Friday to Sunday Apr 7-9, 2023

The San Juan Star

Retailers

Reject ‘Punitive’ Measure

Citizens Urged to Complete Survey for ‘Smart Island’ Initiative

Proposal to Eliminate the Use of Cash in Commercial Transactions Is Deemed ‘Detrimental to the Merchant and the Consumer’ P3

French Unions, Still Furious Over Pension Law, Resume Protests

Xi & Macron Call for Ukraine Peace Talks, but Path Is Murky

GOOD MORNING

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.

Retailers Association rips proposal to bar cash transactions

By THE STAR STAFF

United Retailers Association (CUD by its Spanish acronym) President Lourdes M. Aponte Rodríguez on Thursday rejected House Bill (HB) 1655, which would eliminate the use of cash in commercial transactions.

The goal of the bill is to fight and prevent money laundering.

We are tired of the fact that small and mediumsized businesses [often referred to as SMEs] continue to suffer under measures that only favor the banking sector,” the CUD leader said. “We cannot continue limiting the accessibility of services to only electronic payment methods when there are marked generational gaps, where the exchange of services in specific sectors is done by paying in cash since not everyone has bank accounts, credit cards or alternative payment methods over the internet.

INDEX

voluntary later becomes the law, she said.

Aponte Rodríguez went on to say that HB 1655 impedes the development and progress of SMEs, which are the economic engine that moves a country. In addition, she said it goes against the current trend in the mainland United States, where many states have enacted laws that prohibit the elimination of paper money as a payment method. Even currently, a bipartisan bill called the Payment Choice Act is before the consideration of Congress, which would prohibit the elimination of paper money as a payment method.

According to the institution, Puerto Rico is at a critical juncture due to the inefficiency of an unstable system of electrical energy service, which places the general public in a situation of greater vulnerability since the commercial transaction system depends heavily on the electrical system and communications such as the internet. Aponte Rodríguez asserted that the measure lacks analysis and studies supporting the argument that it would guarantee greater revenue collection and greatly reduce tax evasion.

She said she believes there are no metrics. And although the measure indicates that it is voluntary, it is common knowledge that what starts as something

“This measure [HB1655] does not represent a solution and any offer of tax relief is tied to the decision of the Fiscal Control Board [sic],” the CUD president said. “Continuing to insist and invest money from the public treasury to promote punitive measures that are detrimental to the merchant and the consumer does not advance and does not facilitate greater access to services. Furthermore, the law of providing two payment alternatives in each establishment is already complied with in all establishments.”

“The request from SMEs is simple; be more facilitators, and create optimal conditions for sustainable development,” Aponte Rodríguez said. “Unfortunately, this [bill] only creates greater uncertainty for us. It slows down the economic development of a country due to poorly planned and unfounded actions. SMEs cannot continue being a guinea pig for measures that would facilitate a sector [banking] and would cause operational charges to those already imposed.”

United Retailers Association President Lourdes M. Aponte Rodríguez

Citizens urged to complete survey for ‘Smart Island’ broadband access initiative

By THE STAR STAFF

After a million-dollar federal allocation for Puerto Rico that will enable the construction of broadband infrastructure necessary to close the digital divide on the island, the government has created the Smart Island program that seeks to develop and maximize initiatives in key areas to achieve high-speed internet in Puerto Rico.

“At this early stage of the program, it is important to define what the specific needs of each municipality are,” said Enrique Völckers Nin, the La Fortaleza official in charge of government innovation, information, data and technology, in a written statement. “For this reason it is necessary to identify, through citizens, those key points that allow us to develop the 5-year Strategic Plan required by the Puerto Rico Broadband Program (PRBP), which will guarantee that the funds allocated to Puerto Rico are used within the established terms and will ensure that the broadband infrastructure necessary to close the digital divide on the island is built promptly.”

One of the methods to determine and identify the specific needs of citizens is through the Internet Service survey, which Völckers Nin said will help, among other

things, the government determine if the person has an internet connection in their homes (and the download speed of the connection), skills in online activities such as using the computer or tablet, skills to conduct government transactions online, knowledge of what information is

safe to share online, among other things, and would help identify what people in Puerto Rico primarily use the internet for.

“This survey is available in www. smartisland.pr.gov/ survey and will reveal information that will help us in the planning and development of the neces-

sary strategies to coordinate, authorize and execute the disbursement of local and federal funds allocated to Puerto Rico for the construction of broadband infrastructure on the island,” Völckers Nin added. “It is important that citizens complete this survey to help us develop the various initiatives that we will be developing through the PRBP that will reduce the digital divide on the island.”

For the past few months, personnel assigned to the Smart Island program have participated in the “Fortaleza por Puerto Rico” initiative in which government services are brought directly to the municipalities. Specifically, they have assisted citizens in filling out the Internet Service survey, as well as guidance on the program, expectations and developments that will be carried out on the island to reduce the digital divide.

The PRBP is under the Office of Management and Budget and was created by Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia through Executive Order 2022-40. Its mission is to reduce the digital divide on the island with projects that improve citizens’ access to broadband connectivity and provide all Puerto Rico residents with access to high-speed internet at affordable prices. Additional details on the PRBP can be found at https://www.smartisland.pr.gov.

Officials recommend homeowners rely on experts to install solar systems

By THE STAR STAFF

Consumer Affairs (DACO by its Spanish acronym) Secretary Hiram Torres Montalvo, along with the Master Electricians Association President Frances Berríos Meléndez, urged consumers on Thursday to corroborate that people who install solar energy systems in their homes are licensed as an expert electrician or electrical engineer, certified by the Public Energy Policy program of the Economic Development and Commerce Department (DDEC).

“With the entry of the Housing Department’s New Energy program, we expect a marked increase in the number of PV [photovoltaic] system installations in Puerto Rico,” Torres Montalvo said. “For this reason, at DACO we have established parameters to ensure that these new facilities associated with the program are carried out by people duly registered for these purposes. Likewise,

we urge consumers that when evaluating options for the purchase and installation of solar systems, corroborate that the technicians who would do the work are licensed electrical experts or electrical engineers, all certified by the DDEC.”

Berríos Meléndez, meanwhile, noted that “only electrical experts and electrical engineers have the knowledge to calculate what the electrical needs of a home are and the safest way to install solar equipment that frees a family from using the traditional expensive electricity supply that it consumes today.”

DDEC Secretary Manuel Cidre Miranda also urged consumers to orient themselves before choosing a company or technicians to install photovoltaic systems.

“We recommend that when installing your renewable energy equipment, you always request the certification issued by the DDEC’s Public Energy Policy Program,” he said.

Enrique Völckers Nin

The president of the Master Electricians Association said “only electrical experts and electrical engineers have the knowledge to calculate what the electrical needs of a home are and the safest way to install solar equipment.”

Fiscal board urges tax system overhaul that sharply limits incentives

By THE STAR STAFF

The Financial Oversight and Management Board has asked the island government to overhaul its tax system so as to limit tax incentives.

The call for tax reform is part of its fiscal plan approved this week.

“A comprehensive review of Puerto Rico’s revenue structure must be completed as part of a tax reform process because Puerto Rico’s income tax structure (for both individuals and corporations) is complex and opaque,” the oversight board said.

Over the past several years, the Puerto Rico government has improved the island’s tax system by changing information reporting requirements and improving the organization of tax information and forms, including the digitization of certain processes. Significant reform is still, however, required because Puerto Rico’s current tax system has historically suffered from structural complexity, instability, internal inconsistency, inefficient administration, and inadequate enforcement, the oversight board said. There have been at least 11 major revisions to Puerto Rico’s tax code since 1994, including at least six adjustments since 2013.

As a result, the board said, the government must continue efforts to reduce the tax system’s complexity, enhance equity, increase transparency, reduce tax administrative and compliance costs and maintain, if not enhance, revenue.

Effective revenue systems are based on taxes that generate sufficient revenue to fund needed public expenditures, are simple to administer, are transparent, are perceived as fair and equitable, and encourage economic efficiency and growth, the oversight board noted. Effective tax systems that have a broad base and low rates generally conform to those

precepts, and generally avoid targeted tax incentives unless those incentives are supported by clearly demonstrated economic or social benefits, the board said.

Furthermore, a broad base combined with low tax rates reduces the potential gain from tax evasion or avoidance. Promoting compliance is another central feature of properly designed revenue systems, the oversight board said.

An overly complex and poorly designed tax structure cannot be implemented effectively and, therefore, compliance and enforcement typically fall short, the board said. Beyond simplicity, perceptions of fairness are another important factor for promoting compliance and enforcement.

Because revenue can be raised from a variety of different sources, it is important that Puerto Rico’s mix of tax sources be carefully considered so that government programs are not excessively reliant on sources that may be uncertain or volatile or to a degree which excessively distorts economic activity or taxpayer choices, the oversight board said. This is particularly relevant because Puerto Rico’s tax regime disproportionately relies on two tax sources, income taxes and sales & use taxes, which represented roughly 73% of General Fund revenue collections in fiscal year 2022.

Unlike the federal tax code, Puerto Rico’s tax brackets are fixed and do not adjust for inflation. The tax code also includes numerous targeted deductions, exemptions, credits, and special rates that benefit narrow groups of taxpayers while potentially distorting the allocation of resources and reducing revenue available to fund needed public expenditures, the oversight board pointed out. These incentives are often privately issued and are not always disclosed publicly. At the same time, businesses faced with paying statutory corporate income taxes

The Financial Oversight and Management Board said the Puerto Rico government must continue efforts to reduce the tax system’s complexity, enhance equity, increase transparency, reduce tax administrative and compliance costs and maintain, if not enhance, revenue.

face a relatively high tax burden, as Puerto Rico has not followed the global trend of reducing statutory corporate income tax rates over the last 20 years.

Similarly, Puerto Rico’s 11.5% sales and use tax is higher than the rate imposed by other U.S. jurisdictions, though there are multiple reductions and exemptions to the rate.

“In addition to reviewing Puerto Rico’s revenue structure, a detailed review of tax expenditures must also be considered because Puerto Rico issues more than 400+ tax incentives with total foregone revenue projected to exceed $23 billion in 2023,” the oversight board said. “Any tax reform considered by the government should establish rates, credits, deductions, and other alterations to tax structures firmly in the tax code. It should also limit the use of negotiated rates or incentives. Tax incentives, moreover, should be evaluated based strictly on a return-on-investment criteria and those that do not provide a significant positive return should be eliminated or reduced.”

Supreme Court chief justice: Allocation in fiscal plan won’t meet payroll needs of judiciary

By THE STAR STAFF

Puerto Rico Supreme Court Chief Justice Maite Oronoz Rodríguez said earlier this week that the additional funds for the payroll of the judicial branch, as included in the 2023 Fiscal Plan for the Government of Puerto Rico, were not enough.

The Financial Oversight and Management Board announced Wednesday it had certified the government fiscal plan.

“For the past few years, we have sought the necessary allocation of funds to implement new pay scales for our staff, including the judiciary,” Oronoz Rodríguez said in a written statement. “Today, the Fiscal Oversight Board [sic] published the 2023 Fiscal Plan, in which it allocates $42 million for several public entities, including the Judiciary, without establishing

the exact amount that would correspond to us. This lump sum is less than the one we are requesting in order to establish competitive remuneration for judicial officials.”

She said the Supreme Court will continue discussions with the oversight board to advance a compensation review that meets the needs of all.

“We are confident that over the next few weeks, the data will be refined and we will be in a better position to communicate the final result to our officials,” Oronoz Rodríguez said. “Even so, the determination of the Fiscal Oversight Board to identify additional recurring funds for salaries is the product of years of work by the administration of the Judiciary and an important step on the road to achieving competitive compensation for the benefit of our sheriffs, secretaries, social workers, mediators, bookkeepers and other personnel, as well as for our judges.”

The oversight board said it has long advocated for a truly comprehensive tax reform that can contribute to Puerto Rico’s competitiveness and contribute to economic growth.

“Having now exited the restructuring process, it is finally time to evaluate opportunities for broad-based, holistic tax reform,” the board said. “At the same time, any potential reform must be fiscally responsible, meaning it cannot lose revenues in the process.”

“Therefore, any tax reform or tax law initiative that the Government undertakes or pursues during a year within the 2023 Fiscal Plan period must be revenue neutral,” the oversight board added.

Each tax measure must also include confidence-building elements, such as behavioral adjustments and reasonable capture rates, the board noted.

“To ensure revenue neutrality, the implementation of any tax law initiative must occur sequentially, with the Government ensuring that initiatives are paid for before rates are reduced,” the board said. “Enforcement mechanisms that yield additional revenues must be part of any tax initiative package that results in a tax revenue decrease to prevent a scenario where tax reductions are not accompanied by sufficient offsetting revenue measures identified in the enabling legislation. Any potential tax reform should also be inextricably linked to the economic development strategy while preserving resources needed to fund essential services.”

The oversight board, executive branch and Legislature have not yet been able to agree on far-reaching proposals that meet this criterion. Nevertheless, the oversight board said it is committed to pursuing fair and competitive solutions that can improve the tax climate for individuals and businesses while also maintaining fiscal stability.

PREB orders PREPA to close delayed Tranche 1 PPOAs for green energy

By THE STAR STAFF

Puerto Rico’s Energy Bureau (PREB) ordered the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) on Thursday to immediately close Tranche 1 renewable power purchase operating agreements with some 18 developers.

The PREB rejected the power utility’s claims that the private operator of its transmission and distribution (T&D) system, LUMA Energy, should be blamed for the delays.

“As the entity in charge of Tranche 1, PREPA representatives could and should have undoubtedly identified long ago any issues potentially jeopardizing the closing of the Tranche 1 PPOAs [power purchase operating agreements] and by this time found appropriate solutions to the alleged issues,” the PREB said in its ruling. “Unfortunately, the record does not reflect any willingness to concretize the agreements.”

The PREB’s ruling came after PREPA requested on March 31 an extension for the closing of all Tranche 1 RFP contracts until September. In the petition, PREPA noted that LUMA has changed its mind four times regarding the interconnection works and has decided to take the

work upon itself even though the PPOAs put that job on the developers. PREPA also cited numerous amendments requested by the service providers and that some of the service providers had requested increases in service prices

to accommodate inflation and high interest rates.

The PREB, however, rejected PREPA’s request for an extension and urged the closing of PPOAs whose projects do not have identified issues, and ordered PREPA to negotiate with project developers any amendments to the PPOAs and resubmit the amendments for PREB approval before closing the PPOA.

In February 2021, PREPA launched the first of six tranches for renewable energy projects. The bid procured 1,000 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy and 500 MW of battery storage. The PREB already granted an extension that is slated to expire this month.

Francisco Santos, PREPA’s senior adviser on renewable energy matters, recently said at a PREPA board meeting that the signing of the Tranche 1 contracts, totaling 23, was behind because of LUMA’s delays in providing project proponents with the interconnection costs. In reality, LUMA provided the costs in September but has yet to perform the construction work for the interconnections, according to PREB documents. The private operator of the T&D system issued a request for proposals for the work in March but it may not be ready until July.

Ponce mayor says prosecutor who referred complaint against him responds to NPP

By THE STAR STAFF

Ponce Mayor Luis Manuel Irizarry Pabón said this week that the prosecutor who referred him to the Special Independent Prosecutor Panel (PFEI by its Spanish initials) answers directly to the New Progressive Party (NPP). He said the mother of the prosecutor works for NPP Sen. Thomas Rivera Schatz, who in turn is “the godfather” of Pablo Colón Santiago, an NPP candidate for mayor of Ponce.

“One of my teachers in what is called being a public official, Rafael ‘Churumba’ Cordero Santiago, our great mayor, taught me, and told me, and he also told the public, that it is important to keep looking,” Irizarry Pabón said in a video posted Wednesday on his social networks. “And in this I want to make this point: As you know, the Department of Justice did a preliminary investigation into some allegations or a complaint that a person made to the department and that they have their right to do this investigation. We have always respected that process. But since the Department of Justice through a prosecutor, Mr. Pedro Mateu, referred [the case] to the Special Independent Prosecutor Panel to continue investigating, we want to make this point: A prosecutor identified with the New Progressive Party, being an analyst, doing an investigation that has clearly been an investigation that we believe has not been correct. Because I go back and repeat, appearance is very important. A politically identified prosecutor, whose mother is an assistant to the senator, Mr. Rivera Schatz, when several weeks ago, the senator made some accusations that I am corrupt and that I am going to be accused.”

“And those who have lent themselves, because they do

not have the votes, to damage the image of this mayor and my work team, in due course, are going to have to answer to the people,” Irizarry Pabón continued. “I thank the people of Ponce, I have faced them, I do not hide, I will continue working so that the City of Ponce continues forward.”

The mayor went on to refer to Rivera Schatz as “the godfather of the one who wants to be a candidate for mayor in the City of Ponce,” that being “Mr. Pablo Colón,” and appeared to cast doubt on the content of the complaint against him.

“And those people who have lent themselves to give false information, at the time, are not going to respond to the mayor, they are going to respond to the City of Ponce,”

Irizarry Pabón said.

