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August 11 - 17, 2011
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Moodys Downgrades Puerto Rico Bonds P31
Cubans Set for Big Change: Right to Buy Homes
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August 11 - 17, 2011
The San Juan Weekly Star
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The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
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Moodys Downgrades Puerto Rico Bonds On Economic, Budget Worries
By Joan E. Solsman DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
M
oody’s Investors Service lowered the rating of Puerto Rico’s general-obligation bonds a notch and kept the door open for another possible downgrade because of several economic and financial worries. Moody’s Investors Service lowered the rating of Puerto Rico’s general-obligation bonds a notch and kept the door open for another possible downgrade because of several economic and financial worries. The firm said that Puerto Rico’s “severely underfunded” retirement systems have deteriorated financially and that needed reforms may exacerbate strains on the commonwealth’s economy and budget finances in coming years. It
noted Puerto Rico has a track record of borrowing to fund budget gaps and said economic trends remain weak. The local economy has been in recession since 2006, and it has high unemployment and poverty levels compared to the U.S., it said. However, supporting the rating are several strengths. Moody’s said that management is dedicated to tax and fiscal reform and that Puerto Rico has a relatively large economy and broad legal powers to raise revenue and adjust spending. The credit rater also noted that the commonwealth’s ties to the U.S. lend it benefits of a strong financial, legal and regulatory system. Moody’s cut Puerto Rico’s general obligation rating one notch to Baa1, which is still three notches above the threshold of junk status. The outlook is negative.
Treasury Auctions for This Week P
uerto Rico Public Buildings Authority, $225 million of government facilities revenue bonds. Ramirez & Company. The Treasury’s schedule of financing this week includes Monday’s regular weekly auction of new threeand six-month bills and an auction of four-week bills on Tuesday. At the close of the New York cash market on Friday, the rate on the outstanding three-month bill was 0.01 percent. The rate on the six-month issue was 0.05 percent, and the rate on the four-week
issue was 0.01 percent. The following tax-exempt fixed-income issues are scheduled for pricing this week: Puerto Rico Public Buildings Authority, $756.4 million of school construction bonds. Popular Securities. Puerto Rico Public Buildings Authority, $225 million of government facilities revenue bonds. Ramirez & Company. West Contra Costa, Calif., Unified School District, $85 million of general obligation refinancing bonds. Piper Jaffray.
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The San Juan Weekly Star August 11 - 17, 2011
More Airports Granted Cuba Landing Rights
By TED JACKOVICS |
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ight airports this week in addition to Tampa International Airport were granted landing rights in Cuba for charter flights. The cities are Fort Lauderdale, At-
lanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Palm Harbor-based travel service provider Scand-America International announced it would arrange travel services to Cuba from the Tampa area, where two companies have been approved to provide flights from Tampa International. The United States has recently authorized more than a dozen of its airports to handle Cuba traffic. Previously Miami, New York’s JFK and Los Angeles International were the only U.S. options for direct service to Cuba. President Barack Obama lifted restrictions on Cuban-Americans’ travel home to see relatives in 2009, leading to a boom in such visits.
U.S. Marshals Task Force Arrest One of Island’s Top Ten F riday morning at approximately 9:30am, members of the U.S. Marshals Northern Ohio Violent Fugitive Task Force and the Cleveland Police Department arrested Miguel GonzalezPerez, age 27, after receiving information Gonzalez-Perez was in the Cleveland area. Gonzalez-Perez was wanted by the Municipality of Bayamon in San Juan, Puerto Rico for murder. It is alleged that on November 13th, 2010, Gonzalez-Perez shot and killed Franscisco Molina-Soto after a heated argument. Late in July, San Juan Police requested assistance from the US Marshals led Puerto Rico Violent Offender Task Force in locating and apprehending Gonzalez-Perez. PRVOTF members established information that Gonzalez-Perez fled Puerto Rico and began hiding out in Cleveland, OH and contacted the NOVFTF to locate Gonzalez-Perez. Members of the U. S. Marshals Task Force in Cleveland received information that Gonzalez-Perez was working at a residence on E. 125th St. around the St. Clair Ave. area. Task force members set up around the area and saw a man that fit the description of Gonzalez-Perez. Officers moved in on Gonzalez-Perez’s suspected location and arrested him without incident. Gonzalez-Perez was transported to the Cuyahoga County
Jail where he will wait extradition back to Puerto Rico. United States Marshal Pete Elliott said, “I commend all the law enforcement agencies that worked together during this fugitive investigation. Mr. Gonzalez-Perez may have thought Cleveland was far enough from Puerto Rico to hide from the law but he was wrong and he will be heading back to face these serious charges.” Anyone with information regarding the whereabouts of a known fugitive is encouraged to contact the U.S. Marshals Northern Ohio Violent Fugitive Task Force at: 1-866-4-WANTED. Callers may remain anonymous.
The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
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The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
Cubans Set for Big Change: Right to Buy Homes By DAMIEN CAVE
J
osé is an eager almost-entrepreneur with big plans for Cuban real estate. Right now he works illegally on trades, linking up families who want to swap homes and pay a little extra for an upgrade. But when Cuba legalizes buying and selling by the end of the year — as the government promised again this week — José and many others expect a cascade of changes: higher prices, mass relocation, property taxes and a flood of money from Cubans in the United States and around the world. “There’s going to be huge demand,” said José, 36, who declined to give his last name, stepping away from the crowd and keeping an eye out for eavesdroppers. “It’s been prohibited for so long.” Private property is the nucleus of capitalism, of course, so the plan to legitimize it here in a country of slogans like “socialism or death” strikes many Cubans as jaw-dropping. Indeed, most people expect onerous regulations and already, the plan outlined by the state media would suppress the market by limiting Cubans to one home or apartment and requiring full-time residency. Yet even with some state control, experts say, property sales could transform Cuba more than any of the economic reforms announced by President Raúl Castro’s government, some of which were outlined in the National Assembly on Monday. Compared with the changes already passed (more selfemployment and cell-phone ownership), or proposed (car sales and looser emigration rules), “nothing is as big as this,” said Philip Peters, an analyst with the Lexington Institute. The opportunities for profits and loans would be far larger than what Cuba’s small businesses offer, experts say, potentially creating the disparities of wealth that have accompanied property ownership in places like Eastern Europe and China. Havana in particular may be in for a move back in time, to when it was a more stratified city. “There will be a huge rearrangement,” said Mario Coyula, Havana’s director of urbanism and architecture in the 1970s and ’80s. “Gentrification will happen.” Broader effects could follow. Sales would encourage much-needed renovation, creating jobs. Banking would expand because, under newly announced rules, payments would come from buyers’ accounts. Meanwhile, the government, which owns all property now, would hand over homes and apartments to their occupants in exchange for taxes on sales — impossible in the current swapping market where money passes under the table. And then there is the role of Cuban emigrants. While the plan seems to prohibit
foreign ownership, Cuban-Americans could take advantage of Obama administration rules letting them send as much money as they like to relatives on the island, fueling purchases and giving them a stake in Cuba’s economic success. “That is politically an extremely powerful development,” Mr. Peters said, arguing that it could spur policy changes by both nations. The rate of change, however, will likely depend on complications peculiar to Cuba. The so-called Pearl of the Antilles struggled with poor housing even before the 1959 Revolution, but deterioration, rigid rules and creative work-arounds have created today’s warren of oddities. There are no vacancies in Havana, Mr. Coyula pointed out. Every dwelling has someone living in it. Most Cubans are essentially stuck where they are. On the waterfront of central Havana, children peek out from buildings that should be condemned, with a third of the facade missing. Blocks inland, Cubans like Elena Acea, 40, have subdivided apartments to Alice in Wonderland proportions. Her two-bedroom is now a four-bedroom, with a plywood mezzanine where two stepsons live one atop the other, barely able to stand in their own rooms. Like many Cubans, she hopes to move — to trade her apartment for three smaller places so the elder son, 29, can start his own family. “He’s getting married,” she said. “He has to move out.” But despite reassurances — on Monday, Marino Murillo, a top official on economic policy, said selling would not need prior government approval — Ms. Acea and many neighbors seemed wary of the government’s promise to let go. Some Cubans expect rules forcing buyers to hold properties for five or 10 years. Others say the government will make it hard to take profits off the island, through exorbitant taxes or limits on curren-
cy exchange. Still more, like Ernesto Benítez, 37, an artist, cannot imagine a real open market. “They’re going to set one price, per square foot, and that’s it,” he said. Of course, he added, Cubans would respond by setting their own prices. And that might be enough to stimulate movement, he said. He certainly hopes so. Mr. Benítez and the woman he has lived with for nearly a decade broke up 18 months ago. Each is now dating someone new and there are nights, they admit, that get a little awkward. Only a narrow bathroom separates their bedrooms. Katia González, 48, whose parents gave her their apartment before they died (which Cuba allows) said she would consider selling for a fair price. What did she think her two-bedroom just blocks from the ocean, in Havana’s best neighborhood, could command? “Oh, $25,000,” she said. “A little more, maybe $30,000.” In Miami, a similar apartment might cost nearly 10 times that — which is what many Cuban-Americans seem to be thinking. José and several other brokers in Havana said real estate transactions on the black market routinely involved money from Cubans overseas, especially Florida. “There’s always money coming in from Miami,” said Gerardo, a broker who withheld his full name. “The Cuban in Miami buys a house for his cousin in Cuba and when he comes here in the summer for a couple of months, he stays in that house.” Technically, this is a violation of the trade embargo that began under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. According to the United States Treasury Department, deals or investments with Cubans are prohibited. Receiving money or profit from Cuba is also illegal. But the rules are muddy in practice. Family transactions — mainly involving recent emigrants — seem to be expanding with a
wink from the White House. Supporting private business is now encouraged under the general license that lets Cuban-Americans visit relatives, and in 2009, President Obama established a new policy letting Cuban-Americans visit the island whenever they want, and send unlimited remittances to relatives. Beyond that, enforcement against individuals, as opposed to businesses, is practically nonexistent: in the past 18 months, only one American was penalized for violating the sanctions, with a fine of $525, according to a Congressional report published last month. Experts say the Cuban diaspora has already begun to create a tiered social system in Cuba. Cuban emigrants sent back about $1 billion in remittances last year, studies show, with an increasing proportion of that money financing budding capitalists in need of pizza ovens or other equipment to work privately. Homes would simply expand the bond, experts say, and offers are already arriving. Ilda, 69, lives alone in a five-bedroom, ninth-floor apartment with views of the sea. A visiting Cuban-American couple — “chic, very well dressed,” she said — asked to buy her apartment for $150,000, with little care for any bans on foreign ownership. “I told them I can’t,” Ilda said. “We’re waiting for the law.” Even when the law changes, she said she would prefer a “permuta,” a trade, because she would be guaranteed a place to live. Her fear of having nowhere to go is common. One recent study, by Sergio DíazBriquets, a Washington-based demography expert, found that Cuba has a housing deficit of 1.6 million units. The government says the number is closer to 500,000, still a serious problem. Mr. Coyula said money from sales might not be enough to fix it, since there is almost no construction industry, permitting process or materials to build with. Other thorny issues might have to be revisited. “Evictions haven’t happened here since 1939,” he said. “There’s a law forbidding them.” For now, though, Cubans are trying to grasp basic details. How will the mortgage system work? How high will taxes be? What’s a fair price? There is even a question of how buyers and sellers will come together. Classified listings are illegal in Cuba, which explains why brokers like José, known as corredores, spend their days moving through open air bazaars with notebooks listing apartments offered or desired. He already has two employees working for him and when the new law arrives, whether his services are legal or not, he expects to hire more. “We have to get coordinated,” he said. “It’s coming.”
The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
7 Mainland
Insurance Coverage for Contraception Is Required By ROBERT PEAR
O
bama issued new standards that require health insurance plans to cover all government-approved contraceptives for women, without co-payments. The requirements apply to insurance in years starting on or after Aug. 1, 2012. They take effect in January 2013 for insurance plans that operate on the basis of a calendar year. Supporters of the new requirement said it would go a long way toward removing cost as a barrier to birth control, a longtime goal of advocates for women’s rights and experts on women’s health. But the requirement does not immediately help women who have no health insurance. It is sure to reignite debate over the federal role in health care at a time when Republicans in Congress are trying to repeal the health care law signed last year by Obama. A major goal of the law is to increase the use of preventive services like mammograms, colonoscopies, blood pressure checks and childhood immunizations. The law generally bans co-payments, deductibles and other charges for preventive services recommended by expert professional organizations. The law directed federal health offi-
cials to pay attention to the health needs of women in particular when listing preventive services. The new standards require coverage of the full range of contraceptive methods approved by the Food and Drug Administration, as well as sterilization procedures. Among the drugs and devices that must be covered are emergency contraceptives including pills known as ella and Plan B. Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said, “These guidelines will save countless dollars and lives, and send a hugely powerful message about the importance of women’s preventive health care.” Representative Lois Capps praised the requirements, “ensure that women have increased access to the services they need to be healthy.” The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and some conservative groups, including the Family Research Council, have strenuously opposed any requirement for coverage of contraceptives. Health plans offered by certain religious employers would be exempt from the requirement to cover contraceptive services. This provision is similar to the exemption for churches found in many of the states that al-
ready require coverage of contraception, federal health officials said. Researchers have found that people who have coverage of preventive services, under Medicare or private insurance, use them much less than recommended. Federal officials said they would try to promote their use by publicizing the fact that wider, costfree coverage is now available. The National Academy of Sciences said the Obama administration had told its experts not to consider “the cost-effectiveness of screenings or services” in deciding which ones to recommend. Insurers expressed concern that coverage for some of the newly required preventive services could be costly. Under the federal rules governing preventive services, insurers can use “reasonable medical management techniques” to control costs and promote the efficient delivery of care. The administration said Monday, for example, that an insurer could charge co-payments for brand-name drugs if a lower-cost generic version was available and was just as safe and effective. In addition to contraceptive services for women, the government will require health plans to cover screening to detect domestic violence; screening for H.I.V., the virus that causes
AIDS; and counseling and equipment to promote breast-feeding, including breast pumps. Other preventive services that must be covered, without co-payments, include screening for gestational diabetes in pregnant women; DNA testing for the human papillomavirus as part of cervical cancer screening; and annual preventive-care visits. Such visits could include prenatal care and preconception care, to make sure women are healthy when they become pregnant. In a report commissioned by the Obama administration, the academy’s Institute of Medicine said free contraceptive coverage was justified because nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States were unintended, and about 40 percent of unintended pregnancies ended in abortion. Thus, it said, greater use of contraception will reduce the rates of unintended pregnancy, teenage pregnancy and abortion. Certain health plans that were in place on March 23, 2010, when Mr. Obama signed the health care law, may be able to avoid the requirement to cover preventive services for a while. But as time passes and insurers and employers modify their coverage, the number of plans entitled to such “grandfather status” is shrinking.
