Tuesday Apr 20, 2021

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

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NASA’s Mars Helicopter Completes 1st Flight on Another Planet

Hope Sinking in Vieques & Culebra

No Reply from ATM Chief Protest Tomorrow at the Capitol

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Photo by Pedro Correa Henry

Senate Committee: LUMA Not Ready for PREPA T&D Takeover in June P5

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 18

New Task Force on Medicaid & Medicare Announced P6

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Tuesday, April 20, 2021

The San Juan Daily Star

GOOD MORNING

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April 20, 2021

The San Juan Daily Star, the only paper with News Service in English in Puerto Rico, publishes 7 days a week, with a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday edition, along with a Weekend Edition to cover Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Study shows limitations in vaccine distribution

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he Puerto Rico-Epidemiological Assessment and Prevention for COVID-19 and Influenza (PREPCOVI) of the Medical Sciences Campus of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) on Monday revealed findings related to the prevalence and geographical distribution of COVID-19 and influenza over time.

The study addresses topics such as the social, economic and mental health impacts during the pandemic, as well as COVID-19 vaccinations.

PREPCOVI is a collaborative effort between the UPR’s Center for Clinical Research and Health Promotion (CCRHP: http://ccrhp.rcm.upr.edu), the island Department of Health, Telecommunications Negotiator and telecommunications companies. The study uses novel and up-to-date technology approaches to enable large-scale ongoing surveillance, according to a statement.

“Among 4,655 participants recruited in PREPCOVI from November 2020 to March 31, 2021, we found 98 confirmed cases (RT-PCR positive) representing 2.1% of the study population and 292 total cases (confirmed/likely) (6.3%) from closing until March 31, 2021,” said Marijulie Martínez Lozano, an epidemiologist and biostatistician for PREPCOVI. “Because many potential cases may not have been evaluated or people may not know or report the type of test they were given, people were considered likely cases if they reported testing positive or having key symptoms, similar to a published study. Younger people (21-49) were more likely to have been classified as a positive case of COVID-19 compared to people over the age of 50, and there appeared to be a higher prevalence in the northeast region.”

Among the 2,884 participants evaluated from Jan. 1 to March 31, 2021 who provided vaccination information, 33% had received one or more doses (15% had received one dose and 18% had received two doses).

Despite risk-based phased distribution plans and free distribution of vaccines, there appear to be significant limitations on the equitable distribution of vaccines, the study found. People with an income of more than $60,000 per year were more than twice as likely to be vaccinated (46% vaccinated) compared to those who responded as having an income of less than $20,000 (19% vaccinated).

Among participants with a high school degree or more, 36.9% had been vaccinated compared to 18.7% who did not finish high school. The highest frequency of vaccination reported was in the Bayamón region, with 35.7% vaccinated, and the Mayagüez region with 35.1% vaccinated. The lowest percentage of vaccination was observed in the Fajardo region (23.9%).

After completing the primary survey, 1,234 (42.1%) PREPCOVI participants agreed to respond to one of three optional modules evaluating COVID-19 progression and risk/ preventive factors; knowledge, attitudes and practices; and social, economic and mental health impact.

Among the 1,234 participants, 57% responded to the risk and preventive factors of COVID-19 and of these, 31.7% were vaccinated (15.9% one dose, 15.9% two doses).

Most were vaccinated at a vaccination center (34.3%), or in a hospital or medical center (22.7%); 50.2% reported receiving the Pfizer vaccine and 48.4% Moderna. Of those vaccinated, 49.1% of participants reported shortterm side effects, and 51.4% of respondents experienced side effects after the first dose, 29.5% after the second dose and 19.1% after both doses. Among all vaccinated, 26.8% reported pain at the injection site as the main side effect, said Kaumudi Joshipura, leading investigator and director of CCRHP. Among the 320 participants who answered questions about knowledge, attitudes and practices on COVID-19 and influenza, 65.3% reported not being vaccinated. Of these, 71.8% are willing to be vaccinated against COVID-19, 19.9% were unsure and 6.8% were unwilling to be vaccinated against COVID-19. For those unwilling to be vaccinated, the main reason was concern about the health and safety impact of available COVID-19 vaccines. Of the unvaccinated participants, 44.9% said they qualified for the vaccine based on age, health or labor criteria. Among health workers, 78.4% of participants had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to 32.1% of other essential workers and 19% of other responders.

PREPCOVI has also been assessing the social, economic and mental health impact during the pandemic. A total of 211 participants responded to this module from January to March. Of these participants, 48.8% reported being moderately to extremely concerned about becoming infected with COVID-19 in the past 30 days.

In terms of self-informed mental health assessment over the past 30 days, 43.1% felt very to moderately anxious and 29.9% felt sad/depressed. In addition, 45.5% felt extremely to moderately nervous, and 40.3% felt exhausted.

Meanwhile, 50.5% of respondents reported that they or a family member had experienced a reduction in the ability to earn money due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the past 30 days. In addition, 17.6% reported that they or a family member lost their jobs or were fired in the past 30 days.

As part of the study, respondents were also asked about substance use in the past 30 days. Among the 211 participants, 44.1% do not drink alcohol, 98.6% have not used opioids and 92.4% have not used cannabis. However, 14.2% responded that in the past 30 days they drank alcohol several times a week or more and 4.8% said they used cannabis. Overall, 76.8% reported never havinb consumed legal/illegal substances or prescription drugs.

“The survey lasts only five minutes,” said Segundo Rodríguez Quilichini, chancellor of the UPR Medical Sciences Campus. “Participation in this study is safe and does not carry any risk, while some personal information of the participant, including his or her telephone number, is retained.”

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Tuesday, April 20, 2021

The San Juan Daily Star

Maritime transportation, supply shortage issues in island municipalities fall on ‘deaf ears’ Viequenses say ATM chief has yet to meet with them; rally at Capitol called for Wednesday

By PEDRO CORREA HENRY Twitter: @pete_r_correa Special to The Star

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lthough the Puerto Rico government has committed itself to improving the maritime transportation system of Vieques and Culebra during the current four-year term after years of complaints, residents of the island municipalities continue to face travel delays and supply shortages due to mechanical damage to vessels.

In an interview with the STAR, Somos Más Que 100x35 (We Are More Than 100x35) spokesperson Elda Guadalupe said Monday that Viequenses who woke up at 5 a.m. had their trips delayed after both the Mr. Mason vessel and the Marilin H. barge broke down over the weekend.

Guadalupe told the newspaper that the Mr. Mason, a vessel owned by Puerto Rico Fast Ferries, “had a problem with the ramp and could not make trips yesterday [Sunday].”

The barge Marilin H., which costs around $23,500 per day to operate, had fallen behind schedule after mechanical issues developed with its tugboat during a “triangle trip,” the Vieques resident said.

“It took a little more than 12 hours to finish that trip, which is normally from Ceiba to Vieques, from Vieques to Culebra, and from Culebra to the Isla Grande again,” she said. “For Culebra, it takes almost five hours, for Vieques, which is a shorter oceanic route, it takes almost two or three hours.”

Guadalupe said the barge’s slowness has affected the arrival of supplies in both island municipalities and makes it difficult for residents with ground vehicles to run errands in Puerto Rico properly.

“I counted more than 15 supply trucks when we arrived in Isla Grande for a medical appointment, and I couldn’t even count the cars that were waiting to leave for the island municipalities,” Guadalupe said. “From what I could see, there was the bread truck waiting, there was the milk truck, and many others I could not identify.”

Regarding complaints made Saturday by Vieques social communicator and cultural manager Diana Ramos Gutiérrez through Twitter, where she indicated that the island had run out of gasoline, Guadalupe told the STAR that at least four fuel trucks had arrived at two gas stations on Sunday.

“But a girl who works at one of the gas stations told me they ran out,” she said. “Now we wait to see when we get more fuel.”

When the STAR asked why Viequenses are facing fuel shortages so frequently, Guadalupe said it is due mostly to shipments being shared between the two offshore island municipalities, the municipal administration not having the appropriate resources for disembarking trucks, and the presence of tourists on the island amid the crisis.

“The Maritime Transportation Authority [ATM by its Spanish initials] ferries that can easily disembark all types of trucks are broken down and in dry dock waiting for the authority to pay for the vessels to get fixed,” she said. “Two are located at a Tampa dry dock and another one at a St. Thomas dry dock.”

“Instead of the government doing something to get these ferries [back on line], which are big enough and capable of carrying up to 25 vehicles and 200 people, they end up renting vessels that are not enough to fulfill our needs,” Guadalupe added.

As for Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia saying in his recent State of the Commonwealth message that he was committed to warp-speeding the ATM’s 23-year public-private agreement with HMS Ferries, Hilcia Guadalupe, who is Elda Guadalupe’s sister, told the STAR she wasn’t surprised that he left Mara Pérez,

who resigned on March 13 amid civil protests, in place as the ATM executive director once he became governor-elect back in November.

“She will always say she did the best she could, as she had the duty to put the ATM in private hands; let’s just say she fulfilled her goal,” Hilcia Guadalupe said. “But that does not mean that we residents don’t know what to do now and how to apply pressure for the contract to be repealed.”

“That contract doesn’t help us a bit; that contract is illegal and many of us know it as the agreement was done behind closed doors thanks to Act 29,” she added, referring to the law that allows the government to negotiate with private entities to provide services to governmental agencies.

“That law is the reason why the LUMA Energy contract exists,” Hilcia Guadalupe said. “We won’t give up no matter what Pierluisi has to say because it is our right to protect our only road and we need that road to work.”

When the STAR asked if islanders have received any response from ATM Executive Director Jorge Droz after the demonstrations that took place on March 30, she said Droz was “willing to meet with them, but has not sent any response.”

“Neither a written response nor a phone call has been made to the contacts that appear in the claims that were delivered to him,” she said. “It’s the same deal as always, our issues fall on deaf ears, and we end up facing shortages again.”

“We are aware that machines are bound to fail, that’s comprehensible,” Hilcia Guadalupe added. “What can’t be understood is how the only two vessels available are not in optimal condition.”

She also told the STAR that the Cayo Blanco vessel, which is owned by the ATM, can only make trips for a limited time given that the U.S. Coast Guard issued a 90-day permit.

Hilcia Guadalupe said the vessel, which has the capacity to carry up to 500 people, can only take around 200 as “half of the ship is not allowed to be used” due to insulation problems.

“We are facing a large-scale administration issue, and our question is if no one from the government will be held accountable for all of these years of bad management, where we see every ship that they own in dry docks and the service being constantly interrupted,” she said.

Meanwhile, Vieques Mayor José Corcino asked Droz in a letter for “concrete and detailed information” on the whereabouts of the broken down ATM vessels and their approximate dates of return.

“I remind you that we still have a fragile transportation system that, today [Monday], failed again,” Corcino said. “We are tired of promises and we don’t see solutions.”

Moreover, the mayor urged the ATM chief to inform him on what alternate plans the agency has for attending to the islanders’ needs.

“I hope to receive an answer and a swift action plan about these issues as both my people and myself are waiting for a reply,” Corcino said in the letter. “I need for you to have a final solution to a problem that has dragged on for years.”

“I remind you. Waiting is unpleasant,” he added.

Vieques and Culebra residents called for a demonstration Wednesday in front of the Capitol in Puerta de Tierra to demand adequate maritime transportation.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

5

Senate committee chair: LUMA not ready to take over PREPA T&D

By THE STAR STAFF

S

enate Strategic Projects and Energy Committee Chairman Javier Aponte Dalmau expressed concern on Monday that there is no document from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) stating that it will reimburse the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) for capital infrastructure projects under the contract with LUMA Energy, the private operator of PREPA’s transmission and distribution (T&D) system.

“The people who have sat here to testify, none can guarantee and recognize that there is a document by which FEMA is going to reimburse the funds from this transaction. We are talking about $10 billion, of which the chairman of the [Puerto Rico] Energy Bureau has recognized that FEMA is not within the contract [between PREPA and LUMA],” Aponte Dalmau said.

“And at the end of the day, the payment for all those projects, if FEMA does not reimburse them in full, will require a rate review and the people of Puerto Rico will pay for it.”

FEMA informed the panel that if it wanted to summon the federal agency to testify, the committee would have to go to court because FEMA is not obligated to testify under the sovereign immunity doctrine. The senator said the process was not an adversarial one but rather an investigative one.

Puerto Rico Energy Bureau (PREB) Chairman Edison Avilés-

Deliz and Tomás Torres Placa, the consumer representative on PREPA’s governing board, testified in Monday’s hearing.

Torres Placa charged that the PREB certified LUMA Energy as an operator and granted it the Energy Compliance Certificate without participation or public discussion.

He asked the Legislature to “take the necessary measures to postpone the commencement date and evaluate modifications of the contract in question, in order to achieve the transformation of Puerto Rico’s electrical system, on which the economy does not depend solely, but lives on, and [so that] we have a world quality system for the benefit of all consumers.”

In its presentation, the PREB presented the legal and procedural framework that applies to Public-Private Partnership (P3) contracts and the role that the PREB plays in terms of the contract awarded to LUMA Energy. One of the functions of the PREB is to assist the P3 Authority in the supervision process during the implementation of the contract. However, that supervision is limited since the PREB “does not have the authority to alter or amend the alliance contract or the sales contract and will not interfere with operational or contractual matters,” said AvilésDeliz, the PREB chairman.

“Regarding the role of the Energy Bureau in the evaluation of the Partnership Contract, it is necessary to clarify that the Energy Bureau: did not approve the Partnership

Contract, did not pass judgment on the procedure followed by the P3 Authority regarding it or regarding those aspects that are not related to the public energy policy and the regulatory framework, such as, for example, labor aspects,” Avilés-Deliz said. “In short, the Energy Bureau limited itself to determining, through an administrative process, which is not adjudicative in nature, that the Preliminary Contract complies with the public energy policy and the current energy regulatory framework.”

LUMA Energy has several processes pending before the PREB, including the approval of a budget and performance metrics.

Following the testimony of Avilés-Deliz, Aponte Dalmau expressed concern that LUMA was not ready to take over PREPA in June of this year.

“The information released by the Energy Bureau shows that of the four main documents that LUMA has to deliver, only one has been delivered, [while] the other three are in the process of delivery,” the senator said. “The chairman of the Energy Bureau has shown us his reservations that [LUMA] will comply with all the time they have had. What they have left to comply with the documentation is 40 days; it is a lot of information that LUMA has to supply and that the Energy Bureau has to evaluate.”

Aqueduct energy redundancy project is underway

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he Puerto Rico Community Foundation (FCPR by its Spanish initials) announced Monday that it has already started the first phase of the energy redundancy project for community aqueducts on the island, which will include the installation of solar systems and emergency generators to guarantee the uninterrupted operation of the aqueducts and, therefore, the supply of drinking water to thousands of families.

The work began with the community evaluation process, after the signing in December of a grant agreement with the Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resilience, under the Risk Mitigation program of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the FCPR said in a press release.

According to the organization, the first phase, scheduled to end in February 2022, follows the authorization of $1.7 million from a $25 million grant. During this first phase, data is being collected on the communities and their drinking water systems, as well as on the prevailing environmental conditions and their possible impact, and permit requirements.

A feasibility analysis is also being carried out to determine types of equipment, and the preliminary design of the redundancy system and its location. In addition, community participation and training processes are under development, as well as work plans for each community.

Initial contact has already been established with 160 communities and visits to 50 community aqueducts have been made -- the systems were grouped into four regions: southwest, south central, central, and southeast.

Puerto Rico has about 242 community aqueducts, located in

43 municipalities and in remote rural and mountainous areas, and they supply drinking water to 3% of the population -- approximately 100,000 people. The infrastructure of the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA) does not provide service to these areas, so the systems are commonly known as NON-PRASA systems.

“After an arduous recruitment process that included the selection of regional managers and community coordinators, the FCPR began in March the first phase of this project for access to drinking water using energy redundancy for vulnerable communities, with the determination to guarantee social justice, equity and community prosperity,” said Nelson Columbus Tarrats, the president and chief executive officer of the FCPR. “In this way, we are preventing future emergencies from putting the continuation of this vital service at risk. We appreciate the confidence that government agencies gave to our proposal, as well as the contribution of donors to the projects that we have executed as part of our Agua ‘Pa Nosotros program.”

The second phase, scheduled to begin in March 2022, includes the installation of high-efficiency water pumping equipment with the capacity to operate with solar energy, electricity from the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority or generators, and installation of photovoltaic equipment to generate solar energy and an emergency generator with an integrated storage tank for fuel.

In addition to the non-interruption of potable water service, the completion of the project will reduce health risks and vulnerabilities associated with the lack of drinking water, particularly during disasters and emergency situations, strengthen community resilience and disaster preparedness, improve access to safe drinking water, and will empower communities by strengthening their capacities.

The project is one of those developed by the FCPR since the

end of 2017 through the Agua Pa ‘Nosotros program, focused on providing access to drinking water and strengthening rural communities in four essential areas of their community aqueducts: infrastructure, community organization, administration and compliance with regulatory agencies.

Prior to the start of the project, Agua Pa ’Nosotros has had relations with 102 communities with community aqueducts, of which about 60 aqueducts have received technical assistance, 20 communities have been awarded donations to improve their infrastructure, two emergency centers have been developed in communities with community aqueducts (Corcovada, in Añasco, and Las Corujas, in Aguas Buenas), and 13 community aqueducts have received donations to support community actions against the COVID-19 pandemic. Agua Pa ’Nosotros has had the following allies and donors: Hispanic Federation, Global Giving, Oxfam, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and Center for Disaster Philanthropy.

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Tuesday, April 20, 2021

The San Juan Daily Star

Governor names task force on Medicaid & Medicare

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

A

s provided by Executive Order 2021-025, Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia announced on Monday the health industry professionals he has named to the Multisectoral Task Force, which will prepare proposals and work on strategies to achieve equal treatment for Puerto Rico in the federal Medicaid and Medicare programs.

Pierluisi, who said he has been a staunch defender of Puerto Rico being treated the same as the states in health programs, appointed Puerto Rico Physicians & Surgeons Association President Dr. Víctor M. Ramos Otero and Puerto Rico Hospital Association President Jaime Plá Cortés to the task force.

The governor also appointed Roberto García Rodríguez, president of the Puerto Rico Medicaid and Medicare Products Association and president of Triple-S; Mennonite Health System Executive Director Ricardo Hernández Rivera; Coral CummingsPino, the regional director of government relations for Puerto Rico-Arizona-Nevada-New Mexico and the U.S. Virgin Islands for Walgreens pharmacy; Association of Independent Primary Practitioners (IPAS) President Jorge Hess; and attorney Luis Pizarro Otero, president of the consulting firm FIDE LLC. The Multisectoral Task Force is chaired by island Health Secretary Dr. Carlos Mellado López, and co-chaired by Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration Executive Director Carmen Feliciano. Also on the board are Puerto Rico Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González Colón, Health Insurance Administration Executive Director Jorge Galva, and Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority Executive Director Omar Marrero.

“I appreciate the availability of each of the members of this excellent Multisectoral Task Force,” the governor said. “Our joint goal is to contribute and improve the health of each of the residents of Puerto Rico, achieving equal treatment in the Medicare and Medicaid programs, and better access to health care for everyone on the island.”

Ramos has led the Physicians & Surgeons Association from April 6, 2014 to the present. He is a graduate physician from the Medical Sciences Campus of the University of Puerto Rico.

During his college years, he served as president and leader of the Council of Internal and Resident Physicians.

Plá Cortes, a former administrator of Saint Luke’s Episcopal Hospital, has for years made efforts to ensure that Puerto Rico receives better treatment in the federal government’s health

programs. He has a master’s degree in health services administration and is licensed to manage hospitals.

García Rodríguez, who has presided over Triple-S since January 2016, as well as the Puerto Rico Medicaid and Medicare Products Association, directs the Puerto Rico Chapter of the American Cancer Society’s CEOs Against Cancer organization. He obtained a master of administration and a Juris Doctor degree, both from Stanford University, among other international specialties, and earned a bachelor of arts degree from Harvard University.

Hernández Rivera, a certified public accountant, has a broad and robust track record of more than 41 years in various industries such as health, auditing, consulting, banking and non-profit organizations. Throughout his professional career, he has specialized in strategic planning, business development, acquisitions and financing.

Cummings-Pino, prior to working with Walgreens, worked as a government adviser focused on legislative processes and in the island Department of Housing. Since joining Walgreens she has been active in corporate and social responsibility activities, in conjunction with various health-focused organizations.

Pizarro Otero is the founder, president and CEO of FIDE LLC, a strategy and legal advisory firm with a unique and multidisciplinary approach that integrates legal advice, compliance, public policy analysis, and business development solutions. He has over 13 years of experience in the Medicaid, Medicare and private health insurance sectors.

Hess has served as IPAS president since 2019 and has over 35 years of experience in the field of medicine and the administration of health care services.

Governor appoints acting Education secretary

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

G

ov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia announced on Monday that he has appointed Jesús González Cruz as acting secretary of the island Department of Education.

“Today [Monday], I am appointing Mr. Jesús González Cruz as acting secretary of the Department of Education.

Mr. González Cruz has been serving as assistant secretary of administration in the Department,” Pierluisi said in a written statement. “It is essential to guarantee the continuity of services and the important work that is being done by our students, and I am sure that Mr. González will carry out this work with the sense of urgency and responsibility that is required at this time.”

González Cruz has proven administrative, legal and legislative experience, the governor said. He has served as secretary of the Department of Correction and Rehabilitation, administrator of the Correction Administration, administrator of the Administration of Juvenile Institutions, attorney for Juvenile Affairs (auxiliary prosecutor) of the Department of Justice of Puerto Rico, municipal secretary of the Municipality of Arecibo and executive director of the Committee on Youth Affairs of the island House of Representatives, among other positions.

A 2004 graduate of Pontificia Universidad Católica School

of Law, González Cruz has been practicing law since 2005.

“In the next few days I will be completing an interview process to make a property designation to be submitted to the Senate of Puerto Rico for its evaluation and consent,” the governor said. “Meanwhile, the work to ensure that all our children have a prepared and safe school continues without pause.”

Pierluisi withdrew the appointment of Elba Aponte Santos as Education secretary on Saturday.

“During the afternoon today [Saturday], I was informed about the decision of the majority of the members of the Senate Appointments Committee regarding the report that does not recommend Professor Elba Aponte to be confirmed as Secretary of Education,” the governor said that day. “After conversations with Professor Aponte, I am withdrawing her appointment.”

“Professor Aponte is fully qualified and has been instrumental in guiding the reopening of schools safely, as was done.

In addition, she always prioritized the education of the boys and girls of the public education system,” Pierluisi added on Saturday. “I only have words of gratitude for her … commitment to the education of our next generations. I am sure that she will continue to contribute to our people.”

Senate President José Luis Dalmau Santiago said meanwhile that “during the months in which Aponte has directed the agency she has not been able to convince me that she can

make the big changes that need to be made in the Department of Education.”

“In a vote with 10 votes in favor and six against, the Appointments Committee determined not to recommend the appointment of the secretary of Education,” he added. “A caucus was held and it was determined that the report would be negative.”

Dalmau Santiago also announced the Appointments Committee’s schedule of public hearings for the next 10 days.

On Monday, the committee was to hold a public hearing on the appointment of Manuel Torres Nieves as commonwealth comptroller, and today a hearing is slated on the appointment of Ray Jones Quiñones as secretary of the Department of Recreation and Sports. Both hearings were to be held at 10 a.m. in the Leopoldo Figueroa Room.

On Wednesday, the appointment of José Colón Grau as commissioner of the Medical Emergency Management Bureau will be the subject of a hearing in the Miguel García Room at 10 a.m.

On Monday, April 26, will be the public hearing of the designated secretary of the Department of Agriculture, Ramón González Beiró, and on Tuesday, April 27, the appointment of Dr. Carlos Mellado López as secretary of the Department of Health will be considered. Those hearings will be held in the Leopoldo Figueroa Room at 10 a.m.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

7

Adults in all U.S. states are now eligible for vaccination

By EMILY ANTHES and MADELEINE NGO

A

ll adults in every U.S. state, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico are now eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine, meeting the April 19 deadline that President Joe Biden set two weeks ago.

The United States is administering an average of 3.2 million doses a day, up from roughly 2.5 million a month before. More than 131 million people, or half of all American adults, had received at least one shot as of Sunday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and about 84.3 million people have been fully vaccinated.

Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont were the last states to expand eligibility, opening vaccinations to all adults Monday.

“It’s truly historic that we have already reached this milestone,” said Dr. Nandita Mani, the associate medical director of infection prevention and control at the University of Washington Medical Center.

After a slow start, the pace of vaccinations has risen considerably in recent months. Biden, who initially said he wanted states to make all adults eligible for a vaccine by May 1, moved the deadline up as vaccinations accelerated.

Biden has also set a goal of administering 200 million doses by his 100th day in office, which the nation is on pace to meet.

The expansion of eligibility comes as medical officials investigate whether Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot COVID-19 vaccine is linked to a rare blood-clotting disorder. All 50 states suspended administration of the vaccine last week, after federal health officials recom-

but people must remain vigilant about wearing masks and social distancing.

At its current pace, the United States will vaccinate 70% of its population by mid-June.

But vaccine hesitancy could slow progress toward herd immunity, which will also depend on vaccinating children.

Pfizer announced this month that it had applied for an emergency use authorization to make children ages 12 to 15 eligible for its vaccine. Moderna is expected to release results from its trial in young teenagers soon, and vaccinations in this age group could begin before school starts in the fall.

Trials in younger children are underway.

Fauci also said Sunday that he expected children of all ages to be eligible for vaccination in the first quarter of 2022.

Although vaccinations have picked up in the United States, many countries still face dire A mass vaccination event for teachers at Carteret High School in Carteret, N.J., this month. vaccine shortages. About 83% of COVID-19 vaccinations have been administered in highand upper-middle-income countries, while harden the hesitancy of some Americans to only 0.2% of doses have been administered mended a pause.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading get vaccinated. in low-income countries, according to a New At the same time, with the virus resurgent, York Times vaccine tracker. infectious disease expert, said Sunday that federal regulators should come to a decision public health experts are warning Americans Dr. Funmi Olopade, director of the Center Friday about whether to resume Johnson & not to let their guards down. The United States for Global Health at the University of Chicago, Johnson vaccinations. Although he said he is averaging more than 67,000 new cases a day said it was crucial for the United States to step did not want to get ahead of the CDC and over the past seven days, up from over 54,000 up its role in the global vaccination campaign the Food and Drug Administration, he said he a month ago, according to a New York Times as supply increases. The virus, left to spread expected experts to recommend “some sort database. around the world, could continue to mutate “Seventy thousand cases a day is not and threaten the nation’s economic recovery, of either warning or restriction” on the use of acceptable. We have to get that down,” said she said. the vaccine.

Even if there is a link between the vaccine Barry Bloom, a research professor and former It is in everybody’s “self-interest to proand the clotting disorder, the risk is exceedingly dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Pu- vide whatever we can in the way of excess low, experts say. blic Health. vaccines to low- and middle-income counStill, Mani said the pause was likely to He said more vaccinations would help, tries,” Bloom said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

As Police reform laws sweep across the U.S., some ask: Are they enough?

By STEVE EDER, MICHAEL H. KELLER and BLACKI MIGLIOZZI

I

n February, Illinois enacted a law that rewrote many of the state’s rules of policing and mandated that officers wear body cameras. In March, New York City moved to make it easier for citizens to sue officers. This month, the Maryland legislature — which decades ago became the first to adopt a Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights — became the first to do away with it.

In recent months, state and city lawmakers across the country have seized on a push for reform prompted by outrage at the killing of George Floyd in May, passing legislation that has stripped the police of some hard-fought protections won over the past half-century.

“Police unions in the United States are pretty much playing defense at the moment,” said Brian Marvel, a San Diego officer and the president of California’s largest law enforcement labor organization. “You have groups of people that are looking for change — and some groups are looking for radical change.”

More than 30 states have passed more than 140 new police oversight and reform laws, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Amber Widgery, a policy expert at the organization, said many of the laws — restricting the use of force, overhauling disciplinary systems, installing more civilian oversight and requiring transparency around misconduct cases — give states far more influence over policing practices that have typically been

A makeshift memorial for Daunte Wright, an unarmed Black man killed by police, in Brooklyn Center, Minn., April 15, 2021. States have passed over 140 police oversight bills since the killing of George Floyd, increasing accountability and overhauling rules on the use of force. left to local jurisdictions.

“We’re seeing the creation of really strong, centralized state guidance that sets a baseline for police accountability, behavior and standards” for all departments, she said.

It’s a remarkable, nationwide and in some places bipartisan movement that flies directly counter to years of deference to the police and their powerful unions. But the laws, and new rules adopted by police departments across the country, are not enough to satisfy demands by Black Lives Matter and

other activists who are pushing for wholesale reforms, cultural shifts and cutbacks at law enforcement agencies.

“The focus has been so heavily on what do we do after harm has already been committed — after the police have already engaged in misconduct — and far less focused on how do we stop this from the beginning,” said Paige Fernandez, an advocate at the American Civil Liberties Union.

While Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis officer accused of murdering Floyd, was on trial last week, episodes inVirginia, Minnesota and Illinois — which have all enacted reforms — underscored how the new laws would not always prevent traumatic outcomes.

A police officer in Virginia was seen on video pointing a gun at a Black Army lieutenant and pepper-spraying him during a traffic stop. A veteran officer in Minnesota fatally shot 20-year-old Daunte Wright, a Black man, after pulling him over. And video recordings showed a Chicago officer chasing and fatally firing at 13-year-old Adam Toledo, a Latino, after he appeared to toss aside a gun while obeying commands to raise his hands. The events ignited fresh protests and more questions about why police interventions escalated into deaths of people of color.

“People aren’t necessarily happy with the change they’re seeing, because the same thing keeps happening,” said Stevante Clark, whose brother Stephon was killed by the

Sacramento police in 2018.

California enacted a law named after his brother that raised the standard for using lethal force, but Clark sees a need for the federal government to impose national regulations.

House Democrats recently passed a sweeping police bill designed to address racial discrimination and excessive use of force, but it lacks the Republican support needed in the Senate. President Joe Biden has also fallen short on a campaign promise to establish an oversight commission during his first 100 days in office.

Nearly 1,000 people have been shot and killed by police annually in recent years, according to data from The Washington Post, which also shows that officers fatally shot Black and Hispanic people at a much higher rate by population than whites.

Some activists have cheered new laws that could curb police misconduct, mainly in states and cities controlled by Democrats.

But they also fear that those changes could be offset in Republican jurisdictions that are proposing to expand police protections or impose harsher penalties for protest-related activities like blocking highways and defacing public property.

Police unions, along with many Republican lawmakers, have resisted some of the reform efforts, arguing that they will imperil public safety. But there have been some signs of bipartisanship.

In Colorado, Republicans joined with Democrats, who control the statehouse, to pass a sweeping bill less than a month after Floyd’s death. The law banned chokeholds, required officers to intervene if they witnessed excessive force and mandated body cameras statewide within three years, among other provisions. The Colorado Legislature became the first to eliminate immunity from civil rights accusations, allowing officers to face claims in state court.

John Cooke, a Republican state senator and former Colorado county sheriff, worked with Democrats to revise their proposals.

Officials, he said, realized that “we need to do something and we need to do it now.”

Republican-led states including Iowa and Utah have implemented changes, too, banning or restricting chokeholds, among other measures. But Iowa’s Republicancontrolled House recently passed a “Back the Blue” bill that Black lawmakers said could unfairly affect peaceful protesters and amounted to “retaliation” against Democrats.

The San Juan Daily Star In Maryland, the Democratic-controlled legislature overrode a veto by the state’s Republican governor to pass a sweeping reform package.

Outlining his objections, Gov. Larry Hogan said the laws would be damaging to “police recruitment and retention, posing significant risks to public safety.”

Importantly, the package erases the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights in the state, a landmark achievement for police unions in the 1970s. Decades ago, similar protections spread across the country in union contracts and local laws, but its passage in Maryland gave broad protections to every department at once.

Critics said the policing bill of rights reduced accountability: Officers could wait days before being questioned about an allegation; only fellow officers could conduct interrogations; some complaints could be expunged from an officer’s file after a few years.

“It is fitting that Maryland is the first state to repeal it as they opened this Pandora’s box in the first place,” said Caylin Young, public policy director at the ACLU of Maryland.

Maryland’s new laws contain a range of provisions to rein in policing: a body-camera requirement for officers regularly interacting with the public, prison sentences of up to 10 years for violations of the state’s use-of-force policy, and restrictions on so-called no-knock warrants. (Those warrants drew national attention last year when the police in Louisville, Kentucky, fatally shot Breonna Taylor, an unarmed emergency medical technician, after smashing through her apartment door during a botched drug raid. Louisville banned the warrants last summer, and state lawmakers limited their use this month.)

Another Maryland law, named after Anton Black, requires disclosure of information about police misconduct investigations. The 19-yearold died in 2018 after officers pinned him to the ground following a struggle. (Prosecutors did not pursue charges, but his family has sued in federal court.) La Toya Holley, Black’s sister, said that the new laws would help but that a broader shift in policing was needed.

“That culture — that mentality — has to do a complete 180 if we want to enact change,” she said. “And it has to start in-house with the police departments, the captains, the chiefs and also the boards that are actually certifying these officers.”

Maryland’s new standards follow a decision by the Baltimore state’s attorney, Marilyn Mosby, to stop prosecuting minor crimes like prostitution and drug possession.

“When we criminalize these minor offenses that have nothing to do with public safety, we expose people to needless interaction with law enforcement that, for Black people in this country, can often lead to a death sentence,” Mosby told the Baltimore City Council last week.

Other proposals to reduce police inter-

Tuesday, April 20, 2021 ventions have caught on elsewhere. In February, Berkeley, California, barred officers from pulling over motorists for not wearing a seat belt, misuse of high-beam headlights or expired registrations.

