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[{"type":"text","text":"The force is strong in this one..."}]

Smile 26 5 14

<title>Daily Smile: Thursday, May 14, 2026</title>

The force is strong in this one...

Daily Smile: Thursday, May 14, 2026

WEB square crop Hayley Lehman Headshot RGZ1636

Haley Lehman

Government & Politics

Members of the Honolulu City Council voted for Tyler Dos Santos-Tam to chair the council starting in December. Esther Kiaʻāina will serve as vice-chair and Scott Nishimoto will be floor leader.

 to reorganize leadership of the Honolulu City Council and the resolution passed with five votes on Thursday afternoon.

He will replace Tommy Waters as chair after the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court found in August that 

Dos Santos-Tam told Aloha State Daily on Friday that it’s “unusual and frankly, unprecedented in recent memory” that the sitting chair is ending his term. He said that the new chair needs to plan for the inauguration in January and work on budgeting, staffing and other internal administrative issues to prepare for the new term.

 requires the council to meet at noon on the second day of January that falls on a business day to elect a chair, vice-chair and floor leader.

The last time a chair was elected, an outgoing councilmember introduced a resolution in 

 for Waters to lead the council when the council met for the first time in 2021. He has led the council since then.

Waters elected chair: The first order of business in the new year will be to adopt a resolution on council leadership. Any councilmember can propose a resolution, but Dos Santos-Tam said, “I certainly hope that we keep the same arrangement because this is a team that is ready to take on the big issues that we face as a city.”

Dos Santos-Tam said that he won’t make committee assignments until December or January.

Dos Santos-Tam’s district covers portions of Kakaʻako, Downtown Honolulu, Chinatown, Punchbowl, Papakōlea, Pauoa Valley, Nuʻuanu, Iwilei, Liliha, ʻĀlewa Heights, Kalihi and Kalihi Valley, according to the city council. He’s a frequent rider of TheBus and said that Route 13 riders share issues with him that they face.

“Having a leader who understands not just the problems that we face but has put forward solutions and seen them through matters,” Dos Santos-Tam said.

In his first term, Dos Santos-Tam sponsored legislation that requires bars and nightclubs in Honolulu to keep naloxone spray on site to reverse opioid overdoses as a condition of their liquor licenses.

“This is an example of us getting ahead of a real issue that’s vexed cities and states around the country,” he told ASD.

He co-sponsored bills to authorize the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) to study extending Skyline, to regulate electric bicycles and to lower speed limits near schools, and sponsored bills to create the Downtown Honolulu Business Improvement District and establish a local residence preference for City sponsored housing programs.

Affordability is a top issue for Dos Santos-Tam, which he said impacts “every family island wide, but in particular, we need to keep our focus on the most vulnerable in our communities.”

“The reality is rent keeps going up for people,” he told ASD. “It’s harder for families to make ends meet. We need to be tackling out housing prices head on. We need to be tackling cost of living issues head on.”

He plans to introduce legislation to expand the low-income bus fare, make it easier for small businesses to obtain permits and push to create more housing.

“I really believe that Honolulu can be a city that works and in a city that works we produce enough housing for our people, the transportation system works for everyone, we have clean and safe parks, but none of this happens by accident,” he told ASD. “It requires us to put forward good policy ideas. It requires us to push and ask tough questions.”

While Dos Santos-Tam received support in public testimony, he also garnered backlash for the way the leadership reorganization came about.

The Office of Information Practices (OIP) opened an investigation into five city councilmembers accused of violating Sunshine Law, the state’s open meetings act, after it received two anonymous complaints that the city councilmembers met at a Zippy’s in Waipahu.

According to a letter from the Honolulu Department of the Corporation Counsel, Councilmembers Radiant Cordero, Dos Santos-Tam, Ester Kiaʻāina, Augie Tulba and Matt Weyer met in an “impromptu gathering” on Oct. 5 and discussed future council leadership but did not vote or decide on the future chair, vice-chair and floor leader.

“To be clear, the Councilmembers neither made a commitment to vote nor sought votes for any of these positions,” Corporation Counsel Dana Viola stated in the letter.