Shell Gets Tentative Approval to Drill in Arctic By JOHN M. BRODER and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
T
he Department of the Interior granted Royal Dutch Shell conditional approval of its plan to begin drilling exploratory wells in the Arctic Ocean next summer, a strong sign that the Obama administration is easing a regulatory clampdown on offshore oil drilling that it imposed after last year’s deadly accident in the Gulf of Mexico. The move confirms a willingness by President Obama to approve expanded domestic oil and gas exploration in response to high gasoline prices and continuing high levels of unemployment. It comes as the issuing of drilling permits in the gulf is quickening, including the granting of a permit for a Shell floating drill rig for a 4,000-foot-deep well. All five of its rigs there will be back to work after a long drilling halt. Shell’s plan to drill four exploratory wells in the Beaufort Sea off the North Slope of Alaska represents a major step in the company’s efforts to exploit the vast oil and gas resources under the Arctic Ocean, although some hurdles remain. The company has spent nearly $4 billion and more than five years trying to win the right to drill in the frigid waters, against
the opposition of many environmental advocates and of Alaska natives who depend on the sea for their livelihoods. Opponents say the harsh conditions there heighten the dangers of drilling and make cleaning up any potential spill vastly more complicated than in the comparatively benign waters of the gulf. The announcement only partly smooths the rocky relations between the administration and the oil industry, with the president remaining committed to repealing $4 billion in annual oil company tax breaks. The administration has also been wary of encouraging the industry’s aggressive plans to drill in shale oil and gas fields across the country because of concerns about potential drinking water contamination. The plan is almost certain to face legal challenges. “No drill bits are going to hit the Arctic seafloor until at least one and probably several courts have reviewed this plan,” said Brendan Cummings. The company has proposed drilling four wells at a depth of approximately 160 feet of water about 20 miles from shore in the Beaufort Sea. The BP well that exploded in the gulf in April 2010 was at a depth of more than 5,000 feet and 40 miles from the Louisia-
na coast. The accident killed 11 workers and spilled nearly five million barrels of oil into the gulf. Energy experts and industry executives said the move on Thursday reflected a partial warming of relations between the oil industry and Obama administration since the BP disaster. “I don’t know if I would call them friends yet, but I look at this as a step in the right direction,” said Craig T. Castille, operations manager for deepwater projects at Stone Energy, who added that the permit process in the Gulf of Mexico remained slower than the industry would like. Shell has spent years trying to convince federal regulators and several courts that it can drill safely in the Arctic, and every year one hurdle or another has stood in its way. Shell has already invested nearly $4 billion on its 10-year offshore leases and preparations for exploration in the forbidding Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Its current plan is to drill up to 10 exploratory wells in the two seas, potentially leading to production by the end of the decade. Shell has been obliged over the years to tighten its spill response plan, especially since the BP accident at the Macondo well in the gulf. It is proposing to use two drill ships
in the Arctic, each capable of drilling a relief well for the other; to put an extra set of shears on its blowout preventers; and to keep emergency capping systems near drill sites to capture any leaks. The Alaskan Arctic may hold 27 billion barrels of oil, enough to fuel 25 million cars for 35 years. But environmentalists warn that a spill in the Arctic would be more catastrophic than the Gulf of Mexico accident was because the Alaskan waters are dark and inaccessible, and because they are vital breeding grounds for many aquatic species that are endangered or at risk. Marilyn Heiman, director of the Pew Environment Group’s Arctic program, said that the region was the harshest area in the world in which to drill for oil, as well as a delicate habitat for a variety of sea mammals. The proposed well sites are subject to fierce winds and high seas in the fall and lie hundreds of miles from the nearest Coast Guard stations. “Hard questions need to be asked about any oil company’s ability to mount a response to a major oil spill in hurricane-force winds, high seas, broken and shifting sea ice, subzero temperatures, and months of fog and darkness,” Ms. Heiman said in an e-mail from Alaska.
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The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
Chinese Officials Seized and Sold Babies, Parents Say By SHARON LaFRANIERE
M
any parents and grandparents in this mountainous region of terraced rice and sweet potato fields have long known to grab their babies and find the nearest hiding place whenever family planning officials show up. Too many infants, they say, have been snatched by officials, never to be seen again. But Yuan Xinquan was caught by surprise one December morning in 2005. Then a new father at the age of 19, Mr. Yuan was holding his 52-day-old daughter at a bus stop when a half-dozen men sprang from a white government van and demanded his marriage certificate. He did not have one. Both he and his daughter’s mother were below the legal age for marriage. Nor did he have 6,000 renminbi, then about $745, to pay the fine he said they demanded if he wanted to keep his child. He was left with a plastic bag holding her baby clothes and some powdered formula. “They are pirates,” he said last month in an interview at his home, a half-hour trek up a narrow mountain path between terraced rice paddies. Nearly six years later, he said, he still hopes to relay a message to his daughter: “Please come home as soon as possible.” Mr. Yuan’s daughter was among at least 16 children who were seized by family planning officials between 1999 and late 2006 in Longhui County, an impoverished rural area in Hunan, a southern Chinese province, parents, grandparents and other residents said in interviews last month. The abduction of children is a continuing problem in China, where a lingering preference for boys coupled with strict controls on the number of births have helped create a lucrative black market in children. Just last week, the police announced that they had rescued 89 babies from child traffickers, and the deputy director of the Public Security Ministry assailed what he called the practice of “buying and selling children in this country.” But parents in Longhui say that in their case, it was local government officials who treated babies as a source of revenue, routinely imposing fines of $1,000 or more — five times as much as an average local family’s yearly income. If parents could not pay the fines, the babies were illegally taken from their families and often put up for adoption by foreigners, another big source of revenue. The practice in Longhui came to an end in 2006, parents said, only after an 8-monthold boy fell from the second-floor balcony of a local family planning office as officials
tried to pluck him from his mother’s arms. Despite a few news reports outside the Chinese mainland about governmentsanctioned kidnappings in Longhui and other regions, China’s state-controlled media ignored or suppressed the news until this May, when Caixin, an intrepid Chinese magazine well known for unusually bold investigations, reported the abductions and prompted an official inquiry. Zeng Dingbao, who leads the Inspection Bureau in Shaoyang, the city that administers Longhui County, has promised a diligent investigation. But signs point to a whitewash. In June, he told People’s Daily Online, the Web version of the Communist Party’s official newspaper, that the situation “really isn’t the way the media reported it to be, with infants being bought and sold.” Rather than helping trace and recover seized children, parents say, the authorities are punishing those who speak out. Two of the most vocal fathers were detained for 15 days in Shaoyang on charges of soliciting prostitutes at a brothel. Released last month, the two men, Yang Libing, 47, and Zhou Yinghe, 34, said they had been entrapped. Mr. Yang said he was constantly followed by government minders. Mr. Zhou said the village party secretary had warned him to stop talking to reporters about the abduction of his 3-month-old daughter in March 2003 or face more punishment. “They are like organized criminals,” Mr. Zhou said. China’s family planning policies, while among the strictest in the world, ban the confiscation of children from parents who exceed birth quotas, and abuses on the scale of those in Shaoyang are far less common today than they once were. Even so, critics say the powers handed to local officials under national family planning regulations remain excessive and ripe for exploitation. “The larger issue is that the one-child policy is so extreme that it emboldened local officials to act so inhumanely,” said Wang Feng, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who directs the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing. The scandal also has renewed questions about whether Americans and other foreigners have adopted Chinese children who were falsely depicted as abandoned or orphaned. At least one American adoption agency organized adoptions from the government-run Shaoyang orphanage. Lillian Zhang, the director of China Adoption With Love, based in Boston, said by telephone last month that the agency had found adoptive parents in 2006 for six Shaoyang children — all girls, all renamed Shao, after the city. The Chinese authorities certified in each case that the child was eli-
gible for adoption, she said, and her agency cannot now independently investigate their backgrounds without a specific request backed by evidence. “I’m an adoption agency, not a policeman,” Ms. Zhang said. The Shaoyang welfare agency’s orphanage is required to post a notice of each newly received child for 60 days in Hunan Daily, a newspaper delivered only to subscribers in Longhui County. Unclaimed children are renamed with the surname Shao and approved for adoption. Foreign parents who adopt must donate about $5,400 to the orphanage. Reports that family planning officials stole children, beat parents, forcibly sterilized mothers and destroyed families’ homes sowed a quiet terror through parts of Longhui County in the first half of the past decade. The casualties of that terror remain suffused with heartbreak and rage years later. Yang Libing, one of the two fathers accused of soliciting prostitutes, said he was a migrant worker in the southern city of Shenzhen when his firstborn, Yang Ling, was stolen from his parents’ home in May 2005 when she was 9 months old. Family planning officials apparently spotted Yang Ling’s clothes hung to dry outside the family’s mud-brick home. Her grandmother tried to hide her in a pigsty, but the grandfather, Yang Qinzheng, a Communist Party member and a former soldier, bade her to come out. “I don’t disobey,” he said last month. “I do what the officials say.” Yang Ling’s parents had not registered their marriage. To keep the baby, the officials said, the elder Mr. Yang would have to pay nearly $1,000, on the spot. Otherwise, they said, he would have to sign away the girl with a false affidavit stating that he was not her biological grandfather. “I was totally outraged,” he said, but “I did not have the courage to resist. They do not play by the rules.” He signed the document. Yang Libing discovered the loss of his daughter during his monthly telephone call home from a pay phone on a Shenzhen street.
“Is she behaving?” he asked cheerily. The answer, he said, made him physically sick. After racing home, he said, he begged family planning officials to let him pay the fine. They said it was too late. When he protested, he said, a group of more than 10 men beat him. Afterward, the office director offered a compromise: although their daughter was gone forever, the Yangs would be allowed to conceive two more children. “I can’t even describe my hatred of those family planning officials,” Mr. Yang said. “I hate them to my bones. I wonder if they are parents, too. Why don’t they treat us as humans?” Asked whether he was still searching for his daughter, he replied: “Of course! This is not a chicken. This is not a dog. This is my child.” Hu Shelian, 46, another anguished victim, gave birth to a second daughter in 1998. Even though family planning specialists said couples in her area were allowed a second child if the first was a girl, she said family planning officials broke her windows and took her television as punishment. After she had a third daughter the following year, they levied a whopping fine of nearly $5,000. When she pleaded poverty, she said, four officials snatched her newborn from her arms, muscled her into a car and drove her to the county hospital for a forced tubal ligation. Her baby disappeared into the bowels of the Shaoyang orphanage. Xiong Chao escaped that fate. Villagers say he was the last baby that officials tried to snatch, and one of the few returned home. Now, six years later, his 63-year-old grandmother, Dai Yulin, patiently scrawls blue and white chalk numerals on her concrete wall hoping — in vain — that Chao will learn them. “He has been to primary school for a whole year,” she said, “and he still cannot recognize one and two.” Nearby is the tiny, dark room where, she said, she tried and failed in September 2006 to hide Chao from family planning officials. He was 8 months old, her son’s second child. Officials demanded nearly $1,000, then took him away when she could not pay. His mother, Du Chunhua, rushed to the family planning office to protest. There, as she struggled with two officials on the second-floor balcony, she said, the baby slipped from her grasp and fell more than 10 feet, to the pavement below. Later, she said, as the baby lay in a coma in the hospital, his forehead permanently misshapen, officials offered a deal: they would forget about the fine as long as the family covered the medical bills for Chao. Also, they said, the Xiongs could keep him.
The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
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Libya Allying With Islamists, Qaddafi Son Says By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
A
fter six months battling a rebellion that his family portrayed as an Islamist conspiracy, Col. Muammar elQaddafi’s son and one-time heir apparent said Wednesday that he was reversing course to forge a behind-the-scenes alliance with radical Islamist elements among the Libyan rebels to drive out their more liberal-minded confederates. “The liberals will escape or be killed,” the son, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, vowed in an hourlong interview that stretched past midnight. “We will do it together,” he added, wearing a newly grown beard and fingering Islamic prayer beads as he reclined on a love seat in a spare office tucked in a nearly deserted downtown hotel. “Libya will look like Saudi Arabia, like Iran. So what?” The leading Islamist whom Mr. Qaddafi identified as his main counterpart in the talks, Ali Sallabi, acknowledged their conversations but dismissed any suggestion of an alliance. He said the Libyan Islamists supported the rebel leaders’ calls for a pluralistic democracy without the Qaddafis. But the interview nonetheless offered a rare glimpse into the defiant, some say delusional, mentality of the Qaddafi family at a time when they have all but completely retreated from public view under the threat of a NATO bombing campaign, now five months old, and a six-month rebellion. On one level, Mr. Qaddafi’s avowed embrace of the Islamists represents a sharp personal reversal for a man who had long styled himself as a cosmopolitan, Anglophile advocate of Western-style liberal democracy. He continues to refer to the Islamists as “terrorists” and “bloody men,” and says, “We don’t trust them, but we have to deal with them.” But it may also be simply a twist on an
old theme, a new version of the Qaddafi argument that by assisting the rebels the Western intervention could usher in a radical Islamist takeover. In a further taunt to the West, he suggested that the Qaddafis would even help the Islamists stamp out the liberals. “You want us to make a compromise. O.K. You want us to share the pot. O.K., But with who?” he said in imagined dialogue with the Western powers. The Islamists, he said, answering his own questions, “are the real force on the ground.” “Everybody is taking off the mask, and now you have to face the reality,” he said. “I know they are terrorists. They are bloody. They are not nice. But you have to accept them.” He seemed to enjoy repeating the notion that Western capitals would be forced to welcome the ambassadors or defense minister of a new Islamist Libya. “It is a funny story,” he said, though he insisted in all seriousness that he and the Islamists would announce a joint communiqué within days, from both Tripoli and the rebels’ provisional capital of Benghazi, Libya. “We will have peace during Ramadan,” he said, referring to the current Islamic holy month. Less than a week after the mysterious killing of the rebels’ top military commander,
Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, by rebel gunmen, Mr. Qaddafi also seemed to be trying to capitalize on potential divisions within their ranks. There have been suggestions that the general was killed by an Islamist faction, perhaps in retaliation for his actions in his former role as Colonel Qaddafi’s interior minister, charged with the detention and torture of radical Islamists. “They decided to get rid of those people — the ex-military people like Abdul Fattah and the liberals — to take control of the whole operation,” Mr. Qaddafi said. “In other words, to take off the mask.” He said that the rebel-held eastern city of Darna, long known as a hotbed of Islamist activism, had already come to resemble the lawless regions of Pakistan. “It is Waziristan on the Mediterranean,” he said, adding that he had reached an agreement with local Islamists to allow them to make it “an Islamic zone, like Mecca.” His comments also conveyed a new disdain for peace talks — with either the rebels’ governing council or its NATO backers — which Qaddafi spokesmen still call for almost every day. Mr. Qaddafi attributed recognition by the United States and other countries of the rebels’ governing council to “a lot of idiot people around the world.” As for the rebels themselves, Mr. Qaddafi called them “rats” and their council “a fake,” “a joke” and “a puppet.” Rebel leaders and Western governments have long acknowledged the presence of Islamists among the rebel fighters, including at least one who was previously imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and another believed to have been in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda ran training camps under Taliban rule. But Western governments have so far accepted the Libyan Islamists’ pledges of support for a pluralistic democracy after the ouster of Colonel Qaddafi, concluding that their agenda is purely domestic and poses no broader threat. Mr. Qaddafi, however, has his own history with Libya’s Islamists, many of whom his father sent to jail during a long campaign to stamp out an organization known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Under the umbrella of liberalization, the younger Mr. Qaddafi led an initiative to rehabilitate many of them. “I released them from prison, I know them personally, they are my friends,” he said, though he added that he considered their release “of course a mistake,” because of their role in the revolt. As for the future of an Islamist Libya, Mr. Qaddafi was vague on the details. He said that he had assented to Islamist demands to prohibit any constitution other than the Ko-
ran, though Mr. Sallabi, the Islamist leader, said he has written publicly in support of a civil constitution. And Mr. Qaddafi refused to discuss his own or his father’s future role. That was a question for after negotiating a peace, he said. “It is like you shoot first and ask questions later.” Although in recent weeks the rebellion has edged forward on three different fronts around Tripoli, Mr. Qaddafi insisted: “We are more united, relaxed, more confident. The rebels are losing every day.” Mr. Qaddafi also described some of his family’s contacts with rebel officials that have stirred controversy. Many in the rebel ranks have suspected General Younes, a former Qaddafi confidante, of maintaining ties to his former boss, and the younger Mr. Qaddafi appeared to confirm those suspicions. “We met him twice in Italy,” he said. “We told him, ‘You will be killed at the end of the day because you are playing with the snakes,’ and he said, ‘Nonsense.’ ” But he talked mostly about his conversations with Mr. Sallabi, who Mr. Qaddafi called the “the real leader” of the rebellion and “the spiritual leader” of its Islamists. “He said liberals, the secular people, they are drunk all the time, they have no place here in Libya,” Mr. Qaddafi said. “These are our common enemies, those nice people with jackets and ties, flying in on private jets from Paris and London.” But Mr. Sallabi said he welcomed the secular leaders. “Liberals are a part of Libya,” he said. “I believe in their right to present their political project and convince the people with it.” As for their conversations, Mr. Sallabi said that Mr. Qaddafi was the one who contacted the rebels. “There were many discussions between him and the opposition,” Mr. Sallabi said. “The first thing discussed is their departure from power.”
