Monday Aug 17, 2020

Monday, August 17, 2020

San Juan The

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The Caribbean Dilemma

It’s On!

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PDP’s Delgado, NPP’s Pierluisi Will Vie to Be Next Governor in General Election P4 & 5

Primary Ran Smoothly, At Last

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NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

New Faces Win Primary Races, Leaving Known and Controversial Figures Out P6

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

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August 17, 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.

SEC headquarters ran smoothly in primary ‘round 2’

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s the first unsuccessful attempt at the primary elections left many citizens unable to exercise their right to vote, the State Elections Commission (SEC) had a smoother run on its second take of the electoral event on Sunday as 1,309 voting colleges opened as they received all ballots and electoral items on time.

As the Puerto Rico Supreme Court ruled earlier Wednesday that primary elections had to continue on Sunday at voting places that did not receive ballots or did not have enough electoral items on Aug. 9, while votes that were cast on that date would be valid and would be counted once the process concluded, the SEC had a successful second run. Earlier in the day, Popular Democratic Party (PDP) Electoral Commissioner Lind Orlando Merle Feliciano told The Star at the SEC Information and Press Center that the primary elections’ second go-round was running better than the previous Sunday.

“We made a great quality check on materials that we had issues with throughout all the precincts in Puerto Rico,” Merle Feliciano said. “And I expect that people have had enough time to react [and vote].”

More than expecting winners, the PDP electoral commissioner expected that people were able to exercise their voting rights and that it would bring about a unified party after the event. Meanwhile, as for his future at the political party as he announced that he would tender his resignation after the primaries concluded, Merle Feliciano said he will wait until the PDP appoints its next president.

“I will never hide from any controversy. This position has to be at the disposition of the next president of the PDP, and I have honestly believed, since I began last year, that once the position [and its responsibilities] was done and they certify the next president, I have to resign and leave it to the discretion of the new president,” Merle Feliciano said. “That’s the way it is. There’s nothing bad about it; that’s the way it should be.”

Meanwhile, New Progressive Party (NPP) Electoral Commissioner María Dolores “Lolin” Santiago said the second phase of the primary elections proved that “we had everything we needed” to run an electoral event properly. Regarding her future at the political party as demands to resign have rained over the SEC president, Merle Feliciano, and herself after the Aug. 9 electoral debacle, she said it was at the discretion of current NPP President Thomas Rivera Schatz given that it is a “position of trust.”

“We have been explaining all week that each [ap-

pointed] president that arrives generally brings their staff and their commissioner, so I came to do a job for my party at a difficult time; in two months, we have erected the electoral structure, we accomplished coordination so the primary election would run, we have worked tirelessly for 10, 15 to 16, 24 and even 48 consecutive hours so the election would run,” Santiago said.

Meanwhile, NPP gubernatorial candidate/hopeful Pedro Pierluisi’s electoral coordinator, Edwin Mundo, said he expects the SEC to certify a clear winner and hoped there would be no backlogs that could delay the general elections, as the SEC president said that there weren’t enough funds to have the event on Nov. 3.

“There will be money, I’m sure that the [Financial Oversight and Management] Board will provide the necessary resources for the [general] elections,” Mundo said. “What matters is that the commission doesn’t delay and not wait to get every result; there are ballots that can be prepared as if there were no primary elections, where the final outcome is available to get those ballots ready, where three political parties have their candidates determined.”

When the Star asked what would be the NPP’s future if Pierluisi was chosen as the party’s gubernatorial candidate, Mundo said the party needed someone as prepared as the former resident commissioner to defend statehood.

“The NPP needs a candidate who can really defend statehood in Washington [D.C.],” he said before press time. “I believe the most prepared person is Pedro Pierluisi, and -- if the ‘penepés’ have the available resources -- [he is the one] who knows the people, has the contacts, and can speak directly with congresspeople and the federal government. Pedro Pierluisi must be chosen as he can do that job in Washington; he already did it as a resident commissioner, and he’s ready to do it again.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

Pierluisi becomes NPP’s gubernatorial candidate after 2nd round of primary

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

A

fter a heated political fight inside the New Progressive Party (NPP), Pedro Pierluisi became the gubernatorial candidate with 58 percent of the votes after a second round of voting in the primary elections on Sunday.

After winning a case in the Puerto Rico Supreme Court that ruled in favor of his request to continue the primary elections that were interrupted due to a lack of ballots at voting places and validated votes cast by citizens during the electoral event, the former resident commissioner obtained the ticket for the general elections. Pierluisi, during his victory speech, expressed his gratitude to those who supported him through their votes.

“I accept this responsibility as the next governor,” he said. “The ideal of statehood, that’s what has moved me all my life, and at every moment I have served Puerto Rico with such respect and with the will to help others. I will fight for equality. I am committed to accomplishing that purpose of unity to bring our people together, after Hurricane Maria, after the earthquakes, after the pandemic, I want to bring equality to everyone,” Pierluisi said. “This is a party that believes in social equality, this is a party

PDP gubernatorial race at press time

that believes in justice. We have to move for this ideal. As American citizens, we have to fight for equality.”

Meanwhile, Speaker of the House of Representatives Carlos “Johnny” Méndez said Pierluisi’s victory shows that the NPP is a “vibrant party that recognizes the leaders that fight for the ideal of statehood.”

“Definitely, we have a great candidate who represents an opportunity for the NPP to revalidate. We worked so hard to get this victory, but this is not an individual victory, it’s a victory for the NPP,” Méndez said. “To Governor Wanda Vázquez Garced and her team, I pay my respects, and I ask you to come and unite to fight for equality through the ideal of statehood.”

Meanwhile, Vázquez said she recognized the advantage that Pierluisi had at the primary elections and confirmed that, as the current governor and as a supporter of statehood, she will fight for equality.

Nonetheless, she said, unlike her opponent, her campaign was never meant to harm anyone’s reputation as she considered that both fight for a better well being for Puerto Ricans.

“I’ll keep working for equality, which remains the standard for my ideas. Puerto Rican

people, you proved to me that there is still hope. To all Puerto Ricans, I said that you were my machinery as you put your trust in me, and I am grateful for your support,” Vázquez said. “As for the negative campaign, which was used to harm my reputation, we never wanted to do that. I will keep fighting as a statehood supporter. I will keep working for you until my last day as governor.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

5

Charlie Delgado wins PDP primary, party gains thousands of new voters

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he most significant result in the Popular Democratic Party’s (PDP) second round of primaries Sunday in which Isabela Mayor Carlos Delgado Altieri became the gubernatorial nominee, was that the PDP garnered 73,000 new voters and the New Progressive Party (NPP) lost half of its primary voters.

“The NPP has lost 200,000 when compared to the primary four years ago, while the PDP got 73,000 more voters,” PDP electoral expert Héctor Luis Acevedo said. “Of course, we did not have a gubernatorial primary four years ago but we did have a primary for resident commissioner. Despite the pandemic and the population loss, the fact that the PDP got 73,000 more voters and the NPP lost half of its voters, is a radical change.”

In 2016, the NPP had 478,000 voters in the primary while the PDP had about 160,000 voters. In Acevedo’s opinion, the change in the number of voters in the 2020 primary means the November election will be a close one that will rely largely on the militancy of the voters.

“I think the PDP is ahead, but there is parity in the base membership,” he said.

Delgado Altieri defeated Senate Minority Leader Eduardo Bhatia and San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto comfortably to obtain the PDP’s gubernatorial nomination Sunday.

From the start, the numbers showed Delgado Altieri ahead of Bhatia by twice the number of votes and ahead of Cruz Soto by at least four times her number of votes.

Delgado Altieri arrived at his campaign meeting in the Hyatt Place at 7:36 p.m. flanked by Héctor Ferrer Jr., who obtained one of the six at-large House seats, and Caguas Mayor William Miranda Torres. Delgado Altieri thanked his late wife and Héctor Ferrer Sr., who is also deceased.

“We will work hard. I won’t fail you,” he said. “Today PDP unity has won. No PDP candidate has defeated another.

The primary is now behind us. Today, we look toward the future firmly.”

Delgado Altieri said he was taking over the PDP with the responsibility of knowing that the party brought economic advancement to Puerto Rico.

“We are now going through the second transformation of Puerto Rico and all of the PDP are needed for that and to defeat the NPP leadership that has hurt Puerto Rico so much,” he said.

He said the PDP will offer voters an honest government that will restore the people’s trust and called for the party to evolve.

Earlier, at 6:10 p.m. with 32 percent of the votes in, Bhatia conceded that he had lost the primary but urged his supporters to continue to count the votes.

“I want to thank the people of Puerto Rico who have been with me for 25 years,” he said.

He also thanked Cruz Soto for putting her foot forward and running for San Juan mayor in 2012 when everyone thought she would not make it.

“To Isabela Mayor Charlie Delgado, who is now the PDP gubernatorial candidate, I wish for him the force and we will all join forces to clean up the country, clean it up from the corruption left by the NPP, which has not rebuilt a single home since the hurricane,” Bhatia said, adding that now he and his wife will have more time to spend together.

Some 30 minutes later, Cruz Soto issued a video acknowledging her defeat from Comerío.

“My intention all this time was to give the PDP a real option of change; an option that could mean another party,”

she said as a car with loud reggaetón music could be heard in the background. “It is now up to the ones who won, to bring the PDP to victory. I still believe in the power of the communities, in governing with alliances and that Puerto Rico is still a colony but it does not have to be. … Another Puerto Rico is possible.”

With 795 of the 2,133 electoral units counted, Delgado Altieri had received 63.7 percent of the votes, Bhatia 22.8 percent and Cruz Soto 13.3 percent.

Earlier in the day, PDP Sen. Aníbal José Torres, who turned over the party presidency Sunday to Delgado Altieri, thanked party supporters for the vote and urged party unity behind the winner.

“This is not about candidacies but about the institution,” he said.

Torres chided the “powered drunken” individuals in the NPP for hurting the primary process, which could not be held as a single event on Aug. 9 because of a lack of ballots at voting places.

Sunday’s primary voting, which was dubbed locally as the secondary primary, ran smoothly, according to voters interviewed by the STAR. Salvador López, a retired veteran, said he encountered problems because officials thought he was trying to jump the line. As a physically disabled individual, he said he could not wait in line to vote for the NPP while standing up at the Francisco Matias Lugo School in Carolina.

Even though Carolina has a PDP mayor, most residents prefer the gubernatorial candidates of the NPP. The voting lines of the NPP were longer than those of the PDP. At the Jesús María Sanroma School in Carolina, Roberto Hernández said it only took him five minutes to vote for NPP gubernatorial candidate Pedro Pierluisi.

PDP Sen. Cirilo Tirado, who is Delgado Altieri’s campaign head, said the primary did have problems. In the central mountain town of Aibonito, the electoral packages of the PDP did not have the alpha lists, which indicate the voting unit of the voter. The situation forced PDP voters to go to the NPP primary to confirm if they were on the list. The PDP

packages did not have the thermometers used to monitor the temperature of voters to stop the spread of coronavirus.

Tirado said the other problem occurred in the Unit 16 in San Juan, the only one in the capital city that operated Sunday as the others completed the vote on Aug. 9, because voters from other units tried to vote there.

NPP gubernatorial race results at press time

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

House and Senate primary race full of surprises: New faces in, some known ones out

By ELSA VELAZQUEZ SANTIAGO Special to The Star

N

ot everyone made the cut for the general election ballot for the Puerto Rico Legislature. Sunday’s primary left some of the most well known faces out, while some fresh faces remain in the race.

At press time, for senators-at-large for the New Progressive Party (NPP), running in first place was current senator and former government official in the Ricardo Rosselló Nevares administration, William Villafañe. He was followed by Sen. Gregorio Matías, vice president of the Police Association. Both filled Senate vacancies after Larry Seilhamer and Abel Nazario resigned. Nazario quit after a scandal.

They were followed by Keren Riquelme, who was surrounded by controversy after a rumor spread on social media involving a doctoral degree she claims to hold. Another senator whose candidacy appeared “saved” Sunday was Itzamar Peña, followed

by Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz.

Carlos Rodríguez Mateo and another new candidate, Alba Iris Cestero, prevailed too.

At press time, in the final spots, and left out, were senators Héctor Martínez and Evelyn Vázquez Nieves. Martínez had served time

for bribery in a federal prison.

For the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) Senate, the following made the general election ballot: Sen. José Luis Dalmau Santiago, party president Sen. Anibal José Torres, Rep. Brenda López de Arrarás, Rep. Luis Vega Ramos, former gubernatorial hopeful and ex-Treasury secretary Juan Zaragoza, and professor Ada Álvarez Conde. At press time, former Rep. Sonia Pacheco, former lawmaker Marco Rigau, former Sen. Ramón Luis Nieves and three new faces, Ruth Currás Paniagua, Samuel González and Pedro J. Norat, didn’t make the cut.

For representative-at-large, NPP vice president and Rep. José “Pichy” Torres Zamora was comfortably first place. He was followed by Rep. José Enrique Meléndez, former House Speaker Rep. José Aponte, Rep. Lourdes Ramos and Rep. Nelson Cruz. New candidate Jorge Emanuel Báez also made the cut. For her part, Rep. María Milagros Charbonier, who is part of an investigation by federal authorities, was left out with 6.95 percent of the vote at press time.

On the PDP side for representative-atlarge, Héctor Ferrer Jr. made his debut in first place, earning a solid spot for his general election candidacy. He was followed

by Rep. Jesús Manuel Ortiz. Another two new faces got in as well: Keyliz Méndez and Yaramary Torres. Gabriel López Arrieta, a former administrator of Public Housing, and Enid Monge, former president of United Retailers Association also made the cut.

For district senator in the NPP, Sen. Henry Newman made the San Juan ballot, as did Sen. Carmelo Ríos. For district representative, lawmaker Antonio Soto earned a solid spot for his general election candidacy.

On the PDP side for district senator, some new names are on the ballot.