Councilmembers Andria Tupola and Val Aquino Okimoto, two councilmembers who did not attend the meeting, voted against the resolution on Thursday. Waters abstained from voting.

Okimoto said during the council meeting, “My opposition is due to concerns that pushing this resolution through today inflicts needless institutional damage on this council, defies the spirit of our open government laws and flies in the face of basic common sense.”

“This measure is an attempt to predetermine and lockdown power before the new council convenes and it is doing so under an active, unresolved legal cloud,” she said.

She said that the reorganization born out of private meeting insults the public’s expectation to “transparency, ethical leadership and respect for the democratic process.”

She said that the “reorganization born out of a private restaurant caucus insults” the public’s expectation to “transparency, ethical leadership and respect for the democratic process.”

Tupola said during Thursday’s meeting that when she met with Dos Santos-Tam on Oct. 6, he told her that the five councilmembers took a vote on its future leadership.

Dos Santos-Tam told ASD that he “vigorously disputes” depictions of a conversations between himself and another councilmember.

He said, “We are a policy making body. We are not a high school drama club and so we have to approach our work seriously and I think the body is going to continue to look at legislation, whoever that may come from, and determine how best to move forward.”

Dos Santos-Tam said that he will follow OIP’s process and recommendations.

Aloha State Daily reached out to OIP and the Honolulu Department of the Corporation Counsel for comment on the ongoing investigation.

Tyler Dos Santos Tam

<title>Tyler Dos Santos-Tam to lead Honolulu City Council</title>

The Honolulu City Councilmember representing District 6 was elected chair of the council on Thursday amid an investigation into allegations of a Sunshine Law violation.

Tyler Dos Santos-Tam to lead Honolulu City Council

Letters to the Editor

Hawai‘i voters gave Democratic Gov. Josh Green a clear win with over 70% of the vote. At the same voters in Honolulu — where more than 65% of Hawai‘i's registered voters live — rejected ranked choice voting by almost 25,000 votes. Nearly 128,000 people voted no, with more than half opposing the change. 

The Republican candidate for governor got fewer than 70,000 votes in Hawai‘i. Nearly 58,000 more people voted down ranked choice voting than voted for him. I can’t tell you how any one person marked both lines. I can tell you this was not a Republican corner of the city talking to itself. 

Question 5 would have changed how Honolulu picks its mayor, its nine City Council members, and its prosecuting attorney for the City and County of Honolulu. The switch could not start before 2032. Voters had plenty of time before the change would take effect, and they still didn’t want it. 

Honolulu’s current system takes a little explaining. A candidate who wins a majority in August wins outright. If nobody does, the top two advance to November. If only two candidates are running, the race goes straight to November.

Question 5 would have replaced it. Most contested races would be settled in November, with voters ranking up to five candidates. Bigger fields would be cut down in August first. If nobody has a majority, the last-place candidate is eliminated, those votes move to the next ranked candidate still in the race, and the process repeats until someone has a majority of the remaining ballots. (Editor's note: ASD provided a two-part deep dive into the pros and cons of ranked choice voting in advance of the election, 

Supporters argued that deciding more races in November would draw more voters than an August election. There’s no question August elections draw fewer voters. But the University of Hawai‘i’s own research does not show that ranked choice voting, by itself, increases turnout. Honolulu already has a way to get a majority winner: hold the runoff. 

The part that gets left out of the brochure: if you don’t rank every candidate, your ballot can die in the middle. Once every name you marked is eliminated, your ballot is finished. Nobody stole it. It just stops counting. It’s called “ballot exhaustion,” but what it really is is real-life disenfranchisement. 

The winner can then have a majority of the ballots still being counted and still not have a majority of the people who voted for that office. Call it a majority if you like. It is not the one most people mean by the word. 

Hawai‘i already uses ranked choice voting in some special elections. But Question 5 would have taken it much further, making ranked choice voting part of the regular process for electing Honolulu’s city officers.  Honolulu said no. 

They were not voting no for sport. Other charter amendments passed. The one that rewires the election did not. 

