Thursday Aug 13, 2020

Thursday, August 13, 2020

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Primaries to Resume Sunday

Photo By Pedro Correa Henry

San Juan The

Serena vs Venus Williams in Tuneup Before US Open

Supreme Court Rules Voting Will Continue, No Disclosure of Results Until Elections End, Every Vote Cast Last Sunday Counts P3

P5

Governor Signs Bill to Restrict Debt Issuances P5

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

PR National Guard Receives More Funds to Fight COVID-19 P6

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Thursday, August 13, 2020

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August 13, 2020

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.

Supreme Court: Primaries to resume Sunday; votes already cast are valid

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he Puerto Rico Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that party primaries will continue this Sunday in the voting places that did not receive ballots on Aug. 9 or that did not begin voting despite having electoral materials.

The island’s high court also ruled that all the votes already cast are valid and that all votes will be counted only after the process has concluded.

The ruling, which was divided, was made in the Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia and Eduardo Bhatia Gautier v. State Elections Commission (SEC) and others.

Isabela Mayor Carlos Delgado Altieri had asked the court to hold the primaries before Sunday. Bhatia and Pierluisi wanted the SEC to issue preliminary results, while Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced wanted last Sunday’s entire primary to be scrapped.

The continuation of the political primaries must take place from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., as established by SEC primary regulations. That is, voters who were unable to vote last Sunday (Aug. 9) because their polling station did not open due to a lack of ballots, will now be able to exercise their right to vote, the top court ruled.

Likewise, the Supreme Court said the ballots of the people who voted on Aug. 9 are valid and will not be annulled. The court said the poor administration of the political primaries left thousands of voters without the opportunity to express their political will and that is not consistent with the constitutional and statutory principles that demand the right to universal, free, secret and direct suffrage.

The justices concluded that the circumstances that permeated the primary cannot be a stumbling block that invalidates voting rights.

Because the primaries have not concluded, the top court also prohibited the disclosure of any preliminary or official results to protect and guarantee the constitutional right of the voters. The SEC must

take the necessary measures to start the voting in the remaining polling places on time and promptly disclose the results of all the votes cast after the end of the primary.

“Let’s hope that, in the name of democracy, there are no more failures, inefficiencies, errors or delays,” the court said. “Any other result or deviation from what is stated here would be clearly unacceptable.”

Regarding the complaint filed by citizen Carmen Damaris Quiñones Torres, the court took judicial notice that the polling station at Francisco Prisco Fuentes School is located in Precinct 106 of the Carolina region, where the voting will be carried out next Sunday and that therefore her right to vote will not be negatively affected.

The SEC issued a statement noting that the Supreme Court’s ruling confirmed its own determination.

The SEC urged the public to vote and to trust the island’s election process.

“We will take all affirmative measures to restore the trust of the people in our institution and the election process,” the SEC said in the statement.

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Thursday, August 13, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

PDP president: Supreme Court’s decision ‘prolongs uncertainty’ on results of primary elections

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

P

opular Democratic Party (PDP) President Aníbal José Torres said Wednesday that the Puerto Rico Supreme Court’s decision to halt all primary election processes involving any sort of scrutiny would “prolong the uncertainty” during the electoral event that is expected to conclude this Sunday after the Supreme Court’s decision.

Moments before PDP officials were expected to start counting votes as a resolution from State Elections Commission (SEC) Chairman Juan Dávila Rivera and PDP Electoral Commissioner Lind O. Merle Feliciano determined to have voting ballots available to count for a preliminary outcome to be used for internal purposes, the party received a phone call from the Supreme Court’s deputy secretary to stop or refrain from any vote count. For Torres and the PDP governing board, the result of the vote counting was to have nothing to do with the work of the SEC, but rather was meant to provide certainty to PDP hopefuls.

“The consequence [of the Supreme Court’s decision] is the continued leaking of results that are uncertain if they were emitted by a ballot reading machine,” Torres said.

“The effect is that we are still speculating if … candidates had these numbers, if those numbers are true, if they were emitted by the machine or not -- it would prolong the uncertainty.”

The PDP president went on to say that alleged preliminary outcomes have been leaked and used to create false impressions among citizens and supporters. For this purpose, the political party thought that the “least harmful choice” to make was to conduct a voting tally and project results to the gubernatorial hopefuls’ representatives as the situation could create a negative environment not only within the party but also with regard to the electoral process.

“No one wanted to see outcomes being leaked,” Torres said. “What happens is that there are some colleagues who, in putting their individual thinking over collective thought, which is what should prevail during these pro-

cesses, begin to provide results to give an impression that a given candidate is a step ahead and that candidate is going to win the event. [But] that’s not true -- there’s no official result. That depends on the procedures done by the SEC.” “The PDP governing board said this [leaking unofficial outcomes] produces a bad environment and can, in one way or another, diminish certainty and trust in the [electoral] process, so the board determined that, in order to stop the leaks, let’s provide the preliminary results in a more official fashion. That’s what we voted for,” he said.

Merle Feliciano, when a member of the press asked what the PDP has left to complete before the second session of the primary elections, said that he submitted a form to the SEC chairman that requested motor vehicles for ballot distribution and essential equipment for polling stations.

However, they were still waiting for ballots, he said.

“The [SEC] chairman told me that there were some funds identified, and I’m waiting for his response in order to know that everything is in order,” Merle Feliciano said.

“Now, the SEC secretary -- this is incredible -- reported that today at 4 p.m. we will be receiving 591,000 ballots when they were supposed to be available last Friday and the elections were on Sunday, and you deliver the ballots on Wednesday. This is disrespectful to the country and the PDP.” However, Torres said those ballots were to be used as a safeguard if voter turnout is higher than expected at polling stations or if they need more ballots.

He added that all ballot briefcases were ready for distribution.

“The PDP has every, every, every station briefcase ready for every precinct that still has not voted, so in terms of the decision by the PDP and its electoral commissioner to run primary elections, I have to tell you [that the answer] is yes, but with the following explanation: what’s out of our hands, I can’t respond to that,” Torres said. “The electoral commissioner said there have been some contract requests [made] for distribution trucks. That’s not under the PDP’s or its electoral commissioner’s control. I can have all the briefcases ready [for distribution], but if the trucks are not

ready, the situation that happened last week will happen again.”

Meanwhile, when it was brought up that although the PDP president has spoken negatively about the SEC and the New Progressive Party (NPP) during the primary elections, he went along with NPP President Thomas Rivera Schatz in suspending last Sunday’s primary voting as polling stations remained closed due to ballot shortages, Torres said the claim was “completely false.”

“I did not ally with the NPP president,” he said. “The NPP president and PDP president represent two institutions involved in running primary elections. If I tell the country that I would have wanted a consensus to approve a new Electoral Code, the consensus would have occurred by just talking.”

“What did I have to do on Sunday? Wait for the SEC chairman and NPP president to meet up and wait at the stand to see which choices they made?” Torres asked rhetorically. “No! That would be a disservice to the PDP.” The Supreme Court associate justices also determined on Wednesday to consolidate all electoral cases filed

by NPP gubernatorial hopefuls Pedro Pierluisi and Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced, PDP gubernatorial hopefuls Eduardo Bhatia Gautier and Carlos Delgado Altieri, and citizen Damaris Quiñones Torres, who is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.

PDP legislator, House hopefuls call on SEC chairman to end electronic voting firm’s ballot monopoly

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

P

opular Democratic Party (PDP) Rep. José “Conny” Varela demanded on Wednesday that State Elections Commission (SEC) Chairman Juan Dávila Rivera terminate what Varela considers a monopoly on the part of Canadian electronic voting company Dominion Voting System Corp., as it is the only company responsible for certifying ballot printing companies.

Varela, joined by House at-large hopefuls Enid Monge Pastrana, Ángel Rodríguez Otero, Pedro Irene Maymí and Carlos Javier Sánchez, said the SEC hired the company to establish an electronic voting system and set requirements for certifying printing companies for ballot print runs, but it only certified Printech, a company that has been under fire as they were unable to print enough ballots for the recent primary elections, causing polling delays.

“Beyond investigating the failure of the primary elec-

tions’ operation last Sunday, we also demand that Juan Ernesto Dávila [Rivera], the SEC chairman, account for the kind of contract that [the SEC] holds with Dominion Voting System Corp. and their [Dominion’s] role in certifying companies to print ballots,” Varela said. “If we determine that the situation is unsustainable, it creates suspicion that, aside from a $38 million contract with Dominion, the commission also holds a contract with this company for ‘maintenance and equipment repair’ for $997,017.”

The PDP legislator said the contract (No. 2020000080) is not available on the Comptroller’s Office website, although the contract requirements set by the SEC chairman are available on the site.

Meanwhile, Monge Pastrana said Dominion limited the opportunity for other printing companies to participate in an SEC bidding process for ballot printing.

“As alleged, as Dominion arrived, the company established negotiations as they only have one certified supplier to buy material for the ballots, apart from the support and maintenance [service] to the SEC,” Monge

Pastrana said. “There are no reasons to maintain a monopoly for ballot printing when there are alternatives in Puerto Rico to do this kind of work economically, swiftly and safely for Puerto Rican voters.”

Rodríguez Otero said a contract that monopolizes the printing of ballots is “counterproductive to the best interests of our country” and raises concerns about the short amount of time for having electoral items ready.

Irene Maymí said the SEC chairman has a lot to answer for.

“The people deserve to know why only one company was chosen and the total of expenses used for the primary elections, more so when $2.5 million was approved and the Financial Oversight and Management Board approved [another] $1.27 million,” Irene Maymí said.

Sánchez urged immediate action to safeguard November’s general elections. The House hopeful said the action should consist of eliminating any impractical requirements imposed on companies to print ballots, expanding the roster of contracted printing companies and establishing a “realistic” production schedule.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

5

Governor signs bill that restricts future debt issuance

By THE STAR STAFF

G

ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced has signed the Debt Issuance Responsibility Law, which imposes controls on future debt issuances by Puerto Rico and its public corporations, according to a La Fortaleza press release Wednesday.

“This measure responds to the need we had before us for the Government of Puerto Rico to once again have credibility and transparency, and establishes uniform and responsible processes for the issuance of any future debt,” Vázquez said in a written communication.

The new law comes as there are still five government entities -- the commonwealth, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the Employees Retirement System, the Public Buildings Authority and the Highway and Transportation Authority -- in bankruptcy under the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability

Act. A sixth, the Puerto Rico Sales Tax Financing Corp., exited bankruptcy in February 2019.

The measure establishes uniform processes for issuing any debt in the future. It imposes restrictions on the issuance of future debt, such as only allowing long-term debt issuance for capital improvements, prohibiting debt issuances maturing in more than 30 years and establishing that repayment on all debt must begin within two years of its issuance date, according to the release.

It was in December that Vázquez first announced legislation that would put stringent controls looking forward on how the commonwealth executes bond issues and would redefine the types of debt that will be calculated within constitutional debt limits.

The measure was not approved in the regular legislative session, but was included in the recent special session.

Treasury: Weekly cash flow results to be measured against liquidity plan once it’s complete

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Puerto Rico Treasury Department reported a net operating cash flow of negative $26 million for the week ending July 31, a report published Wednesday said.

The cash flow account report filed by the Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority (AAFAF by its Spanish initials) noted that the liquidity plan for the Treasury Single Account (TSA) for fiscal year (FY) 2021, which began on July 1, is under development.

“Once the Liquidity Plan is completed, the weekly TSA cash flow report will report actual results against the Liquidity Plan and include all of the detailed supporting receipts and disbursement schedules,” the document says. “In the meantime, an abridged version of the TSA cash flow report will be published weekly with a comparison to the same period from FY20 to help contextualize results.”

On July 15, AAFAF published the report for June 30, 2020 that shows TSA cash flow results relative to the FY20 Liquidity Plan for June FY20, the fourth quarter, and the full year FY20.

Federal funds receipts for the week ending July 31 were $474 million, the report said.

For the FY21 year-to-date (YTD) period ending July 31, the TSA recorded a net cash flow of negative $107 million, or $292 million lower than $185 million YTD net cash flow for the same period during FY20.

The report also showed an ending bank cash position for the week and YTD ending July 31 of $7.59 billion, $184 million higher than the $7.41 billion YTD figure recorded for the same time period in FY20.

Total inflows for the week ending July 31 were $630 million. For the YTD period, they were $1.67 billion coming in, a number that is $88 million under the FY20 result of $1.76 billion. Mean-

while, outflows for the week ending July 31 were $656 million. For the YTD period, outflows were $1.77 billion,

which was $203 million higher than the $1.57 billion YTD figure in FY20, the document says.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Health chief: Expect more restrictive measures to combat COVID-19

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

I

sland Health Secretary Lorenzo González Feliciano said Wednesday that he anticipates more restrictive measures, not less, regarding the so-called reopening of the economy in Puerto Rico.

González Feliciano made his statement in a radio interview, in which he confirmed “the increase in deaths in Puerto Rico” from COVID-19, as well as positive cases.

The Health secretary said he expects

that in the next executive order from Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced, the measures for reopening the economy will not be relaxed, but rather activities will be restricted, in an attempt to reduce coronavirus infections in Puerto Rico.

González Feliciano said the percentage of positive cases of COVID-19 on the island has not decreased as expected.

“The percentage of positives did not drop to 5 percent as was expected,” he said.

By Wednesday, COVID-19 positives had surpassed 10,000 since March.

Health Secretary Lorenzo Gozález Feliciano

PR National Guard receives 4-month extension for COVID-19 response

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he Puerto Rico National Guard (PRNG) continues to support multiple missions and response efforts of the commonwealth government to combat the effects of COVID-19 on the island, PRNG Adj. Gen. José J. Reyes said Wednesday.

“We have received the federal extension for the activation of the Puerto Rico National Guard until December, to continue supporting the government in its efforts to combat COVID-19,” Reyes said. “This

gives continuity to all the efforts that we have carried out since the beginning of the pandemic in March and reiterates our obligation to the well being of the Puerto Rican people.”

Reyes noted that PRNG personnel continue to lead monitoring efforts at Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport to detect passengers who may have symptoms of COVID-19. More than 557,019 people have undergone medical screening, of which 2,573 have had to undergo the molecular test.

At José Aponte de la Torre Airport and at the Maritime Transport Authority boat terminal in Ceiba, PRNG teams are conducting temperature monitoring activities. In this effort, more than 84,820 passengers and port personnel at the boat terminal and 13,237 passengers at the airport have undergone medical screening.

“The Joint Task Force-Puerto Rico continues with its efforts to reach all homes for the elderly,” said Brig. Gen. Miguel A. Méndez, the commander in charge of PRNG operations. “Our commitment remains firm with this population and we will support the Department of Health and the government of Puerto Rico as long as it is necessary.”

The PRNG has supported visits to nearly 300 homes for the elderly and has conducted 19,464 COVID-19 tests on residents, employees and administra-

tors to monitor the virus in this community. In the coming days, PRNG teams will be visiting 19 homes for the elderly in the municipalities of Aguadilla, Bayamón, Corozal, Isabela, Juana Díaz, Lajas, Las Marías, Mayagüez, Peñuelas, Ponce, San Lorenzo and Trujillo Alto to reach 298 employees and 366 residents.

In the COVID-19 Test Centers established by the PRNG to carry out the molecular test on first responders on the island, the organization’s medical personnel have administered more than 81,760 tests. PRNG staff are actively communicating the results of these tests to first responders at the corresponding centers.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

7

In Kamala Harris, a choice at once safe and energizing

By JONATHAN MARTIN and ASTEAD W. HERNDON

I

n naming Kamala Harris as his running mate, Joe Biden made a groundbreaking decision, picking a woman of color to be vice president and, possibly, a successor in the White House someday. Yet in some ways, Biden made a conventional choice: elevating a senator who brings generational and coastal balance to the Democratic ticket and shares his center-left politics at a time of progressive change in the party.

Unlike Barack Obama and George W. Bush, who selected veteran Washington hands as their vice presidents, Biden, 77, is opting for a time-honored model in which running mates are not just governing partners but political understudies of sorts. Pegged as a rising star for a decade, but with less than four years of experience in the Senate — she was 8 years old when Biden was first elected to the chamber — Harris, 55, reflects a traditional archetype in an election year that has been anything but normal.

She is also a thoroughly establishment-friendly figure, as is Biden: Both have hewed closely to their party’s mainstream for years, shifting left with the times but always with an eye on the broader electorate and higher office.

He long said he wanted someone “simpatico” with him and, in Harris, he found that person, at least when it comes to ideology.

Progressive Democrats now find themselves led by two moderates with relatively cautious political instincts, even as activist energy courses through the party and leftwing challengers unseat some incumbents. The mostly young protesters filling the streets of nearly every U.S. city to decry police brutality and President Donald Trump are represented by two figures who have offered sympathetic words and proposals but whose careers have been shaped by their relationship with law enforcement.