For example, for San Juan, Jesús Manuel Laboy and for Humacao, Rosamar Trujillo Plumey. Among the new names for district representative: Manuel Calderón Cerrame (District 4), Rosario Ortiz (District 1) and José “Oepe” Ortiz (District 3). Current Rep. Jesús Santa Rodríguez (District 31) also made the cut.

The State Elections Commission has all the final names and numbers at ceepur.org.

A few close races seen for mayoral candidacies

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he mayoral races across Puerto Rico in Sunday’s primary saw few close races.

Exceptions included in Aguadilla, where New Progressive Party (NPP) Rep. José Luis Rivera Guerra, who years ago faced doubts over the cost of dubious construction on his house, barely trailed Yanitsia Irizarry Méndez.

Rivera Guerra trailed Irizarry Méndez by just 21 votes, 50.19 percent to 49.1 percent, with 68.25 percent of the

Jaime Barlucea Maldonado, Mayor of Adjuntas, prevailed in the NPP primary

vote counted as of press time.

Another close race at press time was seen in the San Germán PDP mayoral race, where Isidor A. Negrón Irizarry barely led Jorge “Jorgito” Ramos, 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent of the vote, with 83.3 percent of the ballots counted.

The following is an accounting of some of the more relevant mayoral races as of press time.

In the San Juan New Progressive Party (NPP) mayoral primary Miguel Romero held a comfortable lead over Manuel “Palomo” Colón, 75.7 percent to 24.3 percent, with 82.8 percent of the vote counted.

In the NPP Caguas mayoral contest, Roberto López held a 52.8 percent to 47.2 percent lead over Ramón Díaz with 50.4 percent of the vote counted.

In the NPP Guaynabo mayoral race, Ángel Pérez Otero held a comfortable 53.8 percent to 39.9 percent lead over Edwrdo O’Neill, with Ricardo Aponte Martínez bringing up the rear with 6.31 percent of the vote with 84.7 percent of the vote counted.

In Canóvonas, Lornna Soto led the NPP mayoral race, 66.1 percent to 33.9 percent for Ramond Sánchez Jiménez, with 75.9 percent of the vote counted.

In the NPP race for mayor in Adjuntas, Jaime Barlucea Maldonado held a slim lead over Obed David Cintrón González, 50.9 percent to 49.1 percent, with 31.3 percent of the vote counted.

In the NPP mayoral race in Arecibo, Carlos Molina

Rodríguez held a comfortable lead over Lemueil Soto Santiago, 65.6 percent to 34.4 percent, respectively, with 75.9 percent of the vote counted.

In the three-way NPP Naguabo mayoral primary, Noe Marcano Rivera led Rosa “Rosita” Díaz with 58.6 percent of the vote followed by 32.2 percent for Díaz and 9.3 percent for Mario López. In Trujillo Alto, José Luis Cruz Cruz held a 69 percent to 31 percent lead over Pedro “Pedrito” Rodríguez, with 78.1 percent of the vote counted.

On the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) side, in Barceloneta, Wanda “Tata” Soler Rosario held a commanding lead, 85.7 percent to 14.3 percent for José “Gaby” Laureano, with 78.2 percent of the vote counted.

In the Trujillo Alto PDP mayoral primary, José Luis Cruz Cruz held a 69 percent to 31 percent lead over Pedro “Pedrito” Rodríguez, with 37.2 percent of the vote counted In Río Grande, Ángel “Bori” González Damutd led comfortably with 86.58 percent of the vote over Manuel “Manny” Ramos Matos’ 13.42 percent in the PDP mayoral race, with 24.2 percent of the vote counted.

In the PDP Lares mayoral race, Marcos A. Irizarry Pagán comfortably led Benjamín Ben Cruz Lugo, 84.3 percent to 15.7 percent, respectively.

In a four-way race in the Isabela PDP mayoral primary, Miguel “Ricky” Méndez Pérez led Carlos Ismael Delgado Irizarry, Sergio Ortiz and Elidio Aldarondo Pagán, with 90.5 percent of the vote counted.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

7

‘We’re clearly not doing enough’: Drop in testing hampers Coronavirus response

By SARAH MERVOSH, NICHOLAS BOGEL-BURROUGHS and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

F

or months, public health experts and federal officials have said that significantly expanding the number of coronavirus tests administered in the United States is essential to reining in the pandemic. By some estimates, several million people might need to be tested each day, including many people who don’t feel sick.

But the country remains far short of that benchmark and, for the first time, the number of known tests conducted each day has fallen.

Reported daily tests trended downward for much of the last two weeks, essentially stalling the nation’s testing response. Some 733,000 people have been tested each day this month on average, down from nearly 750,000 in July, according to the COVID Tracking Project. The seven-day test average dropped to 709,000 on Monday, the lowest in nearly a month, before ticking upward again at week’s end.

The troubling trend comes after months of steady increases in testing, and may in part reflect that fewer people are seeking out tests as known cases have leveled off at more than 50,000 per day, after surging even higher this summer. But the plateau in testing may also reflect people’s frustration at the prospect of long lines and delays in getting results — as well as another fundamental problem: The nation has yet to build a robust system to test vast portions of the population, not just those seeking tests.

Six months into the pandemic, testing remains a major obstacle in America’s efforts to stop the coronavirus.

Some of the supply shortages that caused problems earlier have eased, but even after improvements, test results in some cases are still not being returned within a day or two, hindering efforts to quickly isolate patients and trace their contacts. Now, the number of tests being given has slowed just as the nation braces for the possibility of another surge as schools reopen and cooler weather drives people indoors.

“We’re clearly not doing enough,” said Dr. Mark McClellan, the director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy and the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under former President George W. Bush.

The downward trend may turn out to be only a shortterm setback: The nation reported more than 800,000 tests on Thursday and Friday. There are also limitations to the data, which is largely drawn from state health departments, some of which have recently struggled with backlogs and other issues. It may not include tests done in labs not certified by the federal government.

But according to the figures available, tests were declining in 20 states this week, and data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services showed a similar overall trend nationally.

Without a vaccine or a highly successful treatment, widespread testing is seen as a cornerstone for fighting a pandemic in which as many as 40% of infected people

A mobile truck testing sit in Miami Beach, Fla. , on July 21, 2020. For the first time during the pandemic, the United States saw a downward trend in the number of coronavirus tests conducted each day. do not show symptoms and may unknowingly spread the virus. Testing a lot of people is crucial to seeing where the virus is going and identifying hot spots before they get out of hand. Experts see extensive testing as a key part of safely reopening schools, businesses and sports.

The nation’s testing capacity has expanded from where it was only a few months ago, but public health experts believe it must grow far more to bring the virus under control.

The Harvard Global Health Institute has suggested the country needs at least 1 million tests per day to slow the spread of the virus, and as many as 4 million per day to get ahead of the virus and stop new cases. Some experts view that goal as too ambitious, and others say the benchmark should focus not on a particular number of tests but on the percent of people testing positive.

Yet there is broad consensus that the current level of testing is inadequate and that any decrease in testing is a worrisome move in the wrong direction.

“There is a reasonable disagreement about what that number ought to be, but all of them are way ahead of where we are right now,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “There is no expert that I know of that thinks that our testing infrastructure right now meets the needs of the American people.”

Adm. Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary for health and the Trump administration’s virus testing czar, said that conducting millions of tests per day was not realistic.

The administration has asked states to test at least 2% of their populations each month, or the equivalent of about 220,000 people per day nationally, which Giroir said would be enough to identify rising hot spots.

“We are doing the appropriate amount of testing now to reduce the spread, flatten the curve, save lives,” he told reporters on Thursday.

He said the government was already testing large numbers of asymptomatic people, and he described an effort to strategically deploy tests, including to those who are hospitalized and in nursing homes. “You do not beat the virus by shotgun testing everyone all the time,” Giroir said, adding: “Don’t get hung up on a number.”

Giroir also cited a decline in known cases in states like Florida as an indication that testing is sufficient. But experts say the rate of people testing positive in places like Florida remains high, suggesting too little testing.

For much of the spring and summer, the number of daily tests steadily increased. The United States averaged about 172,000 tests per day in April, before ramping up to an average of 510,000 in June and nearly 750,000 in July.

Continues on page 8

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Monday, August 17, 2020

From page 7 The recent dip in testing is likely a result of several factors, epidemiologists said.

It may, in part, reflect an improved outlook from earlier this summer, when parts of the Sunbelt were seeing alarming outbreaks. The number of people hospitalized with the virus each day across the country has decreased to around 45,000, down from earlier peaks of around 59,000 in April and July. And the percent of people testing positive overall is hovering at about 7%, down from 8.5% in July.

“It’s an indication to me there are not as many people getting sick,” said Nelson Wolff, the county judge in Bexar County, Texas, the home of San Antonio, where a site that provides free tests for people reporting symptoms had seen a decline in demand.

But experts fear the slowing of tests may also reveal a sense of “pandemic fatigue” — people who want or need to be tested but may choose not to, discouraged by stories of others waiting hours in line and waiting as long as two weeks for a result.

Even if fewer people are volunteering to be tested, most experts believe testing should still be going up overall, particularly in regions where the portion of people testing positive is high. A community may be considered to have controlled virus spread if it is testing widely and the percent of people testing positive over a two-week period is less than 5%, according to the World Health Organization.

Yet testing has been dropping in a number of states with positivity rates in double digits, including Mississippi, Nevada and South Carolina.

The situation has been particularly acute in Texas, where the number of reported daily tests fell to as low as 35,000, down from a high of 67,000 in late July. The drop came as the state’s percent of positive tests rose to as high as 24% earlier this week.

Gov. Greg Abbott said the state deployed a team to investigate why the positivity rate had risen so sharply. He said on Thursday that the state had more testing capacity than was being used and that he was sending thousands more tests to Houston.

In Travis County, which includes Austin, the health authority, Dr. Mark Escott, told local officials of a drop in demand. “This is not because tests are not available,”

A testing site in Los Angeles on Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020. The number of tests being conducted daily in the area is down from earlier peaks this summer. he said. “It is because less individuals are signing up.”

That dilemma reveals perhaps the biggest challenge going forward.

The country has so far relied heavily on laboratory tests, which are accurate but can take hours or days for results and are best suited for people who believe they may have been exposed to the virus.

To expand testing to a level that could keep the virus in check, experts say, the United States will need to scale up other types of testing, like antigen tests, which are less accurate but can provide results in as little as 15 minutes, and other new technologies, like tests that could be done at home.

Such an approach would reduce the strain on laboratories, reserving those tests for people who need them most, while allowing the country to simultaneously screen large numbers of asymptomatic people at schools, nursing homes, offices and neighborhoods.

By some estimates, as much as $75 billion in additional federal funding may be needed. The Trump administration agreed to allocate an additional $16 billion for states to conduct testing and contact tracing, as part of a proposal Republicans unveiled late last month. But negotiations over a new coronavirus relief bill have resulted in a standoff between the White House and Democratic leaders in Congress, and only Congress can approve new

The San Juan Daily Star aid. Lawmakers have left Washington until early September, all but guaranteeing they will not approve more funds for testing until next month.

The country is also still waiting on a larger market of tests.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved just two companies to sell antigen tests. One of the companies, the Quidel Corp., says it is making 1 million tests per week. The other, Becton, Dickinson & Co., said it is ramping up testing, with the aim of manufacturing 10 million tests by the end of September.

Other tests are still entering the market. For example, a saliva test developed by Yale, which has been tested on NBA players and staff, won emergency approval Saturday from the FDA. “We are at an inflection point,” said Dr. Jonathan Quick, who is managing the pandemic response at the Rockefeller Foundation, which has said the nation needs to carry out about 4 million tests a day by the fall. “That is a paradigm shift.”

The Trump administration has at times provided inconsistent messages on testing. President Donald Trump said in June that testing leads to more cases, which “makes us looks bad” but is “good to have.” He repeated the idea in an interview with Axios in late July, saying, “There are those that say you can test too much.”

Members of his administration have repeatedly stressed the importance of testing. The nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has said more testing of asymptomatic people is needed. “We’re going to be doing more testing, not less,” he told Congress in June.

Other top officials have also talked about expanding testing. Dr. Deborah Birx, the Trump administration’s coronavirus coordinator, has said that pooling tests together to assess multiple samples at once could expand capacity to as many as 5 million tests per day.

The Department of Health and Human Services said in a report to Congress that its aim was for the country to have the capacity to perform 40 million to 50 million tests each month by September, an average of about 1.3 million to 1.6 million tests a day.

Giroir, the testing chief, said the country was on pace to surpass that number by the fall, with the majority being new tests to screen people. But he said the figure was only a goal for capacity, and that fewer tests might ultimately be carried out.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

9

Firm running Coronavirus database refuses to answer senators’ questions

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

T

he health care technology firm that is helping to manage the Trump administration’s new coronavirus database has refused to answer questions from Senate Democrats about its $10.2 million contract, citing a nondisclosure agreement it signed with the Department of Health and Human Services.

In a letter dated Aug. 3 and obtained Friday by The New York Times, a lawyer for Pittsburgh-based TeleTracking Technologies cited the nondisclosure agreement in declining to say how it collects and shares data. The lawyer refused to share the company’s proposal to the government, its communications with administration officials and other information related to the awarding of the contract.

That contract has come under scrutiny in the wake of an abrupt decision last month by Alex Azar, the health and human services secretary, who ordered hospitals to stop reporting coronavirus patient data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and instead send the information to TeleTracking for inclusion in a centralized coronavirus database. The order raised alarms about data transparency and the sidelining of CDC experts.

Later Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services official in charge of the new database, José Arrieta, abruptly resigned after only 16 months on the job, according to a report in the Federal News Network. On a conference call with reporters last month, Arrieta, the agency’s chief information officer, defended the TeleTracking contract, saying he envisioned it as a “central way to make data visible to first responders at the federal, state and local” levels. He also said the department was considering giving Congress access to the database.