You can like Josh Green and dislike this. You can wish more people showed up in August and still refuse an election system where some ballots stop counting before the count is over. Honolulu did both. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Congratulations, Honolulu. "}]

Ken Cuccinelli is chairman of Heritage Action’s Election Transparency Initiative and a former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security and attorney general of Virginia.

Ranked choice voting

<title>Letter to the Editor: Honolulu voted blue, ranked choice voting lost</title>

Honolulu's voters made the right call in voting down a move to ranked choice voting for mayor, city council members and prosecuting attorney. Here's why.

Letter to the Editor: Honolulu voted blue, ranked choice voting lost

Katie Helland Headshot

Katie Helland

Arts & Entertainment

Aloha Spirit

Moviegoers looking to find a taste of Italy in Honolulu can do so at the 2026 Italian Film Festival, which runs Friday, Nov. 13, through Sunday, Nov. 15. The goal of the event is to share a “vision of the contemporary Italy,” said Iolanda Marinelli, president of the Friends of Italy Society of Hawaiʻi.

“Italian cinema is not Hollywood,” she told ASD. “It's not superheroes. It's really about relationships with people.”

The second annual festival is a collaboration between the Friends of Italy Society of Hawaiʻi, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco. Through the partnership, HoMA provides a space for the screenings at the Doris Duke Theatre, while the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco pays for the rights for the films to be shared with Hawaiʻi audiences.

New this year is a chance for all moviegoers to partake in wine, plus focaccia from the Kaimuki-based Breadshop. Previously, a reception with wine and focaccia bread was open just to members of Friends of Italy Society of Hawaiʻi as a separate ticketed event.

The festival features three films: “La vita va così (Life Is Life),” “Gioia mia (Sweetheart),” and “Nonostante (Feeling Better).” Films are in Italian with English subtitles.

There will also be discussions after the screenings the first two nights of the festival. The first conversation will be led by retired University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Professor 

, she said. The Hawaiʻi-based Photographer 

, who is from Sicily, will lead the conversation on the second evening.

The opening film is “La vita va così (Life Is Life),” which plays at 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 13.

“It's about a stubborn shepherd in the land of Sardinia, which is an island of Italy, and he doesn't want to allow a big corporation to build a resort,” Marinelli said.

It will be followed by “Gioia mia (Sweatheart) at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 14.  The coming-of-age film focuses on a young boy who spends time with his elderly aunt and discovers a few things about live.

“I feel like that just hits really hard the nostalgia trap for anyone remembering their childhood,” said Sarah Fang, the theatre manager and programmer for the Honolulu Museum of Art.

The festival closes with “Nonostante (Feeling Better)” at 7 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 15.

“I just hope that when people come, they can have a fun time in our theater and really experience the joys of a collective experience in watching a film together,” Fang said. “I feel like we've lost a lot of that in this age of streaming. But some of these films you definitely won't be able to see anywhere else. We're really delighted to bring it to our community here.”

Tickets are $15 for adults; $5 for college students; and free for youth, ages 18 years old and younger. 

“La vita va così (Life Is Life)”

<title>Watch movies, drink wine, eat focaccia at this returning festival</title>

The 2026 Italian Film Festival is back for its second year in Honolulu with three films over three days from Nov. 13 to 15 at the Doris Duke Theatre. The collaboration between the Friends of Italy Society of Hawaiʻi, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco returns this year with a new surprise for all moviegoers: focaccia and wine.

Watch movies, drink wine, eat focaccia at this returning festival

Higa headshot white shirt square

Sterling Higa

Columnists

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted last week that he cheated on his wife, Lori Huang, and his company’s board is looking into it. The board is not troubled that he strayed. It is troubled by whom he strayed with.

Alice Huang, no relation, is a Chinese national. Many believe she spies for Beijing. She once worked at CCTV, China’s state television. Then she moved into tech investing. Most recently she was an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore firm that bought Nvidia chips.

Megaspeed was set up in 2023, just after the United States began limiting chip sales to China. China wants those chips to train its best AI models. Megaspeed soon became one of Nvidia’s biggest customers, spending 

. It said the chips were for cloud data centers in Southeast Asia.