“She’s not of the far-left of the party; she’s a former prosecutor,” Janet Napolitano, the former Arizona governor and Homeland Security secretary, said of Harris. “And when you’re a prosecutor you have to make some tough calls.”

While it may repel some younger liberals, Harris’ history as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general may be more asset than liability for more moderate voters, as it has been for Napolitano and so many women in politics who began their ascent as prosecutors.

That law enforcement pedigree, which Harris also shares with Biden’s late son Beau, is only part of the reason he turned to her, though.

He also chose her to help inject excitement into his campaign, which is leading in the polls but mostly because he’s the genial alternative to the most divisive president in modern history who is presiding over a pandemic and economic collapse.

Having started his career in a capital consumed with Watergate and controlled by white men, Biden also

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), then a Democratic candidate for president, campaigns in Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2019. turned to Harris to bring a fresh perspective to the West Wing should they win — a similar calculation, but with the roles reversed between ticketmates, that propelled him to the vice presidency 12 years ago.

Biden spurned those progressives who wanted their consensus-oriented standard-bearer to elevate a liberal like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, instead picking a prominent leader from the demographic that resurrected his campaign in the Democratic primary. By doing what Hillary Clinton did not do four years ago and choosing a Black running mate, he may give the party’s most loyal voters a reason, beyond animus toward Trump, to work for and elect the ticket.

Harris comes to the ticket having started her career in the crucible of San Francisco politics, won statewide office in America’s largest state and sought the presidency herself. She has a relationship with many party donors, lawmakers and activists. She has been scrutinized far more than some of the runners-up, who have either never been elected outside a House district or had never been on a ballot at all, as was the case with Susan E. Rice, the former national security adviser.

This is not to say that Biden simply made a politically safe choice.

Biden is now taking direct aim at Trump’s brand of racial grievance politics by making his political partner the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants. In doing so, he passed over candidates like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan who might have been more appealing to some white moderates and even Republicans in traditional battlegrounds like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Harris is also, like Biden, a candidate some Democrats may be glad is running in a coronavirus campaign free of rallies and short on spontaneity: While she can be extraordinarily effective when she’s well-prepared, Harris is less formidable and at times gaffe-prone when she’s off-script.

Most consequentially of all, though, is what Biden’s

decision may mean to the future of his party. Even though some of his own advisers expressed unease about any running mate who might quickly begin eyeing a future presidential bid, even in 2024 if he does not run again, Biden decided to give Harris a head start on becoming the country’s first female president.

In some respects, the Biden-Harris pairing represents the fulfillment of what many party activists hoped and expected would be their 2020 ticket, which they continued to whisper even in the tense days after the first Democratic debate last year when she sharply criticized him over his 1970s-era opposition to school busing.

Across the spectrum of the Democratic Party — former elected officials, grassroots activists, swing-state moderates, and even much of the progressive wing — the reaction was largely a sigh of relief.

Many were energized about the selection of Harris, and at minimum, they felt she fulfilled many of the requirements their slice of the electorate preferred. More controversial picks were avoided. The overarching rule of “do no harm” was satisfied.

And for Black women in politics, Harris’ elevation was especially sweet — even if they acknowledged the somewhat conventional nature of her selection.

“Oftentimes do-no-harm choices are not exciting — this is an exciting one,” said Leah Daughtry, a decadeslong veteran of Democratic campaigns, sharing that women were calling her in tears. “She is the stand-in for Black women. We are on the ticket.”

At times, it seemed Biden was being pulled in opposing directions: a governing pick ready to lead at any moment and one whose life experiences spoke to the country being torn apart by race and racism. In Harris, Biden and Democrats believe they have both.

Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, said Biden’s selection proved that he is prioritizing the Black electorate in the general election, and rewarding them for supporting him in the primary.

“It will energize Black voters because they can now see themselves in the ticket,” Johnson said. “By supporting Biden in the primary, the question was now how will they be reflected in his administration. And what VP Biden is saying is we’ll have a voice at the highest levels.”

But the reaction was strongest among Democratic women, who have known for months that Biden would select a woman as a running mate — but were nonetheless excited about the announcement. In Harris, the party has someone who made outreach to women a key aspect of her presidential run.

Nse Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, the organization seeking to flip the Southern state by registering new voters, said that “we all know that Black women have been the backbone of the Democratic Party, and our leadership has gone uncredited for far too long.”

8

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Ilhan Omar wins House primary in Minnesota

By ASTEAD W. HERNDON

R

ep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota fended off a well-funded primary challenger Tuesday, ensuring a clean sweep of reelection fights for the group of first-term Democratic congresswomen of color known as the Squad and sending a message to Washington about the staying power of the party’s new progressive voices.

Omar, who made history in 2018 by becoming the first Somali American to be elected to Congress, as well as the first naturalized citizen of African birth and the first woman of color from Minnesota to do so, secured the victory after spending her first two years in the Washington spotlight.

Her unabashed embrace of left-wing politics has won her loyal followers in Minnesota and across the country. She has, however, become a lightning rod for conservatives and has faced criticism from some Democrats, particularly after several episodes in 2019 in which she was accused of making anti-Semitic remarks.

In the deep-blue district, Omar’s primary

success Tuesday virtually assures she will serve a second term in Congress. Late Tuesday, she was leading her chief opponent, Antone MeltonMeaux, by more than 15 percentage points.

“In Minnesota, we know that organized people will always beat organized money,” Omar wrote on Twitter. “Tonight, our movement didn’t just win. We earned a mandate for change. Despite outside efforts to defeat us, we once again broke turnout records. Despite the attacks, our support has only grown.”

Melton-Meaux had received extensive financial support from national groups hoping to see the incumbent ousted. During the second quarter of 2020, Melton-Meaux raised six times as much as Omar did, and an analysis from The MinnPost showed about 20% of his largedollar donations came with bundling help from pro-Israel political action committees. MeltonMeaux also received the endorsement of The Star Tribune, the region’s flagship newspaper.

But Democrats rallied to Omar’s aid in recent weeks, making bedfellows of progressives such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and establishment figures like House

Representative Ilhan Omar, who made history in 2018 by becoming the first Somali-American to be elected to Congress, won her congressional primary on Tuesday.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The race was more than a referendum on her first term and was upended by the two factors that have reshaped every facet of political life in 2020: the coronavirus pandemic and the national protests over racial inequality and police brutality that began in May after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. The unrest was particularly acute in Minneapolis, where fires and chaos raged for days. One Police Department precinct was burned to the ground.

Omar and Melton-Meaux both emphasized the need for social justice and an end to systemic racism. But Omar’s vision of progressive change went further as she embraced calls to restructure the Police Department altogether, diverting money to invest in social services.

The virus also forced most of the campaigning inside and online. Some observers thought it could further highlight MeltonMeaux’s financial advantage as he flooded airwaves for weeks.

Melton-Meaux had sought to make the election a referendum on Omar’s national profile, deploying a similar argument that did not work in Michigan, when Rep. Rashida Tlaib beat back a challenger who tried to cast her as too progressive and nationally focused for the district.

On Election Day, Omar made several public appearances, a sign that her campaign was taking nothing for granted.

In the afternoon, she courted voters at a market in Minneapolis, ordering Mexican food and eating with staff members with no sign of concern.

“Everything in this primary has felt troubling, from the money coming to the overt xenophobic messaging,” she said. “But this is the 5th. This is Minneapolis. This is the place not only to make an overt statement about how excited they are to have immigrants in their neighborhood, but they voted one into Congress.”

Later, at an evening campaign event

in Dinkytown, a Minneapolis neighborhood where Omar likes to spend election nights talking to voters, young supporters gathered as people in cars drove past yelling “Ilhan!” and “We love you!”

Britt D’Arezzo, 22, said national perceptions of Omar didn’t account for her retail politics and her visibility at home.

“They don’t know her local activism,” D’Arezzo said. “They don’t see her walking around and just hanging out on corners. They don’t see the way she connects with us.”

Omar’s victory was one of the final electoral priorities for progressive organizations during the 2020 primary season, which began with abject disappointment for them but has since turned around. When the leading progressive candidates, Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, lost the party’s presidential nomination to former Vice President Joe Biden, some had written off the Democrats’ left wing — minimizing it as a collection of activists and social media voices, not something with mass electoral appeal.

In the months since, a string of insurgent victories in down-ballot races — and the strong victories by people like Omar,Tlaib and OcasioCortez — point to a more complicated picture and a wing of the party that remains ascendant.

In recent months, challengers supported by groups like Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement have won primaries in New York, Illinois and Missouri. The victory in St. Louis was particularly notable, the first time a Black challenger had been able to unseat a member of the Black Congressional Caucus, a key block of the House leadership’s power that represents many deep-blue Democratic districts.

Taken together, the triumphs by challengers and primary victories by incumbents have offered a path forward for political movements on the left. If you can get into office and stay there, people like Omar argue, you can prove to constituents that your proposed reforms are not radical.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

9

925 Quarantined for COVID. Is this a successful school reopening?

By RICHARD FAUSSET

T

he first letter went out Aug. 4, one day after students in the Cherokee County School District returned to their classrooms for the first time since the eruption of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Dear Parents,” wrote Dr. Ashley Kennerly, the principal of Sixes Elementary School. “I am writing this letter in order to communicate that a student in 2nd grade has tested positive for COVID-19.”

By the time the last bell rang Friday afternoon, principals at 10 other schools had sent similar letters to families in Cherokee County, a bucolic and politically conservative stretch of suburbs north of Atlanta. This week, more letters went out.

Altogether, more than 900 students and staff members in the district have already been ordered to quarantine. On Tuesday, one high school closed its doors until at least Aug. 31.

While many of the nation’s largest school systems have opted in recent weeks to start the academic year online, other districts have forged ahead with reopening. In Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana and elsewhere, some schools, mainly in suburban and rural areas, have been open for almost two weeks.

Their experience reveals the perils of returning to classrooms in places where the coronavirus has hardly been tamed. Students and teachers have immediately tested positive, sending others into two-week quarantines and creating whiplash for schools that were eager to open, only to consider closing again right away.

All of this has only further divided communities where parents and teachers have passionately disagreed over the safety of reopening.

Depending on whom you ask, the string of positive tests and isolation orders in Cherokee County either proved the district’s folly for opening schools during the worst American public health crisis in decades, or demonstrated a courageous effort to return to normal.

“This is exactly what we expected to happen,” said Allison Webb, 44, who quit her job as a Spanish and French teacher in the district because of her concerns about reopening schools, and who put her daughter, a senior, in the district’s remote-learning program. “It’s not safe” to return to the classrooms now, Webb said.

But to Jenny Beth Martin, who wanted schools to reopen — even appealing directly to President Donald Trump in a visit to the White House — the district’s return has been a rousing success.

“I think that the opening plan is working,” said Martin, a district parent and co-founder of the national Tea Party Patriots, a conservative political group. “They’re checking, they’re making sure when people have tested positive that they’re

watching the exposure and spread.”

Controversy emerged on day one, as schools opened in Cherokee and nearby Paulding County on Aug. 3. At North Paulding High School, at least one student was suspended, then unsuspended, for sharing photos of crowded hallways on social media, sparking a national uproar. Her school closed for at least three days this week after nine positive cases emerged.

Cherokee County had its own firestorm. A photo taken outside Etowah High School on the first day back showed scores of students crowded shoulder to shoulder, smiling and unmasked. A similar photo from Sequoyah High School was also posted to social media. Beneath the photo, a commenter wrote, “Most of these kids are gonna be sick in the next few days … was it really worth it to appease the anti-mask parents? At what cost?”

The county’s reopening plan was unanimously approved by the school board on July 9. Families could choose online or in-person, five-days-a-week instruction, and masks would be encouraged, but not required, for the district’s 42,500 students.

Opposition began to coalesce almost immediately. Webb, the foreign language teacher, organized a group on Facebook called Educators for Common Sense and Safety. The group started an online petition asking for, among other things, a mask mandate for students and a delayed start to allow time to rework schedules, classrooms and the curriculum “to be safe and engaging for our students.” It attracted more than 1,100 signatures.

In mid-July, the group, which Webb said counts hundreds of members, picketed outside a board meeting. A former English teacher, Miranda Wicker, 38, became its spokesperson — a necessity, she said, because current teachers lacked union protection and feared retaliation if they spoke out.

“They’re terrified,” Wicker said. “They’re being asked, literally, to risk their lives.”

But proponents of reopening, including Martin, cheered the district on. Two days before the school board vote in July, she had appeared in a round-table discussion with Trump at the White House. Parents needed to go to their jobs, she told him. Students needed to be with their teachers.

In early July, when the school board approved reopening, case tallies in Cherokee County, with about 260,000 people, had only begun to rise after remaining flat and relatively low — an average of about 10 new confirmed cases a day — for most of June. Since then, though, the numbers have climbed steadily, mirroring the state as a whole, with the county averaging more than 90 new confirmed cases daily over the past week. Sixty-four people in the county have died of COVID-19, including eight in the past week.

As the first day of school approached, Webb asked if she could erect a Plexiglas barrier in her

A parent inquires about meal vouchers for students on Monday, Aug. 10, 2020, the first day of distance learning classes at Sankofa United Elementary school in Oakland, Calif. classroom. The district’s risk management director, Melissa Whatley, told Webb in an email that she could not “make modifications to a classroom beyond the scope of the approved CCSD Reopening of Schools Plan.” Webb then resigned from teaching and took a job at a law firm.

Wicker pulled her two children out and decided to home-school them. But the vast majority of families in the county — 77% — signed up for in-person learning.

On the first day of classes, a second grader came to school at Sixes Elementary, then stayed home the next day after testing positive for the coronavirus. Officials sent the other 20 students in the child’s class home for two weeks, along with their teacher. The class is now meeting remotely.

As the week wore on, the letters from principals kept coming. An eighth grader tested positive at Dean Rusk Middle School. A first grader at William G. Hasty Sr. Elementary Fine Arts Academy. Two students at Cherokee High School. And more.

As the first week drew to a close, Wicker, with the educators’ group, took to Facebook to update her followers on the number of illnesses and students quarantined: 260 after five days of classes.

“I hope with everything within my being that no one who gets sick right now dies,” she wrote, adding, “This did not have to happen. This was entirely avoidable.”

The schools superintendent, Brian V. Hightower, who did not respond to requests for comment for this article, also posted an update.

He said the district was being transparent about

the situation, and defended the group photos of unmasked high school students on the first day of school, saying that the district had learned, “upon investigation,” that many of those students wore masks routinely.

“Today is the fifth day of school,” Hightower wrote, “and, this year, that is an amazing milestone.”

By Tuesday, the number of quarantined students and staff members in the district had more than tripled, to 925, with 59 positive cases.

Etowah High School, where nearly 300 people had been ordered to isolate after at least 14 positive cases, switched to online classes for the rest of the month. And Hightower pleaded for more routine mask use.

“We know all parents do not believe the scientific research that indicates masks are beneficial,” he said, “but I believe it, and see masks as an important measure to help us keep schools open.”

His sentiment wasn’t shared by some in a group of about 40 parents who showed up at the district’s offices before the school day started Tuesday, carrying balloons and signs declaring their support for the reopening policy. They cheered as officials pulled into the parking lot.

“Don’t worry about the basement Bobbys or negative Nancys,” read the sign held by Morgan Morrison, 28, the mother of a second grader who “lost her mask on the second day.”

Morrison said she and her husband do not wear masks either. “I feel like before we’re even born, God has a plan for when he’s going to take us to heaven,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

In Loving Memory of Rosario Angulo Mestas At this moment of deep and overwhelming sadness at the passing of Doña Rosario Angulo Mestas, We are united in mourning with his family and friends.

May she rest in peace

John 11: 25 -26 Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

Believest thou this?

“I will always be in your hearts, and from this beautiful place, I will always take care of you and protect you!”

M

rs. Rosario Angulo Mestas was born in Cuba on October 7, 1926. She was a faithful practitioner of the Catholic religion and served as president of the Association of Former Students of the Dominican American School in Cuba. In 1954, she married Dr. Ricardo Angulo in the Church of the Cathedral of Cuba at a mass offered by Cardinal Arteaga. Her Catholic principles led her on her honeymoon trip to visit Pope Pius XII, who received the couple in person in Rome. Her Catholic devotion, which accompanied her all her life, led her a few years later, in the company of her husband and her son Gerardo, to visit Pope John Paul II in Rome.

Then they were invited by the current Pope Francis, a visit that she could not make due to her poor health.

For Mrs. Rosario education was of utmost

importance, so much so that when she left Cuba and Matthew Angulo Montag. she obtained a Master’s Degree in Education at Mrs. Angulo was the owner of the San Juan the University of Fairfield. Her great passion for Daily Star newspaper in conjunction with her education led her to dedicate herself to teaching husband, Dr. Ricardo Angulo. for 20 years in New York.