The moves were in part based on research showing that Black motorists in the city were about six times more likely to be pulled over than white motorists were, although the police union raised concerns that the reforms created “significant safety consequences for citizens and officers.”

In Virginia, a law went into effect last month limiting the minor traffic violations for which officers should stop vehicles. It also prohibits officers from conducting searches solely based on smelling marijuana.

“As a Black woman who understands there’s been a disproportionate abuse of Black and brown people by police officers, we had to do something to prevent these injuries and killings of people of color,” said L. Louise Lucas, a Democratic state senator from Virginia, who proposed the bill and spoke of her own mistreatment by law enforcement. “This is an age-old story for Black people.”

Many of the new rules adopted by states and cities have similarities, focusing on the use of force or accountability after the fact. Two of the country’s largest states, California and New York, have been at the forefront of that push — and some cities have taken more dramatic steps.

Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco, for example, last year proposed cuts to their police department budgets. Activists have called for reducing police funding and diverting some of that money to mental health initiatives and social services. But those demands have often met with resistance, not only from law enforcement but also from Black residents and officials who fear that crime would surge.

In fact, in Oakland, some of those cuts, which were enacted because of a budget deficit, were reversed after a spike in murders and attacks on Asian Americans.

“I understand the conversation about defunding and re-imagining the police, but these are real people dying,” said Sgt. Barry Donelan, the head of the Oakland police union.

The city has had more than 40 homicides so far this year compared with 13 at the same time last year.

Immediately after Floyd’s death, the Minneapolis City Council voted to disband its police force, only to be overruled by a city charter commission.

Last year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York ordered nearly 500 local jurisdictions, including New York City, to devise plans to “reinvent and modernize” policing in their communities, threatening to withhold funding if they failed to do so.

The governor has spoken of the need to “resolve the tension” between police and communities.

“You don’t have the option of ending the

9

States have passed over 140 police oversight bills since the killing of George Floyd, increasing accountability and overhauling rules on the use of force — but the calls for change continue. police, and you don’t have the option of continuing with distrust of the police,” he said Wednesday to reporters. “So the relationship has to be repaired.”

DeRay Mckesson, an activist and podcast host who helped found Campaign Zero, an initiative to end police violence, said that he saw progress on state and local legislation, especially around the use of force, but that there was plenty of unfinished business around accountability and how the police operate.

“These issues will have to be things that we work on every year until we finish,” he said.

Mckesson, whose organization tracks legislative activity and works with local leaders on policy, said that unions had maintained their robust lobbying presence but that key lawmakers had become less deferential to them in places like Maryland.

“They were like, ‘We know what’s right and we won’t be swayed by the police just saying it’s going to cause fear,’” he said.

The police remain eager to be heard.

“Most of our members across the country are finding that you have state legislatures that are including law enforcement in on the discussion,” said Patrick Yoes, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents hundreds of thousands of officers. “Then you have those that are pretty much freezing them out and have already made up their mind about the direction they’re going — because they believe that this

reform somehow is going to save the day.”

Police advocates point to statistics showing increases in violent crimes as evidence that early reforms are backfiring. Nationally, murder rates increased significantly last year, according to preliminary FBI data released last month, although experts have cited a number of possible factors that could be at work, including the pandemic.

Excluding law enforcement from the discussions is leading to bad policy, the advocates say.

“They’ve been largely shut out of this conversation, which I don’t think is a good thing because they have experience and knowledge,” said Rafael A. Mangual, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute. “And I think part of that is just a reflection of the moment that we’re in.”

For Carmen Best, who recently retired as police chief in Seattle, cultural changes in policing will come with clear standards and consequences for misconduct.

“People will think twice because they know there are repercussions,” she said.

To get there, she said, there needs to be frank discussion about why “horrific things” sometimes happen to minorities when they interact with the police, including Adam Toledo, whose killing by a Chicago police officer is under investigation.

“At the end of the day, we all watched a 13-year-old die,” she said. “That’s hard on everybody.”

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Tuesday, April 20, 2021

The San Juan Daily Star

In Indianapolis shooting, a red flag that never flew red dangerous if he “presents an imminent risk” to himself or others, or if he fits certain other criteria, including a documented propensity for violence.

In March 2020, Hole’s mother approached officers at a Police Department roll call and told them she believed that her son was having suicidal thoughts and might even try to commit “suicide by cop,” the chief of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police, Randal Taylor, said Sunday.

Jimmy Clark, 79, a retired auto service worker who lives across the street, remembered the situation. “He wanted the cops to kill him,” said Clark, adding that Hole was an angry young man who always seemed to be “mad at the world.”

When the police arrived at the house, Hole’s mother “asked him to come down,” the chief said. “When he does, they’d already Photos of Amarjeet Johal are seen at a vigil in Indianapolis on Sunday, April 18, felt they had enough information to do the ne2021, for those who were killed in a mass shooting carried out by a former worker eded detention.”

Hole, who was 18 at the time, was at a FedEx in Indianapolis on Thursday. taken to a hospital on a “mental health tem“Any law is only as good as the people porary hold,” according to Paul Keenan, the

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON, ALI WATKINS that are enforcing it,” said Brad Banks, a for- special agent in charge of the FBI’s Indianaand ANDRÉS R. MARTÍNEZ mer prosecutor in Marion County, which polis office. hey are the rare gun laws that attract includes Indianapolis, who is now in private Having been told about a shotgun that bipartisan agreement — so-called red practice. “Does it make sense we took away Hole had recently purchased, an officer at the flag laws, which allow the authorities to the gun because he’s too dangerous to have house went upstairs to take it, the chief said, temporarily take away guns from people de- one, but we didn’t take the step to prevent and saw on the young man’s computer “some clared by a judge to be too unstable to have him from going out and buying one the next stuff about some white supremacy ideations day? them. and those kind of things.” Federal investigaRed flag laws are in place in more than tors would interview Hole about those disThe case of Brandon Hole appeared, at first, to be exactly the kind of situation these a dozen states, including Florida and New coveries the next month, though they would laws were designed to address. Indeed, last York. Their conditions vary widely; in Califor- conclude that he did not harbor an ideology March, when Hole’s mother raised alarms nia, for example, family members can directly of “racially motivated violent extremism.” about his mental state, the police seized a petition to have firearms temporarily seized The main concern at the time of the shotgun from his home. It was never returned. from their loved ones. But in Indiana, only police visit, the chief said, was Hole’s comBut a year later, the police say, Hole, 19, law enforcement can initiate that process in ments “about killing himself or possibly even shot and killed eight people at a FedEx faci- court. allowing us to kill him.” And so the officers Named for Timothy Laird, a police offi- took the shotgun. It was never returned. lity before killing himself, using rifles he had legally purchased not long after that incident cer who was shot in the line of duty in 2004, The seizure of weapons under red flag the Indiana law is one of the oldest of its kind laws is often temporary. In Indiana, once a in March 2020.

While many details are still unclear, in the country. It passed in the Republican- weapon is taken by the police, prosecutors Hole’s case is a sobering example of how held state legislature by an almost unanimous have 14 days to justify the seizure to a judeven states with widely supported safeguards vote in 2005. ge. If such a determination is not made, the The law has been particularly effective firearms are immediately returned. But if the can fail to prevent dangerous people from obtaining firearms. The laws, experts say, are in reducing suicides. A study from the Univer- judge decides the person in question is so often used only as short-term solutions. In the sity of Indianapolis showed a 7.5% decrease unstable that he or she should not be perdays after the shooting, local officials have in firearm-related suicides in the decade after mitted to have guns, the police hold onto struggled to explain how a man who was dee- the law’s passage. In Indianapolis alone, more the seized weapons, and the person is bamed by law enforcement as too unstable to than 400 people were subject to it from 2006 rred from possessing any guns for at least six possess a weapon could go on to legally buy to 2013, the study said. months.

Under the statute, a person is consideone months later.

The permanent seizure of Hole’s shot-

T

gun would therefore suggest that prosecutors had sought and obtained a red flag determination. But this apparently did not happen.

“For whatever reason,” Taylor said, “that never made it to the court.”

Taylor said it was not the police’s role to make the decision of whether to bring the case to court for a red flag hearing. The prosecutors’ office “would get a notification,” he said, that police had taken a weapon and that the owner of it had been expressing suicidal thoughts. It would be then up to that office to act, he said. “In reality, he may have qualified, but that is for the prosecutors” to determine, Taylor said.

Ryan Mears, the Marion County prosecutor, said in an interview at a vigil Saturday that he did not know what had happened in this case. But he suggested, posing a hypothetical, that the authorities might have taken the gun in response to pleas from concerned family members, and considered the crisis resolved.

“What could have occurred,” Mears said, “is the point was: ‘Let’s get the gun out of there, make sure the gun is not returned,’ if that was the agreement that was made. And I’m not saying that it is the case. But there’s no reason to go in front of the judge at that point in time, because the point is we want to take the weapon away.”

Experts note that most red flag laws are primarily built to address short-term, imminent crises, said Aaron J. Kivisto, a psychology professor at the University of Indianapolis who was an author of the study on the state’s statute.

“Most suicides are fairly impulsive acts, he said. “And if the person can get through the short term crisis, the suicide doesn’t occur, or the homicide doesn’t occur.”

Still, this would not explain how the authorities legally held on to the shotgun after the 14 days. But the chief said Hole called at one point and said that “he didn’t want the weapons back.”

For those who have studied the evolution of red flag laws, Hole may turn out to be a tragic example of their shortcomings. In practice, experts say containing more chronic threats like Hole might be beyond the laws’ reaches, in their current forms.

“Maybe it prevented something for a year, or six months,” Kivisto said. “And then it wasn’t enough.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

11

The fed faces criticism as it wades into climate and equity issues

By JEANNA SMIALEK

I

n mid-2019, Jerome Powell fielded a question from reporters that he often faced in those days: Were politics, and particularly a pressure campaign coming from Donald Trump’s White House to cut interest rates, influencing the Federal Reserve’s policy stance?

Powell, the central bank chair, tried as he had for months to convince the public that he and his colleagues were not bowing to the Republican administration. “We never take into account political considerations,” he said.

Nearly two years later, the Fed again faces warnings of politicization — but this time from Republican lawmakers who say it risks veering out of its lane as it focuses on what they portray as social priorities. Fed officials have ramped up their attention to climate change risks, racial economic equity and labor market inclusion, issues that many economists say are critical to the nation’s future, but which Washington often treats as the purview of the partisan left.

As the Fed has taken a more expansive view of how it should go about achieving full employment, stable inflation and financial stability — the loosely defined tasks Congress handed it — conservative economists and lawmakers have sent letters and made statements expressing worry that it will stray too far.

One of the most prominent critics is Patrick J. Toomey, R-Pa. and a powerful member of the Senate Banking Committee, who has labeled research by Fed regional banks as “social studies essays.”

Such complaints don’t carry much immediate threat, with Democrats in charge of Congress and the White House and Republicans unable to rein in the Fed legislatively. But the mere accusation that the Fed is bowing to Democrats is a striking inflection point for a central bank that has often lived in America’s imagination as a friend of bankers and free-market enthusiasts.

The timing is also surprising — given Republicans lead the institution.

There is a reason for the shift, central bank watchers say: The Fed is trying to figure out how to do its job in a changing economy. Its new frontiers may align more with one party, but the Fed has spent its 107-year history evolving to fit the world around it.

“It’s not so much a give to political pressure as it is to economic reality,” Steven Kelly, a researcher at Yale’s Program on Financial Stability, said of the shift. That is particularly true when it comes to the focus on labor market equity, he said. “We’ve been overwhelmed with years of low inflation and underemployment, and I don’t think the Fed can ignore it any more.”

The Fed is in charge of guiding the speed of the economy by setting the price of money. It moves interest rates to get growth chugging during bad times or to prevent painful overheating during good ones. Its national and regional policymakers — 18 at present — have been appointed by the president or by business and community leaders and do their jobs independent of the White House and with only arm’s-length oversight from Congress.

The point of that autonomy is to keep political concerns,

The Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building in Washington, Nov. 15, 2020. The Federal Reserve is proudly politically independent — that makes key discussions around climate change and racial inequity a balancing act. such as a presidential election, from preventing prudent policy.

Fed officials have guarded their independence fiercely, and to protect their status, they generally refuse to weigh in on heated political debates. But they have occasionally made exceptions for pressing economic issues.

Their opinions have at times been welcome to Republicans. Alan Greenspan, the Fed chair in the 1990s and early 2000s, famously endorsed George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001, for instance.

But that started to change after the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis, as Republicans sometimes accused Greenspan’s successors of being political. Ben S. Bernanke, who was initially appointed chair by Bush, was sometimes blasted for helping President Barack Obama by buying bonds to help the economy through a slow recovery. When Janet L. Yellen, the Fed chair from 2014 to 2018 and now the Treasury secretary, talked about skyrocketing inequality — saying that “it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history” — Republican lawmakers told her to get her “nose” out of places where it did not belong.

In the years since, the Fed has become more emboldened to discuss issues that have an economic impact, even when they fall into areas of partisan disagreement. Incumbent policymakers have pushed far beyond Yellen’s Fed’s quiet, often internal, efforts to look harder at inequality, labor market inclusion and climate change.

The central bank’s regional branches — which act of their own accord but communicate closely with their colleagues in Washington — have focused on opportunity and inclusive growth and held conferences on the economics of climate change.

And Powell, who was appointed to the Fed by Obama but elevated to chair by Trump, ushered in a new policy framework along with his colleagues last year. It clarified that the Fed saw its full employment target as “a broad-based and inclusive goal.”

Powell said last week that the tweak was a nod to concerns about economic inequality at a time when low inflation rates

had given the Fed leeway to foster a hotter job market that pulled more people in and pushed wages higher.

And when the pandemic spurred a financial meltdown last March and April, the Fed introduced programs to keep credit flowing not just to Wall Street but also to Main Street, including state and local governments. In the subsequent months, Powell gently but firmly pushed for more congressional spending to shore up the economy.

The Fed’s emergency efforts were initially welcomed by both parties, but ended in blowback that could have reined in its powers. Toomey held up stimulus negotiations in December 2020 to insert language that might have — in its original format — prevented the Fed from setting up programs that could help business or municipal borrowers without Congress’ support in the future. His office said the wording, which was eventually watered down, would protect the Fed from becoming a tool for Democrats.

But Toomey has continued to raise concerns that the Fed is on the brink of losing its neutrality. Late last month, he sent a letter to Mary C. Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, that questioned her bank’s climate change and racial equality work.

“The Federal Reserve’s independence and careful adherence to nonpartisanship has allowed it to avoid being seen as a politicized body,” he wrote, going on to criticize central bank writings including a “racial equity primer” the institution published on Medium last year.

“The Federal Reserve may pursue mission creep or welcome itself to political capture,” he continued. “But such activities are inconsistent with its statutory responsibilities.”

Daly told reporters on Thursday that she would “welcome the opportunity to discuss” such matters with Toomey’s staff.

But Fed officials say the central bank is being pragmatic, not political. Daly regularly points out that understanding climate change risks to the financial system is important for bank regulators and supervisors. Powell said during a webcast Wednesday that the Fed sees such issues “through the lens of our existing mandates” — racial, gender and other disparities in economic outcomes “hold the economy back,” for example.

“Also I think we now realize that unemployment can go low for quite a long time without inflation being a problem — which will tend to help those groups,” he said.

Still, the Fed knows it’s in fraught territory. Powell avoids endorsing specific legislative packages. When Fed officials talk about inequality, they often discuss opportunity — a framing with more bipartisan backing.

As the central bank tries to steer through the political moment, the fact that Powell is a Republican — and popular on Capitol Hill across party lines — may help ease the way.

“I have a lot of respect for Chairman Powell,” said Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., who has worried about the Fed’s climate push.

Still, Barr said, the regional banks risked “overstepping” by getting specific about social issues, inconsistent with the Fed’s long history of jealously guarding its independence.

“The Fed, by delving into these sticky political issues, is inviting the political interference they don’t want.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

CBS News will try to reinvent itself, again

Susan Zirinsky, the head of CBS News, in New York, June 13, 2019. In an interview as she prepares to step down as news division head, Zirinsky said, “I feel I have given my entire soul into rebuilding this organization.”

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and JOHN KOBLIN

I

n May 2020, a few months after “CBS Evening News” relocated from its longtime Manhattan home to Washington — a move that perplexed some producers and cost millions — the third-ranked newscast finally seemed to be finding a groove.

Susan Zirinsky, a CBS News legend who became its president in 2019 after nearly a half-century at the network, had picked Norah O’Donnell to lead the “Evening News,” and the anchor had landed a big interview with Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.

At 6:30 p.m., viewers on the East Coast tuned in — but O’Donnell was nowhere in sight. A technical glitch had knocked out CBS’s transmission feed. With homebound staff hobbled by the pandemic, the network tried, and failed, to restore its flagship newscast; instead, viewers saw an awkward ad break and content from the CBSN streaming channel. On Instagram, O’Donnell posted a video apologizing.

It was among the tougher moments of Zirinsky’s time at the CBS News helm, a tenure that began with promises of rebirth under the first woman to lead the network’s news division and ended, on Thursday, with

an announcement that she was stepping down after just two years for a behind-thescenes production role.

Zirinsky, 69, is a singular figure at CBS News, the rare woman to climb the ranks of network news — she was the inspiration for Holly Hunter’s character in the 1987 film “Broadcast News” — and her ascension to president in 2019 was literally met with cheers from the staff. She took over a news division reeling from damaging harassment scandals, including the tarnished exits of Jeff Fager, the longtime executive producer of “60 Minutes,” and Leslie Moonves, the former CBS chief executive.

“The morale was at an all-time low, the shows were messy,” Zirinsky said in an interview on Saturday, shortly after she had finished overseeing live coverage of Prince Philip’s funeral. “What I feel like I’ve achieved in these two years is something that for me, philosophically, journalistically, feels like I righted the ship.”

“I feel I have given my entire soul into rebuilding this organization,” she said.

Zirinsky is also leaving the network’s morning and evening news shows as she had inherited them: in third place, behind ABC and NBC. And she will be succeeded by a pair of outsiders more steeped in business strategy than news reporting: Neeraj

Khemlani, a veteran executive at the publisher Hearst, and Wendy McMahon, the former head of ABC’s local stations group.

The change is a strategic pivot by George Cheeks, the executive who took responsibility of CBS’s television properties last year and is now charged with shaking up a news division that is long on history, but short on viewers. CBS News may be the former home of Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite — its Manhattan studios are filled with relics from midcentury halcyon days — but it has struggled for years to compete against ABC and NBC. Cheeks had lamented at times that Zirinsky — or “Z,” in CBS parlance — could be overly focused on the minutiae of news gathering, rather than broader changes in the news business, according to a person who requested anonymity to speak candidly about private discussions.

“The wants and habits of our consumers evolve by the day,” Cheeks wrote to his staff in a memo last week. He effusively praised Zirinsky as an “indefatigable” driver of “powerful journalism” while suggesting that it would fall to the next generation of CBS leaders to usher in the modern era: “Z has helped position the division for success.”

Zirinsky, in the interview, said that “every part of my being believes this transition is right, at the right time, with the right ideas.” She conceded she “would be lying” if she claimed ratings were unimportant, but she noted that “Evening News” had narrowed its deficit in the key demographic and that she had shored up a newsroom that, after the convulsions of recent years, had “felt a bit abandoned.”

Zirinsky signed star anchor Gayle King to a new contract at “CBS This Morning,” which had lost momentum after the exit of its former co-anchor Charlie Rose over claims of workplace misconduct. On March 8, the show beat ABC and NBC for the first time on the strength of its exclusive excerpts from Oprah Winfrey’s CBS interview with Meghan Markle. “60 Minutes” and “CBS Sunday Morning” remained highly respected and highly rated.

Some of Zirinsky’s strengths — a love of producing; an encyclopedic knowledge of the network — proved double-edged.

Accustomed to the banter of the control room, she sometimes mused aloud about

personnel changes, prompting unease and unauthorized leaks; trained to report every fact, she spent months seeking input about her next moves, delaying big decisions.

By the time O’Donnell was officially named “Evening News” anchor in May 2019 — days after the announcement had leaked to The New York Post — Zirinsky had openly told colleagues that the network presidency could be an awkward fit for her. The Post reported last week that Zirinsky, during a lengthy corporate budget meeting, scrawled “I hate my job” on a sheet of paper and held it up.

“I am transparent,” Zirinsky said, when asked about her expressions of frustration with the job. “The passion that I feel sometimes gets misinterpreted. I wouldn’t have traded this for anything. If I was asked today to step into this role, I would do it all over again.”

CBS News has tried a number of approaches over the years to lift its fortunes.

The “Evening News” tried a megawatt star (Katie Couric) and a lesser-known homegrown prospect (Jeff Glor). “CBS This Morning” was a revolving door of anchors and producers. David Rhodes, who had worked at Fox News before he became the CBS News president in 2011, ran the division in the style of a technocrat before he was replaced by Zirinsky, the old-school shoe leather journalist.

CBS executives said relocating the “Evening News” to Washington included an overdue upgrade for the network’s facilities in the capital. Election years typically attract big audiences, though CBS’s coverage of the 2020 presidential debates ranked behind the major cable news networks and ABC and NBC in total viewers.

The incoming leaders, Khemlani and McMahon, start in May. Khemlani has experience in Hearst’s television business and worked at CBS as a “60 Minutes” producer from 1998 to 2006. McMahon worked at CBS-owned stations in Boston and Minneapolis before her years at ABC. Zirinsky is in discussions about a significant new production role at CBS. In the interview, she acknowledged the TV news business “is pushing in a different direction.”

“This is setting us up for the future,” she said, adding, “I don’t look in the rear view mirror. I look forward.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

13 Stocks

Wall Street slips from all-time peaks, Tesla drops after fatal crash T he major Wall Street indexes slid from record levels on Monday as investors awaited solid guidance from first-quarter earnings to justify the rich valuation equities are trading at, while Tesla Inc shares fell following a fatal car crash.

The electric-car maker was down 3.32% after a Tesla vehicle believed to be operating without anyone in the driver’s seat crashed into a tree on Saturday north of Houston, killing two occupants.

The stock was the biggest drag on the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite Index. An 8.4% drop over the weekend in bitcoin, in which Tesla has a big investment, also weighed on its share price.

The S&P 500 was mostly lower, with the consumer staples and real estate sectors trading near break-even, as analysts await results this week from 79 companies in the benchmark, including Johnson & Johnson, Netflix Inc, Intel Corp, Honeywell and Schlumberger.

Analysts expect first-quarter earnings for S&P 500 firms to have grown 30.9% from a year ago, according to Refinitiv IBES data.

The U.S. economy is poised to boom as consumers hold $2 trillion in savings in excess of what they held before the pandemic, said Doug Peta, chief U.S. investment strategist at BCA Research, adding markets are in pause mode.

“If indeed we do keep grinding higher that would be healthy, that would suggest that the grinding higher is sustainable,” Peta said. “The pullbacks along the way are healthy.”

By 1:44 p.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 150.4 points, or 0.44%, to 34,050.27, the S&P 500 lost 24.91 points, or 0.60%, to 4,160.56 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 148.69 points, or 1.06%, to 13,903.66.

Coca-Cola Co rose 0.35% after the beverage maker trounced estimates for quarterly profit and revenue, benefiting from the easing of pandemic curbs and wide vaccine rollouts.

International Business Machines Corp, another bluechip company, slipped about 0.22% ahead of its results after market close.

“The market has had a huge jump to the upside so it needs to take a little bit of rest,” said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Spartan Capital Securities in New York.

“For now it’s just a little bit of profit taking as traders await results from big tech names on Wall Street.”

A recent retreat in benchmark 10-year Treasury yields from 14-month highs has renewed interest in highly valued technology stocks, while a string of strong economic data has also helped push the S&P 500 and the Dow to record levels.

The S&P 500 has gained the past four weeks, its longest winning streak since August 2020.

GameStop Corp jumped 6.41% on the announcement of its CEO’s resignation.

Crypto stocks including miners Riot Blockchain and Marathon Digital each slumped about 11% each as bitcoin took a hammering.

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14

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

The San Juan Daily Star

A Cuba without a Castro? A country steps into the unknown.

By MARIA ABI-HABIB and ED AUGUSTIN

W

hen Raúl Castro announced last week that he was preparing to retire as Cuba’s top leader, he had a warning for a nation increasingly divided over the legacy of its communist revolution: The choice at hand is continuity of the revolution’s ideals, or defeat.

Since 1959, when Raúl and his older brother, Fidel, led an insurgency against a U.S.backed dictator to victory, Cuba has been led by a Castro. Now, as Raúl — who is 89 and succeeded his older brother — steps down from the helm of the Communist Party, he leaves a country that is torn by the most brutal economic crisis in decades.

There is also a deep generational rift.

Many older Cubans remember the poverty and inequality they faced before the Castros, and remain loyal to the revolution despite decades of hardship. But younger generations, who grew up with the achievements of socialism, including access to education and health care, chafe at its limits. They are demanding less government control and more economic freedom.

“There is a very sharp generational divide,” said William LeoGrande, an expert on Cuba affairs and a professor at the American University. “And that’s one of the Cuban government’s principal challenges going forward, because their historic base of support is gradually retiring and dying off.”

Castro announced he was relinquishing the nation’s most powerful position — first secretary of the Communist Party — on Friday, at the opening of the party’s four-day congress, held this year under the banner of “Unity and Continuity.”

The man expected to become the next head of the Communist Party is Cuba’s current president, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, who turns 61 later this month. A party stalwart, Díaz-Canel is part of a younger generation that wants a gradual opening of the country, though no change to Cuba’s system of one-party rule.

The party conference, which happens every five years, was staged to underscore the endurance of revolutionary ideals in Cuba. But the transition comes at what may be a tipping point for the island.

Over the past few years, as the Trump administration imposed stringent sanctions on Cuba and the tourism industry was decimated by the pandemic, Cubans have seen their country’s economy plummet once again, with many waiting for hours in bread lines. The

A shouting crowd awaits the funeral service for Fidel Castro, at the Plaza de la Revolución in Santiago, Cuba, Dec. 2, 2016. Raúl Castro is preparing to step down as head of Cuba’s Communist Party, leaving Cubans without a Castro to lead them for the first time in over 60 years. country’s lauded health care system is frayed.

And the number of Cubans trying to leave the island is going up, though it is still far from the exoduses of the 1980s and 1990s.

“The Communist Party lives off the achievements of a long time ago, from when they began,” said Claudia Genlui, an activist with the San Isidro political movement, a collective of artists who have protested against the Communist Party in recent months. Although the group is small, it has surprised the nation with its continued defiance.

“The party does not represent my generation, it does not represent me,” Genlui said, adding that “there is a lack of generational connection, of interests, of priorities, and all of that somehow drives us away.”

Castro, to some extent, would agree.

Although Fidel held fast to his rallying cry of “socialism or death” until he died in 2016, the younger Castro grew to realize that reform was necessary to quell growing discontent and began opening up the country’s economy.

After Fidel formally resigned the presidency in 2008, Raúl Castro prioritized recruiting younger Cubans into the Communist Party and putting younger members into top government positions.

That has sat well with some Cubans.

“I think we’ve got to move on to a new generation, younger people with new ideas,”

said Osvaldo Reyes, 55, a taxi driver in Havana, while voicing his support for Castro and the Communist Party. “A revolution should keep transforming, keep doing the best for people.”

When the Castro brothers started their popular uprising, they tapped into a deep well of discontent many Cubans had over their country’s corrupt ruling elite, which was not just out of touch but also unconcerned by the dire living conditions of most Cubans.

The brothers led a scrappy insurgency against the country’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and Cuba became a bulwark against decades of American intervention in Latin America.

But decades later, it would be the Castro brothers and their Communist Party that would be criticized by ordinary Cubans as out of touch. When Raúl Castro took over as head of the Communist Party in 2011, he was surrounded by a government stacked with octogenarian generals.

While many Cubans are fiercely proud of their nation’s sovereignty, they have tired of watching the same revolution-era generals control nearly every aspect of their lives, from how much they earn to the food they eat.

“Lots of people still don’t feel represented because he didn’t manage to breach the gap between the government and the people,” Adilen Sardiñas, 28, said of Raúl Castro.

While Sardiñas expressed frustration with the slow pace of reforms, like many interviewed, she also blamed America for a decadeslong embargo that has crippled Cuba’s economy and further embittered Cubans against the United States.

“We need a change, but I don’t know if we’ll be able to because we’ve got our neighbor, the U.S., stepping on our heels and closing doors everywhere,” she said.

Reform has proceeded at a glacial pace, slowed by a bureaucracy worried about losing its privileges and by the revolution’s old guard, suspicious of any change that might nudge Cuba closer to capitalism.

Carlos Alzugaray, a former Cuban ambassador and a Communist Party member, described the current struggle as generational.

“Raúl used to say our worst enemy is the old mentality, and that’s what I think is happening: that the old leaders don’t want to change,” said Alzugaray. “Raúl wants change, and the younger leaders want change but are worried that they will be criticized for not being truthful to the revolution of Fidel Castro.”

The problem, as the country’s prime minister, Manuel Marrero, said earlier this month when speaking about the urgency to make reforms, is that “people do not eat plans.”

Castro is likely to retain some influence even in retirement, but he is leaving the dayto-day ruling of Cuba to Díaz-Canel. When Castro stepped down in 2018 as president, the country’s second-most powerful position, he handed the job to Díaz-Canel.

A former bodyguard for Castro and a technocrat, Díaz-Canel allowed Cubans to access the internet from their phones in 2018, and in their homes the following year — changes many feel helped fuel protests and demands for greater political freedom.

In January, he further opened up Cuba to private enterprise, expanding the types of businesses Cubans could enter.

But Cuban leaders are proceeding cautiously.

“The government is deathly afraid of change it is not in control of, because it would threaten their economic and political position,” said Ted Henken a professor at Baruch College in New York and author of “Cuba’s Digital Revolution.”

“It is afraid of any change that it is not choreographing and in control of, and that doesn’t come from the top down — which is ironic for what began as a popular revolution that was massively supported by the people.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

15

Afghan women fear the worst, whether war or peace lies ahead

By THOMAS GIBBONS-NEFF, FATIMA FAIZI and NAJIM RAHIM

F

arzana Ahmadi watched as a neighbor in her village in northern Afghanistan was flogged by Taliban fighters last month. The crime: Her face was uncovered.

“Every woman should cover their eyes,” Ahmadi recalled one Taliban member saying.

People silently watched as the beating dragged on.

Fear — even more potent than in years past — is gripping Afghans now that U.S. and NATO forces will depart the country in the coming months. They will leave behind a publicly triumphant Taliban, who many expect will seize more territory and reinstitute many of the same oppressive rules they enforced under their regime in the 1990s.

The New York Times spoke to many Afghan women — members of civil society, politicians, journalists and others — about what comes next in their country, and they all said the same thing: Whatever happens will not bode well for them.

Whether the Taliban take back power by force or through a political agreement with the Afghan government, their influence will almost inevitably grow. In a country in which an end to nearly 40 years of conflict is nowhere in sight, many Afghans talk of an approaching civil war.

“All the time, women are the victims of men’s wars,” said Raihana Azad, a member of Afghanistan’s Parliament. “But they will be the victims of their peace, too.”

When the Taliban governed Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, it barred women and girls from taking most jobs or going to school, and practically made them prisoners in their own homes.

After the U.S. invasion to topple the Taliban and defeat al-Qaida in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Western rallying cry for bringing women’s rights to the already war-torn country seemed to many a noble undertaking. The cause helped sell the war to Americans who cringed at the sight of a B-52 carpet bombing insurgent positions.

Some schools reopened, giving young women and girls a chance at education and careers that many before them didn’t have. But even before U.S. troops touched Afghan soil, some women had already risked their lives by secretly pursuing an education and teaching themselves.

Over two decades, the United States spent more than $780 million to promote women’s rights in Afghanistan. The result is a generation who came of age in a period of hope for women’s equality.

Although progress has been uneven, girls and women now make up about 40% of students. They have joined the military and police, held political office, become internationally recognized singers, competed in the Olympics and on robotics teams, climbed mountains and more — all things that were nearly impossible at the turn of the century.

As the conflict dragged on over 20 years and setbacks on the battlefield mounted, U.S. officials and lawmakers frequently pointed to the gains of Afghan women and girls as proof of success of the nation-building endeavor — some measure of progress to try to justify the loss of life, both American and Afghan, and billions of dollars spent in the war effort.

Even in the twilight weeks before President Joe Biden made his final decision to pull out all U.S. troops by September, some lawmakers and military officials argued that preserving women’s rights was one reason to keep U.S. forces there.

“I remember when Americans came and they said that they will not leave us alone, and that Afghanistan will be free of oppression, and will be free of war and women’s rights will be protected,” said Shahida Husain, an activist in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province, where the Taliban first rose and now control large stretches of territory. “Now it looks like it was just slogans.”

Across the country, schools are now being forced to contemplate whether they will be able to stay open.

Firoz Uzbek Karimi, the chancellor of Faryab University in the north, oversees 6,000 students — half of them women.

“Female students who live in Taliban areas have been threatened several times, but their families send them secretly,” Karimi said. “If foreign forces leave early, the situation will get worse.”

Human rights groups, nongovernmental organizations, schools and businesses are left trying to figure out contingency plans for female employees and students should the Taliban return to power by force or through an agreement with the Afghan government.

In his announcement Wednesday, Biden said the United States would continue to prioritize women’s rights through humanitarian and diplomatic assistance.

But even now, the gains for women in some places over the past 20 years have been fleeting and unevenly distributed despite the millions invested in women’s rights programs.

In Taliban-controlled areas, women’s education is extremely restricted, if not nonexistent. In some areas in the country’s east and west, the Taliban have opened schools to girls who can attend until they reach puberty, and in the north, tribal elders have negotiated to reopen some schools for girls, although subjects like social science are replaced with Islamic studies. Education centers are routinely the targets of attacks, and more than 1,000 schools have closed in recent years.