“We have been transparent with data and pushed boundaries,” the Federal News Network quoted him as saying on Friday.

But that pledge for transparency seems at odds with the nondisclosure agreement. Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at George Washington University Law School who teaches about government contracts and anticorruption, said Friday that such agreements with government vendors were unusual.

“One of the cornerstones of the federal procurement system is transparency, so it strikes me as odd,” she said.

The government uses the data to help track the pandemic and make crucial decisions about how to allocate scarce supplies, like ventilators and the drug remdesivir, which is used to treat hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

HHS officials have said the switch was necessary to speed up reporting and improve accuracy.

But the abrupt change — hospitals were given several days’ notice — has generated an outcry among public health experts and outside advisers to the health and human services agency, who say that the new system is burdening hospitals and endangering scientific integrity.

And one month into the new arrangement, there are questions about how useful the new database is. The COVID Tracking Project, a heavily used resource, reported this week

A list of confirmed Covid-19 cases at the county health department in Salt Lake City. Hospitals were ordered abruptly to stop reporting coronavirus patient data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and instead send it to TeleTracking Technologies, a private company. that the federal data are “unreliable.” In comparing hospitalization data reported by the state and federal governments, the project has found large discrepancies in certain states.

“We felt like we had a very solid baseline current hospitalization number, and then after the switch-over, for reasons that remain somewhat obscure to us, we suddenly saw numbers jumping around in totally different ways,” Alexis Madrigal, the project’s co-founder, said in an interview.

The letter made public Friday was in response to an inquiry from Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Health Committee.

They wrote the company on July 22, seeking information about its arrangement with the Health and Human Services Department — “a sudden and significant departure,” they wrote, “from the way the federal government has collected public health data regarding infectious diseases in the past.”

Washington lawyer A. Scott Bolden replied on behalf of Michael Zamagias, a Pittsburgh real estate developer who is TeleTracking’s chairman and majority owner. Bolden suggested the Democrats direct questions about the contract to the government, and a health department spokeswoman said Friday that that was what members of Congress should do, adding that the agency was working to provide such information.

Murray sent a letter seeking information about the contract to the health and human services agency June 3,

not quite two months after the contract was awarded, and has received no response, her office said. At the time, hospitals had the option of reporting either to TeleTracking or the CDC, and Murray’s letter asked why the government was creating “a seemingly duplicative data collection system.”

Schumer and Murray have been pushing the government to be more transparent about its collection and use of coronavirus data. The two recently introduced legislation aimed at protecting data transparency, and Schumer has raised the issue with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, according to a person familiar with their discussion.

“The Trump administration’s decision to hire a private vendor and then cloak that vendor in a nondisclosure agreement raises numerous questions about their motivations and risks the ability of our public health experts to understand and effectively fight this virus,” Schumer said Friday in a statement.

The manner in which the contract was awarded has also generated confusion. A government website initially listed it as a “sole source” contract, but health department officials later said there were six bidders, although they would not name the others, saying they were “prohibited from sharing that information by federal regulations and statutes.”

Tillipman said keeping the names of bidders a secret is also unusual.

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

Robert Trump, the president’s younger brother, dies at 71

By ANNIE KARNI

R

obert Trump, the younger brother of President Donald Trump, died Saturday night in Manhattan. He was 71.

The White House, which announced his death at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, did not give a cause.

“He was not just my brother; he was my best friend,” the president said in a statement. “He will be greatly missed, but we will meet again.”

Robert Trump, who took blood thinners, had experienced brain bleeds that began after a recent fall, according to a family friend. The president went to Manhattan on Friday to see his brother at the hospital.

On Saturday, when Robert Trump was not expected to live much longer, the president called into the hospital from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. He shortly held a news conference but did not mention his brother’s health. Friends who spoke to him said he was downcast.

“I have a wonderful brother,” the president said Friday at a White House news conference before departing to visit him. “We’ve had a great relationship for a long time, from Day One.” The two had in fact been estranged for years, before Donald Trump’s run for the White House.

Robert Trump had no children, but he

helped raise Christopher Hollister Trump-Retchin, the son of his first wife, Blaine Trump, even giving him his last name. Besides the president, he is survived by his second wife, Ann Marie Pallan, and his sisters, Maryanne Trump Barry and Elizabeth Trump Grau. His brother Fred Trump Jr. died in 1981.

As the youngest of five children growing up in the strict Queens household of Fred C. Trump, Robert Trump was shielded from some of the pressure exerted by his disciplinarian father over his older brothers.

He was never groomed to take over the family real estate company and was considered by those who knew him to be the inverse of the brash, self-promotional brother who eventually did. After graduating from Boston University, he first went to work on Wall Street instead of joining the family business. But he eventually went to work for his brother as a senior executive at the Trump Organization.

“You could consider him the quietest of Trumps,” Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer, said. “He was glad to stay out of the spotlight.”

Jack O’Donnell, a former Trump Organization executive who worked closely with the Trump family, recalled the younger Trump as someone with a natural ease and good humor that his older brother lacked.

“He was dignified, he was quiet, he listened, he was good to work with,”

Donald J. Trump embraces his brother, Robert, at an Election Night event in Manhattan, Nov. 8, 2016. Robert S. Trump, the younger brother of President Trump, died on Saturday, Aug. 15, 2020, in Manhattan.

O’Donnell said. “He had zero sense of entitlement. Robert was very comfortable being Donald Trump’s brother and not being like him.”

That was not always an easy role to play, and simply being a close family member did not shield him from his brother’s rages when Donald Trump needed someone to blame. Family friends said that as Donald Trump’s star grew, Robert Trump struggled with working for his brother and cast himself as his brother’s polar opposite.

Donald Trump faulted Robert Trump, for instance, for the problems with slot machines that plagued the opening of the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1990, costing him tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue. Donald Trump had put his brother in charge of the property after a helicopter accident in 1989 killed three Trump Organization executives who had been overseeing it.

Gaming regulators did not allow the casino to open because of a lack of financial control of the slot machines. On opening night, only a small section of the casino floor was open, and it was months before the slot machines were fully activated.

In one meeting, O’Donnell recalled, Donald Trump screamed at his brother, putting the blame for the slot machine debacle entirely on him.

“Robert calmly got up, walked out of the room, and that’s the last time I ever saw him,” O’Donnell said.

After the blowup, Robert Trump stopped reporting directly to his brother and removed himself from the core of the business, working out of its Brooklyn office and dealing with real estate projects in boroughs outside Manhattan. But people who knew him said he had been devastated by the fight with Donald Trump, and the rift had taken years to heal.

In Brooklyn, Robert Trump would take his father, Fred Trump Sr., who had Alzheimer’s disease, out for lunch every day at an Italian restaurant, a friend recalled.

He reconciled with his brother when Donald Trump decided to run for president, according to a person close to the family. Robert Trump had in recent years been a loyal family spokesman since his older brother entered politics.

“I support Donald 1,000%,” he told The New York Post in 2016. “If he were to

need me in any way, I’d be there.”

He followed through with that promise. In recent months, he led the family in its unsuccessful bid to block the publication of a memoir by their niece Mary Trump — the daughter of their deceased older brother, Fred Trump Jr. — that described decades of family dysfunction and brutality that she claimed turned Donald Trump into a reckless leader. It was the president’s younger brother who requested the restraining order in a filing in Queens County Surrogate’s Court.

Before that, Robert Trump spearheaded the family response in 1999 when Mary Trump and her brother, Fred Trump III, sued for their father’s share of the family estate.

Robert Trump, who for 25 years was married to Blaine Trump, was more accepted in society circles and on the charity circuit than Donald Trump ever was, D’Antonio said.

But after a painful divorce in 2009, involving tabloid coverage documenting his decision to leave his marriage for an employee of the Trump Organization, Ann Marie Pallan, Robert Trump sought a quiet, retired life on Long Island. He and Pallan married this year.

The relationship between the brothers — the older one dominating the younger one — was illustrated by Donald Trump in his book, “The Art of the Deal.” In it, he recalled stealing his younger brother’s blocks when they were children and gluing them together so that Robert Trump couldn’t reclaim them.

The president’s decision to visit Robert Trump in the hospital was different from how he handled news in 1981 that his older brother, Fred Trump Jr., was in poor health.

According to Mary Trump’s account, Donald Trump went to the movies the night that Fred Trump Jr. died. Fred Trump Sr. also did not visit him.

But Gwenda Blair, a biographer of the Trump family, said that in light of Mary Trump’s memoir, the president would have had no choice.

“It’s very much part of the Trump family legend that they are a tight-knit, loyal group,” she said. “That is the family modus operandi. Mary Trump has recently suggested otherwise, but I think as part of the response to that, Donald Trump would have no choice but to go.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

11

New fee on some college bills: It’s for the virus

By ANN CARNS

C

ollege students are used to seeing fees on their semester bills: activity fees, lab fees, athletic fees, technology fees, orientation fees and so on.

This year, some students are noticing a new item: coronavirus fees.

Faced with extra expenses for screening and testing students for the virus and for reconfiguring campus facilities for safety, some colleges and universities are asking students to pay a share of the cost.

The level of testing and protective steps, and the associated cost, vary widely by campus. Some colleges are testing all students at the start of the semester, while others will also test repeatedly throughout the academic term. Testing is mandatory at some campuses, voluntary at others. “It really varies,” said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

The University of Michigan is charging a $50-per-term coronavirus fee this year. Revenue from the fee will help cover the costs of testing and other pandemic-related health and safety services, a spokesman said. Details of the measures are still being worked out.

Merrimack College, a private institution in North Andover, Massachusetts, is charging a “COVID mitigation” fee of $475 per semester to all students taking in-person classes.

The college requires students to test negative for the coronavirus before moving into their dorms and plans to conduct weekly surveillance testing throughout the semester — with some 4,500 on-campus tests expected weekly, according to its website. Merrimack is participating in a college testing protocol offered by the Broad Institute, an initiative of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology that developed a program to help campuses reopen safely.

The college didn’t respond to requests for comment. But its website said that even with budget cuts, the “extraordinary” costs of testing and safety measures “are difficult to absorb,” so a temporary fee was necessary.

Other colleges may still be calculating whether and how to charge fees since plans for testing and safety protocols are

College students are used to seeing fees on their semester bills: activity fees, lab fees, athletic fees, technology fees, orientation fees and so on. changing daily as the start of the academic year approaches, health experts say. Students are already heading back to some campuses, but others won’t show up until after Labor Day. “This is all still emerging,” said Elizabeth Marks, senior strategy consultant with Academic HealthPlans, which provides student health insurance plans at campuses across the country.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t currently recommend blanket “entry testing” of returning students, faculty and staff. The agency’s website notes that such a step hasn’t been systematically studied, and it is “unknown” if it would reduce transmission of the virus beyond what would be expected by using other prevention measures, like social distancing, masks and hand-washing.

But many colleges that are inviting students back to campus are taking aggressive steps to avoid outbreaks. Large universities may have the infrastructure to conduct multiple tests rapidly on thousands of students, Pasquerella said, but smaller institutions may lack the facilities — or the funds — to handle a large volume of tests.

St. Michael’s College in Vermont is

charging all students a “comprehensive” testing fee of $150 for the fall semester, which includes testing at the start of the semester and repeat tests during the fall.

“We know that this is a particularly difficult time financially for many families, and we wish we did not have to charge any fee,” the college says on its website.

Brendan Williams, senior director of knowledge at uAspire, a nonprofit group that advocates college affordability, said in an email that the group applauded colleges that were being “transparent” about the extra charges, rather than quietly folding them into general fees. But, he said, “we don’t necessarily agree with passing the costs on to the student.”

Several colleges noted that if the federal government appropriated money to help colleges pay for testing programs, they would credit all or part of their virus fees back to students.

Here are some questions and answers about the fees: Q: Will my health insurance plan reimburse me for college-required coronavirus tests?

A: Maybe. Many insurers in general cover tests for the virus only if they are deemed “medically necessary,” which ty-

pically means a patient has symptoms or an order from a physician. Screening tests for people who don’t have symptoms — which is what many colleges are doing — may not be covered at no cost.

St. Michael’s College acknowledged that possibility. “The college can provide families with evidence of the payment and what it was for so that they can seek reimbursement from their insurance company,” the website says. “However, our understanding is that most insurance companies will not reimburse for asymptomatic testing, which is what the college will be doing in nearly all cases.”

But Stephanie Cohen, an insurance broker near Washington, D.C., said major health insurers seemed “likely” to reimburse for tests required under formal college testing programs. She advised students to contact their health plans for clarification.

Or students could visit their doctor to explain the situation and request a prescription for the test.

Q: If I get sick with the virus while attending college, will my campus health insurance plan cover my care?

A: Health insurance plans, including those created for and sold through colleges to students, cover coronavirus-related care and treatment in the same way they cover other illnesses, Marks said.

Even if a student is sent home because the campus switches from in-person to remote classes, she said, the health plan generally would cover care and treatment as long as the student remained eligible, which typically means the student is enrolled for a minimum number of credit hours.

Q: My college bill includes a “student health” fee. Does that mean I have health insurance?

A: No. Most colleges charge all students a mandatory health fee, which typically covers the cost of primary care, counseling and health education at a campus health center; a per-visit fee may also be charged. But the fee doesn’t cover more extensive treatment. For that, you would need insurance coverage, whether through a plan offered on campus to students or through coverage you have on your own or through a parent’s health plan. (You can remain on your parents’ health plan until age 26.)

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

State and local budget pain looms over economy’s future

By JEANNA SMIALEK, ALAN RAPPEPORT and EMILY COCHRANE

T

he U.S. economy struggled to shake off the last recession, with historically slow growth and a labor market that took more than six years to recover its earlier employment levels.

A big part of the reason: state and local governments, which cut spending and fired workers amid widespread budget shortfalls.

The same dynamic poses one of the biggest threats to America’s recovery from the pandemic downturn. State governments are again experiencing extreme budget problems as they pay out increasing sums to cover unemployment and health costs caused by the coronavirus crisis while revenues from sales taxes and corporate and personal income tax payments plummet. States could face a gap of at least $555 billion through the 2022 fiscal year, according to one estimate.

