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[{"type":"text","text":"Border Collies when there's no sheep to herd..."}]

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<title>Daily Smile: Saturday, July 25, 2026</title>

Border Collies when there's no sheep to herd...

Daily Smile: Saturday, July 25, 2026

 Border Collies when there&#039;s no sheep to herd...

Square Mike Brestovansky Headshot RGZ3736 Large

Michael Brestovansky

Government & Politics

Crime & Courts

Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke has been indicted for bribery by a O‘ahu grand jury.

Luke’s bail was set at $80,000 Friday after being charged with bribery, conspiracy to commit bribery and falsifying her campaign spending report.

Four others were also indicted Friday in connection with the State Attorney General’s investigation into a purported paper bag full of $35,000 paid to an unknown, but “influential,” lawmaker referenced during a 2022 federal bribery investigation.

Those others included former State Rep. Ryan Yamane, lobbyist Tobi Solidum, former chair of the state Public Utilities Commission Leodoloff Asuncion Jr., and Ford Fuchigami, airports administrator for the state Department of Transportation.

According to the indictment, during Luke’s 2022 campaign for lieutenant governor, Solidum was seeking additional state money for Covid community testing centers. The indictment cites a conversation between Solidum and Ty Cullen — the former Hawai‘i Rep. who, at the time, had turned informant for the FBI — where Solidum was worried that the state DOH would cut funding for Covid testing centers soon.

During the conversation, Solidum reportedly told Cullen Luke was running for the lieutenant governor position, adding: “All I gotta do is give her more money.”

Solidum, Cullen and Luke all reportedly met on Jan. 20, 2022 at Morton’s The Steakhouse in Ala Moana, where Solidum’s stepdaughter Kristen Pae placed an envelope on the table containing two $5,000 checks, one from Solidum and one from Pae. Luke reportedly took the envelope.

Solidum then told Luke, “By next week we’ll have 35, so it will be halfway to our 70.”

Later during that meeting, Solidum asked Luke about the possibility of drawing upon federal funds to continue Covid testing, to which Luke agreed to follow up.

The two $5,000 checks were subsequently deposited into the Friends of Sylvia Luke bank account, the same day Luke arranged for a meeting to discuss emergency appropriations for additional Covid community testing. In February, Luke’s Finance Committee, which she chaired, passed 

, a bill approving more than $170 million in state funds for Covid mitigation measures for the next two fiscal years.

The indictment does not specifically mention an exact $35,000 transaction, let alone a paper bag, although the the transaction in Morton’s strongly resembles an event Luke described in February: she admitted accepting two $5,000 checks in a dinner involving Cullen, although she also claimed she never cashed the checks.

Asuncion’s presence in the indictment entirely stems from his role as Luke’s campaign treasurer, wherein he allegedly knowingly failed to disclose the donations by Solidum and Pae, and also his subsequent claims in March that the checks had been returned to those donors unspent. Asuncion reportedly claimed that those checks had never been deposited into the Friends of Sylvia Luke bank account, and therefore believed he didn’t need to report them.

Despite this, Deputy Attorney General David Van Acker said Friday that he believes Yamane to be the “most culpable” of the five named in the indictment.

According to the indictment, Solidum had sent money to Yamane in 2020 and 2021, and later asked about the status of health care measure 

, which failed to move forward through conference committees that year. Yamane texted Solidum “Sorry couldn’t deliver it.”

Solidum and Yamane continued to meet throughout 2021 and 2022, with Solidum repeatedly giving Yamane money. Solidum reportedly “texted Yamane in an effort to get a rival Covid testing company fined,” which Yamane assisted by forwarding Solidum’s claims about said company to the state Department of Health.

In early 2022, Yamane, Solidum and Fuchigami met frequently to discuss HB 2392. At one point, the text conversation between Yamane and Solidum turned to the federal charges against Cullen, leading Yamane to text Solidum “Might not be good to been [sic] seen with me.”

At the end of the 2022 legislative session, Yamane spoke effusively in support of HB 2392, and specifically named Luke in his thanks for getting the measure passed.

Fuchigami, for his part, received a $7,000 check from Solidum in Jan. 2022. Fuchigami, who worked for the Senate Ways and Means Committee at the time, was party to subsequent conversations with Solidum and Yamane regarding HB 2392.

Yamane was indicted for bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery; Solidum for three counts of bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery; Fuchigami with use of false statements, conspiracy to commit bribery and obstruction of justice; and Asuncion with falsifying candidate committee reports, use of false statements and obstruction of justice.

“For years, people in Hawai‘i have wondered: ‘why can’t we investigate and prosecute our own public officials for corruption?’” Attorney General Anne Lopez said at a briefing Friday. “This is the reason why the Legislature created the Special Investigation and Prosecution Division [within the AG’s office] … We have a commitment to following the facts to where they lead, no matter how long it takes to get there.”

