Traffic woes ADVERTISING Traffic woes What are people thinking?! Highway 130 expanded because of heavy traffic, and now there is a restricted time when you can use it?! I have been on the road until 7:30 p.m., and traffic is
Traffic woes
What are people thinking?! Highway 130 expanded because of heavy traffic, and now there is a restricted time when you can use it?! I have been on the road until 7:30 p.m., and traffic is still heavy.
No one in lower Puna is interested in using Chain of Craters Road, because many have to back-track to use it — plus it takes longer to travel, and that goes for ambulances, also. That’s more time taken away from family, and who has the extra money for gas?
Open Railroad Avenue all the way to Hilo, and pave it. Makes more sense, even though they say lava could cross the road. That is a moot issue. It did not stop the work of expanding Highway 130, which is in the same situation.
Build Railroad Avenue as an overpass and make it conducive with the landscape. Build it right the first time! Keep Chain of Craters Road for tourists and bicyclists.
Jeffrey Pietrzak
Pahoa
Starbucks controversy
As a member of the Pax Turcica Institute, which advocates interests of Turkic Americans, I am deeply disappointed by Starbucks’ surrender to racial bullying by the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA).
Last month, ANCA launched a defamation campaign targeting the posters, which depicted Turkish female dancers in traditional Turkish costumes, inside a Starbucks store in Los Angeles. While such posters reflect the coffee chain’s diverse cultural outreach, the Armenian American pressure group turned it into a hateful campaign to promote its unrelated genocide claims against Turkey.
ANCA alleged that the women depicted in these posters were Armenian. However, Tim Rose, a photojournalist who designed the posters, stated that he was not aware of that (being true) when he photographed the dancers at a festival in Turkey. In fact, the costumes shown on these posters are traditional Turkish garments known as bindalli, meaning “thousand-branched,” a reference to rose bushes, which symbolize love in Turkish poetry.
While ANCA’s anti-Turkish bullying is not new, Starbucks’ immediate removal of the posters in its L.A. store sets a dangerous precedent. Fearing criticism from a handful of radicalized Armenian Americans, Starbucks’ removal of the posters encourages cultural discrimination against the nearly 1 million Americans of Turkic descent.
Additionally, the fact that Starbucks runs countless stores in Turkey, a nation of 76 million people that also introduced coffee drinking to the world, makes the coffee chain’s surrender to “Turcophobia” ever more controversial.
It is a moral duty of every American to stand against hate. … I, therefore, urge Starbucks to reject the intimidation campaign and restore the Turkish posters in the store locations where they were removed.
Engin R.Turkalp
Honolulu
