San Juan Weekly Edicion #87

787-743-3346 / 787-743-6537

June 2 - 8, 2011

50¢

The

Isabela “Garden of the Northwest”

P24

After 50 years an official

Presidential Visit June 14, 2011 P3

Ballet at the U.P.R.

Fonsi

Presents “Gritar” P6

Puerto Rican Wins American Idol P19

P19

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The San Juan Weeekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Hurry Sundown

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Local News Mainland Pets Travel Viewpoint Fashion & Beauty Kitchen Enigmatic Portfolio

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Health & Science International Local Travel Modern love Business Games Horoscope Cartoons Sports

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Fashion & Beauty P15

Race to Space, Through the Lens of Time Enigmatic 18

A Love for the Ages, but Which One?

Prison Crisis

Modern Love P25

Mainland P8

Containing the Costs of Pet Care Pets P10

On Virginia’s Crooked Road, Mountain Music Lights the Way

Community Banks Lobby to Limit New Regulations Business P26

G-8 Leaders to Call for Tighter Internet Regulation

Travel P11 Business P27 San Juan Weekly Star has exclusive New Times English News service in Puerto Rico

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

After 50 years, an Official Presidential Visit E

veryone who has ever watched the telecast of a Puerto Rican Day parade or, better, participated in one, knows we have an exuberant, joyful way of showing off Puerto Rican pride.

This is not to suggest that those rooted in Ireland, Italy, Israel or other nations are shirkers when it comes to celebrating their heritage.

But in this veteran observer’s admittedly chauvinistic opinion, none match the unfettered ebullience of ‘Orgullo Boricua.’

And that pulsing, effervescent Puerto Rican pride will be on vivid display in June when Barack Obama becomes the first president to make an official visit to the Commonwealth since John F. Kennedy stopped by in December 1961.

That JFK visit 50 years ago was a sensation. The young and gracious 35th president was the first Catholic in the Oval Office. And the then mostly Catholic island fell in love and didn’t hesitate to express that unbounded affection when the president stepped off

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In those days, Latin America was a Cold War battlefield. The disastrous CIAsponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of neighboring Cuba had failed to oust Fidel Castro just a few months before; the Cuban missile crisis was a few months in the future; and Puerto Rico bristled with important military bases to protect the Panama Canal against Soviet encroachment.

To cement the strategic dominance of the U.S. in Latin America, JFK was working hand in hand with legendary governor Luis Muñoz Marín to sell his Alliance for Progress - an initiative that gave aid to countries that joined in the fight against communism - to the region.

Puerto Rico no longer has either the military bases or the strategic importance it did during those turbulent times. The canal no longer belongs to us, relations with Cuba are gradually thawing, and bases like Roosevelt Roads and the island of Vieques are gone.

Puerto Rico is a strategic backwater now. It does, however, retain something of great value to a president seeking re-election.

Although the island’s four million residents are citizens, they cannot vote in U.S. elections. But there are another four million Puerto Rican stateside residents who can.

About 725,000 of them now live in the key election battleground of Florida, and President Obama needs those voters if he is to retain the Sunshine State in 2012.

“With his visit, the president makes good on the promise he made during the presidential primaries in 2008 that he would return to Puerto Rico as president,” said the island’s Republican governor Luis Fortuño in the statement announcing the official visit slated for June. “Since the beginning of my administration, we have been working in close collaboration with the president and his administration to make this historic visit a reality.”

I have no doubt that the reception the president will receive will be far better than candidate Obama got during the 2008 Democratic primary in Puerto Rico, when he was soundly beaten by Hillary Clinton, a fact diplomatically unmentioned in the governor’s statement.

And if you think the rousing Irish welcome Mr. Obama received when he drank that pint of Guinness was impressive, wait until he dons a guayabera, eats arroz con pollo, washes it down with a splash of Puerto Rican rum, and salsas with the first lady.

“El Tigre” now as an adult and uncle celebrates the college graduation of his nephew. Senator Juan E. Hernandez Mayoral and his wife Vivian congratulating their nephew Erwin J. Riefkohl Hernández (Dora’s son) who graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University.

The young man is the exact image of his grandfather ex-Governor Rafael Hernández Colón.

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The San Juan Weekly

Obama’s History-Making Trip to San Juan

By Kenneth D. McClintock

I

t is a great experience to fly many hundreds of miles over the Atlantic Ocean to come to an island and be greeted in Spanish, to come to an island which has an entirely different tradition and history, which is made up of people of an entirely different cultural origin than on the mainland of the United States, and still be able to feel that I am in my country, here in this city and island, as I was in my country in Washington this morning.”

-President John F. Kennedy, Dec. 15, 1961

“

For over a decade, I’ve been struggling against the clock, the clock that marks the remaining time for the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s trip to Puerto Rico on Dec. 15-16, 1961. That trip marked the last time that a sitting President made an official visit to his fellow citizens in Puerto Rico.

Subsequent to that trip, President Johnson made a private trip on March 2-4, 1968 to Ramey Air Force Base, the now closed down Strategic Air Command facility in the northwestern city of Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. In the summer of 1976, President Gerald R. Ford attended the II G-6 Economic Summit in Dorado Beach, USA. Both trips, one a private recreational stay in which Johnson remained on the base with no contact with Puerto Rico, but for a one-minute phone call from by-then former Governor Luis Muñoz-Marín, the second a trip to the multilateral annual economic summit with no motorcades, speeches or other meaningful contacts with the people of Puerto Rico, fall far short from an official visit to Puerto Rico.

President Kennedy’s trip included an arrival ceremony with speeches by Gov. Muñoz and the President at the Isla Verde International Airport, a motorcade down Baldorioty de Castro Expressway into Old San Juan, a greeting to the assembled citizens from the balcony at La Fortaleza, a meeting with the Governor and top Puerto Rican officials, a formal official reception and dinner at La Fortaleza, an overnight stay in what is since known as the Kennedy Room at La Fortaleza, and an early morning departure to Caracas Since then, Vice Presidents, future Presidents and former Presidents have visited Puerto Rico several times, but no other sitting President has visited his nearly 4 million fellow Americans in Puerto Rico, while every state and territory has received multiple visits from sitting Presidents during the past 50 years. Thus, President Obama’s planned visit to Puerto Rico, to Puerto Ricans, will shatter the clock that was getting perilously close to what would have been a shamefully long, and depressingly symbolic span of time of benign neglect without a visit from Puerto Rico’s national leaders.

Since he became Governor, Luis For-

tuño has extended an invitation to President Obama every time that they have met once or twice a year for the past two and a half years. Congressman Pierluisi has also reminded the President of the need to visit Puerto Rico, which he visited twice during the local Pierluisi-led Obama primary campaign in 2008. Other Puerto Ricans in contact with the President, including Democratic Party State Chair Roberto Prats, YDA National Committeeman Francisco Domenech, National Committeeman Andrés López and myself have reminded the President of the invitation every time we’ve been able to greet or speak with him. As Secretary of State, I’ve urged the President’s staff (perhaps ad nauseum!) to organize a presidential trip to Puerto Rico.

During presidential campaigns past, I’d obtained commitments from prior presidential candidates, in private conversations with Vice President Gore, Senator Kerry, and Governor Dean, to visit Puerto Rico during their first term if elected President, which they weren’t (well, Gore was, but that’s another story...).

We will now see those who would perhaps rather not have Puerto Rico’s head of state visit us starting to minimize the importance of this historic visit. “It’s too short...what’s he going to do in two hours...”etc. They will not want us all to savor this historic event, but they will fail because the power of the presidency, the admiration of Barack Obama is greater than their pettiness.

His visit is important. The content of his trip will be meaningful. By coming with the membership of his White House Task Force on Puerto Rico’s Status he will be giving support to the invaluable work that the Task Force is carrying out to help Puerto Rico, not only in resolving its century-old status problem but in assisting in our economic development.

The immense majority of Puerto Ricans will be looking forward to watching Air Force One overfly San Juan and approach Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, triggering the beginning of this historic visit by their President on June 14, a day when Puerto Rico will have the opportunity of standing united in proudly welcoming Barack Obama to the place where the United States becomes a Caribbean nation.

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

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Ballet at the U.P.R.

By Max González

A

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

ctividades Culturales of the U.P.R. dedicated this program to the memory of David Marcano who devoted many years to the theatrical activity as sonidista. It was a grand night that covered a colorful panorama of all types of dancing. Ballet Concierto opens tha program with two spakling pas-de-deux superbly danced; Addio and Felicita. The first one done to the music of Mascagni from the opera Cavalleria Rusticana, Nicole Colón and Wayne Riport. Felicita, music by Leoncaballo from his opera Pagliacci. Bettina Ojeda and Omar Nieves. Both couples outdid themselves.

Ballet Teatro Nacional de P.R. followed the neo-classical line with the music by Bethoven of his popular Moonlight Sonata.

This solemn music was danced likewise by the excellent dancers of Ballet Nacional.

Nana Badrena has been shining

abroad with her spectacular works. Indeed, she brought fire with the Tangos done to the music sang by Nacha Guevara. Badrena took me back to Roland Petit years back. Yamilette Padilla has the line and tempers to atrike fire as a qualified Carmen. Gina Batista, Dillon Shifferly and David Soler reached the boiling point of this tango with no inhibitions. The same group with a different slant got involved with the romantic music of Rachmanninof that Badrena carried on with profound knowledge of musicality, thus Encuentro flowed with elegant artistry.

The solo dance Memories choreographed by Brian Sánchez, brought forward the talent and potentialities of Omar Nieves. This young boy throws himself into dancing with all his might every inch.

Hincapié is the alter-ego of Petra Bravo, choreography by “Rocio Espada”. She has a very repectable place in avant-garde contemporary dancing. Her everlasting

quizzical element becomes rather conventional in this work Trayectos, done to the delightful music of Reverie by Maurice Ravel. Ballet Nacional did it again. This time, the Pas-de-Trois from Legat’s comic ballet The Doll that later on became La Boutique Fantasque. In a toy shop, two clowns and the Fairy Doll are debating which one is the favorite. Nilda López, Odemar Ocasio and Omar Román brought the house down with an exhibition of authentic classic dancing.

The works by Rodney Rivera, Techo de Cristal and Arte de Morir, gave us the chance to appreciate new angles in this work. Rivera is like an electrical charge for

the dancers, employing the most demanding bosy language since Martha Graham, the greatest American choreographer in modern dance. The lamenting scene in El Arte de Morir is one of the greatest moment in the local repertory of contemporary dance. The excellent group of ballet Brío enhances the tragedy; Vega, Velázquez, Ortíz, Rodríguez, Lugo and the best corpse ever seen José Rivera.

The U.P.R. Dance Team, directed by Brian Sánchez participated in one work, Entre Dos. The vibrant group of twelve is reminiscent of the yers back presentations of Viva La Gente; non-proffesional performers.

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

7

Wine

Fiano Enjoys a Renaissance

By ERIC ASIMOV

F

OR one of the more dramatic examples of how the world of wine has changed in the last 25 years, consider the white wines of Italy.

Back then, a reasonable response to that suggestion might have been to simply laugh or sigh. Soave might have come to mind, and pinot grigio, though neither would have inspired particularly happy associations. Those white wines in bottles shaped like fishes worked better as campy art, while the memorably named Est! Est!! Est!!! and the various forgettable frascatis offered little pleasure beyond a well-chilled neutrality.

Now, though, the choices are almost embarrassingly rich. Soave has enjoyed a renaissance (try something from Pieropan, for example, to see how good it can be), and the northeastern regions of Alto Adige and Friuli-Venezia Giulia pour forth a river of delectable bottles. Liguria and Sardinia are making delicious vermentinos, while arneis from the Piedmont can be a pleasure. Even those old standbys, pinot grigio and Orvieto, can surprise you with their quality these days.

Many of the best Italian whites are made from grapes that were virtually unknown 25 years ago, like three from Campania: greco, falanghina and fiano.

These ancient grapes have been cultivated over millennia, but they had largely faded from prominence by the middle of the 20th century.

The wine industry of Campania has grown enormously in the last 25 years, however, and so has its focus on indigenous grapes. Back then, you would have been hard pressed to name even a handful of good producers whose wines made it to the United States. Now there are dozens, and once-obscure grapes like aglianico and the three whites have become far better known.

The most interesting to me is the fiano, partly because it’s stylistically versatile. It can play the role of those Italian whites of yore: clean, cold refreshment.

But it can offer more.

At base, it has a smoky, nutlike, spicy quality that I find very attractive, along with winning mineral flavors. Many producers have experimented with fiano, not simply to make fiano taste like more po-

pular wines but to determine which methods can make fiano more distinctively fiano-like.

For example, allowing wines to age on their lees, essentially dead yeast cells and other detritus from fermentation, is an old French technique for adding richness to white wines. Occasionally stirring the lees can add even more body. Many producers are using these methods with fiano, and the result is a richer texture, offering far more tactile pleasure, as if the wine had been aged in barrels — without the wood flavoring — even if the lees stirring took place in steel tanks.

To examine the current state of fianos from Campania, the wine panel tasted 20 bottles from recent vintages. Florence Fabricant and I were joined for the tasting by Brad Nugent, a sommelier at Ciano in the Flatiron district, and Gabrio Tosti di Valminuta, proprietor of De-Vino, a largely Italian wine shop on the Lower East Side.

We were highly impressed with the quality. The best wines had a captivating energy that was wonderfully refreshing.

Some were beautifully textured as well, possibly as a result of lees-stirring, and possibly because of barrel aging. (It’s not always clear which methods were used, unless you are in the cellar to observe.)

Others were straightforward and juicy, in a sort of polished pinot grigio style.

Those we didn’t care for lacked vivaciousness, as if the manipulations had been overdone, sapping the wine of its vigor. Thankfully, we liked most of them.