Nonetheless, Van Acker emphasized that Luke and the others in the indictment are still presumed innocent, and that the statements in the indictment remain only allegations. Van Acker and Lopez did not take questions Friday.

Luke took an indefinite leave of absence from the lieutenant governor position in April, which has continued to this day.

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PXL 20260725 020059478 TS 000 16x9

<title>Luke indicted for bribery</title>

Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke and four others have been charged in Attorney General corruption investigation

Luke indicted for bribery

Higa headshot white shirt square

Sterling Higa

Columnists

This session the legislature raised the income tax on anyone in Hawaiʻi earning more than a million dollars a year. Our 13% top rate now sits among the nation’s highest.

The bill passed quietly. The papers noted it the way they note a road repaving: a thing done, presumably good, needing no comment.

Nobody is weeping for people earning a million dollars a year.

That is precisely why the tax deserves a second look. The measures that pass without argument reveal what a society has stopped arguing about.

Envy is the one vice that never announces itself. Pride struts and greed hoards, but envy always arrives dressed as justice. A tax on millionaires feels like fairness. But fairness is not the only good.

A society can absorb a great deal of unfairness and survive. What it cannot survive is a politics that runs on resentment.

Envy used to know where its target lived. The peasant could see the landlord’s manor from his field, and the plantation worker could see the manager’s house from the rows of pineapple. Hawaiʻi’s own labor movement emerged from those fields with real grievances.

Wealth has since moved out of sight. It lives in brokerage accounts and holding companies now, not on estates. The wealth of the super rich has become intangible, and even their ranches are mirages. Mark Zuckerberg feeds his cattle macadamia nuts on Kauaʻi but eats perfectly well at his home in Palo Alto. Meanwhile, beachfront hotels in Waikīkī are owned by thousands of shareholders. You cannot storm an investment portfolio.

Envy is fed like a furnace. Social media puts every lifestyle on earth in every pocket in Hawaiʻi, heaping the coal into the flames. Envy becomes a mood — a low, constant awareness that somebody, somewhere, has the kitchen or the vacation or the body you were denied. A mood cannot be satisfied, but it can be channeled, and it is channeled toward whatever target happens to be within reach.

On Maui, neighbors were within reach. The short-term-rental phase-out was sold in the language of housing justice, taking from the wealthy to shelter the poor. But the owners it actually strikes are schoolteachers, retirees, the upper middle class — and a seaside condo in Kīhei carrying a $3,000-a-month maintenance fee cannot be cut into four pieces and handed to four needy families. It can only be made worthless, which is a strange kind of charity.

The county plans to phase out roughly 7,000 units, though a cleanup bill 

 could exempt 4,500 units. That suggests Maui’s councilmembers have noticed the problem.

The partisans of envy are running the same play on the Mainland. New York has Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax. California has a wealth tax on the ballot, from which the billionaires are already excusing themselves by moving out of state.

The fair-minded reader will object that we owe something to the needy, and the reader is right. The widow and the orphan have a standing claim on us, and it’s older than any state. But the objection assumes the claim must be discharged through the state. Taxes for the rich, assistance programs for the poor.

Hawaiʻi already carries one of the heaviest state-and-local tax burdens in the country. The needy are not much better off for it. The burden of our state shows up in the rent, in the grocery bill, in the exodus of local families headed to Las Vegas. A man who can imagine no way to feed a widow except by voting to tax his neighbor has not discovered compassion. He has misplaced his imagination, and it is worth asking where he lost it.

He lost it at school. Consider the life of the average humanities Ph.D.: nine years spent in college and graduate school, paid for with loans and forgone wages. Now, a lottery for a shrinking number of academic posts, stagnant pay, and a publish or perish culture.

Nearing 30, our young doctor has many degrees, but no clear path to supporting a family. He has to take a part-time job as a barista to pay the bills. Meanwhile, his high school classmate who skipped college to fix air conditioners owns a home by the time of their 10-year class reunion.

A man in the professor’s position does not need much to grow resentful. He only needs to marinate. The trouble is that his marinade becomes his students’ curriculum. The resentment gets footnoted and graded. The graduates leave catechized in a simple creed: every problem is a distribution problem, and every solution is a state solution. Take from the rich, and give to the poor. Take from them, and give to me.

Our young professor enjoys a standard of living beyond nearly every human who has ever lived. He carries in his pocket marvels his grandparents would have gladly sweated in the pineapple fields to afford. None of it satisfies. He only needs to see someone doing slightly better, and the resentment is stoked again. Social media is happy to oblige.

That is why the millionaire tax will not be the last. Envy is not a debt that can be paid down because every payment enlarges the claim. When the millionaires have been taxed, the mood will remain, and it will go looking for whoever is next within reach.