“It was my dream to work in a government office,” said Ahmadi, 27, who graduated from Kunduz University two years ago before moving to a Taliban-controlled village with her husband. “But I will take my dream to the grave.”

The Taliban’s idea of justice for women was solidified for Ahmadi when she saw the insurgents beat the unveiled woman in front of her in Kunduz province.

For many other Afghan women, the government’s judicial system has been punishment of a different kind.

Farzana Alizada believes that her sister, Maryam, was murdered by her abusive husband. But a police investigation of any sort took months to start, thwarted by absent prosecutors and corruption, she said. Alizada’s brother-in-law even pressured her to drop the charges by accusing her of stealing. The police asked her why she was pushing the case if her sister was dead.

Domestic violence remains an enduring problem in Afghanistan. About 87% of Afghan women and girls experience domestic abuse in their lifetimes, according to a Human Rights Watch report.

“I lost all the hope I have in this government. In some cases, maybe the Taliban is better than this system.” Alizada said. “No one is on my side.”

Alizada’s sentiments were similarly portrayed in Doha, Qatar, at peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Despite months of negotiations, there has been little progress, especially when it comes to discussing women’s rights, which neither side has made a priority.

At a separate peace conference held in Moscow in March between the Afghan government, political power brokers and the Taliban, only one woman, Habiba Sarabi, was on the 12-member delegation sent by the Afghan government. And only four are a part of the 21-person team in Doha.

“Moscow — and Doha, as well, with its small number of women representatives — laid bare the thin veneer of support for genuine equality and the so-called post-2001 gains when it comes to who will decide the country’s future,” said Patricia Gossman, the associate Asia director for Human Rights Watch.

But one of the gains that is almost indisputable has been Afghanistan’s access to the internet and the news media. Cellphone coverage extends across much of the country, meaning that Afghan women and girls have more space to learn and connect outside their familial bubbles and villages. The Afghan news media, too, has blossomed after large investments from foreign governments and investors, and many women have become nationally known journalists and celebrities.

But even their futures are uncertain.

Lina Shirzad is the acting managing director of a small radio station in Badakhshan, in Afghanistan’s restive north. She employs 15 women and fears, given the growing insecurity, that they will lose their jobs. Even some of the larger national outlets are looking to relocate employees or move some operations outside the country.

“With the withdrawal of foreign forces in the next few months, these women that are the breadwinners for their family will be unemployed,” Shirzad said. “Will their values and achievements be maintained or not?”

A police lieutenant hugs her mother goodbye in Khost, Afghanistan, June 22, 2020. Whatever happens once the U.S. withdraws will not bode well for Afghan women.

16

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

How the tiny kingdom of Bhutan out-vaccinated most of the world

An undated photo provided by the Bhutan Ministry of Health shows a helicopter used for distributing the COVID-19 vaccine to parts of mountainous Bhutan. The Himalayan nation has given more than 60 percent of its people a shot.

By CHENCHO DEMA and MIKE IVES

T

he Lunana area of Bhutan is remote even by the standards of an isolated Himalayan kingdom: It covers an area about twice the size of New York City, borders far western China, includes glacial lakes and some of the world’s highest peaks, and is inaccessible by car.

Still, most people living there have already received a coronavirus vaccine.

Vials of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine arrived last month by helicopter and were distributed by health workers, who walked from village to village through snow and ice. Vaccinations proceeded in the area’s 13 settlements even after yaks damaged some of the field tents that volunteers had set up for patients.

“I got vaccinated first to prove to my fellow villagers that the vaccine does not cause death and is safe to take,” Pema, a village leader in Lunana who is in his 50s and goes by one name, said by telephone.

“After that, everyone here took the jab.”

Lunana’s campaign is part of a quiet vaccine success story in one of Asia’s poorest countries. As of Saturday, Bhutan, a Buddhist kingdom that has emphasized its citizens’ well-being over national prosperity, had administered a first vaccine dose to more than 478,000 people, more than 60%

of its population. The Health Ministry said this month that more than 93% of eligible adults had received their first shots.

The vast majority of Bhutan’s first doses were administered at about 1,200 vaccination centers over a weeklong period in late March and early April. As of Saturday, the country’s vaccination rate of 63 doses per 100 people was the sixth highest in the world, according to a New York Times database.

That rate was ahead of those of the United Kingdom and the United States, more than seven times that of neighboring India and nearly six times the global average. Bhutan is also ahead of several other geographically isolated countries with small populations, including Iceland and the Maldives.

Dasho Dechen Wangmo, Bhutan’s health minister, attributed its success to “leadership and guidance” from the country’s king, public solidarity, a general absence of vaccine hesitancy, and a primary health care system that “enabled us to take the services even to the most remote parts of the country.”

“Being a small country with a population of just over 750,000, a two-week vaccination campaign was doable,” Dechen Wangmo said in an email. “Minor logistic issues were faced during the vaccination

but were all manageable.”

All of the doses used so far were donated by the government of India, where the drug is known as Covishield and manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine producer. Bhutan’s government has said it plans to administer second doses about eight to 12 weeks after the first round, in line with guidelines for the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Will Parks, the representative in Bhutan for UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, said the first round was a “success story, not only in terms of the coverage but also in the way the vaccination drive was executed collectively, from the planning to the implementation.”

“It involved participation from the highest authority to local community,” he said.

The campaign has relied in part on a corps of volunteers, known as the Guardians of the Peace, who operate under the authority of Bhutan’s king, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck.

In Lunana, eight volunteers pitched field tents and helped carry oxygen tanks from village to village, said Karma Tashi, a member of the government’s four-person vaccination team there. The tanks were a precaution in case any villagers had adverse reactions to the shots.

To save time, Tashi said, the team administered vaccines by day and walked between villages by night — often for 10 to 14 hours at a time.

The yak damage to the tents was not the only hiccup. Some villagers did not initially show up to be vaccinated because they were busy harvesting barley or because they worried about possible side effects.

“But after we told them about the benefits, they agreed,” Tashi said.

As of April 12, 464 of Lunana’s 800 or so residents had gotten a first dose, according to government data. The population figure includes minors who are not eligible for vaccines.

Health care in Bhutan, a landlocked country that is slightly larger than Maryland and borders Tibet, is free. Between 1960 and 2014, life expectancy there more than doubled, to 69.5 years, according to the World Health Organization. Immunization levels in recent years have been above 95%.

But Bhutan’s health system is “hardly self-sustainable,” and patients who need

expensive or sophisticated treatments are often sent to India or Thailand at the government’s expense, said Dr. Yot Teerawattananon, a Thai health economist at the National University of Singapore.

A government committee in Bhutan meets once a week to make decisions about which patients to send overseas for treatment, Yot said. He said the committee — which focuses on brain and heart surgery, kidney transplants and cancer treatment — was known informally as the “death panel.”

“I don’t think they could cope with the surge of severe COVID cases if that happened, so it is important for them to prioritize COVID vaccination,” he said, referring to Bhutan’s health authorities.

Bhutan has reported fewer than 1,000 coronavirus infections and only one death.

Its borders, tight by global standards even before the pandemic, have been closed for a year with few exceptions, and anyone who enters the country must quarantine for 21 days.

That includes the prime minister, Lotay Tshering, who received his first vaccine dose last month while in quarantine after a visit to Bangladesh. He has been supporting the vaccination effort in recent weeks on his official Facebook page.

“My days are dotted with virtual meetings on numerous areas that need attention, as I closely follow the vaccination campaign on the ground,” Tshering, a surgeon, wrote in early April. “So far, with your prayers and blessings, everything is going well.”

The economy in Lunana depends on animal husbandry and harvests of a so-called caterpillar fungus that is prized as an aphrodisiac in China. People speak Dzongkha, the national language, and a local dialect.

Last year, the drama “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” became the second film ever selected to represent Bhutan at the Academy Awards. It was filmed using solar batteries, and its cast included local villagers.

Lunana’s headman, Kaka, who goes by one name, said the most important part of the vaccination campaign was not on the ground but in the sky.

“If there hadn’t been a chopper,” he said, “getting the vaccines would have been an issue, since there’s no access road.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

17

FDR didn’t just fix the economy

By JAMELLE BOUIE

T

he New Deal was more than a recovery program for the economy. It was, as historian Eric Rauchway argues in his new book, “Why the New Deal Matters,” a recovery program for American democracy.

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” Franklin Roosevelt declared at the 1932 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Roosevelt had broken tradition to accept his party’s nomination and deliver a speech in person. And in that speech, he promised a program based on the “simple moral principle” that the “welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need” and second on “whether or not they are getting it.”

Aware of the challenge ahead of him should he win the presidency — nearly a quarter of Americans were out of work and the economy was shrinking by double-digits — Roosevelt concluded his address with a call to action.

“Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage,” he said. “This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”

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These days we tend to think of the New Deal as a very large stimulus program. And that was true, to an extent. The Public Works Administration, established under the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, spent around $3.3 billion (roughly $65 billion in today’s dollars) on public buildings and infrastructure. The Works Progress Administration, established two years later, went even further, spending almost twice as much over eight years to employ more than 15% of the nation’s labor force.

But as Roosevelt suggested in his acceptance speech, the New Deal was bigger than just a recovery program.

Rauchway, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, writes that “The foundational belief of the New Deal was the conviction that democracy in the United States — limited and flawed through it remained — was better kept than abandoned, in the hope of strengthening and extending it.”

It was not clear, when Roosevelt took office, that democracy would survive the long night of the Depression. To show what could have happened in the absence of recovery, Rauchway recounts the story of the Bonus Expeditionary Force — veterans of the First World War who occupied parts of Washington in the last months of the Hoover administration, demanding early payment of their “bonus” or promised compensation for service. On one hand were the marchers, thousands of disaffected veterans and their families, and their leader Walter Waters, who drew inspiration from Mussolini’s Black Shirts and Hitler’s Brown Shirts, and who proposed reinventing his Bonus Army as a new “Khaki Shirt” organization.

Here’s Rauchway: “The Bonus Army’s newspaper drew international comparisons to prove the veterans’ importance: ‘For five years Hitler was lampooned and derided, but today he controls Germany. Mussolini before the war was a tramp printer driven from Italy because of his political views. But today he is a world figure … The Khaki Shirts would be essentially American’ — though similar to the backers of those strongmen overseas.”

On the other hand were those Americans at the top who believed that democracy had failed the country. In Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s draconian response to the Bonus marchers — burning their camps and driving them out of the city, against President Herbert Hoover’s explicit orders — they saw a model for how the government might restore “order” to the United States. “To his aide Rexford Tugwell,” Rauchway notes, “Roosevelt described Douglas MacArthur as one of the ‘most dangerous men in the country.’”

MacArthur appealed to Americans who yearned for a strongman, who believed that “democracy had run its course and that the totalitarians had grasped the necessities of the time.” Roosevelt said that among people he knew —

rich people, who came from privileged backgrounds and who found the mobilized people deeply alarming — such talk was commonplace.

Roosevelt had to prove to all Americans that selfgovernment worked; that it could restore confidence and tackle the economic crisis without compromising the principles of the revolution and the founding. That’s why Roosevelt embraced public employment and its direct line to ordinary Americans, so government could “restore the close relationship with its people which is necessary to preserve our democratic form of government.” That’s why he would direct his administration to build dams in the Tennessee Valley, bridges in California’s Bay Area and a second tunnel connecting New Jersey and New York — to show Americans that the government could do big things and do them well. The New Deal libraries and parks and postal offices and other buildings also stand as monuments to collective effort and the public good, to the idea that democracy works best when it works for most of us, and that through this effort, we come closer to the “more perfect union” of our Constitution’s preamble.

The New Deal was not perfect. It liberated some Americans from want at the same time that it deprived others of their freedom. It opened new opportunities for Black Americans — providing jobs, education and even housing to citizens who lived in need of each — at the same time that it, as Rauchway writes, “left existing segregation untouched and even expanded it into new areas, perpetuating it for new generations.” And yet the breakthrough of the New Deal — the way it reshaped the nation’s politics and transformed the relationship between state and citizen — set the stage for the social revolutions of subsequent decades.

The New Deal brought, in Roosevelt’s phrasing, “the broadening conception of social justice” to American life.

And once introduced, it could not be removed. Or, as he said in his January 1934 message to Congress, “Civilization cannot go back; civilization must not stand still. We have undertaken new methods. It is our task to perfect, to improve, to alter when necessary, but in all cases to go forward.”

Put another way, you can think of the New Deal as a third founding moment in the history of American democracy. And in the same way that we still struggle to live up to the ideals of political equality expressed in our first founding and those of racial equality expressed in our second, we have not yet realized the ideal of economic equality and opportunity put forth in the New Deal.

That’s why at this moment of crisis — for our economy, for our climate and for our democracy — the New Deal remains a lodestar for liberals and the left alike, from Joe Biden to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It is a model, it is an aspiration, it is a live part of our political imagination.

18

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Hacienda sobrepasa proyección de desembolsos de $1,400 en primera semana Por THE STAR

A

una semana de aprobado el plan de distribución y de haber iniciado la agenda de desembolsos del tercer Pago de Impacto Económico de $1,400, el secretario del Departamento de Hacienda (DH), Francisco Parés Alicea, informó que se han enviado $2,200 millones a 937,288 familias, superando lo proyectado.

“Los desembolsos van a ritmo acelerado y al día de hoy ya hemos completado el 53% de los pagos, esto supera lo que habíamos planificado.

Adelantamos que podríamos completar el 70% en cuatro o cinco semanas y esperamos rebasar esa cifra en tres semanas. Estamos enviando un promedio de 200 mil pagos diarios de lunes a viernes y continuaremos con este ritmo durante las próximas semanas, hasta terminar con el proceso”, dijo el funcionario.

Para realizar los desembolsos, el Departamento está utilizando la información de los contribuyentes de la Planilla de 2020 y la de 2019, si no han radicado aún. En el caso de las personas

que no tienen la obligación de rendir planilla, se está utilizando la información del formulario alterno que sometieron el año pasado para recibir los primeros dos incentivos de $1,200 y $600, respectivamente.

Parés Alicea aclaró que la agenda de desembolsos de la ayuda federal no interrumpe el procesamiento de planillas ni el pago de reintegros del ciclo contributivo para el año 2020. “La semana pasada se enviaron cerca de $34 millones

en reintegros de aproximadamente 40,000 planillas de Contribución sobre Ingresos de Individuos y continuaremos trabajando paralelamente con los dos proyectos”, agregó.

Por otro lado, el secretario recibió hoy la visita del gobernador Pedro R. Pierluisi, para realizar un recorrido por el Área de Tecnología de Información y del Proyecto del Sistema Unificado de Rentas Internas (SURI), desde donde se trabaja la distribución del nuevo estímulo económico.

Este paquete de ayuda es parte del Plan de Rescate Americano de 2021 (ARPA, por sus siglas en inglés) y alcanza los $3,500 millones, con la expectativa de impactar aproximadamente a 2.6 millones de residentes de Puerto Rico.

Pierluisi se reunió con el secretario Parés Alicea y su equipo de trabajo, quienes le presentaron el Plan Estratégico y Operacional del Departamento, que incluye las metas en desarrollo, entre las que se encuentran la implementación de políticas fiscales, la transformación de los programas de contabilidad y la innovación de los servicios.

Cámara busca que DMO rinda informes financieros ante Oficina de Ética Por THE STAR

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a Comisión de Turismo y Cooperativismo, presidida por el representante José “Cheito” Rivera Madera, realizó el lunes una vista de consideración final sobre el Proyecto de la Cámara 311 con el propósito de requerir al director ejecutivo y a los miembros de la Junta de Directores de la Corporación para la Promoción de Puerto Rico como Destino la radicación de informes financieros anuales ante la Oficina de Ética Gubernamental.

“Ante la actual crisis fiscal que existe en Puerto Rico, nuestro pueblo merece confiar en que el manejo de los fondos públicos se realiza de manera responsable. Es por ello que, a tenor con la política pública de cero tolerancia a la corrupción, y a los fines de mantener la confianza en las instituciones gubernamentales y asegurar la transparencia, esta Ley extiende la obligación de rendir informes financieros ante la Oficina de Ética Gubernamental (OEG) conforme dispone la Ley 1-2012, según enmendada, para que tal requisito de Ley sea de aplicación al director ejecutivo y a los miembros de la Junta de la Corporación para la Promoción de PR como Destino”, sostuvo el presidente de la Comisión en comunicación escrita.

Una de las enmiendas presentadas en el borrador por la OEG es que los ciudadanos particulares nombrados a la Junta, incluyendo al Presidente de la Junta, y al Director Ejecutivo de la Corporación, tendrán que cumplir con la disposición de radicación de informes financieros anuales ante la OEG, según dispuesto por la Ley 1-2012, según enmendada, conocida como la “Ley Orgánica de la Oficina de Ética Gubernamental de Puerto Rico.”

En su votación final, la medida fue aprobada con diez votos a favor. Esta medida fue atendida en una vista pública de consideración final, mecanismo que es utilizado por las Comisiones con jurisdicción primaria para enmendar, recomendar al Cuerpo la aprobación de medidas legislativas o informe o el rechazo de las medidas legislativas o asuntos referidos ante su consideración.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

19

Movies survived 2020. The Oscars diversified. There’s more to do.

By WESLEY MORRIS

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here was a moment last summer, right around the time that “Palm Springs” arrived on Hulu, where if you were thinking about whether the Academy Awards would happen in 2021, you might have wondered if this rinse-and-repeat romantic comedy might be the sort of thing that could wind up a best picture nominee. There are 9,000 eligible Oscar voters, none of whom is me, but “Palm Springs” had a seriousness of purpose and an undercurrent of rage — two people meet at a wedding; then, thanks to a time-space wormhole, keep meeting at that same wedding — that I found seductive. And given the rinse-and-repeating we’ve been doing all these months: predictive. It was a Metaphor of Its Moment.

Director Max Barbakow and screenwriter Andy Siara understood how to merge a funny leading man (Andy Samberg) with an uninhibited character actor (Cristin Milioti) and broad comedy with the existential dread of science fiction. It was a dumb movie. It was shockingly emotional. Alas, it was also probably too bright, too absurd and released too early in the year for any voter’s serious consideration. By March 15, nomination day, it had indeed gone unconsidered.

I had another wishful moment in the fall, after I saw the “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” a Netflix comedy that Radha Blank wrote and directed. This one starred Blank as a washed-up Harlem playwright whose midlife creative crisis has lured her into underground Brooklyn rap. It’s a satire of New York’s art scenes and of whatever Black authenticity is now supposed to be. It’s also a bearhug of bygone American filmmaking priorities: intimacy, emotional truth, framing. The movie is shot almost entirely in black and white and demonstrates an abiding, stress-free nostalgia for the persona-driven romances of prime Woody Allen, for learning-to-crawl Spike Lee. This is Blank’s first film. And I won’t say you can’t occasionally tell. But it’s more redolent with amateurishness than reeking of it. Blank more or less made a movie of her life, not the movie of her life. The thrill of watching is that it feels like the start of something exciting. Oscars-wise, of course, she’s nominated for nothing.

Yet if there were ever a year for the academy to anoint a comedy about old-style moviemaking and old-school hip-hop, made by and starring a Black American woman, it would be the year in which all kinds of businesses and institutions were promising to be a little less exclusionary in their whiteness, to venture beyond the usual suspects, toward women. It would be the year in which the eligibility window ballooned from 12 to 14 months, the year in which the movies were ultimately TV. I knew the chances for Blank and “Palm Springs” were slim. But what if the people doing the picking got to tell us what they like before everybody else tries guessing

The Oscars have never featured a less white class of major nominees — women fill 40% of the director slots and there are three people of Asian descent in the acting categories.

— and perhaps implanting — what they will like? Maybe the final list still wouldn’t have included either movie.

But this felt like the year to find out. The usual socalled bellwether festivals weren’t their normal selves. And the full-tilt campaign machine to brainwash voters into picking the same class of movies over and over again became a diet version of itself. And yet even on a diet, the machine works. Netflix had flashier movies than Blank’s to push — flashier black-and-white movies, like “Mank,” David Fincher’s opulent yarn loosely about the making of “Citizen Kane.” With 10 nominations, it leads the field, as American period movies often do, especially when they’re spritzed with Hollywood cologne. The campaign machine is a permanent part of how things work. I had just assumed that everybody would appreciate a year off.

Instead, the Oscar pundits’ forecasts kicked up in August, once it was clear enough that there would likely be an Oscars. (The ceremony is scheduled for April 25.) These pundits don’t read tea leaves. They’re actually brewing tea. The nominees often look just as they say they will.

Nonetheless, the last year might’ve tricked a person into believing that anything could really happen. And

by nomination day, something had. The academy’s vow to do better with respect to racial, ethnic and gender representation essentially bore out. And they didn’t need a steering committee to do that the way the BAFTAs, the British version of the Oscars, just did. The Oscars have never featured a less white class of major nominees; women fill 40% of the director slots; there are three people of Asian descent in the acting categories. There are enough identity-oriented milestones that enumerating them feels thanklessly actuarial. Instead, you just look at the mix of names and titles and think, Was that so hard? Maybe. All it took was a pandemic.

Now we can toast marshmallows by the hearts warmed by the range of experiences (and faces) in this group of nominees. I’m not wild about most of these movies, but seeing their posters assembled on nomination day was gladdening. This is how things should look. But those are optics, which have their function but can’t be everything.

To some people’s credit, the eight films nominated for best picture — “The Father,” “Judas and the Black Messiah,” “Mank,” “Minari,” “Nomadland,” “Promising Young Woman,” “Sound of Metal,” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7” — were in production before the world changed last year. Even without a global health crisis, it might take a minute for changes demanded even six years ago to seem evident. The movies are just notoriously slow to adapt.

Now we have a revenge thriller about medical school sexual assault and a sort of spy thriller set within the world of Black radicalism. One drama about a family of Korean immigrant farmers in 1980s Arkansas, another about a drummer in an avant-punk duo who loses his hearing. Two feature Fred Hampton, a real-life Black Panther, as a character; and only three of the eight are about white men — and just one of those fellows exists in the present, and he’s not even sure what present he’s in.

The asterisks people were expecting to apply to this field of movies won’t stick. These candidates feel legitimate. And that movie about the deaf drummer, “Sound of Metal,” starring Riz Ahmed, feels like a miracle nominee — delicate without a trace of fragility; imaginatively directed; naturally, observantly acted; surprising. It’s the nominee that sneaks up and wrecks you — and, it must be said, a film with a nonwhite person at its center that needn’t explain why he’s there. I didn’t get “Palm Springs” or Blank. But that’s just as good.

These nominees are probably also a relief to certain academy members who were feeling the pressure to reflect the times (well, to buoyantly reflect them). But it’s always worth pointing out that the Oscars are just the movie industry’s annual checkup. The entertainment doctor might like where those gender and racial representation numbers are.

There are some concerns, though.

Continues on page 20

20

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

From page 19 First, what happens after Hollywood resets? Warner Bros. is going to keep releasing its 2021 slate on HBO Max. Do the studios know that there’s a crisis aside from the matter of who’s starring in and directing what? There are increasingly fewer movies for this diversity of people to work on — at least, movies that don’t owe their existence to do-overs and franchise proliferation.

Yes, this is the part where I lament the death of the midtier, midbudget title that aspires to be little more than a movie star delivery mechanism, a movie pretty much like “Palm Springs.” Or “The Little Things,” that risible but never dull detective thriller with Denzel Washington and Rami Malek that dropped in January on HBO Max. With all due respect to Washington, the biggest stars now are Netflix and intellectual property, or so-called “IP.” The movies are scarcely dead. But they’re bypassing the movie theater on their way to our bloodstreams.

That brings me to concern No. 2. What is a movie now? It’s something we tweet, text and clean during; something we watch in installments, whether it lasts 104 minutes or four hours. It took me three days to complete “The Little Things” — because I wanted it to. A few years ago, I knew “Roma,” Alfonso Cuarón’s black-and-white, starless magnum opus and a Netflix movie, would lose best picture when, after people watched it at home or on a phone, they’d tell me, “I mean, it was OK.” What if what we’re looking for at home is less an emphasis on beauty, style or atmosphere but on plot and action, neither of which were central to this particular Cuarón experience?

That skip-the-multiplex business might seem temporary, but some viewing habits have almost certainly set in.

Try telling an Amazon shopper that she has to go back to getting trash bags from her bodega. We say we miss an actual movie theater, and I think a lot of us do. “Godzilla vs.

Kong” raked in $48.5 million in its first five days in North America and $239 million everywhere else. It’s also on HBO Max, but people want to watch IP clobber IP on the biggest screen they can find.

I don’t see even half those droves deciding to go out and see the flesh-and-blood American itinerants in “Nomadland” or the human flashcards in “The Trial of the Chicago 7” when, in the case of Netflix’s “Chicago 7,” it feels utterly indistinguishable from actual made-for-TV movies.

The experience in June of sitting down to watch a Spike Lee original on Netflix was more thrilling than the movie itself.

We’re losing something obvious: one another. When Carey Mulligan pulls up outside that bachelor party in “Promising Young Woman,” ready for vengeance, dressed like a nurse in a porno, I sat on the edge on my couch desperate for the tension of a packed house. That surgically made, morally confused movie was made for a communal disturbance it never quite got to provoke.

Who knows? The excitement of seeing any movie in a theater might make us all want to give a work of domestic taciturnity like “Minari” the full “Godzilla vs. Kong” treatment.

And if so, for how long? And if we discover that we’ve got an entire theater almost to ourselves, would it be reasonable to conclude that the movie’s a commercial failure?

How do we know what’s a hit now? That’s concern

No. 3. The financial success of a movie isn’t the same as its general excellence. No news there. But box office numbers are a vital sign. We gauge the industry’s health that way. The numbers are the easiest way to show what we consumers like. The streaming era has altered that. Netflix lists what shows people are watching most so you can watch them, too. The actual number of people and how it compares with other shows are mysteries. None of the major streaming platforms — Disney+, Apple TV+, HBO Max, Hulu, Amazon — are releasing stats like the theatrical box office results the studios have released to the public for a century.

In the IP era, this might feel like a negligible development. Marvel and DC movies are usually enormous hits. But when the box office is the standard metric for determining what else to make and for whom, knowing just how big a global smash the Marvel movie with the mostly Black cast is matters for what happens in its wake. The numbers create the wake. Disney put Pixar’s “Soul” on Disney+, where it seemed much appreciated and much discussed, but how did it do?

Otherwise, we’re guessing what a hit is and to what degree. Suppose the pandemic subsides, and the studios maintain this dual theatrical-streaming strategy, offering only partial numbers. That kind of commercial flattening might feel like democratization at future Academy Awards. No one gets to carp this year that the best picture nominees grossed less combined than some IP blockbuster’s international haul. The academy has allayed one diversity crisis but has still another on its hands. The pandemic shuttered movie theaters and forced a rule change that relaxed the eligibility requirement of a theatrical release. It’s a concession that codified or at least acknowledged what was already a standard voting practice. I don’t know what percentage of voters normally opts to watch the contenders on the screeners that studios send out rather than in theaters. But this year, that

The San Juan Daily Star number is probably close to “everybody.”

A consequence might be a class of films that feels celebratory yet mild, neat, muted, pasteurized — cinematically and politically. I, at least, was surprised to sit down with a movie called “Judas and the Black Messiah” and discover that it seems terrified of the astonishing psychological tragedy lurking within its Judas. It passes instead for a more digestible action movie with a lot of FBI blah-blah and some Black radical flavoring.

What’s not here is the visionary masterpiece that offsets a righteous disaster like “Chicago 7.” The nominees list is missing the “culture” movie, the adventurous people’s hit.

The frequent lack of one has long been such a thorn in the academy’s side that in 2018 it briefly flirted with tacking on a popular film category.

Expanding the best picture field, in 2009, from five movies to as many as 10 was supposed to lure more viewers to the broadcast and achieve a blend of the safe, the lucrative and the idiosyncratic. But the industry knew it was more profitable to increase production on movies that would dominate the global box office but that they probably didn’t even like, while all but abandoning the creation of those star delivery mechanisms, the very ones that used to wind up at the Academy Awards.

You’ll still sometimes get a good mix. Last year’s class had a little of everything; and the movie that won, Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite,” was a class comedy that culminated in an attempted massacre. But that sort of mix feels endangered. What midtier, adult-contemporary movies we do get don’t arrive until the latter part of the year or early the following one. And because these movies — “American Hustle,” “Marriage Story” or “1917,” say; or, lord help me, “Green Book” — don’t open in February or April or even September anymore, they form a kind of accidental genre: the Oscar movie. Sometimes it feels like that tail is now wagging the dog — that movies are being bred perhaps more for the academy’s pleasure than for ours.

Whatever devil’s bargain Hollywood struck to own the planet is evident every Oscar season after the broadcast’s numbers are published. The thousands of people who choose Oscar winners also make our movies. And they must know that a browning of the nominees is only a partial solution. The culture is moving on — not from the movies but from the steadily self-flagellating salutes to them.

Average moviegoers don’t get to make hits of “Oscar movies” until that’s indeed what they already are. We didn’t get a people’s movie this year. We couldn’t, obviously. The movies couldn’t bring audiences together to produce a phenomenon like “Gravity,” a Cuarón movie alive with action, plot and beauty and a best picture nominee in 2014 (Cuarón won for best director); a movie that, according to The Wall Street Journal, united “young and old, men and women, art-movie fans, sci-fi geeks and evangelical Christian reviewers.” The movie industry had begun to turn its back on movie culture before the pandemic. For years, it’s been confusing the audience with fans. The movies need — or used to need — curious customers who don’t know what they want until they see it, until a movie we didn’t know we’d been waiting for finds us. That convergence is how “culture” happens.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

21

The family dog is in sync with your kids

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

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amily dogs match their movements to those of the children they live with, according to a poignant new study of young people and their pets. In the study, pet dogs moved when their accompanying children did and remained still when they stopped, a physical synchrony that often signals emotional bonding. The family canines also tended to stay close by and to orient themselves in the same directions as the kids, a further indication of social engagement and attentiveness that could have implications for the emotional development of both dogs and youngsters, as well as for the safety of the interactions between them.

The results add to the growing evidence that how people and other creatures move depends to a surprising extent on who they are with, and that social connections can be shaped and strengthened by shared activity. The findings also raise practical questions about how children and dogs can best learn to read each other’s body language, and how family pets might help to encourage children to move more or best serve as a source of emotional support.

The idea that being around others influences how we move is not new. Past research shows that romantic couples tend unconsciously to synchronize their walking pace to a much greater extent than strangers do and that men often speed up when walking with other men, even if the new pace is not physiologically comfortable for them.

In the same way, moving together seems to build familiarity, even if it did not exist before. People who take up dancing together, for instance, often express greater closeness and cohesion afterward. Moving in tandem seems to generate intangible, intimate bonds.

Other research suggests that these connections are not limited to humans. When, during earlier studies, scientists asked adults to bring their pet dogs to large, unfamiliar rooms and then walk around the space, sometimes pausing, sometimes changing direction, and not directly engaging with their pets, the dogs followed and repeated their owners’ actions to a remarkable degree. About 80% of the time, the dogs walked when their owners walked and fell still when they stopped. They also usually turned and pivoted whenever their owners did, so that they stayed oriented in the same direction.

Dogs in shelters likewise aped the actions of their primary caregivers, other studies showed, but to a lesser extent than among family dogs, indicating looser bonds. Little was known, though, about whether pet dogs similarly synchronize themselves with their family’s children. So for the new study, which was published in January in Animal Cognition, researchers at Oregon State University in Corvallis turned to a group of previously assembled volunteers. As part of a planned, long-term study of animal-assisted interventions for children with developmental differences, the scientists already had recruited local families with children age 8 to

In an undated image provided via Monique Udell and Oregon State University, a moment from a study of young dog owners at Oregon State University. Family dogs match their movements to those of the children they live with, according to the poignant new study of young people and their pets.

17 and their pet dogs.

They now asked 30 of the children, some with developmental differences, such as autism, and some without, if they would bring their dogs to a large, warehouselike space.

The dogs, ranging in breed from floppy retrievers to a Jack Russell mix, a whippet, several poodles and a Great Dane, had received no special training at the time. They were pets.

The researchers asked the youngsters to follow pathways marked with tape in the cavernous space, pausing sometimes, and switching directions, without touching or talking to their dogs. The researchers filmed and later analyzed each duo’s interactions and found that the dogs stayed close to their young owners, walking or stilling in tune with them more than 60% of the time. The dogs also turned frequently to face in the same direction as the child, like greenhorn square dancers.

Their synchrony was less than researchers had noted earlier among adults and their dogs but far greater than would be expected by chance, the researchers concluded.

“The dogs clearly were paying attention and adjusting their behavior” in response to the actions of the child, said Monique Udell, an associate professor of animal sciences at Oregon State and senior author of the study.

But the distance between their synchrony and that of dogs with their adult owners suggests that families with children and dogs might want to have the young people spend more time walking, working with, feeding and playing with their pets, she said. “Let them learn to read each other’s body language,” she said. “I think children, even young children, are capable of taking on more of the responsibility of training pets than we give them credit for.”

And in the process, the pets are likely learn to respond more deeply to the child, she said.

This study was very small and short term, though.

Udell hopes to enroll more dogs and children and follow them during service-animal training, watching to see if, for instance, children start to orient themselves to the actions of their dogs, as well as vice versa, and if there are differences in synchrony according to a child’s age or dog’s breed.

She and her colleagues also are interested in studying the bonding and interwoven movements of people and other types of pets, particularly cats. “We’ve done a little work with cats and, so far, they blow everything out of the water in terms of being socially responsive to their owners’ behavior,” she said. No experiments currently are planned, however, to test the synchrony of cats and dogs.