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The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
LETTERS Did it Again? Mari Brás after receiving the first Certificate of Citizenship of Puerto Rico, September 14, 2007 To Gov. Fortuño: The PR Socialist Party was giving Gov. Romero a hard time, setting fire to Sears and such nights and then Carlos Gallizá warned of a Northern Ireland here if we became a state. And Juan Mari Bras was firebranding on TV at every turn. And Washington was getting spooked. Or so the penepeístas figured. Then Mari Bras’s son was plausibly assassinated by the fellows who’d done such a good job for their equine boss at Cerro Maravilla. And subsequently not a peep out of Mari ever again. Nor Gallizá even. It all brings us back to today. How, on God’s green earth, did you get the seemingly inexhaustible fury of the UPR student strikers to just fizzle out in one afternoon? Did activists suffer traffic accidents, heart attacks? Or commit suicide like the macheteros? Nothing has been heard. How did you pull it? Frágola Serpieri, Santurce
Palm & Swastika Crime, crime, crime. Does it make sense to call it a wave when it’s lasted a generation? It started during Hernández Colón, Romero ignored it, and Rosselló, after his “Sí, se puede” quip to Melo, staged his National Guard spectacular. Every sociology textbook ever written tells that crime is generated by social injustice. How much crime is there is Norway or Switzerland? Or China even? But our hierarchical laissez-faire minimal-government polities are rife with it. You’re only truly blind when you don’t want to see. The penepeísta ruffians, the have-gun-will-travels of the corporations, have taken over after the PDP Weimar. In the 20th century such a phenomenon was known as fascism. Agustín Manzano , Santurce
Pyrrhic Governance To Gov. Fortuño: You won at UPR. Brute police force squashed Ghandi. Not even the combined clout of US Rep. Luis Guitiérrez and Cuban Pres. Fidel Castro meant anything. But how many families having to pay the outrageous “quota” do you think will vote for you next year? And attrition of the middle class means propagation of crime, as is happening, and this is only the beginning.
And the mass firings. You’re not a CEO, you’re the governor, so unemployment reflects on you, particularly when the effect is to depress wages. Taking over the Judicial Branch, bypassing separation of powers and thereby unplugging democracy hardly endear you to the electorate. That and endless legislation to feather the nest of big business and exploit the consumer and suppress upstart entrepreneurs. Indeed, Governor, you’re soon to be snared by your own strawberries.
Feudalism Revisited Outrageous college tuition can’t possibly be justified. First, you can learn in bed from the book really. And cyberspace allows one prof to at one time give class to the entire population of the planet. And beam out some for neighboring ETs. What has to be happening is a nefarious elite is hogging higher education, the way they owned the land and the factories in centuries past----and for the same purpose.
Mara Andere, Miramar Bob Harris, Condado
Fat Chance To Gov. Fortuño: You’re running for re-election. Like Aníbal before you. Party hacks and Milla de Oro underwriters must’ve brownnosed you yesterday till you purred. You put in your best for the business community, Richard Carrión would’ve done it no better. Never mind you let we the people stew, stepped on us even. You particularly endeared yourself to UPR families. And to soon to be such, presumably. Elections are secured through votes, and you sure as hell won’t get there. You’re worse than Aníbal, truly. He’s crazy, you’re plain evil. Bob Harris, Condado
Privatization Folly Privatization only works where the activity in question is watched over by government. But if the goodies were gotten through campaign contributions or if politicians just can’t be bothered, then, whatever lapses into a long just-pick-up-your-check do-nothingness, till the opposition wins the next election by promising to re-nationalize it. And then that doesn’t work either and we’re back to square one. While the politicians sip margaritas at Capitolio on Friday afternoons in the company of kiss-and-tell Melinda Romero. Ana Badillo, Hato Rey
And the $800... The new UPR President is paying a $1.6M federal handout to some corporate octopus for exotic gear on the campuses to save electricity, including solar panels at Río Piedras and little windmills at Humacao. It might help though to turn off air conditioning and lighting overnight, during weekends and through the monthlong Christmas recess. Oh yes, the fungus on the carpets. Tiles? Linoleum? Wood even?22 Emilio Santiago, Summit Hills
Health as Commerce Unconscionable Doctors write your newspaper that health care is rightfully an item of barter. Like used cars and plantains. Is this what the Hippocratic Oath says? Never mind that you’re in no condition to haggle when you’re sick. Human life is sacred. Which is why the civilized world is gravitating to socialized medicine. On our side of the tracks, witness Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador and Costa Rica. The U.S. under the Republicans being the odd nation out. And Puerto Rico. Anita Roig,, Santurce
Not Good for the Gander To Robert Licalzi of Garden Hills, mother of Edna, Juanita & Lucinda: In your gazillion-paragraph antistudent diatribes you railed against “virulent entitlement fever.” An affliction shared by automotive and banking CEOs in their Guccis flying to Washington on their Lear Jets demanding----and getting----billion-dollar bailouts from the President, who visibly would’ve much rather said no. It seems under capitalism the merit of self-reliance does not extend to the big boys Ana Montes, Las Lomas
The San Juan Weekly Star Send your opinions and ideas to: The San Juan Weeekly Star PO BOX 6537 Caguas PR 00726 Or e-mail us at:
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The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
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LETTERS Backward Like the Crab
Respect & Dignity!?
Early in the 20th century it looked like democracy just didn’t work. Like it was tantamount to anarchy both politically and economically, a notion reinforced by the Great Depression. But it didn’t make sense to go back to kings and noblemen, so what minds came up with was organizing society like the military, with a sense of unity and honor and the fascio was an appropriate representation of such a restructuring, it’s sticks tied together, like when we all put our hearts and minds together, there’s no ceiling to what a nation can do. But ever since Caesar gave way to Nero and Caligula it’s been evident that checks and balances, even if they can turn everything into a chicken coop, safeguard us from the corruption of absolute power. No, penepeístas aren’t fascists. They’re just self-serving, arrogant thugs in the tradition of Rafael Trujillo and Fulgencio Batista. It happens that folks south of the Tropic of Cancer are learning all about democracy these days. In particular Ecuador and Chile. But here, like my grandmother used to say, we’re always backward like the crab.
The latest expensive paid-for-by-the-taxpayer PR Police campaign is monikered “Respect and Dignity,” the way cops want to be treated by victims of crime, according to the posters on the train. Like when my car was stolen and the police girl said I could not report an auto theft without the vehicle registration and the insurance paperwork. Eventually all they did was a oneline entry into a rumpled notebook a fifth-grader would discard. Then I was given the name of a cop who was never, ever available and who never, ever returned my calls, whom I never even got to speak to. Years earlier when my car was broken into and my stuff and radio stolen and the investigating policeman wasn’t taking fingerprints and I pointed that out, he asked me whether I though he was Mannix. Unless you’re a politician or a Carrión or a Fonalleda, police here don’t care about crimes committed against you. They just about yawn in your face when---if---you show up at the station. When that happens it’s unlikely not to want to cuss them out. But isn’t the way they treat us even more disrespectful? And what about when they bully, even beat, decent folks over nonsense? And their human-rights offenses against UPR fellows and women? All with the enthusiastic encouragement of the Governor
Juan Vega, Caparra Heights
Integrity To J.D. Aragón: It was vehement and credible where you wrote you’d rather forfeit statehood than get there by way of Fortuño Administration cheating. Though you need to spruce up and streamline your prose, you’re a hard and exhausting read, it’s clarity that enables a letter to smack its target hard. And hew to what’s consequential, leave the petty gossip to la Comay. Samaria Salcedo, Caparra Hts.
Jackson Winters, Isla Verde
Different, Yet the Same Chief Justice Trías Monge What’s the difference between Aníbal and Fortuño? The difference between schizophrenia and mega-
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lomania, albeit in a shared matrix of ineptitude. Actually that’s not true. Our pols just pretend to be morons, and they do it believably. What they are is unprincipled opportunists. Who pander to shadowy characters who are even worse. The late Supreme Court Justice José Trías Monge best described them in one of his cases. I’d quote for you, but too much would be lost in translation, you have to read the original in Spanish, you can probably Google it. He makes the point that how can crime abate when the biggest outlaws are our leaders? Heinrich Himmler-lookalike Figueroa Sancha says you start on lawlessness at the bottom. But you don’t, it’s the top that everybody’s eyes on, How can you expect followers to be law-abiding when leaders aren’t? Miguel Estrada, Caparra Heights
Canine Epiphany Dogs are indeed loyal and loving and faithful. But only to the master, a leftover from wolf days. Everybody else is the enemy to the death, der Todfeind, in German such expressions have more of a kick to them. Back then it was the leader of the pack, now it’s the dumb, selfish, egotistic, inconsiderate, politically reactionary owner. Notice it’s always the same homes that house the canines that drive the neighborhood nuts---not the same dogs. Dogs are an allegory, they act out the hatred that suffuses humankind, the unwitting carriers of aggression and ego that we’re not supposed to have---like aren’t we all good Christians?---but that define us as a species. Reason why dogs co-evolved with us so conveniently. I own a cat instead and I feed the pigeons in the afternoons. Rocco Sastre, Ponce
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FASHION & BEAUTY
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August 11 - 17, 2011
The San Juan Weekly Star
Camp Couture With the 4th of July approaching, we went searching for girls who make the great outdoors seem as chic as a runway. Whether you prefer Alexa Chung’s rock glamazon look, a boho babe à la Gwyneth Paltrow or Lily Donaldson’s jeans and a tee, celebrate your fashion independence! One woman, one vote.
Uncomplicated Chic With temperatures exceeding three digits in June, summer scorchers are here to stay. Dressing for the weather (and looking appropriate) comes effortlessly to Blake Lively, Katie Holmes ( with daughter Suri) and Brooklyn Decker. When it’s hot, the secret is not to fuss. And these three set the standard for uncomplicated chic.
Beach Blondes With the summer solstice upon us, gals all across the world are looking for new ways to beat the heat. We couldn’t think of three girls blending whimsy, elegance and a relaxed attitude better than Kate Bosworth (in Richard Nicoll), Kirsten Dunst (in vintage) and Lauren Santo Domingo (in Proenza Schouler). These three know how to keep their cool.
Electric Ladyland The beaches are officially open and a smattering of white can be seen on the streets, but T noticed that there is a new color spectrum enveloping this summer’s fashion’s darlings — a neon pop that takes its cues from psychedelic colors. Ashley Greene keeps things young and short in a pink retro mini, while Aerin Lauder and Jenna Lyons play with bold accents on top and bottom, respectively. Either way, this is one summer look that definitely colors outside the lines.
The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
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FASHION & BEAUTY
On Point It’s only a matter of weeks before the fall collections — and the polka dots that dominate so many of them — start arriving in stores. As if cued to announce the trend officially, women all over are wearing flirty, black and white versions of it. The actress Sarah Carter wears a mini with cap sleeves, while the starlet Malin Ackerman looks effortless in all white and the model Coco Rocha toughens up a sweetheart silhouette with biker boots. Clearly, we’re not the only ones connecting the dots.
Great Lengths We have yet to see separates make a significant comeback, even though we’re a month into summer. Maxi dresses with allover prints and simple silhouettes are everywhere, and women are opting to wear them most often with shoes that disappear behind the longer hemlines. The actress Halle Berry, with her daughter Nahla, pairs a graphic ikat with a fringed bag and barely there sandals, while the breakout star of the summer, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, puts a casual spin on wallpaper print and the “Gossip Girl” actress Jessica Szohr accessorizes a strapless with long gold chains.
Sirens The hazy and humid days of summer are upon us, and it seems many are coming down with a case of scarlet fever. Rather than run around in barely there ensembles, women are wearing clothes that get attention for their vivid color. The English television presenter Fearne Cotton keeps things casual in cheery off-shades, while the actress Charlotte Poutrel goes glamorous and the model Karolina Kurkova dazzles in floor-length silk. The heat is on.
Buttoned Down With Paris in the throes of couture, fashion fanatics expect extravagance on and off the runways. And while designers are delivering an abundance of glamour, the front-row look couldn’t be simpler- without a trace of the Balenciaga, Chanel and Celine ensembles we’ve come to expect from the fashion flock. Instead, we’re seeing a lot of slouchy Oxford shirts and plain, tailored trousers. Does this trio of taste makers — French Vogue’s editor in chief, Emmanuelle Alt, the model Caroline De Maigret and the heiress Bianca Brandolini d’Adda — portend a new austerity? And will it linger into fall? Or is it just simply too hot to dress up?