This is an old road. The first murder was not committed for money or land. It was committed because one brother’s offering was blessed and the other’s offering was not. Envy had finished its work in Cain long before he lifted his hand. It hollowed him first. It always hollows the envier first, depriving him of the blessings he has by making them invisible.

The exit is not a cleverer tax or a purer market. It is contentment — the settled conviction of having received more than one was owed. It frees a man to look at his neighbor’s good fortune and simply be glad.

Nobody weeps for millionaires. Nobody needs to. They were never the ones in danger.

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Firefly Gemini Flash illustration of tax a millionaire 593166

<title>Hawaiʻi millionaire tax: Why the new 13% bracket won’t be the last</title>

The millionaire tax passed with barely a murmur. ASD opinion columnist Sterling Higa on why the measures nobody argues about deserve the second look.

Hawaiʻi millionaire tax: Why the new 13% bracket won’t be the last

Lopaka and Tanya Kapanui

Lopaka Kapanui and Tanya Kapanui

Hawai‘i History

Prior to Western contact, the Waiākea Peninsula at the edge of Hilo Bay sustained a thriving Hawaiian community for generations. As Hilo gradually developed into an important port for the sandalwood trade, supply replenishment, and the whaling industry, the area began to change.

Although the traditional stewardship of the ʻaina ensured the loʻi kalo (taro fields) and the loko iʻa (fishponds) continued to provide food for the area, the peninsula slowly took on a different purpose. Then, the introduction of private ownership through the Great Mahele of 1848 forever changed how Waiākea would be managed.

With the expansion of Hilo Harbor, the wetlands were drained, and fishponds fell into disuse. To accommodate larger ships, the bay was dredged, and the fill from the bay was used to create new land along the shoreline. Ancient canoe landings disappeared beneath that newly created land, and much of the ceremonial landscape surrounding Kūakaʻananuʻu Heiau was erased. Roads, homes, and public buildings gradually spread across the shoreline, covering many of the features that had defined Waiākea for centuries.

Due to the harborʻs continued growth and change, today’s shoreline bears little resemblance to the one that greeted the first Western merchant vessels. During the early 1900s, a new public park was created to honor the last reigning monarch. Liliʻuokalani Gardens, with its walking paths, decorative bridges, and ornamental gardens replaced the loʻi kalo and loko iʻa, creating a space where residents and visitors could enjoy the shores of Hilo Bay.

In 1933, the Hilo Parks Commission invited director Cecil B. DeMille and other celebrities from the film "Four Frightened People" to plant banyan trees along a new roadway. Later that year, Babe Ruth planted a tree, and the road was formally designated the following year in time for a visit from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who planted his own tree. Over time, nearly 50 trees were planted by aviators, entertainers, politicians, and other notable visitors, and the Banyan Drive became known as “Hilo’s Walk of Fame.” In 1939, the Naniloa Hotel opened its doors on the site of a former yacht club, welcoming visitors to its tranquil location by the sea.

Like the rest of Hilo, the Waiākea Peninsula has had to face the destructive power of the sea. Tsunamis in 1946 and 1960 devastated the coast, destroying homes, businesses, and facilities along the waterfront. While many of the banyan trees survived, a new infrastructure once again reshaped the landscape and Banyan Drive soon became the center of Hilo’s visitor industry.

By the 1970s, Banyan Drive was already established as the center of Hilo’s visitor industry. The Naniloa and the new Hilo Hawaiian, along with other new hotels, welcomed travelers from around the world, while nearby golf courses, parks, and public spaces drew both residents and visitors to the bay.

Although centuries of development had transformed nearly every part of the peninsula, places like Mokuola (Coconut Island) continued to preserve a connection to an older Hawaiʻi. The landscape may look different from the days of loʻi kalo, loko iʻa, and Kūakaʻananuʻu Heiau, but its mana cannot be erased.

Perhaps that is why, despite decades of change, stories continue to emerge from Banyan Drive, describing experiences that seem to be connected to a long-lost past. Former staff have mentioned doors of empty rooms rattling for no reason, and housekeeping staff talk of the water faucets in one of the rooms turning on by itself.

However, the scariest stories are the ones about a group of visitors who turn up during specific moon phases, without reservations. One security guard said it starts with the sound of drums. It’s distant, but the sound is a consistent beat that doesn’t change like modern music. As the drums get louder, a mist appears on the building’s mauka side and moves through the wall and the hotel rooms, exiting through the wall on the opposite end of the building on their way to the ocean.

“I know it’s not my imagination,” he said. “The lights dim and flicker, pictures on the wall shake or fall to the floor, sometimes the furniture moves.”

The guard said that the employees at the hotel know to make themselves scarce during that time, but no one really talks about it with each other.