Economists warn that the long-term risk coming from struggling states could prove even more damaging this time than the last recession, which spanned 2007 to 2009, unless Washington steps in. Yet providing more aid to state and local governments has become one of the biggest political battles in the fight over another pandemic rescue package.

The Senate formally adjourned Thursday until early September, all but ending any chance that an agreement could be reached soon. House members had already left Washington.

President Donald Trump and top Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, warn that providing more money to states could simply bail out fiscally irresponsible governments that did not manage their budgets and their public pension plans prudently in good times. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday in a television interview that most states had not exhausted the $150 billion that was allocated in the relief bill passed in March, although analysts say much of that has already been earmarked for certain projects.

Democrats insist that states need more money and have proposed as much as $1 trillion, saying it would support needed services and help the economy recover more quickly.

While many governments entered the downturn with solid tax revenues and billions of dollars in their emergency reserve funds, those coffers are quickly dwindling. State revenues “could fall as much as or more than they did in the worst year of the Great Recession and remain depressed in following years,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank.

Nearly all states are required to balance

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, left, joins President Donald Trump at a news conference at the White House in Washington, on Monday, Aug. 10, 2020. their budgets, meaning officials will need to plug shortfalls by tapping emergency funds, raising taxes or cutting costs, including jobs.

That worries economists and Federal Reserve officials. Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman, regularly warns that state job cuts could weigh on the economy’s ability to recover, and his colleagues warn of public-sector budget pain as one of the primary vulnerabilities ahead.

“It will hold back the economic recovery if they continue to lay people off and if they continue to cut essential services,” Powell said during congressional testimony in June. “In fact, that’s kind of what happened post the global financial crisis.”

Charles Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, echoed that sentiment in a CBS interview Sunday, saying, “As you look at the economic outlook, there are some negative scenarios, and the ones that are most pessimistic involve not supporting state and local governments.” Absent that help, Evans said, “there will be employment reductions.”

While it is unclear how persistent the cuts will be — some jobs may still come back as economies reopen — state and local employment losses this year have already dwarfed those in and after the entire Great Recession. Back then, state and local governments cut about 750,000 jobs over nearly five years.

Just since February, about 1.2 million local government jobs have been lost. Moody’s Analytics researchers estimate that 2.8 million more could be on the chopping block without more federal help. If that happens, state and local

job cuts stand to shave about 2.6% from overall precrisis employment levels.

With unemployment high, at 10.2%, and many businesses expected to close, states are bracing for more safety net costs on top of the public health expenses they are already incurring. They spend a large chunk of their budgets on Medicaid payments and services for low-income residents.

Yet the Trump administration and many Republican lawmakers have largely brushed off state financial woes, insisting that governors and other local leaders foot part of the pandemic aid bill and refusing to “bail out” Democratic-led states struggling with huge shortfalls in their public pension plans.

Over the weekend, Trump suggested tapping state coffers as part of his plan to extend pumped-up unemployment insurance benefits, which had been going to millions of workers until the program expired at the end of July.

Governors, including some Republicans, expressed concern about the administration’s attempt to have states shoulder more financial responsibility. Trump’s proposal that states contribute an extra $100 in weekly unemployment benefits in order to get a $300 supplement from the federal government received a chilly reception from many state officials.

“They just don’t have the money to kick that in,” said Dan White, director of government consulting and fiscal policy research with Moody’s Analytics.

The administration soon shifted the policy to fit that reality. Officials in the office of Gov.

Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, said they were told late Sunday by the Labor Department of a new option allowing unemployed workers to claim the additional $300 per week without the state’s kicking in an extra $100.

By midweek, White House aides were making clear in interviews that the state payment was largely optional.

“We are no longer insisting on a costsharing deal,” Larry Kudlow, Trump’s economic adviser, told Fox Business.

Even so, Kudlow voiced wariness of unfettered additional assistance to states. And while Mnuchin said the White House was willing to provide an additional $150 billion to states for coronavirus-related costs, that is far less than other policymakers have suggested may be needed. A bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a Republican, are pushing a bill that would give states $500 billion.

“Yes, it is a concern that we’re spending the money now, but the alternative looks far worse,” Cassidy said this week in an interview, referring to many Republicans’ reluctance to add to the nearly $3 trillion already spent.

Analysts say the actual need probably falls somewhere between the various proposals.

Moody’s Analytics, for instance, estimates that states and localities will face a $500 billion budget hole through 2022 if the worst of the pandemic is already past and $750 billion if the United States faces a second pandemic wave this fall.

The economic risks are not confined to blue states. Idaho, West Virginia and Alaska, all Republican-dominated states, also face acute budget shortfalls as a percentage of output, based on estimates from White and his colleagues at Moody’s Analytics.

Hard-hit governments “will start pulling the trigger on cutting services and raising taxes” in the coming years if they do not get help, said Ernie Tedeschi, policy economist for Evercore ISI, a research firm. Such cuts “don’t necessarily plunge you back into recession, but they can slow down the economy.”

Already, many states are dipping into rainy-day funds or using other temporary measures to meet their requirements for balanced budgets, and spending cuts are already underway or proposed in many places. In New York, for instance, lawmakers in April gave Gov. Andrew Cuomo a one-year window to cut spending unilaterally as merited as the state faces down a huge shortfall.

The pain extends to local governments.

More than 700 cities have scrapped plans to work on roads, buy equipment and upgrade critical infrastructure since the pandemic began, based on a survey by the National League of Cities.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

13 Stocks

Biden victory? Disputed election? Wall Street prices in November outcomes

I

nvestors are girding their portfolios for market moves ahead of the U.S. presidential vote, as election season kicks into higher gear with the Democratic National Convention in the coming week.

Though elections have loomed large on investors’ radar this year, their influence on markets has taken a backseat to the coronavirus pandemic and unprecedented stimulus from U.S. policymakers.

That may change in coming weeks, investors said.

Some are beefing up cash positions or making bets on a flare-up in volatility as they eye a range of outcomes, including the possibility that the contest between President Donald Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden may yield a result that is not immediately certain or likely to be disputed.

“There’s plenty of reasons to believe that the election outcome is going to be drawn out,” said Lamar Villere, a portfolio manager at Villere & Co. “That’s going to show the cracks in a market that’s been priced for perfection.”

Villere’s firm has raised its cash levels to as high as 20% of assets as a hedge against election-induced volatility in a stock market some say has become richly valued - the S&P 500 has rallied more than 50% from its lows of the year and trades at its highest forward price-to-earnings multiple in around two decades.

Some investors believe the market’s performance over the next few months could point to which candidate will triumph in November.

The incumbent president has tended to win the White House when the S&P 500 index has risen in the three months before the election, data from TD Securities going back to 1930 showed.

That may be bad news for Trump. While the index is up about 3% for this month, August kicks off what has historically been the weakest three-month stretch of the year for equities, where the average historic return stands at about 0%, according to data from BofA Global Research.

At the same time, no incumbent has been awarded a second term in the midst of a recession, TD securities wrote.

Biden leads Trump by 8 percentage points, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday after Biden had selected U.S. Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate.

A Biden victory - as well as a possible Democratic sweep of the House and Senate - could threaten policies championed by Trump and generally favored by Wall Street, including lower corporate tax rates and fewer regulations, analysts said.

“The full implications of a future Biden presidency could unsettle markets in the first instance,” analysts at Oxford Economics said in a recent note.

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14

Monday, August 17, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Coronavirus crisis has made Brazil an ideal vaccine laboratory

Denise Abranches, a dental surgeon who was among the first volunteers in Brazil for a coronavirus vaccine trial, in Sao Paulo, July 30, 2020.

By MANUELA ANDREONI and ERNESTO LONDOÑO

T

he chaotic response to the coronavirus in Brazil, where it has killed more than 105,000 people, made the country’s experience a cautionary tale that many around the world have watched with alarm.

But as the country’s caseload soared, vaccine researchers saw a unique opportunity.

With sustained widespread contagion, a deep bench of immunization experts, a robust medical manufacturing infrastructure and thousands of vaccine trial volunteers, Brazil has emerged as a potentially vital player in the global scramble to end the pandemic.

Three of the most promising and advanced vaccine studies in the world are relying on scientists and volunteers in Brazil, according to the World Health Organization’s report on the progress of vaccine research.

The embattled government hopes its citizens could be among the first in the world to be inoculated. And medical experts are imagining the possibility that Brazil could even manufacture the vaccine and export it to neighboring countries, a prospect that fills them with something that has been in short supply this year: pride.

“I’m very optimistic,” said Dimas Covas, the director of the Butantan Institute, an internationally renowned biopharmaceutical producer that is partnering with China’s Sinovac on one of the studies that has reached the third stage of research, during which potential vaccines are tested on 9,000 people.

“Brazil will be one of the first countries to have the vaccine,” Covas said.

Some 5,000 Brazilians have also been recruited to support a vaccine trial conducted by AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company in partnership with Oxford University. An additional 1,000 volunteers in Brazil were recruited to test a vaccine developed by New Yorkbased Pfizer.

Researchers need countries with large enough outbreaks to assess whether a vaccine will work. Some volunteers are given the potential vaccine while others are given a placebo, but they have to be in a place where enough virus is circulating to test the vaccine’s efficacy.

Brazil, where the virus has infected more than 3 million people, has clear conditions for these trials. And it will be the only country other than the United States to be playing a major role in three of the leading studies as an unparalleled quest for a vaccine has led to unusually fast regula-

tory approvals and hastily brokered partnerships.

Still, it is far from certain, experts say, that the vaccine trials underway in Brazil will win the race.

Countries across the world are vying to be among the first to get access to a vaccine that will be in demand by billions of people. In India, one of the country’s wealthiest families is taking a gamble by mass producing the Oxford vaccine in hopes that it will be the first to clear safety and regulatory hurdles.

Russia this past week approved a homemade vaccine that has not yet met the final tests for safety and efficacy. If it works, it could position the country to claim it developed the world’s first effective coronavirus vaccine.

Brazil’s explosive caseload has made it the second hardest-hit nation in the world after the United States. While other countries in the region have higher per capita rates, experts have assailed President Jair Bolsonaro’s cavalier handling of the crisis.

The president, who caught the virus in July, has called it a “measly flu” and sabotaged calls for quarantines and lockdowns.

He also appointed an Army general with no medical experience to run the health ministry after two ministers clashed with the president over his disdain for sciencebased approaches.

Because of the country’s disorganized response to the virus, Brazilians have been subjected to travel bans, neighbors have militarized border crossings and unions representing medical workers recently asked the International Criminal Court to charge Bolsonaro for crimes against humanity, arguing that he has given the virus free rein.

Brazil has a universal public health care system with one of the best immunization programs in the developing world, enabling it to contain outbreaks of yellow fever, measles and other pathogens.

But in recent years, as the economy has contracted, the program has suffered, dogged by budget cuts. It has also had to fight disinformation campaigns that have found a rapt audience on social media.

In 2019, for the first time in 25 years, Brazil didn’t fulfill its vaccination goal for any of the shots it routinely administers.

A coronavirus breakthrough could galvanize the country’s vaccine sector. It could also invigorate its scientific institu-

tions, which employ world-class scientists but have been reeling after years of budget cuts that have weakened the public health care system and dented the country’s reputation as a research powerhouse.

Katherine O’Brien, the director of immunization at the WHO, welcomed Brazil’s investments in manufacturing vaccines for COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. But she said bilateral deals like the ones Brazil is involved in were still a gamble.

“Some countries are going to be lucky, entering into contracts with a candidate that’s going to demonstrate efficacy,” O’Brien said. “Other countries are going to pursue deals with candidates that are going to fail and they’ll get nothing.”

Home to about 210 million people, Brazil has the capacity to make roughly 500 million vaccines per year. Under the current coronavirus vaccine deals that Brazil has stakes in, Brazilian vaccine plants would initially handle the final stages of vaccine production after importing the raw materials, and later produce them entirely.

Brazil has signed two deals to get preferential access to a vaccine. One, between the São Paulo state’s Butantan Institute and Sinovac, would provide Brazilians with 120 million doses of the vaccine by early 2021. The second one, between the federal government’s Bio-Manguinhos and AstraZeneca, guarantees access to 100 million doses of the vaccine by the beginning of next year.

Both deals include a technology transfer agreement that would allow Brazil to later manufacture vaccines on its own.

Government officials hope to start vaccinating some Brazilians by the first semester of 2021, although an exact date depends on the results of ongoing studies and a future approval process with the local regulatory agency.

But as researchers celebrate Brazil’s role in the global vaccine race, they have also felt compelled to remind citizens that the good news won’t single-handedly put an end to the suffering the virus has unleashed in the country.

“They should not assume that that’s it and they are done,” said Maria Elena Bottazzi, a vaccine developer at Baylor College of Medicine. “There is still a lot of work that Brazil needs to do to strengthen their public health infrastructure to reduce the transmission of the virus.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

15

As relations with U.S. sink, China tones down ‘hotheaded’ nationalism

By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ

F

or weeks, China fanned nationalist sentiment in its escalating war of words with the Trump administration. Now, it is toning down its message and calling for a truce, as President Donald Trump increasingly makes Beijing a target in his bid for reelection in November.

One after another, top Chinese diplomats have called for “peaceful coexistence” with the United States, forgoing their previous assertions that Beijing’s authoritarian system is superior. Hawkish scholars are now emphasizing prospects for defusing tensions, instead of urging China to challenge U.S. military might. Journalists at state-run news outlets are limiting their direct attacks on Trump, under instructions to take a more conciliatory approach.

“There’s a reflection that we should not let nationalism or hotheadedness somehow kidnap our foreign policy,” Xu Qinduo, a commentator for China Radio International, a state-run broadcaster, said in an interview. “Tough rhetoric should not replace rational diplomacy.”