Our favorite was the 2007 Fiano di Avellino Radici from Mastroberardino, the most historic producer in Campania.

It was smoky, with a faint taste of honey, yet fresh and lively with that gripping texture that I found so intriguing. Only Gabrio raised a hint of an objection to this wine, saying it reminded him a little too much of a Meursault. I could think of worse things, I suppose.

If the Radici has the depth of flavor to improve with a few years of aging, its sibling, Mastroberardino’s straightforward 2009 Fiano di Avellino, our No. 4 bottle, is best consumed young, when its juicy flavors are at their lively peak.

Most fianos come from the inland area around the town of Avellino, hence the appellation Fiano di Avellino. But five

in our tasting came from regions closer to the Mediterranean, a warmer climate where the wines tend to be richer and rounder, like our No. 2 bottle, the 2008 Kràtos from Luigi Maffini. This comes from Paestum, an ancient Greco-Roman city south of the Amalfi coast. The wine was bright and tangy, with a rich texture and an attractive waxy, mineral aroma.

Incidentally, wines from Paestum are not eligible for higher-status appellations, and so generally are labeled I.G.T., for Indicazione Geografica Tipica, or typical of its place of origin.

The only other bottle from outside the Avellino zone to make our top 10 was the most unusual wine in the tasting, the 2004 Antece from De Conciliis, also from Paestum. Aside from being an older wine, the Antece, indicating it is made in the style of the ancestors, is fermented with the grape skins, as would be the case with a red wine, and then is aged in big barrels with the lees. The result is a spicy golden wine with aromas of coconut and honey and a pleasing, raspy texture, not at all typical of fiano but enjoyable nonetheless.

Other top wines that the panel enjoyed include the 2009 Fiano di Avellino from Feudi di San Gregorio, a very ripe yet refreshing style; the robust 2008 Fiano di Avellino from Terredora, and the tangy and complex 2009 Fiano di Avellino from Clelia Romano.

You can be sure that other worthy Italian whites will appear here and there, and if you retain any lingering prejudice against them I urge you to overcome those feelings. If a fiano doesn’t do it, might I suggest one of my new favorite wines, made from the kerner grape in Alto Adige? My friends, we have a great deal of pleasure ahead of us.

TASTING REPORT BEST VALUE Mastroberardino Fiano di Avellino, $22, ✩✩✩ ½ Radici 2007 Fresh, lively, textured and balanced with flavors of nuts, smoke and minerals. (Winebow, New York) Luigi Maffini IGT Paestum, $20, ✩✩✩ Kràtos 2008 Rich yet bright and tangy with waxy, mineral aromas and lingering flavors of ci-

trus and herbs. (Panebianco, New York) Feudi di San Gregorio, $21, ✩✩✩ Fiano di Avellino 2009 Ripe yet refreshing with rich flavors of citrus, nuts and herbs. (Palm Bay International, Boca Raton, Fla.) Mastroberardino, $19, ✩✩ ½ Fiano di Avellino 2009 Lively and juicy with a burst of fruit, flower and mineral flavors. (Winebow, New York) Terredora Fiano di Avellino, $25, ✩✩ ½ Terre di Dora 2008 Robust style, with plenty of fruit, smoke and mineral flavors. (Vias, New York) Clelia Romano Fiano di Avellino, $24, ✩✩ ½ Colli di Lapio 2009 Tangy and energetic, with fresh flavors of fruit, minerals and smoke. (Marc de Grazia Selection/Michael Skurnik Wines, Syosset, N.Y.) Pietracupa, $25, ✩✩ ½ Fiano di Avellino 2008 Richly textured with smoky, savory, nutlike flavors. (Panebianco, New York) Rocca del Principe, $19, ✩✩ Fiano di Avellino 2008 Ripe and perfumed with straightforward fruit flavors and a touch of heat. (Indigenous Selections, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)) De Conciliis I.G.T. Paestum, $35, ✩✩ Antece 2004 Atypical: rich and golden from skin maceration and barrel aging, spicy, coconut flavors (Vignaioli Selection, New York) Vesevo, $16, ✩✩ Fiano di Avellino 2007 Rich and creamy with flavors of minerals and citrus, and a touch of sweetness. (Vin Divino, Chicago)

Mainland 8

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

Prison Crisis T

hree photographs are part of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in which the Supreme Court orders California to release more than 30,000 inmates from state prisons to reduce dangerous overcrowding. Looking at the photos, there should be no doubt that the conditions violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

In the first two, men are packed into what looks like a makeshift shelter, with just a few guards monitoring as many as 200 prisoners. The third photo shows man-sized cages in which prisoners needing mental health treatment are held until a bed opens up. One inmate, Justice Kennedy writes, was found standing “in a pool of his own urine, unresponsive and nearly catatonic.”

The state has two years to reduce the overcrowding. Whatever means it chooses, it needs to rethink laws and policies that keep a large number of people in

prison for technical parole violations and others for minor, nonviolent crimes. Its limited prison space should be used for people who truly pose a threat to society.

The case, Brown v. Plata, grows out of two class-action lawsuits, one started in 1990 by seriously mentally ill prisoners, the other in 2001 by prisoners with serious medical conditions. In 2009, a panel of three federal judges ordered California to reduce its prison population to 110,000 from 156,000 (today there are more than 140,000). The system’s official capacity is 80,000.

In their ruling, the panel noted that 12 years after the first suit was brought — and despite 70 court orders for remedies — conditions had continued to deteriorate horribly. A special master appointed by the panel studied suicides in California prisons and found the rate was almost twice as high as the national average for prisons. Almost three-fourths of the suici-

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des were “probably foreseeable or preventable” because they involved “some measure of inadequate assessment, treatment or intervention.”

California challenged the panel’s ruling in the Supreme Court — especially the need for a limit on the size of the prison population. In Monday’s ruling, Justice Kennedy affirmed the panel’s finding that overcrowding is the “primary cause” of “severe and unlawful mistreatment of prisoners through grossly inadequate provision of medical and mental health care,” leading to “needless suffering and death.”

In separate dissents, Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito Jr. attack the court’s decision in terms so extreme they call for an answer. Justice Scalia accuses the majority of affirming “what is perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Justice Alito warns that the majority makes a “dangerous error” in relying on the three-

judge court’s finding that a large release of prisoners will not jeopardize public safety.

In fact, Justice Kennedy’s opinion is attentive to safety: California can give early release only to prisoners posing the least risk; it can divert low-risk offenders to community programs; and so on. And he bends over backward to let California decide how to solve the problem. The state retains the choice of how to reduce the overcrowding, through parole reform, construction of new prisons and otherwise. It can propose remedies not yet considered and ask the three-judge court for additional flexibility in using them.

But as Justice Kennedy reminds, if the Supreme Court did not impose a limit on California’s prison population, there would be an “unacceptable risk” of continuing violations “with the result that many more will die or needlessly suffer.”

And that would defy the Constitution.

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

9 Mainland

A City Prepares for a Warm Long-Term Forecast

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

T

he Windy City is preparing for a heat wave — a permanent one.

Scientists have told city planners based on current trends, Chicago will feel more like Baton Rouge than a Northern metropolis before the end of this century.

So, Chicago is getting ready for a wetter, steamier future. Public alleyways are being repaved with materials that are permeable to water. The white oak, the state tree of Illinois, has been banned from city planting lists, and swamp oaks and sweet gum trees from the South have been given new priority.

Thermal radar is being used to map the city’s hottest spots, which are then targets for pavement removal and the addition of vegetation to roofs. And air-conditioners are being considered for all 750 public schools, which until now have been heated but rarely cooled.

Across America and in Congress, the very existence of climate change continues to be challenged — especially by conservatives. The skeptics are supported by constituents wary of science and concerned about the economic impacts of stronger regulation.

Yet even as the debate rages on, city and state planners are beginning to prepare.

The precise consequences of the increase of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are hard to determine, but scientists are predicting significant sea level rise; more extreme weather events like storms, tornadoes and blizzards; and, of course, much more heat. New York City, which is doing its own adaptation planning, is worried about flooding from the rising ocean. The Navy has a task force on climate change that says it should be preparing to police the equivalent of an extra sea as the Arctic ice melts.

Some will occur in the near-enough term that local governments are under pressure to act. Insurance companies are applying pressure in high-risk areas, essentially saying adapt or pay higher premiums — especially in urban and commercial areas.

The reinsurance giant Swiss Re, has said that if the shore communities of four Gulf Coast states choose not to implement adaptation strategies, they could see annual climate-change related damages jump 65 percent a year to $23 billion by 2030.

Chicago called the Second City, is way out in front in terms of adaptation.

The effort began in 2006, under the mayor at the time, Richard M. Daley. He said he was inspired in part by the Kyoto international treaty for reducing carbon emissions, which took effect in 2005, and also by an aspiration to raise Chicago’s profile as an environmentally friendly town.

As a first step, the city wanted to model how global warming might play out locally.

Foundations, eager to get local governments moving, put up some money.

Climatologists took into account a century’s worth of historical observations of

daily temperatures and precipitation from 15 Chicago-area weather stations as well as the effect of Lake Michigan in moderating extreme heat and cold to come up with a range of possibilities based on a higher and lower range of worldwide carbon emissions.

The forecasts, while not out of line with global predictions, shocked city planners.

If world carbon emissions continued apace, the scientists said, Chicago would have summers like the Deep South, with as many as 72 days over 90 degrees before the end of the century. For most of the 20th century, the city averaged fewer than 15.

By 2070, Chicago could expect 35 percent more precipitation in winter and spring, but 20 percent less in summer and fall. By then, the conditions would have changed enough to make the area’s plant hardiness zone akin to Birmingham, Ala. But what would that mean in real-life consequences? A private risk assessment firm was hired, and the resulting report read like an urban disaster film minus Godzilla.

The city could see heat-related deaths reaching 1,200 a year. The increasing occurrences of freezes and thaws (the root of potholes) would cause billions of dollars’ worth of deterioration to building facades, bridges and roads. Termites, never previously able to withstand Chicago’s winters, would start gorging on wooden frames.

Armed with the forecasts, the city prioritized which adaptations save the most money and be the most feasible in the light of tight budgets and public skepticism.

Among the ideas rejected, Ms. MalecMcKenna said, were plans to immediately shut down local coal-powered energy plants — too much cost for too little payback.

Actions the city felt necessary but not affordable, it got help from the Civic Consulting Alliance, a nonprofit organization that builds pro bono teams of business experts.

The alliance convinced consulting firms to donate $14 million worth of hours to projects like designing an electric car infrastructure and planning how to move toward zero waste.

Mr. Daley embraced the project. He convened 20 city departments in 2010 and told them to weigh their planning dollars against the changes experts were predicting. The department heads continued to meet quarterly, and members of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration have said he is committed to moving the goals of the plan forward, albeit with an added emphasis on “projects that accelerate jobs and economic development.”

The city’s 13,000 concrete alleyways were originally built without drainage and are a nightmare every time it rains. Storm water pours off the hard surfaces and routinely floods basements and renders low-lying roads and underpasses unusable.

To make matters worse, many of the pipes that handle storm overflow also handle raw sewage. After a very heavy rain, if over-

flow pipes become congested, sewage backs up into basements or is released with the rainwater into the Chicago River — an emergency response that has attracted the scrutiny of the Environmental Protection Agency.

As the region warms, Chicago is expecting more frequent and extreme storms.

In the last three years, the city has had two intense storms classified as 100-year events.

The work planned for a six-point intersection on the South Side with flooding is a prototype. The sidewalk in front of the high school has been widened to include planting areas that are lower than the street surface.

This not only encourages more pedestrian traffic, but also provides shade and landscaping. These will be filled with drought-resistant plants like butterfly weed and spartina grasses that sponge up excess water and help filter pollutants like de-icing salts. Unabsorbed water will seep into storage tanks beneath the streets so it can be used later for watering plants or in new decorative fountains in front of the high school.

The bike lanes and parking spaces being added along the street are covered with permeable pavers, a weave of pavement that allows 80 percent of rainwater to filter through it to the ground below. Already 150 alleyways have been remade in this way.

The light-reflecting pavement includes recycled tires. Rubbery additives help the asphalt expand in heat without buckling and to contract without cracking.

Permeable pavers have to be cleaned or become clogged with silt and lose effectiveness.

New construction is no more expensi-

ve than traditional costs. Transforming one alleyway costs $150,000. Now “We can put a fire hose on it full blast and the water seeps right in.”

Awareness of climate change has filled Chicago city planners with deep concern for the trees.

Not only are they beautiful, said Ms. Malec-McKenna, herself trained as a horticulturalist, but their shade also provides immediate relief to urban heat islands. Trees improve air quality by absorbing carbon dioxide, and their leaves can keep 20 percent of an average rain from hitting the pavement.

Chicago spends $10 million a year planting 2,200 trees. 1991 to 2008, the city added so many officials estimate tree cover increased to 17.6 percent from 11 percent. The goal is to exceed 23 percent this decade.

For trees to reach their expected lifespan — up to 90 years — they have to be able to endure hotter conditions. Chicago has already changed from one growing zone to another in the last 30 years, and it expects to change several times again by 2070.

Off came ash trees that account for 17 percent of tree cover, more than any other tree. Gone, too, are the Norway maples, which provide the most amount of shade.

A warming climate make them susceptible to plagues like emerald ash disease.

Chicago is turning to swamp white oaks and bald cypress. It is like the rest of adaptation strategy, Ms. Malec-McKenna explains: “A constant ongoing process to make sure we are as resilient as we can be in facing the future.”