May she rest in peace!

She had two children, her most precious treasures, to whom she instilled her love of studies. The eldest, Ricardo Angulo Jr., studied at Dartmouth College and completed his master’s degree at Harvard Business School. Mrs. Angulo and her husband donated 156 scholarships to Dartmouth College in their son’s name known as “The Rick Angulo World Experience Award” scholarships.

Her second son, Gerardo Angulo, studied at Princeton University and also completed his master’s degree at Harvard Business School. His great legacy are his sons Ricky Angulo Montag

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Un pedacito de cielo

Dicen que cuando tienes a alguien

que amas en el cielo, tienes un pedacito de cielo en tu casa, para siempre.

Yo te tengo a ti esposa querida, pero una parte de ti vive conmigo, tu recuerdo sigue en mi hogar y está presente en mi vida.

Todo lo que me rodea tiene la huella de tu entrega, tu cariño y tu amor infinito.

Aunque te fuiste, sigues conmigo aquí en mi corazón.

Tu esposo Dr. Ricardo Angulo,

Tus Hijos (Q.E.P.D.) Ricardo Angulo Jr., y Gerardo Angulo, Tus Nietos Ricky Angulo y Matthew Angulo elevamos una oración al todo poderoso por el eterno descanso de tu alma.

Vivirás por siempre en la gloria del señor ROSARIO ANGULO MESTAS

OCTUBRE 7, 1926 – AGOSTO 10, 2020

11

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

New York accuses egg producer of price gouging in pandemic

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ne of the nation’s largest egg producers has been accused by New York authorities of raking in $4 million in illegal revenue by gouging customers with exorbitantly high prices when the state was grappling with rising coronavirus cases.

A lawsuit filed Tuesday by Attorney General Letitia James of New York contends that the producer, Hillandale Farms, at times quadrupled the price of eggs to cash in on a surge in demand in March and April.

In particular, Hillandale targeted distributors in New York City, as well as the military installations at West Point, Fort Hamilton and Fort Drum, according to the lawsuit.

The company was not raising prices to offset increased costs, the suit says, but “simply to line its own pockets and profit off New Yorkers during a time of crisis.”

In a statement, officials at Hillandale denied the attorney general’s accusations, saying the price of eggs has often been volatile and is now lower than it was in August 2019. “Our approach to pricing has been consistent for decades, and without complaint, whether that has led to profits or losses, and the last several months have been no exception,” the company said.

According to the lawsuit, the attorney general’s office received hundreds of complaints from consumers angered by the sudden price increases.

“This location serves low-income families who, due to the current pandemic emergency, have most likely lost what little income they have,” wrote one complainant. “Disgraceful!”

The lawsuit is one of several accusing major egg producers of illegally taking advantage of heightened demand at a time when restaurants were shuttered and many Americans were forced to rely more heavily on home cooking.

In April, Texas’ attorney general accused the nation’s largest egg producer, Cal-Maine Foods, of increasing egg prices by 300%.

Another price-gouging lawsuit, in California, named several major supermarket chains including Whole Foods and Costco.

The New York suit names Hillandale Farms Corp., which has its headquarters in Kent, Ohio, as well as five other companies that use the Hillandale name.

Hillandale is often ranked among the

top five egg producers in the United States. It sells to several supermarket chains with stores in New York, including Stop & Shop, Western Beef, BJ’s Wholesale Club and Associated Supermarkets.

Between January and early March, Hillandale sold eggs to Western Beef at prices ranging from 59 cents to $1.10 a dozen. Then on March 15, two days after President Donald Trump declared a national emergency in response to the coronavirus, the lawsuit says Hillandale increased its price to $1.49.

The company continued to raise its wholesale prices as the pandemic grew intensified, to a peak of $2.93 a dozen by the end of March.

The prices charged to Western Beef did not return to normal levels until early May, according to the lawsuit.

Other stores saw similar increases. At Stop & Shop, the price Hillandale charged jumped from as low as 85 cents a dozen in January to $3.15 by early April.

The lawsuit contends that Hillandale raised prices using a “feedback loop” system in which it coordinated with a market research company, Urner Barry, to justify the price gouging.

Authorities say the feedback loop worked like this: Hillandale and other egg producers told Urner Barry their assessment of egg prices; Urner Barry used these assessments to create “indexed” prices that it sent to the producers; finally, the egg producers sold eggs at the price set by Urner Barry, citing the index as their method for setting a “fair” price.

Urner Barry has denied wrongdoing, saying the price increases reflected the rise in demand.

During the period covered by the lawsuit, Hillandale took in about $8 million in revenue in New York, about $4 million of it from price gouging, according to the lawsuit.

While the price differences may seem nominal, they could have a significant effect on customers on tight budgets. For a family using a dozen eggs a week, the monthly cost could have risen to $13 from about $5.40.

One complainant, who shopped at a Fine Fare store in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, told the New York attorney general that the prices were “sad and disrespectful.”

“I’ve been living in the community for 65 years,” the person wrote. “The prices are ridiculous.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

13

Concrete, a centuries-old material, gets a new recipe funded group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I don’t see a single game-changer technology,” he added. “It’s going to be a combination of things.”

By JANE MARGOLIES

O

n any given day, Central Concrete, in San Jose, California, does what concrete companies have been doing for centuries: combining sand, gravel, water and cement to create the slurry that is used in construction.

But Central — one of a handful of companies at the forefront of a movement to make a greener concrete — is increasingly experimenting with some decidedly new mixtures.

In one part of the plant, carbon dioxide from a chemical gas company is injected into the concrete, locking in that greenhouse gas and keeping it out of the atmosphere, where it would contribute to global warming. Elsewhere, engineers tinker with the recipe for concrete, trying out substitutes for some of the cement, which makes up about 15% of the mix and functions as the glue that holds it all together. Cement, however, is also responsible for most of concrete’s carbon emissions — emissions so high that some have abandoned concrete for alternative building materials like mass timber and bamboo.

Concrete, it turns out, has a serious pollution problem.

The most widely used construction material on the planet, it has given us sculptural buildings, sturdy bridges and dams, parking garages and countless other structures that surround us. But concrete is also responsible for about 8% of global carbon emissions. If concrete were a country, it would rank third in emissions behind China and the United States.

In the United States alone, 370 million cubic yards of concrete were produced last year, with nearly 40% of it going into commercial real estate, according to the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association, a trade group.

In recent decades, architects, developers and policymakers seeking to lower the carbon footprint of buildings have focused on reducing energy use by improving the efficiency of lighting, heating and other systems. To lower emissions even further, they are looking beyond such operational matters to the carbon emitted in the production and transportation of the materials that make up the structures, or so-called embodied carbon. All eyes are on concrete because buildings use so much of it, from foundations to the topmost floors.

“People are getting smarter about where global-warming impacts are coming from,” said Amanda Kaminsky, principal of Building Product Ecosystems, a consulting firm in New York. “Concrete is responsible for a disproportionate chunk.”

Central, part of U.S. Concrete, a manufacturer based in Texas, is making progress tackling the problem: Low-emission concrete makes up 70% of the material the company produces annually, up from 20% in the early 2000s. The plant’s push to decarbonize “has really accelerated in the last three years,” said Herb Burton, vice president and general manager of U.S. Concrete’s west region.

Guiding Central’s effort is U.S. Concrete’s national research laboratory at the plant in San Jose. Headed by Alana Guzzetta, an engineer, the lab scrutinizes technology and

AVISO VISTA PÚBLICA

Samples of, from left, Portland cement; slag, a byproduct of steel manufacturing; and fly ash, a byproduct of coal, at the U.S. Concrete lab in San Jose, Calif., on July 31, 2020. products developed by other companies, deciding whether to put them to the test and, ultimately, incorporate them into its operations.

Fiddling with concrete’s recipe is not new, however.

The Romans used a formula involving lime and volcanic rock.

In the early 19th century, an English bricklayer invented Portland cement, still the most widely used type, whose production involves combining limestone and clay and heating it to blistering temperatures. Each construction project today has its own concrete mix, designed by structural engineers to take into account how and where it will be used.

Several new ways to make concrete greener employ waste carbon dioxide.

CarbonCure Technologies, a company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, invented a process that involves shooting liquid carbon dioxide into concrete during mixing. Doing so not only keeps the greenhouse gas out of the air but also strengthens the concrete and reduces the amount of cement needed.

So far, CarbonCure concrete has a net carbon reduction of only 5% to 7%, but the technology has already been installed at 225 plants in the United States. Recently, Central used the CarbonCure technology for the concrete it supplied to LinkedIn for the 245,000-square-foot headquarters the networking company is building in Mountain View, California.

Blue Planet, based in Los Gatos, California, uses carbon dioxide collected from the exhaust stack of a power plant to produce a synthetic limestone that functions as a substitute for the sand and gravel in concrete. Although Blue Planet is still piloting its technology, Central has already used its aggregate in concrete poured at San Francisco International Airport.

Other companies — including Solidia Technologies in Piscataway, New Jersey, and BioMason in Durham, North Carolina — have developed processes that are being used for cast-concrete products like pavers and tiles.

Central is keeping tabs on all the action.

That is the right approach, said Jeremy Gregory, executive director at the Concrete Sustainability Hub, an industry-

Para conocimiento del público en general y de conformidad con las disposiciones del Artículo 8.6 de la Ley 161-2009, según enmendada, conocida como “Ley para la Reforma del Proceso de Permisos de Puerto Rico”, la Ley Núm. 38 2017, según enmendada, conocida como “Ley de Procedimiento Administrativo Uniforme del Gobierno de Puerto Rico”, el Reglamento Conjunto para la Evaluación y Expedición de Permisos Relacionados al Desarrollo, Uso de Terrenos y Operación de Negocios, la Orden Administrativa OGPe 2020-13, y cualquier otra disposición de ley aplicable, se informa que la Oficina de Gerencia de Permisos (“OGPe”) celebrará vista pública para el caso que se describe a continuación: Peticionario: María A. Meléndez Díaz p/c Ing. Henry Contreras Caso Núm.

2020-305275-PU-026285 Dueño de la Propiedad: María A. Meléndez Díaz Dirección de la acción propuesta: Comunidad Campamento Calle A, Lote 1 Bda Campamento, Bo. Rincón, Gurabo

Cualquier interesado en acceder y participar en la Vista Pública Virtual puede a través de: www.ddec.pr.gov/vistaspublicas Fecha: Hora:

1 de septiembre de 2020 9:30 a.m.

Calificación: Distrito Residencial Intermedio (R-I)

En la vista del caso de referencia se interesa discutir, pero sin limitarse, una solicitud de permiso de uso vía variación en uso para establecer un Salón de Belleza, en una estructura ubicada en la Comunidad Campamento Calle A, Lote 1 del Barrio Rincón de Gurabo. La solicitud se evaluará a tenor, pero sin limitarse, a lo establecido en las Reglas 2.2.10, 6.1.2 y 6.3.1 del Reglamento Conjunto. La parte proponente tendrá que justificar su solicitud para la concesión de la variación.

Se convoca e invita al público en general a comparecer y participar a la vista pública a celebrarse mediante el método alterno (“virtual”), no obstante, con acceso al público general, además de las partes reconocidas. Es mandatorio que el Proponente y/o dueño de la propiedad o su representante autorizado asista a la vista pública, de no asistir se procederá al archivo de la solicitud. En el caso de otras partes ya reconocidas en el procedimiento, la no comparecencia a la vista pública será considerada como falta de interés en el caso. Se advierte que las partes, incluyendo corporaciones y sociedades, podrán, pero no están obligadas, a comparecer asistidas por abogado. Salvo justa causa, la vista no podrá ser transferida. Cualquier solicitud de transferencia de vista tendrá un cargo de $100.00, y deberá ser presentada con no menos de cinco (5) días de antelación a la fecha de la misma a través del Sistema Unificado de Información (“Single Business Portal”) de la OGPe, expresando las razones que justifican la solicitud. Deberá además cubrir los costos que conlleve la notificación de la transferencia y anunciar el nuevo señalamiento mediante la publicación de un nuevo aviso de prensa. El peticionario de la transferencia de la vista notificará y enviará copia de la solicitud simultáneamente a las otras partes ya reconocidas en el proceso y certificará el cumplimiento con lo aquí expuesto en la propia solicitud de trasferencia.

El Reglamento Conjunto, faculta al Oficial Examinador a imponer una multa de $500.00 a toda persona que observe una conducta irrespetuosa durante la vista, intencionalmente interrumpa o dilate los procedimientos sin causa justificada.

Cualquier persona podrá requerir examinar el expediente o solicitar copia del mismo mediante solicitud (SCE) a través del Single Business Portal en la página www.ogpe.pr.gov. Podrá, además, haciendo referencia al número de solicitud, presentar por escrito sus comentarios a través de notificacion@ddec.pr.gov.

Debido a la emergencia causada por la pandemia del Covid-19 el Servicio al Cliente de la OGPe tanto en su Oficina Central en San Juan como Oficinas Regionales, será limitado y mediante coordinación al respecto.

14

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Stocks

S&P 500 finishes within points of record high close

T

he index in afternoon trading briefly surpassed its record high closing level of 3,386.15 from Feb. 19, before the onset of the coronavirus crisis in the United States that caused one of Wall Street’s most dramatic crashes in history.

The index reached as high as 3,387.89. Its intraday record of 3,393.52 was also set on Feb. 19.

Heavyweights Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) and Apple Inc (AAPL.O) were among the top boosts to the S&P 500 during the session.

The Nasdaq and Dow also rose sharply. The Nasdaq was the first of the three major indexes to bounce back to an alltime high in June. The Dow remains below its February peak.

With a better-than-feared second-quarter earnings season largely over, investors are preparing for the risk of a closely contested U.S. presidential election in the fall.Moderna Inc (MRNA.O) jumped 7.7% as it started a U.S. government-backed late-stage trial to assess its COVID-19 vaccine candidate in about 30,000 adults.

Hasbro Inc (HAS.O) dropped 7.5% after the toymaker missed quarterly results estimates, hit by production shutdowns due to coronavirus lockdowns.

They also are awaiting news on stimulus talks. A breakdown in bipartisan talks over the next federal aid bill to help tens of millions of Americans suffering in the coronavirus pandemic entered a fifth day, with neither side ready to resume negotiations.

“Clearly the market has been outperforming the economy by a wide stretch recently. There may be a little bit of relief in that you now have basically two centrist candidates on the Democratic ticket,” said David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management.

Democratic candidate Joe Biden on Tuesday picked Senator Kamala Harris as his choice for vice president.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI rose 289.93 points, or 1.05%, to 27,976.84, the S&P 500 .SPX gained 46.66 points, or 1.40%, to 3,380.35 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 229.42 points, or 2.13%, to 11,012.24.

Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) shares jumped 13.1%, in one of the biggest boosts to the Nasdaq, after it announced a five-forone stock split in an attempt to make its shares more accessible to employees and investors.

Data showed U.S. consumer prices increased morethan-expected in July, but high unemployment is likely to keep inflation under control, allowing the Federal Reserve to continue pumping money into the economy.

Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a 1.70-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 1.34-to-1 ratio favored advancers.

The S&P 500 posted 33 new 52-week highs and no new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 80 new highs and 25 new lows.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

15

Trump v. Putin: A vaccine manhood Contest

President Donald Trump addresses a news conference at the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2020.

By PETER BAKER

A

merican scientists hope this is one time that President Donald Trump really does believe it is all just a Russian hoax.

As President Vladimir Putin of Russia triumphantly declared on Tuesday that his country had produced the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, public health experts in the United States worried that Trump would feel compelled to compete in a pharmaceutical manhood contest by hastily rolling out his own vaccine even before it is fully tested.

“I am sure that this will give him more impetus to push U.S. R&D and FDA to move more quickly,” Margaret Hamburg, a Food and Drug Administration commissioner under President Barack Obama, said, referring to research and development. “If he believes that testing causes cases, I suspect he may believe that if you don’t test a vaccine or drug, they must be OK.” The announcement in Moscow roiled the international quest to stop the pandemic in what had already developed into a geopolitical race among the world’s biggest powers. The Russian vaccine, approved without the sort of extensive trials typically required in the West, may work, American scientists said.

But if it does not, the rushed process could pose dangers not just for Russians but for many others if Trump seeks to match the supposed achievement prematurely.

The search for a vaccine has already been caught in a whirlwind of pressures as the Trump administration scrambles to develop a drug to combat a virus that has killed more than 164,000 Americans. Two pharmaceutical companies have moved to Phase 3 trials in the United States, the final stage of testing before a vaccine can be approved. But scientists have expressed con-

cern that the trials would be short-circuited by Trump’s desire for a political win before the general election Nov. 3.

The White House has said that data, not politics, will govern the decision to approve a vaccine, although Trump has repeatedly linked his Operation Warp Speed to the campaign calendar. He has suggested that a vaccine could be rolled out by Election Day even though scientists said it would take until early next year to complete the trials.