In toning down the rhetoric, the ruling Communist Party hopes to reduce the risk that excessive nationalism will hurt Beijing’s global image or cause tensions between the superpowers to accelerate uncontrollably. China’s ties with the United States are at a perilous juncture now that Trump has made assailing Beijing a focal point of his election campaign, with his administration taking a series of actions against China in rapid succession.

Just in recent weeks, the Trump administration has shut down the Chinese consulate in Houston; imposed sanctions on Communist Party officials; said it would cancel the visas of some students and tech company employees; and proposed restrictions on two popular Chinese social media networks. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has traveled abroad urging countries to band together to fight China’s “tyranny.”

Unwilling to concede or look weak, China has responded in kind to most of the measures, closing a consulate in Chengdu and sanctioning U.S. politicians. But in rejecting Pompeo’s criticisms, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, also presented an olive branch, saying the government was ready to discuss all of Washington’s concerns “at any level, in any area and at any time.”

Wang avoided the scathing denunciations that have come to characterize China’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, named after an ultrapatriotic Chinese film franchise. Only three weeks earlier, Wang had told his counterpart in Russia that the United States had “lost its mind, morals and credibility.”

The call for dialogue was repeated by several prominent officials, including Yang Jiechi, China’s top diplomat, and Cui Tiankai, the ambassador to the United States, in recent days.

On Wednesday, Le Yucheng, another senior Chinese diplomat, accused U.S. politicians of telling lies to smear China. But he also said the two countries should work to prevent relations from “spiraling out of control” over the next several months.

“The change is that the United States keeps attacking, and if China keeps countering, and also stops communicating while simply following along irrationally, it will probably only make the relationship worse,” said Song Guoyou, an American studies expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, describing the shift in diplomatic strategy.

“China may be indeed sending this kind of signal intensively to the United States, saying it hopes to work with it the U.S. on issues calmly,” Song said.

The campaign for restraint also appears to be aimed, in part, at signaling to Trump’s Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, and others in the United States that China still sees a friendly path forward. While Chinese officials believe Biden is less volatile and caustic than Trump, many also worry that he would continue to push for harsh action against China on human rights, technology and other issues, analysts said.

“There’s still a possibility that tensions could become even more profound, and more severe, in the future under a Democratic administration,” said Shi Yinhong, director of the Center on American Studies at Renmin University.

Despite the softer tone, China’s underlying view that the United States is a strategic and ideological rival bent on suppressing its rise has not changed. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, continues to push a forceful agenda, including a crackdown on free speech and activism in Hong Kong, even in the face of punishments by the United States. Xi’s government still routinely denounces America as a bully and hypocrite.

But China’s aggressive moves have also triggered disputes with other countries including India, Britain, Canada and Australia. Xi may now be seeking to project a less confrontational image as China finds itself increasingly isolated.

“Beijing’s rhetoric appears aimed at defusing the global backlash that its brash diplomacy and harsh policies have provoked,” said Jessica Chen Weiss, an associate professor of government at Cornell University.

As Trump has escalated his punitive campaign against China, Beijing’s propaganda apparatus has worked to avoid stoking anger at home by instructing state media outlets to play down unfavorable news and limit talk of war, according to interviews with Chinese journalists.

News of the closure of the U.S. consulate in Chengdu last month, a visceral symbol of the erosion of ties between the two countries, was buried in a two-sentence brief at the bottom of page three of People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper.

Trump’s signing last week of two executive orders meant to restrict the use of Chinese social media apps in the United States did not even make the evening news, one of the most widely watched television programs in China.

Even as China shifts tactics, its success could be limited.

The Trump administration shows no signs of easing its efforts to dismantle decades of political, economic and social engagement with China. The State Department on Thursday said it was designating the U.S. headquarters of the Confucius Institutes, a Chinese government educational organization, as a diplomatic mission, a move China denounced as “totally unacceptable.”

The Trump administration is also unlikely to heed calls for a cease-fire unless Chinese officials go beyond promises of reconciliation. Beijing may need to offer concrete proposals on issues such as military tensions in the South China Sea or Xi’s crackdown in Hong Kong.

“There’s no way to maintain the avoidance of major conflict without concrete trade-offs,” said Shi, the American studies expert at Renmin University.

Hu Xijin, editor in chief of the Global Times, in Beijing, June 21, 2019.

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Monday, August 17, 2020

Under siege in Belarus, Lukashenko turns to Putin

By ANDREW HIGGINS and IVAN NECHEPURENKO

A

fter claiming for weeks that Russia was plotting to overthrow him, President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus appealed to the Kremlin on Saturday for help against a wave of protests and strikes triggered by police violence after a disputed presidential election.

Lukashenko spoke by telephone with President Vladimir Putin, Belarus’ state news agency Belta reported, and secured a promise of Russian security assistance should Belarus request it.

The agency quoted Lukashenko as saying that Putin had pledged that, if needed, “comprehensive assistance will be provided to ensure the security of the Republic of Belarus.”

The Kremlin’s own account of the leaders’ conversation, however, gave no indication that Putin had offered any concrete support or even a clear endorsement of Lukashenko’s staying in power.

The Belarus news agency said Putin had offered help to “ensure the security of Belarus in the event of external military threats,” which suggested that any help from Russia might not include security assistance against domestic threats like protesters.

In its own statement on the talks, the Kremlin said that Putin had agreed with the Belarusian leader on the need “to strengthen allied relations” and prevent “destructive forces” from using the

political turmoil in Belarus to “harm the mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries.”

Putin and Lukashenko, the Kremlin said, “expressed confidence that all existing problems will be settled soon.”

As recently as last month, Lukashenko was accusing Moscow of engineering plots to overthrow his government and even of sending mercenaries to Belarus to disrupt the presidential election, which was held last Sunday.

But Lukashenko, facing the gravest crisis of his 26 years in power after claiming a landslide victory in what Western governments and many Belarusians dismissed as a rigged election, now seems to have calculated that Russia offers the best hope for his survival.

The European Union, outraged by a violent crackdown on protesters by Lukashenko’s security forces, said Friday that it was preparing to impose new sanctions on Belarus, while the leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania called on the country to conduct new “free and fair” elections.

Lukashenko, who has often been called “Europe’s last dictator,” has danced between Russia and the West for decades, playing each off against the other as he struggled to keep his country’s decaying economy afloat and stay in power.

In Minsk, the Belarusian capital, thousands of people brought flowers to the Pushkinskaya metro station to a makeshift memorial for Aleksandr Taraikovsky, a protester who died

President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, right, with President Vladimir V. Putin or Russia last year. He later accused Moscow of plotting to overthrow him.

there during some of the heaviest clashes with the police earlier in the week.

The protesters were peaceful, and there were no police officers at the site. But Lukashenko, speaking to officials in Minsk, warned that his government would not be “lulled to sleep” by peaceful protests, saying that it was under attack from internal and external foes who were spreading “fake” stories about his actions and the true scale of the protest movement.

Belarusian state television, which has either ignored the protests or painted them as a foreign-born plot, became a focal point for protesters later Saturday. More than 1,000 people massed outside its Minsk offices, shouting “We want the truth!” and demanding fair coverage.

Over the past three days, protesters and riot police officers have refrained from confronting each other, retreating from the violent clashes seen earlier in the week.

“He gave an order to allow us to get out and chant a bit,” said Vitaly Karazhan, 33, referring to Lukashenko. “At one point, he will have the riot police out again, he doesn’t want to give up power and there is no other way for him but the bloody one.”

Karazhan, who works as a medical equipment engineer, said he feared that Lukashenko might ask the Kremlin to send reinforcements to support his own stretched and exhausted riot police squads.

“If it wasn’t for Putin, he would have fled the country already,” Karazhan said in an interview. “Factories are on strike — where is he going to get the money to feed his security apparatus?”

Karazhan’s sentiment was shared by other protesters, who said they were wary of Russian interference. A poster at the Pushkinskaya station read: “We can sort this out without Putin.”

The Kremlin said that Belarus on Friday had released 32 Russian citizens who were arrested in late July when Lukashenko’s security services claimed they had foiled a Russian plot to disrupt the presidential election with a mercenary force of around 200 fighters. The Russians’ release, the Kremlin said Saturday, showed that the two countries’ “relevant departments” — code for security and intelligence agencies — were now engaged in “close cooperation.”

Lukashenko, signaling an abrupt tilt back toward Russia, told his officials in Minsk that he needed to speak with Putin because his country’s tumult was “no longer just a threat to Belarus” but endangered both countries.

Lukashenko’s turn to Russia for help Saturday, his latest pirouette in a dance that has been repeated time and again since he came to power in 1994, suggested that the Belarus leader has run out of new ideas for staying in control.

When protesters took to the streets after the election, the security forces responded with shocking brutality, aggressively beating demonstrators, even after they fell to the ground, and using rubber bullets, tear gas and, in at least one confrontation, live bullets.

The police violence, however, backfired, outraging even parts of Lukashenko’s base. Strikes by workers in dozens of stateowned factories gained steam Friday and indicated that opposition to the president had spread far beyond Western-leaning youths in Minsk and reached deep into what had been the bedrock of Lukashenko’s support.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

17

Mothers, babies stranded in Ukraine surrogacy industry

By MARIA VARENIKOVA

T

ears streamed down Yevhenia Troyan’s face as her flight took off from Northern Cyprus, one of the odd corners of Europe where Ukrainian surrogacy agencies have set up shop.

The flight in February was her last chance to return home to Ukraine before its borders slammed shut with coronavirus travel bans. But she had to leave — abandon, she felt — the baby girl she had just given birth to on behalf of a lesbian couple in London.

“I had the feeling I was leaving my own baby behind,” she said.

In one of the more bizarre consequences of coronavirus travel restrictions, biological parents, babies and surrogate mothers have become scattered and sometimes stranded in multiple countries for months this year.

Ukraine, with its relatively permissive reproductive health laws and an abundance of willing mothers among a poor population, is a hub of the international business, executives in the industry and women’s rights advocates say.

But Ukrainian law bans surrogacy for same-sex couples or for clients who wish to select the sex of the child. In response, a branch of the Ukrainian industry began moving women to other jurisdictions for impregnation and birth, often to legal gray zones like the largely unrecognized, Turkish-backed splinter state of Northern Cyprus.

An “ideal destination for all family models,” one company offering the service, Surrogacy 365, says on its website.

In Northern Cyprus, the Ukrainian mothers give birth without a legal surrogacy contract.

Instead, they renounce custody after birth, which allows the genetic parents to adopt the children. It is a legal process that can stretch for several weeks.

In February and March, 14 Ukrainian mothers, fearful of being stranded by virus travel bans, left Northern Cyprus after giving birth but before completing the transfer to the

genetic parents, leaving behind some babies in legal limbo.

An ensuing dispute between agents and the mothers has spilled into the news media in Ukraine and shed light on what is usually a secretive business. The women say they endured shoddy medical care and mandatory cesarean sections, assertions supported by medical records of postpartum treatment. One baby died.

“These illegal programs became visible” only because the virus travel bans disrupted their business model, said Svitlana Burkovska, director of Mothers’ Force, a nongovernmental group.

Burkovska estimated that last year, before the virus travel bans, about 3,000 Ukrainian women traveled abroad for surrogacy births and another 30,000 traveled to donate eggs, mostly out of public view. “It is very risky” for the women giving birth, she said.

Her group is now investigating an underground maternity ward in an apartment in the town of Famagusta in Northern Cyprus. The mothers described it as a clandestine hospital.

They said the nurses spoke only Turkish, and the doctors didn’t know their medical histories.

“When I came to the hospital a doctor was surprised to hear I had a C-section before,” said one of the women, who offered only her first name, Ira, because she does not want family and friends to know of her work as a surrogate mother.

It was too late to follow safe practice and deliver her next child by C-section, as her cervix was opening, she said. “An anesthesiologist arrived wearing a down jacket,” rather than scrubs, inside the makeshift hospital, and she gave birth.

Several hours later, she watched the baby die on a table nearby while medical workers were trying to save her own life, she said. She was bleeding internally and vomiting.

“They obviously did not have enough staff,” Ira said. “They put the baby aside. It was a nice, healthy-looking girl. She did not breathe, but I saw her moving,” Ira said, crying while recalling the ordeal, which took place in February.

After the death, the Turkish doctors de-

A Mosque that was once a cathedral in the Northern Cyprus town of Famagusta, one of the odd corners of Europe where Ukrainian surrogacy agencies have set up shop, Nov. 23, 2019. manded the women give birth by C-section, though one was allowed a vaginal birth.

“I begged to give birth naturally,” Troyan said. “They promised me I could, but the doctor suddenly came and said I am having a C-section right now.”

An agent sent a text message to her phone: “We don’t need more deaths.”

Another surrogate mother in the group, who offered only her first name, Yana, 22, carried a baby girl for a gay couple from England. The baby was born in the 36th week by C-section. “I could have easily carried the baby full term,” she said.

As the virus spread in February, the surrogacy agency asked the mothers to remain in Famagusta and feign parenthood of the children until paperwork was completed, but they left instead.

“I was told to pretend, if the police came to check, that the biological father is my common-law husband,” said one of the moth-

ers, Yulia, 40, who carried twin girls for a gay couple from England.

Yulia is in touch with the couple, who paid more than 100,000 euros, or $118,000.

But the couple has been unable to pick up the twins, she said. The babies are temporarily in foster care, Yulia said.

When she left, Troyan feared for the uncertain legal future of the girl she had given birth to, and she cried. In her case, however, the gay parents from Britain managed to retrieve the infant from Northern Cyprus.

Back in Ukraine, the women’s lack of documents showing renunciation of custody leaves them fearful that child welfare officials will investigate them after they request postpartum care without infants to show for the births.

“I am afraid I can be arrested,” said Yana.

Doctors, she said, have started asking her a question she cannot answer: “Where is your baby?”

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Monday, August 17, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Biden dreams of Kamelot

By MAUREEN DOWD

O

ne wintry day in 1992, my boss drolly told me to try to look young.