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Tuesday, April 20, 2021

The San Juan Daily Star

Regular exercise may help protect against severe COVID

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

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ore exercise means less risk of developing severe COVID, according to a compelling new study of physical activity and coronavirus hospitalizations. The study, which involved almost 50,000 Californians who developed COVID, found that those who had been the most active before falling ill were the least likely to be hospitalized or die as a result of their illness.

The data were gathered before COVID vaccines became available and do not suggest that exercise can substitute in any way for immunization. But they do intimate that regular exercise — whether it’s going for a swim, walk, run or bike ride — can substantially lower our chances of becoming seriously ill if we do become infected.

Scientists have known for some time that aerobically fit people are less likely to catch colds and other viral infections and recover more quickly than people who are out of shape, in part because exercise can amplify immune responses. Better fitness also heightens antibody responses to vaccines against influenza and other illnesses.

But infections with the novel coronavirus are so new that little has been known about whether, and how, physical activity and fitness might affect risks for becoming ill with COVID. A few recent studies, however, have seemed encouraging. In one, which was published in February in The International Journal of Obesity, people who could walk quickly, an accepted gauge of aerobic fitness, developed severe COVID at much lower rates than sluggish walkers, even if the quick striders had obesity, a known risk factor for severe disease. In another study of older adults in Europe, greater grip strength, an indicator of general muscle health, signaled lowered risks for COVID hospitalizations.

But those studies looked at indirect measures of people’s aerobic or muscular fitness and not their actual, everyday exercise habits, so they cannot tell us if getting up and moving — or staying still — changes the calculus of COVID risks.

So, for the new study, which was published Tuesday in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, researchers and

physicians at Kaiser Permanente Southern California, the University of California, San Diego, and other institutions decided to compare information about how often people exercised with whether they wound up hospitalized this past year because of COVID. The Kaiser Permanente health care system was well suited for this investigation, because, since 2009, it has included exercise as a “vital sign” during patient visits. In practice, this means doctors and nurses ask patients how many days each week they exercise, such as by walking briskly, and for how many minutes each time, then add that data to the patient’s medical record.

Now, the researchers drew anonymized records for 48,440 adult men and women who used the Kaiser health care system, had their exercise habits checked at least three times in recent years and, in 2020, had been diagnosed with COVID-19. The researchers grouped the men and women by workout routines, with the least active group exercising for 10 minutes or less most weeks; the most active for at least 150 minutes a week; and the somewhat-active group occupying the territory in between.

The researchers gathered data, too, about each person’s known risk factors for severe COVID, including their

age, smoking habits, weight, and any history of cancer, diabetes, organ transplants, kidney problems and other serious, underlying conditions.

Then the researchers crosschecked numbers, with arresting results. People in the least-active group, who almost never exercised, wound up hospitalized because of COVID at twice the rate of people in the most-active group and were subsequently about 2 1/2 times more likely to die. Even compared to people in the somewhatactive group, they were hospitalized about 20% more often and were about 30% more likely to die.

Of the other common risk factors for severe disease, only advanced age and organ transplants increased the likelihood of hospitalization and mortality from COVID more than being inactive, the scientists found.

“Being sedentary was the greatest risk factor” for severe illness, “unless someone was elderly or an organ recipient,” said Dr. Robert Sallis, a family and sports medicine doctor at the Kaiser Permanente Fontana Medical Center, who led the new study. And while “you can’t do anything about those other risks,” he said, “you can exercise.”

Of course, this study, because it was observational, does not prove that exercise causes severe COVID risks to drop, but only that people who often exercise also are people with low risks of falling gravely ill. The study also did not delve into whether exercise reduces the risk of becoming infected with coronavirus in the first place.

But Sallis points out that the associations in the study were strong.

“I think, based on this data,” he said, “we can tell people that walking briskly for half an hour five times a week should help protect them against severe COVID-19.”

A walk — or five — might be especially beneficial for people awaiting their first vaccine, he adds.

“I would never suggest that someone who does regular exercise should consider not getting the vaccine. But until they can get it, I think regular exercise is the most important thing they can do to lessen their risk,” Sallis said. “And doing regular exercise will likely be protective against any new variants, or the next new virus out there.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

23

NASA’s Mars helicopter completes first flight on another planet

By KENNETH CHANG

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small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the wispy air of the red planet. It was the first machine from Earth ever to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world.

The achievement extends NASA’s long, exceptional record of firsts on Mars.

“We together flew at Mars,” MiMi Aung, the project manager for Ingenuity, said to her team during the celebration. “And we together now have this Wright brothers moment.”

Like the first flight of an airplane by Wilbur and Orville Wright in 1903, the flight did not go far or last long, but it showed what was possible.

Ingenuity was something different for NASA — a high-risk, high-reward project with a modest price tag where failure was an acceptable outcome.

That approach is more similar to that of nimble space companies like SpaceX than large traditional development programs that work through every possible contingency to build a full-scale machine that has to work the first time.

Ingenuity was thus a small experiment with the potential for a paradigm-breaking advance. NASA tacked the helicopter on to its latest Mars rover, Perseverance. But building Ingenuity required a mastery of robotic flight engineering and overcoming the physics of a world with almost no air. And its success could open new ways of exploring the red planet.

Perhaps a more advanced helicopter could serve as a scout for a future rover, identifying intriguing locations for closer study and safe routes for the rover to drive there. Or swarms of helicopters could zip up and down cliff faces to examine layers of rock that are too far away or out of view of current spacecraft.

On Sunday, mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California radioed the commands for the test to Perseverance, which landed on Mars in February.

Perseverance in turn relayed the commands to Ingenuity, which was sitting 200 feet away on flat terrain that was chosen to serve as the airstrip for a series of five test flights.

At 3:30 a.m. Eastern time — it was the

A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the air. This was the first machine from Earth to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world. middle of the Martian day, half an hour past noon — the helicopter spun up its rotors as it had been commanded and rose above Jezero crater, into the Martian sky.

It hovered at a height of some 10 feet.

In less than 60 seconds, it was back down on the surface.

But at that moment, no one on Earth — including people at NASA — knew what was actually happening. The two spacecraft were not in communication with Earth during the test, and Ingenuity had to perform all of its actions autonomously.

It was only three hours later that one of NASA’s other Mars spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, passed overhead, and Perseverance could relay the test data gathered from the flight through the orbiter back to Earth.

Minutes later, engineers analyzed the data and found evidence of the successful flight.

“Altimeter data confirms that Ingenuity has performed its first flight,” Havard Grip, the engineer who serves as NASA’s chief pilot for Ingenuity, announced as the data arrived, “the first powered flight of a powered aircraft on another planet.”

Soon after, engineers displayed a picture taken by Ingenuity in flight showing its shadow on the ground and then a video by Perseverance of the helicopter hovering in the air.

Flying on Mars is on the edge of impossible because there is not much air to push against. At the surface of Mars, the atmosphere is just 1/100th as dense as Earth’s.

Thus, to generate enough lift for the 4-pound Ingenuity to rise up, its two rotors, each about 4 feet wide, had to spin in opposite directions at more than 2,500 revolutions a minute.

Aung told her team to celebrate the moment. “And then after that, let’s get back to work and more flights,” she said.

With Monday’s success, up to four more flights could be attempted. The first three are designed to test basic abilities of the helicopter. The third flight could fly a distance of 160 feet and then return. The final two flights could travel farther, but NASA officials did not want to speculate how much farther.

NASA plans to wrap up the tests within 30 Martian days of when Ingenuity was dropped off on April 3 so that Perseverance can commence the main portion of its $2.7 billion mission. It will leave the helicopter behind and head toward a river delta along the rim of Jezero crater where sediments, and perhaps chemical hints of ancient life, are preserved.

Ingenuity was an $85 million nice-tohave, add-on project, but not a core requirement for the success of Perseverance.

The looser requirements of a technology

demonstration allowed the engineers to use an almost off-the-shelf Qualcomm processor that was originally developed for cellphones with more computing power than all previous interplanetary spacecraft combined.

The processor, which was not adapted for the harsh conditions of space, was more susceptible to disruptions of radiation, but the helicopter needed all of that number-crunching speed to handle the continual adjustments that Ingenuity had to make in the air.

The little machine, which traveled to Mars tucked on the underside of Perseverance, has also captured the imaginations of many.

Just before Perseverance launched to Mars in June last year, Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator at the time, said, “I’ll tell you, the thing that has me the most excited as an NASA administrator is getting ready to watch a helicopter fly on another world.”

John P. Grotzinger, a professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology and formerly project scientist for Curiosity, an earlier Mars rover that arrived in 2012, said he was also a fan of Ingenuity.

“This is a really viable way to go about exploring the planet because you can cover so much area,” Grotzinger said.

A helicopter, especially one flying in the thin air of Mars, could carry only a limited number of sensors, and it would not be able to see things as detailed as a rover, which can move a robotic arm and press instruments right against a rock.

“But the trade-off gives us access to a different part of understanding Mars,” Grotzinger said.

NASA wasn’t the only visitor to the red planet from Earth this year.

China’s Tianwen-1 probe also arrived in February, and it entered a steady orbit of the planet weeks later. As early as late May, it will release a lander and rover that will try to reach the surface of the red planet. If it succeeds, it will be China’s first successful touchdown on another planet — it has landed on the moon three times already.

The United Arab Emirates’s Hope probe also arrived at Mars two months ago. After a firing of its thrusters on March 29, it has entered into an orbit where it can begin a close study of the planet’s atmosphere and weather.

That phase of scientific research was scheduled to begin last Wednesday.

24

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

The San Juan Daily Star

Could the pandemic prompt an ‘epidemic of loss’ of women in the sciences?

By APOORVA MANDAVILLI

L

ike many women during the pandemic, Alisa Stephens found working from home to be a series of wearying challenges.

Stephens is a biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania, and the technical and detail-oriented nature of her work requires long uninterrupted stretches of thought. Finding the time and mental space for that work with two young children at home proved impossible.

“That first month was really hard,” she recalled of the lockdown. Her infant daughter’s day care was closed, and her 5-yearold was at home instead of at school. With their nanny unable to come to the house, Stephens tended to her children all day and worked late into the evening. In the fall, when her daughter was set to begin kindergarten, the schools did not reopen.

Things eased once the family could safely bring in a nanny, but there was still little time for the deep thought Stephens had relied on each morning for her work. Over time, she has adjusted her expectations of herself.

“Maybe I’m at 80% as opposed to 100%, but I can get things done at 80% to some extent,” she said. “It’s not great, it’s not my best, but it’s enough for now.”

Stephens is in good company. Several studies have found that women have published fewer papers, led fewer clinical trials and received less recognition for their expertise during the pandemic.

Add to that the emotional upheaval and stress of the pandemic, the protests over structural racism, worry about children’s mental health and education, and the lack of time to think or work, and an already unsustainable situation becomes unbearable.

“The confluence of all of these factors creates this perfect storm. People are at their breaking point,” said Michelle Cardel, an obesity researcher at the University of Florida. “My big fear is that we are going to have a secondary epidemic of loss, particularly of early career women in STEM.” Female scientists were struggling even before the pandemic. It was not unusual for them to hear that women were not as smart as men, or that a woman who was successful must have received a handout along the way, said Daniela Witten, a biostatistician at the University of Washington in Seattle. Some things are changing, she said, but only with great effort, and at a glacial pace.

The career ladder is particularly steep for mothers. Even during maternity leave, they are expected to keep up with lab work, teaching requirements, publications and mentoring of graduate students. When they return to work, most do not have affordable child care.

Women in academia often have little recourse when confronted with discrimination. Their institutions sometimes lack the human resources structures common in the business world.

The path is even rockier for scientists of color, like Stephens, who encounter other biases in the workplace — in everyday reactions, professional reviews or promotions — and now

Alisa Stephens, a biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia on March 13, 2021. have to cope with the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Black and Latino communities.

Stephens said a close friend, also a Black scientist, had five family members who contracted COVID-19.

The year has been a “pause” for everyone, Stephens added, and universities should find a way to help scientists when the pandemic ends — perhaps by adding an extra year to the time allotted to them to earn tenure.

Others said while extra time for tenure may help, it will be far from enough.

“It’s sort of like if you’re drowning, and the university tells you, ‘Don’t worry if it takes you an extra year to get back to shore,’” Witten said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, that’s not helpful. I need a flotation device.’”

Compounding the frustration are the outdated notions about how to help women in science. But social media has allowed women to share some of those concerns and find allies to organize and call out injustice when they see it, said Jessica Hamerman, an immunologist at the Benaroya Research Institute in Seattle. “People are just much less likely to sit quietly, and listen to biased statements that affect them.”

In November, for example, a controversial study on female scientists was published in the influential journal Nature Communications, suggesting that having female mentors would hinder the career of young scientists and recommending that the young women instead seek out men to help them.

Nearly 7,600 scientists signed a petition calling on the journal to retract the paper — which it did on Dec. 21.

The study arrived at a time when many female scientists were already worried about the pandemic’s effect on their careers, and already on edge and angry with a system that offered them little support.

“It’s been an incredibly difficult time to be a woman in science,” said Leslie Vosshall, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller Uni-

versity in New York. “We’re already on the ground, we’re already on our knees — and then the paper just comes and kicks us to say: ‘We have the solution, let’s move the graduate students to a senior man.’”

She has applied some of her wisdom to invoke change at Rockefeller University, one of the oldest research institutions in the country.

A couple of years ago, Rockefeller University invited news anchor Rachel Maddow to present a prestigious prize. On her way into the auditorium, Maddow pointed to a wall adorned with pictures of Lasker Award and Nobel Prize winners — all male — affiliated with the university. At least four women at the university had also won prestigious prizes, but their photographs were not on display.

“What’s up with the dude wall?” Maddow asked. And Vosshall, who had walked past the wall a thousand times, suddenly saw it differently. She realized it sent the wrong message, overtly or not, to all the high school, undergraduate and graduate students who routinely walked past it.

“Once you notice a dude wall, you see them everywhere,” she said. “They’re in every auditorium, every hallway, every departmental office, every conference room.”

Rockefeller University eventually agreed to replace the display with one that is more representative of the institution’s history. The pictures were taken down on Nov. 11, Vosshall announced on Twitter, and will be replaced by a more inclusive set.

Departments at Yale University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston have also reconsidered their dude walls, Vosshall said. “There are some traditions that should not be perpetuated.”

Leslie Vosshall, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University, in New York on Dec. 2, 2020. Even before the pandemic, many female scientists felt unsupported in their fields and now, some are hitting a breaking point.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

25

A stew that captures the essence of the sea

By YEWANDE KOMOLAFE

D

aniela Narcisco, a Brazilian cookbook author and food historian based in Florianópolis, the capital of Santa Catarina, Brazil, describes moqueca as “a wonderful addition to any celebration.” And this seafood stew, built on a few simple yet deeply flavorful ingredients, is pleasing: Its vibrant broth is luscious and light, and evokes the essence of the sea.

Ideal for both small gatherings and celebrations, moqueca also serves as an everyday meal across Brazil.

Variations exist throughout the country. In the northeast state of Bahia, moqueca draws from the rich culture of its Afro Brazilian population. It begins with sautéed garlic, onion, tomatoes and sweet peppers, followed by coconut milk and the freshest seafood you can find. An added hot chile is critical for depth, as is red palm oil, known as azeite de dendê in Portuguese. Another well-known version is the Indigenous- and Portuguese-influenced moqueca capixaba from Espírito Santo, south of Bahia, that has a base of olive oil and annatto seeds.

And everywhere, there’s a vegetarian alternative that replaces seafood with yellow plantains.

I love the many versions of moqueca, but I am drawn to Bahia’s because I know it from childhood as the familiar fish stew included in my family’s Easter celebrations in Lagos, Nigeria. Ozoz Sokoh, author of the blog Kitchen Butterfly and curator of Feast Afrique, was born and raised in Nigeria and noted, “Dishes we have always associated with Easter weekend celebrations — mingau, frejon and kanjika, a spiced jelly pudding of cornstarch and coconut milk — are dishes present on both sides of the Atlantic.”

The Brazilian dishes Sokoh discussed arrived in West Africa with formerly enslaved people from Brazil who settled in Lagos in the 19th century. That powerful connection between the continents left a lasting impact on

Nigerian cuisine.

Common among moquecas is the use of a wide, shallow cooking vessel that allows the seafood to cook evenly and the liquid to reduce into a creamy sauce. Mara Salles, chef and owner of the restaurant Tordesilhas in São Paulo, considers a wide clay pot as fundamental to the process. “The clay pot ensures the moqueca comes bubbling and colorful to the table,” she said. “A wonderful experience.”

Salles serves it with traditional accompaniments of acaçá, a rice side dish with a puddinglike texture, and farofa made with toasted manioc powder. She also offers pirão, a creamy manioc side dish utilizing stock from the fish used for the moqueca.

The stew remains the centerpiece. The broth lingers on the palate with a slowly building bouquet of floral flavors, a bit of heat and the umami of the seafood. That is the brilliance of moqueca: a simple combination with deeply satisfying results.

Moqueca (Brazilian Seafood Stew) Yield: 4 to 6 servings Total time: 40 minutes 6 head-on prawns or large head-on shrimp (about 12 ounces) 12 ounces cod fillet, cut into 1-inch pieces Kosher salt 2 limes 3 tablespoons dendê oil (red palm oil; see Tip) 4 garlic cloves, minced 1 small yellow onion, chopped (1 cup) 8 ounces sweet baby bell peppers or 2 bell peppers, any color, sliced into 1/4-inch strips (2 cups) 1 pound fresh tomatoes, cut in 1-inchwide wedges (2 1/2 cups) 1 whole hot chile, such as red Scotch bonnet or bird’s-eye, pierced all over

A version of moqueca with large prawns and cod, served with rice, in New York on March 10, 2021. A vibrant seafood stew, moqueca invigorates holiday menus and everyday meals alike. with the tip of a knife 1 (13.5-ounce) can full-fat coconut milk 1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro Steamed rice, for serving 1. Use a pair of kitchen scissors to cut along the length of each prawn deep enough to expose and remove the vein. Place the fish chunks in a large bowl and season with 1 teaspoon salt. Squeeze in the juice of 1 lime and toss to coat. Set the prawns and fish aside while preparing the sauce.

2. In a large, shallow Dutch oven or large, deep skillet, melt 2 tablespoons dendê oil over medium heat.

Add the garlic and cook, stirring, until softened and fragrant, 1 minute. Add the onion, stir and cook, stirring until translucent, about 2 minutes.

3. Increase the heat to high, add the peppers, tomatoes and chile. Season with salt. Cook, stirring frequently, until the peppers are softened and any liquid from the tomatoes is beginning

to evaporate, 4 minutes.

4. Pour in the coconut milk, stir and reduce the heat to medium. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the liquid thickens and reduces to a creamy sauce, about 10 minutes. Taste, adjust the salt, if necessary, and stir in 2 tablespoons chopped cilantro.

5. Carefully place the prawns in the sauce in a single layer and cook for 2 minutes. Turn the prawns to cook the other sides and add the cod. (Discard any juices in the bowl.) The fish will be partly submerged. Cook until the fish is tender and just cooked through, 2 to 3 minutes.

6. Remove from heat, drizzle in the remaining 1 tablespoon dendê oil and sprinkle with the remaining 2 tablespoons chopped cilantro. Slice the remaining lime into wedges. Serve immediately, with steamed rice and lime wedges for squeezing.

Tip: Dendê oil, also known as red palm oil, is available online or at West African or Caribbean markets.

26 LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE MANATI.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante vs.

WILLIAM SOSTRE CRUZ, su esposa NATALIA CRUZ AVILES y la Sociedad Legal de Bienes Gananciales compuesta por ambos

Demandados CIVIL NÚM: MT2019CV00582.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO (Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria). EDICTO DE SUBASTA.

Al: Público en General A: WILLIAM SOSTRE CRUZ, su esposa NATALIA CRUZ AVILES y la Sociedad Legal de Bienes Gananciales compuesta por ambos

Yo, WILFREDO RODRIGUEZ CARRION, ALGUACIL CONFIDENCIAL #PLACA-135, Alguacil de este Tribunal, a la parte demandada y a los acreedores y personas con interés sobre la propiedad que más adelante se describe, y al público en general, HAGO SABER: Que el día 6 de mayo de 2021 a las 2:00 de la tarde, en mi oficina, sita en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Manatí, Manatí, Puerto Rico, venderé en Pública Subasta la propiedad inmueble que más adelante se describe y cuya venta en pública subasta se ordenó por la vía ordinaria al mejor postor quien hará el pago en dinero en efectivo, giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del o la Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado, estarán de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal de Manatí durante horas laborables. Que en caso de no producir remate ni adjudicación en la primera subasta a celebrarse, se celebrará una segunda subasta para la venta de la susodicha propiedad, el día 13 de mayo de 2021, a las 2:00 de la tarde y en caso de no producir remate ni adjudicación, se celebrará una tercera subasta el día 20 de mayo de 2021, a las 2:00 de la tarde en mi oficina sita en el lugar antes indicado. La propiedad a venderse en pública subasta se describe como sigue: RUSTICA: Parcela marcada con el No. 221 en el plano de parcelación de la COMUNIDAD RURAL LA LUISA del Barrio Tierras Nuevas Ponientes del término municipal de Manatí, con una cabida superficial de 0.890 cuerda, equivalentes a 350.00 metros

@

cuadrados. En lindes por el Norte, con la parcela No. 222 y la calle de la Comunidad; por el Sur, con las parcelas Nos. 220 y 239 de la Comunidad; por el Este, con las parcelas Nos. 222 y 239 de la Comunidad; y por el Oeste, con la parcela No. 220 y la calle de la Comunidad.

Enclava una casa para fines residenciales. La escritura de hipoteca se encuentra inscrita al folio 45 vto. del tomo 574 de Manatí, Registro de la Propiedad de Manatí, finca número 9,575, inscripción 8ª. Modificada la hipoteca de la inscripción 8va., en cuanto al principal el cual se cancela parcialmente en la suma de $2,500.00 para un nuevo principal que será por la suma de $105,500.00, con intereses al 3.875% anual, vencedero el día 1ro. de agoso de 2032, según la escritura número 196, otorgada en Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, el día 26 de junio de 2012, ante la Notario Público Susann Isabel Valtuena Ruis, inscrita al folio 45 vuelto del tomo 574 de Manatí, Registro de la Propiedad de Manatí, finca 9,575, al margen de la inscripción 8va. La dirección física de la propiedad antes descrita es: Parcela Número 33 (221) Opalo St., Comunidad La Luisa, Manatí, Puerto Rico. La subasta se llevará a efecto para satisfacer a la parte demandante la suma de $80,046.25 de principal, intereses al 3.875% anual, desde el día 1ro. de enero de 2019, hasta su completo pago, más la cantidad de $10,550.00 estipulada para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado, más recargos acumulados, todas cuyas sumas están líquidas y exigibles. Que la cantidad mínima de licitación en la primera subasta para el inmueble será de $105,500.00 y de ser necesaria una segunda subasta, la cantidad mínima será equivalente a 2/3 partes de aquella, o sea, la suma de $70,333.34 y de ser necesaria una tercera subasta, la cantidad mínima será la mitad del precio pactado, es decir, la suma de $52,750.00.

Si se declara desierta la tercera subasta se adjudicará la finca a favor del acreedor por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada si esta es igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la tercera subasta, si el Tribunal lo estima conveniente. Se abonará dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si esta es mayor. La propiedad se adjudicará al mejor postor, quien deberá satisfacer el importe de su oferta en moneda legal y corriente de los Estados Unidos de América en el momento de la adjudicación y que todo licitador acepta como suficiente la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes preferentes, si los hubiese, continuarán subsistentes, entendiéndose que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mis-

mos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. La propiedad a ser vendida en pública subasta se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores.

Podrán concurrir como postores a todas las subastas los titulares de créditos hipotecarios vigentes y posteriores a la hipoteca que se cobra o ejecuta, si alguno o que figuren como tales en la certificación registral y que podrán utilizar el montante de sus créditos o parte de alguno en sus ofertas. Si la oferta aceptada es por cantidad mayor a la suma del crédito o créditos preferentes al suyo, al obtener la buena pro del remate, deberá satisfacer en el mismo acto, en efectivo o en cheque de gerente, la totalidad del crédito hipotecario que se ejecuta y la de cualesquiera otro créditos posteriores al que se ejecuta pero preferente al suyo.

El exceso constituirá abono total o parcial en su propio crédito.

EN TESTIMONIO DE LO CUAL, expido el presente Edicto para conocimiento y comparecencia de los licitadores, bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en Manatí, Puerto Rico, a 5 de abril de 2021. WILFREDO RODRIGUEZ CARRION, ALGUACIL CONFIDENCIAL #PLACA-135, ALGUACIL TRIBUNAL, SALA SUPERIOR DE MANATI.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE CAROLINA.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante Vs.

SUCESION DE CARMEN ANA PEREZ GALARZA, compuesta por FULANO DE TAL y ZUTANO DE TAL como posibles herederos forzosos desconocidos; CENTRO DE RECAUDACION SOBRE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (CRIM)

Demandados CIVIL NÚM.: CA2019CV04038 (403). SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO (Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria). EDICTO DE SUBASTA.

Al: Público en General A: SUCESION DE CARMEN ANA PEREZ GALARZA, compuesta por FULANO DE TAL y ZUTANO DE TAL como posibles herederos forzosos desconocidos; CENTRO DE RECAUDACION SOBRE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (CRIM)

Yo, SAMUEL GONZALEZ ISAAC, Alguacil de este Tribunal,

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

a la parte demandada y a los acreedores y personas con interés sobre la propiedad que más adelante se describe, y al público en general, HAGO SABER: Que el día 7 de mayo de 2021 a las 3:00 de la tarde, en mi oficina, sita en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Carolina, Carolina, Puerto Rico, venderé en Pública Subasta la propiedad inmueble que más adelante se describe y cuya venta en pública subasta se ordenó por la vía ordinaria al mejor postor quien hará el pago en dinero en efectivo, giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del o la Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado, estarán de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal de Carolina durante horas laborables. Que en caso de no producir remate ni adjudicación en la primera subasta a celebrarse, se celebrará una segunda subasta para la venta de la susodicha propiedad, el día 14 de mayo de 2021, a las 3:00 de la tarde y en caso de no producir remate ni adjudicación, se celebrará una tercera subasta el día 21 de mayo de 2021, a las 3:00 de la tarde en mi oficina sita en el lugar antes indicado. La propiedad a venderse en pública subasta se describe como sigue: URBANA: Solar radicado en la URBANIZACIÓN GOLDEN HILL, situado en el Barrio Las Cuevas del término municipal de Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, marcado con el No. 3 de la Manzana “C” del plano de inscripción, con un área de 661.24 metros cuadrados. En linderos: Norte, en 16.50 metros, con prolongación calle existente; Sur, en 16.59 metros, con Emilia Pérez de Rosa Nieves; Este, en 39.80 metros, con el solar No. 4 del Bloque “C”; y por el Oeste, en 40.10 metros, con el solar No. 2 del Bloque “C” de dicha Urbanización. Enclava casa. La escritura de hipoteca se encuentra inscrita como asiento abreviado Ley #216 extendido el 23 de septiembre de 2013, al folio móvil del tomo 661 de Trujillo Alto, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección Cuarta,finca número 4332, inscripción 15ª y 16ª. Modificada la hipoteca de la inscripción 15ta., en cuanto al principal el cual se cancela parcialmente en la suma de $8,829.00, para un nuevo principal que será por la suma de $182,371.00 con intereses al 5.125% anual y vencedero el día 1ro. de agosto de 2038, según la escritura número 164, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 31 de julio de 2013, ante el Notario Público José F. Pérez Román, inscrita al folio 143 del tomo 695 de Trujillo Alto, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección Cuarta, finca 4,332, inscripción 16tª. La dirección física

(787) 743-3346

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021 de la propiedad antes descrita es: Urbanización Golden Hill, C3, Anizeto Díaz, Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico. La subasta se llevará a efecto para satisfacer a la parte demandante la suma de $158,712.77 de principal, intereses al 5.125% anual, desde el día 1ro. de abril de 2019, hasta su completo pago, más la cantidad de $18,237.10 estipulada para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado, más recargos acumulados, todas cuyas sumas están líquidas y exigibles. Que la cantidad mínima de licitación en la primera subasta para el inmueble será de $182,371.00 y de ser necesaria una segunda subasta, la cantidad mínima será equivalente a 2/3 partes de aquella, o sea, la suma de $121,580.67 y de ser necesaria una tercera subasta, la cantidad mínima será la mitad del precio pactado, es decir, la suma de $91,185.50. Si se declara desierta la tercera subasta se adjudicará la finca a favor del acreedor por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada si esta es igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la tercera subasta, si el Tribunal lo estima conveniente. Se abonará dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si esta es mayor.La propiedad se adjudicará al mejor postor, quien deberá satisfacer el importe de su oferta en moneda legal y corriente de los Estados Unidos de América en el momento de la adjudicación y que todo licitador acepta como suficiente la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes preferentes, si los hubiese, continuarán subsistentes, entendiéndose que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. La propiedad a ser vendida en pública subasta se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores.

Podrán concurrir como postores a todas las subastas los titulares de créditos hipotecarios vigentes y posteriores a la hipoteca que se cobra o ejecuta, si alguno o que figuren como tales en la certificación registral y que podrán utilizar el montante de sus créditos o parte de alguno en sus ofertas. Si la oferta aceptada es por cantidad mayor a la suma del crédito o créditos preferentes al suyo, al obtener la buena pro del remate, deberá satisfacer en el mismo acto, en efectivo o en cheque de gerente, la totalidad del crédito hipotecario que se ejecuta y la de cualesquiera otro créditos posteriores al que se ejecuta pero preferente al suyo.

El exceso constituirá abono total o parcial en su propio crédito.

EN TESTIMONIO DE LO CUAL, expido el presente Edicto para conocimiento y comparecencia de los licitadores, bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en Carolina, Puerto Rico, a 5 de abril

de 2021. SAMUEL GONZALEZ ISAAC, ALGUACIL TRIBUNAL, SALA SUPERIOR DE CAROLINA.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE FAJARDO.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante vs.

JOEL VILLAR RODRIGUEZ

Demandado CIVIL NÚM:FA2019CV00593.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO (Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria). EDICTO DE SUBASTA.

Al: Público en General A: JOEL VILLAR RODRIGUEZ

Yo, DENISE BRUNO ORTIZ, Alguacil Auxiliar #266, Alguacil de este Tribunal, a la parte demandada y a los acreedores y personas con interés sobre la propiedad que más adelante se describe, y al público en general, HAGO SABER: Que el día 4 de mayo de 2021 a las 3:30 de la tarde, en mi oficina, sita en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Fajardo, Fajardo, Puerto Rico, venderé en Pública Subasta la propiedad inmueble que más adelante se describe y cuya venta en pública subasta se ordenó por la vía ordinaria al mejor postor quien hará el pago en dinero en efectivo, giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del o la Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado, estarán de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal de Fajardo durante horas laborables.

Que en caso de no producir remate ni adjudicación en la primera subasta a celebrarse, se celebrará una segunda subasta para la venta de la susodicha propiedad, el día 11 de mayo de 2021, a las 3:30 de la tarde y en caso de no producir remate ni adjudicación, se celebrará una tercera subasta el día 18 de mayo de 2021, a las 3:30 de la tarde en mi oficina sita en el lugar antes indicado. La propiedad a venderse en pública subasta se describe como sigue: URBANA: Solar radicado en la URBANIZACIÓN LOS ÁRBOLES, situado en el Barrio Zarzal del término municipal de Río Grande, Puerto Rico, identificado con el número, bloque, área y colindancias que se relacionan a continuación y contiene una casa de concreto reforzado diseñada para una familia, construida de acuerdo con los planos y especificaciones aprobados por la Junta de Planificación y otras Agencias Gubernamentales: Número del solar: Diez (10) del Bloque “R”.

Área del solar: TRESCIENTOS SETENTA Y SIETE PUNTO SESENTA Y DOS (377.62) METROS CUADRADOS. En lindes por el NORTE, con la Calle número Quinientos Tres (503), en una distancia de CATORCE PUNTO VEINTICINCO (14.25) METROS; por el SUR, con los solares número Dieciséis (16), Diecisiete (17) y Dieciocho (18) del mismo bloque, en una distancia de CATORCE PUNTO VEINTICINCO (14.25) METROS; por el ESTE, con el solar número Nueve (9) del mismo bloque, en una distancia de VEINTISÉIS PUNTO CINCUENTA (26.50) METROS; y por el OESTE, con el solar número Once (11) del mismo bloque, en una distancia de VEINTISÉIS PUNTO CINCUENTA (26.50) METROS. La escritura de hipoteca se encuentra inscrita al folio 219 del tomo 496 de Río Grande, Registro de la Propiedad de Carolina, Sección Tercera, finca 26,925, inscripción Segunda. La dirección física de la propiedad antes descrita es: Urbanización Los Arboles, R-10, Río Grande, Puerto Rico. La subasta se llevará a efecto para satisfacer a la parte demandante la suma de $123,730.45 de principal, intereses al 5.875% anual, desde el día 1ro. de septiembre de 2017, hasta su completo pago, más la cantidad de $16,522.60 estipulada para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado, más recargos acumulados, todas cuyas sumas están líquidas y exigibles. Que la cantidad mínima de licitación en la primera subasta para el inmueble será de $165,226.00 y de ser necesaria una segunda subasta, la cantidad mínima será equivalente a 2/3 partes de aquella, o sea, la suma de $110,150.67 y de ser necesaria una tercera subasta, la cantidad mínima será la mitad del precio pactado, es decir, la suma de $82,613.00.