Grand Naniloa Hilo

<title>Night Marchers at the Naniloa</title>

Babe Ruth and President Franklin D. Roosevelt are among the Mainland luminaries who planted banyan trees along Banyan Drive. The history of the Hilo area surrounding the Naniloa Hotel goes back to ancient times, and as hotel staff tell it, on some nights the old days come marching through in a mist.

Night Marchers at the Naniloa

Stephanie Salmons Headshot

Stephanie Salmons

Business & Tourism

Food & Dining

[{"type":"text","text":"Hawaiian Airlines is taking a taste of Hawai‘i to the skies."}]

The airline is doing away with complimentary meals in the main cabin of most domestic flights. Instead, starting July 1, those passengers will be able to pre-order food from a Hawai‘i-inspired menu curated by Maui-based chef Sheldon Simeon.

According to a Thursday announcement from Hawaiian, his menu offers "elevated takes on local favorites and comfort foods," with many items highlighting signature flavors from his restaurants.

Simeon, who's known for his Valley Isle eateries Tin Roof and Tiffany's Restaurant & Bar, has received several James Beard Award nominations and was a 

 for Best Chef: Northwest & Pacific this year.

"Already offered in first class, the pre-order model puts guests in control of their onboard dining experience throughout the cabin, with first class guests now benefiting from an expanded selection of menu options," the announcement notes.

"We're excited because this is really about a transformation across our entire in-flight experience from a food and beverage perspective," Alisa Onishi, managing director of Hawai‘i marketing for Hawaiian Airlines, told Aloha State Daily. 

It's the first time Hawaiian has offered a chef-curated menu in the main cabin, she says. The curated pre-order menu will be available on all domestic flights between Hawai‘i and the Mainland, except for those to JFK International Airport in New York City, which will continue to receive a complimentary meal.

Other buy-on-board products will remain the same, Onishi says, and the airline will continue to offer free snacks from local partners on board.

"Our most frequent flyers have given us feedback over the years that they've been wanting more choice and higher-quality meal options, so we are exited to provide more selection," Onishi says, noting that gluten-free and vegan options have been requested by guests throughout the years, "and we are now able to provide for them. We're really excited about giving our guests more choice and better quality option for food in-flight."

Onishi says that the airline began to work toward this before its integration with Alaska Airlines, and always had Simeon, one of Hawaiian's featured chefs in 2015, "in our hearts and minds."

"He had done one of our first class menus back then and [was] just such a great chef to work with," she told ASD. " ... He understood how to make food on an airplane taste really good. He understands the restrictions ... we have in the aircraft, so he was really able to create this menu that was island-inspired, using local resources, making sure that there's a story behind each of the menu items. So, we knew from the beginning that Chef Sheldon was one of our first choices. We knew he was the right [person] to partner with for this program because it is the first time for doing this in our main cabin and we wanted to make sure that we had a chef who understood the assignment and knew how to make something beautiful and successful and taste really great from kitchen into the airplane."

During a tasting of the menu Wednesday, Simeon said it's been nearly a year since discussions first began.

"There have been so many ideas, even prior to our first meeting and our first tasting, that we did internally with my chefs at the restaurant," he says. "It was just such a cool opportunity. ... Hawai‘i has some of the best cuisines, some [of the] best restaurants and best flavors that there is, and we have to continue to celebrate that. This is a huge, huge win for Hawai‘i culinary that Hawaiian has given us the opportunity to share these flavors."

Here's what you'll be able to grab from the 

The morning menu, available for flights that depart between 6 and 9:59 a.m., includes corned beef hash and poached eggs; french toast or banana pancakes with scrambled eggs and Portuguese sausage (don't skip the the spicy-K mayo or banana bread syrup); coconut overnight oats, a vegan and gluten-free option; and a cheesy omelet with chicken sausage and roasted potatoes, which is coming this fall.

Meanwhile, the afternoon and evening menu, available for flights departing between 10 a.m. and 8:29 p.m., includes crispy mochiko chicken and garlic noodles, which comes with mac salad and bag of crispy toppings; a bento that includes grilled teriyaki chicken, tamagoyaki, kamaboko and a shoyu hotdog; teriyaki cheeseburger; grilled chicken bahn mi sandwich; a salad with li hing mango, baby kale, almonds, edamame, grape tomato and quinoa, along with a li hing balsamic vinaigrette; Italian sub; and cheeseburger mac and cheese, which is coming this fall.

Prices for each meal range from about $11 to $17. According to the announcement, the meals will be prepared with fresh ingredients no more than 12 hours before each flight.

You can order through the Alaska Hawaiian mobile app or website two weeks in advance and as close as 20 hours before departure.

Hawaiian and Simeon will introduce new dishes and rotate items throughout the year, the announcement notes.

Residents who are Huaka‘i by Hawaiian members, or who become members by June 24, will get two free meals starting July 1.

In March, Hawaiian welcomed Chef Dell Valdez as its new executive chef. Read 

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Daily Smile: Saturday, July 25, 2026

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