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The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

Containing the Costs of Pet Care

Pokie, a pit bull mix, ran up a $2,300 vet bill after swallowing some Advil and going into renal failure. While pet insurance is available, some owners prefer to set aside money for unexpected expenses.

By WALECIA KONRAD

D

EBORAH NOCELLA, a 43-yearold mother in Park Slope, says she feels as if she takes the family’s two dogs to the vet almost as often as she takes them to the neighborhood dog run.

Last year the Nocella family adopted two puppies, a pit bull mix named Pokie and a “puggle” named Browny.

Since then, Ms. Nocella estimates, the family has spent as much as $5,000 on veterinarian bills.

The dogs have had routine checkups and shots, of course. But then there were unexpected costs: Pokie arrived with a bad case of worms and kennel cough; some strange bumps on her paws turned out, after $700 worth of tests, to be warts. Browny has severe allergies and requires frequent trips to the vet.

Last November, Pokie swallowed Advil pills, which are toxic to dogs.

She went into renal failure and required emergency treatment overnight in a nearby animal hospital. The treatment was successful and Pokie is fine, but the incident set the Nocellas back $2,300.

Pet owners like Ms. Nocella are spending more on veterinarian bills than ever before. The American Pet Products Association estimates that Americans will spend $12.2 billion on veterinary care this year, up from $11 billion last

year and $8.2 billion in 2006.

Advances in veterinary medicine mean more extensive, and expensive, treatments are available for animals, but even ordinary costs like flea and tick protection can add up quickly. Here are some ways to curb those costs while still giving your pet the best of care.

LOW-COST ALTERNATIVES Local shelters often offer free or low-cost spaying and neutering for dogs and cats, said Dr. Louise Murray, vice president at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animal’s Bergh Memorial Animal Hospital in New York and author of “Vet Confidential.” To find a shelter near you, check the A.S.P.C.A. Web site at www.aspca.org/pet-care/ spayneuter.

Shelters where pets can be adopted may offer low-cost vaccinations and checkups. Mobile clinics, usually sponsored by local governments or animal protection agencies, also provide routine pet care for far less than a traditional vet would charge.

Veterinarian schools are another good source of low-cost care. Students are carefully supervised by qualified veterinarians, so pets receive quality care — everything from heartworm tests to major surgery, often for as little as a third of the price at a veterinarian’s office.

THE RIGHT VACCINES Keeping up with a pet’s shots will save money,

not to mention misery, in the long run by preventing many serious illnesses. But that does not mean a pet needs every vaccine available.

“A corgi who lives on the Upper East Side doesn’t need the same protocol as a Labrador in Connecticut,” Dr. Murray said. “Your veterinarian should customize a vaccine plan that fits your pet.”

A HEALTHY DIET Many vets sell prescriptions and high-quality pet food, but the same brands are sold for much less at many pet supply stores or Web sites. Still, do not skimp on quality.

“Cats, for example, are carnivores and aren’t meant to eat carbohydrates,” Dr. Murray said. “Feeding them only the cheap dried food can lead to diabetes or blockages that will cost you a lot more in the long run than the price you’ll pay for the right food.”

DRUG DISCOUNTS If a pet needs regular medication, discount chains such as Costco can be cheaper than a regular drug store or the vet’s office, said Dr. Sharon Friedman, a veterinarian at the Berkley Animal Clinic in Berkley, Mich.

But consult a veterinarian first, she advised, to be sure to buy the right medicine at the right dosage.

On the other hand, do not assume that tick and flea treatments or heartworm medications are cheaper at the big discount chains. Manufacturers want to distribute these medicines through veterinarians’ offices, so they often offer promotions and discounts there that are not available elsewhere.

“One company recently offered two free tick and flea treatments if you bought six doses. That worked out to be

less expensive than PetMeds, a popular online store, or Costco,” Dr. Friedman said. “It often pays to ask.”

Many Web sites sell high-quality pet medications at good prices, but a recent Food and Drug. Administration. investigation caught some sites selling counterfeit, unapproved or expired drugs.

Beware of any site that sells medications without requiring a veterinarian’s prescription.

The F.D.A. also recommends that consumers look for sites accredited as a Veterinary-Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Site, part of a voluntary accreditation program.

CONSIDER INSURANCE Pet health insurance is a booming industry, growing more than 20 percent every year, although only an estimated 3 percent of pet owners have bought policies. While Ms. Nocella has never seriously considered buying pet insurance, she does acknowledge it might have come in handy the day Pokie ate the Advil.

But like health insurance for humans, pet insurance can be complicated and highly restricted. Some policies will not cover older pets or genetic conditions that certain breeds are known to have, such as hip dysplasia in retrievers.

Others limit coverage to only one treatment per illness. So if your dog develops asthma, for instance, some policies will cover just the first trip to the vet although treatment will require multiple visits.

Prices for pet insurance can range from $12 to $50 a month, depending on the type and age of the pet and any preexisting conditions. In almost all cases the pet owner pays up front, then files a claim for reimbursement.

Costs are higher to insure older, sicker pets, or for policies that cover preventive care, such as vaccines and veterinarian office visits.

Many pet owners prefer to save for unexpected vet expenses in an emergency fund instead of paying premiums for coverage they may not use. Dr. Murray suggested putting away a little each week until savings reach $2,000 to $3,000.

“That’s the minimum you’ll need if a serious situation arises and your pet needs lifesaving care,” she said.

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

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On Virginia’s Crooked Road, Mountain Music Lights the Way

By SARAH WILDMAN

I

T starts with a well-worn fiddle, held in equally well-worn hands above a tapping black cowboy boot. Then in comes the banjo, plucked with steel finger picks, followed by the autoharp, the mandolin, the percussive beat of an upright bass. Another banjo grabs the melody, and suddenly the room is bursting with knee-slapping, country-porch music. A man in a crisp checked shirt gets up and starts to dance, bouncing out a complicated bumbumBAM bumbumBAM with his feet, moving smoothly hitting the floor on the downbeat.

It is Thursday night in Fries (pronounced freeze), Va., population 600, on the New River. In the century-old Fries Theater, the silk wallpaper, once a glorious aquamarine embossed with gold ferns, is faded. A sign promises movies for 10 cents, 25 cents on weekends, there hasn’t been a film here in years.

The Fries high school closed in 1989 after the cotton mill that gave birth to this hamlet in 1902 shut down. But where the economy has faltered, the local music culture is thriving.

Take a drive through the dozens of onestoplight towns along highways that twist through this region’s blue hills and green valleys, and you’ll find music is the manna.

Fries was my first stop on the music trail known as the Crooked Road — an official designation of Virginia since 2004. The heritage of the path can be found in this dance, in that tune, learned by ear from house to house and passed down through generations. The Road isn’t one single highway — it’s a 300-mile series of interconnected twolane byways and long stretches of Route 58, which skims Virginia’s North Carolina and Tennessee borders to Kentucky. The sound here is Appalachian: mountain music.

Over five days in April, I rambled along part of the Crooked Road and from Fries up to Ferrum and Floyd, back to Galax and out to Marion, dipping down toward Abington, and back to Galax again. I drove down roads that curve so dramatically locals joke you can see your own taillights as you round the bends.

The drive cuts through pastures dotted with cows and horses and weather-beaten barns, some abandoned and left to splinter. Many see the land they sold in recent decades now covered in Christmas trees, a boom industry that has changed the landscape. Churches rise up one after the other: Baptist, Pentecostal, Methodist.

We traveled 370 miles in all, what with switchbacks and retracing our steps to hear just one more tune. We were following songs that had blown like so many dandelion seeds across the Blue Ridge Mountains and through the foothills of Appalachia. Our lodgings included everything from a Hampton

Inn to an eco-minded auberge decorated by local artists, to a Ragtime-era hotel, recently restored to its former glory.

ALONG the way we stuffed ourselves with buttery biscuits, farm eggs and smokehouse Southern flavors that somehow taste different south of the Mason-Dixon line. Loved every minute of it; affinity for the music was immediate. When she ran onto the dance floor at the Floyd Friday Night Jamboree, the man next to me caught my arm. “Let her be,” he said. “We’re mountain people — we’ll take care of her as our own.” She woke each morning singing the twang of the banjo.

If there was a place where musical authenticity was born and nurtured, “raised up” as the people around here say, the Crooked Road is it. From the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons (the site of Johnny Cash’s last concert) and Clintwood, deep in coal country, to the farms near Floyd, music is still being made on fiddles and banjos, mandolins and guitars, dulcimers and autoharps. Every night you’ll find pick-up jams on front porches, performances in theaters and quartets that pack storefronts, an old courthouse and even a Dairy Queen. In summer the area is awash in festivals, from Dr. Ralph Stanley’s Memorial Day bluegrass festival in the mountains of Coeburn, Va., to the venerable Old Fiddlers Convention held every August.

Where old-time and bluegrass was born. Old-time is dance music, simpler and older than bluegrass. Bluegrass is filled with vocal harmonies, many made famous by newbies like Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch. It is suited more for seated audiences than the foot-stomping dance I saw in Fries, which is known as flatfoot. Both genres evolved from tunes brought by Scotch-Irish and German settlers who traveled down the wagon trails from Pennsylvania. They brought dulcimers and fiddles and later picked up the banjo from former slaves.

“It wasn’t real practical to bring an organ till there was a train,” said David Arnold, a Fries native whose wild white beard reached mid-sternum. I met him at a jam. It turned out he was the chairman of the Music Heritage Committee at the Grayson County Heritage Foundation in nearby Independence.

Nights we spent looking for music, but day there were farms to explore and hikes to be taken through gorgeous parks. Even there, you’ll find music. In June, at the Grayson Highlands State Park, home to herds of photogenic wild ponies, the annual Wayne C. Henderson guitar festival draws some of the best guitar players in a region packed with prodigies.

Henderson a local legend lives and makes guitars in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village Rugby (population 7) that’s not officially on the Crooked Road, though his shop is something of a pilgrimage site. (Eric Clapton owns one of his guitars.) I met him at one of those musical nights that seem to happen all the time performing at a community center in Galax while volunteers sold sacks of homemade gingersnap cookies for a dollar.

The event was a fund-raiser for a program called JAM (Junior Appalachian Musicians) which aims to get local children involved in their own roots by teaching them to play music. A kids’ string band called Loose Strings played to thunderous applause.

“Entertainment for mountain people,” Henderson said of the music he grew up with. He won the 1995 National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship.

“I got into making them because I couldn’t afford a nice Martin. Living in Appalachia, nobody’s got much money.”

Galax is a depressed city. The streets were quiet the afternoons we wandered through. Folks were around, though, once we started to look. Some were wiping their hands on napkins at the Galax Smokehouse, which is known for pork, but also serves an

excellent, juicy barbecue chicken. And then there’s the 1920s Rex Theater, which broadcasts live each Friday night on WBRF, a country and bluegrass radio station that provided the soundtrack to our trip.

The liveliest business is Barr’s Fiddle Shop. Packed floor to ceiling with fiddles, guitars, amps — as well as a candy-shop section stocked with fudge — Barr’s hosts music sessions, curious tourists and lesson seekers.

In the 1920s, the Hill Billies quartet got its start on the site — then a barbershop — and their sound, which came to be known as hillbilly music, swept the nation.

The best place to be to really see generational mix, was Floyd. So we bid farewell to Galax, popped a Wayne Henderson CD into the car stereo, and headed up the Crooked Road.

BEFORE we’d gone too far, we came across Harmon’s. The sign, calling it the“Boot Capitol of Virginia,” was enticing a sprawling store filled with stiff Wranglers, Stetson hats and endless rows of cowboy boots. Tucked in back a museum dedicated to regional lawenforcement: a hodgepodge of Civil War paraphernalia; news reports of a shooting at the Carroll County jail in 1912 that people still talk about; the 1920 Matewan mining massacre; and random bits, like a stuffed twoheaded calf. Even here there is a music exhibit, with a dulcimer and a banjo, and records cut by local musicians in the 1920s.

I tried on a pair of boots, shot with aqua up the shaft, rich mahogany leather at the bottom. The ladies at the cash register clucked with approval. Impulsively, I bought them and jumped back in our rented Ford.

I saw Ian with a Harmon’s bag. “I bought a Western-style shirt, $21,” he said, shrugging.

A few hours later we were picking up tickets for the Floyd Country Store Friday Night Jamboree $5 each we wandered down to Oddfella’s Cantina, a cozy restaurant with mismatched furniture, for salads (a relief after all the barbecue) washed down with local Shooting Creek beer. We skipped dessert to hit the jamboree.

The night began with the bluegrass gospel group Janet Turner & Friends. Tiny and snowy-haired, Ms. Turner plays a mean autoharp that pairs well with her sweet, high voice. “When I die, hallelujah, by and by, I’ll fly away,” she sang. Orli stood in the footlights, playing an air guitar; she and another toddler each began to dance.

Within seconds of the band’s closing note there was a rush for the dance floor. The audience had changed into double tap shoes, and left a sea of shoes in their wake. What had started out churchlike became a rumble and a roar. The Friday Night Old Time Band had begun. The music picked up, and the

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Comes from page 11 number of people in the store doubled, tripled, quadrupled. Every inch of wall space was undulating, whooping, stomping. More polished than the dancers at Fries, everyone knew how to flatfoot, and the tap shoes kept the time. I did my best to keep up, clicking my boots on the floor.

Catching my breath, I wandered back into the store, past swirls of giant lollipops and displays of Carhartt pants and jackets.

The room reeked of sweat; dancers were backed up to the ice cream counter. There I met Jackie Martin in pressed Liberty overalls.

The music she said, nearly teary, has kept her going through hard times. “It’s who we are and what we are,” Ms. Martin said. “I’m 66 years old and I can still flatfoot!”