“We’re doing very well in everything including corona, as you call it,” Trump said in an interview Tuesday with radio host Hugh Hewitt. “But let me just tell you, we’re getting to an end.

We’re getting to, and the vaccines are ready to rock. We’re going to be very close to a vaccine. We’re ready to distribute.”

At a news briefing later in the day, the president offered no comment on Russia’s announcement but made a point of boasting about the “tremendous progress” on an American vaccine and asserted that “we’re moving very close to that approval.”

“Operation Warp Speed is the largest and most advanced operation of its kind anywhere in the world and anywhere in history,” he said, his competitive juices on display.

Putin saw no need to wait for more expansive testing in Russia, where the medical system is not considered as rigorous as in the United States, despite the prospect that it may not work as advertised or may even prove unsafe. But in doing so, he put Trump in an awkward position given the friendship between the two men.

“Judging from Trump’s history of seeming deference to Putin as well as an ongoing personal desire for a ‘win,’ Trump may wish to replicate at home what he sees as a Russian vaccine triumph,” said Monica Schoch-Spana, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

David Kramer, a Russia scholar at Florida International University and a former assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush, said Trump should use the moment to put his desire for better relations with Russia to the test.

“Aside from arms control, fighting the virus would be one issue where we and Russia should work together and not be another source of competition,” he said. “The speed with which the Russians have found a vaccine has to raise concerns, however, and risks exacerbating the level of distrust between our two sides if it does not work or even does harm.”

The vaccine race comes at a time when Washington is already engaging in a new debate over how to recalibrate relations between the two powers after the election. A group of 103 former Cabinet secretaries, ambassadors and other officials from Democratic and Republican administrations published an open letter last week in Politico arguing for an effort to “put the relationship on a more constructive path.”

Another group of former officials, this one with 33, led by Kramer, published its response Tuesday rejecting a new “reset” and arguing that Putin’s regime poses “a threat to American interests and values, requiring strong pushback.”

The relationship has been dominated by the aftermath of the 2016 election, when Russia intervened in the American campaign to help Trump, according to intelligence agencies and a special counsel investigation. While no charges were brought

alleging a criminal conspiracy, Trump has at times rejected even that Russia played a role, calling it a hoax.

Just last week, U.S. intelligence agencies reported that Russia was still trying to intervene in American elections to help reelect Trump, a conclusion that the president likewise instantly rejected. “I think that the last person Russia wants to see in office is Donald Trump because nobody has been tougher on Russia than I have, ever,” he said at a briefing for reporters.

Told that was not what the intelligence agencies were finding, Trump snapped, “Well, I don’t care what anybody says.”

He defended himself further on Tuesday when Hewitt asked who had been tougher on Russia, Trump or Obama. “By a factor of 50, me, OK?” Trump said, arguing that he built up the U.S. military and sent weapons to Ukraine for its continuing conflict with Russia.

As he often does, however, Trump laced his answer with factual fallacies. He boasted that he sent Javelin anti-tank weapons to Ukraine when Obama would not, which is true. But what Trump did not say was that his administration barred the Ukrainians from actually using the Javelins and mandated that they be kept locked up far from the battlefront.

The president likewise boasted that “I got NATO to pay $400 billion a year more to protect themselves against Russia.”

That is not true. NATO has projected that the allies will increase military spending by a cumulative $400 billion from 2016 to 2024, meaning over eight years, not each year. Similarly, Trump said he “spent $2.5 trillion” on the U.S. military, but that credits him with every dollar spent on defense over three years and then some, not just the increases he helped push through.

It is true that his administration has taken aggressive action to counter Russia at times — including sanctions, diplomatic expulsions and modest troop deployments to Eastern Europe — but Trump has left the tough talk to his subordinates and rarely if ever has a word of criticism of Putin, whose leadership and strength he has publicly praised. Indeed, Trump has spoken repeatedly with Putin in recent months without once raising intelligence reports that Russia has paid bounties to Afghan fighters to kill U.S. soldiers. Trump dismissed the reports from his own administration as “fake news.”

In a separate string of Twitter messages Tuesday, Trump disputed the notion that he trusted Putin more than U.S. intelligence agencies, but he then proceeded to explain why he would doubt his own country’s security apparatus, pointing back to his first encounter with veteran intelligence officials that he later came to consider his enemies.

“John Bolton, one of the dumbest people I’ve met in government and sadly, I’ve met plenty, states often that I respected, and even trusted, Vladimir Putin of Russia more than those in our Intelligence Agencies,” Trump wrote, referring to his own former national security adviser.

“While of course that is not true,” he continued, “if the first people you met from so called American Intelligence were Dirty Cops who have now proven to be sleazebags at the highest level like James Comey, proven liar James Clapper, & perhaps the lowest of them all, Wacko John Brennan who headed the CIA, you could perhaps understand my reluctance to embrace!”

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Thursday, August 13, 2020

Israel quietly opens its borders, and Palestinians have a beach day

By ADAM RASGON

T

he 16-year-old high school student couldn’t stop smiling.

For the first time in her life, Shaima Jamous felt the water of the Mediterranean lap over her feet and the sand wash out from under them. For the first time, she inhaled the salt air and was lulled by the sound of the waves.

The beach in Netanya, Israel, was just 30 miles from her home in Nablus, in the West Bank, but it may as well have been another world.

“I always knew I would eventually make it to the beach, but I never thought it would be so easy,” Jamous said.

She was among the tens of thousands of Palestinians who enjoyed a rare day at the beach over the past several days through an informal arrangement that required no Israeli permit but did require slipping through holes in Israel’s security barrier.

The opening was tacit and unannounced, and after a flurry of Israeli and Palestinian news reports on it, Israel shut it down Tuesday.

The Israeli military and other security agencies declined to comment on why Palestinians were allowed to cross through openings in the barrier — a series of fences and walls that cut off much of the occupied West Bank from Israel — without permits. Israel usually requires Palestinians to obtain travel permits — an often arduous and complicated process that includes passing significant security checks — to cross into its territory.

Gadi Shamni, a former head of the military’s Central Command, said he thought that Israel was trying to “relieve pressure” on Palestinians in the West Bank, where unemployment has risen sharply since the emergence of the coronavirus.

Israel usually issues tens of thousands of permits to Palestinians over the Eid holidays but did not this year because of restrictions officials said were imposed to combat the virus.

Shamni and other former security officials warned that allowing Palestinians to cross into Israel without formalities posed a security risk, which they said wouldbe attackers could exploit. That concern may be one reason for the government’s silence about the opening, which would have been unpopular with a large sector of the Israeli public.

Many residents of Netanya, a conservative town where the right-wing Likud party captured the most votes in the last election, in April, expressed opposition to allowing Palestinians to cross into Israel without permits, though some welcomed it.

“These are people who would like to spend time at the beach,” said Maurice Sedowitz, a retired dentist.

“Palestinian families should be able to enjoy themselves here with or without a permit.”

The usually heavily guarded borders were clearly open for business.

A pair of Israeli soldiers patrolling near a hole in the barrier in the northern village of Faroun on Monday did nothing to stop throngs of Palestinians carrying coolers and bags of food from passing through. Nor did two Israeli military vehicles driving by take action against the beachgoers.

Residents of Faroun, the site of multiple traffic jams over the past week, even said they had witnessed the army help people pass through the hole at night by turning on lights.

Word of the opening spread quickly on Palestinian social media. Palestinian tour agencies, which have suffered major losses since the pandemic hit the West Bank in March, sprung into action.

Saadi Abu Zant, the owner of Prestige Travel and Tourism, organized two trips this past week with stops in Haifa as well as the beach in Netanya.

“For months, I sat at home doing absolutely nothing,” Abu Zant said. “The openings in the fence totally changed that.”

Other tour operators offered kayaking adventures on the Jordan River, tours of Acre’s Old City and excursions through Jaffa and Tiberias.

On Monday, after Palestinians walked through a wide gap in the fence in Faroun, they headed toward a dirt lot filled with buses. Bus drivers hawked the names of cities: “Haifa, Acre,” yelled one. “Jaffa, Tel Aviv,” said another.

The beachgoers paid the drivers, took their seats

and were off.

Azzam al-Naanaa, 44, a husky university security guard from Nablus who was visiting Netanya, said the last time he went to an Israeli beach was two decades ago.

“It’s a very special experience to come to the beach, but it’s even more special because I did so with my kids,” he said. His four children were sitting in the sand and staring at the waves crashing on the shore.

Al-Naanaa said that Israeli authorities had previously barred him from entering Israel on security grounds. He did not say why but Israel often takes such measures against members of militant organizations, people it suspects of involvement in violence and people related to those who committed violent crimes.

The West Bank is landlocked except for a small strip on the Dead Sea, which is hot, hard to swim in and under Israeli control.

Holes have existed in the fences for years. In the past, the Israeli army has turned a blind eye to Palestinian laborers passing through the holes to reach constructions jobs in Israel. But several West Bank Palestinians said they couldn’t recall a time when Israel allowed thousands of families to cross through them to go to the beach.

Nasreen Abu Alia, an interior designer from Nablus, was sitting under an umbrella in Netanya watching her daughter play in the sand.

“I feel like I’m seeing a dear old friend who I missed so much,” said Abu Alia, who was visiting the beach for only the second time. “Being here today is really a dream come true.”

Tens of thousands of Palestinians slipped through holes in Israel’s security barrier, with Israel’s tacit approval, for a rare day on a Mediterranean beach.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

17

‘No slavery in Australia’? These Pacific islanders tell a different story

Marion Healy and her daughter, Dominique, in a field of headstones recently added to the once unmarked graves of South Sea Islanders in Mackay, Australia.

By ISABELLA KWAI

M

arion Healy’s great-grandfather Kwailu was just a boy when “recruiters” took him aboard a ship on a beach in the Solomon Islands.

The destination was Australia, where, for meager wages, he would do backbreaking labor planting and cutting sugar cane for white farmers.

Thousands of South Pacific islanders like Kwailu were lured to Australian plantations in the 19th century, some through deception, others through force, and all through a colonialism that looted less-advantaged societies. So when Healy recently heard Prime Minister Scott Morrison say that there had been “no slavery in Australia,” she wondered whether her people’s history, already little known, could be lost entirely.

“How dare you say that?” she said of the prime minister. “I’m a bit frightened that we might slip out of their memory.”

The Black Lives Matter movement, as it has swept the globe, has led Australia to look more deeply at entrenched discrimination against its Indigenous peoples and other minorities. Morrison’s remark, for which he later apologized, focused particular attention on outwardly racist policies in Australia’s past, a legacy many tend to overlook in a country that

proclaims itself proudly multicultural.

Healy and others descended from South Pacific laborers are often confused with Indigenous Australians, whose ancestors were the continent’s first inhabitants and have faced similar discrimination. Although South Pacific laborers were not the only ones engaged in such work, the prime minister’s comment has created an opportunity for their descendants to cement a distinct identity.

“It’s a chance to have our story told,” Healy said. “We need to take that opportunity.”

That story begins with the need for inexpensive labor in Britain’s colonies, which pushed Australia as close to abject bondage as was allowed after the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833.

Chattel slavery, as practiced in America and elsewhere, meant that enslaved people were treated as the property of their masters to be bought, sold and exploited. The children of the enslaved were automatically born into slavery.

But in Australia, the British found cheap workers in the indentured labor of Indigenous Australians, Chinese, Indians, white convicts and South Pacific islanders.

Some historians say that the more than 50,000 South Pacific islanders who worked largely on the sugar plantations

of northeastern Australia from 1863 to 1904 were not technically enslaved because they were paid for their toil, albeit typically much less than white workers.

Some laborers, including Kwailu, who returned to their home islands in the South Pacific ended up coming back to Australia.

“But there was kidnapping. Nobody would argue against that,” said Clive Moore, an emeritus professor at the University of Queensland who has extensively studied the history of the laborers, known in Australia as South Sea Islanders.

Large numbers of the cane workers were “blackbirded”: lured from their island homes, some with the promise of items like axes and knives — valuable goods in a less industrialized society.

Many of the South Sea Islanders did not survive their years of labor on the plantations.

Their toil helped make the colony, and later the state, of Queensland prosperous. But instead of recognizing the South Sea Islanders for their contributions, Australia sought to erase them from the record.

One of the country’s first acts as a new nation in 1901 was to enact frameworks intended to keep the country ethnically European, the so-called White Australia policy. The country deported a majority of the cane workers and banned their reentry. A small number received exemptions, while others hid from immigration agents with the help of sympathetic farmers.

The country’s largest population of South Sea Islanders, who number an estimated 20,000, live in the Mackay region of coastal Queensland. It is a place speckled with reminders of the legacy of blackbirding, but also a painful awareness — reinforced by the prime minister’s slavery comment — that, without a fight, memories will fade.

A traditional hut near the city’s lush gardens has become a cherished meeting place. A mural showing Mackay (pronounced muh-KAI) through the years depicts the South Sea Islanders’ journey by ship and their symbolic transformation into blackbirds. A plaque on the banks of the Pioneer River marks where South Sea Islanders were taken “for bidding and

haulage to various sugar plantations.”

And in Mackay’s heritage-site cemetery, a field of fresh headstones bearing the silhouette of a kneeling man with a blackbird at his side stands separated from the rest. Before a 2016 project to identify them, the graves of about 160 workers who died while cutting cane were largely unmarked.

“I used to ride across here for a shortcut and not realizing I was riding over my own ancestors,” said Starrett Vea Vea, the chairman of the Mackay and District Australian South Sea Islander Association.

He led a team that looked through cemetery records to help identify the graves. “These were the ones that never went back to the islands,” he said.

Vea Vea said he dreamed of creating a heritage trail that would lead people through the area’s significant sites, from the graves to the cane fields.

Another resident, Raechel Ivey, who works for the regional government, is also hoping to pursue education efforts. As part of this, she is hosting a program where elders teach students how to weave traditional fishing nets.

Ivey grew up with her great-grandmother, who was brought to Australia at the age of 8 and became a maid for a white family. She was kept and fed but not paid more than that. “She used to hold up the atlas and tell me that she was from New Hebrides,” now known as Vanuatu, Ivey said.

Many in Mackay know little about this history, she said, “which is why we’re the forgotten people.” She believes that passing on the culture to all Mackay residents, not just South Sea Islanders, is crucial.

The city’s population of about 80,000 has grown increasingly diverse, with nearby mines underpinning the arrival of new workers, some of whom are unaware of the area’s history. The mayor, Greg Williamson, said that Mackay should be forthright about how its prosperity had come at the suffering of South Sea Islanders.

“There’s absolutely no sense in denying any of that happened,” said Williamson, an independent who, along with South Sea Islanders, invited Morrison to visit Mackay for a history lesson.

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Thursday, August 13, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Kamala Harris is the future, so Mike Pence may well be history

By FRANK BRUNI

A

lready, I am dreaming of the debate.

There’s Mike Pence, white of hair as well as cheek, his demeanor more starched than his dress shirt, his smile so tight it’s the twin of a grimace. He represents more than the Trump administration, God help him. He represents an America that’s half memory, half myth.

And there’s Kamala Harris — younger, blacker and more buoyant. She’s only the fourth woman on the presidential ticket of one of the country’s two major political parties and she’s the first woman of color. She represents an America that’s evolving, fitfully, toward equal opportunity and equal justice.

Under her gaze, Pence has to defend a racist, sexist president. As he watches helplessly, Harris gets to talk about how that racism and sexism feel to a Black woman like her. This isn’t any ordinary clash of perspectives and philosophies. It’s an extraordinary collision of life experiences.

And that’s exactly what Joe Biden wants.

Throughout his campaign, Biden has defined himself as the opposite of President Donald Trump in experience and earnestness and as the antidote to Trump in how he sees America and what he values about it. He has used his choice of a running mate to hammer home that last bit.

Harris is a distinguished public servant with a résumé —

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Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Joe Biden’s running mate, speaks to reporters following the Democratic presidential debate in Miami on June 27, 2019. “She represents an America that’s evolving, fitfully, toward equal opportunity and equal justice,” writes Frank Bruni.

U.S. senator from California, state attorney general — unquestionably suited to this opportunity, which she has earned. She is also an agent of contrast, emphasizing the difference between the Republican ticket and the Democratic one, between Trump’s politics of division and Biden’s politics of inclusion.

But even as she affirms Biden’s orientation toward the future, she reflects his appreciation of his own past. She enables him, for a second time, to be part of a presidential ticket that sets a precedent and blazes a trail. It’s almost as if he’s trying to recreate the established magic, to repurpose the victorious script.

Twelve years ago, he was the running mate of the first Black nominee of one of the country’s two major parties, Barack Obama, who then became the country’s first Black president. Harris would be the country’s first Black vice president, its first Asian American vice president and its first female vice president, in excellent position to be the country’s first female president down the line. Having a hand in that no doubt excited Biden.