Si se declara desierta la tercera subasta se adjudicará la finca a favor del acreedor por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada si esta es igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la tercera subasta, si el Tribunal lo estima conveniente. Se abonará dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si esta es mayor. La propiedad se adjudicará al mejor postor, quien deberá satisfacer el importe de su oferta en moneda legal y corriente de los Estados Unidos de América en el momento de la adjudicación y que todo licitador acepta como suficiente la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes preferentes, si los hubiese, continuarán subsistentes, entendiéndose que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. La propiedad a ser vendida en pública subasta se adquirirá libre de car-

gas y gravámenes posteriores.

Podrán concurrir como postores a todas las subastas los titulares de créditos hipotecarios vigentes y posteriores a la hipoteca que se cobra o ejecuta, si alguno o que figuren como tales en la certificación registral y que podrán utilizar el montante de sus créditos o parte de alguno en sus ofertas. Si la oferta aceptada es por cantidad mayor a la suma del crédito o créditos preferentes al suyo, al obtener la buena pro del remate, deberá satisfacer en el mismo acto, en efectivo o en cheque de gerente, la totalidad del crédito hipotecario que se ejecuta y la de cualesquiera otro créditos posteriores al que se ejecuta pero preferente al suyo.

El exceso constituirá abono total o parcial en su propio crédito.

EN TESTIMONIO DE LO CUAL, expido el presente Edicto para conocimiento y comparecencia de los licitadores, bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en Fajardo, Puerto Rico, a 7 de abril de 2021. DENISE BRUNO ORTIZ, Alguacil Auxiliar #266, ALGUACIL TRIBUNAL, SALA SUPERIOR DE FAJARDO. ***

LEGAL NOT ICE IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO.

BAUTISTA REO PR CORP.; Plaintiff, v.

NEFTALÍ RIVERA NIEVES, HIS WIFE LUCY LEBRÓN CRUZ A/K/A LUCY M. LEBRÓN RIVERA A/K/A LUCY L. DE RIVERA A/K/A LUCY LEBRON CRUZ A/K/A LUCY LEBRÓN DE RIVERA A/K/A LUCY MILAGROS LEBRÓN CRUZ, AND THEIR CONJUGAL PARTNERSHIP;

Defendants Civil No. 3:19-cv-2044 (JAG).

COLLECTION OF MONIES AND FORECLOSURE OF MORTGAGE. NOTICE OF SALE.

TO: DEFENDANTS AND GENERAL PUBLIC

On January 30, 2020, this Court issued Default Judgment in favor of Bautista Cayman Asset Company, now Bautista REO PR Corp. To date, Defendants have not satisfied the Judgment. Consequently, there is an outstanding balance as of January 15, 2020 of $122,764.46, which consists of: (i) $92,558.55 in principal; (ii) accrued interests in the amount of $18,203.18, which continues to accrue, even post-judgment as per the agreement of the parties, until full payment of the debt at $19.28 per diem; (iii)

The San Juan Daily Star late charges in the amount of $1,049.73 which continues to accrue, even post-judgment as per the agreement of the parties; (iv) plus any other advance, charge, fee or disbursements made by Bautista, on behalf of Defendants, in accordance with the Mortgage Note and the Mortgage; (v) plus $1,314.00 in valuation and other expenses incurred by Bautista in relation to this action; (vi) plus costs and agreed attorney’s fees in the amount of $9,639.00.

Pursuant to the said judgment and/or the Order of Execution of Judgment, the undersigned appointed Special Master was ordered to sell, at public auction for U.S. currency in cash or certified check, without appraisement or right to redemption, to the highest bidder, at the office of the Clerk of the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, Room 150 - Federal Building, Carlos Chardón Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, or at any other place designated by said Clerk, to cover the sums adjudged to be paid to the plaintiff, the following property: URBAN: Lot marked with the number eight C in the plot plan of the Green Hills Development, located in the Rio ward, of the municipality of Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, with a surface area of two thousand six hundred forty point fortyseven zero six meters squares; it borders on the NORTH, in a distance of fourteen meters with Jose Ramon Cardona; by the EAST, in a distance of eighty point fifty-five meters; with lot number nine, according to the document and according to the plot plan, with lot number eight B; by the SOUTH, in a distance of four point twenty-five fifteen (thus arises) meters, with project street and by the WEST, in a distance of one hundred and eight point sixty-seven meters, with lot eight B, according to the document, according to the plot plan of inscription with the lot (nine). Property number 18,615, recorded at Page 20 of Volume 391 of Guaynabo, Registry of Property of Guaynabo, 1st inscription. The Property is described in the Spanish language as follows: URBANA: Solar marcado con el número ocho C en el plano de inscripción de la Urbanización Green Hills, radicado en el Barrio Río de la municipalidad de Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, con un área superficial de dos mil seiscientos cuarenta y dos punto cuarenta y siete cero seis metros cuadrados; colinda por el NORTE, en una distancia de catorce metros con José Ramón Cardona, por el ESTE, en una distancia de ochentiseis punto cincuentisiete metros, con el lote número nueve según documento y según el plano con el lote número ocho B; por el SUR, en una distancia de cuarenticuatro punto veinticinco quince (así surge) metros, con calle del

proyecto, y por el OESTE, en una distancia de ciento ocho punto noventiuno sesentisiete metros, con lote ocho B, según el documento, y según el plano de inscripción con el lote (nueve). Inscrita al folio 20 del tomo 391 de Guaynabo, finca número 18,615, Registro de la Propiedad de Guaynabo, 1ra inscripción. The property is subject to the following liens:

BY ITS ORIGIN: Free of Liens.

BY ITSELF: MORTGAGE in guarantee of note in favor of METRO ISLAND MORTGAGE, INC, or to its order, in the principal amount of $96,390.00, with a yearly interest rate of 7.50%, due on December 1st, 2012, as per Deed No. 355, executed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on November 30th, 2005 before Notary Public Jorge Laborde Corretjer, recorded at page 170 of volume 1536, 5th abbreviated inscription. MODIFICATION OF MORTGAGE: The mortgage for $96,390.00 is subject to this modification, which arises from the inscription 5th abbreviated; as per deed #444, on December 23, 2009, before the Notary Public Humberto Soto Mainardi, recorded in page 170 of volume 1536, inscription 5th abbreviated. Potential bidders are advised to verify the extent of preferential liens with the holders thereof. It shall be understood that each bidder accepts as sufficient the title and that prior and preferential liens to the one being foreclosed upon, including but not limited to any property tax, liens, (express, tacit, implied or legal), shall continue in effect. It being understood further that the successful bidder accepts them and is subrogated in the responsibility for the same and that the bid price shall not be applied toward their cancellation. The lien executed is over the property, and for the purposes of the first judicial sale the minimum bid amount is as follows: The amount of $96,390.00, as set forth in the mortgage deed, shall serve as the minimum bidding amount for the first public sale. Should the first public sale fail to produce an award or adjudication, two-thirds of the aforementioned amount or $64,260.00 shall serve as the minimum bidding amount for the second public sale. Should there be no award or adjudication at the second public sale, the minimum bidding amount for the third public sale shall be $48,195.00.

Said sale to be made by the appointed Special Master is subject to confirmation by the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico and the deed of conveyance and possession to the property may be executed and delivered after the judicial sale. Upon confirmation of the sale, an order shall be issued canceling all junior liens. THEREFORE, public notice is hereby given that the appointed Special Master,

Tuesday, April 20, 2021 pursuant to the provisions of the Judgment herein before referred to, will, on the 7th day of May, 2021, at 10:00 a.m., on the sidewalk in front of the main gate entrance of the United States District Court, Federal Building, 350 Chardon Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, will sell at public auction to the highest bidder the property described herein, the proceeds of said sale to be applied in the manner and form provided by the Court’s Judgment. Should the first judicial sale set hereinabove be unsuccessful, the second judicial sale of the property described in this Notice will be held on the 14th day of May, 2021, at 10:00 a.m., on the sidewalk in front of the main gate entrance of the United States District Court, Federal Building, 350 Chardon Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico. Should the second judicial sale set hereinabove be unsuccessful, the third judicial sale of the property described in this Notice will be held on the 21st day of May, 2021, at 10:00 a.m. on the sidewalk in front of the main gate entrance of the United States District Court, Federal Building, 350 Chardon Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico.

The records of the case and of these proceedings may be examined by the parties at the Office of the Clerk of the United States District Court, Federal Building, Chardón Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, this 26 day of March, 2021. ÁGUEDO DE LA TORRE, SPECIAL MASTER.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE CAROLINA

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante V.

JUAN FELICIANO RIVERA, NITZA NIDIA LOZADA RIVERA Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandado Civil Núm.: CA2019CV02768.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE GARANTÍAS. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS. EDICTO DE SUBASTA. Yo MANUEL VILLAFAÑE BLANCO, Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Carolina, al público en general.

CERTIFICO Y HAGO SABER: Que en cumplimiento de un Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia fechado el 9 de febrero de 2021, que me ha sido dirigido por la Secretaría del Tribunal de Primera Instancia,

Sala Superior de Carolina, en el caso arriba indicado, venderé en la fecha o fechas que más adelante se indican, en pública subasta al mejor postor, en moneda legal de los Estados Unidos de América, en efectivo, cheque certificado o giro postal, en mi oficina sita en el local que ocupa en el Centro Judicial de Carolina, Puerto Rico, todo derecho, título e interés que tenga la parte demandada, en el inmueble que se describe a continuación, propiedad de la parte demandada Juan Feliciano Rivera, Nitza Nidia Lozada Rivera y la Sociedad Legal de Bienes Gananciales Compuesta por Ambos. Dirección Física: C7 Calle 3, Urb. Rincon Español, Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico 00976. Finca 15,474, al folio 250 del tomo 304 de Trujillo Alto, Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección IV de San Juan. URBANA: Solar radicado en la Urbanización Rincón Español, situado en el Barrio Las Cuevas del Municipio de Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, que se describe en el Plano de Inscripción de la Urbanización, con el número, área y colindancias que se relacionan a continuación: Solar número siete C, con un área de ciento ochenta y ocho metros cuadrados con cincuenta y seis centímetros (188.56 m.c). En lindes por el NORTE, con la Calle número tres, en una distancia de un arco de ocho metros con treinta y dos centímetros; por el SUR, con Gilberto Morales, en una distancia de ocho metros con setenta y un centímetros; por el ESTE, con el Solar número siete A, en una distancia de veintidós metros con doce centímetros; y por el OESTE, con el Solar número seis A, en una distancia de veintidós metros con cuarenta y cuatro centímetros. Enclava una casa de concreto dedicada a vivienda familiar. Finca 15,474: Por su procedencia está afecta a: a. a.

Servidumbre a favor de la Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados de Puerto Rico. b. b.

Servidumbre a favor de la Autoridad de Fuentes Fluviales de Puerto Rico. c. c.. Servidumbre a favor de la Puerto Rico Telephone Company. Por sí está afecta a: a. Hipoteca en garantía de un pagaré a favor de AAA Concordia Mortgage Corporation, o a su orden, por la suma principal de $71,350.00, con intereses al 7 ½ % anual, vencedero el día 1 de octubre de 2025, constituida mediante la escritura número 924, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 28 de septiembre de 1995, ante el notario Gamalier Oliveras Álvarez, e inscrita al folio 253 del tomo 304 de Trujillo Alto, finca número 15,474, inscripción 5ta. b. Embargo de fecha 22 de abril de 2005 expedido en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Carolina, en el caso civil número FCD20002289, seguido por Popular Lea-

sing and Rental, Inc., contra juan Feliciano Rivera y Nitza Lozada Rivera y la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales, por la suma de $4,481.44, anotado el día 8 de agosto de 2010, al folio 253, del tomo 304 de Trujillo Alto, finca número 15,474, Anotación A. c. Modificada la hipoteca de la inscripción 5ta, en cuanto a los siguientes extremos: para un nuevo principal que será por $62,441.15 y el interés que será al 4.50% anual, vencedero el día 1 de septiembre de 2041, según la escritura número 461, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 16 de agosto de 2011, ante el notario David Toledo David, e inscrita al folio 41 del tomo 893 de Trujillo Alto, finca número 15,474, inscripción 6ta. d. Aviso de Demanda de fecha 29 de julio de 2019, expedido en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Carolina, en el Caso Civil número CA2019CV02768, sobre Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca, seguido por Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, contra Juan Feliciano Rivera, Nitza Nidia Lozada Rivera y la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales compuesto por ambos, por la suma de $56,159.54, más intereses y otras sumas, anotado el día 7 de mayo de 2020, al tomo Karibe de Trujillo Alto, finca número 15,474, Anotación B. El precio mínimo de este remate con relación a la Finca 15,474 antes descrita y la fecha de cada subasta serán la siguiente: FECHA DE SUBASTA: PRIMERA SUBASTA: 1 DE JUNIO DE 2021 A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA. PRECIO MÍNIMO: $71,350.00.

HIPOTECA: Escritura Número 924 sobre Hipoteca, otorgada el día 28 de septiembre de 1995, ante el notario Gamalier Oliveras Alvarez y modificada mediante Escritura Número 461, otorgada el 16 de agosto de 2011, ante el Notario David Toledo David. SEGUNDA SUBASTA: 8 DE JUNIO DE 2021 A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA. PRECIO MÍNIMO: $47,566.67.

TERCERA SUBASTA: 15 DE JUNIO DE 2021 A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA. PRECIO MÍNIMO: $35,675.00. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado estarán de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal durante las horas laborables.

Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titulación que se transmite y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y las preferentes, si las hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante, continuarán subsistentes, entendiéndose que el rematante las acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de las mismas, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate.

Conforme a la Sentencia dictada el día 19 de febrero de 2020, notificada el 25 de febrero de 2020 y publicada el 3 de marzo de 2020, la anterior venta se

27

hará para satisfacer las sumas adeudadas por concepto del préstamo garantizado por la hipoteca antes mencionada y las sumas que se mencionan a continuación: La suma principal de $56,159.54, más intereses a razón de 4.5%, desde el 1 de abril de 2017, que se acumulan diariamente hasta su total y completo pago, más la suma de $137.45 por cargos por mora, más la suma de $7,135.00 por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado hipotecariamente asegurados. Se notifica por la presente a los acreedores que tengan inscritos o anotados sus derechos sobre los inmuebles a ser subastados con posterioridad a la inscripción del gravamen del ejecutante descrito anteriormente, o acreedores de cargas o derechos reales que los hubieren pospuesto al gravamen del actor y a los dueños, poseedores, tenedores de o interesados en títulos transmisibles por endoso o al portador garantizado hipotecariamente con posterioridad al gravamen del actor para que puedan concurrir a la subasta si así lo interesan o satisfacer antes del remate el importe del crédito, de sus intereses, costas y honorarios de abogado, quedando subrogados en los derechos del acreedor ejecutante. La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores. Y, para conocimiento de licitadores, del público en general, y para su publicación de acuerdo con la ley en un periódico de circulación general de la isla de Puerto Rico y en tres sitios públicos del Municipio en que ha de celebrarse la venta, tales como la Alcaldía, el Tribunal y la Colecturía y vía correo certificado con acuse de recibo a la última dirección conocida de la parte demandada, expido el presente edicto bajo mi firma y el sello de este Tribunal en Carolina, Puerto Rico, hoy día 5 de marzo de 2021. MANUEL VILLAFAÑE BLANCO, ALGUACIL, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE CAROLINA.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE MAYAGÜEZ SALA SUPERIOR

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante Vs.

JOSÉ L. ALVARADO LUGO T/C/C JOSÉ LUIS ALVARADO LUGO

Demandados Civil Núm.: ISCI2017-0465.

(205). Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA (VÍA ORDINARIA). EDICTO DE SUBASTA. El Alguacil que suscribe por la presente CERTIFICA, ANUNCIA y hace CONSTAR: Que en cumplimiento de un Manda-

miento de Ejecución de Sentencia que le ha sido dirigido al Alguacil que suscribe por la Secretaría del TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE MAYAGÜEZ, SALA SUPERIOR, en el caso de epígrafe procederá a vender en pública subasta al mejor postor en efectivo, cheque certificado en moneda legal de los Estados Unidos de América el 27 DE MAYO DE 2021, A LAS 10:00 DE LA MAÑANA, en su oficina sita en el local que ocupa en el edificio del TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE MAYAGÜEZ, SALA SUPERIOR, todo derecho, título e interés que tenga la parte demandada de epígrafe en el inmueble de su propiedad que ubica en: BD-3, SEA VIEW, CABO ROJO, PR 00623 y que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Propiedad Horizontal, apartamento número BD-3 para fines residenciales, localizado en el tercer nivel del Edificio B del Condominio Sea View. Tiene un área privada de vivienda de mil doscientos veintidós punto treinta y seis (1,222.36) pies cuadrados, equivalentes a ciento trece punto cincuenta y seis (113.56) metros cuadrados. Colinda por el NORTE, con elementos exteriores; por el SUR, con elementos exteriores; por el ESTE, con el apartamento BC-3 y área comunal (lobby); y por el OESTE, con el apartamento BE-3. El apartamento contiene 3 habitaciones, 2 baños, sala-comedor, cocina, lavandería y balcón. Su puerta de entrada y salida comunica el área comunal del edificio, que a su vez tiene acceso a la calle principal. Le corresponde el uno punto veintidós (1.22%) de participación de elementos comunes. Le corresponde el uso de los estacionamientos identificados con el número ciento veinticuatro (124) y número ciento seis (106) en el Plano de Inscripción. La propiedad antes relacionada consta inscrita al Folio 211 del Tomo 941 de Cabo Rojo, finca número 32,047, Registro de la Propiedad de San Germán. El tipo mínimo para la primera subasta del inmueble antes relacionado, será el dispuesto en la Escritura de Hipoteca, es decir la suma de $204,953.18. Si no hubiere remate ni adjudicación en la primera subasta del inmueble mencionado, se celebrará una SEGUNDA SUBASTA en las oficinas del Alguacil que suscribe el día 3 DE JUNIO DE 2021, A LAS 10:00 DE LA MAÑANA. En la segunda subasta que se celebre servirá de tipo mínimo las dos terceras partes (2/3) del precio pactado en la primera subasta, o sea la suma de $136,635.45. Si tampoco hubiere remate ni adjudicación en la segunda subasta se celebrará una TERCERA SUBASTA en las oficinas del Alguacil que suscribe el día 10 DE JUNIO DE 2021, A LAS

10:00 DE LA MAÑANA. Para la tercera subasta servirá de tipo mínimo la mitad (1/2) del precio pactado para el caso de ejecución, o sea, la suma de $102,476.59. La hipoteca a ejecutarse en el caso de epígrafe fue constituida mediante la escritura de hipoteca número 145 otorgada en Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, el día 9 de mayo de 2007, ante el Notario Javier B. Sepúlveda Rivera, y consta inscrita al Folio 211 del Tomo 941 de Cabo Rojo, finca número 32,047, en el Registro de la Propiedad de San German, inscripción segunda (2da) y última.

Modificada en cuanto a su principal que es de $204,953.18, en cuanto a los pagos 1 al 60, el interés será de 2.50% porciento anual y el pago mensual de principal e interés será la cantidad de $548.08, en cuanto a los pagos 61 al 72, el interés será de 3.50% porciento anual y el pago mensual de principal e interés será la cantidad de $633.62, en cuanto a los pagos 73 al 84, el interés será de 4.50% porciento anual y el pago mensual de principal e interés será la cantidad de $723.50, en cuanto a los pagos 85 al 96, el interés será de 5.50% porciento anual y el pago mensual de principal e interés será la cantidad de $817.03, en cuanto a los pagos 97 al 108, el interés será de 6.50% porciento anual y el pago mensual e interés de principal será la cantidad de $913.56, en cuanto a los próximos 372 pagos/meses el interés será de 6.625% porciento anual y el pago mensual e interés de principal será la cantidad de $925.71, en cuanto al tipo mínimo para la primera subasta en caso de ejecución de hipoteca será la cantidad de $204,953.18, en cuanto a su último pago que será la cantidad de $38,756.63 (“Ballon Payment”) y en cuanto a su vencimiento que es el primero (1ro) de septiembre de 2056, según consta de la escritura número 44, otorgada en San Juan, el día 31 de agosto de 2016, ante el Notario Alfredo Ramón Vélez López, y consta inscrita al Tomo Karibe de Cabo Rojo, finca número 32,047, inscripción tercera (3ra), en el Registro de la Propiedad de San Germán. Dicha subasta se llevará a cabo para con su producto satisfacer al Demandante total o parcialmente según sea el caso el importe de la Sentencia que ha obtenido ascendente a la suma de $166,196.55 por concepto de principal, más intereses al tipo pactado de 2.50% anual desde el 1ro de octubre de 2016 y hasta el 1ro de septiembre de 2021. Del 1ro de octubre de 2021 y por los próximos doce (12) pagos/meses el interés será de 3.50% anual . Del 1ro de octubre de 2022 y por los próximos doce (12) pagos/ meses el interés será de 4.50% anual. Del 1ro de octubre de 2023 y próximos doce (12) pa-

28 gos/meses el interés será de 5.50% anual. Del 1ro de octubre de 2024 y por los próximos doce (12) pagos-meses el interés será de 6.50% anual. Del 1ro de octubre de 2025 hasta el 1ro de septiembre de 2056 el interés será de 6.625% anual.

Dichos intereses continúan acumulándose hasta el pago total de la obligación. Además la parte demandada adeuda a la parte demandante los cargos por demora equivalentes a 5.00% de la suma de aquellos pagos con atrasos en exceso de 15 días calendarios de la fecha de vencimiento; los créditos accesorios y adelantos hechos en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca; y las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado equivalentes a $19,400.00. Además la parte demandada se comprometió a pagar una suma equivalente a $19,400.00 para cubrir cualquier otro adelanto que se haga en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca y una suma equivalente a $19,400.00 para cubrir intereses en adición a los garantizados por ley. Por razón de dicho incumplimiento, y al amparo del derecho que le confiere el Pagaré, el demandante ha declarado tales sumas vencidas, líquidas y exigibles en su totalidad. Que los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al Procedimiento incoado estarán de manifiesto en la SECRETARIA DEL TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE MAYAGÜEZ, SALA SUPERIOR durante las horas laborables. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titulación del inmueble y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante continuarán subsistentes entendiéndose que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio de remate. La propiedad no está sujeta a gravámenes anteriores y/o preferentes según surge de las constancias del Registro de la Propiedad en un estudio de título efectuado a la finca antes descrita. Por la presente se notifica a los acreedores desconocidos, no inscritos o presentados que sus derechos sobre los bienes hipotecados con posterioridad a la inscripción del crédito del ejecutante o acreedores de cargos o derechos reales que los hubiesen pospuesto a la hipoteca del actor y a los dueños, poseedores, tenedores de o interesados en títulos transmisibles por endoso o al portador garantizados hipotecariamente con posterioridad al crédito del actor que se celebrarán las subastas en las fechas, horas y sitios señalados para que puedan concurrir a la subasta si les conviniere o se les invita a satisfacer antes del remate el importe del crédito, de sus intereses, otros cargos y las costas y honorarios de abo-

gado asegurados quedando subrogados en los derechos del acreedor ejecutante. La propiedad objeto de ejecución y descrita anteriormente se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores una vez el Honorable Tribunal expida la correspondiente Orden de Confirmación de Venta Judicial. Y para conocimiento de licitadores del público en general se publicará este Edicto de acuerdo con la ley por espacio de dos semanas en tres sitios públicos del municipio en que ha de celebrarse la venta, tales como la Alcaldía, el Tribunal y la Colecturía. Este Edicto será publicado dos veces en un diario de circulación general en el Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, por espacio de dos semanas consecutivas. Expido el presente Edicto de subasta bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal en Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, hoy día 26 de marzo de 2021. JOSÉ M. CRESPO NAZARIO, ALGUACIL DE SUBASTAS, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, CENTRO JUDICIAL DE MAYAGÜEZ, SALA SUPERIOR.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Parte Demandante Vs.

WILLIAM SANTANA NEVÁREZ, MYRNA IVETTE RÍOS CRUZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Parte Demandada Civil Núm.: BY2019CV06075.

Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA “IN REM”. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS. AVISO DE PÚBLICA SUBASTA. El Alguacil que suscribe por la presente anuncia y hace constar que en cumplimiento de la Sentencia de 10 de enero de 2020, la Orden de Ejecución de Sentencia del 10 de marzo de 2020 y el Mandamiento de Ejecución del 10 de marzo de 2020 en el caso de epígrafe, procederé a vender el día 10 DE MAYO DE 2021, A LAS 10:00 DE LA MAÑANA en mi oficina, localizada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Centro Judicial de Bayamón, en la Sala 503 del quinto piso, ubicado en la Carretera #2, Km. 11.03, Esquina Esteban Padilla, Bayamón, Puerto Rico, al mejor postor en pago de contado y en moneda de los Estados Unidos de América cheque de gerente o giro postal, todo título,

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

derecho o interés de la parte demandada sobre la siguiente propiedad: URBANA: Solar radicado en la Urbanización Quintas de Dorado, situada en el Barrio Higuillar de Dorado, Puerto Rico, que se describe en el plano de inscripción de dicha urbanización con el número, área y colindancias que se relacionan a continuación: Número de Solar: 36 del bloque J. Área del Solar: 450.00 metros cuadrados. En lindes por el Norte, en 18.00 metros, con el solar número 23 del bloque J; por el Sur, en 18.00 metros con la calle número 12; por el Este, en 25.00 metros con el solar número 37 del bloque J; y por Oeste, en 25.00 metros, con el solar número 35 del bloque J. Enclava una casa para fines residenciales. La propiedad consta inscrita al Folio 30 del Tomo 136 de Dorado, Finca 6424, Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección IV. La escritura de hipoteca consta inscrita al Folio 101 del Tomo 274 de Dorado, Finca 6424, Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección IV. Inscripción novena. Dirección Física: Quintas de Dorado, J36 calle Maga, Dorado, PR 00646-4722. SUBASTAS: PRIMERA: 10 DE MAYO DE 2021 A LAS 10:00 DE LA MAÑANA. TIPO MÍNIMO: $177,608.00. SEGUNDA: 17 DE MAYO DE 2021 A LAS 10:00 DE LA MAÑANA. TIPO MÍNIMO: $118,405.33. TERCERA: 24 DE MAYO DE 2021 A LAS 10:00 DE LA MAÑANA. TIPO MÍNIMO: $88,804.00.

El tipo mínimo para la primera subasta será de $177,608.00.

De no haber adjudicación en la primera subasta se celebrará una SEGUNDA SUBASTA, el día 17 DE MAYO DE 2021, A LAS 10:00 DE LA MAÑANA en el mismo lugar, en la cual el tipo mínimo será de dos terceras partes del tipo mínimo fijado en la primera subasta, o sea, $118,405.33. De no haber adjudicación en la segunda subasta, se celebrará una TERCERA SUBASTA el día 24 DE MAYO DE 2021, A LAS 10:00 DE LA MAÑANA en el mismo lugar, en la cual el tipo mínimo será la mitad del precio pactado, o sea, $88,804.00. Si se declarase desierta la tercera subasta, se adjudicará la finca a favor del acreedor por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada si ésta es igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la tercera subasta, si el tribunal lo estima conveniente.

Se abonará dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si ésta es mayor. Dicho remate se llevará a cabo para con su producto satisfacer a la demandante el importe de la Sentencia por la suma de $148,270.74 de principal, más intereses sobre dicha suma al 4.5% anual desde el 1 de abril de 2019 hasta su completo pago, más recargos acumulados, más la cantidad estipulada de $17,760.80 para costas, gastos y honorarios de

abogados, así como cualquier otra suma que contenga el contrato del préstamo. Surge del Estudio de Título Registral que sobre esta propiedad pesan los siguientes gravámenes a la hipoteca que por la presente se pretende ejecutar: Condiciones Restrictivas: Comparece La Autoridad para el Financiamiento de la Vivienda de Puerto Rico, a través del programa de Bono de Vivienda, no expresa suma. Sujeta a condiciones por 10 años, según consta de la escritura número 54, otorgada en San Juan, el 26 de agosto de 2010, ante el notario Fran Javier Pérez Galarza. Inscrita al folio 101 del tomo 274 de Dorado. Inscripción octava.

Presentación: AL ASIENTO 2019-113864-BY04, presentada el 25 de octubre de 2019, Demanda de fecha 15 de octubre de 2019, ante el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Bayamón, en el caso civil número BY2019CV06075, seguido por Banco Popular de Puerto Rico vs. William Santana Nevárez y su esposa, Myrna Ivette Ríos Cruz y Estados Unidos de América, representada por el Secretario de la Vivienda y Desarrollo Urbano (HUD), sobre Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca, en la que se reclama el pago de hipoteca, con un balance de $148,270.74 y otras cantidades, o la venta en pública subasta de la propiedad. Pendiente de anotación. Se notifica al acreedor posterior o a su sucesor o cesionario en derecho para que comparezca a proteger su derecho si así lo desea. Se les advierte a los interesados que todos los documentos relacionados con la presente acción de ejecución de hipoteca, así como los de Subasta, estarán disponibles para ser examinados, durante horas laborables, en el expediente del caso que obra en los archivos de la Secretaría del Tribunal, bajo el número de epígrafe y para su publicación en un periódico de circulación general en Puerto Rico por espacio de dos semanas y por lo menos una vez por semana; y para su fijación en los sitios públicos requeridos por ley. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante, continuarán subsistentes; entendiéndose que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate y que la propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores tal como lo expresa la Ley Núm. 2102015. Y para el conocimiento de los demandados, de los acreedores posteriores, de los licitadores, partes interesadas y público en general, EXPIDO para su publicación en los luga-

res públicos correspondientes, el presente Aviso de Pública Subasta en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, hoy 23 DE MARZO DE 2021. MARIBEL LANZAR VELÁZQUEZ, ALGUACIL PLACA #735, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE MAYAGÜEZ SALA SUPERIOR

PR RECOVERY & DEVELOPMENT JV, LLC Demandante V.

LUIS VELEZ CRUZ, SU ESPOSA CARMEN BEATRIZ RAMIREZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandados Civil Núm.: ISCI200700499.

Sala: 307. Sobre: cobro de dinero Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VIA ORDINARIA. AVISO DE SUBASTA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PUEBLO DE PUERTO RICO, S.S. YO, CALIXTO RIVERA GHIGLIOTTY, el Alguacil que suscribe, por la presente anuncia y hace constar, que en cumplimiento del Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia expedido por la Secretaria del Tribunal de Primera Instancia de Puerto Rico, procederé a vender en pública subasta y al mejor postor, quien pagará el importe de la venta en dinero efectivo, en cheque certificado o en cheque de gerente a la orden del alguacil suscribiente en moneda de curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América el día 4 DE MAYO DE 2021 A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA, en mi oficina localizada en el CENTRO JUDICIAL DE MAYAGÜEZ, todo título, derecho o interés que corresponda a las partes codemandadas sobre el inmueble que se describe a continuación: RÚSTICA: Predio de terreno radicado en el Barrio Minillas del término municipal de San German, con una cabida de setenta y seis punto mil quinientas cincuenta y tres (76.1553) cuerdas y colindantes por el NORTE, con terrenos de Patria Tió; por el SUR, con terrenos de Luis Montalvo; por el ESTE con la quebrada Cupeles, que separa terrenos de Patria Tió; y por el OESTE con Faustino del Valle y terrenos de Pedro Figueroa.

La Propiedad consta inscrita al folio 259 del tomo 394 de San Germán, finca 13,128, Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección de San Germán. AFECTA POR SU PROCEDENCIA: Libre de cargas.

AFECTA POR SÍ: HIPOTECA: En garantía de un pagaré a

favor de Banco De Desarrollo Económico Para Puerto Rico, o a su orden, por la suma de $120,000.00, con interés al 2% por encima de la tasa de interés preferente anual cada tiempo en tiempo por Citibank en la ciudad de NY para préstamos comerciales, establecido que el interés inicial anual será de 10.75%, y vencedero a la presentación, según consta escritura #62, otorgada el día 15 de marzo de 2000, ante el notario Gil Antonio Mercado Nieves, inscrita al folio 262 del tomo 518 de San German, finca #13,128, inscripción 6ta. HIPOTECA: En garantía de un pagaré a favor de Estados Unidos de America a/p/c Farmes Home Administration, o a su orden, por la suma de $70,000.00, con interés al 5.00% anual, y vencedero a los 7 años, según consta escritura #42, otorgada el día 30 de octubre de 2007, ante el notario Franklin Rodríguez Mangual, inscrita al folio 112 del tomo 605 de San Germán, finca #13,128, inscripción 7ª. MODIFICACIÓN DE HIPOTECA: Se modifica la hipoteca de la inscripción 7ª, antes relaciona en cuanto a: El nuevo balance al 31 de agosto del 2009 es de $76,555.79, será pagadero de la siguiente forma y manera: plazos anuales de $6,184.00 cada uno, comenzando el 31 de agosto del 2010 y así sucesivamente todos los 31 de agosto de cada año, siendo vencedero el ultimo plazo en 15 años a partir del otorgamiento de la escritura.

Los intereses de esta deuda se computarán a razón del 2.50% anual del principal no pagado; según consta de la Escritura #131 otorgada el 31 de agosto del 2009 ante la notario Susan Báez Dixon, subsanada por la Escritura #150 otorgada el 16 de octubre del 2009 ante la misma notario, inscrita al folio 112 del tomo 605 de San Germán, al margen de la inscripción 7ª.

ANOTACIÓN DE DEMANDA: Es objeto de esta anotación la Hipoteca a favor de Banco De Desarrollo Económico Para Puerto Rico que surge de la inscripción 6ta, Demandante: Banco de Desarrollo Económico para Puerto Rico, Demandado: Titulares, Cantidad Adeudada $108,587.00, por concepto de principal más intereses, según Demanda Expedida por el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Mayagüez en el caso civil #ISCI 2007-00499 el día 8 de junio de 2007, inscrito al tomo Karibe, Anotación A de fecha del 17 de enero de 2017.