The Floyd Country Store may be all about tradition, but the rest of town has a nouveau-hippie vibe, evident in places like the eco-minded Hotel Floyd, in events like Floyd Fest (a summer World Music festival) and in new galleries like Troika, which features decidedly unfolksy pottery, photography, wood pieces and drawings. Owned by the potter Silvie Granatelli, Gibby Waitzkin (a paper artist), and Susan Icove (a lighting

designer), Troika emerged out of a biannual gallery crawl called 16 Hands, which takes visitors to the studios of artists who have moved to the region over the last 30 years or so, lured by affordable property and lovely vistas. In the process, they have pushed Floyd toward a creative economy that has buoyed it beyond the economic hardship experienced elsewhere on the Road. (Abingdon, about two hours from Floyd, has that energy too; a regional arts center called Heartwood is due to open in June.) We visited Ms. Granatelli’s studio, which is set in a swath of scenery that feels like an Andrew Wyeth painting: lazy cows on the hillside above her white clapboard house, a serene creek below.

In the morning, after stacks of hot cakes, we got on the Blue Ridge Parkway and headed an hour south to the Blue Ridge Music Center on the Virginia-North Carolina border. Run by the National Park Service and the National Council for the Traditional Arts and created by Congress, the Music Center has hiking trails, a marvelous Mid-Day Mountain Music series that runs from May through October and an amphitheater.

“Roots of American Music,” a new interactive exhibition with instruments, photography and stories trace the history and

sound of the region created by Joe Wilson, chairman of National Council of Traditional Arts and author of “A Guide to the Crooked Road: Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail,” and designed by Ralph Applebaum, known for the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Ms. Marshall recommended we head to the Blue Ridge Institute & Museum, in Ferrum.

The drive to the museum was on one of the most breathtakingly twisting roads in a region of shockingly complicated driving. On arrival, we were pleased to find a child-friendly 19th-century working farm. A woman named Rebecca was dressed as the farmer’s wife; there were oxen and lambs to pet, horses, a blacksmith and a woman fiddling away on an ancient violin. Black-and-white photography in another room captures Appalachian women in the middle of the last century.

In Marion main street is darkened by shadows of empty storefronts. On the edge of town, a Wal-Mart looms. The Lincoln Theater and the Francis Marion hotel next door are lone standouts in a time of deep economic upheaval. Built in 1929 by the furniture factory owner Charles Wassum, the Lincoln is a masterpiece of Mayan revival; it stood empty from 1977 until a renovation in 2004.

The hotel was rehabilitated from a boarding

house to its former glory five years ago. After checking into our neat room, we had a bite to eat and ran into the Lincoln for its monthly event, Song of the Mountains, a collaboration between the Lincoln Theater and PBS. The theater is gorgeous — Art Deco murals on the walls, depicting scenes of Southern history. Sweet Potato Pie, a fivewoman bluegrass band, was on stage. The sound was amazing.

Carter Family Sound took the stage next and played a string of songs in homage to the first families of bluegrass and country music. I met the group in the lobby after their set, and they laughed I’d brought a 2-yearold. The place for little ones is the Carter Family Fold, in Hiltons, a few hours down the road. On Saturday nights, old-time bands pack the house and children run free.

You could spend a whole summer here, going to jams every night, seeking out sitdown venues like the Fold, and the Lincoln, standing-room-only music sessions in stores, and hiking the trails along New River.

I kept thinking of the song playing when we’d left the Fries session that first night. “Y’all come see to us now and then.”

And we promised ourselves that we would.

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

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The San Juan Weeekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

LETTERS Obama v. Osama Bin Laden’s life was certainly guaranteed by neither the US Constitution nor by the Geneva Convention. But the President’s decision not to retrieve the rascal in one piece suggests concern over what the charismatic leader might’ve had to say in open court. When interviewed by for the BBC, his slaughtering of civilian men, women and children was challenged. His calm reply was that it’s appropriate to do to the Americans and the West what they’re doing to his people. Now that makes sense. If such a thing can be shown, wouldn’t the defendant have then turned out prosecutor?

According to Wikipedia, “ESTIMATES OF CIVILIAN DEATHS AS A CONSEQUENCE OF THE [Iraq] SANCTIONS RANGE FROM 170,000 TO OVER 1.5 MILLION, MOST OF THEM CHILDREN.” And when young Fidel Castro was put on trial, his famous La historia me absolverá (History Will Absolve Me) speech, that characteristically lasted all day, won him the hearts and minds of the Cuban populace.

Agustín Manzano, Santurce

Uneducation Commonwealth Policy No, we’ll never get public libraries. Unless perchance the feds set them up. But in the States libraries are always a local affair.

What would happen if there were a library in every neighborhood here? For one thing, we’d gain access to better sources of information than La Comay et al. And we’d all learn that crime stems from socioeconomic injustice---not from insufficiency of family values, perreo lyrics or not enough religion: the nonsense our politicians tongue-in-cheek tell us, though they, being well-educated scions of privilege, certainly know better.

Yes, we’d become politically aware, the genie would be out of the bottle. And then there’d be no way the bums currently at Fortaleza and Capitolio would ever again get themselves reelected. No, we’ll never get public libraries.

Bob Harris, Condado

Abuse of Power The Governor’s insistence that both the police and the students misbehaved at UPR, with its implication that one cancels out the other, is outrageously specious.

When the activists disregarded the rights of others, that was unlawful mischief. But the police assault on citizenry at the Sheraton, Capitolio and UPR, and Fortuño’s

patting them on the head for it, that was tyranny.

Bob Harris, Condado

Inflationary Greed It’s clear as daylight that third (MEDICARE) and fourth party intervention (private insurance companies) must have an inflationary effect on the cost of healthcare. That is precisely why our system is as expensive as it is; we spend more money on it on a per capita or GDP basis than any other country in the world. Unfortunately, it’s a political hot potato floating in an ocean of ideology and self interests. What older person still in his right mind would ask for the repeal of Medicare? Not as long as another man’s taxes are paying for it. Any politician who wants an early retirement only has to mess around with Medicare benefits to see his wish fulfilled instantly. I bet if JFK came back from the grave and called us to ask what we could do for our country, and not what the country could do for us, he’d be given a one way ticket to GOP purgatory, courtesy of the Democratic Council of Elders. (Or the Puerto Rican Committee for Perpetual Federal Income Tax Exemption.)

Since the inception of Medicare the average income of a doctor has outrageously outpaced that of his own patients. For a healthcare system that constantly claims to be the best in the world, the statistics published by very credible health watchers suggest otherwise. The American taxpayer may not be getting the best deal for his money. Americans spend more on healthcare than any other country in the world yet have a life expectance that is near the bottom of the western world. Life expectancy at birth ranks 21st out of the 30 member countries of the OECD. In per capita number of acute care beds it ranks 23rd. The list goes on, too long for my letter.

So when Dr. Ron Paul argues for smaller government I am amazed at how a keen mind as his cannot fathom that getting out of Medicare, like his idea of doing away with the IRS, may reduce costs but would likely produce social havoc. Our Founding Fathers may not have envisioned health care to the elderly as a responsibility of the State but they never figured on having to compete with Socialism or Communism for the hearts and souls of his countrymen during the Great Depression, which thanks to FDR’s Social Security they never got. Who in his right mind would take away from the elderly something that poorer nations, with as much individual freedoms as ours, have been able to hold in the same esteem as a free public education?

He is not the only one amazing me in this respect. I have read books by prestigious economists who have joined the Doomsday ranks and have specifically pointed to the rising costs of Medicare relative to Gross Domestic Product as the most urgent problem facing our Nation. Yet none of them has suggested that Socia-

lized Medicine is the only feasible alternative because it is the only way to drive Greed out of the healthcare system. Perhaps if now complacent beneficiaries of Medicare understood that this free lunch cannot last forever, they would get in touch with the good Dr. Paul to have him champion their cause. To do this he would have to overcome his lifelong ideologic notions of limited government but I guess that would be like expecting pears from an elm tree.

Ed Martínez, San Juan

Lowering the Bar The gays all want to get married now and half the straights don’t and the tab for the average wedding in the States runs $26K, not including the divorce. We live in a quicksand of nonsensicality concocted by lawyers.

Lisa Bay, Caparra Heights

Motherhood in Times of Strawberries Now it’s legal in Puerto Rico to abandon your children. And adoption’s been streamlined. Next some corporate octopus enters stage and Island babies become a major export and Hacienda collects taxes and the politicians bribes. All the brainchild of the First Lady.

How maternal of her.

Agustín Manzano, Santurce

Abject Colonials In taíno days dogs were truly pets in Borikén. Because they didn’t bark, they were a breed that couldn’t.

But then we, belittlers of whatever happens to be ours, shipped in the noxious varieties from Europe. Now they’ve proliferated and are driving us nuts.

Ana Badillo,Hato Rey

The San Juan Weekly Send your opinions and ideas to: The San Juan Weeekly PO BOX 6537 Caguas PR 00726 Or e-mail us at:

sanjuanweeklypr@gmail.com Telephones: (787) 743-3346 · (787) 743-6537 (787) 743-5606 · Fax (787) 743-5500

San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

Hurry Sundown

By CATHY CATHY HORYN

T

HE sole purpose of my in-basket this week seems to bbe to goad d me iinto llooking ki at fasf hion from the Cannes Film Festival. Everybody from Armani to those Chopard people has been sending e-mails, and, I swear, I don’t know why Jude Law needed to borrow a white gold Chopard watch. Didn’t he bring his own? And who’s going to see it under the cuff of his tux, anyway?

That’s why I don’t look at this kind of e-mail until I absolutely have to. They make me crazy.

You, too? I know. Looking at some of the pictures from Cannes, I can’t tell if I’m watching a rerun of “Gunsmoke” or “The Love Boat.” I do know that if the jury were to give a Miss Kitty award for the worst dawggone dress, it ought to go to Penélope Cruz, in a lavender, corseted Marchesa. There are just too many people on the poop deck of the “Love Boat” to name.

But you know who you are!

Because of the duration of Cannes, and the

number of events — not just the premieres and the AmfAR AIDS gala on Thursday, but also daily photo calls and parties — the festival has outpaced Oscars iin style.

You see an entire d the h O l Y i catalog l of trends, from Jessica Chastain’s sweet Peter Pan-collared Louis Vuitton dress and Inès de la Fressange’s relaxed Carven look with sandals, to the sporty Riviera glamour of Milla Jovovich’s Prada polo top and long skirt.

The amount of white on the red carpet (Uma Thurman in Dolce & Gabbana, Diane Kruger in Calvin Klein) merely offered proof of an existing trend, rather than producing an inspiring attitude.

We look at pictures from Cannes for many reasons, but surely one is to appreciate what looks flattering on women of different ages. If you have Eva Herzigova’s legs, you can wear hot pants and red stilettos — no problem. The same goes for the abstract nothing-of-a-dress worn by the stylist Giovanna Battaglia. But some of the couture froth worn by actresses was aging. A notable exception was Jane Fonda in a sleek Marios Schwab.

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FASHION & BEAUTY

Kitchen

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The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

Cooking Temperature for Pork Is Lowered

By WILLIAM NEUMAN

T

HE other pink meat?

That could be pork’s new slogan after the United States Department of Agriculture on Tuesday said it was lowering its safe cooking temperature to 145 degrees, from the longtime standard of 160. The new recommendation is in line with what many cookbook authors and chefs have been saying for years.

“History is littered with examples of what people thought was dogma and then dogma changed,” said David Chang, the

chef and owner of the pig-happy Momofuku restaurants in New York. “Everyone thought the sun revolved around the earth, too.”

The agency said that after pork hits the target internal temperature, it should be allowed to rest for three minutes, while its temperature rises a few more degrees.

That should be enough to kill any harmful bacteria, but the meat should be juicy and may look pink. The same temperature guidelines already apply to whole cuts of beef, lamb and veal.

Other recommendations are unchanged. Ground pork, beef, lamb and veal should be cooked to 160 degrees, the agency said, and poultry should be cooked to 165 degrees.

“Finally, people from the U.S.D.A. start cooking themselves, and they realize that if you have a lean piece of meat it gets tough and dry,” at the higher temperature,

The Upside of Rhubarb

By MELISSA CLARK

T

O cook the rhubarb or not to cook the rhubarb: that was the question I had when contemplating an upsidedown cake.

Whether it’s better to take the time to simmer the stalks and reduce their juices, and avoid a sodden cake; or to chop them, and leave them raw and a bit chewy?

Recipes go either way. I thought about the pineapple upside-down cakes I’ve made, always with cooked, canned fruit. Then there was the plum polenta upside-down cake I baked with a simmered compote that worked out well, too.

So I quickly sautéed rhubarb in butterscotch before spooning it into the pan,

but when it emerged from the oven, the fruit had disintegrated, cleaving to the panlike a mushy, mealy glaze. With soft cake and soft topping, there was nothing for my teeth to do but bear witness to a failed experiment.

Next, I went raw, tossing diced rhubarb with a little cornstarch to bind and thicken any excess juices. I left on the red peels to give the cake a pretty sunset glow and help keep the pieces intact for a nicer texture.

Baked and unmolded, it resembled a pale pink mosaic atop velvet-crumbed and vanilla-infused cake. The rhubarb was tangy and tender, firm enough to give me something to chew over.

Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake Time: 1 hour 45 minutes 2 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature, more to grease pans 1 1/2 pounds rhubarb, rinsed and sliced into 1/2-inch cubes (about 4 cups) 2 teaspoons cornstarch 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar 1/2 cup light brown sugar

2 cups cake flour 1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt Zest of 1 lemon, grated 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 4 large eggs 1/3 cup sour cream 2 teaspoons lemon juice.

said Jacques Pépin, the chef and cookbook author.