Wine
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The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
Thinking Inside the Box By ERIC ASIMOV
I
T’S the epitome of déclassé, the vinous equivalent of trailer trash, the wine snob’s worst nightmare. No, I don’t mean the screw cap. I’m talking about boxed wine. Despite the almost reflexive elevation of noses at the mention of boxed wines, one significant detail undermines these smug dismissals: the idea of putting wine in a box, or more accurately, in a bag within a box, is brilliant. The packaging solves significant problems that have dogged wine for millennia, whether it was stored in urn, amphora, barrel, stone crock or bottle. No matter how elegant or handy those containers may be, their fixed volumes permit air to enter when wine is removed. Air attacks and degrades wine, making it imperative to drink up what remains, usually within no more than a few days. The bag-in-a-box, to use the unlovely industry term, resolves this problem of oxidation by eliminating space for air to occupy. Wine can stay fresh for weeks once it has been opened. But while the packaging may be ingenious, what’s inside has been a problem. Quite simply, the quality of the boxed wines sold in this country has been uniformly bad. Those in the wine trade have tried to explain this sad fact by citing an entrenched public perception of boxed wines as wretched. What’s the point of putting better wines in boxes, they said, if people won’t buy them? Even so, the logic of placing wine in a box is so compelling that sooner or later, some producers were going to take a chance that better wines would sell this way. I have had isolated examples in the last few years of just the sort of fresh, lively, juicy wines that thrive in the bag-in-a-box environment. Did this signal that overall quality was turning a corner? To answer the question, the wine panel recently tasted 20 wines from three-liter boxes. We tasted 12 reds and 8 whites, without regard to price or provenance. The only guideline for our tasting coordinator, Bernard Kirsch, was to seek out producers who were striving for quality. For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Colin Alevras, the service manager at the Dutch, and Alexander LaPratt, the sommelier at db Bistro Moderne. Let me backtrack for a moment. To say that consumers have rejected boxes is not strictly accurate. At the lowest echelon of quality, the realm of domestic burgundies and rhine wines, a great deal of boxed wine is sold. These boxes, largely in five-liter sizes, the equivalent of 6.67 bottles, which might sell for as little as $12, did especially well just
after the economic meltdown, said Danny Brager of the Nielsen Company, which tracks sales. But sales are relatively flat now. The biggest growth in boxed wines, Mr. Brager said, was in the three-liter, higher-priced category: that is, $20 or more. Sales last year were up 19 percent, he said, and this year through June they are up 16 percent. So let’s get to the crucial question: How were the wines? Without a doubt, the choices are far superior to what was available five years ago. Among the wines we liked best, we found more than a few that we’d be happy to serve as a house pour, especially among the reds. We liked the boxes brought in by two small importers who specialize in French wines: the Wineberry Boxes from Wineberry America, and From the Tank from Jenny & François Selections, who focus on natural wines. Jenny Lefcourt of Jenny & François became a fan of boxed wines while living in France for 10 years. “I always thought it was a fantastic way of serving and conserving wine,” she said. “I didn’t see any disadvantages to it, except that people still have a negative image of them in the U.S.” Since the From the Tank wines, one white and one red, were introduced in 2008, she said, they have taken off nationally. “I’m pretty bowled over by the success of it,” she said. “We were cautious at first, but we just kept selling out.” Wineberry began with its boxes two years ago, and now sells three reds, two whites and a rosé. The Wineberry boxes are unusual in that they are made of wood rather than cardboard, which gives them heft, solidity and a certain personality the cardboard boxes lack. “We live in the most sophisticated area in the world,” said Eric Dubourg, the founder of Wineberry, which is based in New York. “People care about what things look like. Still, the quality of the wine is the main point.” True enough, and Wineberry’s 2010 Côtes-du-Rhône from Domaine le Garrigon was our clear favorite, with its fresh red fruit and mineral flavors. A juicy, pleasurable wine, it would be good for gulping uncritically but offers enough interest to satisfy people who care about what they are consuming. We also liked the From the Tank red, a 2009 Côtes-du-Rhône from Estézargues, a very good cooperative. This, too, was fresh and lively, though perhaps a little more straightforward than the Garrigon. Still, these were exactly the sort of pleasing wines we were hoping to find, and reasonably priced. Both were under $40 a box, the equivalent of less than $10 a bottle, and excellent values, in fact, compared with most $10 bottles.
The boxed whites on the whole were less attractive. Too many were flat, lacked vivacity and seemed muted aromatically. We liked our top white well enough, the 2010 Torre del Falasco from Cantina Valpantena in the Veneto region of Italy. It was made of the garganega grape, the main grape in Soave, but for one reason or another didn’t qualify to be called Soave. Nonetheless, it was lively, with the nutlike quality that I often find in Soave and a fine value at $27. Our next white, a 2010 New Zealand sauvignon blanc from Black Box, struck none of us as sauvignon blanc in the blind tasting. This was odd, as sauvignon blanc is generally one of the easier grapes to identify. But this wine, while fresh and tangy, lacked any sauvignon blanc character. We liked it enough to make it our No. 6 wine. We also liked the 2010 Picpoul de Pinet from La Petite Frog in the Languedoc, in southern France, a very pleasant summer drinker. Even though two more whites made our Top 10, we all thought they could have been better. It occurred to me that while box packaging solves a problem once the wines are opened, it perhaps creates one before they are opened. Unopened boxed wines have a shorter shelf life. The box and bag are more porous to air than an unopened bottle, so they must be consumed relatively young. What’s more, because they are so inexpensive, they may not be handled or stored with great care. Heat and vibration can be hard on whites in particular, which is one possible reason the whites didn’t perform as well as the reds. I said these wines were cheap, but we indeed had one outlier. It was our No. 3, Dominio IV’s Love Lies Bleeding, a 2009 pinot noir from the Dundee Hills in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. It cost $90, almost twice as much as the next most expensive box on the list, Wineberry’s 2010 Bourgogne Blanc from Baronne du Chatelard, which was $48. What accounts for this disparity? For one thing, grapes from the Dundee Hills aren’t cheap, and neither is aging the wine in oak barrels, 30 percent new, said Patrick Reuter, the winemaker. The wine was fresh and deep, very ripe and a bit oaky but clearly identifiable as good pinot noir. Mr. Reuter said the boxes had sold well to restaurants, which poured it by the glass. But consumers, he said, seemed to think that the high price required a more elegant vessel. “I think I need to think out the packaging,” he said. At the same time, he said, he has kept a box on the counter in his kitchen for months, and the wine is still good. “I can’t believe how intact it’s stayed,” he said. “It’s the craziest thing.”
Tasting Report
Domaine le Garrigon, $39, ✩✩✩ Côtes-du-Rhône 2010, 3 liters Aromas of red fruit and herbs, fresh and lightly tannic, lingering flavors of fruit and minerals. (Wineberry America, New York) From the Tank Côtes-du-Rhône, $37, ✩✩ ½ Estézargues 2009, 3 liters Fresh, bright and balanced, with tangy flavors of red fruit. (Jenny & François, New York) Dominio IV Dundee Hills Pinot Noir, $90, ✩✩½ Love Lies Bleeding 2009, 3 liters Rich cinnamon-scented fruit with clear pinot noir identity, but a touch too much oak flavor. Cantina Valpantena Veronese, $27, ✩✩ ½ Torre del Falasco I.G.T. Garganega 2010, 3 liters Lively with mellow flavors of nuts and minerals. (Omniwines, Flushing, N.Y.) Château Moulin de la Roquille, $39, ✩✩ ½ Francs Côtes de Bordeaux 2009, 3 liters Dark fruit flavors with a pleasant herbal edge and a light rasp of tannins. (Wineberry America) Black Box New Zealand, $22, ✩✩ ½ Sauvignon Blanc 2010, 3 liters With flavors of peaches and apricots, it doesn’t quite taste like sauvignon blanc, but fresh, balanced and pleasing. (Black Box Wines, Madera, Calif.) La Petite Frog Coteaux du Languedoc, $30, ✩✩ Picpoul de Pinet 2010, 3 liters Dry and refreshing with flavors of nuts, citrus and herbs. (Kysèla Pere et Fils, Winchester, Va.) Baronne du Chatelard, $48, ✩✩ Bourgogne Blanc 2010, 3 liters Low-key and somewhat neutral with simple flavors of apples and herbs. (Wineberry America) Würtz Rheinhessen Riesling, $27, ✩✩ 2010, 3 liters Light citrus, herbal and floral aromas; serve well chilled. (Domaine Select, New York) Osborne Spain Seven Octavin NV, $20, ✩✩ 3 liters Straightforward and fruity red with a suggestion of sweetness. (Underdog Wine Merchants, Ripon, Calif.)
The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
15
Kitchen
Duck Fat for Later, a Salad for Now By MELISSA CLARK
W
HEN I cook duck, it’s just as often for the rendered fat as it is for the meat. As much as I love the gamy, sweet flesh, it’s the fat that I really crave. I keep a jar of the heady stuff in the fridge, pulling it out when I want to sauté fish or potatoes or kale, or pop a vat of popcorn. I use it to make pie crusts and biscuits, and to fry chicken. When my supplies run low, I simply cook up some more duck to replenish it. In winter, this means confiting the legs and roasting whole birds that ooze quarts of golden grease. In summer I generally stick to the
breasts, which don’t need hours in the oven and are the leanest part, if you render off the creamy layer of fat. There are two ways to do this. You can sear the fat off in a pan, letting the skin brown and the drippings caramelize. Or, trim off the fat and skin and render it separately. I like to cut it into pieces, add a little water to the pan and let it slowly melt until the fat is liquid and the skin crackling. I save the fat and nibble the cracklings as a snack. The trimmed breasts, denuded of all the flare-inducing fat, are ideal for grilling. One of my summer staples is grilled flank steak marinated with Vietnamese seasonings, with a crunchy slaw of cu-
cumbers, radishes and carrots strewn with herbs and roasted peanuts. The recipe also works with trimmed duck breasts. They have a brawny chewiness similar to flank steak, and suck up the potent marinade beautifully. The only other change I make is with technique. Flank steak likes to be grilled
over direct heat until charred, but bloody within. Duck prefers the gentler indirect heat. Even if you end up tossing out the fat instead of rendering it, this zesty, cool and satisfying dish is still worth making on any steamy summer night. Of which we’ve had many this year, with more likely to come.
3. Light a grill for high indirect heat (or heat a broiler with a rack 8 inches from the heat). Remove the duck from the marinade, scraping off any excess bits, and season with salt and pepper. Transfer duck to the unlighted portion of the grill; close cover and cook to desired doneness, 5 to 6 minutes per side for medium-rare. (If broiling, place duck on a baking sheet. Broil, turning once halfway through, 4 to 5 minutes per side for medium-rare.) Transfer to a cutting board and let it rest for 5
minutes. Thinly slice against the grain. 4. In a large bowl, toss together cucumber, carrots, radishes, cilantro, mint and 1 jalapeño (thinly sliced), with just enough of the vinaigrette to lightly coat everything. Taste and season with salt and pepper as needed. Toss in the peanuts. Place salad on a large platter and top with sliced meat. Drizzle with more of the vinaigrette, and sprinkle with cilantro and mint. Yield: Serves 4.
Vietnamese Grilled Duck Salad With Cucumber, Radishes and Peanuts Time: 40 minutes plus at least 90 minutes’ marinating 1/2 cup soy sauce 3 limes 2 tablespoons grated ginger 2 teaspoons toasted (Asian) sesame oil 4 garlic cloves, finely chopped 4 duck breast halves (2 1/2 pounds), rinsed and patted dry 2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar 2 teaspoons Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce 3 small jalapeños, seeded 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive or peanut oil Kosher salt and black pepper 1 large cucumber, peeled and thinly sliced 2 large carrots, peeled and coarsely grated 1/3 pound radishes, thinly sliced 1/4 cup chopped cilantro, plus more for garnish
1/4 cup chopped mint, plus more for garnish 1/3 cup chopped salted roasted peanuts 1. Whisk together 1/4 cup soy sauce, juice and zest of 1 lime, ginger, and sesame oil. Mash half the garlic into a paste and whisk it into this marinade. Trim away the duck skin and most of the fat (reserve for rendering, if you like). Place the duck in a shallow dish and pour the marinade over it, turning to coat. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 to 12 hours. Remove from the refrigerator 30 minutes before cooking. 2. In a small bowl, whisk together 1/4 cup soy sauce, vinegar, juice of 2 limes, fish sauce, 2 jalapeños (finely chopped) and oil. Mash the remaining garlic to a paste and whisk into this vinaigrette.
Long Island Duck Breast Adapted from Seamus Mullen Time: 30 minutes 2 1/2 cups olive oil Zest of 1 orange, removed in strips 2 dried guindilla peppers or 1 dried ancho pepper 2 branches thyme 1 clove garlic, lightly crushed 2 duck breasts, halved lengthwise Salt and freshly ground black pepper Farro salad.
1. In a shallow saucepan just large enough to fit all four pieces of the duck breast, combine the olive oil, orange zest, guindilla or ancho pepper, thyme and garlic over medium heat until the temperature of the oil reaches 140 degrees on an instantread thermometer. Adjust the heat to maintain that temperature. 2. Lightly score the skin of the duck breasts in a diamond pattern, and season thoroughly with salt and pepper. Place a skillet over medium-
low heat. When the pan is hot, add the duck breasts skin-side down. Allow them to sear, without moving them at all, until they are crispy and golden brown, 5 to 7 minutes. 3. Once the skins are golden brown, remove the duck from the pan and place skin-side up in the oil. Cook until firm and medium rare, 7 to 10 minutes. Remove from the pan, let them rest for 5 minutes and slice. Serve with farro salad. Yield: 4 servings.
Kitchen 16
The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
Isla Verde’s Palm Restaurant Brings the Legends of New York’s Palm and Palm Too
By SAM SIFTON “ALMOST no one who has ever eaten at Palm feels lukewarm about it,” Mimi Sheraton wrote in The New York Times in 1976, at the start of a review that awarded the steakhouse four stars, the newspaper’s highest rating. Either you saw Palm as a boisterous and exciting house party, Ms. Sheraton reported, or a crowded, shouty bore. There was no middle ground. (Everyone loved the steak.) The restaurant was then 50 years old. It is now 85, the father figure in an international chain that has 27 locations, all of them inspired by the original, with its sawdust-strewn floors, gruff, uniformed waiters and celebrity cartoons on the walls. The restaurant’s first child, a Palm in Washington, was born in 1972 and soon became a power haunt; its second, Palm Too, directly across Second Avenue from the original, came the following year, and Los Angeles after that. There are now Palms in the theater district and TriBeCa; in San Diego; Nashville; Boston; Orlando, Fla.; Mexico City; and San Juan, P.R. in the El San Juan Hotel & Casino in Isla Verde. In New York City, the flagship restaurant and its annex have become almost a single entity — a restaurant with a front dining room on the west side of Second Avenue (Palm) and a back room on the east (Palm Too), a combination that is set-ready for new episodes of “Mad Men,” missing only ashtrays and a strictly followed dress code. They are almost entirely interchangeable unless you have been to both enough times to have developed a preference for one over the other. Here is the cheat sheet: Palm is for groups, for first-timers and those who gather around them, for anyone interested in eating at the heart of the Italian steakhouse beast, with its composed salads and cold seafood, its excellent steaks, fat grilled lobsters and starches, or anything you’d like to consume under a blanket of melted mozzarella and sticky red sauce. At Palm the bulk of the dining room is made up of broad tables of four and six and eight, all of them raucous and crammed into a space that is smaller than it appears from outside its wide windows, and just as merry (or miserable) as it was when
Ms. Sheraton stalked its aisles. Waiter, another round! Palm Too is better should you desire to eat alone or with a single friend, quietly occupying a comfortable booth beneath a caricature of the publisher Jason Epstein as a green bookworm emerging from a Random House title, or a seat beneath a framed photograph of Dave Winfield, then a Yankee outfielder. Palm Too is the more intimate Palm. (And it is always Palm, not the Palm. This is a result of a city clerk’s corruption of the 1926 desire of the founders, Pio Bozzi and John Ganzi, to name the restaurant Parma, in honor of their hometown in Italy. The clerk nodded, and wrote “Palm” on the form.) The food on both sides of the avenue is first-rate, at least if you stick to the original script of salad and tangy, prime-rated beef, or salad and huge, perfectly acceptable lobster, along with potatoes and greens. (The best dessert is a cigar and a long walk home, or just the cigar, though you can certainly get cheesecake.) The best salads at Palm are brusque and proprietary. There is a requisite hearts of palm version, which offers a mixture of the slick, delicious vegetable with romaine, tomato, egg and kalamata olives. (Who needs blue cheese?) And there are two salads named for Gigi Delmaestro, who was the maître d’hôtel at Palm Too when it opened, later moving to the Los Angeles branch in 1975. The East Coast version combines shrimp, green beans, tomato, onion and bacon in a simple red wine vinaigrette; the West Coast version adds to this chopped iceberg lettuce, egg, roasted pepper and avocado. (It should be called the Kitchen Sink.) Against this bounty there is no reason to order a Caesar. It seems and tastes disloyal. Seafood starters include a marvelous rendition of baked clams oreganata, and a size-large crab cocktail that offers plain lump crab meat with a cocktail sauce that takes well to the loads of fresh horseradish that come on the side. You might have shrimp instead, which receive the same treatment, or a silky lobster bisque of deceptive heartiness — it derives its thickness almost certainly from rice rather than cream, and lists only 120 calories on the menu. Yes, there are calorie counts listed against every dish at the Palms. This is in keeping with a 2008 New York City law that requires all restaurants with 15 or more outlets nationwide to display calorie information. It is terrible for a steakhouse as good as Palm to have to comply (those clams oreganata top out at 400 calories; the West Coast Gigi at 380; a plate of hash browns will deliver or set you back a whopping 980), but this is the price of success for the Bozzi family, which still owns
the business. Guests who walk into the restaurants talking of beef blanch at the numbers and bail into green salads and plain fish. Moods are ruined, arguments begun. It is better to do as was always customary at Palm in the past, and ignore the menu entirely. Most want steak — the prime porterhouse if it’s available is generally the most crusty without and tender within —
and some want a giant lobster. Just ask for the steak after some Gigis and a crab. The waiter knows you want creamed spinach and hash browns. Cut into your buttery meat, your buttery potatoes, your creamy greens. These are prepared with real skill and care, and taste it. Meanwhile, look at that sawdust on the floor and the twinkle in everyone’s eyes.