The mayor, who described himself in the message as a “rookie,” added that he “respects” the Popular Democratic Party, despite the fact that he rejected the imposition of a special delegate in former legislator Carlos Vizcarrondo Irizarry.

According to press reports, Irizarry Pabón is allegedly being investigated for making municipal employees pay off a personal loan with which the current mayor paid for part of his political campaign. It has been mentioned that he increased the salary of a director of a municipal unit so that the individual would be able to cover the repayment of the loan. The mayor has not publicly rejected those allegations.

The Puerto Rico Energy Bureau rejected the power authority’s claims that the private operator of its transmission and distribution system, LUMA Energy, should be blamed for the delays.

Ponce Mayor Luis Manuel Irizarry Pabón

Trump’s charges bring doubts, hopes and uncertainty in both parties

By JONATHAN WEISMAN, KATIE GLUECK and JAZMINE ULLOA

In an ordinary presidential-primary season, the indictment of a front-runner over hush money paid to a porn actress would, at the least, be an opening for rivals to attack. But a day after the arraignment of former President Donald Trump on 34 felony counts, one thing was clear: This will not be an ordinary political season.

The failure of Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination to go on offense — indeed, their willingness to defend him — underscored the centrality of the former president in the GOP. His opponents appeared to be using the same playbook that a crowded field of White House hopefuls ran in 2016, laying back, absorbing Trump’s blows and hoping external factors would take him down.

“The sad thing is that so many people accept it as part of the character and conduct of the former president,” Asa Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas who on Sunday announced that he was running for the Republican presidential nomination, said of the charges. “That’s not something from a candidate perspective that I’m wanting to dwell on.”

Still, the political landscape remains uncertain as Trump’s legal peril grows.

To some Republican and Democratic leaders, including former and current elected officials, strategists and others, the charges appeared to be flimsy, a hodgepodge of bookkeeping accusations that felt far less consequential than many had hoped. To others in both parties, the charges and attendant spectacle were troubling and had the potential to reverberate and hurt the former president politically.

At the very least, the charges will have to be answered in a court of law, extending a tawdry tale of extramarital affairs into a courtroom for a party that once considered itself the home of family values.

Trump might rail against the Manhattan district attorney who is leading the prosecution, Alvin Bragg, and the judge who will preside, but the court proceedings and possibly a trial will unfold in a potentially damaging manner as a Republican race for the White House runs alongside them.

“It’s still serious,” said former Rep. Reid Ribble of Wisconsin, a Republican critic of Trump who has doubts about the case. “Who wants to be charged with any crime? Most normal Americans will never be charged with a misdemeanor their entire life. To be charged with 30 of them? I mean, it’s shocking, and for somebody who you want to have as a leader in the country, it’s a disqualifier for me.”

Trump’s arraignment on charges that he falsified business records to cover up payments to the porn actress, Stormy Daniels, certainly did make history. Trump is now the first former president to face criminal charges — and he does so amid his third run for the White House.

But the moment did not yield a rush to abandon him

by many voters or party leaders. On Friday, the day after the news of Trump’s indictment, Sarah Longwell, a Republican pollster and Trump critic, assembled a focus group of voters who had cast ballots for him in 2016 and 2020 to ask how the charges were affecting their next vote.

Every one of the voters said they would cast a ballot again for the former president, the first unanimous verdict since she began assembling such groups for the 2024 election cycle.

On Wednesday, former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, who is exploring a run for the Republican nomination, told a Fox News reporter in New Hampshire: “Sometimes we have to put all our politics aside and say, ‘Is this the right thing to do for the country?’ This sure doesn’t look right.”

Even conservative evangelical leaders who might be expected to look askance at the extramarital dalliances contained in the allegations were supportive, continuing a pattern of overlooking Trump’s personal conduct that dates back most prominently to their response to the “Access Hollywood” tape in 2016. Daniels said she had sex with Trump in California in 2006, as his wife, Melania Trump, was home caring for their baby, Barron, in New York.

“This has already been litigated by evangelicals in 2016 and 2020,” said Rev. Robert Jeffress, the pastor of a Texas megachurch, who delivered an opening prayer at Trump’s campaign rally in Waco last month. “And I don’t think evangelicals want to re-litigate it.”

Asked whether he believed Trump’s denials about having a sexual encounter with Daniels, Jeffress said that was not his judgment to make: “That’s really between him,

Stormy Daniels and God.”

If anything, Trump’s rivals now see a moment of peak power for him that they hope will dissipate.

“Trump just got a big old shot in the arm with people who don’t like where we are and don’t trust the government,” said Katon Dawson, a former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party who this year helped start the presidential campaign of Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations. “They are frightened of the unfairness that seems to be coming from the judiciary right now.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is widely expected to be Trump’s biggest threat for the Republican presidential nomination, was silent on the subject Wednesday, although he did win the endorsement of a conservative House Republican, Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Massie said in a text message that he had planned to make the endorsement “without regard to the arraignment, and decided not to let Alvin Bragg get in the way.”

Haley, a former South Carolina governor who was the second major candidate to declare for the Republican nomination, also kept her head down. Dawson said Haley and others would bring up the charges at some point, but not at a moment when conservative voters were rallying around the former president.

“There’s going to be a contest with real players eventually,” Dawson said. “Certainly, it’s Trump’s to lose right now.”

Democrats expressed frustration bordering on contempt.

David Pepper, the former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, said the charges against Trump might not have been as sweeping as some of the other cases still pending against the former president. But Pepper argued that any other candidate or political figure who was accused of engaging in the same activities would be under the same microscope.

“Is it as problematic as Jan. 6 or what happened at Mar-a-Lago? No,” Pepper said, referring to federal investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t investigate it.”

Other Democrats were sharper in their criticism.

“I won’t use the word ‘criminal’ until after he’s convicted, but he’s a morally bankrupt liar, and he’s been that for a while,” state Sen. Sharif Street, the chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, said of Trump.

A spate of polling released Wednesday showed a one-on-one contest between Trump and President Joe Biden at a dead heat. A Reuters/Ipsos survey found that 54% of Republicans believed the indictment would help Trump secure the presidency, even as 58% of Republicans said the charges that the former president paid hush money to cover up an affair were believable.

“The concern is that Trump will get all the oxygen, which allows him to be the nominee,” Longwell said.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speaks to a crowd in Collect Pond Park across from Manhattan Criminal Court, where former President Donald Trump was arraigned Tuesday, in Manhattan, April 4, 2023.

5 dead after tornado in Missouri, as storms unsettle country

By JUDSON JONES AND JESÚS JIMÉNEZ

Five people died and others were injured in southeast Missouri earlier this week after at least one tornado and other storms tore through the area, officials said, on a day of tornado watches and blizzard warnings across many regions.

Sheriff Casey Graham of Bollinger County confirmed the deaths in a Facebook post Wednesday and said that search-and-rescue operations were still underway. Graham said that the Grassy and Glenallen communities, about 120 miles south of St. Louis, “were hit with what appears to be a significant tornado early this morning.”

Sgt. Clark Parrott, a public information officer for the Missouri State Highway Patrol, said earlier Wednesday that damage was widespread and that crews were still working to assess the impact at the scene.

“There are just multiple homes damaged, missing roofs, power lines, power poles, trees down across multiple highways, making it difficult for first responders,” he said. “This is still a very active search-and-rescue operation.”

The central and southern regions of the United States have had an onslaught of bad weather recently, including destructive tornadoes and blizzards that hammered multiple states last week and the week before, leaving at least 58 people dead across the country.

In response to the latest storm, Gov. Mike Parson of Missouri said on Twitter that he would join emergency workers on the ground to assess the damage.

Tornadoes are rated on the enhanced F-scale, which runs from EF0 to EF5. The National Weather Service in Paducah, Kentucky, said Wednesday that damage surveyed in Bollinger County, in southeast Missouri, appeared to indicate that an EF2 tornado struck the area with estimated winds of up to 130 mph.

Joshua Wells, 30, who lives in Glenallen in central Bollinger County, said there was extensive damage in the area, including uprooted trees, homes with roof damage and an auto repair shop that had been “twisted.”

“A lot of older structures have been completely lev-

eled,” Wells said.

Having experienced a tornado before, Wells said he was awake before the tornado moved through and had gone next door to his sister’s house to shelter.

“I’m always wary of bad weather,” Wells said. “I had that gut feeling that we should definitely take shelter.”

More than 11 million people from Arkansas to Michigan were under tornado watches throughout Wednesday.

Throughout the day, more than 190 flights had been canceled and over 430 others were delayed out of Chicago O’Hare International Airport, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking company. Dozens more cancellations and delays were also reported at Chicago Midway International Airport and St. Louis Lambert International Airport.

And in the Upper Plains and Rockies, heavy snow was falling and several major roads were closed, as drivers faced poor visibility and other hazards. More than 1 million people were under blizzard warnings. By Wednesday night, portions of South Dakota had recorded up to 30 inches of snow, according to the weather service.

On Tuesday, several fresh tornadoes were reported in Iowa, Missouri and Illinois.

In Colona, Illinois, about 80 miles southeast of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a tornado ripped the roof from a gas station and uprooted trees, according to the weather service. Local police said that two people had been evacuated safely from the station and that no injuries were reported.

In Iowa, the storms rumbled near areas where tornadoes had torn roofs off homes and other buildings days earlier, displacing residents.

One of those residents, Jacob Dilks of Hills, Iowa, said he had been on an “emotional roller coaster” ever since his home was destroyed Friday. On Saturday, his son turned 2. On Tuesday, his wife gave birth to a girl.

“One minute, you’re scared for the lives of your family, and the next you’re happy to be alive,” said Dilks, 28, whose family has been staying with relatives in nearby Coralville.

Destructive, baseball-size hail was also reported Tuesday afternoon in towns in northeast Illinois. The roughly 3-inch hail that fell in the Chicago area was the largest since a July 2020 storm, according to the weather service in Chicago. The Chicago Fire Department said that high winds had downed trees and power lines, and damaged buildings.

In the city, where voters on Tuesday elected Brandon Johnson as mayor, people appeared to heed a call to vote early, before the bad weather, according to Max Bever, a spokesperson for the Chicago Board of Elections. As of noon local time, the number of ballots cast reflected a 23% citywide turnout, compared with 21% at noon in the previous election on Feb. 28.

Aside from a dip in voter turnout in the early afternoon as a thunderstorm rolled through, the elections board was not aware of other storm-related effects on turnout, Bever said Tuesday night. He added that the overall turnout figure for the day was relatively low for an election day.

Scientists are not yet able to determine whether there is a link between climate change and the frequency or strength of tornadoes. Researchers do say that in recent years tornadoes seem to be occurring in greater clusters, and that the region known as tornado alley in the Great Plains, where most tornadoes occur, appears to be shifting eastward.

An early-morning tornado caused extensive damage in Bollinger County, Mo., uprooting trees and destroying homes.

EPA to tighten limits on mercury and other pollutants from power plants

By LISA FRIEDMAN

The Biden administration said earlier this week that it would require coal- and oil-fired power plants to reduce emissions of several hazardous air pollutants, including mercury, a neurotoxin that can cause developmental problems in infants and children.

The proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency has two broad policy aims: reduce dangerous toxins in the environment while also encouraging the transition away from coal-burning power plants and toward cleaner energy sources like solar and wind.

The proposal sets up a likely legal battle with the coal industry and several Republican-led states, which fought to block a previous effort to regulate mercury under the Obama administration. The Obamaera rule, which took effect in 2012, was credited with reducing mercury emissions by about 90%.

However, the EPA found that mercury coming from power plants still posed a risk to human health. So the new rule aims to strengthen the limits for mercury emissions from affected coal-burning power plants by 70%. It also would further restrict other toxic pollutants like lead, nickel and arsenic.

Michael Regan, the EPA administrator, said in a statement that the rule would not be expensive for plant operators to implement because of new technologies that are available for monitoring and controlling of emissions.

”By leveraging proven emissionsreduction measures available at reasonable costs and encouraging new, advanced control technologies, we can reduce hazardous pollution from coal-fired power plants, protecting our planet and improving public health for all,” Regan said.

The new Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule would not directly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that are driving climate change. But it is one of several recent EPA regulations targeting toxins emitted from smokestacks and coal ash ponds that could have that effect indirectly, by making coal plants too costly to operate.

Regan has in the past suggested that an aspect of the Biden administration’s climate strategy, by cracking down on pollutants,

is to encourage operators of coal plants to shut them down or make a transition to renewable energy.

“By presenting all of those rules at the same time to the industry,” Regan said at an oil and gas conference last year, “the industry gets a chance to take a look at this suite of rules all at once and say, ‘Is it worth doubling down in investments in this current facility? Or should we look at that cost and say now it’s time to pivot and invest in a clean energy future?’”

On Wednesday, Regan said the new rule would ensure “historic protections” for communities located near power plants. Known as fenceline communities, they are typically home to low-income people of color who suffer from elevated rates of asthma, cancer and other health effects. The Biden administration has made it a priority to address the disproportionate environmental burdens carried by such communities.

The proposal drew criticism from Republicans and the coal industry.

Michelle Bloodworth, president and CEO of America’s Power, a trade group that advocates for coal-powered electricity, said the industry is concerned that the combined effect of EPA’s regulations will lead to premature retirements of coal plants. The industry group has argued if coal plants

shutter too quickly, it will hurt the reliability of the electricity grid.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said the Biden administration “continues to wage war on coal” with the regulation. Capito called the regulation unnecessary and said that it “put politics over sound policy.”

Democrats praised the proposal and said it will lead to health improvements nationwide.

“The Mercury and Air Toxics Standards continue to be a remarkable, cost-effective success in reducing mercury and other toxic air pollution,” Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del. and chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, said in a statement. He said the new rule “will help save lives.”

The EPA estimated that the health benefits over the lifetime of the rule would be between $2.4 billion and $3 billion, from the prevention of deaths or hospitalizations for respiratory and cardiovascular disease. The agency put the estimated cost to the industry of complying with the rule at between $230 million and $300 million.

“Childhood exposure to mercury has very profound health effects,” said Matthew Davis, a vice president of federal policy at the League of Conservation Voters and a former EPA official whose research underpinned the first rules cutting mercury emissions from coal power plants.

He called the proposed rule significant.

“On top of that, we are seeing the climate impacts from fossil fuel combustion, and certainly coal plants are contributing to that crisis,” Davis said. “So any rules that address coal-fired power plants and perhaps make it less viable for some of those to continue operating also has a big impact in our transition to cleaner electricity.”

The EPA will accept public comments on the proposed rule for 60 days and will hold a public hearing before a final rule would take effect, most likely next year. Many Republican lawmakers are expected to oppose the rule. Last month, the Biden administration restored a rule that gives the government a legal foundation to regulate mercury, which had been stripped away by the Trump administration. The Biden administration’s move also prompted criticism from coal-state lawmakers at the time.

The Biden administration is pairing regulations with offers to provide financial help to coal communities. On Monday, the White House announced that it was making $450 million available for solar farms and other clean energy projects at the site of current or former coal mines.

In making the announcement, the White House took a jab at the Trump administration, which had promised, and failed, to deliver a coal renaissance.

“President Biden came to the White House to end years of big words but little action to help energy-producing parts of the country,” a White House fact sheet said.

A coal power plant in Colver, Penn., July 11, 2022. The Biden administration said Wednesday, April 5, 2023, that it would require coal and oil-fired power plants to reduce emissions of several hazardous air pollutants, including mercury, a neurotoxin that can cause developmental problems in infants and children.

House GOP’s plan to cut food stamps faces a tough vote

By CATIE EDMONDSON

Republican Rep. Marc Molinaro, a former mayor who flipped an open seat in New York’s Hudson Valley last year and helped the GOP take back the House, frequently tells the story of how his mother relied on food stamps and subsidized school lunches to keep him fed as a child.

Now, as Republican leaders press to tighten work requirements for food stamps and other government assistance programs as a way to slash federal spending, Molinaro finds himself in a politically uncomfortable spot.

“I grew up on food stamps; my mom worked and worked hard, but she’s a single mom,” he said recently during a brief interview at the Capitol. “That is a red line for me. We’re not going to be touching or diminishing services or support for single moms.”

Molinaro’s reservations help explain why Republican leaders have had such a difficult time coalescing around a budget blueprint that could achieve the kind of deep spending cuts the party is seeking in exchange for raising the debt ceiling to avert a default as early as this summer.

Any cuts Republicans suggest will instantly become a line of attack for Democrats, leaving the party toiling to cobble together a budget plan that can win the support of mainstream Republicans in competitive districts like Molinaro’s and right-wing hard-liners who are pushing for the largest cuts possible.

With a razor-thin majority and Democrats solidly opposed to spending cuts on the scale that they are demanding, Republicans can afford no more than a few defections in their own ranks if they hope to pass a fiscal plan. They have already ruled out reductions to Medicare or Social Security, determined to insulate themselves and their most politically vulnerable members from accusations that they support slashing benefits for older Americans.

But even the seemingly easier steps, such as cuts in food assistance programs, could make for a politically fraught vote.