El gravamen objeto de ejecución en este procedimiento es la que surge de la Escritura de Hipoteca número 62, otorgada el 15 de marzo de 2000 ante el Notario Público Gil Antonio Mercado Nieves, en la cual se establece como precio mínimo para la primera subasta la suma de $120,000.00. De no adjudicarse la propiedad en la primera subasta, se celebrará una SEGUNDA SUBASTA, en

las mismas oficinas de este Alguacil, el día 11 DE MAYO DE 2021 A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA. El precio mínimo para la segunda subasta serán dos terceras partes (2/3) del tipo mínimo de la primera subasta, o sea, $80,000.00. De no adjudicarse la propiedad en esa segunda subasta, se celebrará una TERCERA SUBASTA en las mismas oficinas de este Alguacil, el día 18 DE MAYO DE 2021 A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA. El precio mínimo para la tercera subasta será la mitad (1/2) del tipo mínimo de la primera subasta, o sea, $60,000.00. Esta subasta se hará para satisfacer a la Parte Demandante, hasta donde alcance, el importe adeudado bajo la sentencia en este caso, que al 23 de enero de 2020 ascienden la cantidad total de $105,561.26, más los intereses que se continúen acumulando a razón de $8.15 diarios hasta el saldo total y completo de la deuda, y una cantidad adicional de $12,000.00 por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado. Se entiende que todo licitador que comparezca a la subasta señalada en este caso acepta como bastante la titularidad que da base a las mismas. La venta en pública subasta de la propiedad descrita anteriormente se verificará libre de toda carga o gravamen posterior que afecte dicha propiedad. Se entiende que cualquier carga y/o gravamen anterior y/o preferente, si lo hubiera, al crédito que da base a esta ejecución, continuará subsistente, entendiéndose, además, que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de estos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. POR LA PRESENTE, se le notifica a los titulares de créditos y/o cargas registrales posteriores, si alguno, que se celebrarán las SUBASTAS en las fechas, horas y sitio anteriormente señalados, y se les invita a que concurran a dichas subastas, si les conviniere, o se les invita a satisfacer, antes del remate, el importe del crédito, sus intereses, otros cargos y las costas y honorarios de abogado asegurados, quedando entonces subrogados en los derechos del Acreedor ejecutante, siempre y cuando reúnan los requisitos y cualificaciones de Ley para que se pueda efectuar tal subrogación. SE HACE CONSTAR que los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado están de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal durante horas laborables, bajo el epígrafe de este caso. Y PARA SU PUBLICACIÓN en el tablón de edictos de este Tribunal y en dos (2) lugares públicos del Municipio donde se celebrarán las subastas señaladas. Además, en un periódico de circulación general en dos ocasiones y mediante correo certificado a la última dirección conocida

de la parte demandada. EXPEDIDO el presente EDICTO DE SUBASTA en Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, a 31 de marzo de 2021. CALIXTO RIVERA GHIGLIOTTY, ALGUACIL, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE MAYAGÜEZ.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE PONCE SALA SUPERIOR

PR RECOVERY AND DEVELOPMENT JV, LLC Demandante V.

JBA TRANSPORT & LOGISTICS, INC., ET. ALS.

Demandados Civil Núm.: JCD2012-0165.

Sala: G028. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. AVISO DE SUBASTA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PUEBLO DE PUERTO RICO, S.S. YO, JORGE HERNÁNDEZ PAGÁN, el Alguacil que suscribe, por la presente anuncia y hace constar, que en cumplimiento del Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia expedido por la Secretaria del Tribunal de Primera Instancia de Puerto Rico, procederé a vender en pública subasta y al mejor postor, quien pagará el importe de la venta en dinero efectivo o en cheque certificado o en cheque de gerente a la orden del alguacil suscribiente en moneda de curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América el día 4 DE MAYO DE 2021 A LAS 2:15 DE LA TARDE, en mi oficina localizada en el Centro Judicial de Ponce, todo título, derecho o interés que corresponda a las partes codemandadas sobre el inmueble que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Lote de terreno y casa marcado con el número tres (3) del bloque P de la Urbanización Los Caobos, en la ciudad de Ponce, Puerto Rico, con frente a la calle número veintisiete (27) con una medida superficial del TRESCIENTOS CINCO PUNTO CINCO METROS CUADRADOS (305.5mc). En lindes por el NORTE, en veintitrés punto cinco metros (23.5m) con el lote número dos (2) de ese bloque; por el SUR, en igual medida con el lote número cuatro (4) de dicho bloque; por el ESTE, en trece metros (13.00m) con el lote número diez (10) del mismo bloque; y por el OESTE, en igual medida con la calle número veintisiete (27). La propiedad antes descrita consta inscrita al folio 126 del tomo 1,372 de Ponce Norte, Finca 40,165, Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección primera (1era) de Ponce. DIRECCIÓN FÍSICA: 2239 calle Moca, Urb. Los Caobos, Ponce, P.R. 00731. AFECTA POR SU PRO-

The San Juan Daily Star CEDENCIA: SERVIDUMBRES a favor del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico; Autoridad de Fuentes Fluviales de Puerto Rico; CRUV; Puerto Rico Telephone Company; Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados de Puerto Rico; y Condiciones restrictivas. AFECTA POR SÍ: HIPOTECA: En garantía de un pagaré a favor de Housing Investment Corporation, o a su orden, por la suma de $32,200.00, con interés al 8% anual, y vencedero el 1 de julio de 2005, según consta escritura #78, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 4 de junio de 1975, ante el notario Jaime Santos Mirabal, inscrita al folio 126 del tomo 1372 de Ponce Norte, finca #40165, inscripción 1ra. HIPOTECA: En garantía de un pagaré a favor del Banco De Desarrollo Económico Para Puerto Rico, o a su orden, por la suma de $250,000.00, con interés al 2% sobre la tasa primaria, y vencedero a la presentación, según consta escritura #7, otorgada en Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, el día 15 de febrero de 2006, ante el notario Eduardo Tamargo, inscrita al folio 171 del tomo 2043 de Ponce Norte, finca #40165, inscripción 3ra. EMBARGO FEDERAL número 790321811 contra JBA Transport & Logistics Inc. # patronal 66-0591761 por la suma de $31,686.67, presentado y anotado el día 16 de junio de 2011. Anotado al tomo 8, folio 164, asiento 1 del Libro de Embargos Federales de Ponce Norte. EMBARGO FEDERAL número 659392710 contra JBA Transport & Logistics Inc. # patronal 66-0591761 por la suma de $23,325.37, presentado y anotado el día 29 de junio de 2010. Anotado al tomo 6, folio 71, asiento 2 del Libro de Embargos Federales de Ponce Sur. EMBARGO FEDERAL número 790321611 contra JBA Transport & Logistics Inc. # patronal 66-0591761 por la suma de $31,686.67, presentado y anotado el día 16 de junio de 2011. Anotado al tomo 6, folio 180, asiento 2 del Libro de Embargos Federales de Ponce Sur. EMBARGO FEDERAL número 659392910 contra JBA Transport & Logistics Inc. # patronal 66-0591761 por la suma de $23,325.37, presentado y anotado el día 6 de junio de 2010. Anotado al tomo 8, folio 33, asiento 2 del Libro de Embargos Federales de Ponce Norte. El gravamen objeto de ejecución en este procedimiento es la que surge de la Escritura de Hipoteca número 7, otorgada el 15 de febrero de 2006 ante el Notario Público Eduardo Tamargo, inscripción tercera (3era), en la cual se establece como precio mínimo para la primera subasta la suma de $250,000.00. De no adjudicarse la propiedad en la primera subasta, se celebrará una SEGUNDA SUBASTA, en las mismas oficinas de este Alguacil, el día 11 DE MAYO DE 2021

A LAS 2:15 DE LA TARDE. El precio mínimo para la segunda subasta serán dos terceras partes (2/3) del tipo mínimo de la primera subasta, o sea, $166,666.67. De no adjudicarse la propiedad en esa segunda subasta, se celebrará una TERCERA SUBASTA en las mismas oficinas de este Alguacil, el día 18 DE MAYO DE 2021 A LAS 2:15 DE LA TARDE. El precio mínimo para la tercera subasta será la mitad (1/2) del tipo mínimo de la primera subasta, o sea, $125,000.00.

Esta subasta se hará para satisfacer a la Parte Demandante, hasta donde alcance, el importe adeudado bajo la sentencia en este caso, que al 30 de agosto de 2019 ascienden a la cantidad total de $159,731.13, más los intereses que se continúen acumulando hasta el saldo total y completo de la deuda, y una cantidad adicional de $25,000.00 por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado, según pactados en el Pagaré Hipotecario que garantiza la deuda. Se entiende que todo licitador que comparezca a la subasta señalada en este caso acepta como bastante la titularidad que da base a las mismas. La venta en pública subasta de la propiedad descrita anteriormente se verificará libre de toda carga o gravamen posterior que afecte dicha propiedad. Se entiende que cualquier carga y/o gravamen anterior y/o preferente, si lo hubiera, al crédito que da base a esta ejecución, continuará subsistente, entendiéndose, además, que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de estos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. POR LA PRESENTE, se le notifica a los titulares de créditos y/o cargas registrales posteriores, si alguno, que se celebrarán las SUBASTAS en las fechas, horas y sitio anteriormente señalados, y se les invita a que concurran a dichas subastas, si les conviniere, o se les invita a satisfacer, antes del remate, el importe del crédito, sus intereses, otros cargos y las costas y honorarios de abogado asegurados, quedando entonces subrogados en los derechos del Acreedor ejecutante, siempre y cuando reúnan los requisitos y cualificaciones de Ley para que se pueda efectuar tal subrogación. SE HACE CONSTAR que los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado están de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal durante horas laborables, bajo el epígrafe de este caso. Y PARA SU PUBLICACIÓN en el tablón de edictos de este Tribunal y en dos (2) lugares públicos del Municipio donde se celebrarán las subastas señaladas. Además, en un periódico de circulación general en dos ocasiones y mediante correo certificado a la última dirección conocida de la parte demandada. EXPE-

Tuesday, April 20, 2021 DIDO el presente EDICTO DE SUBASTA en PONCE, Puerto Rico, a 26 de febrero de 2021.

JORGE HERNÁNDEZ PAGÁN, ALGUACIL, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE PONCE.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN

REVERSE MORTGAGE FUNDING LLC. Demandante Vs.

SUCESION JOSE PORBEN ULLOA T/C/C JOSE PORBEN COMPUESTA POR JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; SUCESION MIRIAM GONZALEZ REINA T/C/C MIRIAM GONZALEZ T/C/C MIRIAM GONZALEZ Y REINA T/C/C MIRIAM G. PORBEN COMPUESTA POR JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA; CENTRO DE RECAUDACION DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (CRIM)

Demandados Civil Núm.: SJ2019CV12273.

Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EDICTO DE SUBASTA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS.

A: LA PARTE DEMANDADA, AL (A LA) SECRETARIO(A) DE HACIENDA DE PUERTO RICO Y AL PÚBLICO GENERAL:

Certifico y Hago Constar: Que en cumplimiento con el Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia que me ha sido dirigido por el (la) Secretario(a) del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de SAN JUAN, en el caso de epígrafe, venderé en pública subasta y al mejor postor, por separado, de contado y por moneda de curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América y/o Giro Postal y Cheque Certificado, en mi oficina ubicada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de San Juan, el 10 DE MAYO DE 2021, A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA, todo derecho título, participación o interés que le corresponda a la parte demandada o cualquiera de ellos en el inmueble hipotecado objeto de ejecución que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar marcado con el numero cincuenta y uno (51) del Plano de Inscripción de la

Extensión de la Urbanización Roosevelt del Barrio Hato Rey del municipio de San Juan, Puerto Rico, con una cabida de TRESCIENTOS UNO PUNTO TREINTA Y CUATRO (301.34) metros cuadrados. Colinda por el NORTE, en veinticuatro punto setenta (24.70) metros, con el solar numero cincuenta y dos (52) de la Urbanización; por el SUR, en veinticuatro punto setenta (24.70) metros, con el solar numero cincuenta (50) de la Urbanización; por el ESTE, en doce punto veinte (12.20) metros, con el solar treinta (30) de la Urbanización y por el OESTE, en doce punto veinte (12.20) metros, con la Calle “Q” de la Urbanización.

Contiene una vivienda de una planta de concreto, diseñada para una familia, con sala, comedor, cocina, baño, cuarto dormitorios, balcón y marquesina. Inscrita al folio 145 del tomo 543 de Rio Piedras Norte, finca 13,923, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección II. La hipoteca objeto de esta ejecución se encuentra inscrita al Tomo Karibe, finca 13,923, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección II, inscripción 11ª. Propiedad localizada en: EXT. URB. ROOSEVELT, 559 (51) CALLE ARRIGOITIA, SAN JUAN, PR 00918. Según figuran en la certificación registral, la propiedad objeto de ejecución está gravada por las siguientes cargas anteriores o preferentes: Nombre del Titular: N/A. Suma de la Carga: N/A. Fecha de Vencimiento: N/A. Según figuran en la certificación registral, la propiedad objeto de ejecución está gravada por las siguientes cargas posteriores a la inscripción del crédito ejecutante: Nombre del Titular: Secretario de la Vivienda y Desarrollo Urbano. Suma de la Carga: $232,500.00. Fecha de Vencimiento: 20 de febrero de 2087. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad de la propiedad y que todas las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes al crédito ejecutante antes descritos, si los hubiere, continuarán subsistentes.

El rematante acepta dichas cargas y gravámenes anteriores, y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. Se establece como tipo de mínima subasta la suma de $252,500.00, según acordado entre las partes en el precio pactado en la escritura de hipoteca. De ser necesaria una SEGUNDA SUBASTA por declararse desierta la primera, la misma se celebrará en mi oficina, ubicada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de San Juan, el 17 DE MAYO DE 2021, A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA, y se establece como mínima para dicha segunda subasta la suma de $168,333.33, 2/3 partes del tipo mínima establecido originalmente. Si tampoco se produce remate ni adjudicación

en la segunda subasta, se establece como mínima para la TERCERA SUBASTA, la suma de $116,250.00, la mitad (1/2) del precio pactado y dicha subasta se celebrará en mi oficina, ubicada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de San Juan, el 24 DE MAYO DE 2021, A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA. Dicha subasta se llevará a cabo para, con su producto satisfacer a la parte demandante, el importe de la Sentencia dictada a su favor ascendente a la suma de $99,708.28 por concepto de principal, más la suma de $23,758.11 en intereses acumulados al 31 de octubre de 2020 y los cuales continúan acumulándose a razón de 4.221% anual hasta su total y completo pago; más la sumas de $6,649.88 en seguro hipotecario; $450.00 en tasaciones; $280.00 en inspecciones de la propiedad; $3,019.30 de honorarios de abogado; más la cantidad de 10% del pagare original en la suma de $23,250.00, para gastos, costas y honorarios de abogado, esta última habrá de devengar intereses al máximo del tipo legal fijado por la oficina del Comisionado de Instituciones Financieras aplicable a esta fecha, desde este mismo día hasta su total y completo saldo. La venta en pública subasta de la referida propiedad se verificará libre de toda carga o gravamen posterior que afecte la mencionada finca, a cuyo efecto se notifica y se hace saber la fecha, hora y sitio de la PRIMERA, SEGUNDA Y TERCERA SUBASTA, si esto fuera necesario, a los efectos de que cualquier persona o personas con algún interés puedan comparecer a la celebración de dicha subasta. Se notifica a todos los interesados que las actas y demás constancias del expediente de este caso están disponibles en la Secretaría del Tribunal durante horas laborables para ser examinadas por los (las) interesados (as). Y para su publicación en el periódico The San Juan Daily Star, que es un diario de circulación general en la isla de Puerto Rico, por espacio de dos semanas consecutivas con un intervalo de por lo menos siete (7) días entre ambas publicaciones, así como para su publicación en los sitios públicos de Puerto Rico. Expedido en San Juan, Puerto Rico, hoy 7 de abril de 2021. PEDRO HIEYE GONZÁLEZ, ALGUACIL. ****

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE FAJARDO

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante V.

CHAU KIM NGUYEN Demandado(a)

29

Civil: FA2019CV01083. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: CHAU KIM NGUYEN. 504 CARNABY CT BOSSIER CITY, LA 71111. 3602 SE 31 ST STREET PER, OCALA, FL 34471. COND. HILLSIDE VILLAGE PH-1 A (CLUSTER) EDIF. OLAS RÍO GRANDE, PR 00745.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 10 de abril de 2021, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 12 de abril de 2021. En Fajardo, Puerto Rico, el 12 de abril de 2021.

WANDA I. SEGUÍ REYES, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. MARYLIN SÁNCHEZ CORDERO, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOT ICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE CAGUAS,

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO DEMANDANTE VS.

JENNY MYRNALEE DELGADO ROSA, SU ESPOSO MARCOS REYES RODRÍGUEZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS; SUCESIÓN DE JUANA ROSA T/C/C JUANA ROSA CORREA T/C/C JUANA ROSA ROSA COMPUESTA POR SU HEREDERA CONOCIDA JENNY MYRNALEE DELGADO ROSA; FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANA DE TAL COMO HEREDEROS

DESCONOCIDOS Y/O PERSONAS CON INTERÉS EN DICHA SUCESIÓN; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NÚM.: CG2019CV02848.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EDICTO ANUNCIANDO PRIMERA, SEGUNDA Y TERCERA SUBASTA. El Alguacil que suscribe, funcionario del Tribunal de Caguas, Puerto Rico, por la presente anuncia y hace saber al público en general que en cumplimiento con la Sentencia dictada en este caso con fecha 20 de marzo de 2020, y según Orden y Mandamiento del 29 de marzo de 2021 librado por este honorable Tribunal, procederé a vender en pública subasta al mejor postor, y por dinero en efectivo, cheque certificado o giro postal a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal con todo título derecho y/o interés de la parte demandada sobre la propiedad que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar marcado con el número Cuarenta (40) del Proyecto denominado UM guión Diecinueve (UM-19), El Parque, situado en el Barrio Hato del término municipal de San Lorenzo, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de doscientos noventa y uno punto nueve mil cuatrocientos noventa y cuatro metros cuadrados (291.9494 m/c). Colinda por el NORTE, con el solar número treinta y nueve (39), en una distancia de veintidós punto treinta y uno (22.31 m.); por el SUR, con el solar número cuarenta y uno (41), en una distancia de veintidós punto cuarenta y seis (22.46 m.); por el ESTE, con el solar número veintitrés (23), en una distancia de quince punto ochenta metros (15.80 m.); y por el OESTE, con la calle número tres (3), en una distancia de trece punto ocho metros (13.08). FINCA NÚMERO: 16,903, inscrita al folio 74 del tomo 352 de San Lorenzo, sección II de Caguas.

Dirección física: EL PARQUE SOLAR #40, PROYECTO UM19 SAN LORENZO, PR 00754.

Se anuncia por medio de este edicto que la primera subasta habrá de celebrarse el día 12 de mayo de 2021, a las 10:00 de la mañana, en mi oficina sita en el edificio que ocupa el Tribunal Superior de Puerto Rico, Sala Superior de Caguas.

Siendo ésta la primera subasta que se celebrará en este caso, será el precio mínimo aceptable como oferta en la Primera Subasta, eso es el tipo mínimo pactado en la Escritura de Hipoteca para la propiedad, la suma de $62,900.00. De no haber remanente o adjudicación en esta primera subasta por dicha suma mínima, se celebrará una segunda subasta el día 19 de mayo de 2021, a las 10:00 de la mañana, en el mismo lugar antes señalado en la cual el precio

mínimo serán dos terceras (2/3) partes del tipo mínimo pactado en la escritura de hipoteca, la suma de $41,933.33. De no haber remanente o adjudicación en esta segunda subasta por el tipo mínimo indicado en el párrafo anterior, se celebrará una tercera subasta en el mismo lugar antes señalado el día 26 de mayo de 2021, a las 10:00 de la mañana, en la cual el tipo mínimo aceptable como oferta será la mitad (1/2) del precio mínimo pactado en la escritura de hipoteca, la suma de $31,450.00. Si se declare desierta la tercera subasta se adjudicará la finca a favor del acreedor por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada si ésta es igual o menor que el monto del tipo mínimo de la tercera subasta, si el tribunal lo estima conveniente. Se abonará dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si ésta es mayor.

Con el importe de esta venta se habrá de satisfacer el balance de la sentencia dictada en este caso el cual consiste en el pago de $30,197.01 de principal, más intereses convenidos al 7.00% anual más recargos hasta su pago, más el pago de lo pactado en la sentencia para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogados. Se dispone que una vez celebrada la subasta y vendido el inmueble relacionado, el alguacil pondrá en posesión judicial a los nuevos dueños dentro del término de veinte (20) días a partir de la celebración de la Subasta. Si transcurren los referidos veinte (20) días, el tribunal podrá ordenar, sin necesidad de ulterior procedimiento, que se lleve a efecto el desalojo o lanzamiento del ocupante u ocupantes de la finca o de todos los que por orden o tolerancia del demandado/deudor la ocupen. El Alguacil de este Tribunal efectuará el lanzamiento de los ocupantes de ser necesario. Si la subasta es adjudicada a un tercero y luego se deja sin efecto, el tercero a favor de quién se adjudicó la subasta solo tendrá derecho a la devolución del monto consignado más no tendrá derecho a entablar recurso o reclamo adicional alguno (judicial o extrajudicial) contra el demandante y/o el acreedor y/o inversionista, dueño pagaré y/o su abogado.

Por la presente también, se notifica e informa a Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal, personas desconocidas que puedan tener derechos en la propiedad o título objeto de este edicto.

La Venta en Pública Subasta de la referida propiedad se verificará libre de toda carga y gravamen posterior que afecte la mencionada finca, a cuyo efecto se notifica y se hace saber la fecha, hora y sitio de la Primera, Segunda y Tercera Subasta, si eso fuera necesario, a los efectos de cualquier persona o personas con algún interés puedan comparecer a la celebración de dicha Subasta. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante

30 para las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado. La deuda es por concepto de un préstamo que le fue desembolsado por la demandante y cuyos últimos cuatro dígitos son 0102. Se le emplaza y requiere que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto, a través del Sistema Unificado de Administración y Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Deberá notificar a la licenciada: María S. Jiménez Meléndez al PO Box 9023632, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00902-3632; teléfono: (787) 723-2455; abogada de la parte demandante, con copia de la contestación a la demanda. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende LEGAL NOTICE procedente. Expedido en MaESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO natí, Puerto Rico, a 9 de marzo DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- de 2021. VIVIAN Y. FRESSE SECRETARIA NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA GONZÁLEZ, SALA SUPERIOR DE MANATÍ REGIONAL. CARMEN J. ROBANCO POPULAR DE SARIO VALENTÍN, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR DEL TRIBUNAL PUERTO RICO I. Parte Demandante Vs.

la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante continuarán subsistentes. Se entenderá que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento del caso de epígrafe están disponibles en la Secretaría de este Tribunal durante horas laborables y para la concurrencia de los licitadores expido el presente Edicto que se publicará en un periódico de circulación diaria en toda la Isla de Puerto Rico por espacio dos (2) semanas y por lo menos una vez por semana y se fijará, además, en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Alcaldía y la Colecturía de Rentas Internas del Municipio donde se celebrará la Subasta y en la Colecturía más cercana del lugar de la residencia de la parte demandada. EN TESTIMONIO DE LO CUAL, expido el presente que firmo y sello, hoy día 15 de abril de 2021.

ALBERTO NEGRON ROMAN #435, ALGUACIL, SALA SUPERIOR DE CAGUAS.

OMAYRA IRIZARRY DELGADO

Parte Demandada Civil Núm.: MT2020CV00522.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO (ORDINARIO).

EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO EMITIDO POR EL TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA DE PUERTO RICO, SALA DE SUPERIOR DE MANATÍ.

A: OMAYRA IRIZARRY DELGADO, PARTE DEMANDADA EN EL CASO DE: Banco Popular de Puerto Rico vs. Omayra irizarry Delgado, Civil Núm.: MT2020CV00522, sobre Cobro de Dinero (Ordinario).

Se le notifica a usted, OMAYRA IRIZARRY DELGADO, que en la Demanda que originó este caso se alega que usted le adeuda a la parte demandante, BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO, las siguientes cantidades: a. $20,501.63 de principal, $723.24 de intereses hasta el 2 de diciembre de 2019, más los intereses que se devenguen a partir de la fecha de radicación de la Demanda al tipo legal, hasta el total y completo pago de la obligación, $51.74 de cargos por mora, $205.01 de otros cargos y la cuantía de $2,148.16 pactada

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE HUMACAO.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante v.

SUCESIÓN DE MARÍA ANTONIA CARRIÓN COTNER, COMPUESTA POR SANDRO PÉREZ CARRIÓN, JUAN LUIS TRUJILLO CARRIÓN Y FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS

Demandado CIVIL NÚM: CG2018CV01434 (206). SOBRE: INTERPELACIÓN, COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE GARANTÍAS. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS. EDICTO DE SUBASTA. Yo MARIA DEL PILAR RIVERA RIVERA, Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Humacao, al público en general. CERTIFICO Y HAGO SABER: Que en cumplimiento de un Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia fechado el 26 de

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Tuesday, April 20, 2021

marzo de 2021 que me ha sido dirigido por la Secretaría del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Humacao, en el caso arriba indicado, venderé en la fecha o fechas que más adelante se indican, en pública subasta al mejor postor, en moneda legal de los Estados Unidos de América, en efectivo, cheque certificado o giro postal, en mi oficina sita en el local que ocupa en el Centro Judicial de Humacao, Puerto Rico, todo derecho, título e interés que tenga la parte demandada, en el inmueble que se describe a continuación, propiedad de la parte demandada Sucesión de María Antonia Carrión Cotner, compuesta por Sandro Pérez Carrión, Juan Luis Trujillo Carrión y Fulano y Mengano de Tal, como posibles herederos desconocidos. Dirección Física: Urb. La Campiña, 18-D Calle 5, Las Piedras, PR 00771. Finca 14,159, inscrita al folio del tomo Móvil 264 de Las Piedras, Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección de Humacao.

URBANA: Solar marcado con el número “D” guión dieciocho (D-18) de la Urbanización La Campiña del término municipal de Las Piedras en Puerto Rico, con una cabida de trescientos cuatro punto ochocientos (304.800) metros cuadrados.

En lindes: por el NORTE, en una distancia lineal de doce punto setenta (12.70) metros, con el solar D guión diez (D10); por el SUR, en una distancia lineal de doce punto setenta (12.70) metros, con Calle cinco (5); por el ESTE, en veinticuatro punto cero cero cero (24.000) metros lineales, con el solar D guión diecisiete (D-17) de la Urbanización; por el OESTE, en veinticuatro punto cero cero (24.00) metros lineales, con el solar D guión diecinueve (D-19) de la Urbanización. Enclava una casa. Finca 14,159. Por su procedencia está afecta a: a) Servidumbre a favor de la Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica de Puerto Rico. b) Servidumbre a favor de la Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados de Puerto Rico. c) Servidumbre a favor de la Puerto Rico Telephone Company. Por sí está afecta a: a) Sujeto a condiciones bajo el Programa Mi Nuevo Hogar, Ley 122, por haber concedido la suma de $4,802.50, por un término de 10 años. b) Hipoteca en garantía de un pagaré a favor de The Money House, Inc., o a su orden, por la suma principal de $98,525.00, con intereses al 5 1/2% anual, vencedero el día 1 de enero de 2041, constituida mediante la escritura número 84, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 31 de diciembre de 2010, ante la notario Zoila Espinoza Vaquer, e inscrita al folio 54 del tomo 303 de Las Piedras, finca número 14,159, inscripción 8va. c) Aviso de Demanda de fecha 31 de julio de 2018, expedido en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior

de Caguas, en el Caso Civil número CG2018CV01434, seguido por el Banco Popular de Puerto Rico versus María Antonia Carrión Cotner, mediante la cual se solicita el pago por la suma de $88,594.62 o la venta en Pública Subasta, anotado el día 11 de abril de 2019, al tomo Karibe de Las Piedras, finca número 14,159, Anotación “B”. El precio mínimo de este remate con relación a la Finca 14,159 antes descrita y la fecha de cada subasta serán la siguiente: Primera Subasta: 17 de junio de 2021 a las 3:00PM, Precio Mínimo: $98,525.00, Hipoteca: Escritura Número 84, sobre Hipoteca, otorgada el 31 de diciembre de 2010, ante la Notario Zoila Espinoza Vaquer.

Segunda Subasta: 24 de junio de 2021 a las 3:00PM, Precio Mínimo: $65,683.33. Tercera Subasta: 1 de julio de 2021 a las 3:00PM, Precio Mínimo: $49,262.50. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado estarán de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal durante las horas laborables. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titulación que se transmite y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y las preferentes, si las hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante, continuarán subsistentes, entendiéndose que el rematante las acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de las mismas, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate.

Conforme a la Sentencia dictada el día 24 de enero de 2020 y archivada en los autos el 27 de enero de 2020, la anterior venta se hará para satisfacer las sumas adeudadas por concepto del préstamo garantizado por la hipoteca antes mencionada y las sumas que se mencionan a continuación: La suma de $88,594.62, más $8,993.44, que incluye intereses según pactados, cargos por demora y otros cargos, que se acumulan diariamente hasta su total y completo pago, más la suma de 10% del principal, por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado hipotecariamente asegurados. Se notifica por la presente a los acreedores que tengan inscritos o anotados sus derechos sobre los inmuebles a ser subastados con posterioridad a la inscripción del gravamen del ejecutante descrito anteriormente, o acreedores de cargas o derechos reales que los hubieren pospuesto al gravamen del actor y a los dueños, poseedores, tenedores de o interesados en títulos transmisibles por endoso o al portador garantizado hipotecariamente con posterioridad al gravamen del actor para que puedan concurrir a la subasta si así lo interesan o satisfacer antes del remate el importe del crédito, de sus intereses, costas y honorarios de abogado, quedando subrogados en los derechos del acreedor

ejecutante. La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores. Y, para conocimiento de licitadores, del público en general, y para su publicación de acuerdo con la ley en un periódico de circulación general de la isla de Puerto Rico y en tres sitios públicos del Municipio en que ha de celebrarse la venta, tales como la Alcaldía, el Tribunal y la Colecturía y vía correo certificado con acuse de recibo a la última dirección conocida de la parte demandada, expido el presente edicto bajo mi firma y el sello de este Tribunal en Humacao, Puerto Rico, hoy día 5 de abril de 2021. MARIA DEL PILAR RIVERA RIVERA, ALGUACIL, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE HUMACAO. JENNISA GARCIA MORALES #796, Alguacil Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE AGUADILLA SALA SUPERIOR.

LUNA ACQUISITION, LLC Demandante Vs

MADELINE MATIAS ROSADO, FRANCISCO VILLA GARCIA Y SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

DEMANDADO (S) CIVIL NUM. RN2021CV00010.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA POR LA VIA ORDINARIA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTOS. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS E.E. U.U. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación en la secretaría del Tribunal y enviando copia al abogado de la parte demandante: ENRIQUE NASSAR RIZEK & ASSOCIATES, ATENCIÓN Lcda. Edda Ivette Rodríguez, abogados de la parte demandante: PO. Box 191017, San Juan Puerto Rico 00919-1017, Teléfono (787) 754-1313; Fax (787)754-8760. En dicha demanda se tramita una acción de Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria donde se le reclama las sumas adeudadas al I de mayo de 2018, la suma principal de $75,813.27 más intereses devengados a la tasa de 6.25% según pactados, la suma de $962.33 por concepto cargos por demora, más la suma de $9,000.00 por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado, según pactados. SE LES APERCIBE que de no hacerlo así, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará sentencia en la cual se concederá el remedio solicitado contra usted en la Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle. EXTENDIDO bajo mi firma y el sello del Tribunal en Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, a 8 de abril de 2021. SARAHI REYES PEREZ, Secretaria Regional.

ERIKA I CRUZ PEREZ, Sec Auxiliar.

DE LA SUCESION DE ESMERALDA RODRIGUEZ VILLAFAÑE, T/C/C GERARDA RODRIGUEZ VILLAFAÑE.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 9 de abril de 2021, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 14 de abril de 2021.

En FAJARDO, Puerto Rico, el 14 de abril de 2021. WANDA I. LEGAL NOTICE SEGUÍ REYES, SECRETARIA ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO REGIONAL. MILDRED BURDE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- GOS ROBLES, SECRETARIA NAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA AUXILIAR. TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSLEGAL NOTICE TANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE FAJARDO ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante V.

SUCESION DE ESMERALDA RODRIGUEZ VILLAFAÑE, A: MADELINE MATIAS T/C/C GERARDA ROSADO, FRANCISCO RODRIGUEZ VILLAFAÑE VILLA GARCIA Y LA compuesta por JESSICA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DAVILA NAVARRO, DE GANANCIALES ALEJANDRA DAVILA COMPUESTA POR RIVERA, FULANO AMBOS DE TAL Y SUTANO BARRIO PUEBLO DE DE TAL; CENTRO RINCÓN CARRETERA 115 DE RECAUDACION KM 11.0 RINCÓN DE INGRESOS PUERTO RICO 00677; MUNICIPALES; Y A LOS 7208 SUMMIT PL ESTADOS UNIDOS DE WINTER HAVEN FL, 33884; AMERICA Demandado(a) BARRIO PUEBLO DE RINCÓN, 19-B CALLE SOL Civil: FA2019CV01445. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJERINCÓN PUERTO RICO CUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR 00677; LA VÍA ORDINARIA. NOTIFI-

POR LA PRESENTE se le CACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR emplaza y requiere para que EDICTO. conteste la demanda dentro de A: JESSICA DAVILA los (30) días siguientes a la puNAVARRO, ALEJANDRA blicación de este edicto. Usted DAVILA RIVERA, deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema FULANO DE TAL Y Unificado de Manejo y AdminisSUTANO DE TAL COMO tración de Casos (SUMAC), al POSIBLES MIEMBROS cual puede acceder utilizando DE NOMBRES la siguiente dirección electróniDESCONOCIDOS ca: https://unired.ramajudicial.

representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 14 de abril de 2021. En Añasco, Puerto Rico, el 14 de abril de 2021. LIC. NORMA G. SANTANA IRIZARRY, SECRETARIA. EVELYN PADILLA NIEVES, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE VEGA BAJA

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante V.

FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION (FDIC) COMO SÍNDICO DE DORAL BANK, DE RG PREMIER BANK OF PUERTO RICO Y DE RG MORTGAGE CORPORATION, SUCESOR DE MORTGAGE STORE OF PUERTO RICO, INC.; DORAL FINANCIAL DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUCORPORATION POR NAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA CONDUCTO DE SU TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA MUNICIPAL DE AGENTE RESIDENTE, AÑASCO DORAL MORTGAGE COOPERATIVA DE CORPORATION T/C/C AHORRO Y CRÉDITO DORAL MORTGAGE, DE RINCÓN (ANTES LLC., POR CONDUCTO COOPERATIVA DE DE SU AGENTE AHORRO Y CRÉDITO DE RESIDENTE CT AÑASCO) CORPORATION SYSTEM; Demandante V. ORIENTAL BANK COMO JUDITH ROSADO VEGA SUCESOR EN DERECHO Demandado(a) DE SCOTIABANK Civil: AÑ2020CV00006. Sobre: DE PUERTO RICO; COBRO DE DINERO ORDINARIO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENDAVID RODRÍGUEZ TENCIA POR EDICTO. VELÁZQUEZ, MELVA A: JUDITH ROSADO FELICIANO AVILÉS VEGA - RR 01 BOX 2211, T/C/C MELVA YADIRA AÑASCO, PR 00610.

FELICIANO AVILÉS Y (Nombre de las partes a las que se le LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que susDE GANANCIALES cribe le notifica a usted que el 6 COMPUESTA POR de abril de 2021, este Tribunal AMBOS; FULANO Y ha dictado Sentencia, SentenMENGANO DE TAL, cia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente POSIBLES TENEDORES registrada y archivada en autos DESCONOCIDOS DEL donde podrá usted enterarse PAGARÉ detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o

Demandado(a) Civil: VB2020CV00463. Sobre: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO POR LA VÍA JUDICIAL. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

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A: FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL; POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 12 de abril de 2021, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 14 de abril de 2021. En Vega baja, Puerto Rico, el 14 de abril de 2021. LCDA LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA. MARITZA ROSARIO ROSARIO, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante V.

ALFREDO RODRIGUEZ SANCHEZ Y NANCY SANCHEZ SANCHEZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES, COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandado(a) Civil: BY2019CV03509. Sala: 701. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE GARANTÍAS. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO,

A: ALFREDO RODRIGUEZ SANCHEZ Y NANCY SANCHEZ SANCHEZ, POR SI Y EN REPRESENTACION DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES, COMPUESTA POR AMBOS.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 14 de abril de 2021, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia,

Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 15 de abril de 2021. En BAYAMÓN, Puerto Rico, el 15 de abril de 2021. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA. MARÍA E. COLLAZO, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

Tuesday, April 20, 2021 fono: (787) 759-6897; Correo electrónico: legal@jrslawpr. com. Se le advierte que dentro de los diez (10) días siguientes a la publicación del presente edicto, se le estará enviando a usted por correo certificado con acuse de recibo, una copia del emplazamiento y de la demanda presentada al lugar de su última dirección conocida: Bo. Dajaos, Carr. 812 Km 1.2, Bayamón, PR 00956; RR 8 Box 9119, Bayamón, PR 009569835. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y el sello del Tribunal en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, hoy día 24 de febrero de 2021. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, LEGAL NOTICE SECRETARIA REGIONAL. ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO YARILIZ CINTRÓN, SUB-SEDE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- CRETARIA. NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA LEGAL NOTICE SALA DE BAYAMÓN ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO ORIENTAL BANK DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUDemandante V. DEWEL REYES DE JESUS NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE ARECIDemandado BO Civil Núm.: BY2020CV03396.

(505). Sobre: COBRO DE DI- MTGLQ INVESTORS, L.P. Demandante V. NERO POR LA VÍA ORDINAal Apartado 2342, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico 00681-2342, Teléfonos: (787) 832-9620 y (845) 345-3985, Abogada de la parte demandante, apercibiéndose que en caso de no hacerlo así podrá dictarse Sentencia en Rebeldía en contra suya, concediendo el remedio solicitado en la Demanda sin más citarle ni oírle. EXPIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y el Sello del Tribunal hoy 28 de enero de 2021.

DIANE ÁLVAREZ VILLANUEVA, SECRETARIA REGIONAL I. WANDA I. RIVERA PÉREZ, SECRETARIA DEL TRIBUNAL CONFIDENCIAL II.

RIA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENLEGAL NOTICE TE DE LOS EE. UU., EL ESESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO TADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL PUERTO RICO, SS. GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIA: DEWEL BUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANREYES DE JESUS. CIA SALA DE UTUADO BANCO POPULAR DE POR MEDIO del presente edicto se le notifica de la radicación PUERTO RICO de una demanda en cobro de Demandante Vs. dinero por la vía ordinaria en la OMIR J. PÉREZ NUÑEZ que se alega que usted adeuda Demandado a la parte demandante, Oriental Civil Núm.: UT2020CV00230. Bank, ciertas sumas de dinero, Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO. y las costas, gastos y honoraEMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDIC- rios de abogado de este litigio.

TO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE El demandante, Oriental Bank, AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE ha solicitado que se dicte senDE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, tencia en contra suya y que se EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIA- le ordene pagar las cantidades DO DE PUERTO RICO. reclamadas en la demanda.

POR EL PRESENTE EDICTO A) OMIR J. se le emplaza para que presenPÉREZ NUÑEZ. POR LA PRESENTE: Se le te al tribunal su alegación resnotifica que contra usted se ha ponsiva a la demanda dentro presentado la Demanda sobre de los treinta (30) días de haCobro de Dinero de la cual se ber sido diligenciado este emacompaña copia. Por la pre- plazamiento, excluyéndose el sente se le emplaza a usted y día del diligenciamiento. Usted se le requiere para que dentro deberá presentar su alegación del término de TREINTA (30) responsiva a través del Sistema días desde la fecha de la Publi- Unificado de Manejo y Adminiscación por Edicto de este Em- tración de Casos (SUMAC), al plazamiento presente su con- cual puede acceder utilizando testación a través del Sistema la siguiente dirección electróniUnificado de Manejo y Adminis- ca: https://unired.ramajudicial. tración de Casos (SUMAC), al pr/sumac/, salvo que se reprecual puede acceder utilizando sente por derecho propio, en la siguiente dirección electróni- cuyo caso deberá presentar su ca: https://unired.ramajudicial. alegación responsiva en la Sepr, salvo que se represente por cretaría del Tribunal. Si usted derecho propio, en cuyo caso deja de presentar su alegación deberá presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido responsiva en la Secretaría del término, el tribunal podrá dicTribunal de Primera Instancia, tar sentencia en rebeldía en su Sala de Utuado, P.O. Box 2555, contra, y conceder el remedio Utuado, Puerto Rico 00641- solicitado en la Demanda, o 2555 y notifique a la LCDA. cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en GINA H. FERRER MEDINA, el ejercicio de su sana discrepersonalmente al Condominio ción, lo entiende procedente.

Las Nereidas, Local 1-B, Calle El abogado de la parte demanMéndez Vigo esquina Ama- dante es: Jaime Ruiz Saldaña, dor Ramírez Silva, Mayagüez, RUA número 11673; Dirección: Puerto Rico 00680; o por correo PMB 450, 400 Calle Calaf, San Juan, PR 00918-1314; Telé-

RICHARD AYALA TORRES, OLGA HERNANDEZ RIVERA Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS, KATHERINE MALDONADO MERCADO

Demandados Civil Núm.: AR2019CV01419.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA, EDICTO DE SUBASTA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS.

A: LA PARTE DEMANDADA, AL (A LA) SECRETARIO( A) DE HACIENDA DE PUERTO RICO Y AL PÚBLICO GENERAL:

Certifico y Hago Constar: Que en cumplimiento con el Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia que me ha sido dirigido por el (la) Secretario(a) del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Arecibo, en el caso de epígrafe procederá a vender en pública subasta al mejor postor en efectivo, cheque gerente, giro postal, cheque certificado en moneda legal de los Estados Unidos de América al nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, en mi oficina ubicada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Arecibo, el 8 DE JUNIO DE 2021 A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA, todo derecho título, participación o interés que le corresponda a la parte demandada o cualquiera de ellos en el inmueble hipotecado objeto de ejecución que se describe a continuación: RÚSTICA: Radicada en el barrio Hato Abajo del término municipal de Arecibo, Puerto Rico,

compuesta de 1591.0215 metros cuadrados, equivalentes a 0.4048 cuerdas. En lindes por el NORTE, en una distancia de 36.910 metros lineales con carretera municipal Las Canelas; por el SUR, en una distancia de 37.239 metros lineales con lote marcado 1-B segregado en este acto; por el ESTE, en una distancia de 44.250 metros lineales con Universidad Interamericana y por el OESTE, en una distancia de 42.25 metros lineales con uso público. Consta inscrita al folio 245 del tomo 970 de Arecibo, finca número 42588, Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección I de Arecibo. Propiedad localizada en: PR#2, KM 84 INT, Barrio Hato Abajo, Las Canelas, Arecibo, PR 00612. Según figuran en la certificación registral, la propiedad objeto de ejecución está gravada por las siguientes cargas anteriores o preferentes: Nombre del Titular: N/A. Suma de la Carga: N/A. Fecha de Vencimiento: N/A. Según figuran en la certificación registral, la propiedad objeto de ejecución está gravada por las siguientes cargas posteriores a la inscripción del crédito ejecutante: A. AVISO DE DEMANDA con fecha 22 de agosto de 2019 seguido en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Arecibo, en el caso civil número AR2019CV01419, sobre cobro de dinero y ejecución de hipoteca; MTGLQ Investors, L.P., demandante v. Richard Ayala Torres, Olga Hernández Rivera y la sociedad legal de gananciales compuesta por ambos; Katherine Maldonado Mercado, demandados. Por la misma se reclama el pago $219,977.76, más otras sumas. Anotada el 4 de septiembre de 2019 al Tomo Karibe, finca 42588 de Arecibo, anotación “’B”. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad de la propiedad y que todas las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes al crédito ejecutante antes descritos, si los hubiere, continuarán subsistentes.

El rematante acepta dichas cargas y gravámenes anteriores, y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. Se establece como tipo mínimo de subasta la suma de $232,600.00, según acordado entre las partes en el precio pactado en la escritura de hipoteca. De ser necesaria una SEGUNDA SUBASTA por declararse desierta la primera, la misma se celebrará en mi oficina, ubicada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Arecibo, el 15 DE JUNIO DE 2021 A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA, y se establece como mínima para dicha segunda subasta la suma de $155,066.67, dos terceras (2/3) partes del tipo mínimo establecido originalmente. Si tampoco se produce remate ni adjudicación en la segunda subasta, se establece como mínima para la TERCERA SUBAS-

31

TA, la suma de $116,300.00, la mitad (1/2) del precio pactado y dicha subasta se celebrará en mi oficina, ubicada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Arecibo, el 22 DE JUNIO DE 2021 A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA. Dicha subasta se llevará a cabo para, con su producto satisfacer a la parte demandante, el importe de la Sentencia dictada a su favor ascendente a la suma de $198,103.82 de principal, intereses al tipo del 6.12500% anual según ajustado desde el día 1 de julio de 2018 hasta el pago de la deuda en su totalidad, más la suma de $23,260.00 por concepto de honorarios de abogado y costas autorizadas por el Tribunal, más las cantidades que se adeudan mensualmente por concepto de seguro hipotecario, cargos por demora, y otros adeudados que se hagan en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca. La venta en pública subasta de la referida propiedad se verificará libre de toda carga o gravamen posterior que afecte la mencionada finca, a cuyo efecto se notifica y se hace saber la fecha, hora y sitio de la PRIMERA, SEGUNDA Y TERCERA SUBASTA, si esto fuera necesario, a los efectos de que cualquier persona o personas con algún interés puedan comparecer a la celebración de dicha subasta. Se notifica a todos los interesados que las actas y demás constancias del expediente de este caso están disponibles en la Secretaría del Tribunal durante horas laborables para ser examinadas por los (las) interesados (as). Y para su publicación en el periódico The San Juan Daily Star, que es un diario de circulación general en la isla de Puerto Rico, por espacio de dos semanas consecutivas con un intervalo de por lo menos siete (7) días entre ambas publicaciones, así como para su publicación en los sitios públicos de Puerto Rico. Expedido en Arecibo, Puerto Rico, hoy día 18 de marzo de 2021. ÁNGEL DE J. TORRES PÉREZ, ALGUACIL DE SUBASTAS, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, CENTRO JUDICIAL DE ARECIBO, SALA SUPERIOR.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE BAYAMON,

FAIRPORT ASSET MANAGEMENT, LLC DEMANDANTE V.

JOSE ENRIQUE LIZARDI DIAZ Y ANATALIA ORTIZ TORRES Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

DEMANDADA CIVIL NÚM. BY2019CB05182.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE SENTENCIA. AVISO DE VENTA EN PÚBLICA SUBASTA.

A: JOSE ENRIQUE LIZARDI DIAZ Y ANATALIA ORTIZ TORRES Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL COMPUESTA POR AMBOS; BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO; Y AL PUBLICO EN GENERAL:

El que suscribe, Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior, Centro Judicial de Bayamón, Bayamón, Puerto Rico, hago saber a la parte demandada, y al PUBLICO EN GENERAL: y a todos los acreedores que tengan inscritos o anotados sus derechos sobre los bienes hipotecados con posterioridad a la inscripción del crédito del ejecutante, o de los acreedores de cargas o derechos reales que los hubiesen pospuesto a la hipoteca ejecutada y las personas interesadas en, o con derecho a exigir el cumplimiento de instrumentos negociables garantizados hipotecariamente con posterioridad al crédito ejecutado, siempre que surjan de la certificación registral, para que puedan concurrir a la subasta si les convenga o satisfacer antes del remate el importe del crédito, de sus intereses, costas y honorarios de abogados asegurados, quedando entonces subrogados en los derechos del acreedor ejecutante. Que en cumplimiento del Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia expedido el día 12 de febrero de 2021, por la Secretaria del Tribunal, procederé a vender y venderé en pública subasta y al mejor postor la propiedad que se describe a continuación: Carretera 864 #49 Marginal, Bo. Hato Tejas, Bayamón, P.R. 00961: RUSTICA: Solar con una extensión superficial de doscientos treinta y siete y medio metros cuadrados (237 ½) metros cuadrados, radicado en el Barrio Hato Tejas de Bayamón, Con colindancias por el NORTE, en una extensión de (25) metros con el solar y casa de Julia Rodriguez; por el SUR, en una extensión de (25) metros con parcelas de donde se segrega; por el ESTE, en una extensión de (9) metros con la carretera insular número (2); por el OESTE, en una extensión de (10) metros con la finca de Jose Ricardo Dávila. Se identifica el solar descrito con el numero treinta y cinco (35) del plano de inscripción que consta archivado en este Registro. Enclava edificación, valor de $4,500.00, según consta de la escritura #5, otorgada en Bayamón, el 10 de noviembre de 1954, ante el Notario Jose L. Feliu Pesquera, inscrito al folio 36 del tomo 162 de Bayamón Sur, finca #8,182 13ra. Consta inscrita al folio 35 del tomo 172 de Bayamón Sur finca número 8,182 del Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección Primera. La propiedad antes descrita afecta a un gravamen preferente que

se describe a continuación: BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO o a su orden: A cuyo favor aparece inscrito un Pagaré por la suma de $50,000.00, intereses al 8.75% anual y a vencer a su presentación, según consta de la escritura número 69, otorgada el día 5 de abril de 1994, ante la Notario Público Onofre Santiago Quiles. Inscrita al folio 264 del tomo 1385 de Bayamón Sur, finca número 8,182, Inscripción 14ta. El producto de la subasta se destinará a satisfacer al demandante hasta donde alcance, la SENTENCIA dictada a su favor, el día 28 de diciembre de 2020, en el presente caso civil, a saber, la suma de $24,143.38 al 4 de febrero de 2020, la cual se desglosa en $19,006.83 de principal, $1,524.75 de intereses, $62.00 de cargos por seguro de propiedad, costas, gastos y la suma de $3,550.00 por concepto de honorarios de abogado, según pactados equivalente al 10% del principal pagare, los cuales continúan aumentando a razón de $2.11 al día (“per diem”) hasta el pago total de la deuda. Los intereses se continúan acumulando a razón de $2.11 al día (“per diem”), hasta el saldo total de la deuda, para cubrir el principal adeudado, disponiéndose que si quedare algún remanente luego de pagarse las sumas antes mencionadas el mismo deberá ser depositado en la Secretaría del Tribunal para ser entregado a los demandados previa solicitud y orden del Tribunal. La venta de la referida propiedad se verificará libre de toda carga o gravamen que afecte la mencionada finca. La adjudicación se hará al mejor postor, quien deberá consignar el importe de su oferta en el acto mismo de la adjudicación, en efectivo (moneda del curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América), giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del alguacil del Tribunal. LA PRIMERA SUBASTA se llevará a efecto el 2 DE JUNIO DE 2021 A LAS 11:15 DE LA MAÑANA, en la oficina del referido Alguacil, localizada en el Centro Judicial de Bayamón, Piso 5, Sala 503, Bayamón, Puerto Rico.

Que el precio mínimo fijado para la PRIMERA SUBASTA es de $35,500.00.

Que de ser necesaria la celebración de una SEGUNDA SUBASTA, la misma se llevará a efecto el día el 9 DE JUNIO DE 2021 A LAS 11:15 DE LA MAÑANA, en la oficina del referido Alguacil, localizada en el Centro Judicial de Bayamón, Piso 5, Sala 503, Bayamón, Puerto Rico. El precio mínimo para la SEGUNDA SUBASTA será de $23,666.67, equivalentes a dos terceras (2/3) partes del tipo mínimo estipulado para la PRIMERA subasta. Que de ser necesaria la celebración de una TERCERA SUBASTA la misma se llevará a efecto el día el 16 DE JUNIO DE 2021 A LAS 11:15 DE LA MAÑANA, en

32 la oficina del referido Alguacil, localizada en el Centro Judicial de Bayamón, Piso 5, Sala 503, Bayamón, Puerto Rico. El precio mínimo para la TERCERA SUBASTA será de $17,750.00, equivalentes a la mitad (1/2) del tipo mínimo estipulado para la PRIMERA subasta. Si se declarase desierta la tercera subasta, se adjudicará la finca a favor del acreedor por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada si ésta es igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la tercera subasta, si el Tribunal lo estima conveniente; se abonará dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si esta es mayor, todo ello a tenor con lo dispone el Articulo 104 de la Ley Núm. 210 del 8 de diciembre de 2015 conocida como “Ley del Registro de la Propiedad Inmueble del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico”.

La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquiere libre de toda carga y gravamen que afecte la mencionada finca según el Artículo 102, inciso 6. Una vez confirmada la venta judicial por el Honorable Tribunal, se procederá a otorgar la correspondiente escritura de venta judicial y se pondrá al comprador en posesión física del inmueble de conformidad con las disposiciones de Ley. Para conocimiento de la parte demandada y de toda aquella persona o personas que tengan interés inscrito con posterioridad a la inscripción del gravamen que se está ejecutando, y para conocimiento de todos los licitadores y el público en general, el presente Edicto se publicará por espacio de dos (2) semanas consecutivas, con un intervalo de por lo menos siete días entre ambas publicaciones, en un diario de circulación general en el Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico y se fijará además en tres (3) lugares públicos del Municipio en que ha de celebrarse dicha venta, tales como la Alcaldía, el Tribunal y la Colecturía. Se les informa, por último, que: a.

Que los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado estarán de manifiesto en la secretaría del tribunal durante las horas laborables. b. Que se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante continuarán subsistentes.

Se entenderá, que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate.

EXPIDO, el presente EDICTO, en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, hoy día 29 de marzo de 2021. JOSE F MARRERO ROBLES #131, Alguacil Auxiliar, División de Subastas, Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Bayamón.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO

DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA MUNICIPAL DE HORMIGUEROS EN CABO ROJO

COOPERATIVA DE AHORRO Y CRÉDITO DE CABO ROJO Parte Demandante Vs.

ISABEL COLÓN RIVERA

Parte Demandada Civil Núm.: HO2020CV00061.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO (REGLA 60). EDICTO.

A: ISABEL COLÓN RIVERA.

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva a la Demanda que se acompaña con este Emplazamiento, dentro de los treinta (30) días de haber sido diligenciado este Emplazamiento, excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento, notificando copia de la misma al abogado (a) de la parte Demandante o a ésta, de no tener representación legal. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), el cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial. pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

VAZQUEZ & ASSOCIATES LAW OFFICES F:/LCDO. ROSA LINDA VAZQUEZ LOPEZ RUA 17843 379 Calle Cesar González Hato Rey, San Juan, PR 00918 Tel (787) 766-0949 / Fax (787) 771-2425 Email: vazquezyasociadospr@gmail.com Se le apercibe que de no hacerlo, se podrá dictar Sentencia en rebeldía concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda, sin citarle ni oírle más. EXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA Y EL SELLO DEL TRIBUNAL, en Caguas, Puerto Rico, hoy día 29 de marzo de 2021. CARMEN ANA PEREIRA ORTIZ, SECRETARIA DEL TRIBUNAL. CARMEN M. VÁZQUEZ TORRES, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

Se le apercibe que la parte demandante por mediación del Lcdo. Rafael Fabre Colón, P.O. Box 277, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico 00681, Tel. 787-265-0334, ha radicado la acción de epígrafe en su contra. Copia de la demanda, emplazamientos y del presente edicto le ha sido enviado por correo a la última dirección conocida. Pueden ustedes obtener mayor información sobre el asunto revisando los autos en el Tribunal. Se le apercibe que tiene usted un término de treinta (30) días para radicar contestación a dicha demanda de cobro de dinero y/o cualquier escrito que estime usted conveniente a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal de epígrafe, pero que de no radicarse escrito alguno ante el Tribunal dentro de dicho término el Tribunal procederá a ventilar el procedimiento sin más citarle ni oírle. Dada en cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, hoy 5 de abril de 2021.

LIC. NORMA G. SANTANA IRIZARRY, SECRETARIA GENERAL, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA MUNICIPAL DE CABO ROJO. FDO. MARÍA M. AVILÉS BONILLA, SECRELEGAL NOTICE TARIA AUXILIAR. ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBULEGAL NOTICE NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO SALA SUPERIOR DE CARODE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- LINA NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA BANCO POPULAR DE CENTRO JUDICIAL DE CAPUERTO RICO GUAS Parte Demandante Vs.

AIDA LUZ NEGRON TRINIDAD Demandante Vs

VÍCTOR M. NEGRON RIVERA

Demandado Civil Núm.: EDI2013-0601.

Salón: 609. Sobre: DIVORCIO (RUPTURA IRREPARABLE).

EMPL AZAMIENTO POR EDICTO DEL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: VÍCTOR M. NEGRON RIVERA. URB. VENUS GARDENS, M-27, CALLE PISCIS, SAN JUAN, PR 00926.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

LA SUCESIÓN DE FRANK RIVERA SANABRIA T/C/C FRANK RIVERA COMPUESTA POR JOEL RIVERA, JONATHAN RIVERA y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLE HEREDERO DESCONOCIDO; ZULMA VÁZQUEZ NEGRÓN T/C/C ZULMA VÁZQUEZ POR SÍ Y EN LA CUOTA VIUDAL USUFRUCTUARIA; DEPARTAMENTO DE HACIENDA POR

CONDUCTO DE LA DIVISIÓN DE CAUDALES RELICTOS; CENTRO DE RECAUDACIÓN DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (CRIM)

Parte Demandada Civil Núm.: CA2019CV02086.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO, EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO E INTERPELACIÓN. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS E.E.U.U., EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: JOEL RIVERA, HEREDERO DE FRANK RIVERA SANABRIA t/c/c FRANK RIVERA a sus últimas direcciones conocidas: VILLA FONTANA, TL2 VÍA 22, CAROLINA, PR 009833950, 3670 SE 1ST CT, HOMESTEAD, FL 33033-7455, y a 10030 ROSELUNNA DR. APT. 31, BELLFLOWER CA 90706.

Queda usted notificado que en este Tribunal se ha radicado demanda sobre ejecución de hipoteca por la vía ordinaria en la que se alega se adeuda las siguientes cantidades: $75,208.13 de principal, intereses sobre dicha suma al 6.875% anual desde el 1 de enero de 2018 hasta su completo pago, más $158.00 de recargos acumulados, más la cantidad estipulada de $9,680.00 para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogados, así como cualquier otra suma que contenga el contrato de préstamo. La propiedad que garantiza hipotecariamente el préstamo es la siguiente: URBANA: Solar localizado en la Urbanización Villa Fontana, situada en el Barrio Sabana Abajo del término municipal de Carolina, marcado en el número 2 de la manzana TL, en un área de 279.30 metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE: con el solar número 1 distancia de 32.00 metros; por el SUR: en el solar número 3 distancia de 21.00 metros; por el ESTE: con la calle número 2 distancia de 13.30 metros; y por el OESTE: con un paseo distancia de 13.30 metros.

Enclava una casa de concreto para una familia. La propiedad consta inscrita al folio 41 del tomo 176 de Carolina, Finca 6258. Registro de la Propiedad de Carolina, Sección I. La escritura de hipoteca y su modificación constan inscritas al folio 186 del tomo 948 de Carolina, Finca 6258. Registro de la Propiedad de Carolina, Sección I. Inscripción novena y décima.

La demandante es la tenedora por endoso, por valor recibido y de buena fe del referido pagaré objeto de la presente acción.

Se interpela a los demandados

para que acepten o renuncien a la herencia de la causante dentro de los 30 días subsiguientes a la fecha que fuesen emplazados o requeridos que contesten, para darle cumplimiento al Artículo 1578 del Código Civil entendiéndose que, si no se expresan dentro de dicho término, aceptan el caudal relicto; la renuncia se hará por instrumento público o por escrito judicial. La parte demandada deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Administración y Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal. Se le advierte que si no contesta la demanda, radicando el original de la contestación en este Tribunal y enviando copia de la contestación a la abogada de la parte demandante, Lcda. Belma Alonso García, cuya dirección es: PO Box 3922, Guaynabo PR 00970-3922, Teléfonos: (787) 789-1826 y (787) 708-0566, correo electrónico: oficinabelmaalonso@gmail.com, dentro del término de treinta (30) días de la publicación de este edicto, excluyéndose el día de la publicación, se le anotará la rebeldía y se le dictará Sentencia en su contra, concediendo el remedio solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y el sello del Tribunal, hoy 5 de abril de 2021 en Carolina, Puerto Rico. LCDA. MARILYN APONTE RODRÍGUEZ, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. ROSA M. VIERA VELÁZQUEZ, SUBSECRETARIA.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN.

MR LOIZA, LLC; Demandante v.

FATMEN GROUP,LLC,

Demandado Civil Núm. SJ2020CV04206.

Demandante, DESAHUCIO SUMARIO Y COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: Fatmen Group, LLC PMB 371, 1353 RD, 19 Guaynabo, Puerto Rico 00966.

POR MEDIO del presente edicto se le notifica de la Demanda presentada en su contra. Se le emplaza y requiere que presente, dentro del término de treinta (30) días de la publicación de este edicto, su alegación responsiva a la Demanda a través de Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos

(SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaria del Tribunal. Copia de la alegación responsiva deberá notificarse a los abogados de la demandante Mr. Loíza, LLC: Ferraiuoli LLC P.O. Box 195168 San Juan, PR 00919-5168 Tel: 787-766-7000 Lcda. Elizabeth Villagrasa-Flores RUA Núm. 16,877 Email: evillagrasa@ferraiuoli.com Se le apercibe y notifica que, si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva a la Demanda dentro del referid o término el Tribunal podrá anotarle la rebeldía en su contra y dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra, concediendo los remedios solicitados en la Demanda, o cualquier otro, si el Tribunal en el ejercicio de su sana discreción lo entiende procedente, sin más citarle ni oírle. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 31 de marzo de 2021. GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, Secretaria. DE LA PAZ ORTIZ, EDITH M., SubSecretario.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Parte Demandante Vs.

EL SECRETARIO DE LA VIVIENDA Y DESARROLLO URBANO T/C/C SECRETARY OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT OF WASHINGTON (HUD) POR SِÍ Y EN REPRESENTACIÓN DE ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA; DORAL FINANCIAL CORPORATION; FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION (FDIC) COMO SÍNDICO DE DORAL BANK; DORAL MORTGAGE CORPORATION T/C/C DORAL MORTGAGE, LLC.; PREFERRED MORTGAGE CORPORATION; JEFFREY PARRILLA VEGA T/C/C JEFFRY PARRILLA VEGA, JAYZSA JANITZA ROSARIO AGOSTINI T/C/C YAYZSA JANITZA ROSARIO AGOSTINI Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES

COMPUESTA POR AMBOS; FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ

Parte Demandada Civil Núm.: BY2021CV00657.

(502). Sobre: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO POR LA VÍA JUDICIAL. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS E.E.U.U., EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: JEFFREY PARRILLA VEGA T/C/C JEFFRY PARRILLA VEGA, JAYZSA JANITZA ROSARIO AGOSTINI T/C/C YAYZSA JANITZA ROSARIO AGOSTINI Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS a sus últimas direcciones conocidas: URB RIO HONDO 2, AD10 CALLE RIO GUADIANA, BAYAMÓN, PR 009613217, URB REPTO VALENCIA, AC7 CALLE 5, BAYAMÓN PR 00959-3718 y 9138 BELL ROCK PL, LAND O LAKES FL 346382604.

FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ.

Queda usted notificado que en este Tribunal se ha radicado demanda sobre cancelación de pagaré extraviado por la vía judicial. El 27 de julio de 2002, Jeffrey Parrilla Vega t/c/c Jeffry Parrilla Vega y su esposa Jayzsa Janitza Rosario Agostini t/c/c Yayzsa Janitza Rosario Agostini, se acogieron a la alternativa de “Partial Claim”. Dicho beneficio, el cual se ofrece a los préstamos asegurados por la Administración de Vivienda Federal (FHA por sus siglas en inglés), consiste en la reinstalación del préstamo hipotecario, difiriendo los pagos en atraso a través de una hipoteca subordinada, sin intereses. Esta hipoteca subordinada fue constituida San Juan, Puerto Rico, mediante la Escritura núm. 558 autorizada por el notario Luis Fernando Castillo Cruz en garantía de un pagaré por la suma de $5,232.64, suscrito bajo testimonio número 3,032, a favor de Secretario del Departamento de Desarrollo Urbano Urbano y Vivienda de los Estados Unidos t/c/c Secretary Of Housing And Urban Development, sin intereses y vencimiento al 1ro de abril de 2030 sobre la siguiente propiedad: URBANA: Parcela de terreno en la Urbanización

Estancias de Río Hondo, segunda Unidad de Planificación, localizada en el Barrio Hato Tejas del término municipal de Bayamón, Puerto Rico, que se describe con el número, área y colindancias que se relacionan a continuación: solar número 10 del bloque AD con un área de 406.284. En lindes por el NORTE, en 23 metros con el solar número 11; por el SUR, en 25 metros 896 milímetros con el solar número 9; por el ESTE, en 21 metros 9 milímetros con los solares número 21, 22 y 23 y por el OESTE, en 2 metros 218 milímetros y un arco de 11 metros 166 milímetros con la calle Río Guadiana.

Contiene una casa de concreto para una familia. La propiedad consta inscrita al folio 2 del tomo 7 de Bayamón Norte, Finca 181 (antes 49,576). Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección III. La escritura de hipoteca consta inscrita al Tomo Karibe de Bayamón Norte, Finca 181 (antes 49,576). Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección III. Inscripción undécima. La parte demandada deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Administración y Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal. Se le advierte que, si no contesta la demanda, radicando el original de la contestación en este Tribunal y enviando copia de la contestación a la abogada de la Parte Demandante, Lcda. Belma Alonso García, cuya dirección es: PO Box 3922, Guaynabo, PR 00970-3922, Teléfono y Fax: (787) 789-1826, correo electrónico: oficinabelmaalonso@gmail.com, dentro del término de treinta (30) días de la publicación de este edicto, excluyéndose el día de la publicación, se le anotará la rebeldía y se le dictará Sentencia en su contra, concediendo el remedio solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y el sello del Tribunal, hoy 5 de abril de 2021, en Bayamón, Puerto Rico. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SáNCHEZ, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. YARILIZ CINTRÓN COLÓN, SUB-SECRETARIA.

LEGAL NOT ICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE SALINAS

FIRST BANIK PUERTO RICO Demandante V.

LA SUCESION DE MARTA DE JESUS GIRAUD COMPUESTA POR TOMASSA DE

The San Juan Daily Star

JESÚS, JOHN DOE Y AVISO DE VENTA EN PÚBLIRICHARD ROE COMO CA SUBASTA. A: GLENDA LIZ POSIBLES HEREDEROS NIEVES CAMACHO; DESCONOCIDOS AUTORIDAD PARA EL DE MARTA DE FINANCIAMIENTO DE LA JESÚS GIRAUD, VIVIENDA EN PUERTO ADMINISTRACION RICO: Y AL PUBLICO EN PARA EL SUSTENTO GENERAL: DE MENORES, CENTRO El que suscribe, Alguacil del DE RECAUDACION DE Tribunal de Primera Instancia, INGRESOS MUNICIPALES Sala Superior, Centro Judicial

Demandado(a) Civil Núm.: GM2019CV00408.

Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA Y COBRO DE DINERO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: TOMASSA DE JESUS COMO PARTE DE LA SUCESIÓN DE MARTA DE JESÚS GIRAUD, JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESIÓN DE MARTA DE JESÚS GIRAUD.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia par edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 26 de marzo de 2021, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 05 de abril de 2021. En Salinas, Puerto Rico, el 05 de abril de 2021. MARISOL ROSADO RODRÍGUEZ, SECRETARIA. BRENDA L. RAMOS POMALES, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE ARECIBO

CONDADO 3 LLC Demandante V.

GLENDA LIZ NIEVES CAMACHO

Demandada Civil Núm.: AR2019CV01335.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE PRENDA.

de Arecibo, Arecibo, - {243 Pueblo}Puerto Rico, hago saber a la parte demandada, y al PUBLICO EN GENERAL: y a todos los acreedores que tengan inscritos o anotados sus derechos sobre los bienes hipotecados con posterioridad a la inscripción del crédito del ejecutante, o de los acreedores de cargas o derechos reales que los hubiesen pospuesto a la hipoteca ejecutada y las personas interesadas en, o con derecho a exigir el cumplimiento de instrumentos negociables garantizados hipotecariamente con posterioridad al crédito ejecutado, siempre que surjan de la certificación registral, para que puedan concurrir a la subasta si les convenga o satisfacer antes del remate el importe del crédito, de sus intereses, costas y honorarios de abogados asegurados, quedando entonces subrogados en los derechos del acreedor ejecutante a saber: AUTORIDAD PARA EL FINANCIAMIENTO DE LA VIVIENDA DE PUERTO RICO O A SU ORDEN: A cuyo favor aparece inscrito un Pagaré por la suma de $15,000.00, sin intereses y a vencer el 1 de junio de 2011, según consta de la escritura #508, otorgada en San Juan, el 28 de mayo de 2003, ante el Notario Pedro Mario Rivera Matos, inscrito al folio 171 vuelto del tomo 1063 de Arecibo, finca #17,497, inscripción 12da. Que en cumplimiento del Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia expedido el día 24 de febrero de 2021, por la Secretaria del Tribunal, procederé a vender y venderé en pública subasta y al mejor postor la propiedad que se describe a continuación: Urbanización Arecibo Gardens, C-2 Calle C, Arecibo, P.R. 00612: URBANA: Solar marcado con el número dos del bloque “C” de la Urbanización Arecibo Gardens, localizado en el barrio Tanama del término municipal de Arecibo, con un área de cuatrocientos noventa y nueve metros con veintisiete centésimas de metro cuadrado, en lindes por el NORTE, en treinta y seis metros con seis centímetros con los solares tres y cuatro del mismo bloque, por el SUR, en treinta metros cincuenta y un centímetros con el solar número uno del mismo bloque; por el ESTE, en quince metros con la calle ‘C’ y por el OESTE, en dieciséis metros con terrenos pertenecientes al Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico. So-

Tuesday, April 20, 2021 bre este solar enclava una casa construida de concreto armado y bloques para fines residenciales. Consta inscrita al folio 101 del tomo 437 de Arecibo, finca número 17,497, Registro de la Propiedad Sección Primera de Arecibo. El producto de la subasta se destinará a satisfacer al demandante hasta donde alcance, la SENTENCIA dictada a su favor, el día 9 de diciembre de 2020, en el presente caso civil, a saber, un balance insoluto de $44,478.73 al 8 de enero de 2020, el cual se desglosa en $33,494.71 de principal; $4,632.67 de intereses, los cuales continúan acumulándose a razón de $6.05 al día (“per diem”) hasta el pago total de la deuda: $236.88 de cargos por atraso: $248.45 de deficiencia en la cuenta plica (“escrow”); $274.00 de cargos por seguro de propiedad; $1,131.72 de cargos por impuestos sobre la propiedad (CRIM), más costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado ascendentes al 10% del principal del pagare o la suma de $4,460.00. Los intereses se continúan acumulando, hasta el saldo total de la deuda, para cubrir el principal adeudado, disponiéndose que si quedare algún remanente luego de pagarse las sumas antes mencionadas el mismo deberá ser depositado en la Secretaría del Tribunal para ser entregado a los demandados previa solicitud y orden del Tribunal. La venta de la referida propiedad se verificará libre de toda carga o gravamen que afecte la mencionada finca. La adjudicación se hará al mejor postor, quien deberá consignar el importe de su oferta en el acto mismo de la adjudicación, en efectivo (moneda del curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América), giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del alguacil del Tribunal. LA PRIMERA SUBASTA se llevará a efecto el 1RO DE JUNIO DE 2021 A LAS 10:30 DE LA MAÑANA, en la oficina del referido Alguacil, localizada en el Centro Judicial de Arecibo, Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Que el precio mínimo fijado para la PRIMERA SUBASTA es de $44,600.00. Que de ser necesaria la celebración de una SEGUNDA SUBASTA, la misma se llevará a efecto el día el 8 DE JUNIO DE 2021 A LAS 10:30 DE LA MAÑANA, en la oficina antes mencionada del Alguacil que suscribe. El precio mínimo para la SEGUNDA SUBASTA será de $29,733.34, equivalentes a dos terceras (2/3) partes del tipo mínimo estipulado para la PRIMERA subasta. Que de ser necesaria la celebración de una TERCERA SUBASTA la misma se llevará a efecto el día el 15 DE JUNIO DE 2021 A LAS 10:30 DE LA MAÑANA, en la oficina antes mencionada del Alguacil que suscribe. El precio mínimo para la TERCERA SUBASTA será de $22,300.00, equivalentes a la mitad (1/2) del tipo mínimo estipulado para

la PRIMERA subasta. Si se declarase desierta la tercera subasta, se adjudicará la finca a favor del acreedor por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada si ésta es igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la tercera subasta, si el Tribunal lo estima conveniente; se abonará dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si esta es mayor, todo ello a tenor con lo dispone el Articulo 104 de la Ley Núm. 210 del 8 de diciembre de 2015 conocida como “Ley del Registro de la Propiedad Inmueble del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico”.

La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquiere libre de toda carga y gravamen que afecte la mencionada finca según el Artículo 102, inciso 6. Una vez confirmada la venta judicial por el Honorable Tribunal, se procederá a otorgar la correspondiente escritura de venta judicial y se pondrá al comprador en posesión física del inmueble de conformidad con las disposiciones de Ley. Para conocimiento de la parte demandada y de toda aquella persona o personas que tengan interés inscrito con posterioridad a la inscripción del gravamen que se está ejecutando, y para conocimiento de todos los licitadores y el público en general, el presente Edicto se publicará por espacio de dos (2) semanas consecutivas, con un intervalo de por lo menos siete días entre ambas publicaciones, en un diario de circulación general en el Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico y se fijará además en tres (3) lugares públicos del Municipio en que ha de celebrarse dicha venta, tales como la Alcaldía, el Tribunal y la Colecturía. Se les informa, por último, que: a. Que los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado estarán de manifiesto en la secretaría del tribunal durante las horas laborables. b. Que se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante continuarán subsistentes. Se entenderá, que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate.

EXPIDO, el presente EDICTO, en Arecibo, Puerto Rico, hoy día 16 de marzo de 2021. ÁNGEL DE J. TORRES PÉREZ, ALGUACIL #770, DIVISIÓN DE SUBASTAS, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE ARECIBO.

SERRANO VIERA

Parte Demandada Civil Núm.: MZ2019CV00191.

Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA Y COBRO DE DINERO. ANUNCIO DE SUBASTA. El suscribiente, Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia de Puerto Rico, Sala de Mayagüez, a los demandados de epígrafe y al público en general hace saber que los autos y documentos del caso de epígrafe estarán de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal durante horas laborables y que venderá en pública subasta al mejor postor, en moneda de curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América en efectivo, cheque certificado, o giro postal a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, en mi oficina en este Tribunal el derecho que tenga la parte demandada en el inmueble que se relaciona más adelante para pagar la SENTENCIA por $112,325.21 de balance principal, el cual se compone de la suma de $107,169.81 de primer principal y la suma de $5,155.40 de balance de principal diferido; más los intereses adeudados sobre dicho principal y computados al 5.50% anual desde el primero de junio de 2018, hasta su total pago y completo pago; más el 5% computado sobre cada mensualidad de principal e interés por la suma de $622.74 por concepto de cargos por demora devengados desde el primero de julio de 2028, a razón de $31.14 mensuales hasta su total pago; más la suma de $11,114.00 como cantidad estipulada para honorarios de abogado, pactada en la escritura de hipoteca; y cuales quiera otras sumas que por cualesquiera concepto legal se devenguen hasta el día de la subasta. La propiedad a venderse en pública subasta se describe como sigue: RÚSTICA: Porción de terreno radicado en el Barrio Borinquén del término municipal de Cabo Rojo, de una extensión superficial de mil diez punto seiscientos ochenta y nueve metros cuadrados (1010.689). Colinda por el Norte, con el solar “A”, en cuarenta y seis punto veintiséis metros (46.26), por el Sur, con terrenos de Jaime L. Rodríguez, en cuarenta y seis punto sesenta y nueve metros (46.69), por el Este, con terrenos de José Fas, en veintiuno punto setenta y seis metros (21.76) y por el Oeste, con la calle de uso público, en veintiuno punto setenta y cinco metros (21.75). Es el remanente de esta finca según LEGAL NOTICE escritura número veintisiete ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO (27), otorgada en Cabo Rojo, el DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- cinco (5) de febrero de mil noNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA vecientos ochenta y dos (1982), ante el Notario Rafael Doitteau, SALA DE MAYAGÜEZ al margen de la inscripción FIRSTBANK tercera. Enclava casa según PUERTO RICO inscripción quinta (5ta). Inscrita Parte Demandante Vs. al folio doscientos ochenta y ROSA ELENA dos (282) del tomo trescientos

33

veintiséis (326) de Cabo Rojo, finca numero diez mil ochocientos setenta (10870), Registro de San Germán. Dirección Física: Apt. 101, Chalets de las Palmas, Humacao PR 00791.

La PRIMERA SUBASTA se llevará a cabo el día 2 DE JUNIO DE 2021, A LAS 10:30 DE LA MAÑANA, y servirá de tipo mínimo para la misma la suma de $109,678.23 sin admitirse oferta inferior. En el caso de que el inmueble a ser subastado no fuera adjudicado en la primera subasta, se celebrará una SEGUNDA SUBASTA el día 9 DE JUNIO DE 2021 A LAS 10:30 DE LA MAÑANA y el precio mínimo para esta segunda subasta será el de dos terceras partes del precio mínimo establecido para la primera subasta, o a sea la suma de $73,118.82. Si tampoco hubiera remate ni adjudicación en la segunda subasta, se celebrará una TERCERA SUBASTA el día 16 DE JUNIO DE 2021, A LAS 10:30 DE LA MAÑANA y el tipo mínimo para esta tercera subasta será la mitad del precio establecido para la primera subasta, o sea, la suma de $54,839.12. El mejor postor deberá pagar el importe de su oferta en efecto, cheque certificado o giro postal a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal. Si se declarase desierta la tercera subasta, se dará por terminado el procedimiento, pudiendo adjudicarse el inmueble al acreedor hipotecario dentro de los diez días siguientes a la fecha de la última subasta, si así lo estimase conveniente, por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada conforme a la sentencia, si ésta fuera igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la tercera subasta y abonándose dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si ésta fuera mayor. Se avisa a cualquier licitador que la propiedad queda sujeta al gravamen del Estado Libre Asociado y CRIM sobre la propiedad inmueble por contribuciones adeudadas y que el pago de dichas contribuciones es la responsabilidad del licitador. Que se entenderá por todo licitador acepte como suficiente la titulación y que los cargos y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes al crédito del ejecutante continuarán subsistentes en entendiéndose que el rematador los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse su extinción al precio rematante. Todos los nombres de los acreedores que tengan inscritos o anotados sus derechos sobre los bienes hipotecados con posterioridad a la inscripción del crédito del ejecutante, o de los acreedores de cargas o derechos reales que los hubiesen pospuesto a la hipoteca ejecutada y las personas interesadas en, o con derecho a exigir el cumplimiento de instrumentos negociables garantizados hipotecariamente con posterioridad al crédito ejecutado, siempre que surgen

de la certificación registral, para que puedan concurrir a la subasta si les convenga o satisfacer antes del remate el importe del crédito, de sus intereses, costas y honorarios de abogados asegurados, quedando entonces subrogados en los derechos del acreedor ejecutante. La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores. Y para conocimiento de licitadores, del público en general y para su publicación en un periódico de circulación general diaria en Puerto Rico y en los sitios públicos de acuerdo a las disposiciones de la Regla 51.7 de las de Procedimiento Civil, así como para la publicación en un periódico de circulación general diaria y en el Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, por espacio de dos semanas con antelación a la fecha de la primera subasta y por lo menos una vez por semana. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento indicado estarán de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal durante las horas laborables.

(Art. 102 (1) de la Ley núm.

210-2015). Expedido el presente en Mayagüez, Puerto Rico a 19 de marzo de 2021. CALIXTO RIVERA GHIGLIOTTY, ALGUACIL #283 DEL TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA DE MAYAGÜEZ.

circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 14 de abril de 2021. En Caguas, Puerto Rico, el 14 de abril de 2021. CARMEN ANA PEREIRA ORTIZ, SECRETARIA. SANDRA J. TRINIDAD CAÑUELAS, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN

DLJ MORTGAGE CAPITAL, INC Demandante V.

NIURCA TORRES FIGUEROA

Demandado(a) Civil: BY2019CV06218. 702.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO LEGAL NOTICE Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. NODE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL TIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA GENERAL DE JUSTICIA SALA POR EDICTO. MUNICIPAL DE CAGUAS

GRAN VISTA 2 HOMEOWNERS ASSOCIATION, INC. Demandante Vs.

SAMAR SOTO SERRANO, LLOYD P. MERCADO RODRIGUEZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandados Caso Núm.: GR2020CV00193.

Sobre: COBRO DINERO - REGLA 60. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: SAMAR SOTO SERRANO, LLOYD P. MERCADO RODRIGUEZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTAS POR AMBOS.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se les notifica la sentencia por edicto): EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 13 de marzo de 2021, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de

A: NIURCA TORRES FIGUEROA.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 15 de abril de 2021, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 15 de abril de 2021. En BAYAMÓN, Puerto Rico, el 15 de abril de 2021. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA. ELIBETH M. TORRES ALICEA, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Why the worst NBA player is (probably) still better than you

By SOPAN DEB

O

ut of the millions of people around the world who play basketball, fewer than 500 are in the NBA at any given time. Fewer than 150 are in the WNBA. Before retiring in 2012, Brian Scalabrine spent 11 seasons in the NBA, far more than the majority of players who have made it to that level. He won a championship as a reserve for the Boston Celtics in 2008. He is 6-foot-9 and roughly 250 pounds.

Yet strangers cannot seem to stop challenging Scalabrine to one-on-one games.

Last month, a video that went viral showed Scalabrine being challenged at a gym by an overeager high schooler in Taunton, Massachusetts. Scalabrine, playing the teenager for a pair of sneakers, beat him, 11-0.

Scalabrine, who averaged 3.1 points a game for his career, said this happened to him regularly, and conversations with other unheralded former players revealed that it was the same for them. By his own account, Scalabrine, 43, looked “pudgy on television compared to some of the best athletes in the world” and was not known as much of a rebounder or scorer.

But even so, Scalabrine survived in the league by developing a reputation for rarely making mistakes, being versatile on defense and shooting the 3.

“Being a white NBA player from the suburbs, I have to level up,” said Scalabrine, who is from Long Beach, California, and was often referred to as the White Mamba, a play on Kobe Bryant’s Black Mamba nickname.

“People don’t understand how a little bit nuts you have to be to sustain an NBA career,” Scalabrine said. “Especially when you’re not that talented. You have to be ready. You have to be up for the fight. You have to be like that every day. And if you’re not, you lose your livelihood.”

Scalabrine has, to some degree, invited the challenges. Shortly after retiring, he took part in a Boston radio station’s “Scallenges” promotion in which top local players played him one-on-one. Scalabrine won every game by a large margin.

Of course, even the top players in the NBA are challenged, often at youth camps they run. Those clips go viral as well, with the stars gleefully blocking shots of children and teenagers several feet shorter

Brian Scalabrine, a retired N.B.A. player, said professional athletes have another gear that amateurs can’t match. than them. Rarely, the challenger will win, as in 2003, when John Rogers, who was then the 45-year-old chief executive of an investment firm, beat the recently retired Michael Jordan in a game of one-on-one at Jordan’s camp after Jordan had beaten 20 other people in a row.

But for players who aren’t, or weren’t, the face of a franchise, they are challenged in a different way, as Michael Sweetney can attest. The former New York Knick, who played in the NBA for four seasons from 2003-07, said that he was challenged “all the time.” In fact, Sweetney, 38, said it happened just a few weeks ago by two former high school basketball players who happened to be at a gym in Florida where he was working out with children at a basketball camp.

“I guess they were thinking that since I was far removed and retired that, ‘Hey, I can probably challenge him,’” said Sweetney, who averaged 6.5 points a game in 233 games. “It was funny because they tried to catch me off guard.”

Sweetney added: “I was like: ‘I’m just letting you know, I’m not going to take it easy. You challenge me, it’s going to be competitive. It ended up being a situation like Scalabrine. I beat one like 11-2, and the other one was like 11-1.”

The two challengers were surprised, said Sweetney, who is now an assistant at Yeshiva University. It was another reminder: When a player makes the NBA, no matter for how long, he is, in that moment,

one of the 500 best basketball players in the world.

“Yes, I’m removed,” Sweetney said.

“I’m probably not in NBA shape. But you still have talent and people just think if you’re not a superstar, they might have a chance against you.

“They don’t know that even the 15th guy on the bench is better than the average person walking down the street.”

Scalabrine, who is a television analyst for the Celtics, has taken pleasure in reminding the public of that. End-of-thebench NBA players may even have to work harder than stars to stay in the league, because one missed assignment could be the difference between having a job or not.

“I can go into any gym right now and I can find some of the best players going through the motions sometimes,” Scalabrine said. “Can you imagine 15 straight years? Maybe even more like 17, 18, straight years of never going through the motions?”

He said professional athletes, even retired ones, had an extra gear that an average person could not tap into. He referred to it as the “dark place.”

“I would always say things, like in a game, ‘If I miss this next shot, my kids are going to die,’” Scalabrine said. “I would say that to myself, just to get through, just to put the pressure so I can lock in and make the shot.”

Many WNBA teams bring in nonprofessional men to play against in practice, which Cheyenne Parker, a 28-year-old for-

ward for the Atlanta Dream entering her seventh season, diplomatically described as “great competition” because “they are strong and fast.”

She added, with a laugh: “But skillwise? Yeah.”

Parker said she is challenged often — “especially being a tall woman.” She was playing pickup in Chicago, where she lives, last month when a cocky man started trash-talking her.

“We start the game, and I get my first chance to touch the ball. I like to work on my moves during pickup so I do this nice little Kyrie move. I juked him real bad,” Parker said, referring to Kyrie Irving, the Brooklyn Nets star known for his ball-handling skills. “I scored it in his face. Everybody went, ‘Ohhh!’ It was funny.”

Adonal Foyle, who played in the NBA from 1997 to 2009, mostly as a reserve for Golden State, said that he had faced similar challenges in retirement when he went home to the Caribbean. Basketball players are more likely to be challenged than other athletes, Foyle said, because they are more visible. They do not wear masks while playing, and fans can sit courtside. But there is also a misconception among amateurs that athleticism keeps players in the league, he said.

“Basketball players at the end of their career are like Chinese movies,” Foyle, 46, said. “You have this Silver Fox. He walks in and he looks like he’s the one from the grave. And then he starts doing karate. And you’re like: ‘Oh my goodness. I didn’t know he could do all that.’”

What Scalabrine referred to as “the dark place,” Foyle calls “the stupid gene” — the switch that professional athletes have when their competitiveness is tested.

“You go to the gym. You try to play with regular folks. You’re having a good time,” Foyle said. “Somebody tries to dunk over you. Immediately, you flip that switch of, ‘OK, you’re going down.’ To me, what I always worry about is not beating the other person. It is how much my body can take of this stupid gene.”

For Scalabrine, the reason his skills are continually questioned goes beyond the confidence of the challengers.

“Joakim Noah said it best,” Scalabrine said, referring to his former teammate on the Chicago Bulls. “He said, ‘Scal, you look like you suck, but you don’t suck.’”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

35

College players graduating to the NHL have a chance for longer test run

By GARY SANTANIELLO

E

ach spring as college hockey seasons conclude, several top players — highly drafted underclassmen and free agents, for the most part — quickly progress to the pros. But there is a bonus for those players this year.

Because the NHL season did not start until January, and was extended to May 19 to accommodate games postponed and rescheduled because of the coronavirus pandemic, college signees will arrive with more games left in the NHL regular season than usual, giving them six additional weeks to acclimate themselves to the pros. With more games to evaluate players, burning the first year of an entry-level contract becomes less fraught for teams.

Some players are initially assigned to American Hockey League affiliates, depending on whether their NHL team is in rebuilding mode with plentiful ice time available, or is chasing a playoff spot.

Another complicating factor this year was that the NHL trade deadline, normally in late February, was pushed back to April 12. Trade acquisitions have affected ice time — positively and negatively — for recent collegians.

Philadelphia Flyers general manager Chuck Fletcher signed Michigan sophomore defenseman Cam York, the No. 14 overall pick in the 2019 draft, on March 31, five days after the Wolverines had to withdraw from the NCAA tournament because of positive coronavirus tests.

With the Flyers trying to remain in playoff contention, they sent York to their AHL affiliate, Lehigh Valley, which had about 20 games remaining when York signed.

“Normally, when these kids sign out of college, they might get a handful of regular-season games prior to the summer break,” Fletcher said, adding “It’s an opportunity for him to really get some games, get some experience.”

The most recent college signees to make their NHL debuts were Ottawa’s Shane Pinto and Jacob BernardDocker, who signed entry-level contracts shortly after North Dakota lost the NCAA Midwest Regional final on March 27. After completing their required seven-day quarantine periods, they had their first practice with their new teammates Tuesday. Bernard-Docker made his debut Wednesday, and Pinto, the No. 32 pick in 2019, played his first game in Montreal on Saturday and had an assist.

“It’ll be good for me to get some experience,” Pinto said, “and then I’ll have a whole summer to figure out what to get better at.”

Montrealers will have to wait for the rookie they most want to see: Cole Caufield, who capped his two years at Wisconsin by winning the 2021 Hobey Baker Award, given to the best player in men’s college hockey.

Caufield, 20, who led Division I in goals (32) and points (52), signed the day after his Badgers were eliminated in the NCAA tournament. Although the Canadiens were in need of scoring help — they held the final playoff spot in the North Division entering Sunday — they as-

Matt Kiersted, right, played his first game with the Panthers two days after signing out of the University of North Dakota. He has played five games for Florida, which has 11 regular-season games remaining. signed him to their AHL affiliate, the Laval Rocket. In his first two games, he scored three goals, two of them winners, earning the moniker Goal Caufield.

Montreal called up Caufield on Friday, but he was placed on the taxi squad. Caufield can practice, but his only way into the lineup will require the Canadiens clearing cap space or a player being injured.

A return to Laval would not be the worst thing for Caufield. In the estimation of Bill Guerin, the Minnesota Wild general manager, there are several benefits to starting a pro career in the minors, which he did for parts of two seasons for Utica in the AHL, before playing 18 years in the NHL. “The teammates that I had helped me develop, learn how to be a good teammate and how to act like a professional and carry yourself,” Guerin said.

Guerin himself signed a player out of college last month — 20-year-old Boston College sophomore Matt Boldy — and sent him to the Wild’s AHL team in Iowa.

“As soon as Matt’s ready and proves himself at Iowa, we’ll take the next step,” Guerin said. “He’s a very important piece of our puzzle. We’re going to do the things that are right for his development so that when he gets here, he can help us win.”

Unlike Boldy, former North Dakota defenseman Matt Kiersted immediately jumped to the NHL and quickly saw the difference. Kiersted made his pro debut April 3, two days after signing with Florida, joining a team in a threeway battle with Tampa Bay and Carolina for first place in the Central Division.

“The faster play is what stood out for me,” Kiersted said after the Panthers’ home victory against Columbus on April 3. “Things happen quicker, guys are better at making plays, and it’s a little tougher to defend.”

After the Frozen Four, defenseman Zac Jones of national champion Massachusetts was among those who signed pro contracts. Jones joined the New York Rangers last Thursday, but coach David Quinn has yet to play him.

In his sophomore season at UMass, Jones finished third in the nation in scoring among defensemen with nine goals and 24 points in 29 games. Still, college credentials do not guarantee automatic entry into an NHL lineup.

Even with the calculation changed for teams, a simple factor remains important, especially for the Rangers as they entered Sunday six points out of a playoff spot.

“They’ve got to earn it and give you reason to put them in,” Quinn said. “We certainly won’t hesitate putting him in there if we think he can help us win.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Breakaway European Soccer League starts legal action to defend itself

By TARIQ PANJA

T

he group behind a multibilliondollar breakaway soccer competition for elite European clubs has warned the sport’s authorities that it has taken legal action to counter efforts to block a project that has drawn widespread condemnation.

As they went public Sunday with their plans for the European Super League, the proposal’s backers wrote to the president of FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, and the head of UEFA, the European soccer federation, saying that they would like to work with the organizations but that they had also taken measures to prevent anything from getting in their way.

So far, 12 teams, from England, Spain and Italy — including Manchester United, Liverpool, Real Madrid and Juventus — have signed up for the league.

Rumors of the creation of the breakaway competition, which hopes to add three more permanent founding members to what will be an annual 20team league, prompted FIFA in January to bow to pressure from UEFA and issue a statement that threatened severe repercussions against players and clubs involved in any unsanctioned tournament. UEFA, top European leagues and national soccer associations from the three countries that have clubs enlisted in the new competition issued a joint statement Sunday condemning the project.

FIFA warned in January that players taking part in the breakaway effort would risk being kicked out of events like the World Cup and that participating teams would lose access to domestic competitions such as the hugely popular Premier League in England.

Faced with that threat, the company created to control the new league told FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, and the head of UEFA, Aleksander Ceferin, in the letter sent Sunday that motions had been filed in multiple courts to prevent any moves to jeopardize the project, which has $4 billion of financing already in place.

The company has “taken appropriate action to challenge the legality of the restrictions to the formation of the competition before such relevant courts and European authorities as

Liverpool fans hung banners outside the team’s stadium to protest its decision to join a breakaway superleague.

may be necessary to safeguard its future,” said the letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times.

The league they have agreed to form — an alliance of top clubs closer in concept to closed leagues like the NFL and the NBA than to soccer’s current model — would bring about the most significant restructuring of elite European soccer since the 1950s and could herald the largest transfer of wealth to a small set of teams in modern sports history.

While discussing the legal measures, the six-page letter also invites soccer’s leaders to hold “urgent” talks to find a common way forward for a project that the group says will benefit soccer even beyond the narrow group that will enjoy unparalleled riches should the tournament begin. Under the plan, the 15 founder members of the European Super League would be provided at the start with an equal share of 3.5 billion euros ($4.2 billion) equating to some $400 million each.

That amount is more than four times what the winner of European soccer’s marquee tournament, the Champions League, took home in 2020. In the letter, the founders of the Super League say they do not wish to

replace the Champions League but to create a tournament that would run alongside it.

The damage to the prestige and value of the Champions League, though, would be immediate and long lasting, turning what has for decades been club soccer’s elite competition into a secondary event, one that is unlikely to retain anywhere near its current commercial appeal. UEFA ratified the biggest changes to that tournament since 1992 at a meeting of its executive board Monday.

Nasser al-Khelaifi, chairman of the French champions Paris Saint-Germain, was among the officials who voted for the changes. He so far has resisted efforts to lure PSG, a club stocked with some of the world’s best players, to the new league. Teams in Germany, including last season’s Champions League winner, Bayern Munich, have also declined to join the new venture.

The substantial changes to the Champions League may now be consigned to irrelevance should the breakaway clubs manage to get their way and take to the field in a competition that they say they hope to begin as soon as this summer.

In the letter, the group said that

their urgency stemmed from the huge losses piling up as a result of the coronavirus. The sight of games played in cavernous but empty stadiums has become the norm, and restrictions on public gatherings mean that hundreds of millions of dollars are being lost in gate receipts, while broadcasters have also clawed back vast sums from leagues and competition organizers.

UEFA and other groups opposed to the new competition huddled over the weekend to discuss their legal options and began talks with governments across Europe as well as with the European Union. That led to swift statements of condemnation from figures including Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and President Emmanuel Macron of France.

Faced with the possibility of seeing the value of their own events being devalued in the future and the prospect of current broadcast and commercial partners demanding a reduction in the fees they pay, UEFA is considering seeking damages from the 12 clubs that form the breakaway group, and from some of their top officials.

The biggest European clubs have long been frustrated with sharing wealth from tournaments in which they are the biggest draw, and talks about a new league began well before the pandemic. Documents leaked in 2019 showed that the president of Real Madrid, Florentino Pérez, an architect of the current plan, had sought to create an earlier iteration of a competition involving the biggest teams.

The role of FIFA is also intriguing.

Infantino has talked in recent years of creating new competitions to increase interest in soccer around the globe.

As part of that push, he has given his backing to a 20-team Super League in Africa.

FIFA issued a statement late Sunday, reiterating that it would not support a closed breakaway competition.

The Super League’s founders, though, insist that their event is not completely closed, saying that there would be access every season to five teams outside the expected 15 founding members.

“The competition intends to include some of Europe’s leading clubs, with open-access qualification routes available on the basis of sporting merit,” the letter said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

37

Sudoku How to Play: Fill in the empty fields with the numbers from 1 through 9.

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

Answers on page 38

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

38

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

(Mar 21-April 20)

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

With the Sun and Mercury moving into Taurus from today, this can bring a down-to-earth quality to your affairs over coming weeks. You may be more inclined to take the thoughtful route, and less likely to swing into action on the spur of the moment. Although perhaps not your natural style, this practical blend of energies could inspire you to persist and build solid foundations.

A more intense focus begins from today, and can see you willing to look into issues that touch on more intimate and personal matters. Daunting though it may seem at first, you could find that doing so brings relief. The coming weeks might also be a good time to take stock of financial or business affairs, especially as there are ample lucrative opportunities for growth, Libra.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Scorpio

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

You’ll be fired up from today, as the Sun and articulate Mercury move into your sign for a four week stay. These upbeat influences could boost vitality, and inspire you to invest in ideas and projects that you can really relate to. If there have been delays relating to an opportunity or plan, you may gradually see a way to make it happen, especially if you talk this over with others.

Feel like more alone time? With the Sun and Mercury entering a private zone, the coming weeks are ideal for reflection and for eliminating emotional baggage. If you find yourself in a more soulful mood, then simplify your life and make time to go with the flow.

Your intuition can kick in as a result. Felt the weight of pressing issues? Now is the time to let them go for good.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

With relationships a stronger focus now, the emphasis is on teamwork and making new connections.

Need to resolve a misunderstanding? If so, this is a good time to talk things over and find a solution. There may be one matter where you are unlikely to budge Scorpio, because it is so important to you. If this causes some friction, then explaining your reasons can help.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Ready to adopt a new schedule? As the Sun and Mercury glide into Taurus and your lifestyle zone, you may be ready to look at what works and what doesn’t. Analysing the situation may help, but tune in and listen to your feelings too. Are you doing something because you think you should or because your instincts tell you to? Have the courage of your convictions, Archer.

Your social life looks set to sparkle from today, as key planets give a positive boost to this sector, bringing a strong desire to make new connections. These friendly influences suggest that a little teamwork could bring excellent results, enabling you to accomplish more than you might alone. You may have big dreams too Cancer, and this is a chance to make them a reality.

What makes your heart sing, Capricorn? If you are not sure, you may be about to find out. As the emphasis shifts to your leisure zone, dive in and indulge those activities that refuel you. Want to do more of them? If you have a natural aptitude for something, then you might want to take things further by starting a business. Let your romantic side surface too, and rekindle the passion.

Leo

Aquarius

(July 24-Aug 23)

You could find yourself in the limelight over the coming four weeks, as the Sun and Mercury stride purposefully into a high-flying zone. Although you are not generally known as someone who holds back from promoting yourself, the weeks ahead can be excellent for doing so. Fresh opportunities might show up as a result Leo, and some of them may lead to positive outcomes.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

With a focus on the grounded element of earth and your exploration zone, you may be ready to go further afield. This might mean enjoying a trip or even a mini-break, or just relishing the chance to try your hand at new experiences. This can also be an excellent time to invest in knowledge and skills, as you could be inspired in a practical way to aim even higher, Virgo.

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

You seem to be brimming with brilliant ideas that could enable you to give your home the perfect makeover. Whether you have a lot or a little to spend, the coming weeks can find you ready to make a bold and beautiful statement, that might transform your place and enhance the atmosphere.

Want to give it your unique stamp? Experiment, and see where it takes you.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Ready to cement that deal or hold a conversation that’s been on the cards for a while? As the Sun and thoughtful Mercury move into your sector of talk and thought, you may become quite animated. It’s time to let your thoughts flow by sharing them with others, or getting them down on paper. This can help bring clarity around your goals and relationships, and take you forward.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 37

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

39

CARTOONS

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

Herman

Ziggy

40

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

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