Mr. Pépin said that the 145-degree recommendation was fine for leaner cuts like a pork loin, but that cuts with more fat would often be braised longer and reach higher temperatures. “People are crazy about pork belly,” he said. “It has to be cooked for hours and hours. When you do a pig’s head or pig’s feet, that has to be cooked a long time, braised.”

Nathan Myhrvold, an author of “Modernist Cuisine,” said the Department of Agriculture has long had an attitude that he described as “very paternalistic, father knows best, we can’t let those dumb consumers know the real thing.” The new guidelines, he said, are closer to what regulators have long told chefs and food manufacturers.

Chris Cosentino, the chef and owner of Incanto in San Francisco, said he was ex1. Heat oven to 325 degrees. Line the bottom of a 9-inch springform pan with parchment paper. Butter the paper and sides of the pan. Wrap two layers of foil under the pan, and place it on a buttered baking sheet.

2. In a medium bowl, mix rhubarb, cornstarch and 1/2 cup granulated sugar.

3. Mix the brown sugar and 1/2 stick butter in a pan over medium heat. Whisk until smooth and bubbling, about 2 minutes. Sift together the cake flour, baking powder and salt.

4. Whip 2 sticks butter in a mixer with a paddle attachment for 2 minutes. With your fingers, blend the remaining 1 cup sugar with lemon zest until the mixture is uniform in color.

Cream together with the butter at medium-high speed until it is light and fluffy, about 4 minutes, stopping to scrape down the bowl halfway through. Add the vanilla and mix well. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Mix in the sour cream, then the lemon juice. (It’s O.K. if the mixture looks curdled.) With the mixer set to low speed, add the flour mixture, 1/4 cup at a time, until well combined. Scrape down the mixer bowl in between the additions.

5. Pour the brown-sugar

cited by the change. After all, he sells a raw pork dish made from the flesh of Spanish pigs fed with acorns.

He said adventurous eaters shouldn’t get their hopes too high. “I don’t foresee the U.S.D.A. agreeing with serving chicken sashimi anytime soon,” he said. mixture into the cake pan, then spoon in the rhubarb and its juices. Spoon in the batter so it covers all of the rhubarb. Smooth out the top.

6. Bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes, or until the top of the cake is firm to touch and a toothpick stuck in the middle comes out without any large, moist crumbs.

7. Place the pan on a wire rack, and cool for 15 minutes. Run a knife around the cake, place a plate on top of the pan and turn it upside-down. Release the cake from the pan while still warm or else it will stick.

Yield: 8 servings.

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

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Kitchen

Double Asparagus Vinaigrette Time: 30 minutes Kosher salt 1 1/2 to 2 pounds asparagus 1 shallot, peeled 2 tablespoons tarragon leaves 2 tablespoons at-leaf parsley leaves Juice of 1 lemon 1/4 cup grapeseed oil 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil.

1. Bring medium pot of salted water to boil. Trim and peel the asparagus and reserve the trimmings. Add trimmings and shallot to the pot, lower heat and simmer until almost tender, about 7 minutes. Add tarragon and parsley and continue cooking just until the herbs are bright green, about 1 minute.

Drain.

2. Transfer the herbs and trimmings to a blender or food processor, add 2 ice cubes and 1/4 cup water, and purĂŠe until smooth. Add a little more water to the blender if necessary. Add the lemon juice and a pinch salt.

Then, with the motor running, add the grapeseed and olive oils.

Adjust the seasoning if necessary, then strain through a sieve, reserving the dressing and discarding the rest.

3. Bring large pot of salted water to boil. Put in the asparagus stalks, in batches if necessary, lower heat and simmer until just tender and still bright green, about 5 minutes. Drain on towels and serve with vinaigrette spooned over.

Yield: 6 servings.

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The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

Race to Space, Through the Lens of Time

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

I

t was the spring of 1961. President John F. Kennedy, speaking of new frontiers and projecting the vigor of youth, had been in office barely four months, and April had been the cruelest.

On the 12th, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth — one more space triumph for the Soviet Union. Though the flight was not unexpected, it was nonetheless deflating; it would be more than a month before Alan Shepard became the first American in space, and that was on a 15-minute suborbital flight. On the 17th, a force of anti-Castro exiles, trained by the C.I.A., invaded communist Cuba at the Bay of Pigs — a fiasco within 36 hours. Mr. Kennedy’s close aide Theodore Sorensen described him on the 19th as “anguished and fatigued” and “in the most emotional, self-critical state I had ever seen him.”

At one meeting, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general, “turned on everybody,” it was reported, saying: “All you bright fellows. You got the president into this. We’ve got to do something to show the Russians we are not paper tigers.”

At another, the president pleaded: “If somebody can, just tell me how to catch up. Let’s find somebody — anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there.” Heading back to the Oval Office, he told Mr. Sorensen, “There’s nothing more important.”

So, 50 years ago, on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress and a national television audience, declaring: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

There it was, the challenge flung before an adversary and to a nation on edge in an unconventional war, the

beginning of Project Apollo.

Echoes of this time lift off the pages of “John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon” (Palgrave Macmillan), a new book

by John M. Logsdon, a political scientist and longtime space policy specialist at George Washington University. He has drawn on new research in archives, oral histories and memoirs available in recent years to shed new light on the moon race.

The famous speech came after five weeks of hand wringing, back-channel memos and closed-door conferences, often overseen by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. In those meetings NASA and Pentagon officials, scientists and engineers, budget analysts and others decided that sending astronauts to the Moon by the end of the sixties was the country’s best shot at overcoming the Soviet post-Sputnik command of the orbital front in the cold war.

But, Dr. Logsdon said in an interview last week, the new material highlighted some recurring themes that had been overlooked, like Mr. Kennedy’s return, time and again, to the idea of engaging the Russians in a cooperative venture, his continuing support of the project through a time of doubt, and how little was known then of Soviet capabilities and intentions.

Most of all, Dr. Logsdon said, hindsight had made him aware of his blindness to Apollo’s implications for the long run.

He said he had been wrong, in a 1970 book on the subject, to think that the lunar decision “can be generalized to tell us how to proceed toward other “great new American enterprises.”

And like many others who for years lived and breathed the project, he finally had to recognize that the “impact of Apollo on the space program has on balance been negative.” It was, he explained, not the beginning of human voyages to Mars and lunar bases but “a dead-end undertaking in terms of human travel beyond the immediate vicinity of this planet.”

Of course, it takes two to have a race.

A The American president could not be sure R the Russians had a lunar-landing program.

Ther was no evidence that the Russians There were building facilities for a booster capabl of launching people to the Moon. pable Was the president just double-dog-daring the to come out in the schoolyard and them sho their stuff? show An intelligence report in 1962 had no nothing to add, short of speculating that

“the chances are better than even that a lunar landing is a Soviet objective.” Only in 1964 did intelligence agents detect signs that there was indeed someone to make it a race.

Initially, NASA set its sights on late 1967 for the landing attempt. As spending escalated, Apollo ran into its first sharp criticism in Congress, the science establishment and the news media in 1963. “Even some of the Kennedy advisers were eager to slip the end-of-decade date and relieve the pressure, mainly to save money,” Dr. Logsdon said.

These “winds of change,” as he put it, may have motivated Kennedy’s renewed invitation in a United Nations address in September to the Russians to join in a cooperative mission. He had proposed this informally to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, at a meeting in Vienna shortly after his 1961 address to Congress. It was rejected out of hand. Russian accounts after the cold war have linked the rejection to a fear of exposing the technological shortcomings of the country’s program.

Walter A. McDougall, the historian who wrote “The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age,” has suggested that Kennedy’s periodic messages on space cooperation “were just exercises in image-building.” Dr. McDougall took a more skeptical view of spaceflight’s bearing on geopolitics, more in line with President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address on the spreading influence of the militaryindustrial complex in national affairs.

Dr. Logsdon countered that the American achievements had by 1963 progressed to the point, as Mr. Sorensen said, that there was “a very real chance that we were even with the Soviets.” And since the Cuban missile crisis the year before, it was noted, Soviet-American relations had improved.

McGeorge Bundy, the national secu-

rity adviser, talked tactics with the president. Either press for cooperation with the Russians, he suggested, or continue to use their space effort as “a spur to our own.” In a memorandum, Mr. Bundy said that “if we cooperate, the pressure comes off” regarding the decade goal, and “we can easily argue that it was our crash effort in ’61 and ’62 which made the Soviets ready to cooperate.”

In the year of criticism, Kennedy wavered but never backed away from his lunar commitment. Visiting Cape Canaveral on Nov. 16, 1963, he seemed to enjoy seeing preparations for the next astronaut flights. Days later, on Nov. 22, in the speech Kennedy never lived to give in Dallas, he intended to say “the United States of America has no intention of finishing second in space.”

The goal was reached on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and then Buzz Aldrin stepped on the gray surface of the Sea of Tranquillity. Since the last of six landings, in 1972, no one has been back.

No presidents since have felt the need or believed they could marshal political support for comparable undertakings. NASA has achieved dazzling successes exploring the solar system and the cosmos with robotic craft. But the agency was driven at the outset by the challenge of human flight to the Moon. At the conclusion of Apollo, Dr. Logsdon wrote, “NASA entered a four-decade identity crisis from which it has yet to emerge.”

In the book and interview, Dr. Logsdon sought solace in thinking that flying to the Moon at least “will forever be a milestone in human experience, and particularly in the history of human exploration, perhaps eventual expansion.” Even critics like Dr. McDougall conceded that “perhaps Apollo could not be justified, but by God, we could not not do it.”

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

i s n o F s Lui

19

T

he singer, musician, n, composer and Puerto Rican producer, Luis Fonsi, has surprised his fans who followed him through the Internet when he announced the release of “Gritar”, the firstt single from his highly anticipatedd new album. The Latin Grammyy winner shared a 20-second preview w of the new single to be released to t radio worldwide and will be availavaiilil able for digital and mobile download ad which began last April.

Luis Fonsi, who has established hed himself as one of the most popular ular Latin artists on the internet with more than 5 million followers in social sites, used both, Twitter and Facebook accounts as a platform to announce the launch of the new single. The reaction

which whiich goes on sale this summer.

Thee project is one of the most anticipated antticipated releases of the year, preceded preeceded by the great success of the th previous artist album, “Palabras Del Silencio”, an album lab that ccould go potentially platinum and gold gol in the U.S., Spain and sevfrom his fans has been overwhelming eral countries in Latin America, and around the world hailing hear the new included the international mega-hit song.

“No Me Doy Por Vencido” topping to “Gritar” is the first official single the # 1 radio show in the U.S. for 21 from the new album by Luis Fonsi weeks and became the pop song of the

decade according to t the report “End Of Decade “Billboard magazine.

Fonsi has devised devi his new material is presented through an online conference for the different modes as well as Latin America.

Remember that his last album, Palabras del Silencio, achieved platinum and gold in several Spanish-speaking countries as well in North America, and as if this were not enough, hit up No managing to stay in the first place for many weeks in different countries.

Puerto Rican Wins American Idol

T

McCreery was born to Judy (née Cooke) and Michael McCreery in Garner, North Carolina. His father was born in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico to a Puerto Rican mother from San Juan and an American father. “Yes, I’m Puerto Rican,” said McCreery with a smile. “I have a little bit of J.Lo in me.

he bass voiced and coun-try music singer Scotty McCreery, won the tenth edition of “A i Id l” after ft b i of “American Idol”, being v viewed by over a 22.5 million of sp spectators which witnessed his v victory over Lauren Alaina, whom h been considerate as the favohas ri by the contest judges in the rite final round. McCreery, aged 17, em embraced the contestants of the current cu “Idol” and then his family af after the host Ryan Seacrest declare him as the winner of the televised ed singing red co i d i the h season with i h hi contest.

McCreery has won the audience during his b bass v voice and elegant appearance in the scenery that hides his youth. He’s the th first country music performer who won the contest since Carrie Underwood claimed the title back in 2005 and became the “Idol” most successful winner in terms of money making, records and tours. As a child, Scotty personifies the legendary singer Elvis Presley and learnt how to play guitar at the age of 15. His father is Puerto Rican.

HEALTH & SCIENCE

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The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

When Doctors Are Called to the Rescue in Midflight

By KATIE HAFNER

D

r. Matthew Rhoa is still haunted by one of his lowest moments as a physician. Several years ago, on the first leg of an international flight, he was just settling in for a nap when a flight attendant came on the public address system to ask, “Is there a doctor on the plane?”

Dr. Rhoa, who lives in San Francisco, didn’t push his call button. “As a gynecologist, I always waited for another doctor,” he said. “There’s never a need for a Pap smear at 30,000 feet.”

He fell asleep, only to be awakened an hour later by a second call for medical help.

This time he answered, and at the back of the plane he found two anxious parents with their 18-month-old toddler, who had a cast on her broken leg and was crying inconsolably.

The girl’s toes were blue. Limbs can often swell in flight, and it was clear that the cast was much too tight. Dr. Rhoa slit the cast and pried it open. The girl stopped crying at once.

“I have been riddled by guilt to this day,” said Dr. Rhoa, who now promptly answers every call for medical help on a plane.

“I never want that feeling again of a kid suffering like that when I could have done something sooner.”

Since the earliest days of commercial aviation, airlines have coped with medical emergencies in flight by calling on physicians who happen to be passengers. And as more people travel by air, the number of emergencies has risen accordingly.

“Passenger health is becoming more and more of an issue, because of increased life expectancy and more people flying with pre-existing conditions,” said Dr. Paulo Alves, a vice president at MedAire, a company that provides crew members with medical advice from physicians on the ground.

MedAire, which advises more than 60

airlines around the world, managed about 19,000 in-flight medical cases for commercial airlines in 2010. Although few were lifethreatening, 442 were serious enough to require diverting the plane — and 94 people died onboard.