Top House Republicans have made increasing work requirements for participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, one of

the central elements of whatever spending blueprint they will ultimately release. It is a key tenet of conservative orthodoxy, and Republicans have framed it as a straightforward way to curtail what they believe is the nation’s out-of-control spending, arguing that it would also lift Americans out of poverty.

Republicans may soon be forced to put the matter to a vote. Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters last week that House Republicans could soon move on legislation modeled on a letter he sent to President Joe Biden last month outlining spending cuts his conference would seek, including “strengthening work requirements for those without dependents who can work.”

Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, a favorite of Republican leadership, earlier this year introduced legislation that would make able-bodied adults without dependents subject to work requirements until they are 65 years old, raising the current age from 49. It would also make it more difficult to obtain work requirement waivers, taking away the ability that states have to request that the mandate be relaxed if there are not enough jobs to provide recipients employment.

Proponents of an overhaul argue that

states abuse the waivers, seeking them even when jobs are readily available, and the government is too lax about granting them.

“What most Republicans that I’m talking to are most interested in is eliminating a loophole that states are really egregiously using to ignore work requirements,” Johnson said in an interview. “Keeping in mind — and I think this has been misreported — no pregnant woman is subject to these requirements, nobody with young dependents at home is subject; nobody in areas of high unemployment.”

Johnson, who also grew up on food stamps and is now chair of the Republican Main Street Caucus, is considered one of the most influential mainstream conservatives in the House. But most of the lawmakers who have co-sponsored the legislation so far are either members of the hard-right Freedom Caucus or lawmakers from safe seats. Of the 38 Republicans who have signed on, only three represent competitive districts.

In the meantime, Democrats are already readying their attack advertisements. CJ Warnke, the communications director for House Democrats’ political action committee, accused Republicans of “continuing their extremist assault on fami-

lies and children.”

“MAGA House Republicans are threatening to default and not pay their own bills, while simultaneously attacking SNAP benefits,” Warnke said, adding that Republicans were declaring that millions of Americans “should not have food on their tables.”

Republicans are well aware of the political peril that comes with the proposal. In 2018, when they controlled the House, the Senate and the White House, Republicans led by President Donald Trump tried repeatedly to add similar work requirements for food stamp recipients. The efforts failed, after a bipartisan group of lawmakers negotiating the twice-a-decade legislation deemed the move too politically toxic.

Five years later, the issue is just as charged.

Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., the chair of the Agriculture Committee who is responsible for shepherding the farm bill this year, has sounded more ambivalent than many of his colleagues about the urgency of stiffening work requirements.

Any dispute over the food stamp program could derail the farm bill, considered critical legislation to both political parties because it has huge implications for lowincome families who rely on federal food assistance programs and the agriculture industry.

Thompson told reporters that he didn’t believe there was much fraud within the food stamp program.

“Principle one, quite frankly, is we have a responsibility to help people, families who are struggling financially to reach the next rung in the ladder of opportunity,” he said. “Some folks actually don’t recognize that we have work requirements.”

Still, Thompson conceded that there were “probably some improvements out there that we can make” to the program and said that it wasn’t “helpful” for lawmakers to suggest that the program go entirely unmodified.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, suggested it was a battle the party should be willing to wage.

“If you’re going to live off the taxpayers and some kind of SNAP program and government resources, there should be a work requirement,” Jordan said. “This will be a big fight when we get to the farm bill.”

Rep. Marc Molinaro, (R-N.Y) walks down the House steps on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 28, 2023. As Republican leaders press to tighten work requirements for food stamps and other government assistance programs as a way to slash federal spending, Molinaro finds himself in a politically uncomfortable spot.

People bought Crocs during the pandemic. They haven’t stopped.

By JORDYN HOLMAN

Like Peloton, Etsy and Zoom, Crocs saw its business boom during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. The company’s aesthetically questionable but easily slipped-on clogs were the perfect footwear for Americans puttering around their homes, gardens and kitchens during quarantine.

But while many people got off their exercise bikes, cut back on DIY arts projects and resumed in-person meetings as a sense of normalcy returned to the world, they have kept their Crocs on.

Maggwa Ndugga of Raleigh, North Carolina, bought his first pair in 2020 and now has five. And he is spreading his enthusiasm, giving his parents and sisters each a pair fow Christmas.

“They’re not the most appealing things to look at,” said Ndugga, 25, but they offer support to his flat feet and can be worn whether he’s working at his standing desk at home, running errands, hiking on the weekends or lifting weights.

“I roll into the gym with my Crocs on and everything, and people ask, ‘Aren’t you going to change shoes?’” Ndugga said. “No, this is how I’m going to live life for now.”

Fans like Ndugga — along with celebrities like Questlove, who has been known to sport the clogs at award shows — have helped Crocs emerge as a rarity in the business world. It is a pandemic winner whose success might outlast pandemic shopping behavior.

The stock prices and sales of Peloton, Etsy and Zoom have dropped since their sharp rises in the pandemic, but Crocs’ stock has soared 167% since January 2020. The company’s annual sales have increased 200% since 2019.

At a recent conference in New York held by the wealth manager UBS, Andrew Rees, the CEO of Crocs, said he often heard from the investment community that “Crocs was a pandemic beneficiary and it’s going to return to its norm.”

“There is very little chance of that happening, quite honestly,” Rees told a room of investors and analysts.

Last month, after announcing that quarterly sales rose 61%, Crocs said it anticipated another record year of growth. Its management team laid out an ambitious business plan that promised more robust profits and revenues when many in the retail industry are trying to temper investor expectations. (Part of the surge in overall sales is coming from the company’s acquisition of the footwear brand Hey Dude.)

Crocs said in November that it expected revenue from its namesake shoe line to reach more than $5 billion in three years, a nearly 90% increase. It sees its adjusted operating margin staying around 26% even as

other consumer companies are feeling a squeeze in their profits.

Of course, the company, which is based in Broomfield, Colorado, might not reach these goals. Fashion is notoriously fickle, and footwear is a category that relies on the popular apparel of the moment, such as the latest jean cut.

But the reason for the optimism, company executives and analysts say, is a steady stream of new products and shrewd marketing, especially on social media, where Crocs has cultivated a devoted customer base. It has 165,000 followers on Twitter and even more on TikTok (920,600), Instagram (1.6 million) and Facebook (6.9 million).

Over the years, the brand has developed a distinctive online voice through its use of emojis and memes, making shoppers feel that its aim is creating a community rather than just getting people to buy more clogs.

The company is adept at seizing cultural moments, as it did when it tweeted about Questlove wearing black Crocs on the Oscars’ Champagne-colored carpet this month. And during the pandemic, it drove customers to its mobile app with the promise of discounts, which it called Appy Hours.

“It’s not like people haven’t heard of using social media to create brand awareness and brand relevance, but this management team is just doing it better,” said Jay Sole, a retail analyst at UBS.

Crocs has steadily become more popular among Generation Z shoppers, a coveted demographic for any retail brand. In the fall, teenagers ranked Crocs No. 5 on a list of footwear brands, according to a biannual Piper Sandler survey. In 2017, it was No. 38. Hey Dude also cracked the top 10 in the most recent survey.

The more obsessive customers collect Crocs, which often sell for $49.99; it’s not uncommon for someone to have a dozen pairs or more. They can be accessorized with Jibbitz, the personalized trinkets pushed into the holes of Crocs clogs.

“Like any large company, the meteoric growth of the early years becomes more and more difficult to replicate,” said Matt Powell, the founder of Spurwink River, a retail consulting firm. “They recognize that the clog is the most important product. They’ve worked really hard to diversify away from that to take some pressure off of it.”

Crocs’ sandals carry lower profit margins than its clogs, but people generally buy sandals more frequently than other types of footwear. And a person who buys a pair of Crocs sandals, Rees said, is one who can be converted into a clog wearer.

Crocs’ sandal business had $310 million in sales in 2022, and the company is projecting $400 million this year. Rees said he and his team have more work to do overseas, noting that sandals are a $30 billion global category. They hope to increase sales in India and countries throughout Southeast Asia, where many people wear sandals year-round. Currently, North America accounts for 60% of all sales for the Crocs brand.

Crocs faces the risk that the cultural winds can shift away from them. Customers could start falling in love with another type of shoe. But analysts say its management team has shown that it can pinpoint consumer behavior and use those insights to sell even more shoes that customers like.

“They found a way to get into the better market — the more fashion-forward market,” Powell said. “They really are really hitting on a lot of the right notes right now.”

While other brands that thrived with customers in quarantine have dropped off, sales of Crocs, the easily slipped-on clogs, are up nearly 200 percent since 2019.

UBS chiefs see risks ahead in Credit Suisse takeover

By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED

UBS faces big risks as it prepares to absorb its longtime archrival, Credit Suisse, the bank’s chairman warned shareholders at its annual meeting this week.

In his first address to UBS shareholders since the takeover of Credit Suisse was announced on March 19, Colm Kelleher, the chair, said that the $3.2 billion deal — brokered at the behest of the Swiss government — was the first to combine two banks designated by regulators as “systemically important.”

It was an acknowledgment that taking over Credit Suisse, which imploded during the recent banking crisis over longstanding concerns about its history of scandals and financial losses, will present challenges. In announcing the deal, the Swiss government said that it was prepared to support UBS with billions of dollars’ worth of financial guarantees. (That said, the deal values Credit Suisse at a fraction of where it had traded before the takeover was announced.)

“You cannot just put numbers together and reach a sum,” Kelleher told the more than 1,100 shareholders assembled at the St. Jakobshalle arena in Basel, Switzerland. “You have to understand that there is a huge amount of risk in integrating these businesses.”

UBS’ vice chair, Lukas Gähwiler, noted the speed with which the firm had to carry out the transaction. “We had only 48 hours to carry out our due diligence,” he said. “So many questions remain unanswered.”

At a news conference in Bern on

Wednesday, the president of FINMA, Switzerland’s financial regulator, said that the agency had weighed putting Credit Suisse into bankruptcy before deciding that selling it to UBS was the best way to avoid disrupting Swiss and global financial markets.

Shotgun mergers to save failing banks have had a rocky history. JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has complained publicly about the headaches and legal costs that came with acquiring Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual during the 2008 financial crisis. They are experiences

that Kelleher, who was the chief financial officer of Morgan Stanley at the time, saw up close.

But UBS officials on Wednesday were also quick to argue that their firm — which was bailed out by the Swiss government in the 2008 crisis — was in a far stronger financial position. Unlike Credit Suisse, which lost billions in recent years from bad trading bets, UBS has focused mostly on managing the money of wealthy clients, a far less risky business.

Kelleher reiterated that his firm intended to close down huge swaths of Credit

Suisse’s investment bank to continue UBS’ emphasis on more stable operations.

“Our strategy is clear and unchanged,” he said, adding that risk management and prevention of financial crime were key focuses of UBS’ board — perhaps an oblique reference to his fallen rival’s checkered history.

But UBS executives said it was too soon to say how many employees would lose their jobs as the two banks are combined. Vincent Kaufmann of the Ethos Foundation, a prominent shareholder, said in his appearance at the lectern, “We expect that UBS will show social responsibility by preserving as many jobs as possible.”

Wednesday’s event was far less solemn than Credit Suisse’s final shareholder meeting, held Tuesday in Zurich. At that gathering, speakers repeatedly took to the microphone to accuse executives of mismanaging the 167-year-old bank, an icon of Switzerland’s banking industry, into oblivion.

At the UBS meeting, some shareholders said they worried that the Credit Suisse takeover would create a single giant institution that would dominate Swiss banking. UBS officials pushed back against that criticism, arguing that the combined firm would still have to compete with scores of smaller banks.

Climate activists also made their presence known. Two demanded that the UBS board refuse to do business with fracking companies that it would inherit from Credit Suisse, a major financier of oil and gas companies. Others greeted incoming shareholders outside the arena with inflatable props and banners decrying “fossil banks.”

A screen displays Lukas Gahwiler, the vice chairman of UBS, as he addresses the bank’s annual shareholder meeting near Basel, Switzerland, April 5, 2023. UBS faces big risks as it prepares to absorb its longtime archrival, Credit Suisse, the bank’s chairman warned shareholders at its annual meeting on Wednesday.

‘Powell’s Curve’ Plunges to New Lows, Flashing US Recession Warning

The Federal Reserve’s preferred bond market signal of an upcoming recession has plunged to fresh lows, bolstering the case for those who believe the central bank will soon need to cut rates in order to revive economic activity.

Research from the Fed has argued that the “nearterm forward spread” comparing the forward rate on Treasury bills 18 months from now with the current yield on a three-month Treasury bill was the most reliable bond market signal of an imminent economic contraction.

That spread, which has been in negative territory since November, plunged to new lows this week, standing at nearly minus 170 basis points on Thursday.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last year that the 18-month U.S. Treasury yield curve was the most reliable warning of an upcoming recession.

“Powell’s curve ... continues to plunge to fresh century lows,” Citi rates strategists William O’Donnell and Edward Acton said in a note on Thursday. Refinitiv data showed the curve was the most inverted since at least 2007.

Recession fears have surged in recent weeks, with investors worried the tumult in the banking system sparked by the March collapse of Silicon Valley Bank will tighten credit conditions and hurt growth.

The Fed - which has embarked on one of its most aggressive rate hiking cycles in decades to defeat inflation over the past year - has forecast borrowing costs will remain around current levels to the end of 2023. But market participants believe tighter monetary policy is already starting to hurt growth and are betting on rate cuts later this year.

When looking at that curve inversion in light of recent declines in economic indicators and money supply, “it’s not hard to see why markets may be increasingly thinking ‘policy error’ when reading about further rate hikes,” Citi’s analysts said.

Continuing its inflation-fighting campaign, the Fed last month raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point, though it indicated it was on the verge of pausing further increases in borrowing costs after the banking turmoil.

Some Fed officials have recently argued for more hikes, with St. Louis Fed President James Bullard saying on Thursday that the Fed should stick to raising interest rates to lower inflation while the labor market remains strong. Money market investors, however, on Thursday were largely betting the Fed would have cut rates by about 70 basis points by December, from the current 4.75%-5% range. “All this tightening of financial conditions, with the Fed raising rates significantly, now it’s

MOST ASSERTIVE STOCKS

morphing into maybe a little bit of a credit tightening,” said Jack McIntyre, portfolio manager at Brandywine Global. “Our conviction level down the road is that rates are going to be lower,” he said.

By KATIE ROGERS

The United States on Thursday acknowledged that the government should have started the withdrawal of Americans and Afghans from Kabul earlier at the end of the war in Afghanistan in 2021, and as a result, the government has changed policies to carry out evacuations in foreign countries sooner when security conditions worsen.

The acknowledgment was tucked inside a long-awaited summary of the August 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, which led to the swift collapse of the Afghan government and military. And amid rushed attempts by military officials to evacuate people from Kabul’s international airport, an Islamic State group suicide bomber carried out an attack that killed as many as 170 civilians and 13 U.S. service members.

President Joe Biden initially defended his decision as an “extraordinary success” and declared the end of an era in which the U.S. government used military power to remake other countries. But polling at the time showed that less than

40% of Americans supported how he handled the withdrawal, and Biden eventually demanded a “top to bottom” review of the pullout.

According to a 12-page summary of the review, government officials sought to put much of the blame on Biden’s predecessor, former President Donald Trump, accusing Trump of hastily striking a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops by spring 2021 and failing to outline a plan. But officials also acknowledged the speed with which the Taliban overtook the country and indicated a new stance of erring on the side of “aggressive communication” about risks.

The document says that in the months before the military pulled out, the Biden administration chose “to not broadcast loudly and publicly about a potential worst-case scenario unfolding in order to avoid signaling a lack of confidence” in the Afghan government.

The report does not directly call that a mistake, but at two points, the report says the government has changed its policies and will no longer make that choice.

“We now prioritize earlier evacuations when faced with a degrading security situation,” the administration said in a summary. “We did so in both Ethiopia and Ukraine,” referring to continuing conflicts in the countries.

US acknowledges it should have started evacuations from Afghanistan sooner NATO countries are divided over giving Ukraine membership, officials say

By STEVEN ERLANGER

NATO countries are divided over what kind of political reassurances they might give Ukraine at the next NATO summit meeting, in mid-July, with the United States, Germany and France resisting pressure from central and Eastern European allies to provide any detailed “road map” toward membership, Western officials said following a meeting of NATO foreign ministers this week.

On some level, they said, the debate is notional, given that Ukraine is at war and a major part of its territory is occupied by Russian invaders. And much will depend on how successful Ukraine is in its long-heralded counteroffensive, expected later this spring or early summer.

The debate was one focus of the meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels this week, as it was for the previous such meeting, held in Bucharest, Romania, in November, when the United States also resisted making any political promises to Ukraine about accelerated membership.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that he would only come to the midsummer NATO summit meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, if he is given some concrete path or enhanced steps toward NATO membership. Ukraine applied to join the alliance in September, but NATO officials understood the application to be a question for a more peaceful future.

Ukraine would also like some concrete assurances about security guarantees NATO could offer it once peace is established. The kind of assurances and longer-term partnership NATO might have with Ukraine, short of full membership, is another divisive issue.