In selecting her, he echoed Obama’s selection of him.

Obama and Biden competed against each other in the 2008 Democratic primary, and Obama had to forgive Biden for insulting him by saying that he was a rare “clean” and “articulate” African American candidate.

In selecting Harris, Biden had to forgive her attacks during a Democratic primary debate for his past alliances with segregationists and his opposition to busing to integrate public schools. He and his aides considered that a cheap shot. They

clearly got over it.

Choosing any of the Black women on Biden’s list of prospective running mates would have sent the kind of signal that Harris’ selection does. Choosing any of them would have recognized how crucial Black voters were to the success of Biden’s primary campaign and how crucial they’ll be in the general election. Choosing any of them would have been a fitting response to the country’s current soul-searching about its racism.

So why Harris and not Susan Rice, Karen Bass, Val Demings, Keisha Lance Bottoms or Stacey Abrams? Because Biden obviously believes the polls that give him a significant lead over Trump and wants above all to protect it. Harris is the safest of the bunch.

Rice would have been a more comforting choice — Biden knows her much better — but she has never run for political office and might come across as too wonky for the Rust Belt. She and the others have less conventionally, unequivocally vice-presidential résumés.

And because of Harris’ high-profile participation in the Democratic primary, her life has been more thoroughly hashed over and her warts more exposed than is the case with those other contenders. She has liabilities, including a record from her long career as a prosecutor that many progressives deplore, but those have been out in the open for a while now.

No sooner had her selection leaked than several Democratic operatives emailed me to say, anxiously, “I hope she’s better in the general election than she was in the primary!”

She certainly flopped then. But Biden flopped as miserably in the 2008 primary, and that didn’t scare off Obama.

A primary and a general election are different beasts.

Harris ran for the Democratic presidential nomination against a huge field of other Democrats. She’s running for the vice presidency against Trump and Pence, and there’s a real chance that the same Black voters who were cool to her in the primary will thrill to her now that she’s on a history-making ticket, prosecuting the case against a president who has deeply offended them.

She brings to that ticket some of the balance that presidential candidates typically want their running mates to bring.

Biden is 77. She’s 55. Biden is East Coast. She’s West Coast.

Biden is a white guy, like all but four of the major-party presidential or vice-presidential nominees before Harris. She’s not.

And oh, can she be fierce. That’s what Biden learned in that primary debate, cheap shot or no cheap shot. That’s what Brett Kavanaugh and William Barr learned when they appeared before Senate committees and endured her grilling.

That’s what I hope and trust Pence will learn on Oct. 7, at the University of Utah, where the sole vice-presidential debate is scheduled to take place. A man who reputedly doesn’t like to eat alone with any woman other than his wife — it looks weird and is a recipe for trouble — will face off against a woman who’s big trouble indeed. I suspect she’ll have him for breakfast.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

19

Representantes solicitarán fondos a la JSF para celebrar Juegos Centroamericanos en Mayagüez 2022 Por THE STAR os representantes del Partido Nuevo Progresista LCordero, (PNP), Maricarmen Mas Rodríguez y José ‘Che’ Pérez endosaron el miércoles, la idea de explorar la

celebración de los Juegos Centroamericanos del Caribe 2022 en la ciudad de Mayagüez ante el retiro de la sede original, Panamá.

Los legisladores novoprogresistas en el oeste informaron, además, que estarán comunicándose en los próximos días con miembros de la Junta de Supervisión Fiscal (JSF), incluyendo su directora ejecutiva, Natalie Jaresko, para auscultar su sentir sobre la propuesta y evaluar posibles asignaciones presupuestarias para hacer realidad el evento.

“Como representantes de los municipios de Mayagüez, San Germán, Aguada, Añasco, Moca y Rincón, entendemos que la idea de celebrar los Juegos Centroamericanos en la región oeste, con sede principal en Mayagüez es una muy buena que ayudará a rehabilitar el deporte olímpico luego de los estragos de la pandemia del COVID-19. Pero las cosas se tienen que hacer en el marco de la realidad fiscal que atraviesa Puerto Rico y los municipios de la zona oeste. Ante esto, vamos a dialogar el asunto a la mayor brevedad con la Junta para que podamos identificar los fondos necesarios, que rondan en millones de dólares, con el fin de hacer de esta propuesta una realidad”, comentó Mas Rodríguez, quien representa el Distrito 19 de Mayagüez y San Germán.

Por su parte, Pérez Cordero señalo que existen muchas facilidades construidas para los Juegos Centroamericanos Mayagüez 2010 que se podrían rehabilitar con esfuerzos conjuntos entre los gobiernos de los munici-

pios del oeste, el gobierno central y la empresa privada.

“Sabemos que múltiples instalaciones deportivas construidas para los Juegos de Mayagüez 2010 ya no existen, como el velódromo de ciclismo de circuito en Aguadilla, y otras están en avanzado estado de deterioro que no se pueden reparar. Sin embargo, existen muchas facilidades como el Estadio Centroamericano en Mayagüez, con una pista de calibre mundial y la piscina de natación en el Recinto Universitario de Mayagüez, se pueden colocar en óptimas condiciones de manera expedita. Otras, quizás necesitarían mejoras

más profundas, pero están ahí y se puede hacer. Para ello necesitamos la aprobación de la Junta, ese es el primer paso a lograr que esta idea se convierta en realidad para el beneficio de todo Puerto Rico”, dijo el legislador por el Distrito #18 de Aguada, Añasco, Moca, Mayagüez y Rincón.

Los legisladores del PNP dejaron claro que cursarán una misiva a Jaresko en los próximos días solicitando una reunión de emergencia para comenzar a delinear el programa presupuestario que se podría implementar de concretarse todas negociaciones.

ULEES solicita acción al presidente de la Cámara de Representantes Por THE STAR Unidad Laboral de Enfermeras(os) y Lcoles,aEmpleados de la Salud reclamó el miéra la Cámara de Representantes en

torno a la dilación en el envío de los Proyectos de Ley 2143 y 2144 a la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced para su respectiva firma.

“En un momento como el que vivimos y donde nuevamente se ha puesto de manifiesto el rol e importancia de nuestro personal de Enfermería, se hace más que meritorio que de manera inmediata dichos proyectos de ley sean enviados a la Fortaleza para sus respectivas firmas. La Cámara de Representantes no puede seguir secuestrando al pueblo de Puerto Rico, en este caso a nuestros profesionales de la salud, en su guerra política. Ambos proyectos fueron atendidos y aprobados en la sesión extraordinaria, no hay razón alguna que justifique la dilación en el envío de

estos proyectos de ley a Fortaleza que no sea otra que una política”, afirmó José Alverio Díaz, Director Ejecutivo de la ULEES en comunicación escrita.

Explicó que dichos proyectos, que fueron aprobados por ambos cuerpos en la pasada sesión extraordinaria convocada por la primera mandataria del país, establecen un nuevo salario básico para el personal de Enfermería Práctica y Graduada.

“Esta es una magnífica oportunidad para que se apoye al personal que ha estado desde el primer día en primera fila batallando con el mortal virus que enfrentamos a nivel mundial. A esos que llamaron Héroes es hora de que se les reconozca su labor y se les respete. Hacemos un llamado al Hon. Carlos J. Méndez, presidente de la Cámara de Representantes para que estampe su firma en ambos proyectos y se envíen a la atención de la gobernadora”, concluyó.

20

Thursday, August 13, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

A black nurse saved lives. Today she may save art.

By CAROL POGASH

I

n June, Laura Voisin George, a graduate student, was writing a scholarly article about a series of Works Progress Administration frescoes at the University of California, San Francisco.

The 10 panels of “History of Medicine in California,” completed in 1938 by Bernard Zakheim, a Polish-born muralist, show such scenes as Native Americans offering herbs to doctors and a trapper inoculating someone with the smallpox vaccine.

Voisin George recognized a central figure in one of the vivid social realist tableaus. Biddy Mason, a Black nurse, is depicted alongside a white doctor as they treat a malaria patient. Mason, a woman who was born into slavery in 1818, went on to become a midwife, a nurse, a philanthropist and a founder of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles.

Voisin George, who studies history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, learned that the frescoes were about to be destroyed while she was researching. The Jewish News of Northern California reported the news. Her reaction, she said, was: “What? How could this be?”

The university had announced plans to demolish the building to make way for a state-of-theart research center. It had informed Zakheim’s son Nathan that if his family didn’t retrieve the frescoes, which weigh as much as 2,500 pounds, they would be destroyed.

Until Voisin George identified Mason, neither the artist’s family nor university officials knew about her presence in the frescoes. As news outlets have reported this discovery, Mason has become a star of the murals and their potential savior. An assertion by the federal government that it owns the frescoes has further complicated matters.

Adam Gottstein, the artist’s grandson, said that the university’s placing responsibility on the family to save the artwork “boiled my blood.” It showed a “complete lack of respect and concern for historical art.” Mason’s presence, he said, “adds considerable pressure to UCSF to do the right thing.”

The frescoes were part of the WPA’s Federal Art Project, which hired unemployed artists. Since their creation, the Zakheim murals have been praised, criticized and painted over because a professor said they distracted medical students attending lectures in the auditorium where they are on display. Because of concerns about earthquakes, that auditorium is no longer used.

In 2015, Polina Ilieva, UCSF’s archivist, wrote that the murals “remain the jewel of the university’s

An image provided by UCSF Archives and Special Collections shows a detail of Bernard Zakheim’s mural “History of Medicine in California,” housed in an auditorium at the University of California, San Francisco. art collection.”

Bernard Zakheim was “one of the most prominent artists in Northern California with a national reputation,” said Robert Cherny, a history professor retired from San Francisco State and an expert on New Deal art. “These murals are his largest work,” he said. Zakheim, who also created other Depression-era murals for the project, died in 1985.

Nathan Zakheim, the artist’s son, an art conservator who in 1976 restored the murals, said he was shocked when he and other heirs received a letter from UCSF’s lawyers, dated June 4, giving them 90 days to produce a plan to remove the murals. If they failed to respond, the letter said, the university would “presume” it had their consent “to proceed with destruction.”

Nathan Zakheim told the university he could move the murals for less than $1 million. There was one hitch: The family lacked the funds.

But the university said it would not spend public money on the move because money was tight during the pandemic. It described the murals as “fragile,” even though an analysis by Page &

Turnbull, a historic preservation architecture firm the university hired, said they were “structurally sound.”

Then, June 18, the university received a letter from the General Services Administration stating that “ownership of the murals resides with GSA, on behalf of the United States.” The federal agency wanted the murals to be preserved.

“We were surprised when the GSA said, ‘We assert an ownership interest,’” said Brian Newman, UCSF’s vice chancellor for real estate. The university said it rejects the GSA’s ownership claim.

Putting further pressure on the university, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed piece July 10 that was based in part on Voisin George’s research. Its headline read: “A monument to California’s Black history — and a great work of art — may soon be destroyed.”

Cheryl and Robynn Cox, sisters who are descendants of Biddy Mason, grew up knowing that their famous ancestor was painted on the frescoes, as had their mother and grandparents. She also was the subject of a 2015 young adult book illustrated with the mural.

Both women assumed the murals would always be available to the public, until they read the reports about plans to destroy them.

“It’s interesting, if you look through the lens of race and gender, this extraordinary Black woman and former slave is bringing attention to the destruction of these murals, but no one personally reached out to us,” said Robynn Cox, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Southern California.

The Cox sisters said they recently met over Zoom with UCSF officials, including a meeting Monday attended by the chancellor, Sam Hawgood.

Last week, the school announced it was seeking bids to remove the 10 frescoes and place them in storage, at a price not to exceed $1.8 million.

“We are hoping we can come up with a viable plan for the murals to preserve them,” Newman, the vice chancellor, said.

The federal government response, in an email from Pamela Pennington, a GSA press secretary, said: “Until a new location for the murals is determined, their removal, preservation and storage by UCSF is supported by GSA.” But the descendants of the artist and the famous nurse want the art to be seen.

Gottstein said, “If they are in storage and never see the light of day, then we will have lost, after all.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

21

She explains ‘Mansplaining’ with help from 17th-century art

By ALISHA HARIDASANI GUPTA

T

his story begins, as so many do these days, on Twitter.

In May 2019, Nicole Tersigni, a Detroit-based writer, logged onto the social media platform at the end of a long day. She was tired and frazzled from looking after her 8-year-old daughter, who was home sick at the time.

“So I go online just to kind of scroll through Twitter and zone out for a little bit,” she said, “and I see a dude explaining to a woman her own joke back to her — something that has happened to me many times.”

In the past, Tersigni had let those kinds of irritating conversations go, but this one sparked something in her. She Googled “woman surrounded by men” (“because that is what that moment feels like when you’re online,” she said) and stumbled upon a 17th-century oil painting

by Jobst Harrich of a woman baring one breast in the middle of a scrum of bald men.

She combined that image with the caption: “Maybe if I take my tit out they will stop explaining my own joke back to me.”

In another post, Tersigni placed an 18thcentury painting titled “Conversation in a Park”

by Thomas Gainsborough next to the caption, “you would be so much prettier if you smiled,” turning what seems like a vignette of a man flirting with a woman into a laugh-out-loud scene.

She kept tweeting, and her posts went viral, garnering tens of thousands of likes and

retweets, including by actors Busy Philipps (“THIS THREAD IS GENIUS,” she proclaimed) and Alyssa Milano (“Might be my all time favorite thread ever”) — a platform-specific indication that Tersigni had playfully captured everyday instances of misogyny that many women found uncomfortably familiar.

“It just snowballed from there because it was just so easy to consume and relate to and laugh about,” Tersigni said. (Several men chimed in to explain her joke to her or point out that not all men do these things.)

Within days, an agent got in touch, suggesting she turn her tweets into a book. Two weeks later, they were meeting with editors, Tersigni said, and struck a deal with Chronicle Books.

“I remember I got it, looked at it and just cracked up,” said Rebecca Hunt, editorial director at Chronicle Books, who works on pop culture and humor books.

“When it was time for me to share it with our editorial team, I printed out a lot of the pages and spread them on the table. We all didn’t even need to say anything, we were all just reading and laughing,” she said. “That’s how you know right away that something will resonate.”

Just over a year after that first tweet, Tersigni’s vision will leap from social media to print with “Men to Avoid in Art and Life,” to be released Tuesday.

Each chapter of the coffee-table book, which brings together works of art and razorsharp captions, explores the different “types” of

In an undated image provided by the publisher, images from “Men to Avoid in Art and Life,” by Nicole Tersigni. men that Tersigni and many women encounter on a regular basis. She describes five of them, with some examples from pop culture, here.

The Mansplainer “The mansplainer explains things in a condescending way,” Tersigni said. “Their thoughts are always unsolicited. Nobody is asking for them. One of my favorite jokes that I used in the thread and also in the book for the mansplainer is, ‘Let me explain your lived experience.’”

The Concern Troll Concern trolls approach women with a sense of worry about something they are saying or doing, but it isn’t sincere, Tersigni said.

“They use their faux worry to undermine or criticize you.”

Think Gaston from “Beauty and the

New York Comic Con is going online

By GEORGE GENE GUSTIES

T

he annual New York Comic Con, which was scheduled to be held at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center Oct. 8-11, is going virtual. It is the latest comic book convention to go online in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

ReedPOP, which operates New York Comic Con, announced Tuesday that it would offer New York Comic Con’s Metaverse, an online convention experience, in a partnership with YouTube, on the same dates.

It will offer livestream panels about television series, including “American Gods” on Starz, and use YouTube’s live chat features to allow fans to participate in discussions. The convention programming includes watch parties, professional workshops and the ability to buy three-minute-long virtual meet-and-greets.

A big plus of the virtual comic cons is not needing to wait in lines amid the crowds.

The New York Comic Con Metaverse will be the second virtual con from ReedPOP. The first one is Thursday through Sunday.

Beast,” who feigns concern for Belle’s well-being when he sees her with a book (“It’s not right for a woman to read. Soon she starts getting ideas — and thinking!”).

In the real world, Tersigni said, “They’ll say things like, ‘I agree with your point, but you shouldn’t use that tone or you’ll alienate your audience.’”

The Comedian The comedian is not just someone who tells jokes. He is the unfunny person who is convinced of his funniness, “but if you don’t laugh at his jokes, which are really tired, sexist, racist jokes, it’s because you just don’t understand comedy or you need to get a sense of humor,” Tersigni said.

“Todd Packer, from ‘The Office,’ is a great example of this guy,” she added. “He tells the worst jokes and gets so mad when people don’t like him that he gives them laxative cupcakes.”

The Sexpert This is what you call the heterosexual man who believes he has all the answers when it comes to women and sex. “The sexpert thinks he knows your body better than you do,” Tersigni said. “They think they know what’s going on with you internally.”

