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Daily Smile

[{"type":"text","text":"The Three Stooges..."}]

Smile 26 3 5

<title>Daily Smile: Thursday, March 5, 2026</title>

The Three Stooges...

Daily Smile: Thursday, March 5, 2026

[{"type":"text","text":"This ain't gonna fly....."}]

Smile 26 7 17

<title>Daily Smile: Friday, July 17, 2026</title>

This ain't gonna fly.....

Daily Smile: Friday, July 17, 2026

Square Mike Brestovansky Headshot RGZ3736 Large

Michael Brestovansky

Crime & Courts

A Waialua man was convicted Monday of funneling funds to Iran in defiance of U.S. sanctions.

Between 2016 and 2022, Arash Einolghozati, 37, made dozens of online transfers, sending money and cryptocurrency to people in Iran, without a license from the U.S. Department of the Treasury authorizing him to do so.

The Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations prohibit any person in the U.S. from transporting any goods or services, including funds, to Iran or anyone within Iran. Nonetheless, according to an FBI investigation, Einolghozati conspired with several others to do exactly that.

An FBI investigator reported that Einolghozati immigrated to the U.S. from Iran and became a lawful permanent resident here around April 2016. Since his arrival, Einolghozati resided in part in Hawai‘i.

Einolghozati reportedly communicated via email with two other people — an American and a Canadian citizen — in 2017, discussing the transfer of funds to unspecified people in Iran. In that conversation, Einolghozati reportedly stated he wanted to move up to $90,000 to the country.

Then, in 2017, Einolghozati used the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase to transfer cryptocurrencies valued at about $18,000 to a user the FBI investigator believed was an Iranian citizen.

In 2020, Einolghozati then made 72 separate transactions which transferred about $108,000 in cryptocurrency to another Iranian Coinbase user.

The FBI investigator also noted several other miscellaneous Coinbase transactions Einolghozati made between 2020 and 2021 to various users, including one series of 19 payments totaling nearly $36,000 to one user, who, the investigator believed, transferred the money to different Iranian cryptocurrency exchanges.

An affidavit by the FBI investigator claimed that the FBI interviewed Einolghozati in October of 2024. During the interview, Einolghozati reportedly claimed he never knowingly sent any cryptocurrency to Iranian exchanges; he claimed his transactions were sent to repay a lost bet to one friend, to pay for another friend’s wife’s education, or to make crypto investments, not knowing the end recipients were in Iran.

However, the FBI investigator noted, these claims were contradicted by Einolghozati’s online conversations: one such conversation began with Einolghozati asking (in translated Farsi) “Can I send you dollars in some way and you give it to someone in Iran?”

Einolghozati was charged in 2024 with violating the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations. On July 13, he pled guilty. He faces a maximum possible sentence of 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million, and will be sentenced on Oct. 29.

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Courtfed

<title>Waialua man pleads guilty to violating Iran sanctions</title>

Arash Einolghozati sent thousands of dollars to people in Iran despite longstanding economic sanctions.

Waialua man pleads guilty to violating Iran sanctions

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta Headshot

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta

Food & Dining

Business & Tourism

[{"type":"text","text":"If you’re driving too fast on South King Street, you’ll miss it."}]

 can be found at his red trailer — located on South King Street, between the 76 gas station and McDonald’s — on specific days of the week. He’s been in business for about 10 years serving up Tennessee-style barbecue.

“I learned how to cook from my grandfather in Tennessee,” says business owner Sean Paul Jones. He says he was one of 12 grandkids.

“My grandfather taught me how to cook barbecue,” he says. “Since I was a kid, he taught me how to barbecue and cook. For Tennessee-style (barbecue), we use a little dry rub mixed with the barbecue sauce; that’s what makes it really good.”

Jones, who previously worked as a contractor for the military, knew he wanted to start his own barbecue-centric business. He decided to name his business after his grandpa, Bozie Jones, in honor of the man who taught him how to cook.

Jones moved his red trailer around various locations on Oʻahu before settling on his current spot on South King Street.

“A lot of customers wanted me back (here); they kept asking me to come back,” he says.

Jones’ menu is simple, and comprises rib tips ($18), ribs ($24), brisket ($28), chicken ($17) and combo plates ($30). He says the ribs and brisket are the bestsellers.

[{"type":"text","text":"“Within two to three hours, the brisket sells out,” he says."}]

Jones prepares the meats with kiawe wood. He says it takes about three to four hours for the ribs and rib tips to cook.