NATO members will continue to discuss what they are collectively prepared to offer to Ukraine in Vilnius, but it will not be easy to find a compromise that is more than symbolic and that will satisfy Kyiv.

“We’ve got several weeks of hard negotiations ahead to close those gaps and craft a political outcome,” one Western official said. But some of Ukraine’s neighbors have been pushing for a path to membership, including Poland, the linchpin of NATO’s eastern flank. While on a state visit to Warsaw, Poland, on Wednesday, Zelenskyy won strong backing for a rapid entry into NATO from President Andrzej Duda.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, asked Wednesday about whether some proposal about membership might come at the meeting in Vilnius, said that it was more important to concentrate on “the very practical steps” to get Ukraine’s military trained and equipped for the counteroffensive.

“Our focus right now is relentlessly on doing what needs to be done to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian aggression, and indeed to put it in

a position to retake more of the territory that’s been seized from it by Russia,” he said. “That’s our intense focus.”

Blinken added that NATO was “also looking at what we can do, over a longer period of time, to build up Ukraine’s capacity to deter aggression, to defend against aggression and, if necessary, again in the future to defeat aggression.

“And a big part of that is bringing Ukraine up to NATO standards, and to NATO interoperability. And I suspect that you’ll see that focus continue at the Vilnius summit.”

In 2008, NATO leaders promised Ukraine and Georgia eventual membership, but without setting a date. Russia went to war against Georgia that year, and Russian troops remain in parts of Georgia, as they do in large sections of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014.

Afghans waving their documents at U.S. Marines who were standing guard atop the blast walls surrounding the international airport in Kabul, Afghanistan on Aug. 22, 2021.

Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, during a meeting of the alliance’s foreign ministers in Brussels on Wednesday.

‘Outrageous’: Russia accused of spreading disinformation at UN event

By FARNAZ FASSIHI

Days after Russia took the helm of the U.N. Security Council’s rotating presidency, a coalition of more than 50 countries earlier this week called Moscow’s first event a brazen disinformation showcase and an abuse of its role at the world body.

Russia hosted an informal Council meeting on the fate of thousands of Ukrainian children forcefully deported to Russia and placed with Russian families for adoption — a move that the International Criminal Court of Justice labeled a war crime. The court also issued arrest warrants last month for President Vladimir Putin of Russia and the head of that country’s children protection agency, Maria Lvova-Belova.

But not only did Moscow host and livestream an event on Wednesday about the very issue that drew global condemnation, Lvova-Belova also appeared via video before the Council to deny the charges and defend Russia’s actions.

When she spoke, representatives of several Western countries, including Britain, Malta and the United States, walked out of the chamber, returning only to deliver speeches condemning Russia.

“No amount of disinformation spread by the Russian Federation can deny the truth of the matter nor shield individuals from accountability for these crimes,” a joint statement by the United States, Ukraine and European Union member states said.

Lvova-Belova said that she was pleased to have the opportunity to “dispel the fakes and show the opposite side,” and that Russia was ready to cooperate with the reunification of the Ukrainian children with their families. “We have no doubt that this is a campaign to discredit our country and attempts to conceal their irresponsible actions about children,” Lvova-Belova told the Council.

She noted that Russia did not recognize the jurisdiction of the international court.

Britain’s mission to the United Nations had said that it would block the U.N. webcast of Russia’s session because of Lvova-Belova’s appearance. “If she wants to give an account of her actions, she can do so in The Hague,” it said in a statement.

But on Wednesday, Russia found a way, providing a livestream of the event, with simultaneous translation, on YouTube.

“It is outrageous, outrageous that Russia’s event today included Maria Lvova-Belova,” said Ngoyi Ngoyi, a representative of the U.S. mission to the United Nations. He said Russia’s actions demonstrated its contempt for the United Nations and international law, and called its attempts to justify its actions “appalling.”

Russia took over the rotating presidency of the Security Council more than year after its military stormed across the borders of neighboring Ukraine. The session

on Wednesday flew in the face of American and European diplomats’ hope. They said they expected Russia to conduct its work professionally but would call out Moscow if it used the platform to spread propaganda and disinformation to justify its actions in Ukraine.

Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, said on Twitter that his country would “never allow Russia’s lies to go unchallenged.”

Russia’s moves also called into question a statement made on Monday by its ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, who said, “We do not abuse the prerogatives of the presidency,” adding that “we cherish” the role of the Council presidency.

The session on Wednesday included a stream of video appearances and images apparently meant to make the case that Russia’s actions in Ukraine were justified and that the children were in good hands.

There were upbeat testimonials from officials from regions in Ukraine illegally annexed by Russia and not recognized by the United Nations; video messages from women claiming to be Ukrainian mothers who said that they were very pleased to have their children whisked away to Russia; and three promotional-style videos showing Lvova-Belova visiting Ukrainian children in hospitals and homes — and hugging and kissing them and handing them toys.

Nebenzia, the Russian ambassador, also used the forum to spin highly questionable narratives. He said, without providing any evidence, that Ukrainian children were being forcibly separated from their families and taken to European countries like Germany, Spain and Portugal for placement in shelters and with local families. Nebenzia said a Russian lawyer was involved in “extracting Ukrainian children from European slavery.”

He also accused the United States of forcibly transferring Vietnamese children to American shores after the Vietnam War and placing them with American families for adoption and refusing to return them to their families.

Not all Council members condemned Russia on Wednesday.

China, another permanent member of the Council and an ally of Russia’s, said it had taken note of Russia’s willingness to unify children with families and spoke generally of the need to protect children in armed conflicts.

Japan, one of the countries that signed the joint statement condemning Russia, said Moscow needed to evacuate its forces from Ukraine instead of evacuating children.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, sat out the session on Wednesday but said she had met with her Russian counterpart, Nebenzia, on Tuesday to demand the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been detained in Russia on espionage charges.

It was the first time that American and Russian ambassadors to the United Nations had a one-on-one meeting since the Russian invasion.

Maria Lvova-Belova, head of Russia’s children’s protection agency, addressed the U.N. Security Council via video on Wednesday.

French unions, still furious over pension law, resume protests

By AURELIEN BREEDEN

French workers marched and went on strike around the country on Thursday for the 11th time in three months, as the stalemate between President Emmanuel Macron and labor unions endured even after his pension overhaul, which raised the legal age of retirement to 64 from 62, has become law.

About 570,000 protesters took to the streets of France, according to French authorities, with violent clashes in some places. Unions gave the much higher figure of 2 million.

It was a large number but nonetheless lower than in previous rounds of protests, a sign that a movement that has posed the greatest political threat to Macron’s second term was losing some steam, at least for now.

Roughly 740,000 people marched around the country last week, and some of the biggest protest days of the past few months had attracted over 1 million people. The number of strikers in key sectors like transportation and education has also slowly declined.

France’s national railway company said three out of four high-speed trains were running on Thursday, as well as one in two regional express trains, far better than on previous strike days; while traffic on the Paris transportation network was close to normal. The Education Ministry said that about 8% of teachers were on strike, far fewer than before.

But disruptions and small acts of protest, like brief traffic blockages, have not stopped,

including on days without organized protests, and some strikes could pick up again. In Paris, where the streets are now clear of mounds of trash that had piled up during a weekslong garbage-collector walkout, one of the main unions is threatening a new strike next week.

Unions are also planning a new day of protests on the eve of a key ruling on the pension law by the Constitutional Council, a body that reviews legislation to ensure that it conforms to the Constitution. That ruling is expected next week.

The protests on Thursday came a day after a cordial but fruitless meeting — the first since January — between Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne and the heads of the main labor unions. The union representatives left after less than an hour and complained that they were not being heard.

“They are living in a parallel reality,” Sophie Binet, the newly elected head of the Confédération Générale du Travail, France’s second-largest labor union, told reporters at a march in Paris on Thursday.

Binet acknowledged that enthusiasm for the walkouts was waning in some areas, partly because of the financial burden for striking workers, but she said that the protests were a “long-distance race,” not a sprint.

As long as the pension overhaul “is not withdrawn, the mobilization will continue in one form or another,” she added.

On Wednesday, protesters briefly shut the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and unfurled a banner that read “No to 64!” from the top

of the famous landmark. Electricity workers have continued making sporadic power cuts in official buildings, including at a local prefecture in Lyon on Thursday. Some universities are still being occupied by protesting students.

The chaotic unrest that followed Macron’s decision to push the law through Parliament without a full vote has slightly subsided — but not the persistent opposition to the pension overhaul and the anger against Macron, who is currently on a state visit to China but is closely following the turmoil back home.

While the protests around the country were mostly calm, they were also marred by now-familiar clashes and injuries, as a minority of protesters threw projectiles at riot police, who responded with tear gas and batons.

In Nancy, the door to a local French central bank office was set on fire. In Lyon, protesters looted a Nespresso store and tossed coffee capsules into the crowd.

In Paris, protesters lit bonfires and smashed in the windows of several bank branches. Some also targeted La Rotonde, the restaurant where Macron celebrated his 2017 electoral victory, pelting the establishment with rocks and bottles, and starting a small blaze on an awning that was quickly put out by firefighters.

France’s interior minister said that over 150 officers had been injured during the protests, and over 100 people had been arrested.

Macron’s opponents have warned that his insistence on pushing through the pension overhaul is creating a dangerous mix.

Recent polling has shown that voters would be more likely to support Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader and Macron’s strongest rival in the past two French elections, and less likely to back Macron or his allies in a hypothetical election.

Laurent Berger, the leader of the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail, France’s largest labor union, told reporters at a protest in Paris that Macron’s approach had led to increased mistrust toward the government, higher social tensions and more support for the far right.

“If those aren’t all the ingredients of a democratic crisis, I don’t know what is,” Berger said.

Macron’s government has argued that it followed the law at every step and that most opposition parties presented no realistic alternatives to ensure that the French pension system remains financially sustainable.

The government maintains that it wants to talk with the unions but has refused to discuss the age increase, while the unions insist that dropping the measure is the only way forward. Each side has accused the other of refusing to compromise.

“I understand that we have been unable to convince at this time, but it’s work that must continue in the long term,” Olivier Véran, spokesperson for the French government, told France Inter radio.

“The far right is high in voting intentions,” Véran acknowledged. But, he added: “Why? Because it says nothing, because it offers nothing, and as always it reaps the fruits of anger.”

The new pension law will stand as is unless the Constitutional Council strikes down part or all of it. Legal experts are divided over a possible outcome.

The conflict between Macron and the opposition is now essentially in limbo, with all sides awaiting the council’s ruling.

“The impasse” was the headline on the front page of Le Parisien, a French daily newspaper, on Thursday, while Olivier Baccuzat, deputy editor-in-chief of L’Opinion, another newspaper, wrote that the meeting between Borne and the unions “ended exactly as one might have feared: with nothing.”

“And for good reason, each of the protagonists got exactly what they came for: nothing,” he added in his editorial. “Or rather, little things that allow both sides to keep up appearances and to boast that they have not given up anything.”

Demonstrators, some holding a sign calling for President Emmanuel Macron’s pension overhaul to be blocked, protesting in Nantes, western France, on Thursday.

Xi and Macron call for Ukraine peace talks, but the path is murky

By ROGER COHEN

President Emmanuel Macron of France and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, on Thursday appealed for a rapid return to peace talks to end the war in Ukraine, but Xi did not indicate whether he would use his close relationship with Moscow to push Russia to negotiate.

Greeted with great pomp at the flag-bedecked Great Hall of the People, Macron told Xi that he was counting on him “to bring Russia back to reason and everyone back to the negotiating table” on Ukraine.

Xi, flanked by the French leader, went partway toward a positive response. He said that “together with France, we appeal for reason and restraint” in the conflict. China was seeking “a resumption of peace talks as soon as possible,” he said, and, in an apparent nod to Russian concerns over NATO’s expansion eastward, “a European security architecture that is balanced, effective and lasting.”

In what Xi described as “a joint call with France for the international community,” he said that China “appeals for the protection of civilians. Nuclear weapons must not be used, and nuclear war must not be fought.” His statement marked some distance from President Vladimir Putin, who has repeatedly hinted at nuclear warfare and whose forces have routinely targeted civilians.

Two important points were, however, left vague. It was unclear whether Xi might put any pressure on Putin, as Macron requested; and Xi did not commit to any time frame for speaking with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, who said last month that China could be a “partner” in seeking peace.

There have been no known peace talks between Russia and Ukraine since last April, and each side insists it has no interest in a cease-fire, setting preconditions that are anathema to the other.

Moscow claimed last year to annex four provinces in eastern and southern Ukraine, although its forces do not control all of that territory, and insists that Kyiv must recognize them as Russian. Ukraine’s stated position has been that Russia must withdraw or be driven out of occupied lands — including Crimea, the peninsula Russia illegally annexed in 2014 — before there can be peace talks. Any halt in fighting, Zelenskyy has said, would simply solidify the Kremlin’s control of the area it has seized and reward its aggression.

Before the invasion last year and in the weeks after it, Zelenskyy expressed openness to discussing the status of some of the area claimed by Russia, including Crimea. His position later hardened, but this week, there were mixed signals from his government about whether, beneath its tough public stance, there was some room for negotiation.

If Ukrainian forces recapture enough occupied land in the south to reach the border of Crimea, Kyiv would be willing to discuss the status of the peninsula with Moscow, Andriy Sybiha, the deputy head of Zelenskyy’s office, told The Financial Times. But he later told the BBC that reverting to diplomacy did not mean Ukraine would give up the goal of reclaiming the peninsula. And Tamila Tasheva,

Zelenskyy’s envoy on Crimea, told Politico that the only open question on Crimea was whether Russia left voluntarily or by force.

The NATO countries backing Ukraine insist it is up to Kyiv whether and when to negotiate, but many officials within the alliance have said privately — and sometimes publicly — that Ukraine should consider peace talks without achieving all of its goals. Western nations are wary that the war could drag on for years, or that losses on the ground could prompt Putin to escalate.

Sybiha’s comments could be a signal to the allies saying, “Don’t worry, we won’t act rashly,” said François Heisbourg, a French defense expert. “Send us tanks and planes, but we won’t use this stuff in a way that creates a crisis.”

Zelenskyy has taken care not to criticize China and has said he wants to talk with Xi, in hopes that Beijing can use its influence in Russia to Ukraine’s benefit.

Xi last month traveled to Moscow for a warm state visit with Putin, but he has not spoken directly with Zelenskyy since Russia’s full-scale invasion more than a year ago.

Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president who accompanied Macron to Beijing in a show of European unity (even if they did not appear together publicly), told journalists that “President Xi reiterated his willingness to speak when conditions and the time are right” with Zelenskyy. Asked if Xi had given a timeline, she demurred.

Neither Macron nor Xi took questions from journalists Thursday.

Macron told Xi the objective of any negotiation must be “a durable peace that respects internationally recognized borders and avoids all forms of escalation.”

Xi called for parties to “observe the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter,” which calls for countries

to refrain from the “use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Yet China has never condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor called Putin’s assault on a neighboring state a war.

Beijing would like to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe, a consistent theme during Macron’s visit. Xi, for example, said China supports Macron’s quest for European “strategic autonomy,” shorthand for some European distancing from the United States.

“China considers Europe to be an independent pole in a multipolar world,” Xi said.

It was an explicit sign that he does not view America’s alliance with Europe as a defining feature of the continent in a 21st century that China seeks to shape.

“The China-Europe relationship is not targeted at, subjugated to or controlled by any third party,” Xi said.

A statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry after Xi held a three-way meeting with Macron and von der Leyen took clear aim at the United States. “Playing up the ‘democracy vs. authoritarianism’ narrative and stoking a new Cold War will only bring division and confrontation to the world,” it said.

Europe’s hard-hit economy needs the Chinese market, and Europe provides major economic opportunities to China that are not readily available in Russia.

Macron, embattled at home over his decision to raise the retirement age to 64, appears to have found in Xi a partner in imagining a new world. Xi borrowed some of the French president’s favorite phrases, speaking of changed “strategic architecture,” freed from “bloc confrontation” and offering European “strategic autonomy.”

The hard part is knowing what all this means, how it might be applied and what place the United States, France’s oldest ally, would have in such a world.

A resident walks along the road as smoke rises from the site of a Russian rocket strike in an industrial complex in Slovyansk, Ukraine, on March 10, 2023.

Ramos Director Funerario

Putin should have read Evan Gershkovich, not imprisoned him

By BRET STEPHENS

If Vladimir Putin had ever bothered to read Evan Gershkovich’s reporting — it’s a safe bet he didn’t, for reasons I’ll explain below — he might have thought a little harder before throwing him into prison last week on transparently bogus espionage charges.

In December, Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, along with his colleagues Thomas Grove, Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson, delivered what is surely one of the most richly reported and convincing explanations of why Putin’s war in Ukraine has gone so badly.

The long and short of it: Putin has no independent sources of reliable information. He refuses to read news stories on the internet, fearing it might be used to spy on him. Battlefield information is filtered — and laundered — through layers of military bureaucracy and takes days to reach him. Past military successes in Georgia and Crimea made him overconfident, and the pandemic turned him into a paranoid recluse. On the eve of the invasion, neither his foreign minister nor his domesticpolicy chief was aware of the war about to come.