Chef Amelia Fitch
Isla Verde Palm Restaurant
A
melia Fitch, distinguished alumnus of the prominent Culinary Arts Institute of Louisiana with Le Cordon Bleu accreditation, developed a fervent penchant for cooking with her specialty being Italian cuisine. Chef Fitch is also certifidedy in Nutrion and Health. Upon her graduation, Fitch advanced her career by spending the subsequent years training under world famous “Bam!” and “Kick it up a notch!” Chef Emeril Lagasse. Working with Chef
Emeril not only in his kitchen but also in shows like Rosie Odonell and Elmo. After years of proving her dedication and passion for the fine food arena, Fitch’s hard work paid off as she was proudly named Executive Chef of The Palm steakhouse in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Chef Fitch is also the only female Executive Chef in The Palm francise. Even the ultra-cognoscenti are amazed by the exquisite perfection of this dining experience. Chef Fitch graciously states, “I am
The Palm Famous GiGi Salad This salad was named after the lategreat Gigi Delmastro, general manager who rumor has it invented this famous salad for him and his staff to eat durning a power outage. 5 oz –tomato (chopped) 2 oz –onion (chopped) 3 oz – green beans (cooked and chopped in ½ inch pieces) 1 oz –garlic vinaigrette 2 -4 each large shrimp (chopped into ½ inch pieces) 1 oz –bacon bits
pleased to be such an integral part of the well regard and famous 3rd generation owned steakhouse.” The restaurant opened in 1999 and is located at the El San Juan Hotel 6063 Ave Isla Verde, Carolina PR 00979, at Tel: 787.791.3300
Toss the tomato, green beans, onion, bacon bits and the vinaigrette together in a bowl and place in a salad/soup bowl Toss shrimp with residual vinaigrette and place on the top of the salad Serve in a soup bowl and garnish with guest’s choice of dressing
The Palm Key Lime Easiest Key Lime Pie Recipe 6 large egg yolks 1 ¾ cup sweetened condensed milk 2/3 fresh or bottled lime juice 2 limes washed and dried 9 inch graham cracker crust Preheat the oven to 350. In a large bowl, combine the egg yolks , condensed milk, and lime juice. Holding the whole limes over the bowl, use zester to remove the zest, letting it fall into the mixture and reserving a little to use for garnish. Juice the zested limes, and add the juice to the bowl. Whisk the mixture thoroughly, and pour into the pie crust. Bake for 15 minutes. Cool to room temperature and refrigerate. Garnish with whip cream and a slice of lime.
The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
Jerry Rivera
Reached the Top of Billboard Once More
By: Daniel B D i lM Morales l P Pomales l
J
erry Rivera dominates the radio with his new number one hit single “Solo Pienso en Ti” on the Billboard chart Tropical Songs. This success leads him to be the 4th artist (tying Juan Luis Guerra). “Solo pienso en ti” is the tenth song that he ranks at the top of tke list, being the other remaining nine: “Suave” (1995), “Loco de Amor” (1996), “Una y mil veces” (1996), “Lloraré” (1997), “Ese” (1998), “Yo” (2001), “Vuela muy alto” (2002), “Mi Libertad” (feat. Voltio - 2003) and “Cuesta Abajo” (2007). “Solo pienso en ti” is the first single extracted from the album “El amor existe” which is now available under the seal VeneMusic. Thanks to his fans and his team of radio work, Cross Over U.S. Promotions and Eric Valentin in Puerto Rico, Rivera returns to stand as the favorite in tropical formats. Rivera Rive continues preparations in hhis work as a judge of FremantleMedia mantleM IDOL program to be broadcasted in Puerto Rico, as it broadca prepares prepare to continue his promotional tour in Miami, New York and Puerto Rico.
17
SCIENCE / TECH 18
The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
Scientists Find Signs Water Is Flowing on Mars S By KENNETH CHANG
hifting dark streaks on the surface of Mars are signs that water is flowing there today, scientists said. The possible presence of liquid water is certain to revive speculation that Mars is teeming with microbial organisms. The recipe for life, at least as we know it, calls for liquid water, carbon-based molecules and a source for energy. There is plenty of ice on Mars, but the chemical reactions for life come to a halt when water freezes. High-resolution photographs taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which arrived at Mars in 2006, show fingerlike streaks up to five yards wide that appear on some steep slopes in the planet’s late spring. These streaks grow and shift through summer, reaching hundreds of yards in length before they fade in winter. One crater had about 1,000 streaks.
Finding streaks is not the same as finding water. An instrument on the Mars orbiter capable of detecting water has not found any, but that might mean the amount of water in the flows is too little to be seen. “We have this circumstantial evidence for water flowing on Mars,” Alfred S. McEwen of the University of Arizona, who is the principal investigator for the camera. “We have no direct detection of water.” The scientists said the streaks were caused by a flow of extremely salty water down the slopes. The salts, which have been detected all around Mars, allow the water to remain liquid at much colder temperatures than pure water. They cannot explain how the water darkened the soil. They are also at a loss to explain why the streaks vanish each winter. The streaks have been seen in seven locations and tentatively identified in 20 others. Scientists have known for years of vast
swaths of frozen ice on Mars. Many geological features like canyons, dried-up lakes and river channels point to the flow of liquid water in the distant past when Mars may have been warmer. In 2000, images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft showed fresh-looking gullies, which some scientists hypothesized had been carved by water. More recent looks indicate that they were more likely cut by carbon dioxide frost. However, the areas where the dark streaks occur, located in the southern midlatitudes, are too warm for carbon dioxide frost. “I think this is the best evidence to date of liquid water occurring today on Mars,” said Philip R. Christensen, a geophysicist at Arizona State University. Scientists are not likely to be able to confirm their suspicions anytime soon. The Mars Science Laboratory rover, scheduled to launch late this year, will not be able to help. Its landing site is far from any of the streaks, and it would not be able to navigate the steep
slopes. Dr. McEwen said that experiments on Earth mimicking Martian conditions provided the best hope for understanding what is going on. At the news conference, Lisa M. Pratt, a biogeochemist at Indiana University, said that the best analog on Earth might be the Siberian permafrost. “This is very speculative, because we really have no idea whether or not there are extant organisms on Mars or whether there ever was life on Mars,” Dr. Pratt said. But on Earth, microbes can live in pockets of salty water that never freeze, or even if the water froze solid, organisms could go dormant and “patiently hang out near the surface until spring comes around again,” she said. “If there were to be evolving organisms on Mars,” she said, “I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t adapt to that kind of seasonally available, very brief access to resources. You bloom quickly, you do what you need to do, and you go dormant.”
The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
19 SCIENCE / TECH
Ambitions as Deep as Their Pockets By WILLIAM J. BROAD
A
new generation of daredevils is seeking to plunge through nearly seven miles of seawater to the bottom of a rocky chasm in the western Pacific that is veiled in perpetual darkness. It is the ocean’s deepest spot. The forbidding place, known as the Challenger Deep, is so far removed from the warming rays of the sun that its temperature hovers near freezing. The would-be explorers can afford to live their dreams because of their extraordinarily deep pockets. Significantly, their ambitions far exceed those of the world’s seafaring nations, which have no plans to send people so deep. The billionaires and millionaires include Mr. Cameron, the airline mogul Richard Branson and the Internet guru Eric E. Schmidt. Each is building, planning to build or financing the construction of minisubmarines meant to transport them, their friends and scientists into the depths. Entrepreneurs talk of taking tourists down as well. The vehicles, meant to hold one to three people, are estimated to cost anywhere from $7 million to $40 million. The first dive is scheduled for later this year. Since secrecy and technical uncertainty surround many of the ventures, oceanographers say the current schedules may well change. The rush is happening now in part because of advances in materials, batteries and electronics, which are lowering the cost and raising the capabilities of submersibles. Still, the challenges are formidable. Hardest to build are the crew compartments, whose walls must be very thick, strong and precisely manufactured to withstand tons of crushing pressure. Designers are using not only traditional steel but such unexpected materials as spheres of pressureresistant glass. Humans have laid eyes on the Challenger Deep just once, half a century ago, in a United States Navy vessel. A window cracked on the way down. The landing on the bottom stirred up so much ooze that the two divers could see little and took no pictures. They stayed just 20 minutes. Forays to lesser depths have multiplied over the years. Since the discovery of the Titanic at the bottom of the North Atlantic in 1985, hundreds of explorers, tourists and moviemakers (including Mr. Cameron) have visited the world’s most famous shipwreck. It lies more than two miles down. The Challenger Deep and similar recesses are part of a vast system of seabed trenches that crisscross the globe. The deepest are found in the western Pacific and off the coast of Puerto Rico, The Puerto Rican Trench.
Over the decades, biologists have glimpsed their inhabitants by lowering dredges on long lines. Up have come thousands of bizarre-looking worms, crustaceans and sea cucumbers. More recently, undersea robots have filmed swarms of eels and ghostly fish, their tails long and sinuous. In early April, Mr. Branson held a news conference in Newport Beach, Calif., to unveil his submersible. “The last great challenge for humans,” declared Mr. Branson, the founder of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Galactic, “is to explore the depths of our planet’s oceans.” His solo craft, nearly 18 feet long, looked like a white-and-blue airplane with stubby wings and a cockpit. The curve of the wings is meant to drive the vehicle downward as it speeds through the water, rather than upward, as with an airplane. Graham Hawkes, the craft’s designer and a veteran maker of undersea vehicles, said in an interview that more conservative designs were possible but that his goal was “to advance the state of the art.” The winged craft and its mother ship cost $17 million. The submersible is to plunge deep later this year. A few weeks later, in late April, another team went public. It unveiled plans, rather than a nearly complete vehicle. The company, Triton Submarines, based in Vero Beach, Fla., makes tiny submersibles with acrylic personnel spheres that carry two people down a half mile or more. The clear spheres provide much better viewing than the tiny portholes of traditional submersibles. The company announced that it was ready to build a submersible to carry three people into the Challenger Deep. The vehicle’s personnel sphere — seven and a half feet in diameter — would be made entirely of glass and open like a clamshell to admit passengers. Glass might seem fragile. But as pressures rise, said L. Bruce Jones, the company’s chief executive, “it gets stronger.” He said two people — a billionaire and a near billionaire — were talking separately about buying one or two of the craft, each costing $15 million. A company brochure says investors can expect to charge $250,000 a seat for tours of the Challenger Deep. Mr. Jones said the craft would drop fast, covering the seven miles in about two hours. That would leave hours of bottom time for exploration before the return trip to the surface. “It’s not a publicity stunt,” he said of the Mike McDowell, a leading organizer of adventure tours, including dives to the Titanic, said he was talking to Triton and added that he expected the market for dives into the Challenger Deep to be relatively limited.
EXPLORER The bathyscaphe Trieste plumbed the Challenger Deep in 1960. A window cracked, and the two Navy divers stayed only 20 minutes. “It’s more an iconic experience than ‘Gee, everything was so beautiful,’ ” he said in an interview. “And you eliminate a lot of people on the fear factor.” Mr. Cameron, the maker of Hollywood blockbusters, has kept a low profile and based his effort in Australia. Some five years ago, he formed a team that has been quietly building a submersible along traditional lines, only smaller. In an interview, he said its steel personnel sphere was just four feet wide and would accommodate just one person. The sphere underwent a successful pressure test in September 2009, Mr. Cameron said. He said his team had overcome major problems with foam meant to buoy the heavy sphere: Early foam crumbled under pressure tests, threatening to rob the submersible of buoyancy and maroon it on the bottom. “It’s not like you can call up AAA to come get you,” he said. The team is building cameras for threedimensional filming, Mr. Cameron said. Despite reports that the vehicle might be involved in an oceanic sequel to “Avatar,” he insisted that the deep craft had “nothing to do with my feature life” — though a documentary or two might be forthcoming. “The only thing it has to do with ‘Avatar,’ ” he said of the vehicle, “is that it’s slowing me down.” He said that the craft cost $7 million to $8 million, and that chartering a mother ship for the expedition would run from $30,000 to $40,000 a day. Mr. Cameron said test dives were scheduled for early next year. In the summer of 2012, he added, he and his team will dive in the western Pacific 12 to 15 times. The goal is to plumb not only the Challenger Deep but the Tonga and Kermadec Trenches, which lie north of New Zealand. The filmmaker added that he was talking to oceanic institutes about developing long-term relationships for use of the submersible. “We’ve gotten a pretty resounding response from the science community,” he said, “because they have such limited funding and access to these deep environments.” Perhaps the least visible of the entrepreneurs is Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman
of Google — and the founder of the Schmidt Ocean Institute and the Schmidt Research Vessel Foundation. The institute’s two oceangoing ships are quite large, 253 and 272 feet long. Mr. Schmidt has also financed the development of an advanced submersible designed by Deep Ocean Exploration and Research, a company on Alameda Island in San Francisco Bay. Its founder, Sylvia A. Earle, is an oceanographer and a former chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “We were proud to help her launch the project,” he said. “New technologies are needed to explore, map, measure and report on the oceans and marine life.” The advances, he added, “will help everyone and everything on earth.” The craft, Deepsearch, is large and sleek by submersible standards. It looks like a fish or a torpedo. Holding up to three people, it would plunge seven miles in little more than an hour. Its personnel sphere, like that of the Triton model, is to be made of glass for better viewing. “The goal,” says a company Web site, “is not a stunt dive” to the Challenger Deep but “a world asset capable of providing scientists with unlimited access to the deep ocean.” A submersible that incorporated “every cutting-edge concept” might cost $40 million, the company says. It plans to build a pair. The venture is described at www.deepsearch.org. All the craft are to have large arrays of bright lights so they can illuminate the deep black sea. If anyone thinks of the new explorers as grown-up children playing with expensive toys, ocean veterans reply that there is ample scientific justification for creating new technologies that can regularly plumb the full depth of the ocean, which covers more than 70 percent of the planet yet remains poorly explored. “The result will be good,” said Don Walsh, a retired Navy officer who survived the descent to the Challenger Deep in 1960 and is advising some of the new ventures. “It will bring people around to remembering how little we know about the oceans.”