“Harry, from ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ is a total sexpert,” she added, something that Meg Ryan’s character, Sally, finds so annoying that it leads to her memorable performance at Katz’s Deli in New York City.

The Patronizer A close relative of the concern troll, patronizers minimize women by harping on their (imagined) feelings. “The patronizer uses your emotions as weapons against you and makes you feel small, so that he can feel big,” Tersigni said. “That guy will say things like ‘I can’t talk to you if you’re going to be hysterical,’ which is like nails-on-the-chalkboard annoying.”

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Thursday, August 13, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

‘Made in Italy’ review: Father and son reunion

By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS

T

he title promises “Made in Italy,” but I wouldn’t get too excited. Oh, there’s pretty scenery (including the requisite cy-

press trees), and a villa to yearn for, even in its dusty, dilapidated state. But for a movie that’s supposedly meant to lift us off our couches and set us down in a verdant dreamscape, this limp foreign-soil fantasy from James D’Arcy doesn’t

Michéal Richardson and Liam Neeson in “Made in Italy.”

come close to getting the job done.

Still, there’s Liam Neeson, who’s no small consolation for D’Arcy’s unutterably trite and painfully predictable script. Neeson plays Robert, a grouchy artist whose creative output stalled when his wife died many years earlier.

His adult son, Jack (Micheál Richardson, Neeson’s real-life son), is on the brink of a divorce that will leave him jobless unless he buys the London art gallery he’s been running. A quick sale of the family’s neglected Tuscan villa will furnish the necessary cash — provided they clean out its hoard of painful memories and unprocessed grief.

These emotional undercurrents fill “Made in Italy” with wistful echoes of the 2009 loss of Natasha Richardson, Neeson’s wife and Richardson’s mother. Yet both actors struggle to authenticate what should be the movie’s most affecting moments. So, while we anticipate the inevitable healing and bonding, we amuse ourselves by handicapping the likelihood that the tactful real estate agent (the wonderful Lindsay Duncan) will fall for Robert’s scruffy mug and blood-red, massacre-like mural. Or that the gorgeous owner of a local restaurant (Valeria Bilello) will serve Jack dessert after he’s finished his ragù.

In other words, “Made in Italy” feels so recognizable we could almost write it ourselves.

‘A Thousand Cuts’ review: A free press endures lacerations

By BEN KENIGSBERG

T

he death by a thousand cuts that gives this documentary from Ramona S. Diaz its title is the death of democracy — a slow wounding that eventually makes the democracy too weak to survive. And while that assessment, offered by journalist Maria Ressa, refers to the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte, the absorbing and multipronged “A Thousand Cuts” presents the country as a test lab for autocracy — and suggests that its experiments have a high potential to travel.

Refreshingly, the film is not simply a profile of Ressa, who founded the news site Rappler and has fearlessly chronicled the abuses of Duterte’s presidency and the violence it has encouraged against purported drug dealers and addicts, but a kaleidoscopic dissection of how information courses through the country. It illustrates social

media’s capacity to deceive and to entrench po- es against her widely seen as a government effort litical power. to stifle reporting. Exactly how many cuts are left?

While Duterte dismisses Rappler’s articles as “rife with innuendos and pregnant with falsity,” the movie implies that such colorful language is part of an image-softening strategy. Diaz follows the parallel senate campaigns of Ronald dela Rosa, a Duterte loyalist also known as Bato, and Samira Gutoc, an opposition party candidate. The pop-music-singing Bato acts more like an entertainer than a public servant.

But the principal focus is Ressa, whom Diaz captures in offhand moments. She trails Ressa as she steps off a plane in the Philippines anticipating being detained. Elsewhere, Ressa tells a sibling, “The only way to not be afraid is to understand the worst-case scenario, and embrace it.”

The movie ends by noting Ressa’s conviction in The journalist Maria Ressa in the documentary “A June in a cyber libel case — part of a raft of charg- Thousand Cuts.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

23

The Coronavirus is new, but your immune system might still recognize it

By KATHERINE J. WU

E

ight months ago, the new coronavirus was unknown. But to some of our immune cells, the virus was already something of a familiar foe.

A flurry of recent studies has revealed that a large proportion of the population — 20% to 50% of people in some places — might harbor immunity assassins called T cells that recognize the new coronavirus despite having never encountered it before.

These T cells, which lurked in the bloodstreams of people long before the pandemic began, are most likely stragglers from past scuffles with other, related coronaviruses, including four that frequently cause common colds. It’s a case of family resemblance: In the eyes of the immune system, germs with common roots can look alike, such that when a cousin comes to call, the body may already have an inkling of its intentions.

The presence of these T cells has intrigued experts, who said it was too soon to tell whether the cells would play a helpful, harmful or entirely negligible role in the world’s fight against the current coronavirus. But should these socalled cross-reactive T cells exert even a modest influence on the body’s immune response to the new coronavirus, they might make the disease milder — and perhaps partly explain why some people who catch the germ become very sick, while others are dealt only a glancing blow.

“If you have a population of T cells that are armed and ready to protect you, you could control the infection better than someone who doesn’t have those cross-reactive cells,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington who is studying the immune responses of COVID-19 patients. “That’s what we’re all hoping for.”

T cells are an exceptionally picky bunch. Each spends the entirety of its life waiting for a very specific trigger, like a hunk of a dangerous virus. Once that switch is flipped, the T cell will clone itself into an army of specialized soldiers, all with their sights set on the same tar-

A colorized scanning electron micrograph of a human T cell. Encounters with other coronaviruses may prime the immune system to fight the virus that causes Covid-19. get. Some T cells are microscopic assassins, tailor-made to home in on and destroy infected cells; others coax immune cells called B cells into producing virusattacking antibodies.

The first time a virus infects the body, this response is sluggish; it takes several days for the immune system to sort out which T cells are best suited for the job at hand. But subsequent encounters typically prompt a response that is stronger and faster, thanks to a reserve force of T cells, called memory T cells, that lingers after the initial threat has passed and can quickly be called into action again.

Usually, this process operates best when T cells must battle the same pathogen again and again. But these recruits are more flexible than they are often given credit for, said Laura Su, an immunologist and T cell expert at the University of

Pennsylvania. Should these cells chance upon something that bears a strong resemblance to their germ of choice, they can still be roused to fight, even if the invader is a total newcomer.

In theory, cross-reactive T cells can “protect almost like a vaccine,” said Smita Iyer, an immunologist at the University of California, Davis, who is studying immune responses to the new coronavirus in primates. Previous studies have shown that cross-reactive T cells may guard people against different strains of the flu virus, and perhaps confer a trace of immunity against dengue and Zika viruses, which share a family tree.

The case for coronaviruses is less clear cut, said Alessandro Sette, an immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology who has led several studies examining cross-reactive T cells to the

new coronavirus. Researchers have found people in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore and the United Kingdom who have never been exposed to the new coronavirus but who carry T cells that react to it in the lab.

Researchers are eager to understand the history of these T cells, because that might help reveal who is more likely to have them. A growing body of evidence, including data published last week in Science by Sette and his colleagues, points to common-cold coronaviruses as a potential source. But even unrelated viruses can share similar features, and researchers may never know for sure what originally “drove their development,” said Avery August, an immunologist and T cell expert at Cornell University.

Whatever the origin of T cells, their mere existence could be encouraging news. There is much more to the immune system than T cells, but even a semblance of preexisting immunity could mean that people who have recently grappled with the common cold may have an easier time fighting off a nastier member of the coronavirus clan.

Cross-reactive T cells alone probably would not be enough to completely stave off infection or disease. But they might alleviate symptoms of the coronavirus in people who happen to carry these cells, or extend the protection provided by a vaccine.

“That would be awesome,” Iyer said.

T cells are also expert orchestrators.

Depending on the signals they send out, they can synchronize cells and molecules from disparate parts of the immune system into a tag-teamed attack, or quell these assaults to return the body to baseline. If it turns out that cross-reactive T cells tend toward quieting the response, they could suppress a person’s immune defense before it has a chance to kick into gear, August said.

Then again, many types of T cells exist, and all operate as part of a complex immune system. “It’s almost like some people are trying to say this is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’” Su said. “It’s probably more nuanced than that.”

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Thursday, August 13, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

How to think like an epidemiologist

By PAULA SPAN

T

here is a statistician’s rejoinder — sometimes offered as wry criticism, sometimes as honest advice — that could hardly be a better motto for our times: “Update your priors!”

In stats lingo, “priors” are your prior knowledge and beliefs, inevitably fuzzy and uncertain, before seeing evidence.

Evidence prompts an updating; and then more evidence prompts further updating, so forth and so on. This iterative process hones greater certainty and generates a coherent accumulation of knowledge.

In the early pandemic era, for instance, airborne transmission of COVID-19 was not considered likely, but in early July the World Health Organization, with mounting scientific evidence, conceded that it is a factor, especially indoors. The WHO updated its priors, and changed its advice.

This is the heart of Bayesian analysis, named after Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century Presbyterian minister who did math on the side. It captures uncertainty in terms of probability: Bayes’ theorem, or rule, is a device for rationally updating your prior beliefs and uncertainties based on observed evidence.

Bayes set out his ideas in “An Essay Toward Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances,” published posthumously in 1763; it was refined by preacher and mathematician Richard Price and included Bayes’ theorem. A couple of centuries later, Bayesian frameworks and methods, powered by computation, are at the heart of various models in epidemiology and other scientific fields As Marc Lipsitch, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard University, noted on Twitter, Bayesian reasoning comes awfully close to his working definition of rationality.

“As we learn more, our beliefs should change,” Lipsitch said in an interview. “One extreme is to decide what you think and be impervious to new information. Another extreme is to over-privilege the last thing you learned. In rough terms, Bayesian reasoning is a principled way to integrate what you previously thought with what you have learned and come to a conclusion that incorporates them both, giving them appropriate weights.”

With a new illness like COVID-19 and all the uncertainties it brings, there is intense interest in nailing down the parameters for models: What is the basic reproduction number, the rate at which new cases arise? How deadly is it? What is the infection fatality rate, the proportion of people with the virus that it kills?

But there is little point in trying to establish fixed numbers, said Natalie Dean, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida.

“We should be less focused on finding the single ‘truth’ and more focused on establishing a reasonable range, recognizing that the true value may vary across populations,” Dean said. “Bayesian analyses allow us to include this variability in a clear way, and then propagate this uncertainty through the model.”

The Logic of Uncertainty Joseph Blitzstein, a statistician at Harvard, delves into the utility of Bayesian analysis in his popular course “Statistics 110: Probability.” For a primer, in lecture one, he says: “Math is the logic of certainty, and statistics is the logic of uncertainty. Everyone has uncertainty. If you have 100% certainty about everything, there is something wrong with you.”

By the end of lecture four, he arrives at Bayes’ theorem — his favorite theorem because it is mathematically simple yet conceptually powerful.

“Literally, the proof is just one line of algebra,” Blitzstein said. The theorem essentially reduces to a fraction; it expresses the probability P of some event A happening given the occurrence of another event B. “Naively, you would think, ‘How much could you get from that?’” Blitzstein said. “It turns out to have incredibly deep consequences and to be applicable to just about every field of inquiry” — from finance and genetics to political science and historical studies. The Bayesian approach is applied in analyzing racial disparities in policing (in the assessment of officer decisions to search drivers during a traffic stop) and search-and-rescue operations (the search area narrows as new data is added). Cognitive scientists ask, ‘Is the brain Bayesian?’ Philosophers of science posit that science as a whole is a Bayesian process — as is common sense.

Take diagnostic testing. In this scenario, the setup of Bayes’ theorem might use events labeled “T” for a positive test result — and “C” for the presence of COVID-19 antibodies: Now suppose the prevalence of cases is 10% (that was so in New York City in the spring), and you have a positive result from a test with accuracy of 87.5% sensitivity and 97.5% specificity. Running numbers through the Bayesian gears, the probability that the result is correct and that you do indeed have antibodies is 79.5%. Decent odds, all things considered.

If you want more certainty, get a second opinion. And continue to be cautious.

An international collaboration of researchers, doctors and developers created another Bayesian strategy, pairing the test result with a questionnaire to produce a better estimate of whether the result might be a false negative or a false positive.

The tool, which has won two hackathons, collects contextual information: Did you go to work during lockdown? What did you do to avoid catching COVID-19? Has anyone in your household had COVID-19?

“It’s a little akin to having two ‘medical experts,’” said Claire Donnat, who recently finished her Ph.D. in statistics at Stanford and was part of the team. One expert has access to the patient’s symptoms and background, the other to the test; the two diagnoses are combined to produce a more precise score, and more reliable immunity estimates. The priors are updated with an aggregation of information.

“As new information comes in, we update our priors all the time,” said Susan Holmes, a Stanford statistician, via unstable internet from rural Portugal, where she unexpectedly pandemicked for 105 days, while visiting her mother.

That was the base from which Holmes refined a preprint

Bayesian analysis captures uncertainty in terms of probability: Bayes’s theorem, or rule, is a device for rationally updating your prior beliefs and uncertainties based on observed evidence. paper, co-authored with Donnat, that provides another example of Bayesian analysis, broadly speaking. Observing early research in March about how the pandemic might evolve, they noticed that classic epidemiological models tend to use fixed parameters, or constants, for the reproduction number — for instance, with an R0 of 2.0.

But in reality, the reproduction number depends on random, uncertain factors: viral loads and susceptibility, behavior and social networks, culture and socioeconomic class, weather, air conditioning and unknowns.

With a Bayesian perspective, the uncertainty is encoded into randomness. The researchers began by supposing that the reproductive number had various distributions (the priors).

Then they modeled the uncertainty using a random variable that fluctuates, taking on a range of values as small as 0.6 and as large as 2.2 or 3.5. In something of a nesting process, the random variable itself has parameters that fluctuate randomly; and those parameters, too, have random parameters (hyperparameters), etc. The effects accumulate into a “Bayesian hierarchy” — “turtles all the way down,” Holmes said.

The effects of all these up-and-down random fluctuations multiply, like compound interest. As a result, the study found that using random variables for reproductive numbers more realistically predicts the risky tail events, the rarer but more significant superspreader events.

Humans on their own, however, without a Bayesian model for a compass, are notoriously bad at fathoming individual risk.

“People, including very young children, can and do use Bayesian inference unconsciously,” said Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “But they need direct evidence about the frequency of events to do so.”

Much of the information that guides our behavior in the context of COVID-19 is probabilistic. For example, by some estimates, if you get infected with the coronavirus, there is a 1% chance you will die; but in reality an individual’s odds can vary by a thousandfold or more, depending on age and other factors. “For something like an illness, most of the evidence is usually indirect, and people are very bad at dealing with explicit probabilistic information,” Gopnik said.

The San Juan Daily Star LEGAL NOTICE Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior de BAYAMON.

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante v.

ANDRES NALES ESCOBAR Y OTROS

STRUCTURED SECURITIES ACQUISITION TRUST 2017-HBI, WILMINGTON SAVINGS FUND SOCIETY, FSB NOT INDIVIDUALLY BUT SOLELY AS A TRUSTEE Demandante Vs.

SUCESIÓN DE GLADYS Demandado(a) JOSEFINA MILÁN LÓPEZ Civil: Núm. BY2019CV06070. t/c/c GLADYS MILÁN SALA 504. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE LÓPEZ t/c/c GLADYS GARANTIAS. NOTIFICACIÓN JOSEFINA MILÁN t/c/c DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. GLADYS J. MILÁN LÓPEZ A: FULANO Y MENGANO t/c/c GLADYS J. MILAN DE TAL, COMO compuesta por RAFAEL POSIBLES HEREDEROS DE TAL Y SUTANO DESCONOCIDOS DE TAL; CENTRO DE DE ANDRES NALES RECAUDACIONES DE ESCOBAR E IRIS INGRESOS MUNICIPALES DOMINGA PEREZ RUIZ; Y A LOS ESTADOS ANDRES, EDNA, VICTOR, UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA NEREIDA, ANGEL, Demandados RUBEN E IRIS LUISA, CIVIL NÚM.: YU2019CV00189.

TODOS DE APELLIDOS SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO NALES PEREZ COMO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VíA ORDINARIA. MIEMBROS DE LAS MANDAMIENTO. ESTADOS SUCESIONES DE UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESANDRES NALES TADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO ESCOBAR E IRIS ASOCIADO DE PUERDOMINGA PEREZ RUIZ LIBRE TO RICO. Por Cuanto: Se ha EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 5 de agosto de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 7 de agosto de 2020. En Bayamon, Puerto Rico, el 7 de agosto de 2020. F/ Laura I. Santa Sanchez, Secretaria. F/Vivian J. Sanabria, Sec Auxiliar.

dictado en el presente caso la siguiente Orden: ORDEN. Examinada la demanda enmendada radicada por la parte demandante, la solicitud de interpelación contenida en la misma y examinados los autos del caso, el Tribunal le imparte su aprobación y en su virtud, acepta la Demanda Enmendada en el caso de epigrafe, así como la interpelación judicial de la parte demandante a los herederos del codemandado conforme dispone el Articulo 959 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. sec. 2787.