All plates come with a side of baked beans and Jones’ housemade barbecue sauce.

“The sauce is my granddaddy’s special that he made in Tennessee,” Jones explains. “It’s a vinegar and mustard-based sauce.”

“It’s been a lot of work, and a lot of relationships have been built,” Jones says. “A lot of people keep coming back for the same barbecue.

“I wanted to bring part of the soul and love from Tennessee to Hawaiʻi, and infuse southern barbecue with Hawaiʻi by using kiawe wood,” he adds. “I didn’t just want to bring Tennessee here, but bring Hawaiʻi and Tennessee together.”

Jones’ trailer is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays to Fridays and Sundays. Earlier this year, he also opened a second location with Maunakea Marketplace in Chinatown; his food stall is open every day except Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The Chinatown location’s menu is mostly the same as the one at the trailer, but it features more daily specials, according to Jones.

Bozie Jones BBQ owner 041626

<title>Where to find Tennessee-style barbecue in Honolulu</title>

Bozie Jones Barbecue — with its signature red trailer on South King Street — has been serving Tennessee-style barbecue for about nearly 10 years. Owner Sean Paul Jones learned how to cook barbecue from his grandfather in Tennessee, and now serves up brisket, barbecue ribs and rib tips.

Where to find Tennessee-style barbecue in Honolulu

, the sister restaurant of Tempura Ichika, is known for its intimate setting and high-quality Japanese sushi.

On July 6, the eatery is launching a new dining experience called Makai omakase. This omakase will only be available on Mondays and Tuesdays; it starts at $90 per person.

The new dining experience is inspired by the express-style omakase concepts popular in cities like Los Angeles, New York, Taiwan and Tokyo. This course is designed for customers who want an elevated sushi experience within a shorter timeframe.

There will be three seatings for the omakase — 5:30, 6:45 and 8 p.m. — which is designed to only take about 75 minutes. The counter seats about five people.

The current menu will stay the same for about a month, as it highlights seasonal ingredients. Our meal started with chutoro, isaki (a white fish) from Nagasaki and hirame (flounder) with shiso and topped with lemon and salt.

Highlights include zuke maguro (tuna), shrimp coated with garlic miso, a small bowl of rice and ikura with sake and soy sauce, salmon nigiri, and Hokkaido scallop with yuzu kosho.

The eatery uses Yamagata rice — a Japanese short-grain rice — that’s seasoned with a blend of red and white vinegar, according to head sushi chef Ken Kawakami.

The course concludes with rice topped with Hokkaido uni and wrapped in nori, along with miso soup.

Reservations for the Makai omakase are available; seating is limited, due to the restaurant’s cozy setting.

Makai omakase available on Mondays and Tuesdays, 5:30, 6:45 and 8 p.m.

Sushi Ichika chef 070126

<title>Sushi Ichika has a new, affordable omakase experience</title>

The sister restaurant of Tempura Ichika is starting a new Makai omakase on July 6. This new course starts at $90 per person, and it will only be available on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Sushi Ichika has a new, affordable omakase experience

Kam Napier Headshot

A. Kam Napier

Columnists

Government & Politics

 Thursday. Joining former president Barak Obama and Michelle Obama in Chicago, Illinois, were former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Joe Biden, and a host of Hollywood, music and media celebrities.

Far as I can tell, no one locally has covered this event, outside of a wire service story picked up by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. If Hawai‘i Democrats attended the party, they were certainly quiet about it. You can hardly tell that, back in the day, Hawai‘i tried really, really hard to be the home for Obama’s presidential library.

Maybe, now that we can see it, kama‘āina are, like me, breathing a sigh of relief that it isn’t here. But first some backstory, before I dust off my architecture critic skills.

You don’t hear about this much anymore, but all through the Obama administration, Hawai‘i — well, maybe just especially prominent, political parts of Hawai‘i — were totally in love with Barack Obama. They were eager to claim him as Hawai‘i’s own, on the grounds that he attended high school here*, and acted as if someone from the Islands had been elected directly to the White House. This one-sided love affair was in full swing when, early in Obama's first term, talk of his presidential library first emerged.

[{"type":"text","text":"“Pick me!” Hawai‘i said."}]

“The Hawai‘i Legislature has sent the White House a joint resolution that it passed last session urging Obama to pick Hawai‘i as the site for his library,” reported Dan Nakaso in the Star-Advertiser on 

We did more then send a resolution. Nakaso reported that a University of Hawai‘i working group would be created to study potential sites, designs, archive management policies and more. UH Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Reed Dasenbrock was scheduled to fly to Washington D.C. “to meet with the head of the presidential library division of the National Archives and to Little Rock, Ark., to meet with the director of the Clinton Presidential Center and the Clinton Foundation.