SCIENCE / TECH 20
The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
Birdlike Dinosaur Fossil May Shake Up the Avian Family Tree By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
I
n the 150 years since its discovery in Germany, Archaeopteryx has perched high on the avian family tree as the earliest and most primitive bird, somewhere near the evolutionary moment when some dinosaurs gave rise to birds. But recent fossil finds cast
doubt on this interpretation: Archaeopteryx may be only a birdlike dinosaur rather than a dinosaurlike true bird. Chinese paleontologists reported in the current issue of the journal Nature that a previously unknown chicken-size 155-million-year-old dinosaur with feathers, named Xiaotingia zhengi, “challenges the centrality
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of Archaeopteryx in the transition to birds.” Like so many fossil dinosaurs and other life from the late Jurassic period, Xiaotingia was found in Liaoning Province, a happy hunting ground for paleontologists. The skeleton was embedded in shale, along with the clear impressions of feathers. Scientists who studied the specimen said it was not as striking in appearance as several of the 10 known Archaeopteryx remains, but good enough apparently to contradict conventional wisdom about proto-birds. The discovery team and other scientists emphasized that the new findings, if confirmed by additional research, would not undermine the prevailing theory that modern birds descended from dinosaurs. The question now is, if not Archaeopteryx, which of many feathered dinosaurs or dinosaurlike birds being found is closest to the first bird? Other assumptions about the early evolution of birds, they said, would also need to be re-evaluated. Xing Xu and his colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing said that their examination of Xiaotingia, in comparison with more recognizably bird skeletons from the same period as well as the 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx, showed that the new fossils fell short of a place in the avian family. Several of its anatomical traits, like the long and robust forelimbs once thought to be diagnostic of birds, were actually common to a group of dinosaurs known as deinonychosaurs. Dr. Xu’s team concluded that “the most important result of our analysis” is that the anatomies of the Chinese specimen and Archaeopteryx were remarkably similar, meaning that both belonged to the lineage of the meat-eating deinonychosaurs, not the planteating early birds. In short, Archaeopteryx presumably was not an ancestral bird. The recent discovery of a tenth Archaeopteryx specimen “greatly improved our knowledge” of its similarities to the dinosaur group and its differences from birds, the paleontologists said.
Several scientists who were not involved in the research said they were not especially surprised by the findings. “It may seem heretical to say that Archaeopteryx isn’t a bird, but this idea has surfaced occasionally since as far back as the 1940s,” Lawrence M. Witmer, a paleontologist at Ohio University, wrote in a commentary accompanying the journal article. “Moreover, there has been growing unease about the avian status of Archaeopteryx as, one by one, its ‘avian’ attributes (feathers, wishbone, three-fingered hand) started showing up in non-avian dinosaurs.” Nor was this report likely to be the last word on the subject. The researchers themselves, among the leading dinosaur specialists in China, acknowledged that their interpretation was sure to be controversial. They conceded that some of their conclusions are “only weakly supported by the available data.” At such an early stage in the dinosaurbird transition, distinctions among species were often subtle, or “rather messy affairs,” as Dr. Witmer said. Scientists are expected to take another, deeper look at many feathered fossil animals that have been uncovered in China in the last 15 years. Several of these avian dinosaur species, including Epidexipteryx, Jeholornis and Sapeornis, may then take wing as the new early birds. And relentless fossil hunters are certain to turn up new species. “This will be frustrating and exciting,” Dr. Witmer said in an interview, noting that — who knows? — the next discovery might tempt scientists to restore Archaeopteryx to its place in the proto-bird flock. “Some of these things may never be entirely conclusive,” he said. “It drives us nuts.” Since “virtually all our notions about early avian evolution have previously been viewed through the lens of Archaeopteryx,” Dr. Witmer said, “the impact of losing Archaeopteryx from the avian clan is likely to rock the paleontological community for years to come.”
August 11 - 17, 2011
The San Juan Weekly Star
21
ART
15 (Long) Minutes With ‘The Last Supper’ By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
T
he setting can seem a lot like quarantine. The entrance, through several holding pens and sets of automatic doors, leads to an enormous, vaulted, semiprivate room, the patient stretched out to the right. A bedside crowd coos appropriately. Occasionally I have joined that crowd, before Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” in the former whitewashed refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, checking in on a beloved, hospice-bound but faded relative, expecting to make the most of the allotted 15 minutes tourists are permitted. Jesus delivers his message of betrayal, as always, and the shock wave disperses his apostles above the broad white tablecloth like bowling pins. It was a rainy, cold morning the last time I stopped in to see the picture, whose fuzziness and fragility don’t altogether obscure the flashes of coral, blue and pink. I started daydreaming about waves on the beach in Condado. I scribbled notes about economy of form and the faraway landscape, but the image kept slipping out of focus, up there high on the wall, in the glare of spotlights, with a buzz of people around and the clock ticking. Why are the greatest, or anyway, the most familiar works of art sometimes the hardest to concentrate on? Is it the problem of seeing afresh what we think we already know in our minds’ eyes? Friends of mine, art historians, have lamented they can no longer abide “The Last Supper” because it’s too sad in its current state and they hate being hustled from the room after a quarter of an hour. I’m reminded of the borscht belt joke about the guy who complains about the restaurant that serves lousy food in such teensy portions. But I’d bet most people are grateful for the time limit. How often these days do we pause for even a full minute before any work of art? I notice that visitors to Santa Maria delle Grazie tend to peer a few times at the Leonardo, in between scanning the labels fastened to the railing beneath the painting, then, after a few minutes, they amble toward the other fresco in the room, near the exit, stealing glimpses at their watches, as if calculating the moment it might be acceptable to slip out of the room. Maybe Leonardo’s time has passed. Maybe that’s part of the problem. He belongs to another era, steeped in antique rhetoric and faulty materials. Like Laserdiscs, Yugoslavia and the ailing Czarevich Alexei, his “Last Supper” came into this world already ill fated. Not 20 years after it was finished, in 1498, it began to flake.
Giorgio Vasari, the artist and Leonardo’s biographer, declared it a ruin a few decades later. Poor restorations, alterations to the refectory, along with centuries of pollution and the occasional war left the picture in the condition I first discovered it, in the half light of a late summer afternoon, as a teenage art pilgrim during the late 1970s, shortly before it underwent its last round of reconstructive surgery. That last round took 21 years. An altogether different painting appeared on newspaper front pages, previous restorations stripped away and vacant patches of lost pigment filled in by watercolor. The work looked ghostly, like breath on glass. Nostalgists fumed, naturally, but the patient was at least stable, conservators responded, and what survived of it demanded our forbearance. Viewing hours were henceforth to be by appointment only, 15 minutes per customer, for our sake and the art’s. And so the picture I found filthy but florid during the gritty days of late Fellini and the Red Brigade had been re-
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born into the fastidious age of soy milk and nanotechnology. In lieu of lone pilgrims and natural light, package tourists making online bookings joined artificial lights that flattened the image. Modernized in its new climate- and crowd-control environment, one of the most familiar pictures in the history of art suddenly seemed alien, like vacuum-packed heirloom tomatoes and no-smoking parks. Even the time limit, a courtesy of the modern hospitality industry, only discouraged visitors from getting to the bottom of the bottomless. We get the culture we deserve in the end, which represents us. The other morning I found myself drifting with the crowd toward the room’s second fresco, a huge Renaissance Crucifixion by Giovanni Donato da Montorfano: horses, soldiers and throngs of figures mill at the bases of crosses that tower like sequoias, rising into lunettes beneath the ceiling. It’s a splendid, colorful work, I thought, then glanced back toward the Leonardo. And almost unconsciously, I checked my watch.
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The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
Owners Abandoning ill and Aging Pets in Hard Times “I just can’t handle it,” the owner
By JAMIE HANSEN
A
Pit Bull puppy with Parvovirus and a Shih Tzu that had been hit by a car are just two examples of pets that have been abandoned by their owners at East Bay animal shelters in recent months. To the operators of the shelters, the growing number of sick animals arriving at their doors is a disturbing sign of the economic times: pet owners are surrendering their sick or old animals because they cannot afford to pay the medical bills. “People seem to be dropping them off rather than treating them,” said Allison Lindquist, executive director of the East Bay Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “When it comes down to feeding your family or helping your pet, that’s a hard decision to make.” Ms. Lindquist recalled that when a Pekingese, who was 12, was down to a single tooth, her owner simply handed her across the counter.
said. Pet surrenders were already high as the recession led people to downsize or to lose their homes. Now, having an animal that needs expensive medical attention is becoming yet another breaking point for strapped pet owners. Afflictions that lead to a pet’s being surrendered run the gamut from broken legs to flea infestations — even the cost of grooming for dogs that require frequent care can be the last straw, Ms. Lindquist said. Most shelters have not consistently kept track of the number of sick animals being turned in over the years, but shelter providers gave anecdotal evidence of the rise in sick animals being dropped off. Kate O’Connor, manager of Animal Care Services in Berkeley, said she has seen more sick pets — including dying puppies and a one-eyed Chihuahua — left at the night drop box, where anyone can leave an
animal after hours. Megan Webb, director of Oakland Animal Services, said she had noticed more people asking to have sick pets euthanized — something many cannot afford to have done on their own, even if the animal is suffering. Sometimes pets that have been dropped off to be euthanized turn out to be healthy enough to live. The problem is worse in places still dealing with high rates of unemployment and foreclosures. Alameda and Contra Costa Counties have two of the highest unemployment rates in the nine-county Bay Area, and shelter operators in both report a rise in the number of abandoned sick animals. In contrast, areas with stronger economies report fewer sick animals arriving at their doors or no increase at all. Marin County has a relatively low unemployment rate, 7.4 percent. Its animal service provider, the Marin Humane Society, initially saw a spike in animal drop-offs when the recession hit, but last year the
number began to return to normal. Sandra Stadler, superintendent of Palo Alto Animal Services, said the city had seen a small increase in the number of animals coming in as families were forced to downsize, but no noticeable rise in the number of animals with medical problems. “But,” Ms. Stadler said, “that could be because of our demographic.”
The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
23
modern love
A Lost Child, but Not Mine O By KASSI UNDERWOOD
N the third anniversary of my abortion, I found out via MySpace that my ex-boyfriend was having a baby with another woman. It was none of my business, except I somehow convinced myself that his new baby was a replica of ours, and as such I felt a sense of ownership, of responsibility for the child’s well-being. My college roommate in Vermont had introduced us. He was road-weary that first night, having just driven up from a concert in Kentucky, my home state. He was 20, a ski-lift operator, a community college student. I was a blond Episcopalbred 19-year-old studying literature and costume design. Early on, he told me he was on probation for drug-related offenses, which was forcing him to remain clean and sober. It was easy for me to accept his blemished past because I had my own struggles with drugs and alcohol, making me feel like Nancy to his Sid. He and I talked textbooks and compared rap sheets. In his ramshackle apartment, we belted out Bob Dylan songs as he twirled me across the sloping floorboards. He gave me piggyback rides up my dormitory steps and carted me around town on the handlebars of a bicycle. Two months after we met, his probation ended. Without supervision, he began crushing up OxyContin and sucking the powder into his nose through a rolled-up dollar bill. On St. Patrick’s Day I stayed after theater class, sewing a corset. Clad in a threadbare flannel shirt, he stopped in to help me clip the bones. I hoped nobody could see the dope in his pinned eyes or the pregnancy in mine. My period was two weeks late. “If it hasn’t come by April, we’ll take a test,” he whispered. Several weeks later, after a university doctor delivered the news, he and I lay side-by-side on his bare twin mattress. “I’m not ready to be a father,” he said. I nodded, planting my head on his chest. I stared at the water-stained ceiling and prayed he would score a lucrative job instead of more OxyContin. I let myself imagine that I could clean up my own act and finish school and we could hire an au pair, and everything would be fine. But I knew it wouldn’t happen that way. I had promised myself not to tell my parents, but when I called my mother in
Kentucky, I burst into tears as soon as she answered the phone. In the background, my father said, “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?” It had been our collective worst nightmare. “Come on home,” my mother sobbed. “We’ll rear the child here.” I told her I just couldn’t. The truth is, I had ambitions. While I adored children and romanticized the idea of one day raising a small brood dressed in elaborate get-ups of my own design, I wanted a family on my terms: happily married with enough money to live well. After college, after graduate school, after I had started a career. There was no fantasy in raising a child alone. In deciding against adoption, I blamed alcohol: the chance that I had already harmed the baby with my drinking. But my ambivalence remained, and when I quit drinking, again thinking of the baby, my boyfriend was lucid enough to notice. We lay entwined on his secondhand couch one night when he muted the TV. “You want to have this baby, don’t you?” he said. “We could call her Jade,” I said. All 11 of my grandmother’s siblings had names starting with J. Mick Jagger had a daughter named Jade. Naming her Jade would be a no-brainer. “Jade’s pretty,” he said. “But we can’t go through with it,” I reassured him, reminding myself that we didn’t have the emotional equipment. “It’s better this way.” In late April, heading to the clinic, he slept in the passenger seat as I fiddled with the radio. Most offices do not allow partners in the room during the procedure, but when I pressed my feet to the stirrups, he was there to knead my shoulders. I dug my fingernails into the nurse’s hand. He and I watched each other instead of the ultrasound machine. “I’m hot,” I said. “I’m blacking out. Please take off my socks.” “You’ve got to breathe, honey,” the nurse said. “Take off her socks!” he hollered. His support and innate if untraditional sense of duty almost made me think twice about ending the pregnancy. I thought he might have been a nurturing father after all. I emerged from the appointment emotionally unscathed, or so I thought. The five-minute procedure had ended my insufferable mélange of nausea, exhaustion and shame. I briefly saw a therapist, troubled that I did not feel guilty.
Soon I started drinking again, was arrested for drunken driving and was fired from three jobs for coming in slurring my words or for showing up late or not at all, while my boyfriend eventually disappeared into heroin. I waited for the countless rehabs to work their institutional magic on him, but they didn’t. Our relationship ended on good but sorrowful terms. Not long after we broke up, he met a girl at a music festival, and a couple of years later she gave birth to their child, whom they named Jade, of all things. They managed to stay together during his stints in jail. By now I was following them on Facebook, where they had migrated like just about everyone else. Meanwhile, I went into treatment, quit drinking and moved to Austin, Tex., for a job. With sobriety and a salary, I couldn’t stop thinking about the baby that wasn’t, a loss somehow made more painful by his baby that was. I spent my workdays browsing photos of his little girl, believing in some twisted respect that I was glimpsing the face of the child I could have had. On lunch breaks, I went home to cry in bed, longing for a paranormal miracle. By the time I called him, his daughter was about to celebrate her first birthday. He was living at a halfway house in Boston, where my company was flying me for a conference. I harbored a secret motive to find out if he dwelled on the loss as much as I did, so I asked him if he would meet me. I figured I would bawl in his trackmark-scarred arms. We would plant a tree in remembrance. Then we would raise his (our?) child in my studio apartment. He came ambling up to the corner on Newbury Street. I waited in a business suit, disappointed that he was not pushing a stroller. Gone was his shaggy brown hair, mischievous smile and weatherworn Grateful Dead jacket. He had turned hip-hop, from his puffy white Adidas to his crooked white cap. His teeth had browned from the drugs. We sat down for cappuccinos in a fancy cafe where we could afford nothing else. He told me that his ex-girlfriend had recently drained his meager bank account and vanished, leaving her infant behind. He confessed that paramedics had recently resuscitated him after he overdosed in a restaurant bathroom. Rehab followed. Now he scrimped by on construction work. He aspired to save for a deposit on a roomy apartment for him and his child,
who was living with his parents. I felt an urge to run to his parents’ home and cradle his baby in my arms, as if she were the responsibility I had shirked. “I think a lot about what happened,” he said. “Me, too.” He stared ruefully into his steaming mug. “But,” I continued, “if I had had that baby, you wouldn’t have Jade.” Could her name be a coincidence? Maybe when they picked her name, he didn’t realize he was remembering. “Oh, yeah,” he said, flashing a relieved smile; something was lost, and he got to keep it. I drew my lips to match his cheery expression even though I felt shorted. I had graduated with honors, seen the first book I edited published with my name in microscopic print, and been accepted to an Ivy League graduate program. I kept trying to secure the next accomplishment that would make my decision worthwhile. Meanwhile, he got Jade, yet he couldn’t take care of her. An overdosing jailbird father stared back at me, buttering crackers with a silver coffee spoon. THE heat of summer hung down on our shoulders when we hugged on the bustling street corner. As we parted, I walked up Gloucester Street toward the conference center; he headed toward the pickup truck he’d borrowed from a friend at the halfway house. In the three years since, he has spent much of his time incarcerated for drugrelated offenses. I wish I could share my sobriety, my degree and my career to rent that apartment for his little girl, but reality has finally sunk in: the abortion is mine alone, just like Jade is his.