The numbers reflect a fraction of the actual number of in-flight emergencies. The Federal Aviation Administration does not track in-flight medical episodes, and airlines are not required to report them.

Airborne calls for medical assistance pose a singular challenge for physicians, who find themselves suddenly caring for a stranger whose history they don’t know, often with a problem well outside their specialty, in a setting with limited equipment but no shortage of onlookers scrutinizing their every move.

And they do this for no compensation.

(The fact that Good Samaritan laws generally protect them from lawsuits is a small saving grace.)

So it is little wonder that many physicians hesitate before responding to an emergency call.

Three years ago, Dr. Peter Freed, a psychiatrist in Manhattan, answered a call for a physician during a cross-country flight. A passenger had just had a seizure. Dr. Freed told the flight attendant he had not practiced general medicine since his residency. Still, he was the only doctor to respond, and the flustered crew member told him she was grateful for any help at all.

The passenger, a woman in her 30s traveling from Europe, told Dr. Freed she had a longstanding seizure disorder. He had her take her medication and remained with her, hoping she would be fine for the rest of the flight. But after another 20 minutes, she developed the uncontrollable shaking of a grand mal seizure and fell unconscious.

He asked to speak to a neurologist on the ground, and within minutes the pilot was able to get one on the radio. But as Dr. Freed

recalled, he was barred from the cockpit for security reasons and could not speak directly with the specialist.

“I talked to the flight attendant, who talked to the captain in the cockpit, who talked to the doctor,” he said.

Next came the question that many physicians who answer in-flight emergency calls face: Should the plane be diverted to a nearby airport? Ultimately, the decision rests with the pilot, but the pilot looks to the medical expert for guidance. And it is a decision that other passengers await most anxiously.

After calculating that it would take as long to divert the plane as to reach their destination, Dr. Freed decided against it.

Once the plane landed, an emergency medical team whisked the woman away. The pilot had Dr. Freed stand with him while passengers disembarked. As people filed past, they shook Dr. Freed’s hand and thanked him. But while that response was gratifying, the episode still felt unresolved.

“Doctors typically like to hear how cases end,” Dr. Freed said. “But I didn’t hear a thing. I never even knew her name. I still think about her.”

Physicians are not completely without backup in an airborne emergency. The F.A.A. requires that flight attendants undergo CPR training and that all United States airlines carry emergency medical kits and automated external defibrillators.

But physicians who get a firsthand look at the kits say the contents vary.

“With some planes, it’s a hospital in a box, and they have everything you could ever want,” said Dr. Paul Abramson, a primary care physician in San Francisco. “But often they look like they’ve been picked over.”

Dr. Abramson said one kit he was given had implements for ventilating a patient unable to breathe, but no bag to push air into the patient — a situation akin to having a gasoline nozzle and tank, but no fuel.

Another kit contained only enough intravenous saline solution to rehydrate a baby, not the 200-pound man he was tending.

Dr. Paul Sullam, a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco, said he was on a plane several years ago when a passenger seemed to be having a heart attack.

The crew asked passengers if anyone had nitroglycerin tablets, small pills that are placed under the tongue to improve blood flow to the heart. No one responded. But when it asked for Valium, to calm the patient, “a forest of hands went up,” Dr. Sullam recalled.

The lack of standardization was criticized in a recent article in The Journal of the American Medical Association. The paper argued not only that the medical kits should

be standardized, down to the number of latex gloves, but also that a method for reporting incidents should be consistent among all airlines.

“Aviation is held up as this paragon of safety, yet here’s this nasty thing that happens with no standard for reporting,” said one of the article’s authors, Dr. Melissa Mattison, associate director of hospital medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “We know more about animals that die on airplanes than we do about people.”

Dr. Abramson, the San Francisco physician, has answered so many emergency calls on planes that he now carries some basic medications in his toiletries bag whenever he flies, including antihistamines, prednisone, sedatives and painkillers, all “just in case they don’t have it.”

He also books his flights with “Dr.” in front of his name. “That’s so that if I’m asleep, they might wake me,” he said. And he doesn’t take sleeping pills or drink alcohol in flight. “The last thing you want to do is be woken up and not be with it,” Dr. Abramson said.

“I kind of like doing it,” he continued.

“Because it’s what I do, and it seems helpful, and it’s interesting to make do with whatever minimal resources you have.”

Dr. Abramson occasionally receives letters of thanks from the airline, and once received a free domestic ticket. “That was the best,” he said.

Dr. Sullam, of U.C.S.F., said United Airlines once showed its gratitude by sending him an Arnold Palmer putter. “They must have figured all doctors play golf,” he said.

(He does not, but he still has the putter.)

Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins who works in global public health, has answered numerous emergency calls on flights. After one such call, she was given a bottle of Champagne as she left the plane to rush for a connecting flight.

“I thought, ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ ” she recalled. She returned it to a flight attendant.

Despite the pressures, the haphazard nature of the work, the lack of compensation and the risks, physicians continue to reach up and answer the call. In a world of insurance forms, rushed office visits and ubiquitous technology, many count such emergency calls among the purest expressions of their Hippocratic oath.

“You feel good about trying to help someone, and that’s the most important thing,” said Dr. Ingrid Katz, an infectious disease specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “But don’t expect anything. It’s solely for the benefit of the person in need.”

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

21

HEALTH & SCIENCE

On Your Marks, Get Set, Measure Heart Health H

By TARA PARKER-POPE

ow fast can you run a mile?

For people in midlife, this simple measure of fitness may help predict their risk of heart problems as they age.

In two separate studies, researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and the Cooper Institute in Dallas analyzed fitness levels for more than 66,000 people. Over all, the research showed that a person’s fitness level at midlife is a strong predictor of long-term heart health, proving just as reliable as traditional risk factors like cholesterol level or high blood pressure. The two reports were published last month in Circulation and The Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

In the studies, fitness was measured using carefully monitored treadmill testing to gauge cardiovascular endurance and muscle fatigue. But in analyzing the data, the researchers suggested that the treadmill results could be translated to average mile times, offering a simple formula for doctors and individuals to rate their fitness level at midlife and predict long-term heart risk.

“When you try to boil down fitness, what does fitness mean?” said Dr. Jarett D. Berry, assistant professor of internal medicine and cardiology at Southwestern Medical School and a co-author of both papers.

“In both these studies, how fast you can run in midlife is very strongly associated with heart disease risk when you’re old.

The exercise you do in your 40s is highly relevant to your heart disease risk in your 80s.”

Dr. Berry cautioned that more study is needed before mile times could be used as an accepted benchmark of cardiovascular risk. Still, he noted that the pace at which a person runs is a measure of fitness to which people can easily relate, and a good starting point for measuring overall fitness.

From the study data, Dr. Berry calculated that a man in his 50s who can run a mile in 8 minutes or less, or a woman who can do it in 9 minutes or less, shows a high level of fitness. A 9-minute mile for a man and 10:30 for a woman are signs of moderate fitness; men who can’t run better than a 10-minute mile, and women slower than 12 minutes, fall into the low-fitness category.

The categories make a big difference in risk for heart problems, the study found: Subjects in the high-fitness group had a 10

communicate with and motivate people in the low-fitness category.

“You know whether you’re in the unfit category,” he said. “If you’re physically inactive, if you sit 18 hours a day, if you get exhausted walking up a flight of stairs. If you’ve got a choice between walking two blocks or taking a taxi and you wait 20 minutes to take a taxi, you’re unfit.”

Dr. Berry agreed that mile-time benchmarks might not be good indicators for every individual, given that some highly fit people have physical limitations that prevent them from running fast. The larger issue, he said, is that most people don’t

percent lifetime risk, compared with 30 percent for those in the low-fitness group.

Dr. Berry notes that fitness varies greatly with age and sex, and that mile-time estimates are just easy benchmarks for patients and doctors to begin a discussion about fitness. Over all, he said, a 10-minute mile for a middle-aged man and a 12-minute mile for a woman suggest a good level of fitness.

“The principal finding of these studies is that your fitness level when you’re young is highly predictive of heart disease risk 30 to 40 years later,” he said. “If we’re trying to boil this down into practical implications, it’s the speed at which you can run. Heart disease risk increases markedly for every minute longer it takes you to run a mile.”

Dr. Timothy Church, a professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., said more research was needed to validate the notion that a person’s mile time correlates with the risk categories in the original study. But he agreed that exercise experts needed to come up with a better way to communicate exactly what fitness represents.

“You can’t look at someone and judge whether or not they are fit,” said Dr. Church. “What is fitness? From a riskfactor standpoint, it’s about avoiding low fitness.”

And he sounded another note of caution about the mile-time benchmarks.

“I’m nervous about people testing fitness on their own,” he said. “I don’t want a 45-year-old sedentary male to go out and run a mile as fast as he can.”

Even so, Dr. Church noted that most of the health benefits of exercise come with moving from low fitness to moderate fitness, and the challenge is finding a way to

have a clear sense of where they fall on the fitness spectrum, and don’t appreciate the risks that poor fitness poses for overall health.

Even people who take regular walks three times a week may have an inflated sense of their level of fitness, he said, adding, “You’re meeting the guidelines for physical activity, but you’re not necessarily fit.”

While modest levels of exercise are better than nothing, he went on, “getting off the couch is the first step, but vigorous activity has a much more dramatic effect on fitness level.”

Fossil Sheds Light on the Lizard-Snake Divide

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

T

he origin of snakes is a perplexing matter.

Although DNA analysis suggests that snakes are related to monitor lizards and iguanas, they are anatomically more similar to a group of earthwormlike creatures called worm lizards.

Now a new study helps clear the confusion, suggesting that worm lizards are related not to snakes, but to lacertids, a group of limbed lizards found in Europe, Africa and Asia.

Writing in the journal Nature, researchers identify a 47-million-yearold fossilized lizard in Germany that appears to be a common relative to both lacertids and worm lizards.

“This was the transitionary animal; it was exactly what we were looking

for,” said Johannes Müller, a paleozoologist at the Natural History Museum in Berlin and the study’s first author. “It indirectly implies that identifying burrowing worm lizards with snakes is a mistake.”

Dr. Müller and his co-authors used X-ray computed tomography, or CT scans, to study the skull of the fossilized lizard and compare it with those of living lizards and snakes. They found that the fossilized lizard had a thickened, capsulelike skull with no external ear opening, similar to worm lizards.

The fossil was discovered in Messel Pit, a fossil site near Frankfurt and a Unesco World Heritage Site. The lizard, named Cryptolacerta hassiaca, is less than three inches in length and is the only known specimen of its kind.

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June 2 - 8, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

China’s Utilities Cut Energy Production, Defying Beijing

By KEITH BRADSHER

I

t is a power struggle that is causing a power shortage — one that has begun to slow China’s mighty economic growth engine.

Balking at the high price of coal that fuels much of China’s electricity grid, the nation’s state-owned utility companies are defying government economic planners by deliberately reducing the amount of electricity they produce.

The power companies say they face financial ruin if the government continues to tightly limit the

prices they can charge customers, even as strong demand is sending coal prices to record levels. The chairwoman of one giant utility, China Power International, recently warned that one-fifth of China’s 436 coal-fired power plants could face bankruptcy if the utilities cannot raise rates.

The utilities’ go-slow tactics include curtailing the planned expansion and construction of power plants, and running plants for fewer hours a day.

And in a notable act of passive defiance, the power companies have scheduled an unusually large number of plants to close for maintenance this summer — right when air-conditioning season will reach its peak.

So far there have been no public confrontations between Beijing officials and utility executives. But the dispute indicates that China’s unique marriage of market competition and government oversight may be starting to fray after three decades of phenomenal economic success.

“The Chinese electricity companies are firing a shot across the bow, and essentially saying they’re not going to just sit there and take massive losses,” said Jeremy C. Carl, a Stanford University researcher on Chinese energy issues. “It’s almost the equivalent of a corporate sick-out.”

The official Xinhua news agency reported late Monday that the country’s main electricity distribution company, the State Grid, had warned that power shortages this year could be worse than in 2004, when China had its worst blackouts in decades. That year, the problem involved railroad bottlenecks in getting coal to power plants — an issue largely resolved with the subsequent investments in more rail lines.

This time, the impasse between government and industry is not the only cause of China’s electricity shortages. Surging electricity demand is also a factor.

China’s 700 million rural residents have been on a two-year buying spree of electric devices, purchasing hundreds of millions of air-conditioners and other energy-hungry appliances with government subsidies aimed at narrowing the gap in living standards between cities and rural areas.

In a little-noticed milestone, the latest data from Beijing and Washington shows that China passed the United States last year as the world’s largest consumer of electricity.

Since March, responding to the power shortages, government officials in six provinces have begun rationing electricity, including here in Hunan province. At least five more provinces are preparing to do so, according to official reports.

In Yiyang, a town of 360,000 in south-central China, electricity shortages are so severe this spring that many homes and businesses receive power only one day in three. Even gasoline stations in this region are silent more days than not, because the pumps

lack electricity.

Meanwhile, blackouts are starting to slow the nation’s torrid growth of energy-intensive industries like steel, cement and chemicals. Unlike garment makers and other small manufacturers, the big factories cannot easily switch to backyard diesel generators.

To accommodate businesses that do use diesel back-ups, China last week banned exports of diesel fuel to conserve scarce supplies.

The power cuts are a reason the year-on-year growth rate of China’s industrial production dipped last month — to 13.4 percent in April, down from 14.8 percent in March — and seems to be continuing to fall.

The lower productivity of factories, plus high diesel costs for those using generators, is likely to further raise average prices of American imports from China. Prices of Chinese exports are already up 2.8 percent in the last 12 months, after years of gradual decline that helped restrain inflation in the United States.