We were meeting Richard Nixon and the fallen president preferred to talk to reporters who were not old enough to have covered his Waterloo of Watergate.

We had our coffee with him two years before he died.

Some of his observations on the presidential race were smart but one seemed more vengeful than visionary.

He warned that Bill Clinton’s campaign would have to be careful about how it deployed Hillary Clinton. “If the wife comes through as being too strong and too intelligent, it makes the husband look like a wimp,” he said, adding that unfortunately some voters concurred with Cardinal Richelieu’s pronouncement, “Intellect in a woman is unbecoming.”

I wondered if he was still smarting that Hillary Rodham had been a lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry. And I didn’t agree with him. Arkansas voters had a period of adjustment with their governor’s formidable wife. But on the national stage, it was Bill Clinton’s inability to control his appetites that made him seem weak — not having a strong partner.

Without missing a beat, nearly three decades later, William Bennett went on Fox News after Joe Biden anointed Kamala Harris and picked up right where Nixon had left off.

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“She is a very ambitious person,” Bennett told Bret Baier, about how the California senator might overshadow Biden.

“She’ll be out there doing tons of interviews. Where will Joe be?

Will he still be in the basement? There could be some problems here that arise.”

It won’t fly.

All those old tropes about castrating women are as threadbare as Donald Trump’s despicable attempt to recycle the birther smear he used to slime Barack Obama, this time against Harris, the daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother. She was born in Oakland, California.

Biden looks confident for choosing an accomplished woman who delivered a haymaker in a debate. After Trump’s petty vindictiveness, Biden rising above grudges is a lovely thing to behold.

Trump represents the last primal shriek of retrograde white men afraid to lose their power. He’s a dinosaur who evokes a world of beauty pageants, “suburban housewives,” molestation, cheating on your wife when she’s pregnant, paying off porn stars, preferring women to be seen and not heard, dismissing women who challenge you as nasty, angry and crazy.

Even as Fox hacks lambasted Harris as “transactional,” Michael Cohen dropped an excerpt from his tell-all describing life with Trump as a mob movie: “I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”

In his nefarious attempt to suppress the vote, Trump is ruining that great American achievement, the U.S. Postal Service.

He’s complimenting Marjorie Taylor Greene, the winner of a Republican primary in Georgia who openly flirts with the insane QAnon cult and says she’s going to Washington to get rid of that “bitch,” Nancy Pelosi. (Let us know how that goes.) And, inexplicably, the president is talking about undermining Social Security, not only touching the third rail of politics but picking it up and putting it in his mouth.

Yet our mad king has the gall to dismiss Harris as “sort of a madwoman.”

Trump’s hard-core base of white misogynists and his yammering sewing circle of Bill Barr, Rudy Giuliani, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson will eat it up.

“Is America ready for a shallow, hectoring, rich lady whose only real fans work at hedge funds and MSNBC?” Carlson said, hectoring.

Harris has shown she can throw a few elbows, that she doesn’t worry about always being nice, and I like that about her.

The effort to cast her as an Angry Woman will not succeed; the country is rapidly moving past such caricatures. Besides, women should be angry. Trump’s feckless response to the coronavirus has forced parents to play Russian roulette with their kids and schools.

It’s rich that the campaign of the phony in the Oval called Biden’s running mate “Phony Kamala.” If Team Trump wants to depict her as calculating, bring it on.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Joe Biden’s running mate, in Sioux City, Iowa on Aug. 8, 2019.

After all the Trump flailing, some calculating would be welcome. We need the daughter of a scientist — as a little girl, she washed her mother’s test tubes at the research lab — to calculate the best way to get us out of virus Groundhog Day, once the president who fought masks and who bungled testing is dispatched.

We need someone who worked in law enforcement to calculate the best way to reimagine policing without decimating it.

The charismatic senator bristles at being called “the female Obama.” Valerie Jarrett, Hilary Rosen and other feminists have sent out a memo instructing the media not to talk about the appearance of a woman running on the ticket. Don’t call her glamorous! Still, I have to say, the senator has that same magnetic smile that Obama had, back in the days before Mitch McConnell wore him down, a smile that fills you with hope about what America can be.

After Biden teamed up with Obama, he said privately that he knew that he was unlikely to succeed the president because his party would want to make history with the first woman in the White House after the first Black president. Biden would have to settle for being the bridge linking the past — experience and establishment ties — to a future with the exciting political newcomer.

But fate, which has often been cruel to Biden, has provided a stunning, soaring twist to the story. After being condescended to by Obama whippersnappers and Hillaryworld, and pushed out of contention for the 2016 race by Obama, Biden was brought back to life in 2020, at age 77, by Jim Clyburn and Black voters in South Carolina. And now he will be the nominee he thought he could never be, as well as the bridge for another younger, biracial, razzle-dazzle partner with an uncommon first name. This time, it’s a woman from the West with a “Modern Family” home life. Biden could be paving the way for the first woman to be president, one who writes with pride about her Black and South Asian roots. (A bit of expiation for Anita Hill.)

If that happens, Trump will deserve some credit, too, for mobilizing women voters to fight against his porcine, backward, dangerous behavior and inspiring Democrats to push for a woman, especially a woman of color, to get the golden ticket.

Trump tweeted Friday that he wants to build a “BEAUTIFUL STATUE” here in honor of the centennial of women getting the right to vote. But being the catalyst to elect the first woman as vice president would be the best way to celebrate.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

19

“Más que mi respaldo, procura el de los que votaron por mí”, Vázquez a Pierluisi Por THE STAR

L

a gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced le dijo el domingo a Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia que más que su apoyo como candidato a la gobernación por el Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), procure el de las personas que votaron por ella.

“Quiero dirigirme a Pedro Pierluisi y sé que es una de las preguntas que tienen pendientes de cuál es el respaldo. Y yo le digo al licenciado Pierluisi que lo más importante en este proceso que tiene que perseguir y que tiene que aspirar a que esos miles y miles de puertorriqueños que creyeron en esta servidora y que me dieron su voto, que creyeron en hacer la diferencia, en hacer un gobierno fuera de política, pensando en la gente, siendo la voz del, decidir y escuchar la voz de nuestro pueblo, a esas personas es que debe aspirar el respaldo de nuestra gente”, dijo la gobernadora en su mensaje al conceder la victoria a Pierluisi Urrutia.

“De igual manera le digo a Pierluisi que piense en la gente, que haya humildad, que haya sensibilidad para nuestro pueblo”, añadió.

Vázquez Garced insistió en su mensaje sobre lo que consideró una campaña política baja en su contra por parte de Pierluisi Urrutia.

“Hoy como mujer de ley y orden acato el mandato del pueblo progresista, así lo solicité el domingo pasado. Mi llamado es a que queden atrás los estilos de ataque personalistas que permearon la campaña

en mi contra y que todos y todas las estadistas nos unamos para alcanzar la igualdad para todas y todos

los puertorriqueños”, sostuvo la gobernadora, quien luego del mensaje salió de su comité de campaña.

Sila María Calderón llama a la unidad del PPD Por THE STAR exgobernadora Sila María Calderón, hizo el doLpularamingo un llamado a los integrantes del Partido PoDemocrático a unirse detrás de la candidatura

para gobernador de Carlos “Charlie” Delgado Altieri.

“El pueblo se ha expresado democráticamente en forma abrumadora endosando a Charlie Delgado como su candidato a la gobernación para las elecciones de noviembre. A pesar de que respaldé a otro candidato para las primarias, acato la voluntad del pue-

blo Popular y felicito de corazón a Delgado Altieri.

Las elecciones de noviembre son una oportunidad para terminar con el mal gobierno y la corrupción que han prevalecido en los últimos años en Puerto Rico bajo la administración del Partido Nuevo Progresista. Éste es el momento de todos los Populares unirnos detrás de nuestro candidato a la gobernación, Carlos “Charlie” Delgado, para darle un triunfo contundente a Puerto Rico el próximo 3 de noviembre”, en comunicación escrita.

20

Monday, August 17, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

With American TV on pause, here are 5 British series to watch

Gabrielle Creevy in “In My Skin,” which debuted Thursday on Hulu. It’s one of many British series arriving on American TV in the next few weeks.

By MIKE HALE

A

mong the things the COVID-19 pandemic has taken away from us, at least temporarily, new Americanmade television series are not the most important. But for those who keep track of these things, the paucity of domestic scripted shows premiering is striking.

And yet there are plenty of fresh comedies and dramas arriving during that time, more than 20 of them, scoured from countries around the globe where they were made before the virus struck. The majority are British, continuing a trend that began as a small stream with the launch lineups of HBO Max and Peacock and is turning into a cross-Atlantic tsunami as summer progresses. Here are some highlights of this latest batch of British imports.

— ‘In My Skin’ Hulu Bethan (Gabrielle Creevy), the Welsh teenager at the center of this gently barbed coming-of-age story, is a full-time fabulist.

She feeds her friends and teachers a steady diet of haute-bourgeois lies — one of her more inspired ad-libs when a friend wants to come over is, “I can’t, we’re having a conservatory built” — because she’s mortified by the sad, even dangerous reality of life with her bipolar mom and drunk, deadbeat dad.

It’s part of her larger artistic impulse: While she’s spinning her vision of a stable,

prosperous home environment as a smoke screen for those around her, she’s writing derivative proletarian verses for her high school literary anthology. (The show frequently cuts away from the action to show us flashes of what’s going on inside Bethan’s head; her poetry is accompanied by heroic black-and-white images of Welsh coal miners.)

The lies begin to catch up with her, of course, partly because she’s powerfully distracted by a popular female classmate (Zadeiah Campbell-Davies). But across the five episodes of the initial season — written

by Kayleigh Llewellyn and directed by Lucy Forbes, who directed half of the second season of “The End of the ____ World,” and shown on BBC Three in March — happily smutty dark humor and light melancholy mostly win out over maudlin life lessons.

The distinctively British mix of winsomeglum kitchen-sink drama and sitcom beats works in this case, helped by the loose, runand-gun style of Forbes and her cinematographer, Benedict Spence, and Creevy’s alert, understated performance.

— ‘Hitmen’ Peacock Imagine Laverne and Shirley as a pair of working-class contract killers and you’ve pretty much got the idea of this comedy, whose six-episode first season ran in March on Sky. Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, best known as the original hosts of “The Great

British Bake Off,” play Jamie and Fran, who approach their violent occupation with the enthusiasm and professionalism of shelfstockers at a big-box store. (Joe Markham and Joe Parham, the show’s creators, previously worked together on the nutty animated series “The Amazing World of Gumball.”)

The broad humor, largely of the restless-middle-age variety, often takes place while the hit women sit in their van with a trussed-up victim, waiting for instructions from their unseen employer, Mr. K. Much of the fun comes from the actors playing the testy, garrulous targets, including Jason Watkins of “The Crown” as a crooked lawyer and Sian Clifford of “Fleabag” as a disloyal accountant.

— ‘Endeavour’ PBS This prequel series, a fixture of PBS’ “Masterpiece,” is creeping closer in time to “Inspector Morse,” the popular British mystery from which it was spun off: The seventh season of “Endeavour” is set in 1970, within hailing distance of the 1987 advent of “Morse.” And as the shows converge, the notion that the stern young detective Endeavour Morse played by Shaun Evans in the current series is going to age into the paunchy, sardonic, thoroughly modern misanthrope played by John Thaw in the original is becoming increasingly hard to entertain.

Evans’ formal, diffident, awkward Morse is fine in its own right, though, and ITV’s “Endeavour” shares the original’s pensive, almost mournful atmosphere. The new three-episode season (it premiered in February) carries on storylines from Season 6 that find Morse increasingly at odds with his boss and mentor, Fred Thursday (Roger Allam), as the case of the killer haunting the towpaths of Oxford’s canals refuses to stay solved. The racism and sexism of the time figure into other homicides, and the indignities of aging and Morse’s latest disastrous love affair contribute to the generally downbeat tone. As always, the dolorous goingson are exquisitely enacted by Evans, Allam and, as their superintendent, Anton Lesser.

— ‘We Hunt Together’ Showtime At the far end of the British mystery spectrum from “Endeavour,” this rare original series from Alibi — a channel that exists primarily to show reruns of other channel’s

crime shows — is firmly within the camp of lurid melodrama. Everyone is damaged, from the former child soldier to the brainy phone-sex worker to the frighteningly rigid cop.

Eve Myles (“Torchwood”) and Babou Ceesay (“Into the Badlands”) play the latest variation on mismatched partners — her the all-business sergeant, him the jolly, empathetic, higher-ranking detective just brought in from internal affairs. Myles and Ceesay make the familiar byplay fairly engaging, but they’re only half the story: Equal time, and nearly equal sympathy, is given across the six episodes (which debuted in Britain in May) to the Bonnie-and-Clyde killers played

by Hermione Corfield and Dipo Ola. The murder-for-love plotline may not hold water, but everyone involved is fun to watch.

— ‘The Other One’ Acorn TV This series about two half sisters who discover each other when their father dies belongs to a genre, the life-force comedy, that isn’t my favorite. (It often involves weddings, as in “Muriel’s” and “My Big Fat Greek.”) But the show’s creator, Holly Walsh (“Motherland”), deftly undercuts the inherent sentimentalities of her story, even as the supremely uptight Cathy (Ellie White) and the raucous, free-spirited Cat (Lauren Socha) predictably overcome their differences and form a new family blended from emotional openness and cheap white wine run through a SodaStream.

White, who plays the dire Princess Beatrice in “The Windsors,” is entirely convincing as the anxious and controlling but big-hearted Cathy, and she’s ably supported in the first season’s seven episodes (shown on BBC beginning in June) by Socha and a pair of scene-stealing veterans, Rebecca Front and Siobhan Finneran, as the dead man’s furious wife and his dizzy, agoraphobic mistress. Perhaps most important in setting the show’s tone is a classic-pop soundtrack centered in the missing father’s late-’70s sweet spot: Supertramp, Orleans, Hall and Oates, “The Piña Colada Song.”