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The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
36 Hours in Budapest By EVAN RAIL
L
IKE much of post-Communist Europe, Budapest has replaced the image of the impoverished East with symbols of international luxury, like the Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace and a new branch of Nobu, the high-end Japanese restaurant. But unlike many other cities in the region, the Hungarian capital’s brightest spots are often nativeborn, rather than imports. From stately Buda in the west to Pest’s shabby-chic streets east of the Danube, a range of new attractions show off the achievements of local artists, producers, vintners and chefs. Even if you don’t end up tasting every last domestic food specialty identified as a “hungarikum,” or tracking down every up-and-coming designer, a weekend here provides a glimpse of the city’s justifiable pride, as well as an authentic sense of place. Friday 5 p.m. 1) GET YOUR KICKS Buda has steep hills, while Pest’s long boulevards are seemingly without end. Get ready for legwork with new sneakers from Tisza Cipo (Karoly korut 1; 36-1-266-3055; tiszacipo.hu), the flagship store of a once-reviled Communist-era brand that was revived as a modern line of streetwear in 2003. Though the flashy colors, plush material and quality construction of today’s Klasszik model (19,900 forints, or about $105, at 190 forints to $1) are unlike just about anything from the former regime, no one will ever confuse the distinctively Eastern Bloc retro vibe for a pair of Nikes. Your favorite souvenirs? You’re wearing them. 7:30 p.m. 2) WINE KITCHEN Home to the oldest classified wine regions in Europe, Hungary is also a fount of excellent Old World cooking. The two combine splendidly at the seven-month-old Borkonyha (Sas utca 3; 36-1-266-0835; borkonyha.hu), or “wine kitchen,” an airy, modern bistro with a list of about 200 outstanding domestic bottles, many of which are available by the glass. Homegrown fare like trout from the northern Hungarian village of Szilvasvarad or braised Mangalica hog cheeks with roasted carrots (2,350 forints) pair gloriously with unusual local varie-
tals like Zoltan Gunzer’s 2009 kadarka (980 forints per glass), an elegant, dry red whose rich blackcurrant and blackberry notes compare with those of a great zinfandel. 10 p.m. 3) GARDEN BAR In warm weather, vacant lots around the city are transformed into kert (“garden”) bars: grungy outdoor dives occupying a middle ground between beer gardens and anarchist squats, generally with a downmarket vibe. But one of the newest manifestations of the trend,
Otkert (Zrinyi utca 4; 36-30-413-1173; otkert.blogspot.com), takes the idea upscale, creating what the English-language news and culture blog pestiside.hu called the “first posh kert” when it opened last summer. Find a quiet corner nook to chill out over a shot of pear or apricot palinka (880 to 950 forints), the local take on schnapps, then join the crowd of beautiful people for a spin on the open-air dance floor. Saturday 11 a.m. 4) YOUR STYLE First, check the Our Style online store, ourstyle.hu, in case one of its fashion pop-up shops is operating somewhere in the city. If nothing’s listed, head down to the area between the Dohany Street Synagogue, the Hungarian National Museum
and the Danube, where numerous small boutiques like Black Box (Iranyi utca 18; 36-30-41-48-979; blackboxconceptstore. tumblr.com) offer everything from club wear to haute couture confections, all by local designers, often at very affordable prices. At the nearby Eclectick (Iranyi utca 20; 36-1-266-3341; eclectick.hu), colorful linen summer dresses, printed with bird motifs, cost 21,900 forints. 1 p.m. 5) ROCK HOSPITAL Summers here can really cook. When the mercury rises, seek shelter at
the oddball Sziklakorhaz (Lovas ut 4/c; 36-70-7-01-01-01; sziklakorhaz.hu), a former secret hospital and nuclear bunker, hidden deep inside the mountain under Buda Castle, that opened to the public as an unusual cold-war museum in mid-2007. Nomatter how hot it might be outside, remember to bring an extra layer, as the underground temperatures are always under 64 Fahrenheit. Hourlong tours in both Hungarian and English leave every hour on the hour, after which you can buy a Marka soda
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The San Juan Weekly Star Comes from page 11 (250 forints) and such bunker-worthy tchotchkes as Communist-era military helmets and gas masks (1,000 forints). 3 p.m. 6) OFF THE LISZT Expect to hear a lot about the local hero Franz Liszt — a k a Liszt Ferenc — this year. An up-to-date Web site (liszt-2011.hu) details the exhibitions, concerts and other events around town in honor of the bicentennial of the composer’s birth, including a “wine of the Liszt year” and even a Liszt-themed locomotive. On a smaller scale, the Liszt Museum (Vorosmarty utca 35; 36-1-322-9804; lisztmuseum. hu) has a single-room exhibition on the composer’s relationship to his city, running through March of next year, while permanent exhibitions recreate Liszt’s final Budapest apartment with tons of his personal belongings, instruments and furniture, including an original writing desk with its own three-octave piano keyboard. 7:30 p.m. 7) OVER THE TOP
August 11 - 17, 2011
Budapesters groaned when Prague became the first post-Communist capital with a Michelin-starred restaurant in 2008. But the Hungarians pulled ahead this March, with the four-year-old Onyx (Vorosmarty ter 7-8; 36-20-386-9157; onyxrestaurant.hu) earning their city’s second French asterisk, after the stylish Costes, on Raday Utca. Jaded diners might find the gold-on-black walls, heavy armchairs and oh-so-formal table service somewhat over the top, but dishes like goose liver torte with strawberry jelly and kolache (4,000 forints) and confit of beef shoulder with creamy carrot purée (7,000 forints) come across as remarkably accomplished, effortlessly bridging the traditional flavors of the country with contemporary international culinary techniques. For cheap dates, the lunch menu, served Tuesday through Saturday until 2 p.m., features much of the same excellent cooking at much lower rates, with three-course menus for 3,990 forints. 9:30 p.m. 8) ANCHORS AWEIGH For years, the biggest exports from Hungary’s contemporary music
scene have been D.J.’s and electronica acts like Yonderboi and Neo, but the country’s indie rockers are starting to make themselves heard. Just steps from bustling Deak Ferenc square in Pest, the spacious, year-old Anker Klub (Anker koz 1-3; 36-70-505-5480; facebook.com/ ankerklub) hosts intimate concerts from new-folksters like Kistehen Tanczenekar, a k a Little Cow, and charmingly atmospheric singer-songwriters like Norbert Kristof. 11:30 p.m. 9) UP ALL NIGHT Some of the best new bright spots here echo the glories of the city’s interwar period. A legendary fashion center when it first appeared in 1926, the giant Corvin department store is now better known as Corvinteto (Blaha Lujza ter 1-2, enter from Somogyi Bela utca; 36-20-77-22-984; corvinteto.hu), a club and after-hours lounge that has taken over the building’s top levels. Inside, concerts of dub, drum ’n’ bass and electroclash run year-round, but if it’s going to be a really late night, the enormous rooftop bar — open only from spring to autumn — might just be the best spot to watch a sunrise over the city skyline. Sunday Noon 10) TASTE TO GO
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On Sundays, trendy locals and expats meet at the second Pest branch of Culinaris (Balassi Balint utca 7; 36-1-373-0028; culinaris.hu), a lunch counter with a separate specialty-foods shop that opened near the neo-Gothic parliament building in 2008. First, grab a loosely wrapped burrito (1,590 forints) or Cobb salad (1,490 forints) at the cool and bright counter. Then head around the corner to the shop with a collection of cheeses, cookies, crackers, pastas, wines and beers so extensive it could be a costly mistake to gawk on an empty stomach. Before you leave, think of a typical airport meal. Then order a togo ham-and-cheese, custom-built on a fluffy, house-made black-olive loaf (1,790 forints), for a final taste that will stay with you at least as far as the departure gate. IF YOU GO Design hotels can sometimes feel insubstantial. Not so the Palazzo Zichy (Lorinc pap ter 2; 36-1-235-4000; hotel-palazzo-zichy.hu), a stylish, chic 80-room establishment that opened in 2009 in a restored 19th-century mansion, whose thick walls lend a sense of solidity. The mix of original, neo-Baroque stairwells and modern minimalist décor probably shouldn’t work, but it does. Prices vary based on occupancy, though high-season doubles generally start at about 80 euros (about $112). Closer to the action in Pest, just off touristy Vaci utca, is the new La Prima (Pesti Barnabas utca 6; 36-1-799-0088; laprimahotelbudapest.hu), a selfstyled “fashion hotel” that opened this spring. A Web search for mid-August found double rooms with breakfast at 95 euros.
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The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
U.S. Posts Stronger Job Gains Amid Fear By MOTOKO RICH
A
s the economy continued to wobble, employers added 117,000 jobs in July, staving off a panic that had threatened to engulf the financial markets. Though the government’s monthly snapshot of the labor market brought a sigh of relief to traders on Friday, the number of jobs created was not enough to provide much comfort to those who have been waiting for the recovery to kick into high gear. The unemployment rate slipped a notch to 9.1 percent, but that was mainly because some people had simply given up looking for work. The net new jobs created in July exceeded the dismal number reported in June, but the total was barely sufficient to accommodate normal population growth, exceeded the 18,000 net new jobs originally reported in
June. The Labor Department also revised its estimate of American job growth in June to 46,000. Stock markets, pummeled on increasing pessimism over the American economy, drew about even in early trading, retreating from a 1 percent bounce higher at the opening. The jobs numbers came in a week when Congress finally agreed to a deal to raise the country’s debt ceiling and cut government spending. Divisions remain between the two political parties on how to cut spending further at a time when many economists worry that the economy can ill afford it. “All we can say is it’s a bit better than the two previous months. I suspect, though, that relief will probably not last too long as people refocus on what they think will happen in the future.” Indeed, other signs that the recovery
has slowed to a crawl are mounting. The Commerce Department reported earlier this week that consumer spending, which accounts for up to 70 percent of economic activity, actually declined in June for the first time in nearly two years. A closely watched survey of manufacturers showed that employment in July grew at a slower rate than in June and that new orders of factory goods actually fell. Housing prices are still extremely weak. With extended unemployment benefits scheduled to expire at the end of this year, there are still 13.9 million people out of work, 6.2 million of whom have been searching for jobs for six months or longer. Another 8.4 million are working part-time because they couldn’t find a full-time job, and 1.1 million have become so discouraged that they have stopped looking for work altogether. Inclu-
ding such people, the broader measure of unemployment was 16.1 percent. In a sobering note, only 58.1 percent of the population is working, lower than at any point in 28 years. With consumer confidence on a knife’s edge and orders slipping, employers have been reluctant to add workers. “We just don’t see where there is much incentive for companies to ramp up hiring at a time when there’s so much uncertainty gripping the country,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist with the Economic Outlook Group. Mr. Baumohl, who said the risk of a fall back into recession had certainly increased, said the most likely prospect was that the economy would continue in a “muddle through” phase. “I don’t think we’re going to see anything major happen in the labor markets until well into the fall,” he said.
Time to Say It: Double Dip Recession May Be Happening By FLOYD NORRIS
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t has been three decades since the United States suffered a recession that followed on the heels of the previous one. But it could be happening again. The unrelenting negative economic news of the past two weeks has painted a picture of a United States economy that fell further and recovered less than we had thought. When what may eventually be known as Great Recession I hit the country, there was general political agreement that it was incumbent on the government to fight back by stimulating the economy. It did, and the recession ended. Great Recession II, provoked a completely different response. Now the politicians are squabbling over how much to cut spending. After months of wrangling, they passed a bill aimed at forcing more reductions in spending over the next decade. If this is the beginning of a new double dip, it will have two significant things in common with the dual recessions of 1980 and 1981-82. In each case the first recession was caused in large part by a sudden withdrawal of credit from the economy. The recovery came when credit conditions recovered. The second recession began at a time when the usual government policies to fight economic weakness were deemed unavailable. The need to fight inflation ruled out an easier monetary policy. The perceived need to reduce government spending rules out a more accommodating fiscal policy. The economy fell into what was at first a fairly mild recession at the end of 2007. But
the downturn turned into a worldwide plunge after the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 led to the vanishing of credit for nearly all borrowers not deemed supersafe. Banks in the United States and other countries needed bailouts to survive. The unavailability of credit caused a decline in world trade volumes of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression, and nearly every economy went into recession. But it turned out that businesses overreacted. While sales to customers fell, they did not decline as much as production did. That fact set the stage for an economic rebound that began in mid-2009, with the National Bureau of Economic Research determining that the recession ended in June of that year. Manufacturers around the world reported rapidly rising orders. Most believed the economy was in a slow recovery, albeit one with very disappointing job growth. The official figures on gross domestic product showed the United States economy grew to a record size in the final
three months of 2010, having erased the loss of 4.1 percent in G.D.P. from top to bottom. Then last week the government announced its annual revision to the numbers for the last several years. New government surveys indicated Americans had spent less than previously estimated in 2009 and 2010 on a wide range of things, including food, clothing and computers. Tax returns showed Americans even cut back on gambling. The recession now appears to have been deeper — a top-to-bottom fall of 5.1 percent — and the recovery even less impressive. The economy is still smaller than it was in 2007. In June, more manufacturers said new orders fell than rose. The margin was small, but the survey had shown rising orders for 24 consecutive months. Manufacturers in most European countries, including Germany and Britain, also reported weaker new orders. Back in 1980, a recession was started when the government — despairing of its failure to bring down surging inflation rates — invoked controls aimed at limiting the expansion of credit and making it more costly for banks to make loans. Those controls proved to be far more effective than anyone expected, and the economy promptly tanked. In July the credit controls were ended, and the economic research bureau later determined that the recession ended that month. By the first quarter of 1981 the economy was larger than it had been at the peak. But little had been done about inflation, and the Federal Reserve was determined to slay that dragon. With interest rates high, home sales plunged in late 1981 to the lowest level since the government began collecting the data in 1963. Now they are even lower.
There is, of course, no assurance that a new recession has begun or will do so soon, and a positive jobs report on Friday morning could revive some optimism. But concerns have grown that the essential problems that led to the 2007-09 recession were not solved, just as inflation remained high throughout the 1980 downturn. Housing prices have not recovered, and millions of Americans owe more in mortgage debt than their homes are worth. Extremely low interest rates helped to push up corporate profits, but companies have hired relatively few people. In any other cycle, the recent spate of poor economic news would have resulted in politicians vying with one another to propose programs to revive growth. President Obama has called for more spending on infrastructure, but there appears to be little chance Congress will take any action. The focus in Washington is now on deciding where to reduce spending, not increase it. There have been some hints that the Federal Reserve might be willing to resume purchasing government bonds, which it stopped doing in June, despite opposition from conservative members of Congress. But the revised economic data may indicate that the previous program — known as QE2, for quantitative easing — had even less impact than had been thought. With short-term interest rates near zero, the Fed’s monetary policy options are limited. Government stimulus programs have appeared to be accomplishing little until the cumulative effect suddenly helps to power a self-sustaining recovery. This time, the best hope may be the stimulus we have already had will prove enough.