As power-deprived factories in China have less demand for raw materials, the impact has rippled around the world among China’s suppliers as well, contributing to 10 percent declines in global prices for commodities like iron ore and copper. That is impinging on the economies of countries like Australia and Brazil, for which China is a big customer of natural resources.

Looking ahead, China has placed big bets on wind turbines for generating electricity. And despite Japan’s recent nuclear travails, China is also cautiously proceeding with plans to lead the world in the construction of nuclear power plants in the coming decade.

But coal is still king in China. The country has nearly half of the world’s total coal-fired capacity, and coal plants currently represent 73 percent of this nation’s total generating capacity.

Hydroelectric power, at 22 percent, is a distant second and has been hampered by droughts this year.

If Beijing and the utilities can resolve their differences, China plans to build even more coal-powered plants. Doing so would produce another big surge in emissions of greenhouse gases, of which China is already the world’s largest emitter.

“Only coal can provide new capacity in the time and scale needed,” said David Fridley, a China energy expert at the University of California, Berkeley.

The idea of recalcitrant utilities balking at Beijing’s dictates might seem to contradict the popular perception of China’s government-guided economy. But while the electric utilities are majority-owned by the government, they are also profit-motivated companies accountable to the other holders of their publicly traded stock. So the power companies’ incentives are not necessarily

The San Juan Weekly aligned with those of central planners in Beijing.

The government, for its part, has imposed a growing array of price controls, including on electricity rates, as it struggles to insulate the Chinese public from inflation. Consumer prices are rising 5.3 percent a year according to official figures, and Chinese and Western economists say the true rate may be nearly double that.

But coal prices, which the government deregulated in 2008, are rising even faster in China, which is a net importer of coal, despite having its own extensive mining operations.

Huaneng, China’s biggest electric utility, said last month that electricity rates it charges customers should have been 13 percent higher last year to match the increase in coal prices. But regulators held utility rates essentially flat.

Spot coal prices in China have surged an additional 20 percent this year — to a record $125 a metric ton for top grades — partly because of floods in Australia’s and Indonesia’s coal fields and partly because Japan is buying more from the global market to offset its

June 2 - 8, 2011

lower nuclear power output.

But Chinese regulators have let electricity prices climb only 2.5 percent this spring. Residential users in China’s cities pay 8.2 cents a kilowatt-hour. That compares to a national average of 11 cents in the United States and 15 cents in the heavily urban mid-Atlantic region. Chinese industrial users in cities are supposed to pay 12 cents a kilowatthour, although politically connected businesses receive discounts; the average industrial rate in the United States is 7 cents, and 9 cents in the mid-Atlantic region.

Big power generators like Huaneng buy nearly half their coal on the spot market and the rest on long-term contracts with prices that rise more slowly.

The government has put pressure on China’s coal mines, also largely state-owned, to continue supplying power companies with coal at below-market prices under long-term contracts. But the coal mines, which are also profitoriented operations, have responded with their own form of passive resistance — by sending their cheapest, lowest-

23

quality coal with the most polluting sulfur.

As a result, many power plants across China are now paying penalties to yet another arm of the government — environmental regulators — for burning the sulfur-spewing coal. That has further added to the utilities’ cost of doing business, said Howard Au, the chief executive of Petrocom Energy, a Hong Kong company that builds coalblending facilities.

Trying to help utilities reduce those environmentally and financially costly emissions, Petrocom has built an immense series of gray silos and red conveyor belts at Lianyungang port in northern China to dilute high-sulfur Chinese coal with low-sulfur imported coal.

Blackouts appear to be the worst in smaller towns like Yiyang here in Hunan, one of China’s largest and most populous provinces. The power shortages are threatening to curb the explosive growth the province has experienced since the opening in late 2009 of a high-speed electric train link to prosperous Guangdong province to the south,

which helped companies tap Hunan’s cheaper land and labor force.

In rationing electricity, Hunan officials have given priority to big cities like Changsha, the provincial capital. Even there, though, industrial districts are blacked out one day in three.

In Yiyang, meanwhile, multiday blackouts have ruined a tiny restaurant run by Xu Zhanyun, 48, who now must cook meals over lumps of coal instead of his electric stove. “I have so much food in my refrigerators that all went bad,” he said.

There is running water only every other day because the pumping station requires electricity. And so he must haul water from a well — as he did as a boy, before China’s economy surged.

In other cities, factories require employees to work at odd hours when electricity is available.

“They shut down the electricity for a day every three days,” said Jin Jianping, manager of an umbrella factory in Ningbo, in east-central China. “We just arrange night shifts for everyone,” Mr. Jin said. “We all have to work at night every three days now.”

24 June 2 - 8, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Isabela

“Garden of the Northwest”

I

sabela is a municipality of Puerto Rico located in the north-western region of the island, north of San Sebastián; west of Quebradillas; and east of Aguadilla and Moca. Isabela is spread over 13 wards and Isabela Pueblo (The downtown area and the administrative center of the city). It is a principal city of the Aguadilla-Isabela-San Sebastián Metropolitan Statistical Area.

The town is known as the “Jardín del Noroeste,” the “Garden of the Northwest,” because of the many wild flowers in its landscape. It is also knowns as el “Pueblo de los Quesitos de Hoja”, the “town of Leaf Cheeses,” for its production of this typical fresh white cheese wrapped in banana plant leaves, reputed to be the best. It is also known as la Ciudad de los Gallitos or the “City of the Fighting Cocks.” Since the 18th century, cock fighting was very common throughout the island, and the town became famous and well known for the quality of its fighting cocks and special breeding and training techniques used by its people.

The Taíno chief Mabodamaca, one

of the most important chieftains of the Island of Boriken (Taino name for the island of Puerto Rico) during the 18th century, ruled the region of the ‘Guajataca’ (Taíno name for the northwestern region of Puerto Rico) where Isabela was originally founded. Although the actual date of the origins of the first Spanish settlement is not precisely known, a small settlement/hermitage is known to have existed by the end of the 17th century or beginning of the 18th century in a great extension of land into what encompass today the municipalities of Isabela, Camuy and Quebradillas. The settlement

bordered to the east with the shoreline of the Guajataca River and was located on the grounds of an earlier Taíno settlement.

San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

25

modern love

A Love for the Ages, but Which One?

By ANNA KLENKE

I

T was early June in Illinois: hot, humid, unbearably sticky. The cicadas droned in the trees, their monotonous buzz somehow adding to the heat.

There was no air-conditioned room to escape to, not even an electric fan. I wore a long-sleeve cotton dress, two petticoats, stockings, shoes and an apron. Although in the outside world it was 2008, inside the fenced confines of Blackberry Farm’s Pioneer Village, the year was 1840. And I was being courted.

I worked at the most remote historical site in the park, the log cabin replica, and Matt worked in maintenance, blessed with the freedom to cruise around in a golf cart.

As two of the few college-age workers amid a group of older people, we had been introduced on his first day and promptly became friends out of desperation for conversation that didn’t involve quilting.

Across the pond from the prying eyes of supervisors, Matt would take a break from his maintenance duties and bring his lunch to eat on my doorstep every day. We rested in the shade on the small front porch and watched the children visiting the park chase turkeys around the yard.

While Matt looked on, I lectured the crowd about churning butter and dipping candles. The younger visitors gaped at me and asked unanswerable questions: “Are you a mom?” “Are you Abraham Lincoln’s sister?” “Are you dead?”

The period costume prompted a deep sense of long-repressed domesticity to rise up in me during the workday hours of 9 to 3. Channeling the spirit of my pioneer ancestors, I swept the porch, tidied the cabin and labored for hours, making soup and baking mulberry cake in the fireplace.

Deep down, I hoped my prowess in the 19th-century kitchen would convince Matt that I was a good candidate for a 21stcentury girlfriend. I looked the other way when he scraped the burned pie crust edges out of the cast-iron Dutch oven and reminded myself that it was 2008 and Matt surely wasn’t judging me on my culinary skills.

After work, I shucked off my sweatsoaked pioneer garb, donned a tiny pair of athletic shorts and a tank top that showed off my navel ring, and biked home to the wonders of indoor plumbing and wireless Internet. Matt requested me as a friend on Facebook, and I spent two hours fine-tuning my “About Me” paragraph and untagging myself in unflattering photos before I accepted. To my thinking, Matt had only met the 19th-century me, and the opportunity to present myself in a more modern light was akin to being able to make a second first im-

pression.

On our first date, we had dinner at a sushi restaurant, a far cry from my charred fireplace cakes at the pioneer cabin. I struggled with the chopsticks, demolishing the delicate crunchy shrimp rolls. Eventually, I resorted to eating with my hands, which was, Matt assured me, the mark of a true sushi connoisseur.

Drinking sake out of a tiny glass and chatting with the waiter, Matt morphed before my eyes from the cute maintenance guy at the historical village to a cosmopolitan, sophisticated man who tipped well but not too extravagantly. Our next stop was Borders, where I was thrilled to learn that he, unlike other guys I had dated, was not only functionally literate but also read books for fun.

As we browsed the shelves together, we might as well have been back in a previous century for all the Jane Austen-esque emotions that coursed through me. I was completely entranced by this rare specimen of sensitive human male — rustic maintenance man by day, refined consumer of literature by night.

From there our relationship expanded, bleeding across centuries and through cultures. We rode the train into Chicago, and Matt instructed me about the beauty of steam engines, those long-gone giants of transportation and his passion. After emerging from the Red Line, we visited the Jazz Record Mart and picked over thousands of CDs and vinyl records, the big-band music transporting us back to the 1930s.

Over the drawn-out summer months, we watched Blu-rays, shopped at thrift stores, ate Mexican, Indian and Italian in dark restaurants. We looked at old family pictures in Matt’s basement and reminisced about the good old days that we hadn’t lived through.

I felt that the yellowing photographs could tell me something about the boy sitting next to me, that through the eyes of his ancestors I would somehow come to know him.

I was physically drawn to Matt, my hands shook whenever he stepped into the semidark pioneer cabin or I gazed at his profile picture on Facebook. But he was a mystery, waiting two long weeks before kissing me, and then, after he finally did, moving much faster. He later admitted that my modest pioneer dress had made him think of me as a “good Christian girl,” and he was happy to find out otherwise. Yet there still seemed to be no rhythm to our ways. Some days, we would make out for hours in my basement; others, we wouldn’t even touch each other.

The television show “16 and Pregnant” and movies like “American Pie,” in which four high school boys make a pact to lose their virginity before graduation, had taught me that guys would take any advan-

tage to sleep with a girl. But when Matt’s parents left town for the weekend and we hung out alone at his house late into the night, the subject of sex didn’t even come up. And the sad thing is, I was confused and a little distraught that he didn’t jump all over me. I didn’t know what to think. And I didn’t ask.

In this age of Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter and other untold online troves of information, it’s easy to think we can learn everything about anyone within minutes.

On the Internet, there are no secrets. Turns out, real life isn’t like that.

Whenever Matt and I went out as our 2008 selves, it was hard for us to know what to talk about or how to act — there didn’t seem to be any clear rules. And at the historical park, I not only felt prim and self-conscious in my heavy, unflattering costume, but I also found myself embodying the expectations of 1840s womanhood as I cooked, cleaned house and generally behaved.

At night, I’d sometimes dream of the 2008 Matt — the one I’d already fooled around with — and then rush off to work only to be greeted by the shy, reserved 1840 version. The disconnect between the centuries was oddly real.

Every day, I was struck by the way Matt and I reinvented ourselves in each other’s eyes. Talking to him at work in my high-necked dress was a vastly different experience from hanging out with our friends hours later in “civilian” clothes.

Complicating matters, our exchanges on Facebook would always be totally open and honest, and we’d end up telling each other things that could sway our relationship, making the next in-person encounter either more joyful or more awkward.

What I remember most from that period is feeling stretched between the past and

the present, and between our in-person and online selves, struggling to reach an equilibrium where we could relate on a real level rather than being influenced by what time period, electronic medium or ethnic restaurant we were interacting in at the time.

We made it there eventually, to the point where we had created our own context and didn’t need to rely on an external one, but it took a while. We had to learn to become less self-conscious, to stop viewing every move through the warped lens of a Facebook photo album.

The possibilities of personal reinvention that society affords us today make it more difficult to get onto an even footing with another person, as both of you change your appearance and even personality to match a constantly shifting world. The rules change hour by hour, situation by situation, and I would often look at this nice guy who I had been dating for months and wonder who exactly he was.

Now that I’m away at college, Matt and I keep in touch through texting, e-mail, Facebook, Skype, gchat, phone calls and good old-fashioned letters. I look back on the time before the Internet and shudder, wondering how anyone ever kept in touch or managed a long-distance relationship without modern technology.

As much as the technology helps, however, it’s never enough. Every now and then, when the reality of our relationship begins to slip, Matt drives the six hours north to visit me. When he steps out of his car, shaking the 400 miles of driving out of his limbs, I am transported back to 2008 (or was it 1840?). I feel the heat of the wood fire on my face and marvel at this crazy, jumbled world and the real, physical inevitability of Matt, who it seems I’ve known forever and for no time at all.

26

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

Community Banks Lobby to Limit New Regulations

BY BEN PROTESS

C

amden Fine, who heads the Independent Community Bankers of America, is concerned about restrictions on debit card fees.

Neal S. Wolin, deputy secretary of the Treasury, assured small bankers that regulators will not “prevent them from doing their job.”

Network television ads appearing in the Washington area feature an anxious woman who cautions that “community banks and credit unions will be squeezed” by “bad” regulation.

Subway cars serving suburban Virginia carry similar warnings, while Capitol Hill newspapers have run ads from small banks that show an empty pocketbook alongside an alarming notice that “Washington is helping you clean out your wallet.”