More recent and coming British, Australian and Canadian series premieres: “Maxxx,” Hulu; “Ladhood,” Hulu; “Frayed,” HBO Max; “Brassic,” Hulu; “Get Even,” Netflix; “Wild Bill,” BritBox; “Coroner,” the CW; “Upright,” Sundance Now; “Being Reuben,” the CW; “Five Bedrooms,” Peacock.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

21

Museums and other New York cultural institutions can open Aug. 24

By JULIA JACOBS

M

useums and other cultural institutions will be allowed to open in New York City starting Aug. 24, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday, following five months of a pandemic shutdown that has resulted in substantial layoffs and financial crises for many of these organizations.

The announcement came as the state has seen less than 1% of all coronavirus tests return positive for seven straight days, Cuomo said in a news conference. Cuomo surprised administrators by announcing last month that museums would not be allowed to open in Phase 4, which started July 20.

The plans to lift the lockdown on cultural institutions come with some significant restrictions on the reintroduction of visitors. Institutions will be required to keep the buildings at 25% occupancy and to use a timed ticketing system, which would allow museums to carefully regulate how many people are entering at once.

The state also will require museums to control the flow of traffic through their buildings, and face coverings will be compulsory. The directive does not allow theaters and other performing arts venues to open.

For months, museum officials have been making their case to the Cuomo administration that their institutions are able to provide a safe experience for visitors.

“I’m walking on air!” Adam D. Weinberg, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, said after the announcement. “We’ve been waiting for weeks with bated breath.”

The Whitney plans to open Sept. 3, though members would be able to go from Aug. 27-31. Weinberg said that visitors will all have their temperatures taken at the start of their visits and that museum guards would help enforce social distancing.

Keeping the Whitney at 25% capacity will mean about 500 visitors allowed there at a time.

Museum officials have already begun factoring in reduced capacity restrictions into their plans for the fall. This month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art laid off 79 staff members and furloughed many more in anticipation that they would not be allowed to welcome as many visitors as they did before the pandemic struck. The Met had previously announced a reopening date of Aug. 29, though it said it was

The Metropolitan Museum of Art had announced a reopening date of Aug. 29, and had been awaiting direction from the state and city. Other museums are also unveiling their opening dates.

waiting for direction from the state and city.

Other reopening dates for the city’s museums are trickling out. The Museum of Modern Art plans to open Aug. 27, with free admission for the first month, a spokeswoman said.

The Museum of the City of New York plans to open on the same day. The American Museum of Natural History previously announced plans to open Sept. 2 for members and Sept. 9 for the general public.

In April, a task force of more than 20 museums, of various sizes and located in all five boroughs, was assembled to develop guidelines for institutions to follow once they were allowed to reopen.

The suggestions include removing some furniture to maximize the floor space where visitors can stand and “a number of training and orientation days on-site” to make sure that staff members are fully informed about how to prevent the spread of the virus and what the procedure would be for an employees who feels sick. They encourage “deescalation training,” tactics that staff members at retail stores have had to employ when customers object to wearing a mask or even become violent.

Whitney Donhauser, director of the Museum of the City of New York, said that the museum has been functionally ready to reopen since July, before Cuomo changed course.

She said that the museum will only allow two people in an elevator at a time and has put decals on the floor that show how far apart visitors should be. The museum had already updated its air filtration system in recent years.

“We’re ready to open now,” she said. “It’s just a question of making sure out staff is trained and ready to go.”

9/11 Light tribute to take different shape

By COLIN MOYNIJAN

T

he two ghostly columns of light rise each Sept. 11 from the area near ground zero, reaching upward and replicating the shape of the twin towers that were destroyed in a terrorist attack in 2001.

Called the Tribute in Light, the installation has become one of the signature elements of the annual commemorations at the former World Trade Center site, visible for a radius of up to 60 miles and extending 4 miles into the sky.

Over the years, the tribute has offered an opportunity for silent contemplation, with people seeing its paired beams as reminders of physical structures, emblems of lost lives or even a candescent bridge linking the heavens with a site of temporal tragedy.

But next month the shafts of light will not be beamed into the sky. The installation has been canceled because of concerns over the coronavirus pandemic, one of two significant changes instituted this year by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, which oversees the yearly ceremonies.

Instead of the beams, the memorial and museum are planning to honor the anniversary with an alternative that will involve buildings across the city illuminating their spires

and facades with blue lights.

“The world’s beloved twin beams of light regrettably will not shine over Lower Manhattan as part of this year’s tributes,” Michael Frazier, a memorial and museum spokesman, said in a statement, adding that the decision was made “after concluding the health risks during the pandemic were far too great for the large crew.”

Almost 40 stagehands and electricians work in proximity for more than a week as part of producing the tribute, which consists of 88 specially made Space Cannon lights, each with a 7,000-watt xenon compressed gas bulb, said Scott Campbell of Michael Ahern Production Services, which produces the event. The lights, powered by temporary generators, are set out on the roof of a garage on Greenwich Street, in two squares of about 50 by 50 feet. Traditionally the lights have been turned on around dusk and shined through the night until the dawn of Sept. 12.

Another major change came in July, when the memorial and museum said that this year’s commemoration would not include relatives onstage reading the names of the 2,983 victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and the 1993 bombing on the World Trade Center, attributing that decision to a desire to follow social-distancing guidance. Instead, the memorial said, recorded readings of names made by family members

would be broadcast.

Family members will still gather at the outdoor memorial this year, keeping their distance from one another as they take part in an hourslong ceremony that includes the recitation of the names and six moments of silence, acknowledging when each of the World Trade Center towers was struck and fell, and the times corresponding to the attack on the Pentagon and the crash of United Airlines Flight 93.

The beams were first projected on March 11, 2002, six months after the attack, and only three months after fires at the trade center were officially declared extinguished. Five artists and architects — John Bennett, Gustavo Bonevardi, Richard Nash Gould, Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda — came up with the same rough idea at about the same time.

The Municipal Art Society and Creative Time helped combine their visions and bring the project to fruition, working with lighting designer Paul Marantz. The memorial and museum began managing the tribute in 2012. Officials with the organization said they planned for the tribute to return in 2021 for the 20th anniversary commemoration.

This year’s socially distanced version of a tribute, the memorial and museum said, will include One World Trade Center and other buildings. That illumination will also start at dusk on Sept. 11 and last until the following dawn.

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Monday, August 17, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

The Caribbean dilemma

Barbados is offering a 12-month visa to any American interested in moving a work-from-home office to the island

By NINA BURLEIGH

L

ast year, more than 31 million people visited the Caribbean, more than half of them from the United States. I was one of them. Together, we contributed $59 billion to the region’s 2019 gross domestic product — accounting for a whopping 50% to 90% of the GDP for most of the countries, according to the International Monetary Fund.

I admit that in moments of pandemic weariness I have been one of those people eyeing cheap tickets to the Caribbean, wondering when I might feel ready to jump on a flight.

Now, though, our business comes with a mortal threat — that for the sake of a vacation we will bring the coronavirus to islands that are ill prepared to handle a major outbreak. But staying home could be equally ruinous. The COVID-19 lockdown — and the severity of the epidemic in the United States — has been a disaster beyond any hurricane for the Caribbean economy. The pandemic has closed airports and cruise ship docks, shut down restaurants and dive shops and deprived the Caribbean of tens of billions of dollars.

“To not have visitors arriving for any period of time, but particularly for an extended period of time, has brought immense hardship to a number of people throughout the Caribbean,” said Hugh Riley, the former head of the Caribbean Tourism Office, and a partner with Portfolio Marketing Group, which represents some islands. “Caribbean countries face an important dilemma: Try to hermetically seal their borders from

visitors until there’s an effective vaccine, or tackle the risks of restarting tourism now. It is the classic risk/ reward decision,” he said.

As of Aug. 3, 22 islands in the region have reopened to tourism, with 14 allowing visitors from the United States — with negative COVID-19 tests and, usually, periods of quarantine. It has not always gone smoothly: The Bahamas allowed Americans to visit beginning in July, slammed the door shut as coronavirus cases surged in that nation, reopened and then this week shut down again, indicative of the efforts to manage a moving crisis. Puerto Rico opened to Americans from the mainland on July 15, but pushed that date back to Aug. 15 after a weekend of widely viewed videos showing incoming visitors ignoring mask and social distancing rules. On the other end of the spectrum, Barbados is offering a 12-month visa to any American interested in moving a work-from-home office to the island.

Tourists looking to escape to a coronavirus-free tropical island have a responsibility to weigh the risks and take precautions.

So does the airline industry, says Allen Chastanet, the prime minister of St. Lucia and a former airline executive nominated by CARICOM, the 20-nation Ca-

ribbean consortium, and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States to develop recommendations for reopening the region. Chastanet has been urging the airlines to push for the development and implementation of rapid preboarding airport testing for all passengers.

“You have to have testing sites, the way you have a Dunkin’ Donuts kiosk in every airport,” he said.

“The airlines in many ways acted like they had ostrich syndrome, and said it is somebody else’s problem, but ultimately it is their problem. They have to use their advocacy strength to make it happen.”

Tourism has always been a two-edged sword for the region. It brought money for some, but also brought corruption, environmental degradation and unchecked development. No tourist who steps outside an “inclusive” resort can fail to notice the incredible disparity of wealth on the islands: palatial walled estates are often a stone’s throw from cement block shacks. Crime is such a problem on some Caribbean islands that websites are devoted to statistics to help worried travelers shop for the safest destinations. (I can attest to this problem, having been burglarized in Tobago and Vieques.) The BBC once called Jamaica “the murder capital of the world,” to howls of outrage from the Jamaicans.

Puerto Rico reopened to travelers from the American mainland in July, then pushed the date back a month over concerns about whether travelers would follow mask policies.

The San Juan Daily Star As Caribbean tourism exploded and got cheaper, local tour operators raked in money, but faced unexpected problems. Tropical infrastructure, local police and medical systems were overwhelmed on some islands even before the virus. One island friend, a divemaster at a major site, who asked that his name not be used for fear of losing his job, told me he has seen increasingly obese, relatively unhealthy American tourists who feel entitled to be squished into neoprene suits and taken to the depths as cruise lines and cheap tours market scuba diving — once reserved for scientists, Navy SEALs and the ultrawealthy and sporty — to all.

The Caribbean is the biggest source of business for the global cruise industry, which is notoriously callous about the environment. Cruise lines were the first global heralds of the coronavirus disaster and will likely be the last travel industry to come back once the virus is under control.

The cruise industry always had the upper hand on the islands. When a cruise ship docks and thousands of people are disgorged, the impression of prosperity is illusory. Most of the islands pay a per head fee to the cruise lines for each passenger who disembarks, the cruise ships are notoriously bad for reefs, and they have a stranglehold on the discretionary dollars their passengers are spending.

“Everything that can be sold on board is already sold, and anyplace on the island that could benefit has already made arrangements with the cruise company,” said Noel Mignott, a former deputy director of tourism for Jamaica and a founding partner of Portfolio Marketing Group. “If one good thing could come of COVID, I would be encouraged to see governments take this opportunity to renegotiate the relationship with the cruise lines. And if I was a cruise line, I would wave that green flag and try to be as good as I can to the environment — if only to say we are not dumping our garbage in the ocean two miles off Ocho Rios.”

The pandemic has already changed life by necessity. The Caribbean has a “ridiculously high” food import bill because of an assumption that tourists don’t want to eat local food, Riley said. The pandemic may change that. “We have been laboring under the misconception that tourists want something other than what we have. We think people want hamburgers and hot dogs. Now that we are consuming what we have, I think this will lead to an increased variety in what we produce locally,” he said.

Sven Olof Lindblad, the chief executive of Lindblad Expeditions, which offers high-end, small-ship, environmentally conscious cruises around the world, sees the pandemic as a moment in which destinations can seize control of the downside of overtourism and demand changes. “This clearly is a time to rethink — but it won’t be led by businesses who are, by and large, too fat and happy with the way it is. Create working groups to totally rethink the relationship of tourism focused on value — and not just financial value.”

Selling ‘sun, sand and sea’ The tourist industry itself trained Americans to

Monday, August 17, 2020

think of the Caribbean as “sun, sand and sea,” and to think of the diverse islands as interchangeable, Mignott said. Other than the sea they share, the islands are different, each with a unique geological and human history. The older islands to the west, including Cuba, are formed of limestone and billions of shells and skeletons of ancient marine life, while the black cliffs and crags of the younger islands along the eastern edge — where the Caribbean and the Atlantic tectonic plates grind against each other — are relics of violent prehistoric volcanic events.

In my years exploring the Caribbean, I’ve visited Guadeloupe, Bonaire, St. John, Vieques, Jamaica and Tobago, and met people who have in common that they were born with the sound of the sea in their ears, but otherwise possess unique traditions, history, language and culture, that reward visitors with a little curiosity.

The Caribbean tourism industry could take this opportunity to differentiate the islands, and maybe even put responsibility on travelers to go beyond the resort walls or cruise ship all-inclusives and explore local food and culture.

Can it happen? As airlines and cruise ships reduce capacity, and the tourist industry consolidates, the islands need to act deliberately, Riley said. “Are we going to leave it to happenstance or are we going to plan for more socially responsible tourism and put policies in place that redress and undo damage to the environment?” he asked.

The premier of the island of Nevis, Mark Brantley, said the pandemic has taught the Caribbean that overreliance on tourism is not the best model and that COVID-19 could mark the end of the era of cheap tourism and mega-cruises. “Jurisdictions are going to pivot to more tourism pitched at the luxury market, with smaller numbers of people and arguably a better yield,” he said. Additionally, he predicted that local industries, especially agriculture and agri-processing, will become more important sectors of the Caribbean economies. “Countries will be trying to diversify, where tourism continues to be important, but not the only game in town anymore.”