An especially fervent fan was UH Associate Professor of American Studies Robert Perkinson, who, while he knew Chicago officials were already pushing to have the library, said, “But I feel the stars are aligned a certain way that we are really going to fight to win this. I think we’re going to do what it takes. And that means over the next months and years developing an architectural proposal that is breathtaking and a museum that’s innovative and has a really robust public education component that could benefit all of the kids of Hawai‘i and a policy center that could really help us meet Hawai‘i’s challenges and those of the larger Pacific and the larger world.”

Not that Hawai‘i believed it could beat Chicago, where Obama’s political career actually began. In a May 27, 2011 reader poll, the Star-Advertiser found that 70% of 923 respondents thought that Chicago would win.

Four years later, Hawai‘i was in the top four locations vying for the library when Star-Advertiser political columnist Richard Borreca 

on presidential libraries who advised Hawai‘i to quit. The proposed Kaka‘ako location was unlikely to draw the foot traffic that would make it succeed, and the next steps to advance were expensive in terms of developing a “detailed master development plan for the surrounding community.” Meanwhile, Borecca noted, UH was still hot for the library, hoping it would transform the university and its stature.

[{"type":"text","text":"Ultimately, Chicago won."}]

As for the architecture of the Obama Presidential Center, I’m hard pressed to say anything original, as people have been blasting it since the final design first emerged, and more so once people could see it looming 23 stories over an otherwise low-rise, residential neighborhood. It’s been compared to a mausoleum, a headstone, to Saruman’s tower in the "The Lord of the Rings," to something the Empire would build in a "Star Wars" movie. Note: When people make comparisons of this building to movie architecture, it is always Buildings for the Bad Guys.

, based in New York City. Perhaps they hated their client. Or perhaps they were bold enough to honestly reflect the singular, monumental ego of a man who once 

 while running the first time for president, “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it” and “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Or, when he’d won the nomination — not the presidency, mind you, just the nomination — that 

 as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

So given all those and countless other examples, it’s no surprise the architecture stands alone, angular, imposing, humorless. It resembles Soviet naked-concrete brutalist buildings but is actually clad in American granite, yet a granite so gray that they might just as well have skipped the expense and stuck with the cement underneath.

To me, the most significant detail is the tower’s near total lack of windows. This building is literally blind to the outside world and internally recursive — all views bounce back in upon themselves to see only the interior. It’s an architectural manifestation of self-absorption.

What windows the building does have are cropped into one top corner, and are obscured by a massive a massive inscription of — what else? — a quote from one of Obama’s own speeches. One cannot look out without looking through the man himself, through his words given on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches.

 but the inscription has been rendered deliberately illegible. Yes, deliberately.

“One of the key questions I asked at the beginning was, are people supposed to read this?” said designer Micheal Bierut, who typeset the lettering with a team at Pentagram, led by designer Britt Cobb, as reported by 

. “Is legibility the primary goal here? Do we want people to be able to stand on the ground, look up at this tower, and read those words? And that was discussed on the client end, and the answer came back, ‘No, it should have the promise of meaning, it should be decipherable, everything should be spelled right and it should make sense.’”

[{"type":"text","text":"“The promise of meaning.”"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"I just rolled my eyes so hard I pulled an eye muscle."}]

Then there’s the totally on-brand, real world social and economic dimensions of the project.

The cost of construction ballooned from $350 million to $850 million, per 

. Black residents of the neighborhood have been displaced and priced out, so much so that the city of Chicago is budgeting $6 million for affordable housing to make up for it. Construction companies are still owed “hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of millions.” Private funding came nowhere near the investment needed and the State of Illinois, all told, will have spent some $200 million on infrastructure.

Since his foundation hasn’t paid its bills, since the building and its namesake have taken so much from their neighbors, there’s actually another famous quote from Obama that comes to mind:

[{"type":"text","text":"Mahalo, Chicago, for taking this off our hands."}]

*Adding a note 6/21, lest this piece get dragged into the "birther" madness: Of course Obama was born here, too, but when I look back on our local reaction when he rose to political prominence, it was the fact that he later returned to attend Punahou that really completed the "born 

 raised" sentiment. "Where you wen grad" is a real thing here for establishing a local identity.

