cancer cases. Although more women are surviving, breast cancer has been on the rise for several years, and there’s no simple answer as to why. Breast cancer is a complicated disease with a variety of different causes, and many aspects of our lives swing our risk in one direction or another. While some of these are out of our hands, others can be controlled, which is why eating ...