The message is clear: lawmakers and regulators should tread lightly on small banks.

In recent months, the community banking industry has started an aggressive grassroots campaign, taking aim at regulation enacted in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Small banks fear new rules under the Dodd-Frank law, especially certain consumer protection provisions and debit card fee restrictions, could hurt their bottom line and even cause a few banks to fail.

The Independent Community Bankers of America, an industry trade group, spent roughly $1.2 million lobbying

regulators and lawmakers in the first quarter of 2011, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

But the regulation may not be as burdensome as the advertising campaign — or the lobbying dollars — implies. Community banks and credit unions won exemptions from several of the law’s toughest provisions, and some of the rules put small banks on more equal footing with big banks.

“There is basic human anxiety about change,” said Neal S. Wolin, deputy secretary of the Treasury.

“If you sit down with 20 small banks, you’ll find there’s a lot of anxiety there,” he said. “But if you ask them to focus that criticism in concrete ways, there’s not much there.”

Mr. Wolin and other regulators are increasing their efforts to win over the community banking industry, holding private meetings with bankers and delivering public speeches across the country. Nearly every top financial regulator traveled to San Diego in March to speak at the community banking group’s annual convention. This month, at the group’s policy meeting in Washington, Mr. Wolin said that regulators will not “hurt small banks or prevent them from doing their job.”

But not everyone is persuaded.

“We got a lot good things, but it’s hard to say Dodd-Frank is a total win when you come away bloodied and bandaged,” said Salvatore Marranca, a former federal banking regulator who is now president and chief exe-

cutive of Cattaraugus County Bank, a company with 65 employees in Little Valley, N.Y., about 60 miles south of Buffalo.

Despite their protestations, community bankers are quick to praise certain parts of the law. Banks that hold less than $10 billion in assets, or roughly 98 percent of the 7,000 community banks scattered across the country, are immune from new capital and liquidity requirements, for example.

The law also imposes curbs on proprietary trading and the derivatives business, restrictions that level the playing field for small lenders competing against giant competitors.

But small banks perhaps benefited most from the overhaul of deposit insurance rules. The change, which forces large risk-taking banks to pay a bigger share of deposit insurance premiums, is expected to save small banks more than $4 billion over the next three years, according to Camden Fine, who leads the community bankers group.

“The legislation was a very mixed bag for community banks,” Mr. Fine said. “There were some good provisions; some provisions will have a horrendous impact if we can’t get them changed.”

Mr. Fine and his constituents are now focusing on a rule that restricts the fees banks charge grocery stores and other retailers each time a customer uses a debit card. The Federal Reserve has proposed capping the socalled swipe fee at 12 cents for each transaction, 70 percent below the average fee charged in 2009.

Although Dodd-Frank excused

community banks from the rules, Mr. Fine says the exemption is “worthless” because retailers could refuse to accept cards issued by small banks that carry higher fees. It is a concern shared by Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Fed. “It is possible that the exemption will not be effective in the marketplace,” Mr. Bernanke said in recent Congressional testimony, adding that the rule “could result in some smaller banks being less profitable or even failing.”

In an effort to block the rule, the industry is mobilizing lobbyists and bankers to write letters and meet with regulators. Mr. Fine’s group and other small banking and credit union lobbyists have held at least 10 meetings with top Fed officials in the last year.

They also are appealing to Congress, where some lawmakers have introduced a measure to delay the debit card rule for at least 15 months.

“They have the political power to push back, and they’re taking advantage of it,” said Jaret Seiberg, a financial policy analyst at MF Global’s Washington Research Group.

The industry is also pushing the new consumer agency to shield small banks from mortgage and credit card rules. While the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not allowed to inspect or bring enforcement actions against small banks, the industry is subject to the bureau’s regulations.

“That is causing a lot of anxiety,” Mr. Fine said, noting that bankers are taking their concerns directly to the agency.

Community bankers from all 50 states have held discussions with Elizabeth Warren, who is setting up the new bureau. Ms. Warren, who met with more than 60 small bank and credit union executives in March alone, has assured the industry that she will keep them involved in the rulewriting process. In a show of good will, a group of community bankers was recently invited to the first public showing of the agency’s new streamlined mortgage disclosure forms.

“I want to see the business model that they have flourish,” Ms. Warren said. “I want to see it succeed big time.”

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

27

G-8 Leaders Call for Tighter Internet Regulation

By ERIC PFANNER

L

eaders of the Group of 8 industrialized countries are set to issue a provocative call for stronger Internet regulation, a cause championed by the host of the meeting, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, but fiercely opposed by some Internet companies and free-speech groups.

The G-8 leaders will urge the adoption of measures to protect children from online predators, to strengthen privacy rights and to crack down on digital copyright piracy, according to two people who have seen drafts of a communiqué the G-8 will issue at the end of a meeting this week in Deauville, France. At the same time, the document is expected to include a pledge to maintain openness and to support entrepreneurial, rather than government-led, development of the Internet.

Mr. Sarkozy, convened a special gathering of the global digerati in Paris on the eve of the G-8 meeting. Calling the rise of the Internet a “revolution,” Mr. Sarkozy compared its impact to two previous transforming episodes in global history: the age of exploration and the industrial revolution.

The Internet revolution “doesn’t have a flag, doesn’t have a slogan, belongs to everyone,” citing recent uprisings in the Arab world as examples of its positive effects.

The pre-Deauville meeting in Paris, the E-G8 Forum, is providing a public window into debates that have shaped the expected G-8 communiqué — in addition to serving as a soapbox for Mr. Sarkozy as he gears up his campaign for re-election next spring.

Mr. Sarkozy’s push to turn Internet governance into a G-8 issue, elevating it to the level of more traditional topics like trade, currencies, terrorism or climate change, has been applauded by companies in industries like music, which have been ravaged by digital piracy. But it has drawn concern from Internet companies and outright criticism from people who see a threat to the openness that has characterized the Internet to date.

Mr. Sarkozy is not alone in calling existing laws and regulations inadequate to deal with the challenges of a borderless digital world. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said this week that he would ask Parliament to review British privacy laws after Twitter users circumvented court orders

preventing newspapers from publishing the names of public figures who are suspected of having had extramarital affairs.

But France has gone further than many other Western countries in pushing for what Mr. Sarkozy has called a “civilized Internet.”

Among his initiatives are a so-called threestrikes law that threatens persistent digital pirates with the suspension of their Internet connections. Another new French law authorizes the government to filter out Web sites containing illegal content like child pornography.

The G-8 communiqué, which is still being finalized by the G-8 leaders’ sherpas, or policy emissaries, is not expected to contain specific prescriptions like these. Instead, it will include broad pledges to deal with privacy, piracy and child protection, the people with knowledge of the talks said.

In some cases, even general agreement has been difficult. On digital piracy, for example, Russia, which has been the home of some notorious file-sharing services, is said to have raised objections. And while there had been speculation before the E-G8 Forum that Mr. Sarkozy might call for the creation of a new international body to oversee the Internet,

this idea was apparently rejected.

Rod Beckstrom, chief executive of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees the Internet address system, gave qualified support to Mr. Sarkozy’s prescriptions, saying the mix of public- and private-sector groups that oversee the global network needed to cooperate more closely.

“To keep the Internet open and unified, the multi-stakeholder community needs to build better relationships with government,” Mr. Beckstrom said. But he added that he thought efforts to control the content of the Internet would prove futile: “I think there are a lot of global leaders trying to grasp at air.”

Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, said technology, rather than regulation, could take care of many of the challenges facing the Internet, including potential limits on capacity as more and more video traffic and other bandwidth-heavy content passes through telecommunications networks.

“Before we decide there is a regulatory solution, let’s ask if there’s a technological solution,” he said. “We will move faster than any of these governments, let alone all of them together.”

Games

28

June 2 - 8, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Sudoku How to Play: Fill in the empty fields with the numbers from 1 through 9 Click the “check sudoku” button to check your sudoku inputs Click the “new sudoku” button and select difficulty to play a new game

Sudoku Rules: Every row must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every column must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every 3x3 square must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Crossword

Wordsearch

Answers on page 29

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 -8, 2011

HOROSCOPE Aries

(Mar 21-April 20)

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

You should be riding on the crest of a wave and in buoyant mood. Just don’t over do it, we don’t want to be sending out the lifeboats if you get too wrecked.

A stretch of introspection has ended in grand style.

So enjoy the fun and let rip when it counts. Give someone the benefit of the doubt in a love knot. A triangle situation needs delicate handling.

Be aware that you can now see the past differently. A big turnaround is long overdue. Don’t be ashamed of your feelings; but don’t get caught in an embarrassing situation. Plenty of people would like to see you hung out to dry: jealousy is a terrible thing. Just ignore their pettiness and be assured their karma will be repaid in kind.

Taurus

Scorpio

(April 21-May 21)

Stay cool and find your sense of humour in the midst of confusion. The Universe is about to provide a well-deserved pat on the back. But don’t be premature with your actions. Keep your secrets until the right time as certain events take shape. Make sure you’re ready for what life has to offer. Friends and loved ones are eternally grateful for your support.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Do not interfere beyond your brief. Sometimes you overstep the mark. Don’t push it. Sometimes you underestimate the abilities of other people. But when push comes to shove you are ahead of the game. Remember there are many different ways up the same mountain. Just watch you don’t titter at the dizzy heights and take a tumble.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Attention to detail at this point is your saving grace. Keep your focus and ambition intact, whilst concentrating on you. Go with the flow in love and relinquish any need to control events. Take note of that adrenaline rush when a certain person walks by and things could get very interesting indeed. Be selective and prioritize your time.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

You are through the worst, so tap into a ‘destiny’ moment; life will never be the same again.

Harmony is all very well. It’s just that sometimes it pays to take the bull by the horns and give him what for! Humour, flippant remarks and banter don’t really hit the spot. They perpetuate negativity, which is what you must avoid at all costs.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Pitch your words and actions with careful precision to avoid a big mess! Life takes a new turn and it’s time to smile. Go for gold with all the courage you can muster. Enjoy the ‘making up’ to avoid the ‘breaking up’. You need to meet someone halfway. Find a compromise that suits your route into the future. Find common ground.

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Resume contact with a long lost friend or lover: why not? Build bridges. Now is not the time to be too proud. Connect with people as opposed to closing ranks. So stay with it. Be brave and forgiving when it matters. Wade through the mountain of work at your own pace. What’s the rush? Burnout is not an attractive prospect.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Don’t be hasty regarding major life changing decisions. Access your best bits and play to win in competitive situations. Peace of mind is the most precious thing: find, treasure and keep it! You start to see things in a new light. It is really pointless to invest your precious time or energy in a load of old nonsense. Keep your eyes peeled.

You are better off trying to reach your goals gently rather than zooming around like a chicken that’s lost its head. Panic not; the Universe has a cunning plan and you can be a key player. Certain things won’t happen without you, anyway. Unwind wherever possible and enjoy some relaxation and sociability. Stay cool and cut loose.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Get wise to the techniques of the competition.

There is no need for paranoia. We don’t want a self-fulfilling prophecy on our hands. Your best bet is to keep quiet, stay dignified and, if all else fails, join in the scrum! Hedge your bets a little and you will win a whole lot. Sometimes money can buy you love or help you keep it!

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Over-enthusiasm benefits no-one! Steer a steady course. You could spend your life counting and recounting the coffers. It’s time to be less obsessive, as they say. Retain your hard-earned cash, but don’t play Scrooge or get too attached to every penny. Money is an energy that needs to ebb and flow. So don’t be afraid to spend with a good heart.

29 Answers to the Zudoku and Crossword on page 28

30

June 2 - 8, 2011

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

Two Cows And A Chicken

Cartoons

The San Juan Weekly

Ziggi

The San Juan Weekly

June 2 - 8, 2011

Nadal Survives a Scare From Isner

By JOHN BRANCH

R

afael Nadal has made a habit of making victory look easy at Roland Garros. He arrived this time as a fivetime champion with a 38-1 record. And in all those wins since 2005, the Spaniard with the steely nerve and bending shots never needed a fifth and final set.

But along came the American John Isner, a 6-foot-9 attention-grabber with a big serve and no stranger to stirring matches at Grand Slam events. When Isner took the court, he was best known for the record-set-

ting match at Wimbledon last year in which he beat Nicolas Mahut, 70-68, in the fifth set, a contest that strung across three days.

Isner arrived with a No. 39 world ranking and an affinity for hard, fast courts — not the red clay, which often favors grinders and those with a broader array of shots.

Nadal arrived in Paris looking for his record-tying sixth title. That quest was nearly upended in the first round, before Nadal escaped with a 6-4, 6-7 (2), 6-7 (2), 6-2, 6-4 victory.

Nadal trailed, two sets to one, befo-

re he seemed to find firm footing on the familiar dust of Court Philippe Chatrier.

When the 24-year-old Spaniard won the last point of a match that lasted four hours, he nearly fell to his knees while pumping both fists. After shaking hands sheepishly with Isner, Nadal jumped near the net in celebration.

“I didn’t play well in the tiebreak,” Nadal said in an on-court television interview.

“I was probably too nervous. But, anyway, it was a very, very important victory for me.”

Isner, his blue cap backward, patted

31

Sports

Nadal on the back, knowing a rare opportunity had come and gone.

“The way he played in the fourth and fifth set — I haven’ t seen tennis like that, ever,” Isner said. “That’s why he’s No. 1 in the world, and one of the greatest ever.”

Nadal won the French Open from 2005 to 2008, and again last year. His only loss in 40 matches at Roland Garros was in 2009, when Nadal lost to Robin Soderling in the fourth round. Roger Federer won that championship, over Soderling in the final, to secure a career Grand Slam.

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