A. Kam Napier is editor in chief of Aloha State Daily. His opinions in Pipikaula Corner are his own and not reflective of the ASD team.

Obama library Getty Images 2281570460 16x9

<title>Pipikaula Corner: Hawai‘i dodged a library bullet</title>

Hawai‘i tried very hard to be the home of Barack Obama's presidential library. Now the thing exists in Chicago, open to the public, over budget and overwrought. ASD Editor in Chief A. Kam Napier recaps Hawai‘i's doomed quest to secure this building and gets into what the architecture of the finished project tells us.

Pipikaula Corner: Hawai‘i dodged a library bullet

Jon Nouchi Director of Transit

Jon Nouchi

Viewpoints

If you ask someone in Honolulu about public transportation, after some thought, they will wax nostalgic about how they grew up taking TheBus and shout out the route number they used to ride to and from home like a Zip code badge of belonging to their neighborhood. "Route 54! Upper Pearl City, not Lower!" 

Maybe if you're lucky, they'll talk about Skyline and where it goes and doesn't go yet. But most will talk about how they drive everywhere now and what a chore it is to get around on this island to the places we go. This highlights a fundamental truth about transportation whether one rides or drives there: It is a critical public need, yet its ultimate success lies in how seamlessly it blends into the foreground and background of our lives.

Across Oʻahu, people spend far too much time worrying about how they will get from the dreaded Point A to Point B (and often to Point C, D, and beyond). They calculate traffic delays, swipe around the Waze app, stress over finding and paying for parking, and monitor social media for bad actors who can cause traffic delays by their inattention. Why do we spend so much brain space on how to get there instead of what we do when we arrive?

Transportation is a fundamental need, but it should never be a barrier to living our best lives. It should be a reliable baseline that simply works. When we design a transportation network, our goal isn't just moving vehicles of steel and rubber; it should be focused on moving people toward opportunity, community and vitality.

As we shape the future of Honolulu’s urban landscape, public transportation stands as the great connective tissue of our island. True connectivity is not just about linking geographical hubs; it is about binding our communities together. From our robust TheBus and Handi-Van systems to the expanding spine of Skyline and our integrated multimodal options like Biki bikeshare, we are creating a network where a rider can move effortlessly and reliably. When transit becomes seamless, it transforms how we plan our communities. It allows us to pivot away from sprawling concrete parking structures and shift toward transit-oriented urban spaces that prioritize walkable paths, affordable housing and public parks.

In Hawaiʻi, land is one of our most precious and finite resources. In Honolulu, we boasted a high-quality transit network implemented by our Aliʻi who had the foresight that a mobile community is a thriving one. For generations since then, however, the rise of the automobile throughout the nation dictated that spaces be built to accommodate cars first and human beings second. We are changing that paradigm, but it hasn't been easy. 

By embedding reliable transit deeply into the fabric of Honolulu, we unlock the future and potential of our urban neighborhoods. We allow neighborhoods to densify responsibly around walkable and bikeable transit hubs, preserving our precious agricultural and conservation lands from development. Our streets can help transform gridlocked congested roadways of frustration into access points to and from vibrant community spaces where local businesses thrive, culture develops and opportunity abounds.

Ultimately, a modern, intuitive transit network unlocks equity and a level playing field for all. It means our kūpuna can travel independently as they live longer lives, our keiki can safely get a head start to and from school without relying on their parents to ferry them everywhere, and everyone can return home to their ʻohana sooner and with an expectation of safety. As we build out this future, we aren't just managing infrastructure; we are curating the daily experience of living on this island. We want to give you back your time and remove the friction from your day. Transportation shouldn't be the main event of your morning 

 it should simply be the invisible and seamless bridge that gets you to and from what matters most.

Jon Nouchi is set to lead a public discussion about human transit at AIA Hawai‘i's centennial quarterly book club series through “

Human Transit: How clearer thinking about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives.

by Jarrett Walker. The free event runs from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday, June 27, at UH West Oʻahu's Center for Creative Media (91-1001 Farrington Highway). Register 

For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up 

Skyline

<title>Community Voices: When Congestion Rules All</title>

Honolulu DTS director of transit Jon Nouchi is set to lead a public discussion about human transit on June 27 at AIA Hawaiʻi's book club, which this quarter aims to examine how public transit influences connectivity, community planning and the future of Honolulu’s urban spaces. Nouchi gives ASD readers a taste of the upcoming conversation.

Daily Smile: Thursday, March 5, 2026

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Daily Smile: Thursday, March 5, 2026

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