And, like despots through the ages, he listens only to people who tell him what he wants to hear. One of them, the oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, The Journal reported, “assured Mr. Putin that Ukrainians saw themselves as Russian, and would welcome the invading soldiers with flowers.” Putin is godfather to one of Medvedchuk’s daughters.

Foreign reporters play a vital but delicate role in the information economy of repressive states. Most of these regimes tightly control their own press, ensuring their citizens are given a politically convenient and carefully choreographed version of events. Putin took things further, manipulating not only how Russians understand the news but also how those abroad did as well, through social-media disinformation campaigns and the slickly produced Russia Today TV channel.

But repressive states also need foreign reporters, for at least two, essentially contradictory, reasons.

On the one hand, their presence in the country creates an illusion of openness, of having nothing to hide. It’s a form of propaganda.

At its worst, this can lead to fundamentally misleading reporting, as foreign correspondents become witting or unwitting tools of the regimes they are supposed to cover. Walter Duranty, the infamous New Yorrk Times correspondent in Moscow during the 1930s, is an archetype: At the height of Stalin’s collectivization campaign against Ukrainian farmers, in which as many as 5 million people were starved to death, Duranty

wrote, “Conditions are bad, but there is no famine.” (The Times long ago repudiated his shameful coverage, though his Pulitzer Prize has never been revoked.)

On the other hand, good and honest foreign reporters can also offer unvarnished accounts of what’s really happening inside the country — something that an autocrat like Putin can’t easily obtain elsewhere. State-controlled media is of no use in getting facts. Government statistics are massaged to hide bad news. Every bureaucracy, including the domestic intelligence services, has its own agendas and reality-distorting prisms.

Had the Russian president read Gershkovich’s reporting over the past year, he might have read a story or two that would have pleased him, like one from last summer about young Russians largely ignoring the war. (That was before a partial draft sent many Russians fleeing to Dubai, Bali and even a remote Alaskan island.)

Yet Putin would also have learned, thanks to Gershkovich’s solo reporting in Belarus in the earliest days of the war, that the war was not “going to plan,” in contrast to what Russia’s defense minister kept telling him. He would have learned how utterly incompetent his war machine is, thanks to an inside account from a Russian paratrooper who participated in the invasion and later fled to France. He would have learned that despite last year’s energy-revenue windfalls, Russia’s economy is coming undone under Western sanctions and that his old pal Oleg Deripaska has warned: “There will be no money next year. We need foreign investors.”

These stories were written mainly for the benefit of readers in the West. But a wiser autocrat than Putin would have intuited that he might have avoided some costly miscalculations if only foreign media were allowed to operate freely and without fear in Russia. And while he probably wishes to trade Gershkovich (along with Paul Whelan and Marc Fogel, Russia’s other known American hostages) for some high-value Russian spies in the West, no prisoner swap would actually be worth more to him than the gift of accurate, reliable, unbiased information about real conditions in Russia.

By now it should be clear that Putin is living inside a manufactured reality — one that can only harm him in the long term, since truth usually finds a way through, but that poses sharp risks to everyone else in the short term. Diplomatic remonstrations won’t puncture his fantasy bubble, but another tranche of Abrams tanks to Ukraine might.

As for Gershkovich, the most fitting tribute we can pay him is to continue to report the truth about Russia, despite the risks. Putin has sought to wage a disinformation campaign in the West for decades.

Western news organizations can repay his abuses with an information campaign about Russia, in Russian, for Russians. They, too, deserve to have the benefit of facts Putin wants nobody — including even himself — to know.

Manager

Director

President Vladimir Putin of Russia during a joint news conference in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, July 19, 2022.

Afirman promedio de ocupación hotelera supera el 85 por ciento en Semana Santa

SAN JUAN – El director ejecutivo de la Compañía de Turismo de Puerto Rico (CTPR), Carlos Mercado Santiago aseguró el jueves, que el 85 por ciento del

inventario de hospedería en Puerto Rico está ocupado para la Semana Santa.

Añadió que las hospederías en la zona de Porta del Este reportaron los niveles más altos de ocupación entre el 6 y el 9 de abril con 93 por ciento del inventario de las habitaciones disponibles reservadas, mientras que el resto de las regiones reflejan un promedio de ocupación de 85 por ciento; sin contar las reservaciones de último minuto.

“Estamos satisfechos con los resultados que continuamos alcanzando, dado a las diversas estrategias y esfuerzos que hemos implementado junto a nuestros socios de la industria para incrementar la actividad de turismo interno, así como promocionar el destino en

mercados internacionales, dijo Mercado Santiago en declaraciones escritas.

Por su parte, el programa de Paradores de Puerto Rico, de la Compañía de Turismo, reporta un 95 por ciento de sus habitaciones llenas.

De igual forma, esta semana es una muy activa en el Aeropuerto Internacional Luis Muñoz Marín (LMM) con una proyección de más de 125,000 pasajeros.

Asimismo, el puerto de San Juan recibe esta semana 18 cruceros y alrededor de 32,000 pasajeros, cuyas visitas representan un impulso significativo a la economía en la zona del Viejo San Juan, así como para los operadores de excursiones y otros proveedores de servicios turísticos.

Realizan millonario desembolso a la AEE por trabajos de la red eléctrica

POR CYBERNEWS

S AN JUAN – El director ejecutivo de la Oficina Central de Recuperación, Reconstrucción y Resiliencia, el ingeniero Manuel A. Laboy Rivera, anunció el desembolso de $62.7 millones a través del Programa de Asistencia Pública de la Agencia Federal para el Manejo de Emergencias (FEMA por sus siglas en inglés), para la Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica (AEE) por concepto de medidas de protección en emergencias por el embate del huracán Fiona.

“Este reembolso, que es el mayor que se ha realizado bajo este desastre, responde a los gastos en los que incurrió la AEE al activar varias unidades para aumentar la producción de energía con el fin de reducir los apagones en los municipios afectados por el desastre. Continuaremos trabajando junto a nuestros subrecipientes para reembolsar los gastos por emergencia ágilmente para que puedan recuperar estos fondos y continuar con sus obras de recuperación”, indicó Laboy Rivera.

Al momento, FEMA ha obligado aproximadamente $670.5 millones de fondos federales para los trabajos de recuperación por el desastre de Fiona que

lideran los municipios, dependencias gubernamentales y organizaciones sin fines de lucro.

Por su parte, el director ejecutivo de la AEE, Ing. Josué A. Colón Ortiz, expresó que gracias al apoyo de todo el personal que labora en FEMA y en COR3, la Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica se suma a este anuncio del desembolso que se ha efectuado por concepto de los gastos operacionales de las unidades pico que se operaron para restablecer y mantener el servicio de electricidad luego del paso del huracán Fiona.

El ingeniero Colón explicó que, de los gastos operacionales desembolsados, hay unos $61.3 millones por pagos de combustible utilizado por las unidades pico durante el restablecimiento del servicio eléctrico.

“Tan pronto recibimos la notificación de COR3 sobre el reembolso de estos pagos de combustible, comenzamos a preparar una moción para informar sobre el mismo. Ya radicamos una moción ante el Negociado de Energía informándole que recibimos un reembolso de aproximadamente $61.3 millones por gastos de combustible durante la recuperación del huracán Fiona y le solicitamos acreditar dicho reembolso en la próxima reconciliación trimestral de

la facturación a los clientes”, destacó el funcionario. Colón Ortiz explicó que la AEE utilizó estas unidades pico o de respuesta rápida para suplir energía a cargas críticas, como hospitales e instalaciones de agua, luego de la salida de la generación de las unidades base a causa del paso del huracán Fiona.

BAYAMÓN – Dos menores de uno y cinco años quedaron bajo la custodia del Departamento de la Familia, luego que sus padres fueran arrestados ayer por presunto maltrato, informó el Negociado de la Policía.

Según se desprende del informe policíaco, un hombre junto a su esposa, ambos de 27 años, dejaron a los menores casi una hora en el interior de un vehículo Nissan Roque sin supervisión de un adulto mientras reali-

zaban compras en una farmacia que ubica en la urbanización Extensión Forest Hill, carretera 167 en Bayamón. Los hechos se reportaron a eso de las 4:32 de la tarde de ayer, miércoles.

El Departamento de la Familia asumió la custodia temporera de ambos menores, mientras los arrestados están en la espera de que se consulte en el día de hoy con fiscalía ante la posible radicación de cargos.

La agente Idalis Rosado de la División de Delitos Sexuales de Bayamón, se hizo cargo de la investigación.

POR CYBERNEWS

Arrestan a pareja en Bayamón por supuestamente dejar solos a sus hijos en un carro por casi una hora

‘Spin Me Round,’ ‘Small Town Crime’ and more streaming gems

By JASON BAILEY

This month’s recommended viewing includes a pair of unconventional romcoms, genre titles with a lot on their minds and two must-see docs for music lovers.

‘Spin Me Round’ (2022)

Director Jeff Baena and actor Alison Brie first teamed for his 2016 film “Joshy,” and she’s been in every film he’s made since — not only starring in but co-writing his two most recent, “Horse Girl” (2020) and this slightly demented rom-com riff. Brie stars as Amber, the manager of the Bakersfield franchise of an Olive Gardenstyle chain restaurant called Tuscan Grove, who is offered the chance to spend a week at the chain’s training institute in Italy. She takes the leap, clutching an “Eat, Pray, Love” paperback, her imagination full of romantic visions that are, to put it mildly, not to be met. Brie is as starry-eyed and sympathetic as ever, and she and Baena’s stock company of players — including Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen and Baena’s off-screen partner Aubrey Plaza — are reliably uproarious. Stream it on Hulu.

‘The Art of Self-Defense’ (2019)

Alessandro Nivola is a charmingly roguish object of desire for Brie in “Spin Me Round”; he similarly subverts a familiar type in his memorable supporting role in this pitchblack comedy-drama from writer and director Riley Stearns. Jesse Eisenberg is excellent as a nebbish weakling who decides to become a “real man” by learning karate. Nivola is the sensei of the local dojo whose cool demeanor and words of wisdom soon give way to a broad parody of toxic masculinity. Stream it on HBO Max.

‘The DUFF’ (2015)

This high school comedy adheres strictly to the formulations of the genre — the characters, qualities and outcomes haven’t changed much since the John Hughes era that director Ari Sandel so clearly seeks to emulate. What makes “The DUFF” special is the rare leading performance by Mae Whitman, the wonderful young actor from the TV shows “Parent-

hood” and “Good Girls,” who is cast, rather bafflingly, in the title role — an acronym for “Designated Ugly Fat Friend.” (Whitman is neither, but she wears overalls, which is apparently close enough.) Her on-screen charisma is so effortless, her comic timing so sharp, that she elevates the material by her mere presence and investment. Stream it on Netflix.

‘Small Town Crime’ (2018)

John Hawkes is a similar classification of actor to Whitman — usually lighting up a handful of scenes in juicy supporting roles, but rarely given the chance to take the spotlight. This tart little crime thriller gives him that opportunity, with a showy role as a boozy former cop who stumbles into a possible crime (and a shot at redemption). None of this is breaking new ground, but writer-directors (and brothers) Eshom Nelms and Ian Nelms play it all out with affection and respect for the genre, and stack an impressive cast of first-rate supporting players (including Anthony Anderson, Clifton Collins Jr., Robert Forster and Octavia Spencer) for Hawkes to bounce his hard-boiled dialogue off. Stream it on HBO Max.

‘Shadow’ (2019)

The great Chinese director Zhang Yimou, who astonished us with the colorful pageantry of films like “Raise the

Red Lantern,” “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers,” went in an altogether opposite direction for this thrilling martial-arts epic, creating (with impressive effort by cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding and production designer Ma Kwong Wing) what amounts to a black-andwhite world, shot in color. The effect is stunning, emphasizing the beauty of Xiaoding’s compositions and the elegance of the fight choreography and battle scenes. Such tales as this, of historical romance and underdog rebellion, have been done so often that it would be easy to merely replicate works of the past. Bravo to Zhang for finding a whole new way to see (and to make us see) this story. Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.

‘Piggy’ (2022)

Sara (Laura Galán) is the town butcher’s daughter and a teen outcast, brutally bullied (terrorized, really) by her vile classmates for her weight — hence the title, their cruel nickname for her. Their taunting is so merciless, in fact, that the viewer has a hard time judging Sara when the tables turn and she chooses not to save her tormentors from a fate worse than death. Deeply twisted but undeniably compelling, the story by writer and director Carlota Pereda goes so wild by the homestretch, you can’t imagine where she could possibly end up (and then she goes further). It’s a gnarly little item, with a monster of a performance by Spanish star Galán. Stream it on Hulu.

‘Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story’ (2017)

This history of Bad Boy Records (and, by extension, profile of its founder and frontman, Sean Combs) doesn’t probe or prod too provocatively — this is an authorized production, after all, presenting the label’s hip-hop groundbreakers and the mogul behind it in the most desirable light. But as a music showcase it’s hard to beat, as director Daniel Kaufman focuses on two 2016 Bad Boy reunion concerts to highlight both big hits and old beefs. Stream it on Netflix.

‘The Wrecking Crew’ (2015)

The great hits of 1960s rock acts like the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas, the Monkees and Sonny & Cher were often not played by those bands at all — the tracks were provided, often at the behest of super-producers like Phil Spector, by a top-notch group of studio musicians known as the Wrecking Crew. Denny Tedesco, the son of one of those players, directed this affectionate documentary tribute, which details how this band of gunslingers came together, how they came to dominate the West Coast music scene and why so many of them were content to stay in the shadows, even while topping the charts. Testimonials from the likes of Brian Wilson and Cher are effusive, but the real juice comes from the surviving members, who talk shop and dish dirt like they were just in the studio last week. Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.

Aubrey Plaza and Alison Brie in “Spin Me Round.”

The San Juan Daily Star April 7-9, 2023 20

Keith Reid, who brought poetry to Procol Harum, dies at 76

By ALEX WILLIAMS

Keith Reid, whose impressionistic lyrics for the early progressive rock band Procol Harum helped to fuel emblematic songs of the 1960s, most notably “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” has died. He was 76.

His death was announced in a Facebook post from the band. The announcement did not say where or when he died or cite a cause, but according to news media reports, he died in a hospital in London on March 23 after having been treated for cancer for two years.

During its heyday in the late 1960s and ’70s, Procol Harum stood out as musically ambitious, even by prog-rock standards — as demonstrated by its 1972 album, “Procol Harum Live: In Concert With the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.”

The band’s music, which at times bordered on the sepulchral, required lyrics that soared along with it. Reid was happy to oblige. “I always write them as poems,” he said of his lyrics in a 1973 interview with Melody Maker, a British music magazine. Indeed, with Procol Harum, the words tended to come first.

As lyricist Bernie Taupin has long done for Elton John, Reid generally submitted his lyrics to the band’s singer, pianist and primary songwriter, Gary Brooker, or sometimes the band’s guitarist, Robin Trower, or organist, Matthew Fisher, who also wrote songs.

While Reid was a founding member of the group, he was more a rock star by association, since he did not sing or play an instrument and thus did not record or perform with Procol Harum. Still, he rarely missed a gig.

“If I didn’t go to every gig, I would not be part of the group,” he told Melody Maker. Touring, he said, helped him write: “I find it much easier to shut myself away in a hotel room for two hours than to work at home, where there are far too many distractions.”

The results of such focus were apparent with “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the first single off the band’s debut album, released in 1967. The song, which hit No. 1 on the British charts and No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States, sold around 10 million copies worldwide. And it endured long after the ’60s drew to a close.

By the ’80s, it had achieved canonical status. It was often used to underscore the wistful memories of veterans of the flower-power era in films like Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 hippies-to-yuppies midlife crisis tale, “The Big Chill,” and Martin Scorsese’s May-December romance installment in the 1989 film “New York Stories,” which also included short films by Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola.

The song’s famous opening lines (“We skipped the light fandango / Turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor”) conjure bawdy images of drunken debauchery at a party, illuminating a failing romantic relationship. They are set to a haunting chord progression with echoes of Bach, rendered in ecclesiastical fashion by Fisher’s organ, and sung by Brooker in a raspy voice, soaked with longing and regret.

She said “There is no reason

And the truth is plain to see.”

But I wandered through my playing cards

Would not let her be

One of sixteen vestal virgins

Who were leaving for the coast

And although my eyes were open

They might have just as well’ve been closed.

“I had the phrase ‘a whiter shade of pale,’ that was the start, and I knew it was a song,” Reid said in a 2008 interview with British music magazine Uncut.

“I was trying to conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story,” he continued. “With the ceiling flying away and room humming harder, I wanted to paint an image of a scene.”

Keith Stuart Brian Reid was born Oct. 19, 1946, in Welwyn Garden City, north of London, one of two sons of a father from Austria and a mother who had been born in England to Polish parents. His father, who was fluent in six languages, had been a lawyer in Vienna but was among more than 6,000 Jews arrested there in November 1938. He fled to England upon his release.

His father’s experiences at the hands of the Nazis left emotional scars that Reid said influenced his worldview, and his writing.