Se ordena a los herederos de la causante a saber, Rafael de Tal y Sutano de Tal, herederos de nombres desconocidos, a que dentro del término legal de 30 días contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden, acepten o repudien la participación que les corresponda en la herencia de la causante Gladys Josefina Milan Lopez t/c/c Gladys Milan Lopez t/c/c Gladys Josefina Milan t/c/c Gladys J Milan Lopez t/c/c Gladys J Milan. Se le apercibe a los herederos antes mencionados: (a) Que de no expresarse dentro del término de 30 días en torno a su aceptación o repudiación de herencia la misma se tendrá por aceptada; (b) Que LEGAL NOTICE luego del transcurso del término ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO de 30 días contados a partir de DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUla fecha de la notificación de la NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA presente Orden, se presumirá SALA SUPERIOR DE PONCE. que han aceptado la herencia FINANCE OF AMERICA del causante y por consiguien-

@

Thursday, August 13, 2020 te, responden por la cargas de dicha herencia conforme dispone el Artículo 957 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. sec. 2785. Se ordena a la parte demandante a que, en vista de que la sucesión del causante Gladys Josefina Milan Lopez t/c/c Gladys Milan Lopez t/c/c Gladys Josefina Milan t/c/c Gladys J Milan Lopez t/c/c Gladys J Milan incluyen como herederos a Rafael de Tal y Sutano de Tal, como posibles herederos desconocidos, proceda a notificar la presente Orden mediante un edicto a esos efectos una sola vez en un periódico de circulación diaria general de la Isla de Puerto Rico. DADA en Ponce, Puerto Rico, hoy día 15 de noviembre de 2019. (FDO) HON. JOSÉ JOHEL MONGE GÓMEZ, JUEZ SUPERIOR. Por Cuanto: Se le advierte a que dentro del término legal de 30 días contados a partir de la fecha de notificación de la presente Orden, acepten o repudien la participación que les corresponda en la herencia del causante Gladys Josefina Milan Lopez t/c/c Gladys Milan Lopez t/c/c Gladys Josefina Milan t/c/c Gladys J Milan Lopez t/c/c Gladys J Milan. Por Orden del Honorable Juez de Primera Instancia de este Tribunal, expido el presente Mandamiento, bajo mi firma y sello oficial, en San Juan, Puerto Rico hoy día 12 de FEBRERO de 2020. LUZ MAYRA CARABALLO GARCÍA, SECRETARIA GENERAL. KEILENE RODRÍGUZ MELÉNDEZ, SUB-SECRETARIA.

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

Finance of America Reverse, LLC. DEMANDANTE vs.

Sucesión de Julio Enrique Medina Colón, t/c/c Julio E. Medina Colón t/c/c Julio Medina Colón t/c/c Julio E. Media tic/c Julio Medina compuesta por Carmen María López Rosario, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal como posibles herederos de nombres desconocidos; Carmen María López Rosario t/c/c Carmen M. López Rosario t/c/c Carmen López Rosario t/c/c Carmen López t/c/c Carmen María López t/c/c Carmen M. López t/c/c Carmen María López de Medina t/c/c Carmen López de Medina t/c/c

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

Carmen M. López Medina; Luis Jiménez López como tutor de Carmen María López Rosario; Centro de Recaudaciones Municipales; y a los Estados Unidos de América.

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM.: CG2019CV02996.

SOBRE: Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal como cualquier miembro aún desconocido de la Sucesión de Julio Enrique Medina Colón, t/c/c Julio E. Medina Colón t/c/c Julio Medina Colón t/c/c Julio E. Media t/c/c Julio Medina y/o como cualquier otra persona con interés en este caso.

POR LA PRESENTE, se les emplaza y se les notifica que se ha presentado en la Secretaria de este Tribunal la Demanda del caso del epígrafe solicitando la ejecución de hipoteca y el cobro de dinero relacionado al pagaré suscrito a favor de The Money House, Inc., o a su orden, por la suma principal de $217,500.00, más intereses computado s sobre la misma desde su fecha hasta su total y completo pago a razón de la tasa de interés de 5.060% anual, la cual será ajustada mensualmente, obligándose además al pago de costas, gastos y desembolsos del litigio, más honorarios de abogados en una suma de $21,750.00 equivalente al 10% de la suma principal original. Este pagaré fue suscrito bajo el afidávit número 83,001 ante el Notario Público Roberto Soto Tapia. Lo anterior surge de la hipoteca constituida mediante la escritura número 42 otorgada el 30 de abril de 2012, en Caguas, Puerto Rico, ante el Notario Público Roberto Soto Tapia, inscrita al Tomo Karibe de Caguas, Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección I de Caguas, finca número 8,809. La hipoteca grava la propiedad que describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar marcado con el número doce (12) del Bloque G del Plano de lnscripción de la Urbanización: Reparto Villa Blanca”, radicado en el Barrio Bairoa del término municipal de Caguas, Puerto Rico, con un area superficial de cuatrocientos cincuenta punto cero cero (450.00) metros cuadrados En lindes por el NOR-

(787) 743-3346

25 TE, en treinta punto cero cero (30.00) metros, con pasaje de peatones que separa este solar numero once (11) del Bloque G del mencionado Plano, por el SUR, en treinta punto cero cero (30.00) metros, con el solar número trece (13) del Bloque G del mencionado Plano; por el OESTE, en quince punto cero cero (15.00) metros, con la calle dos (2) deI mencionado Plano; y por el ESTE, en quince punto cero cero (15.00) metros, con el solar número treinta y cuatro (34) del Bloque C del mencionado Plano.” Finca número 8,809, inscrita al folio 242 del tomo 318 de Caguas, Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección I de Caguas. Se apercibe y advierte a ustedes como personas desconocidas, que deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Administración y Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal. De no contestar la demanda radicando el original de la contestación ante la secretaria del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Carolina, y notificar copia de la contestación de esta a la parte demandante por conducto de su abogada, GLS LEGAL SERVICES, LLC, Atención: Lcda. Charline Michelle Jiménez Echevarría, Dirección: P.O. Box 367308, San Juan, P.R. 00936-7308, Teléfono: 787-758-6550, dentro de los próximos sesenta (60) días a partir de la publicación de este emplazamiento por edicto que será publicado una sola vez en un periódico de circulación diaria general en la isla de Puerto Rico, se le anotara la rebeldía y se dictara sentencia, concediendo el remedio solicitando en la Demanda sin más citarle ni oírle. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal hoy 11 de mayo de 2020. Carmen Ana Pereira Ortiz, Secretaria. Cynthia Garcia Del Valle, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal I.

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

CARLOS IVÁN BETANCOURT BENÍTEZ, ILANOVA BETANCOURT BENÍTEZ, RANDY BETANCOURT. BENiTEZ YYADIRA BETANCOURT DEL VALLE PETICIONARIOS

EX-PARTE

CIVIL NÚM: SJ2019CV11728.

SOBRE: EXPEDIENTE DE

DOMINIO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO ENMENDADO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PR.

A: Wilfredo Betancourt y Francisco Betancourt Figueroa, miembros de la Sucesión de José Betancourt De Jesús, anterior inmediato dueño, ambos con dirección postal en 61 Yale St. Waterbury CT 06704, Ana Celia Rodríguez, viuda de Pastor López, 442 Glandon Ct., Fort Mills, SC 29708, Ana María López Rodríguez t/c/c Ana Lara, 3432 Pickney Bluff Fort Milis, SC 29715, Georgina López Rodríguez t/c/c Georgina Jarquin, 3575 Tybee Dr. Fort Milis, SC 29715, miembros de la Sucesión de Pastor López Betancourt, Glorimar González López, miembro de la Sucesión de Isabel López y a su vez de la de Lázaro López Betancourt, con dirección desconocida, Estela López Bigio, 866 Hearth Stone Ct., Aurora IL 60506 y Mirka López Bigio, 90 Postmouth lsland Dr., Garner NC 27529-6162: miembros de la Sucesión de Enrique López, Rosaura López González y Wilfredo López González, ambos con dirección en 516 Oak Branch Circle, Kissimmee, FL 32458, miembros de la Sucesión de Silvestre López Betancourt, John Doe, Richard Doe y Jane Doe, miembros de la Sucesión de Carmen María López Betancourt, cuya última dirección conocida era en Yabucoa, PR cuyos nombres verdaderos y paraderos se desconocen, James Toe, con nombre y paradero desconocidos, miembro de la Sucesión de Elvin Reyes López y Efraín Reyes López, con última dirección conocida en Ponce, PR, ambos miembros de la Sucesión de Justa López Betancourt , todos tos anteriores miembros a su vez de la Sucesión de Carmen Betancourt De Jesús, desconocidos, miembros de la Sucesión de José Luis Betancourt Figueroa, a su vez, de la de Jorge Betancourt De Jesús, inmediato anterior dueño; Josean Manuel Febres Betancourt, Joselyn Marie Febres Betancourt, Miosotis Febres Betancourt, Nicole Marie Febres Betancourt, miembros de la Sucesión de Evelyn Betancourt Meléndez y, a su vez, de la de Vicente Betancourt De Jesús, inmediato anterior dueño, con dirección todos en 1515 36th, Milwaukee, WI 53215; Zoraida Betancourt Vázquez, con última dirección conocida en Toa Baja, PR, María Betancourt Vázquez, con última dirección conocida en San Juan, PR y Florentina Betancourt Vázquez, con última dirección conocida

en Sector Villa isleña en Guaynabo, PR, todas miembros de la Sucesión de Esteban Betancourt De Jesús, anterior inmediato dueño; Carmen Laura Betancourt Viera, cuya dirección en Orlando Florida se desconoce, miembro de la Sucesión de Arsenio Betancourt De Jesús, anterior inmediato dueño; Ricardo Betancourt Viera y Jaime Betancourt Viera, con últimos paraderos conocidos en Orlando, Florida y Boston, Massachussetts, respectivamente, ambos miembros de la Sucesión de Víctor Betancourt De Jesús, anterior inmediato dueño; Anastacia Betancourt Díaz, con última dirección conocida en Bo. Pugnado, Manatí, PR y Lydia Betancourt Díaz, con última dirección conocida en Bo. Ensenada, Gurabo, PR, ambas miembros de la Sucesión de Cándido Betancourt De Jesús, anterior inmediato duéño; Carmen Damaris Betancourt Clemente, con última dirección conocida en Bo. Consejo, San Juan, PR, codueña; Perensejo, Mengano, Fulano y FulaDa, con última dirección conocida en Urb. Borinquen Gardens, Calle Poppy AB-7, San Juan, PR 00926, miembros de la Sucesión de Oscar Bonelly, colindante, y Highland Realty, Inc., con paradero desconocido, también colindante del predio objeto del caso de epígrafe.

lineales con ocho centésimas de otro metro lineal (18.08 Mts.), con terrenos de la Autoridad de Carreteras.” Sobre el terreno antes descrito enclava una estructura residencial en concreto. Este Tribunal ordenó que se publique la pretensión por tres (3) veces durante el término de veinte (20) días en un periódico de circulación general diaria, para que todas las personas arriba mencionadas y todas aquellas desconocidas a quienes pueda perjudicar la inscripción o deseen oponerse, puedan así .hacerlo dentro del término de veinte (20) días a partir de la última publicación del presente edicto . Por tanto firmo expido la presente en San Juan, Puerto Rico, a 13 de julio de 2020. Griselda Rodriguez Collado, Secretaria. Marlyn Ann Espinosa Rivera, Sec Serv a Sala.

LEGAL NOTICE Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior de TOA BAJA.

COOPERATIVA DE AHORRO Y CREDITO ORIENTAL Demandante v.

ALEXIS LOPEZ RIVERA

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. T82019CV00718.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO POR LA VIA ORDINARIA. NOPOR LA PRESENTE: se les TIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA notifica que la peticionaria de POR EDICTO. epígrafe ha presentado una A: ALEXIS Petición para que se declare a favor de ella, el dominio que tieLOPEZ RIVERA ne sobre la siguiente propiedad: EL SECRETARIO(A) que sus“RÚSTICA: Parcela de terreno cribe le notifica a usted que el 27 marcada cun el número uno de JULIO de 2020, este Tribunal (1) en la plano de inscripción, ha dictado Sentencia, Sentenradicada en el Barrio Caimito cia Parcial o Resolución en este del término municipal de San caso, que ha sido debidamente Juan, Puerto Rico, con una ca- registrada y archivada en autos bida superficial de seiscientos donde podrá usted enterarse veinte metros cuadrados con detalladamente de los términos quinientos setenta y dos diezmi- de la misma. Esta notificación lésimas de otro metro cuadrado se publicará una sola vez en un (620.0572 M.C.), en lindes por periódico de circulación general el Norte, en una alineación de en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro diecinueve metros lineales con de los 10 días siguientes a su setenta y dos centésimas de notificación. Y, siendo o repreotro metro lineal (19.72 Mts.), sentando usted una parte en el con terrenos de Arcadia Betan- procedimiento sujeta a los tércourt, ahora su Sucesión, y · en minos de la Sentencia, Sentenotra alineación de veinticinco cia Parcial o Resolución, de la metros lineales con dos déci- cual puede establecerse recurmas de otro metro lineal (25.2 so de revisión o apelación denMts.), con terrenos de Oscar tro del término de 30 días contaHernández Bonnelly, ahora su dos a partir de la publicación por sucesión; por el Este, en siete edicto de esta notificación, dirijo metros lineales con treinta y a usted esta notificación que se seis centésimas de otro metro considerará hecha en la fecha lineal (7.36 Mts.), con terrenos de la publicación de este edicde Highland Realty; por el Sur, to. Copia de esta notificación ha en cinco alineaciones que su- sido archivada en los autos de man cuarenta y cinco metros este caso, con fecha de 12 de lineales con noventa y ocho agosto de 2020. En TOA BAJA, centésimas de otro metro lineal Puerto Rico, el 12 de agosto de (45.98 Mts.), con acera que la 2020. Laura I. Santa Sanchez, separa de la Calle Poppy y, por Secretaria. Karla P Rivera Roel Oeste, en dieciocho metros man, Sec Auxiliar.

26

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

It’s Serena vs Venus Williams in a tuneup before the US Open

By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY

T

his is comeback time for everyone in tennis, and Serena Williams pushed the theme to the extreme Tuesday.

In her first match in six months, and the first since the coronavirus pandemic began, Williams lost the first set to unseeded Bernarda Pera at the Top Seed Open in Lexington, Ky., and found herself down, 0-40, on her serve at 4-4 in the second.

But Pera, a left-hander who was raised in Croatia and now represents the United States, never got the chance to serve for the match.

There was no crowd to lift Williams.

The tournament is being played without spectators, with the sounds of passing traffic, including the occasional cement mixer, replacing the roars and groans of a crowd.

Instead of feeding off the buzz, Williams had to feed off her championship past, bringing the thunder with her first serve and forehand when she needed it most.

She saved four break points to hold serve, scrapped into the corners to win the set by breaking Pera in the next game, and then tapped the accelerator pedal to close out a 4-6, 6-4, 6-1 first-round victory that was every bit as taxing as it sounds.

She is rusty, no doubt, but still resilient.

If Williams thought she had seen and heard it all in tennis at 38, 2020 has given her a new landscape and a new set of challenges.

“It was a really calm atmosphere; it was really chill,” Williams said of the empty stadium. “I can’t say I disliked it at all. I kind of didn’t mind it. I’ve been through so many things in my career. So this was totally different. I think I won today because I was calm for once in my career.”

That is a stretch, of course. Williams is often at her most irresistible when she keeps her emotions in check and focuses on the task at hand. (See her repeated in-thezone demolitions of the now-retired Maria Sharapova.)

But Pera, a flat hitter ranked No. 60 with no apparent fear of Williams’ pace, gave her plenty of reason to feel less than serene. She slapped angled winners with little warning to finish off high-velocity

exchanges and kept Williams off-balance with her left-handed serve. Williams even took a tumble at one stage as she tried to shift direction.

“I knew I was needing to do better; I knew I could do better,” Williams said.

“And it was an interesting game. She hit so many winners and so low. I just kind of had to get used to her game a little bit.”

No active player in women’s tennis has rallied to win after losing the opening set more often than Williams. She has a winning record in such matches in the last 10 years, but winning this one required her to lift to a higher plane in a hurry.

Down, 4-4 and 0-40, she saved the first break point with a big first serve, saved the second with a huge forehand winner down the line, saved the third with a fully ripped backhand that clipped the back of the baseline and saved a fourth later in the game with another first serve that Pera could not handle.