But late in 2024, an American inspector visited Megaspeed’s data center in Malaysia. He found Nvidia servers and chips still sealed in their shipping crates. Megaspeed denies that it was passing the freight on to China.

Alice Huang’s work at Megaspeed is how she got close to Jensen.

Among American tech bosses, Jensen led the push to keep selling to Beijing. Now he and his company are in the hot seat. The Democrats who take over Congress in January will be glad to haul him in for questions about the affair. It is a handy excuse for sweeping new rules on AI firms and their 

So the affair gets buried in a larger tale of AI, trade, and great-power rivalry.

But the affair is the heart of it. Jensen’s betrayal reminds us that the kings of tech are fallen men. A man who will cheat on his wife of 40 years is not a man to be trusted. And among the kings of tech, men who can be trusted are scarce.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was the subject of a lengthy 

. Some of the people quoted called him a “sociopath.” The piece traced his chase for tens of billions of dollars from Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, even as his company did business with the U.S. government and military. Both countries have long feuded with Iran, a country we are now at war with.

OpenAI and its rival Anthropic have both taken billions in investments from funds based in the Gulf. One of those funds is under scrutiny for its 

. A fair-minded person may ask whether these firms owe more to their foreign backers than to our security.

Dario Amodei is CEO of Anthropic. His wife, Cami Clark, once co-founded a company that sold “free luxury porn” to women. She 

 from Jeffrey Epstein. For a time she was the mistress of Eric Schmidt. At her urging, Schmidt put early money into Anthropic. His stake may now 

 of affairs in forty years of marriage. Many were with women decades younger. He and his wife still appear together in public as philanthropic donors. Schmidt now runs Relativity Space, which is working with NASA to send payloads to Mars. The company is also bidding for Space Force contracts.

Elon Musk, who runs Tesla and SpaceX, has paid women to bear his children and keep quiet about it. His first wife said he 

, then divorced her without warning. Two months after filing for divorce, he was engaged to the actress Talulah Riley. The two were married, divorced, married again, and divorced again.

Musk’s SpaceX owns 11,000 satellites that serve the U.S. military and its allies, 

 among them. SpaceX also offers its Grok AI to the Pentagon.

Gossip may seem like static, but it is a signal. The men who run America’s most important tech companies hold a low view of the marriage covenant. History has its share of men who cheated at home and served well abroad. But they cheated in an age that still called it cheating, and they feared being found out. These men do not.

Given this low view of marriage, it’s hard to fathom how loyal these men will be to our country.

These men own the satellites our military uses for communications and intelligence. They control the AI that powers autonomous weapons systems. They build reusable rockets to extend our reach in space.

The coverage so far has dwelt on what Jensen’s affair means for trade and defense. That is the smaller story. The CEO of one of the world’s great companies broke a sacred vow. He has plenty of company.

We have grown so used to cheating that we hardly notice it. Our journalists have traded the language of Scripture for the language of the Associated Press, which forbids moral judgment. The gossip page is the one place left where newspapers report on sin, but they share it for entertainment, not for condemnation. The press can speak of loyalty to country, but not of loyalty to a wife.

Jensen should know better. As a boy he boarded at the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, and he has kept up with the school.

In 2019, he and his wife gave $2 million to build a girls’ dorm and classroom building there. They cut the ribbon 

. In 2020, in the depths of Covid, he gave a video address to Oneida’s 

Oddly, his six-minute speech never mentions God. It does say that meeting his wife was one of the great events of his life.

 never mentions God either, though it does show remorse. “To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.”

Jensen’s deepest problem is one he shares with Altman, Amodei, Schmidt, and Musk. None of them seems to be in covenant with the God who made all things and will judge all things. They do not confess Christ, so they have no pardon for past sins. They do not believe Scripture, so they have no law to warn them away from future sin.

They live as if sacred vows are not real. They are wrong, and their error is our nation’s peril.

Jensen and Lori Huang Getty Images 2296995102

<title>Why Nvidia CEO’s infidelity is a national security problem</title>

Jensen Huang and his wife, Lori Huang, cut the ribbon together on a girls’ dormitory at the Kentucky Baptist school that took him in. Six years later he is apologizing to his wife in public, and his mistress may be a Chinese spy. ASD opinion columnist Sterling Higa on why the men who hold America’s satellites, rockets, and AI cannot be trusted with the country if they cannot be trusted with a marriage.