“The tone of my work is very dark, and I think it’s probably from my background in some subconscious way,” Reid said in an interview with Scott R. Benarde, the author of “Stars of David: Rock ’n’ Roll’s Jewish Stories” (2003).

In 1966, Reid was introduced by a mutual friend to Brooker, who was with a band called the Paramounts, whose members also included Trower and drummer B.J. Wilson. Reid and Brooker became friends and started writing together; they, Trower, Wilson and Fisher would all eventually form Procol Harum.

Procol Harum never again scaled the heights it achieved with its first single, but it continued to be a major act through the mid-1970s, regularly releasing albums and scoring the occasional hit single; a live orchestral version of “Conquistador,” a song from the band’s first album, reached the Top 20 in 1972.

Reid said he felt lost after the band broke up in 1977 (it would reform, in various incarnations, over the years). In 1986 he moved to New York, where he started a management company and composed songs (music as well as lyrics) for other artists.

That year, he collaborated with songwriters Andy Qunta, Maggie Ryder and Chris Thompson of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band on “You’re the Voice,” which was recorded by Australian singer John Farnham, and topped the charts in several countries, although it made little impact in the United States.

During the 1990s, Reid wrote songs for Annie Lennox, Willie Nelson, Heart and many others. He would eventually turn the focus on his own talents, releasing two albums by what he called The Keith Reid Project, “The Common Thread” (2008) and “In My Head” (2018), which included artists like Southside Johnny, John Waite and Thompson.

Reid’s survivors include his wife, Pinkey, whom he married in 2004.

Unlike the rock luminaries he came of age alongside, Reid did not bask in the lights of the stage. Even so, he experienced his own form of glory, gazing on as the members of Procol Harum brought life to his words at shows he refused to miss.

“You wouldn’t expect a playwright not to attend the rehearsals of his play,” he told Melody Maker in 1973. “My songs are just as personal to me. They’re a part of my life. They are not gone from me.”

The lyricist Keith Reid in 1970. A kind of rock star by association, he provided the impressionistic words for “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and other songs recorded by Procol Harum but did not perform or record with the band.

A wine vintage takes a break from climate change

By ERIC ASIMOV

Discussions of recent vintages often center on the challenges posed by the climate crisis. Wine has been a leading indicator of how the world is changing, whether you measure by intense heat, drought or once-rare disasters that now seem to occur regularly, like spring frosts, summer hail and forest fires.

This plunge into a new climate reality is part of what makes the 2021 vintage in parts of northern Europe so fascinating, particularly in France and Germany.

After three straight hot years from 2018 to 2020, the ’21 vintage was like a great leap backward into the years before climate change, a time that shaped 20thcentury perceptions of the wines from these regions. It was cool and wet, and growers battled mildew and other maladies that were rare in the recent hot, dry years.

As a result, regions in France and Germany made wines in 2021 that producers like to call “classic,” which is an accurate description even though it’s a term often used as a euphemism for “bad vintage.” I’ve been thinking of them as “pre-climate change wines.”

From a grower’s perspective, 2021 might be considered a bad vintage because the farming was so difficult. Yields were significantly lower, which means producers have less wine to sell. From my viewpoint, the best ’21s recall a delicacy and grace that has been rare in an era when growers around the world must often battle to keep their grapes from overripening.

I’m particularly interested in the ’21 German vintage because it allowed growers to make some beautiful, lightly sweet kabinett rieslings, a lacy style that has been difficult to achieve for most of the 21st cen-

Wine bottles 2021 riesling kabinett from Germany, in Newburg, N.Y., on March 7, 2023. After years of higher temperatures, kabinett riesling producers have a vintage that seems like a throwback to the time when growers battled to ripen grapes; Kabinett lovers rejoice.

tury because of climate change.

To understand kabinett, let’s review German wine nomenclature, which can differ depending on whether a wine is intended to be dry or sweet.

Nowadays, dry German rieslings are assessed like most other dry wines around the world, by how they taste and where the vineyards are situated. Those with the most potential might have a designation like Grosses Gewächs.

Sweet wines, on the other hand, are measured not by taste or site but by the level of ripeness in the grapes when they are harvested. This Prädikat scale designates minimum ripeness levels for wines to be called, in ascending order of ripeness: kabinett, spätlese, auslese, beerenauslese and trockenbeerenauslese.

When I began learning about wine in the 1980s, good kabinett rieslings were barely sweet and wonderfully refreshing. They were delicate wines that made me think of that moment in early spring when buds were just beginning to open. Many were low in alcohol, maybe 7.5% or so, the sort of bottles you’d consider having with lunch.

Climate change has not been friendly to kabinett. They are still made every year, but now, because the Prädikat scale indicates only ripeness minimums, not maximums, kabinett wines tend to be sweeter and richer, more like spätleses than the kabinetts that I remember so fondly.

Many producers take this as a point of pride, as if the Prädikat scale is a quality hierarchy rather than a stylistic differentia-

tion. They think they are doing consumers a favor by offering riper versions of kabinett. But for kabinett lovers like me, opening a richer, sweeter kabinett is no gift. That’s why I have looked forward to the ’21 kabinetts so eagerly.

I found these 12 bottles in New York retail markets, but it wasn’t easy. Other German wine lovers, intrigued by the vintage, have snapped them up, including some of the best small-production bottles. Still, they are available here and there, and you may certainly run into them on restaurant wine lists.

Not all German rieslings made in ’21 are going to be wonderful. Growers had to be skilled in knowing when to pick. Some may not have waited until the grapes were sufficiently ripe. Those wines may seem overly acidic.

Consumers who’ve grown up on spätlese-level kabinetts may also find the vintage challenging. But for those of us who love the high-wire act of kabinett, in which gentle sweetness and refreshing acidity achieve a nervy balance, these wines are a great opportunity to relive some beautiful memories.

I should say, comparing current wines to recollections now shrouded in a rosy glow can be tricky. Regardless, these wines are really good.

Here are the 12 bottles of 2021 kabinett riesling, in order of price.

Meulenhof Mosel Erdener Treppchen Riesling Kabinett 2021, 10%, $24

The classic kabinett rieslings of the Mosel region were lacy and delicate. Even in 2021, this bottle, at 10% alcohol, stands out a bit from the classic style. The grapes come from a warm site in the Treppchen vineyard near the town of Erden, and the result is not quite so fragile as a classic

kabinett might be. No matter, this fruity, lightly sweet wine is a delicious nod in the direction of kabinett riesling. (Skurnik Wines, New York)

A.J. Adam Mosel Dhroner Hofberg Riesling Kabinett 2021, 8.5%, $27

The Dhron Valley is one of numerous small tributaries flowing into the Mosel. Andreas Adam is maybe the only producer I’m familiar with working in that area, and he’s better known for his dry rieslings. Nonetheless, this is a lovely, subtle kabinett, softly sweet and gently acidic for a well-balanced wine. No fireworks, just quiet satisfaction. (Skurnik Wines)

Kruger-Rumpf Nahe Münsterer im Pitterberg Riesling Kabinett 2021, 8.5%, $28

The Kruger-Rumpf estate traces its origin back over centuries, but it only began to bottle its own wines in 1984. The Münsterer im Pitterberg, from a slate-and-schist vineyard on a convex slope, is an ideal kabinett, fresh, gorgeously mineral and full of apricot flavors. The sweetness is subtle, almost unnoticeable. Altogether, this is a lively, energetic kabinett, not as delicate as a Mosel can be, but balanced, refreshing and intense. (Skurnik Wines)

Dönnhoff Nahe Oberhäuser Leistenberg Riesling Kabinett 2021, 8.5%, $30

When Helmut Dönnhoff took over his family estate in 1971, it was a time when others in the Nahe were leaving their steep hillside vineyards for easier-to-farm sites on flatlands. Dönnhoff took the other tack, buying sites on the slopes where he could. The results over the years include wines that serve as Nahe benchmarks. He is still involved in the estate today, though it is now run largely by his children, Cornelius and Christina. This kabinett is lovely — precise and lightly sweet, but also a touch saline, with gentle fruit and fine minerality. (Skurnik Wines)

Alfred Merkelbach Mosel Ürziger Würzgarten Riesling Kabinett 2021, 8%, $32

Two bachelor brothers, Alfred and Rolf Merkelbach, who joke that they wed their tiny vineyard instead, making old-school wines, impervious to fashion. It sounds almost too romantic to be true. Well, call me a sucker, but I’ve enjoyed these wines for years because, in addition to the wonderful story, the wines are terrific. The brothers keep alcohol levels and sugar levels low, and the result is a clas-

sic kabinett, delicate, lightly sweet and as inviting as a bright spring morning. (Skurnik Wines)

Hermann Ludes Mosel Thörnicher Ritsch Riesling Kabinett “Gackes Oben” 2021, 7.5%, $34

This is the first wine I’ve had from the Ludes estate, but it won’t be the last. This gorgeous kabinett is from a cool site in the steep, slate Ritsch vineyard. It is taut and nervous, full of energy like a peripatetic teenager, with a thrilling balance between light sweetness and electric acidity. I love it now, but if I had another bottle I would put it aside for at least five years, as I imagine it will become more complex and expressive with age. (Vom Boden, Brooklyn, New York)

Clemens Busch Mosel Marienburg Riesling Kabinett 2021, 7.5%, $34

Clemens and Rita Busch were among the earliest German growers to adopt organic viticulture in the 1980s. They now farm biodynamically on steep terraced vineyards in the Middle Mosel. This wonderful kabinett is textured and refreshing, walking a knife’s edge between sweet and saline. (Louis/Dressner Selections, New York)

Emrich-Schönleber Nahe Monziger Riesling Kabinett 2021, 9%, $38

I know Emrich-Schönleber better for its excellent dry wines, especially those from three vineyards: Halenberg, Auf der Lay and Frühlingsplätzchen. Nonetheless, this is a superb kabinett, juicy yet fine with peachy-apricot aromas and a wet-stone minerality. It manages to be simultaneously delicate and substantial, gently sweet and thoroughly refreshing. (Vom Boden)

Maximin Grünhaus Mosel Abtsberg Riesling Kabinett 2021, 7.5%, $45

This ancient estate on the Ruwer, a tributary of the Mosel, dates back almost 1,400 years. It was originally part of a Benedictine abbey and has been in the hands of the von Schubert family since 1882. I love these wines — they age beautifully and, even when young, they are emblematic of the delicacy and intensity of the Mosel at its best. This bottle, from the steep, blue slate Abtsberg vineyard, is a bit sweeter than other

’21 kabinetts, but well balanced with lively acidity. It’s already complex. (Loosen Bros. USA, Salem, Oregon)

Schäfer-Fröhlich Nahe Bockenauer Felseneck Riesling Kabinett 2021, 8.5%, $45

Schäfer-Fröhlich’s dry rieslings are terrific, but you really can’t go wrong with any wine it makes. They are meticulously farmed and carefully produced, and the wines are almost always precise and energetic. This is a powerful Nahe rather than a delicate Mosel, but it’s nonetheless a lovely kabinett, focused and barely sweet, with flavors of peach and citrus. (The German Wine Collection, Carlsbad, California)

Joh. Jos. Prüm Mosel Graacher Himmelreich Riesling Kabinett 2021, 8%, $55

Many people, including me, think of Joh. Jos. Prüm as the archetypal producer of sweet Mosel rieslings — as far as I know, Prüm doesn’t even make dry wines. The Prüm family established the estate in the early 19th century, and it’s run today by Katharina Prüm and her father, Manfred Prüm.

The ’21 Graacher Himmelreich epitomizes the classic fragile kabinett, poised and precise, barely sweet and beautifully balanced. Don’t drink it yet, however: The old-school Prüm wines require aging. It’s not that they are unpleasant as babies, they are just nowhere near what they will become in five to 25 years. (The German Wine Collection)

Peter Lauer Saar Schonfels 111 Riesling Kabinett 2021, 7.5%, $59

This bottle comes from the coolest part of the region known until 2007 as the MoselSaar-Ruwer. Now, it is simply called the Mosel. Nonetheless, Florian Lauer, the current proprietor of Peter Lauer, labels this bottle as “Saar.” He only makes sweet wines when he thinks the vintage conditions permit, as they did in 2021. This is a thrilling wine, gently sweet and with searing acidity. It vibrates with energy yet is true to its kabinett identity, gentle rather than extravagant. Give this one some age. (Vom Boden)

A wine bottle Alfred Merkelbach Mosel Urziger Wurzgarten Riesling Kabinett 2021 , in Newburg, N.Y., on March 7, 2023.

Pineapple and ham belong together

By ERIC KIM

Hiwa Rosario is celebrating Easter a week early this year. The actual holiday weekend is one of the busiest times of the year for her business, Farm to Jar Hawaii. She’ll be setting up shop at Ward Centre in Honolulu to sell her coveted pineapple glazes, which her customers buy to deck out their holiday hams. The balanced combination of tangy, sweet fruit and salty, savory pork is, she said, “a perfect union.”

Pineapple and ham belong together — on Easter tables and, yes, on pizza. They look alike, too: When scored for roasting, the ham’s diamond pattern mimics the pineapple’s quilted peel, nature’s manifestation of the golden spiral.

Early 20th-century recipes for ham with pineapple — like the ones that appeared in women’s magazine ads for Hawaiian Pineapple Co., now known as Dole — are still beloved today. Rosy ham, bejeweled with rings of canned pineapple, whole cloves and maraschino cherries, is a classic. But that doesn’t mean it’s not due for an edit.

Canned pineapple rings are pretty but don’t lend much fruity flavor. “I recommend a return to the days when ham was discreetly glazed with pineapple syrup,” James Beard protested back in 1972 in “James Beard’s American Cookery.” And while you’re at it, he said, “Forget the cherries!”

By using fresh fruit and a punchy, sweettart glaze, the best flavors of this retro dish can beam bright.

But you don’t need to get rid of the camp completely: Stick with canned pineapple juice for the liquid when oven-braising the ham in a roasting pan. Baking a bone-in half ham, cut side down in that primrose lagoon, allows the sweet juice to infuse the pork as the ham releases its saltiness into the liquid, creating the base for a vibrant and dynamic glaze. Spike it with tangy lemon juice and fortify the savory and sweet flavors with molasses-tinged dark brown sugar and heady Dijon mustard.

Since uncooked pineapple has a group of enzymes called bromelain, which can turn meat into mush, add the fresh fruit to the roasting pan in the ham’s final moments of glazing rather than affixing it to the meat with toothpicks. The pineapple, surrounding the roast like a legion of sunlit crescent moons, does two

things: It releases fresh, acidic juices and will prevent the glaze from burning on the bottom of the pan.

You can buy fresh pineapple already stemmed, peeled and cored, snug in a plastic quart container in the prepared fruit section of many grocery stores.

But cutting one yourself is simple enough: Just lop off the top and bottom, then carefully slice off the peel downward in long, wide strips, following the curve of the fruit. You could use a special corer to create the rings we get in cans, but since their shape doesn’t matter here, just halve the pineapple from top to bottom, and then slice it into half-moons. A small circular cookie cutter or paring knife makes quick work of carving out the tough core.

As with my glazed holiday ham, I now prefer fresh pineapple — cubed and slightly charred if I’m lucky — on my homemade Friday-night pizzas. Last winter, I had the best variation I’ve ever tasted at Pizza by Alex in Biddeford, Maine, where they use plump cubes of Virginia ham rather than the thin shavings of pork that ordinarily sit atop this quirky pie.

Originally invented in 1962 by Sam Panopoulos, a Greek-born Canadian cook, pineapple and ham pizza, or Hawaiian pizza, was reportedly named after the canned pineapple he used: Hawaiian Pineapple, a brand synonymous with the islands’ complicated colonial past.

Pineapple and the state are inextricably linked. “It’s a good and bad history for Hawaii,” Rosario said, adding “everything is always bittersweet.” After all, her grandmother worked in a pineapple canning factory as a part-time job in high school. In that way, it was just a part of life.

When Rosario lived in Arizona for a few years to attend college, she found comfort in ham and pineapple pizza. The fruit had become an emblem of her home state, a symbol of her sweet tooth. Miles from home, she missed her daily fruit — a pink guava, maybe a chunk of pineapple. The pizza was a portal into her past. There’s something poetic about the way pineapple and ham share that quilted exterior, she said.

Pineapple, ham and pizza exist as a sort of edible continuum: When you roast a ham, you can cube any leftover fruit and meat into fat, juicy chunks for pizza later. As Rosario said, it’s a perfect union.

Pineapple Ham

Although this retro classic — bejeweled with rings of canned pineapple, cloves and maraschino cherries — is still beloved and can be found on many holiday tables, using fresh fruit and a punchy, sweet-tart glaze results in a much brighter pineapple flavor. Baking a bone-in half ham, cut side down in a lagoon of pineapple juice, means the sweet juice infuses the pork as the ham releases some of its saltiness into the liquid. Don’t bother decorating the outside of your ham with fresh pineapple, as the enzymes in the fruit will turn the meat to mush. Instead, add slices to the pan in the final moments of glazing, which burnishes the meat’s diamond scoring that mimics a pineapple’s quilted peel.