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August 11 - 17, 2011
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Sports
With Rodriguez Out, Lineup Hardly Lacks Punch By SAM BORDEN
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hile the Yankees prepared to conclude their series with the Chicago White Sox, their cleanup hitter, Alex Rodriguez, was, beginning his on-field rehabilitation from knee surgery amid another round of controversial headlines. The latest imbroglio for Rodriguez involves reports linking him to a high-stakes Hollywood poker game. As Major League Baseball’s investigation into Rodriguez proceeds (and as Rodriguez recover from his operation), the Yankees can take comfort in the fact that their lineup has performed remarkably well in his absence. Robinson Cano and Russell Martin hit home runs to support Ivan Nova, who struck out a career-high 10 hitters as the Yankees defeated Chicago, 7-2, to sweep a four-game series and move into a tie with the Boston Red Sox for first place in the American League East. “Bottom line,” the hitting coach Kevin Long said, “there’s a lot of damage in that lineup.”
The Yankees have continued to produce consistent, if not staggering, offensive numbers during Rodriguez’s convalescence. Rodriguez last played July 7 and, after winning, the Yankees had a 17-7 record since then while hitting a collective .297 and averaging six runs per game. Four times during that stretch, the Yankees scored 10 or more runs in a game, including an 18-run, 23-hit outburst against the White Sox. “Our depth has really been tested this year,” Girardi said. “Alex is not a guy you can just replace in the lineup, but guys have done a really good job. It’s one of the reasons why we’re at where we’re at.” Of course, the Yankees figure to face a sterner test this weekend against the Red Sox at Fenway Park. With Rodriguez still probably a week away from beginning minor league rehabilitation games, Girardi will continue to look elsewhere for production — something he is used to because Rodriguez, hobbled by a torn meniscus, “was playing on a leg and a half” even before his operation, Girardi said. That has meant a reliance on others, and
Curtis Granderson, Mark Teixeira and Cano have responded by creating what seems like a new foundation for the Yankees’ lineup. In spring training, many projected a massive season for Rodriguez, who was said to be 100 percent healthy after having hip surgery in 2009. When it came to Granderson and Cano, however, there were doubts about the former’s ability to hit left-handers and the latter’s to repeat a superlative 2010 performance. But Rodriguez struggled to hit for power (he had only 13 home runs before his operation), while Granderson and Cano have joined Teixeira in carrying the team. Since Rodriguez’s last game, Granderson is hitting .291 with 22 runs batted in; Teixeira is hitting .292 with 6 home runs and 20 R.B.I.; and Cano is hitting .315 with 3 home runs, 7 doubles and 19 R.B.I. “The production is there,” Long said, adding that while the Yankees have only one .300 hitter in their everyday lineup (Cano is batting .301), they are scoring runs at an overwhelming rate. Entering this game, they were second among A.L. teams in runs sco-
red, first in home runs, second in on-base percentage and second in on-base-plus-slugging. “If you’re right there in those categories, the rest of it takes care of itself,” Long said. Both Girardi and Long also pointed to the recent surge from Derek Jeter as a catalyst. Jeter’s struggles early this season were conspicuous, but he is hitting .345 with 16 runs scored and 15 R.B.I. since July 9 — the day he concluded the lengthy run-up to his 3,000th career hit. “Maybe that 3,000 was more of a weight than any of us thought,” Girardi said. Whatever the reason, Jeter’s return to form has coincided with an important surge from the Yankees’ power hitters. And with Rodriguez still some time from returning, the Yankees’ lineup has continued to churn out runs. Perhaps that was why Girardi was diplomatic when asked if Rodriguez was still the most dangerous hitter on the roster. “Is he the most dangerous?” Girardi said. “I don’t know. They’re all dangerous.”
Sports
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August 11 - 17, 2011
Battling Longer Odds, but Still Courting Fans By LARRY DORMAN
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hen Phil Mickelson pulled into a tie for the lead by playing the front nine at Royal St. George’s Golf Club in five under par three Sundays ago, he looked very much as if he was about to win his first British Open. That was until his 2-foot putt for par stayed out of the 11th hole, cruelly slamming into the side of the cup and lipping out. His momentum gone and confidence shaken, Mickelson bogeyed three more holes on the back nine to finish three strokes behind the winner, Darren Clarke of Northern Ireland. That may not go down as his last best chance to win a major championship, but Mickelson does not look at it that way. Ask him where he thinks his game is right now, and he shakes his head. “I don’t know”. “It’s hard to tell. I played really well last week at Greenbrier and missed the cut. It’s hard to tell” Did he come away from the British Open feeling positive about his game? “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “My game feels like it’s starting to turn, and that’s why I say I felt like I played well at the Greenbrier.” He did hit the ball well most of last week at the Greenbrier. There were a few errant drives that put him in difficult positions, and the putter was the main problem.
Coming down the stretch, after bouncing back close to the cut line with three straight birdies, Mickelson missed two short putts coming in, including one at the 18th hole, to miss the cut by two strokes. It would be silly to write Mickelson off. Like Clarke, he is 42, and is in better physical shape than that free-spirited Ulsterman, reasonably fit and committed to working on his game. But he is fighting the numbers as he continues to try to add to his major championship total of four — three Masters and one P.G.A. Championship — and accomplish the career Grand Slam. Before Clarke’s win at Sandwich, which by his own admission was aided by his experience and mastery of the vagaries of links golf, the last 42-year-old to win a major championship was Payne Stewart in the 1999 United States Open at Pinehurst. And, excepting Clarke, the last golfer over 40 to win a major was Vijay Singh at the 2004 P.G.A. Championship. The odds on Mickelson winning a United States Open — where he has been the runner-up five times — and a British Open before he is finished are long, and get longer with each chance that goes begging. Regardless of how much his chances of winning a major wane with each passing year, Mickelson’s popularity with fans seems to grow by the week.
They were screaming his name at Firestone Country Club, and the more he signed, the more they screamed. This is a part of his job that Mickelson, unlike many players, seems to genuinely enjoy, and there is no doubt that he signs more autographs and talks to more fans than any golfer on any tour. This is because Mickelson enjoys being around people, something one might be able to fake for about 10 minutes of autograph signing, but not much longer. Sixty minutes elapsed from the time Mickelson stepped off the 18th green until he walked up the steps of the clubhouse at Firestone Country Club to the locker room. During that time he signed hundreds of items: caps, shirts, Masters flags, photographs of him leaping in the air after sinking the winning putt in 2004 at Augusta, a photo of him with the 2009 Tour Championship trophy standing next to Tiger Woods, who is holding the FedEx Cup. He makes eye contact with the fans as he signs, and speaks with some of them, taking time to chat with a 15-year-old girl who came directly from high school golf tryouts to try to get his autograph at her first PGA Tour event. “Is that your team shirt?” he asked the girl, Jessica Hespen, a junior at Nordonia High School in Macedonia, Ohio. Told it was, he asked about the team, how it did last year,
what its prospects are and wished her luck before moving on to sign a magazine cover proclaiming him “The People’s Choice.” Mickelson rarely seems hurried. He always accepts best wishes for his wife, Amy, who is much improved but still endures energy-sapping treatments in her battle with breast cancer. She rested at home last week while his children accompanied him to a scheduled vacation at the Greenbrier. When he spotted a boy in a wheelchair to whom he had given a golf ball on the course, Mickelson went over and thanked him again for coming out. When a small boy on his father’s shoulder tossed him a golf ball — one of two things he never signs, the other being currency — he asked the youngster to give him his ticket so he could sign. This is Mickelson at every tournament. Missed 2-footers at Sandwich, a missed 4-footer at Troon in 2004, the drive off the hospitality tent at the Open at Winged Foot in 2006 — they are the furthest thing from his mind at the moment. He will just keep coming back until it all gets done. That is his attitude, and it comes across as genuine.
A Mets All-Star Makes a Foray Into Music By JORGE CASTILLO
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n the field, Jose Reyes has been a revelation this season, taking his already respected skills as a hitter to a significantly higher level. The All-Star shortstop leads the National League in batting (.339 average), hits (142), runs (79) and triples (16). Off the field, Reyes has come up with surprises, too. His interest in music has led to a music video in which he has a starring role, a second song getting play on radio stations, a third song on the way and the creation of a record label called EL7 Music, in a nod to his uniform number. A younger Reyes — he is now 28 — found himself criticized for his exuberant ingame celebrations. He has toned that down, and what is emerging instead is someone apparently intent, through music, on being a
little more serious. The five-minute video, for a reggaeton song titled “No hay amigo” — “There Is No Friend” — was released on the Internet in July and had nearly 146,000 YouTube views. The song’s message: work hard and be careful about whom you trust. Reyes’s voice on the video is Auto-Tuned, altering how he normally sounds and making it hard to judge how he really sings, or raps. “The song is a message for the children that when I was younger I didn’t have anything, but I kept working, and now I have what I have,” said Reyes, who was born and raised in the Dominican Republic. “This is my hobby,” Reyes said. “A lot of baseball players like to fish and have other hobbies. My hobby is music. When it’s the off-season, I like to go to the studio, hang out with friends and make music.” Reyes’s efforts have been collaborative involving established artists and roots in the United States, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Reyes has financed all of the label’s operations, including the music video, which
took several months to complete, and shows Reyes, singing in front of a white Ferrari. The production was completed during an off-day for Reyes in May and was released on the Internet in the middle of last month. There was some hesitation in releasing the video because Reyes was “serious about his season in baseball, and we didn’t want to deviate from his baseball.” The video was the first in which Reyes has appeared and features several performers — Julio Voltio, Vakero and Big Mato — who are established artists in reggaeton, a Caribbean-American hybrid with some similarities to hip-hop. Reyes’s portion of the video was shot at his home on Long Island. Other parts of the video were shot in and around Reyes’s hometown of Santiago, Dominican Republic, including scenes at a local ball field. “No hay amigo” was first recorded two years ago. Baseball games are not altered but music can be remixed, and that’s where Reyes and others got involved. “It’s been a surprise how urban music fans have received the song,” Vakero said
in an e-mail. “I’m happy that it has had as much, if not more, positive feedback than the original.” “No hay amigo” was the second song to be released in which Reyes had a role. In May, “Bate roto,” Spanish for broken bat, featuring Voltio and Echeverria, made its debut. It has been played on Spanish-language radio stations and in nightclubs in both the United States and the Dominican Republic. The label plans on releasing another song featuring Reyes fairly soon. It is titled “Estamos en coro,” roughly translated as “We’re Making Noise.” Some of Reyes’s Mets teammates caught a glimpse of the video several weeks before it was released and generally came away impressed. “My teammates said they liked it a lot. They said I got flow,” Reyes said, laughing. “I haven’t tried to figure out what he’s trying to say,” said outfielder Willie Harris, who does not speak Spanish. “But I like the video. I think it’s cool. I think it’s cool as hell. He can hit triples and then rap. Come on, man, a lot of people can’t do that.”
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August 11 - 17, 2011
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Games
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 30
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August 11 - 17, 2011
HOROSCOPE Aries
(Mar 21-April 20)
Take the rough with the smooth. You have weathered major tests of late but kept your serenity intact. No-one would have the first idea of where you are really at, would they? Isn’t it the right time to speak up and share a heartfelt feeling? Slow and steady is the way to make strides. Notice that things are generally running in your favour and do not be put off by the odd setback. Do not push it.
Taurus
(April 21-May 21)
Seize the moment and get ahead as only you know how. Ditch the factors holding you back. There is no point admitting defeat after you have come so far. Persist and keep up with the good work. You should feel the benefits of a fresh breeze through your life. Play things straight and see where you end up. Do not overspend, but take up an unusual chance to shine. It is about time to show your true emotions. Express yourself from the heart. Make progress.
Gemini
(May 22-June 21)
Libra
(Sep 24-Oct 23)
Rise to the occasion and let your indomitable spirit shine once again. If you are a singleton keep your eyes peeled: if you are spoken for; be careful out there. Established friendships may suddenly spark into something else. Love action is highly likely before too long. Be open and prepared for all eventualities. Go along with the ups and downs of your particular ride.
Scorpio
(Oct 24-Nov 22)
Take action when you have to and do not think too much. Spontaneity serves you well. You must make the most of the magic in the air. Access all areas and confidently invade someone’s space; they are sure to be delighted. Speak to someone you have had your eye on for a while. Do draw on your natural charm and speed of wit, in order to win a love match. Take a risk, why not? If timely moves pay off, imagine how good you will feel? You are great at picking up the pieces.
Sagittarius
(Nov 23-Dec 21)
Put your best face on and connect with the magic of the New Year! Let your heart shine. Be open to what is around the next bend. Things will have a forward momentum, after that lengthy phase of confusion created by mercury retrograde, over the festive season. If you feel uncomfortable, it is up to you to change direction. You can transform a tricky situation.
Where is that last bit of the jigsaw? Not far off, I assure you. Go over some old ground and you will find what you are looking for. Do not buckle under pressure; there really is no need. Pay attention to details. Your concentration may not have been well primed of late, so re-engage in the fray and do your worst! Give a loved one the benefit of the doubt. There is no point making things more difficult than needs be. Sit loose to outcomes and have some faith.
Cancer
Capricorn
(June 22-July 23)
Saturn Retrograde has not been much fun for anyone of late. However, you can expect a reprieve of some kind soon. Your patience is all set to be duly rewarded. Tap into new options, but do not be too hasty regarding major decisions. Take your time. Mix business and pleasure in an easy manner. Work the room to full effect. Time alone with your own thoughts will help you plan a strategy. Ask for assistance if you need professional guidance. Let enjoyment renew your soul.
Leo
(July 24-Aug 23)
(Dec 22-Jan 20)
There is no point buying into further upset. Venus comes to your aid and love starts to pick up. Expect your horizons to be broadened, in all sorts of ways. Embrace what’s on offer, but be discerning when it comes to whom you spend precious time with. Get to the bottom of something in a bid to help someone out. However, do not cross the line and be overly invasive. Certain things sort themselves out, naturally. Use your wit and discernment to work out which way is up! Tap into that creativity.
Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19)
Sing your own praises in a challenging work situation; no-one else will. It is okay to stand up for your principles and to be loud and proud about your achievements. Up to a point you have been in the right with a relationship issue. However, it would not do to rub this in; you have made your point. Special opportunities will continue to manifest. Be brave and desist from burying your head in the sand.
Turn things around. You have the power to influence matters. Push forward with many mad adventures and ideas. A dose of Moon madness will serve you well. Be thoughtful in advance of this power surge. Use the available energy wisely. This can be a high-octane time, but do use your available resources carefully. Watch that your mind does not drift away from important tasks: focus was never more important. Do not ignore a relationship issue any longer. Do not panic.
Virgo
Pisces
(Aug 24-Sep 23)
Show that you really do care. A rare event sets your head in a spin: are you ready? It is about time you rejoiced in the fullness of your charm and personality. You need to use your gifts to good effect. Why bother about jealousy when you can achieve great things over time? Find a great level of contentment within and do not restrict yourself or be held back by anything negative. Change is unsettling but ultimately cool. Get a lot done IN the doing, you will be energized.
(Feb 20-Mar 20)
Recharge your batteries in the company of those who make you feel good about yourself. A slow, easy time is on the cards, but you have to prepare the way. Relax, even amidst hectic situations and you will float through most things. Keep those feet on the ground, at the same time, despite a blissed-out feeling. Your love life may need some attention. Look on this as an opportunity to get things sorted, once and for all.
The San Juan Weekly Star
Answers to the Zudoku and Crossword on page 29
The San Juan Weekly Star
August 11 - 17, 2011
Herman
Speed Bump
Frank & Ernest
BC
Scary Gary
Wizard of Id
Two Cows And A Chicken
Cartoons
31
Ziggi
32
August 11 - 17, 2011
The San Juan Weekly Star