“That 0-40 and how she got it back is a sign for better tennis on the horizon,” said Sven Groeneveld, the veteran coach who has worked with Sharapova and Sloane Stephens and who was watching Williams from afar Tuesday. “Serena needs more matches to get in her flow, but the big serve is always there for the rescue. Had she lost this match it might have derailed her for a bit, but let’s see if she can grow into the tournament.”

Her second-round match will come Thursday against her sister Venus Williams, who defeated Victoria Azarenka, 6-3, 6-2.

It will be their 31st meeting, with Serena holding an 18-12 edge.

The Top Seed Open, a new event that replaced the Citi Open women’s tournament on the calendar this year, has quite a field for a low-level tour stop. It includes Coco Gauff, now 16, who made her own successful return to the tour with a tough 7-5, 7-5 victory over Caroline Dolehide. It was Gauff’s first match since losing to the eventual champion, Sofia Kenin, in the fourth round of the Australian Open in January.

Before the pandemic, the focus was on the age restrictions that kept Gauff from playing a full slate of tournaments as a te-

Serena Williams, above, came back to beat Bernarda Pera, 4-6, 6-4, 6-1, at the Top Seed Open on Tuesday in Lexington, Ky. enager. But after a five-month hiatus, such restrictions are no longer an issue. The challenge is finding enough tournaments for anyone to play.

The players here will travel next to New York City to play the Western & Southern Open and the U.S. Open, which because of scheduling changes caused by the coronavirus will be played back to back at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens.

Playing in an empty temporary stadium in a private Kentucky club will not be quite the same as playing in an empty Arthur Ashe Stadium, with a capacity of more than 23,000.

“I think being in New York will be a little different because there’s this, like, massive stadium,” Serena Williams said. “So I’ll kind of probably have to see how that is. But this is like a solo court. It’s small.

This kind of reminds me of the junior days.

So there was something kind of nostalgic about that.”

Pera, who is still trying to establish herself at the highest level at age 25, is certainly more accustomed to small crowds and off-Broadway venues.

But Williams found a way to adjust to the mix of nostalgia and novelty.

After delaying the start of Tuesday’s

match to have her ankles retaped, she bid farewell to her 2-year-old daughter, Olympia, and husband, Alexis Ohanian, and walked on court for the first time in her career wearing a mask (she took it off before the warm-up).

After winning the toss, she had to choose not only whether to serve or receive serve, but also what color hook she would use to hang her towel behind each baseline. The ball boys and girls are no longer allowed to handle player towels.

After winning the final nine points to close out the match, Williams walked forward and stopped well short of the net, raising her racket and waving her left hand to acknowledge Pera rather than go closer and tap rackets, a gesture that has replaced the postmatch handshake.

It is a new tennis world indeed, and there are absolutely no guarantees that more Grand Slam titles await Williams.

She has been chasing her 24th without success since returning from pregnancy in 2018, and as Pera’s punches and counterpunches amid the silence made clear, more and more players can handle Williams’s power.

But Williams looked fit and eager again Tuesday as she proved that she still knows how to win when she is not yet at her best.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

27

Carmelo Anthony calls push for social justice a ‘lifelong fight’

By SOPAN DEB

T

here was a time in Carmelo Anthony’s nearly two-decade NBA career when his maturity was called into question. As recently as last summer, there was even uncertainty about whether Anthony, the aging 10-time All-Star, was employable as a professional basketball player and could accept being a part of a supporting cast.

But in November, Anthony signed with the Portland Trail Blazers, embraced a reduced role and began having his best season in years.

Now, his story is one of redemption. At 36, he is considered a valued elder statesman who is destined for the Basketball Hall of Fame. After spending much of his NBA tenure fending off questions about his commitment to winning, Anthony showed up noticeably slimmer last month for the league’s restart at Walt Disney World, and he has hit key baskets that have helped Portland remain in the hunt for the playoffs.

“I feel like we could have been in the finals last year if we had him,” Damian Lillard, Portland’s franchise star, told reporters recently, referring to Anthony.

Maybe this is the year. But even if it’s not, Anthony’s strong play has helped him maintain a platform for an endeavor for which he says he will never accept a reduced role: speaking out about social justice.

“Everything is shifting,” Anthony said in a phone interview. “We have to adapt to the change.”

His latest foray into activism comes in a partnership with Chris Paul, the AllStar Oklahoma City Thunder guard, and Dwyane Wade, the retired NBA star. The three helped create the Social Change Fund, a philanthropic effort to invest in organizations that support people of color, both from a policy perspective — such as advancing causes like criminal justice reform and expanded voting rights — and at a community level by targeting racial inequities in housing and education.

Anthony said the group came together because of the conversations about racism after George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by the police in Minneapolis in May, setting off nationwide protests. Several NBA players participated. Anthony said he hoped this fund would be able to address inequality on the front end,

Carmelo Anthony said he wants to be more proactive against injustice. “We realize that we’re still in the same situation that we’ve been in for a very long time,” he said. short-circuiting the familiar conversations after the fact.

“Before, we would say things and we would follow through, then it would just die out until something else happened,” Anthony said. “And then something else happened. We keep being reactive as opposed to being proactive.”

He added, “We realize that we’re still in the same situation that we’ve been in for a very long time.”

Anthony, Paul and Wade contributed the initial funds for the project with the hope that their names could draw more investments. Goldman Sachs and Creative Artists Agency have signed on as seed funders, according to a news release.

“We all have our different lanes,” Anthony said. “Whether I’m on criminal justice reform, or I want to be on educational reform, we all have these different lanes. So we just want to build this whole actual fund so we could then attack those lanes.”

Anthony has been one of the more outspoken players in the NBA for several years. Last month, he guest-edited Slam, a basketball magazine, and appeared on the cover with his 13-year-old son, Kiyan, both in black hoodies. In a column, Anthony wrote, “Will you ever take your knee off our necks? Is it because I’m Black? Does that scare you?”

In 2016, Anthony, Wade, Paul and LeBron James took the stage at the ESPYs and began the show with a monologue decrying racism and police brutality. The year before, Anthony marched in Baltimore, where he grew up, to protest the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man who died in police custody.

Early in Anthony’s NBA career, he was criticized for appearing briefly in an anti-snitching DVD that was filmed in Baltimore and threatened potential witnesses to crimes. Soon after the video emerged, Anthony disavowed its content.

Now, Anthony is speaking out about police reform. He said he grew up in a community where everyone knew each other and some police officers had a strong relationship with the neighborhood. But others were unfamiliar, and that caused issues.

“I’ve dealt with it all. Have I ever experienced police brutality before? Yes,” Anthony said, adding: “Whether it was being pulled over, being racially profiled, or being in my neighborhood and being on my block and the police jumping out of their cars and snatching you up and throwing you on the sidewalk and make you sit there — I’ve experienced that.”

Asked if he supported the movement to defund the police, Anthony said he wanted to learn more.

“Have I thought about it? Yes. Have

I come to a solution? No, I haven’t,” Anthony said. He added, “If we don’t understand the root of policies and police and where that stems from, then going out there and trying to speak on defunding the police would not make sense.”

He continued: “At the end of the day, do we need police? Yes, we need police, but we need them to do their job or we need them to do it the right way and we need to hold them accountable for that the same way we are held accountable for the things we do as well.”

Anthony has rarely spoken about President Donald Trump, but in June, after the National Guard and other law enforcement tear-gassed peaceful protesters outside the White House, he said in an Instagram post that the president had “declared war on the American people.”

But Anthony said that he was not interested in getting involved in the presidential campaign. A few other players have, such as James, who has publicly supported Joe Biden, and Paul, who signed a letter published this week calling on Biden to name a Black woman as his running mate.

“I’m not a politician, so I don’t want to get involved in politics,” Anthony said.

“Where I will get involved in is my community and the future of my community and where my community is at right now.”

Issues motivate Anthony more than specific candidates, from his telling.

“I want what’s right for my people,” he said. “If you’re a Republican and it’s right for my people, then it is what it is.

If you’re a Democrat and it’s right for my people, then it is what it is. I’m not in the business of picking a side just to pick a side.”

On this trajectory, Anthony’s legacy, which has been linked to immense talent but notable failures, may end up being about something else entirely. It’s unclear how much longer he will play in the NBA, but it seems like his days of making All-Star teams are behind him — though people have counted him out before. One way or another, Anthony said he would continue to use whatever microphone he has to talk about social justice.

“This conversation doesn’t just start and stop with me being a basketball player,” Anthony said. “This is a lifelong journey, a lifelong fight, a lifelong conversation I will continue to have. It’s not that I’ll be ‘focusing’ on that. I am that.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Big Ten and Pac-12 are first marquee conferences to postpone football

By ALAN BLINDER and BILLY WITZ

T

wo of the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful college football conferences abandoned their plans to play this fall over coronavirus concerns, a move that fractured the season and promised repercussions far beyond the playing field, even as other top leagues were publicly poised to begin games next month.

The decisions by the two conferences, the Big Ten and the Pac-12, extended the greatest crisis in the history of college athletics, a multibillion-dollar industry that depends heavily on football to underwrite lower-profile sports and which provides universities with a national profile they use to recruit students and attract donations.

By canceling games this autumn, the two conferences defied calls by some coaches and players and by President Donald Trump to mount a season in the face of the virus’s largely unchecked spread. The plans of other leading leagues to start playing by late September could now quickly change, and the Big Ten and Pac-12 may ultimately move their seasons to the spring.

Playing at this stage of the pandemic, though, presented “too much uncertainty, too much risk,” Kevin Warren, the Big Ten commissioner, said in an interview Tuesday.

“You have to listen to your medical experts,” Warren said. “There’s a lot of emotion involved with this, but when you look at the health and well being of our student-athletes, I feel very confident that we made the right decision.”

The moves by both leagues came after intense deliberations among university presidents and chancellors, but the decisions were not universally supported by administrators, coaches and players.

“This is an incredibly sad day for our student-athletes, who have worked so hard and been so vigilant fighting against this pandemic to get this close to their season,” said Gene Smith, Ohio State’s athletic director. The university had sought a delay to the season’s start instead of a sweeping postponement, he said.

Universities in the Pac-12 presented a more united front.

Ray Anderson, Arizona State’s athletic director, said: “Until we have more clarity, we’re not going to go forward.”

College football’s decentralized power structure, which allows different approaches by each conference, means that old and new powerhouses like Ohio State and Oregon will not compete this autumn while other leading programs, like Alabama, Clemson and Louisiana State, may still play.

The other major conferences — the Atlantic Coast, the Big 12 and the Southeastern — will face extraordinary pressure in the coming days. College sports administrators are particularly wary of being seen as motivated by money instead of the safety of players, coaches and others, and any effort to press ahead with a season would assuredly provoke new criticism of an industry already under scrutiny by elected officials and the courts.

The ACC said Tuesday that it would “continue to make decisions based on medical advice” and that it was “prepared to adjust as medical information and the landscape” evolved.

The SEC commissioner, Greg Sankey, said he was still “comfortable” with his league’s approach but that the conference would “continue to refine our policies and protocols for a safe return to sports.”

Although the Big Ten and the Pac-12 upended plans for football, their decisions affected all of their fall sports, including cross-country, field hockey, soccer and volleyball.

The Big Ten includes powerful football teams like Ohio State, Wisconsin and Penn State.

The Pac-12 opted for a more far-reaching approach, postponing all athletic competitions, including in winter sports like basketball, until at least 2021.

The Big Ten’s internal divisions were on vivid display in the hours after the decision. In a statement, Nebraska officials pronounced themselves “very disappointed” and suggested they might try to find a way for their students to compete this fall. (Some college sports officials scoffed at the prospect, in part because of assorted contracts.)

But the Pac-12 said its vote was unanimous.

Dr. Doug Aukerman, senior associate athletic director at Oregon State and head of the conference’s medical advisory board, said his group had two major concerns: that the virus was not under control near the conference’s universities and that there were too many unknowns about health risks related to the virus, including heart damage.

With Pac-12 teams scheduled to begin training camp next week, it appeared all but impossible to play safely, officials said.

“We’re essentially going into a contact season asking them right now to disregard a lot of the guidelines, both federally and locally,” Aukerman said.

He added: “Playing contact sports, we know there’s going to be a higher risk of spread.”

The Pac-12 had moved its planned kickoff to Sept. 26.

But league officials saw no sign that conditions on campuses would improve as students began returning, and Commissioner Larry Scott said the presidents wanted to give athletes certainty, even if it amounted to bad news.

Some athletes were not appeased by the decision.

The Pac-12 unity group, which for the last two weeks has pressed Scott for greater health protections, among other demands, issued a statement criticizing the conference’s “haphazard” response to the virus and what it called a lack

of transparency with players. The group called for preserving athletes’ eligibility — something Scott said the conference would push for from the NCAA — as well as access to athletic department resources and uniform safety measures when football returns.

The financial consequences of the decisions will be enormous, starving schools of tens of millions of dollars unless the leagues can play in the spring. Even if they do, perhaps arresting a greater economic calamity, the delay of football revenues will cause new pain on campuses and in communities across the country. The two conferences together include 26 universities, including Iowa, Michigan, Stanford and Washington.

Wisconsin, for instance, has said it could miss out on up to $100 million without a football season, and top leaders at the university said Tuesday that the decision not to play this fall would hurt “not only our athletic department, but the many businesses and members of our community who rely on Badger events to support their livelihoods.”

Last year, college football brought in nearly $1.6 billion in advertising, excluding digital platforms, according to research firm Kantar.

As the most powerful conferences assessed their seasons, privately, and sometimes publicly, some administrators were skeptical that any of America’s top teams would play a single down before the end of 2020.

Next spring could also prove a stretch. Although the Big Ten and Pac-12 said they would consider playing football and other postponed fall sports early in 2021, Warren refused to commit to a plan.

“We’ll have to start digging in and see what feasibility for it exists,” said Warren, whose son plays football for Mississippi State, an SEC school. “But you have to be mindful that we’re in the midst of a global pandemic.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

29

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

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

(Mar 21-April 20)

You work well in front of an audience. This is your chance to gain support for plans and ideas you cannot complete on your own.

Someone in a high place will show a huge amount of interest in what you are doing and this could lead to a new joint commitment

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

(June 22-July 23)

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Instead of celebrating your successes, a friend will accuse you of cheating. They’re implying you haven’t the knowledge or skills to have achieved this aim. You hadn’t expected this reaction and it will upset you. If someone can’t congratulate you on your accomplishments, they cannot be classed as a friend.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

There is someone close by who will help if you’re finding it time consuming to arrange work related meetings, events and projects.

You have so much more to think about now compared with in the past. Key considerations take up a lot of time and effort. A colleague’s support will help you to move on to new areas.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Decisions made with a small group of people will make you feel you have more control of your life. A nosy friend or neighbour is keen to know what you are up to. You can see the sense of keeping some plans to yourself. You just don’t want the world to know what you are doing.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

You have some good ideas on how to increase your income. Don’t wait to hear what other people might think. You don’t need anyone else’s approval. Explore opportunities that might give you a chance to make money from your home. Ignore any protests that come your way.

Assuming new responsibilities will be challenging, exciting and inspiring. Recently acquired skills will help you get ahead. You’ve made some good choices and you should be feeling proud of your efforts. Being able to do what you want feels wonderful. Family life may not be getting a lot of your attention but your loved ones will understand.

Cancer

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Let other people know you have changed your mind about arrangements involving a lot of people or a long journey. Since you started planning this, a lot has happened. You can see complications if this does go ahead and you might feel it won’t be in your best interests. Don’t feel guilty about pulling out.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Stick to your own devices. It annoys you to have your boss or colleagues watching over your shoulders. Being aware of being overlooked makes you nervous and this is when you start making mistakes. If there are too many people around you move away discreetly to the background. You will get on better on your own.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

A career path you thought was right for you is causing you a lot of stress and disappointment.

You know you’ve made a wrong choice. The longer you leave it without doing anything about this, the more difficult it will be to motivate yourself. Think seriously about training or applying for a new job.

A project you had big hopes for isn’t working out as planned. Delivering phase two of this plan is no longer feasible due to all the restrictions now in place. Increasing costs you hadn’t considered initially may be pushing projects over budget. Your next step is to check out the other options available.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

You aren’t getting a chance to take in everything that is going on. Someone is pushing things along too quickly for your liking. You’re starting to wonder why they are so keen to get a job over with. You sense there are ulterior motives involved. You need more time to check out a complicated transaction.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

An older relative who has always been kind and fair will suggest letting bygones be bygones. You’re tired of all the bickering that has been going on in the family and you will be relieved to follow their example. You feel more able to talk with housemates who have recently opposed your plans and ideas.

They’re now asking for more information.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Thursday, August 13, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, August 13, 2020

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