Yield: 12 servings

Total time: 3 1/2 hours

Ingredients:

1 bone-in, fully cooked unsliced half ham (7 1/2 to 10 pounds)

2 cups canned pineapple juice

1 pineapple (see Tip)

6 packed tablespoons dark brown sugar

6 tablespoons lemon juice (from 2 lemons)

1 1/2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

Freshly ground black pepper or ground cloves

Preparation:

1. Position a rack near the bottom of the oven and heat the oven to 325 degrees. Using a sharp paring knife, make parallel cuts across the surface of the ham, about a 1/2-inch deep and 1 inch apart, then repeat in the opposite direction to create a diamond pattern.

2. Place the ham in a large roasting pan, cut side down, and pour over the pineapple juice. Cover the ham with parchment, then cover the pan tightly with foil. Bake until the ham is heated through, 2 to 2 1/2 hours. The internal temperature should reach 135 degrees, which takes about 15 minutes per pound.

3. While the ham cooks, trim the top and bottom off the pineapple, then cut off the peel. Halve the pineapple from top to bottom, then slice into 1/2-inch-thick half moons. Using a small circular cookie cutter or small knife, cut out and discard the core.

4. Carefully remove the ham from the oven and raise the temperature to 425 degrees.

5. Uncover the ham and ladle out 2 cups of the liquid into a large skillet. Add the brown sugar, lemon juice, mustard and a few generous grinds of black pepper or a pinch of cloves to the skillet and bring to a boil over high heat to make the glaze. Cook, whisking occasionally, until the glaze is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, 15 to 20 minutes.

6. Scatter the pineapple around the pan. Using a spoon or a brush, apply half of the glaze all over the surface of the ham and some over the pineapple slices. Bake, uncovered, until the glaze is bronzed, 8 to 12 minutes. Transfer the ham to a cutting board to rest for at least 15 minutes before slicing and serving with the pineapple and extra glaze.

Tip: In some markets, you can buy fresh pineapple already peeled, cored and sliced in the refrigerated produce section. You can use that as a shortcut here or prepare a pineapple as detailed in step 3.

On the Easter table, these smart, flavorful tweaks make the retro combination even better.

The San Juan Daily Star

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA

CENTRO JUDICIAL DE FAJARDO SALA SUPERIOR CIELO VIVIENDA LLC

Demandante V. LAZARO ARMANDO

FERNANDEZ PAREDES

t/c/c LAZARO A. FERNANDEZ PAREDES

Demandado

Civil Núm.: NSCI201200010. (307). Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. AVISO DE VENTA EN PÚBLICA SUBASTA. Yo, DENISE BRUNO ORTIZ, ALGUACIL

AUXILIAR PLACA #266, Alguacil de la División de Subastas del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Fajardo, a la demandada y al público en general, les notifico que, cumpliendo con un Mandamiento que se ha librado en el presente caso, por el Secretario del Tribunal, con fecha 16 de diciembre de 2022 y para satisfacer la Sentencia por la cantidad de $170,379.47 de principal, dictada en el caso de epígrafe el 13 de febrero de 2013, notificada y archivada en autos el 20 de febrero de 2013, procederé a vender en pública subasta, al mejor postor en pago de contado y en moneda del curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América, todo derecho, título e interés que haya tenido, tenga o pueda tener la deudora demandada en cuanto a la propiedad localizada en el: Municipio de Culebra, Puerto Rico, el bien inmueble se describe a continuación:

“HORIZONTAL PROPERTY”:

RESIDENCIAL UNIT TWEN-

TY FIVE ZERO ZERO TWO (2502) OF CLUSTER TWEN-

TY FIVE (25) WHICH FORMS

PART OF THE COSTA BONITA

BEACH RESORT CONDOMI-

NIUM REGIME, LOCATED AT

LOS FRAILERS WARD, CULEBRA, PUERTO RICO. RECTANGULAR SHAPED ONE

STORY UNIT, WITH A TOTAL

CONSTRUCTION AREA OF SEVEN HUNDRED SIXTEEN POINT SIXTY SIX POINT FIFTY EIGHT SQUARE METERS (66.58). THIS UNIT SHARES

PART OF THE GROUND

FLOOR OF CLUSTER TWEN-

TY FIVE (25) WITH RESIDENTIAL UNIT TWENTY FIVE ZERO ONE (2501). THE MAIN

ENTRANCE IS LOCATED ON THE SIDE OF THE UNIT LEADING TO THE FOYER WHICH IS A LIMITED COMMON ELEMENT OF CUSTER TWENTY FIVE (25). ITS BOUNDARIES ARE: BY THE NORTH, WITH EXTERIOR COMMON AREAS OF THE CONDOMINIUM, BY THE SOUTH, WITH UNIT TWENTY FIVE ZERO ONE

(2501) AND WITH THE FOYER WHICH IS AN INTERIOR LIMITED COMMON ELEMENTS, BY THE WEST, WITH EXTERIOR COMMON AREAS OF THE CONDOMINIUM, AND BY THE EAST, WITH EXTERIOR COMMON AREAS OF THE CONDOMINIUM. RESIDENTIAL UNIT TWENTY FIVE ZERO TWO (2502) CONTAINS A LIVING/SLEEPING AREA, A KITCHENETTE, A BATHROOM, TWO CLOSETS, AN OWNERS CLOSET, AN AIR CONDITIONING CLOSET AND A COVERED BALCONY AREA. THIS UNIT HAS THE EXCLUSIVE USE AND ENJOYMENT OF THE FOLLOWING LIMITED COMMON ELEMENT OF THE COSTA BONITA BEACH RESORT CONDOMINIUM, THE FOYER AND ACCESS STAIRWAYS OF CLUSTER TWENTY FIVE (25) WHICH GIVES ACCESS TO THE UNITS FORMING PART OF SUCH CLUSTER. THE PERCENTAGE SHARE OF THE UNIT IN AND TO THE GENERAL COMMON ELEMENTS IS POINT ZERO THREE ZERO OF ONE PERCENT (.6030%). THE PERCENTAGE SHARE OF THIS UNIT IN AND TO THE LIMITED COMMON ELEMENTS IS TWENTY FIVE PERCENT (25%). FINCA #1935 DE CULEBRA, INSCRITA AL TOMO KARIBE DEL REGISTRO DE LA PROPIEDAD DE PUERTO RICO, SECCION DE FAJARDO. Con el importe de dicha venta se habrá de satisfacer a la parte demandante las cantidades adeudadas, según la Sentencia dictada en el caso de epígrafe, por el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Fajardo, cuyas cantidades ascienden a $170,379.47 de principal, 6 1/8% de intereses, los cuales continúan acumulándose hasta el saldo total de la deuda; $1,394.50 de gastos por mora, los cuales continúan acumulándose hasta el pago total de la deuda, $145.00 de otros gastos y la suma pactada de $18,360.00 para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado.

El tipo mínimo para la subasta será la suma de tasación pactada, la cual es $183,600.00 según la escritura de hipoteca para la propiedad antes descrita. De declararse la subasta desierta, se procederá a una segunda subasta y servirá de tipo mínimo de 2/3 del precio mínimo antes mencionado;

$122,400.00. Si tampoco hubiere remate ni adjudicación en esta segunda subasta, se procederá a una tercera subasta, en la cual regirá como tipo mínimo ésta la 1/2 del precio mínimo antes mencionado;

$91,800.00. Art. 104 de la Ley Hipotecaria, 30 L.P.R.A. sec.

2721. Para el lote descrito, la PRIMERA SUBASTA se llevará

a cabo el día 10 DE MAYO DE 2023, A LAS 3:00 DE LA TARDE. De no comparecer postor alguno se llevará a efecto una

SEGUNDA SUBASTA el día 17 DE MAYO DE 2023, A LAS 3:00 DE LA TARDE. De no comparecer postor alguno se llevará a cabo una TERCERA SUBASTA el día 24 DE MAYO DE 2023, A LAS 3:00 DE LA TARDE. La subasta o subastas antes indicadas se llevarán a efecto en mi oficina, localizada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Fajardo. De Estudio de Título realizado, no surgen gravámenes preferentes, surge el siguiente gravamen posterior: Embargo Estatal contra Lázaro Fernández, cuenta número 596-01-2153, por la suma de $467,034.73 según Certificación expedida por el Departamento de Hacienda de Puerto Rico, el 21 de marzo de 2022, en virtud de la Ley #210 de 2015, anotado al Asiento 2022-002680-EST en el Sistema de Embargos y Sentencias Karibe el 23 de marzo de 2022. Se le advierte a los licitadores que la adjudicación se hará al mejor postor, quien deberá consignar el importe de su oferta en el mismo acto de la adjudicación en moneda de curso legal de los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica, giro postal o cheque de gerente a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal y para conocimiento de la parte demandada y de toda(s) aquella(s) persona(s) que tengan interés inscrito con posterioridad a la inscripción del gravamen que se está ejecutando, y para conocimiento de los licitadores y el público en general y para su publicación en un periódico de circulación general, una vez por semana durante el término de dos (2) semanas consecutivas con un intervalo de por lo menos siete

(7) días entre ambas publicaciones, y para su fijación en tres

(3) lugares públicos del municipio en que ha de celebrarse la venta, tales como, la Alcaldía, el Tribunal y la Colecturía y se le notificará además a la parte demandada vía correo certificado con acuse de recibo a la última dirección conocida. Se les advierte a todos los interesados que todos los documentos relacionados con la presente acción de ejecución de hipoteca, así como la de la subasta, estarán disponibles para ser examinados en la Secretaría del Tribunal. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titulación y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere al crédito de ejecutante, continuarán subsiguientes 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 ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores, previa orden judicial dirigida al Registrador de la Propiedad de la sección correspondiente para la cancelación de aquellos posteriores. Y para conocimiento de la demandada, de los acreedores posteriores, de los licitadores, partes interesadas y público en general, expido el presente Aviso para su publicación en los lugares públicos correspondientes. Librado en Fajardo, Puerto Rico, a 16 de febrero de 2023. DENISE BRUNO ORTIZ, ALGUACIL AUXILIAR PLACA #266. JORGE A. ORTIZ ESTRADA, ALGUACIL REGIONAL INTERINO #622.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE VEGA BAJA

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

Parte Demandante Vs. SUCESIÓN DE CARLOS MANUEL TIRADO FORTY, COMPUESTA

POR CARLOS MANUEL

TIRADO ROJAS, YILDA ENID TIRADO ROJAS, VICTOR MANUEL TIRADO BETANCOURT, JOSÉ MANUEL

TIRADO BETANCOURT, KARLA JANICE

TIRADO QUIÑONEZ

Y FULANO DE TAL, POSIBLE HEREDERO DESCONOCIDO; SYLVIA IVETTE MARTÍNEZ BARRETO, POR SÍ Y EN LA CUOTA VIUDAL USUFRUCTUARIA

Parte Demandada

Civil Núm.: D4CD2017-0064. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO, EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. 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 en Sumaria y Sentencia Rebeldía Nunc Pro Tunc dictada el 5 de diciembre de 2019 enmendada 16 de febrero de 2022 y enmendada nuevamente 14 de marzo de 2022 y notificada el 16 de marzo de 2022, la Orden de Ejecución de Sentencia del 1 de marzo de 2023 y el Mandamiento de Ejecución del 7 de marzo de 2023 en el caso de epígrafe, procederé a vender

el día 13 DE JUNIO DE 2023, A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA, en mi oficina, localizada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Centro Judicial de Vega Baja, Sala Superior, Carretera Número Dos (2) Kilómetro 38.3 (al lado del Centro Gubernamental) Vega Baja, 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, derecho o interés de la parte demandada sobre la siguiente propiedad: URBANA: Solar marcado con el Número nueve (9) del Bloque B del plano de inscripción de la Urbanización Alturas de Cerro Gordo, situado en el Barrio Sabana, municipio de Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, con un área superficial de 893.00 metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE: en 23.50 metros con el Solar Número dos (2) del Bloque B del proyecto; SUR: en 23.50 metros con la Calle Número cuatro (4) de la Urbanización Alturas de Cerro Gordo; ESTE: en 38.00 metros con el Solar Número ocho (8) del Bloque B del proyecto; OESTE: en 38.00 metros con el Solar Número diez (10) del Bloque B del proyecto. Enclava una casa. La propiedad consta inscrita al Folio 166 del Tomo 165 de Vega Alta, Finca 8824. Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección III. La escritura de hipoteca y su modificación constan inscritas al Folio 97 vuelto del Tomo 289 de Vega Alta, Finca 8824. Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección III. Inscripción décima tercera (13ra) y décima cuarta (14ta), respectivamente. Dirección Física: Alturas de Cerro Gordo 1 & 2, 32 Calle Amanecer, Vega Alta, PR 00692-9047. Número de Catastro: 10-018-066-156-09-000. El tipo mínimo para la primera subasta será de $148,840.51. De no haber adjudicación en la primera subasta se celebrará una SEGUNDA SUBASTA, el día 20 DE JUNIO DE 2023, A LAS 9:30 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, $99,227.00. De no haber adjudicación en la segunda subasta, se celebrará una TERCERA SUBASTA el día día 27 DE JUNIO DE 2023, A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA, en el mismo lugar, en la cual el tipo mínimo será la mitad del precio pactado, o sea, $74,420.25. 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 $133,501.38 de principal, más intereses sobre dicha suma al 4.95% anual desde el 1 de agosto de 2016 hasta su completo pago, más $158.88 por recargos adeudados desde el día 1 de septiembre de 2016 hasta su total pago, más la cantidad estipulada de $14,884.05 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 posteriores que afectan la propiedad en cuestión: Aviso de Demanda: Pleito seguido por Banco Popular de Puerto Rico Vs. Sucesión de Carlos Manuel Tirado Forty compuesta por Fulano y Mengano de Tal, Sylvia Ivette Martínez Barreto, ante el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Vega Baja, en el Caso Civil Número D4CD2017-0064, sobre Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca, en la que se reclama el pago de hipoteca con un balance de $133,501.38 y otras cantidades, según Demanda de fecha 10 de febrero de 2017. Anotada al Tomo Karibe de Vega Alta. Anotación A. 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 gra-

vámenes 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 lugares públicos correspondientes, el presente Aviso de Pública Subasta en Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, hoy 21 de marzo de 2023.

LUIS F. ORTIZ ROSA, ALGUACIL AUXILIAR PLACA #821, ALGUACIL DEL TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE VEGA BAJA.

LEGAL NOTICE

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

LIME HOMES, LTD

Parte Demandante Vs. WILLIAM RIVERA DEYNE

Parte Demandada

Civil Núm.: FCD2015-0304. Salón Núm.: (0404). Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EDICTO DE SUBASTA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R., SS.

A: WILLIAM RIVERA

DEYNE: Y AL PÚBLICO

EN GENERAL:

El Alguacil que suscribe, certifica y hace constar que en cumplimiento de Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia que me ha sido dirigido por la Secretaría del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Carolina, procederé a vender en pública subasta y al mejor postor, por separado, de contado y por moneda de curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América. Todo pago recibido por el (la) Alguacil por concepto de subastas será en efectivo, giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del (de la) Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia. Todo derecho, título, participación e 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: Propiedad

Horizontal: Apartamento residencial de forma irregular localizado en la segunda Planta del Edificio H del Condominio Río Vista, localizado en el Barrio Hoyo Mulas del término municipal de Carolina, Puerto Rico, el cual se describe en la escritura matriz de dedicación al Régimen de Propiedad Horizontal con el número 122 con un área de 1,024.80 pies cuadrados, equivalentes a 95.24 metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, en 17’ 10 1/2” con espacio abierto; por el SUR,

en 21’10”, con espacio abierto; por el ESTE, en 36’5” con pared medianera que lo separa del apartamento número 132; y por el OESTE, en 37’8” con pared medianera que lo separa del apartamento número 112 y área de escalera que da acceso al edificio. Tiene su puerta de entrada y salida por su lado Oeste que da al área del pasillo que conduce a la escalera que le brinda acceso al Edificio y además tiene una puerta en el lado Sur la cual le provee acceso al balcón. Consta de balcón, sala-comedor, una (1) habitación dormitorio con un closet en su interior, un pasillo que brinda acceso a las siguientes áreas: cocina, un clóset pequeño, área de lavandería, un baño completo de uso general, una (1) habitación dormitorio con un clóset en su interior y una (1) habitación, dormitorio principal (master room) en la cual ubica un área de “walk-in-closet” y un (1) baño completo. Le corresponden a este apartamento dos (2) espacios de estacionamiento identificados con los números 53 y 54. A este apartamento el corresponde una participación en los elementos comunes del Condominio de 0.0060480%. Inscrita al folio 84 del tomo 1224 de Carolina, Registro de la Propiedad de Carolina, Sección Segunda, finca número 52,521, Inscripción Primera. La propiedad objeto de ejecución está localizada en la siguiente dirección: Condominio Río Vista, Apartamento 122 Edificio H, Carolina, Puerto Rico 00987. Se informa que la propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravamen posterior, una vez sea otorgada la escritura de venta judicial y obtenida la Orden y Mandamiento de cancelación de gravamen posterior. (Art. 51, Ley 210-2015). En relación a la finca a subastarse, se establece como tipo mínimo de licitación en la Primera Subasta la suma de $111,000.00, constituida mediante la escritura número 10, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 18 de junio de 2009, ante el notario Juan C. Galanes Valldejuli, e inscrita al folio 45 del tomo 1354 de Carolina, finca número 52,521, inscripción 4ta., como Asiento Abreviado extendidas las líneas el día 6 de marzo de 2013, según la ley número 216 del día 27 de diciembre de 2010. (Fue presentado el día 3 de agosto de 2009 al Asiento 1085 del Diario 387). Debidamente modificada la hipoteca de la inscripción 4ta., mediante la escritura número 600, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 29 de diciembre de 2012, ante el notario Ricardo Rangel Rivera, e inscrita al folio 45 del tomo 1354 de Carolina, finca número 52,521, inscripción 5ta.