Why Nvidia CEO’s infidelity is a national security problem

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta Headshot

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta

Food & Dining

[{"type":"text","text":"There’s a new soup dumpling spot in Honolulu."}]

 just soft opened in Kakaʻako. The restaurant is located on Kamakee Street in the former space of Phuket Thai and Better Bites Thai and More. The eatery, known for its premium handmade noodles and made-to-order dumplings, has other locations on the Mainland in cities like Las Vegas, San Jose and Austin.

The restaurant features both indoor and outdoor seating; we’re told the eatery can seat 100 customers.

Sijie Special Noodle’s Honolulu menu is currently the same as the ones at the business’s other locations.

The pork soup dumplings ($12.99) are the eatery’s signature xiao long bao. Other soup dumpling fillings include veggie ($13.99), spicy pork ($13.99), shrimp ($17.99), premium beef brisket ($15.99), and pork and crab roe ($20.99). Six dumplings usually come per order.

The eatery also offers boiled ($12.99) and steamed ($12.99) dumplings, along with mini pan-fried buns. The mini pan-fried pork buns ($12.99) are especially popular, due to their size. 

The sweet and sour pork ($28.99), twin pepper deer antler mushroom ($26.99) and flaming wagyu beef cubes ($49.99) are recommended chef specials. The sweet and sour pork, in particular, features a social media-worthy presentation. 

The menu features a variety of appetizers, Sichuan specials — which are known for their spice — rice and chow mein, stir-fries, noodles, rice, and noodle soups.

Popular options include siu mai ($11.99), beef chow funn ($21.99), orange chicken ($22.99) and spicy beef noodle soup ($21.99).

The orange chicken is part of the eatery’s wok chicken selection; customers can choose from other flavors like lemon and sesame.

Drink options range from hot tea ($4) and matcha lattes ($10) to hojicha lattes ($10).

[{"type":"text","text":"Sijie Special Noodle is open daily from 11:30 a.m. to midnight."}]

Sijie Special Noodle staff 110926

<title>Soup dumpling spot Sijie Special Noodle opens in Honolulu</title>

The restaurant, known for its premium handmade noodles and dumplings, just opened on Kamakee Street. Customers can look forward to soup dumplings with a variety of fillings — including pork, shrimp, premium beef brisket and more — steamed dumplings, chef specials and noodle soups.

Soup dumpling spot Sijie Special Noodle opens in Honolulu

, a family-owned and -operated Chinese noodle shop in Honolulu’s Chinatown, is now open for dinner. The business — which opened in 2009 — extended its hours to open for dinner on Nov. 1.

“A lot of people were asking (us to extend the hours),” says restaurant co-manager Joyce Lin.

She also notes that last year, the restaurant also expanded its interior to allow more dining space for customers.

The Chinatown eatery is popular for its look funn noodles, which are made in-house. Lam’s Kitchen specializes in beef flank and tendon look funn, along with won ton mein and beef chow funn.

“The beef flank tendon look funn is the most popular,” Lin says. “I usually add won tons in mine; we’re also known for our won tons.”

Besides the beef chow funn and beef flank and tendon look funn in soup, customers can also opt for a la carte orders of look funn rolls ($1.50 each). The noodles come with sweet soy sauce and peanut sauce; customers can drizzle their desired amount over the noodles.

Lam’s Kitchen also recently added a few new dishes — including sweet and sour pork ($23 and roast duck (half order $28, full order $50) — to its menu. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Customer parking is available in nearby municipal lots."}]

Lams Kitchen manager 110926

<title>Lam’s Kitchen is now open for dinner</title>

The family-owned and -operated noodle shop, located in Honolulu’s Chinatown, recently extended its hours; the biz is now open nightly for dinner. Lam’s Kitchen is known for its beef flank and tendon look funn, along with won ton mein, beef chow funn and look funn rolls.

Daily Smile: Thursday, May 14, 2026

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Daily Smile: Thursday, May 14, 2026

Authors

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