A new twist for the tradition-bound Masters: the LIV Golf era

By ALAN BLINDER

The mystery started in earnest last spring and lasted until autumn’s twilight. But

Phil Mickelson — among the most famous frontmen for LIV Golf, the league bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — insists that he believed he would be allowed to play the 2023 Masters Tournament, which opened Thursday in Augusta, Georgia.

Never mind any discomfort, or how oncourse rivalries had transformed into longdistance furies tinged by politics, power, pride and money. No, Mickelson reasoned, tradition would prevail at Augusta National Golf Club, surely among sports’ safest wagers.

“The history of this tournament, the history of the majors, is about bringing the best players together, and it really needs to rise above any type of golf ecosystem disruption,” Mickelson, a three-time Masters winner, said in an interview last month.

“I wasn’t really worried,” said Mickelson, who spent the 2022 Masters in a self-imposed sporting exile after he effectively downplayed Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses. But, he allowed, “there was talk” of exclusion from one of golf’s most revered events.

Augusta National extinguished the talk on Dec. 20: If a golfer qualified for the Masters through one of its familiar pathways, like being a past champion, his 2023 invitation would be in the mail.

The club’s choice will infuse its grounds through at least Sunday, when the tournament is scheduled to conclude, weather permitting. All of the customary narratives that surround a major tournament are bubbling: Will Scottie Scheffler become the first repeat winner in more than two decades? Might Rory McIlroy finally complete the career Grand Slam? Can Jon Rahm regain his dominant winter form? And, as ever, what will Tiger Woods do?

But an undercurrent of ambition, curiosity and gentility-cloaked discord is present, too.

For LIV, the competition will be a breakthrough if one of its players dons the winner’s green jacket. For the PGA Tour, the Masters is an opportunity to showcase that its 72-hole approach to an ancient game is still king. And for Augusta National, the tournament is an opportunity to depict itself as skeptically above golf’s chaotic fray.

“At the Champions Dinner, I would not have known that anything was going on in the world of professional golf other than the norm,” Fred S. Ridley, Augusta National’s chair, said Wednesday, the day after the traditional gathering of past Masters winners.

He added: “So I think, and I’m hopeful, that this week might get people thinking in a little bit different direction and things will change.”

It was virtually certain that this week would not descend into open brawling, and it has not. Some players have complained about a news media hyperfocus on any potential tensions — and acknowledged that they, too, had wondered about the vibe and contemplated the stakes for their tours.

Cameron Smith, at No. 6 the highestranked LIV player, said PGA Tour players had greeted him with hugs and handshakes. Asked what, exactly, he had anticipated, he replied: “I wasn’t really sure, to be honest.”

He seemed more certain that LIV could use a strong showing on the leaderboards around Augusta National’s hallowed stage.

“I think it’s just important for LIV guys to be up there because I think we need to be up there,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of chatter about these guys don’t play real golf; these guys don’t play real golf courses. For sure, I’ll be the first one to say the fields aren’t as strong. I’m the first one to say that, but we’ve still got a lot of guys up there that can play

some really serious golf.”

Rory McIlroy, seemingly approaching sainthood in the eyes of PGA Tour executives for his steadfast defense of their circuit, said the Masters was “way bigger” than golf’s big spat and that he relished the opportunity to go up against 18 LIV players who are among the world’s finest golfers. Being around them again, he suggested, can build rapport, though he acknowledged restored proximity was not a guarantee of perpetual harmony.

“It’s a very nuanced situation and there’s different dynamics,” McIlroy said. Referring to Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson, the LIV stars and major winners, he added: “You know, it’s OK to get on with Brooks and D.J. and maybe not get on with some other guys that went to LIV, right?”

For its part, Augusta National, whose private membership roster is believed to include at least two former secretaries of state, has sought to tamp down theatrics.

Groupings for Thursday and Friday were and are about the most anodyne possible, at least in the PGA Tour vs. LIV context. Woods and Bryson DeChambeau, who recently suggested that Woods had all but excommunicated him, will not have a reunion at the first tee. Fred Couples, a PGA Tour loyalist who called LIV’s Sergio Garcia a “clown” and Mickelson a “nutbag,” is scheduled to play alongside Russell Henley and Alex No -

ren. McIlroy is grouped with Sam Burns and Tom Kim.

And Ridley said that Augusta National had not invited Greg Norman, the LIV commissioner, to the club, where the leaders of the PGA Tour and DP World Tour have held court in recent days.

“The primary issue and the driver there is that I want the focus this week to be on the Masters competition,” Ridley said. He said he believed Norman had attended the tournament twice in the last decade, once as a radio commentator.

Ridley also sidestepped a query about whether Augusta National had become complicit in “sportswashing” Saudi Arabia’s image.

“I certainly have a general understanding of the term,” Ridley said. “I think, you know, it’s for others to decide exactly what that means. These were personal decisions of these players, which I, you know, at a high level, don’t necessarily agree with.”

With tournament play scheduled to begin Thursday morning, the week’s emphasis was rapidly shifting toward the competition itself. The event’s American television broadcasters appeared unlikely to dwell on offcourse subjects unless they must.

“We’re not going to put our heads in the sand,” said Sean McManus, the chair of CBS Sports, which will broadcast the third and fourth rounds on Saturday and Sunday. “Having said that, unless it really affects the story that’s taking place on the golf course, we’re not going to go out of our way to cover it, and I’m not sure there’s anything that we could add to the story.”

ESPN, which is airing the tournament’s first two rounds, has suggested it is even less interested in golf’s geopolitical soap opera. Curtis Strange, the two-time U.S. Open champion who is now a commentator, said he didn’t “see us mentioning the Roman numerals at all.”

“We have to give respect to the Masters Tournament,” he said. “The only way I could ever see anything coming up — and not even mentioning LIV — but some of these players haven’t played a lot of competitive golf. So how sharp can they be?”

LIV golfers have said that they will be prepared for the rigors of the Masters, even though they have been playing 54-hole events, instead of 72, at courses that some doubt will have them ready for Augusta’s challenges.

“The history of this tournament, the history of the majors, is about bringing the best players together, and it really needs to rise above any type of golf ecosystem disruption,”

Phil Mickelson said last month.

The Yankees cap goes viral in Brazil: ‘Is it basketball?’

By JACK NICAS

Matheus Gustavo arrived for his second day of work at a hat shop in Rio de Janeiro wearing a black New York Yankees cap. His new job, for the most part, was selling Yankees hats. On the displays around him, about 3 out of 4 caps promoted that baseball team in the Bronx.

Yet Gustavo had a confession. He had worn a Yankees hat for years, he said, “but I never knew the real reason for the NY.”

When told the Yankees were a baseball team, the 23-year-old looked unimpressed. “Ah,” he responded. “It’s more about soccer here.”

That is an understatement. In Brazil, soccer is life, and baseball confounds. But a few days in any of Brazil’s metropolises or beyond will make clear that, regardless, the Yankees cap is perhaps the country’s hottest headwear.

It is ubiquitous on the beaches of Rio, and in the bars of São Paulo. It was perched on the heads of some right-wing protesters demanding a military coup to oust Brazil’s leftist president. And last month, it hung from a tree, torn and muddied, at an illegal gold mine deep inside the Amazon rainforest.

Just don’t expect many Brazilians to understand what the hat means.

“It’s American football? Or is it a brand?” said Carlos Henrique, 20, hawking Yankees caps off a metal rack he was carrying on Rio’s Ipanema Beach. Either way, it was his bestseller. “I just know it calls attention,” he said. “And it looks good on everyone.”

More than any other sports paraphernalia, the Yankees cap has become its very own fashion trend, unmoored from the sport or the team it represents. Lifted by starring roles in hip-hop videos, celebrity endorsements and collaborations with Gucci and Supreme, the hat has gone fully global, crossing borders to lands where mentions of Babe Ruth and Aaron Judge will elicit blank stares — never mind trying to explain the “Evil Empire.”

Last week, the Yankees started playing meaningful baseball once again, and Yankees fans in New York pulled on the caps to show their allegiance. But to many others in places like Brazil, China and Africa, the interlocked NY insignia will remain simply a classic piece of Americana, a status symbol, or a generic — perhaps chic — emblem of the West.

“The logo is super stylish and, I think, sophisticated,” said Natalia Monsores, 40, while checking out a wall of Yankees hats in a luxury-mall shop owned by New Era, the Buffalo, New York, company that makes the official Yankees caps. “It’s the symbol of the brand, right? New Era,” she replied when asked what the logo meant.

“You’re sending a sign: ‘I’m wearing something quality.’”

Isabel Cunha, 26, an ad professional in a Yankees cap eating breakfast in Rio, admitted that she, too, was not quite sure what she was wearing. “I think it’s pretty,” she said. When told it was a sports team, she replied, “basketball?”

Artur Regen oversees Brazil for New Era, Brazil’s largest — and, he said, only — licensed Major League Baseball hat seller. “Ninety-eight percent of Brazilians don’t know it’s a baseball team,” he said. “New York is cool and they want to be associated with it.”

New Era sells Yankees hats in more than 125 countries. Since entering Brazil in 2010, the company has added more than 2,000 partner stores and 150 franchise shops, Regen said. Over the past two years, sales have doubled.

At two New Era shops in Rio this month, the displays were blanketed in doz-

ens of variations of Yankees caps — clashing colors, subtle designs, rips, stripes, camouflage, mesh. There were a few Los Angeles Dodgers hats. Some other American teams had a hat or so each. That other New York hat — for the Mets — was not spotted.

“Walk on any beach in Brazil and 90% of the New Era hats you’ll see are probably going to be the Yankees,” Regen said. Four workers across the two shops said 9 out of 10 hats sold were Yankees caps.

How does Regen, who wore a Yankees shirt to an interview for this article, feel about baseball? “Personally,” he said, “I don’t understand it.”

That was the refrain on baseball across Brazil: Everyone had heard of it; some had seen it; no one understood it.

“We can’t even understand how a sport like this is so successful,” said João Ricardo Santos, an art director in Rio, who was shopping for a baseball cap downtown. In the United States, baseball “fills the stadiums and soccer doesn’t,” he said. “Like, in our head, that doesn’t make any sense.”

Santos got his first Yankees cap more than a decade ago — a red-and-white version he sought out after seeing the American singer Chris Brown wear it.

He has seen a lot more Yankees caps around Brazil lately, which he attributed to growing U.S. influence fueled by the internet. “With YouTube, people don’t just listen to the music. They see the video, they see how the artists dress,” he said. “People want to feel like they belong. So brands play this role, and the Yankees cap is part of that.”

In 2009, Jay-Z rapped, “I made the Yankee hat more famous than a Yankee can.” But while he and other artists may have helped spark the trend, Brazilian celebrities now carry the torch. Among them are funkeiros — the artists who play Brazilian funk, a raw spinoff of hip-hop — and social-media influencers.

Gabriel Maximo, an actor, was smoking a cigarette on a Rio street corner recently, during a break from shooting a new TV series in which his character — a famous social-media influencer — wears a Yankees cap. Maximo said he owns about 15 Yankees caps, which he wears in many of the photos he posts to his 51,000 Instagram followers.

“My friends all buy New Era,” he said. “They buy the Yankees.”

“It fits my head,” he added. “I have big hair.” (He does.)

While New Era’s business is booming in Brazil, the Yankees don’t profit much; the 30 MLB teams split revenue from most official apparel sales. But most Yankees hats sold in Brazil — Regen estimates 9 in 10 — are knockoffs anyway.

At a bustling street market in downtown Rio, six separate hat vendors said Yankees caps were their top seller, which they sold for $5 to $8 each. At the New Era shops, they cost as much as $48.

Some street vendors bought from wholesalers nearby, while others said they ordered in bulk from out-of-state factories. Maria Rodrigues, a vendor wearing a Yankees cap, said her supply comes from a man who shows up weekly with a bag of Yankees caps, priced at $4 each. She sells them for a buck more. “I don’t know where they come from,” she said.

One of the few people interviewed for this article who knew what the Yankees are was Jesús Tacae, an immigrant from Venezuela, a baseball hotbed. He was wearing a Yankees cap while riding a bike from his job at an ice factory in Boa Vista, a city in the Amazon.

Yet he had his own confession. “My favorite team is Boston,” he said. “But they don’t sell that here.”

Carlos Henrique selling Yankees caps on Rio’s Ipanema Beach.

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 30

Wordsearch

Aries (Mar 21-April 20)

Today’s Full Moon in your sector of relating emphasizes your feelings, especially those that have been pushed under the carpet. Dazzling aspects can encourage you to talk things over and find a way to make the peace. An edgier angle later in the day, could encourage you to purchase on impulse. You might be seeking immediate satisfaction, but it can lose its appeal fast.

Taurus (April 21-May 21)

A powerful lunar phase today occurs in your wellness zone, and could spotlight a habit that you have been meaning to give up for a while. If it’s about relinquishing a certain food and substituting it for something healthier, this can be a good time to make that commitment. With determination to persist, the old ways will soon disappear and you’ll likely feel much better for it.

Gemini (May 22-June 21)

With a bubbly influence on the cards, leisure and social events such as a celebration, outing or other occasion, can be exciting. Feelings may be very much to the fore though, which could lead to squabbles over awkward matters. There is the potential for laughter and romance too Gemini, which may take the edge off more involved issues and might act as a pleasant escape.

Cancer (June 22-July 23)

A potent Full Moon in your domestic zone puts the spotlight on the home environment, and might see you seeking some quiet time in which to unwind. Will this be possible? If there are any family dramas brewing, the chances are that they could come to a head today. A heart-to-heart concerning such matters may help diffuse tensions, and allow you and others to feel better.

Leo (July 24-Aug 23)

Feelings can fluctuate, so extra care may be needed when discussing delicate issues, Leo. You could discover that you are far more emotional about a matter than you thought, and this might show in your conversation about it and the decisions you make. It’s possible you may overreact, especially if someone challenges you. And yet once the air is cleared, it can all be forgotten.

Virgo (Aug 24-Sep 23)

Emotional issues could be the reason you feel like going on a spending spree, as powerful energies can trigger sensitive feelings around such matters, Virgo. Are you happy with the way things are going? If not, this may be the time to acknowledge any key issues and to consider what you want to do about them. A talk with someone you trust, might leave you much more at ease.

Libra (Sep 24-Oct 23)

A Full Moon in your sign might mean you’re more emotional over the next day or so, which can influence your relationships. This could lead to spur-ofthe-moment decisions, whether linked to an ongoing bond or a new romance. Your feelings may be very changeable and quite unreliable, so if you do have some key decisions to make, wait until you feel calmer and at peace, Libra.

Scorpio (Oct 24-Nov 22)

Today’s lunation inspires you to take some time out for yourself to relax and recharge. It takes place in a secluded zone, so you’ll naturally withdraw from life and may engage with quieter pursuits. If you have a lot on, a break will give you the chance to get your priorities in order and get a fresh perspective on your plans. You’ll emerge greatly refreshed and renewed, Scorpio.

Sagittarius (Nov 23-Dec 21)

Lunar energies can stir up your social sector adding feel-good energy to coming days, especially if you’re ready to enjoy yourself. Attending an event? It could be a boisterous occasion Archer, but one you’ll relish. Emotions may fluctuate though, so think carefully about any commitments as you might be reacting to the mood of the moment. A slower pace can help avoid any regrets.

Capricorn (Dec 22-Jan 20)

A Full Moon in your sector of personal goals, can inspire you to make your feelings known. If this encourages useful discussion and leaves you more at ease, then so much the better. But this is also an opportunity to stand out from the crowd, and to do so in a way that attracts others who share your views. Is a project coming to an end? Enjoy the sense of accomplishment you’ll feel.

Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19)

Your eyes may be opened to an opportunity you haven’t considered, but that could take your plans to a new and exciting level. Today’s Full Moon can highlight it, and key synchronicities might encourage you to give it more attention. Plus, someone may stand out from the crowd as being worth getting to know. With just a little effort, you could become firm friends, Aquarius.

Pisces (Feb 20-Mar 20)

Feelings may run deep Pisces, and could leave you a tad overwhelmed. If you can put some simple steps into action now, it might make life easier. If there’s an issue that you know needs your attention, then it’s best not to leave it too long, as it could gain momentum. Take whatever steps you can to handle it now. Make the important decisions once you feel more settled.

Speed Bump