Cruise lines were the first global heralds of the coronavirus disaster and will likely be the last travel industry to come back once the virus is under control.

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TRAVEL

When the pandemic struck, St. Lucia was already midway into a national program to promote what he called “village tourism.”

Chastanet said that when the pandemic struck, St. Lucia was already midway into a national program to promote what he called “village tourism,” sprucing up hamlets with new infrastructure and training and providing seed money for resort workers and hotel chefs to open up their own small-scale, boutique operations. “The things we were doing just got reinforced by COVID,” he said.

“We really hope if one good thing happens from the pandemic, it will be that travel is more thoughtful, and travelers are more conscious about the environment,” said Mignott, the former deputy tourism director for Jamaica. “We don’t think people are just going to go back like Covid never happened. We really think it will be different.”

A different kind of tourism I will regret the end of cheap, mass Caribbean tourism, if it comes, but I understood its downside long before the coronavirus. I have also been another kind of island traveler — a temporary resident. I spent most of my seventh month of one pregnancy floating like a turtle in the sea outside an old-time resort called Arnos Vale in Tobago, traditionally known as a destination for birders. We couldn’t afford to lodge there, but we swam on the beach and spent time under the slow flapping porch fan where a talking parrot held court.

A year later, we moved our family into a Tobago rental for six weeks. We lived simply on peanut butter sandwiches, the daily fish catch and Betty Crocker box cakes. Every day I rode my bike past a ruined pink plantation and through a hilltop hamlet impossibly named “Whim.”

In Whim, Tobagoans lived in simple wood shacks perched on cliffs overlooking crashing surf, poor in money, but the owners of stupendous, million-dollar views.

When we returned to the island a few years later we found newly paved roads, traffic jams, and a new mood — the hum and honk of progress drowning out the hummingbirds and the cackle of the national bird, the cocrico, at dawn. I know Whim is still on the map, but I wonder who owns those little shacks.

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Monday, August 17, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

The benefits of talking to strangers

By JANE E. BRODY

I

’m a lifelong extrovert who readily establishes and relishes casual contacts with people I encounter during daily life: while walking my dog, shopping for groceries, working out at the Y, even sweeping my sidewalk. These ephemeral connections add variety to my life, are a source of useful information and often provide needed emotional and physical support. Equally important, they nearly always leave me with a smile on my face (although now hidden under a mask!).

In recent months, under stay-at-home orders due to the coronavirus pandemic, many people lost such daily encounters. I, on the other hand, have done my best to maintain as many of them as possible while striving to remain safe. With in-person time with family and close friends now limited by a mutual desire to avoid exposure to COVID-19, the brief socially distant contacts with people in my neighborhood, both those I’ve known casually for years and others I just met, have been crucial to my emotional and practical well-being and maybe even my health.

The benefits I associate with my casual connections were reinforced recently by a fortuitous find. During a COVID-inspired cleanup I stumbled upon a book in my library called “Consequential Strangers: The Power of People Who Don’t Seem to Matter … but Really Do.” Published 11 years ago, this enlightening volume was written by Melinda Blau, a science writer, and Karen L. Fingerman, currently a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the nature and effects of so-called weak ties that people have with others in their lives: the barista who fetches their coffee, the person who cuts their hair, the proprietor of the local market, the folks they see often at the gym or train station.

In an interview, Fingerman noted that casual connections with people encountered in the course of daily life can give people a feeling that they belong to a community, which she described as “a basic human need.”

As she and Blau wrote in their book, consequential strangers “are as vital to our well-being, growth and dayto-day existence as family and close friends. Consequential strangers anchor us in the world and give us a sense of being plugged in to something larger. They also enhance and enrich our lives and offer us opportunities for novel experiences and information that is beyond the purview of our inner circles. They are vital social connections — people who help you get through the day and make life more interesting.”

My tendency to “chat up” total strangers I meet in the course of just living has resulted in a slew of acquaintances who have filled my days with pleasantries, advice, information, needed assistance and, most important of all during this time of enforced semi-isolation, a valuable sense of connections to people who share my environment.

COVID-19 lockdowns have reminded so many of us of how important our relationships are to our quality of life

Casual connections with people we encounter in the course of daily life can give us the sense of belonging to a community.

— not only relationships with the friends and family members we love and know well and who know us well, but also with more casual ones that help us maintain a positive outlook during dark and distressing times.

Fingerman’s research has also shown that people who are more socially integrated are also more active physically.

“Being sedentary kills you,” she said. “You have to get up and move to be with the people you run into when exercising.” Consequential strangers also help your brain, she said, because “conversations are more stimulating than with people you know well.”

A fellow researcher in the field, Katherine L. Fiori, chairwoman of undergraduate psychology at Adelphi University, who studies social networks of older adults, has found that activities that foster “weaker ties” than are formed with family and close friends foster greater life satisfaction and better emotional and physical health.

“The greater the number of weaker ties, the stronger the association with positive feelings and fewer depressed feelings,” Fiori said in an interview. “It’s clearly not the case that close ties are all that older adults need.”

And not just older adults, all adults. Fingerman said research has shown that, in general, “people do better when they have a more diverse group of people in their lives.”

But as Fiori observed, “Unfortunately, COVID has severely

curtailed our ability to maintain weaker ties. It can take a lot more effort to do this online.”

To counter the loneliness and maintain her many casual connections, one of my Y buddies started a group email that not only filled in for the daily conversations she was missing but also gave her a continuing support system when faced with an injury and struggling with doom-andgloom isolation.

In their book, Blau and Fingerman emphasize the importance of creating and being in environments that foster relationships with consequential strangers. Decades ago when The New York Times erected cubicles for its writers and editors, it destroyed an environment that was conducive to sharing information and fostering camaraderie, prompting me to work from home most days and save the time and effort needed to dress for work and commute. I suspect that when COVID limitations are finally lifted, many more office workers will do the same and sacrifice casual work-based relationships.

As the authors wrote, “Where we live, work, shop, and mingle has everything to do with the weak ties we cultivate, and therefore our quality of life.” As they described a central theme of their book, “Casual acquaintances inspire us to venture beyond our comfort zones.” And until we do, we’ll never know what we might gain from relationships with “people who don’t seem to matter.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

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IDANIA SORIANO y la del Sistema Unificado de Manejo SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Sociedad Legal de Bienes y Administración de Casos (SUPOR LA VÍA ORDINARIA Y Gananciales compuesta MAC), al cual puede acceder EJECUCIÓN DE GRAVAMEN utilizando la siguiente dirección: por ambos MOBILIARIO (REPOSESIÓN DE https://unired.ramaiudicial.pr/ Demandados VEHÍCULO). EMPLAZAMIENsumac/ salvo que se represente TO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS CIVIL NÚM. CA2019CV04076. por derecho propio, en cuyo caso UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRE- SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO deberá presentar su alegación SIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. DE (Ejecución de Hipoteca por la responsiva en la secretaría del Vía Ordinaria).

EMPLAZAMIENAMERICA EL ESTADO LIBRE tribunal y enviar copia a la reASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. TO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS presentación legal de la parte UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PREA: MIGUEL ÁNGEL demandante cuya dirección más SIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS CÁLIZ RODRIGUEZ adelante se indica. Si usted deja UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE Quedan emplazados y notificade presentar su alegación resASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. dos que en este Tribunal se ha ponsiva dentro del referido térA: YUDELKA IDANIA radicado Demanda Enmendada mino, el tribunal podrá dictar sensobre cobro de dinero por la vía SORIANO, por sí y como tencia en rebeldía en su contra y ordinaria y ejecución de gravaca-administradora de conceder el remedio solicitado en men mobiliario (reposesión de la Sociedad Legal de la demanda, o cualquier otro, si vehículo) en la que se alega que el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su Bienes Gananciales que sana discreción, lo entiende prola parte demandada MIGUEL ÁNGEL CÁLIZ RODRIGUEZ; JU- constituye con su esposo cedente.

Lic. Baldomero A. Collazo Torres LIA VICTORIA RODRIGUEZ CAAngel Aníbal Nevárez Bufete Collazo, Connelly & Surillo, LIZ, le adeudan solidariamente a Ramos LLC AMERICAS LEADING FINANCE POR EL PRESENTE EDICTO P.O. Box 70212 LLC,: la suma de $15,551.97, por se le notifica que se ha radicado San Juan, P.R. 00936-8212 concepto de deficiencia, más los en esta Secretaría por la parte Tel. (787) 625-9999 cargos que se continúen acumuFax (787) 705-7387 demandante, Demanda sobre lando, más las costas, gastos y E-mail: bcollazo@lawpr.com Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de honorarios de abogado según Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria en Se le notifica también por la pactados, más los intereses que la que se alega adeuda la suma presente que la parte demancontinúa acumulando, más una principal de $89,663.99, intere- dante habrá de presentar para suma razonable por concepto de ses al 4% anual, 1 desde el día su anotación al Registrador de honorarios de abogados, costas 1ro de mayo de 2019, hasta su la Propiedad del Distrito en que y gastos, según pactados. Se completo pago, más la cantidad está situada la propiedad objeto les advierte que este edicto se de $9,818.80, estipulada para de este pleito, un aviso de espublicará en un periódico de circostas, gastos y honorarios de tar pendiente esta acción. Para culación general una sola vez y abogado, más recargos acumu- publicarse conforme a la Orden que, si no comparecen a conteslados, todas cuyas sumas están dictada por el Tribunal en un tar dicha Demanda Enmendada líquidas y exigibles. La propie- periódico de circulación general. dentro del término de treinta (30) dad hipotecada a ser vendida en EN TESTIMONIO DE LO CUAL, días a partir de la publicación pública subasta es: URBANA: expido el presente Edicto que del Edicto, a través del Sistema Solar marcado con el número firmo y sello en Carolina, Puerto Unificado de Manejo y AdminisTres (3) de la Manzana Cinco Rico, hoy 15 de mayo de 2020. tración de Casos (SUMAC), al guión DD (5-DD), radicado en la Lcda. Marilyn Aponte Rodriguez, cual puede acceder utilizando la URBANIZACIÓN VILLA FONTA- Secretaria Regional. Maricruz siguiente dirección electrónica: NA, situado en el Barrio Sabana Aponte Alicea, Sec Auxiliar. https://unired.ramajudicial.pr/ Abajo del término municipal de LEGAL NOTICE sumac/, salvo que se represente Carolina, Puerto Rico, con un por derecho propio, en cuyo caso área de TRESCIENTOS ONCE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE deberá presentar su alegación PUNTO OCHENTA Y OCHO PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE responsiva en la secretaría del (311.88) METROS CUADRA- PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE tribunal, se le anotará la rebeldía DOS. En lindes por el NORTE, ARECIBO SALA SUPERIOR DE y se dictará Sentencia concecon la Calle número Cinco guión CIALES. diendo el remedio así solicitado Dieciocho (5-18), en distancia de MTGLQ INVESTORS, L.P. sin más citarles ni oírles. La trece punto ochocientos (13.800) Parte Demandante Vs. abogada de la parte demandante metros; por el SUR, con los soLA SUCESION DE es el Lcdo. Gerardo Ortiz Torres, lares número Veintinueve (29) y WILFREDO BATISTA cuya dirección física y postal es: Veintiocho (28), en distancia de Cond. El Centro I, Suite 801, 500 MELENDEZ compuesta trece punto ochocientos (13.800) Muñoz Rivera Ave., San Juan, metros; por el ESTE, con el solar por Carlos J. Batista Puerto Rico 00918; cuyo número número Cuatro (4), en distancia Fontan, Wilfredo Batista de teléfono es (787) 946-5268, y de veintidós punto seiscientos Fontan yJoel Batista su correo electrónico es: gerar(22.600) metros; y por el OESTE, do@bellverlaw.com. Expedido Fontan; John Doe y con el solar número dos (2), en bajo mi firma y sello de este TriRichardRoe como distancia de veintidós punto seisbunal, en Carolina, Puerto Rico, cientos (22.600) metros. Contie- miembros desconocidos; hoy día 5 de agosto de 2020.

LEGAL NOTICE

@

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

ADMINISTRACIÓN PARA EL SUSTENTODE MENORES, Y CENTRO DERECAUDACIÓN SOBRE INGRESOSMUNICIPALES; AUREA ESTHER FONTANARROYO

Parte Demandada CASO CIVIL NUM: AR2020CV00184. SOBRE: EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA POR LA VIA ORDINARIA Y COBRO DE DINERO EMPLAZAMIENTO Y NOTIFICACIÓN DE INTERPELACIÓN POR EDICTO. Estados Unidos de América Presidente de los Estados Unidos de América Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico.

A: CARLOS J BATISTA FONTAN Y JOE L BATISTA FONTAN herederos de Wilfredo Batista Meléndez y su viuda Aurea Esther Fontan Arroyo

POR LA PRESENTE se les emplaza y requiere para que conteste la demanda dentro de los sesenta (60) días siguientes a la publicación de este Edicto. Usted deberá radicar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: · t http://unired.ramajudicial.pr/ sumac/, salvo que se presente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá radicar el original de su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia a los abogados de la parte demandante, Lcda. Marjaliisa Colon Villanueva, al PO BOX 7970, Ponce, P.R. 00732; Teléfono: 787-843-4168. ‘ En dicha demanda se tramita un procedimiento de cobro de dinero y ejecución de hipoteca bajo el número mencionado en el epígrafe.

Se alega en dicho procedimiento que la parte Demandada incurrió en el incumplimiento del Contrato de Hipoteca, al no poder pagar las mensualidades vencidas correspondientes a los meses de agosto de 2016 hasta el presente, más los cargos por demora correspondientes. Además, adeuda a la parte demandante las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado en que incurra el tenedor del pagaré en este litigio.

De acuerdo con dicho Contrato de Garantía Hipotecaria la parte Demandante declaró vencida la totalidad de la deuda ascendente a la suma de $8,012.72, más intereses a razón del 6.996% anual, así como todos aquellos créditos y sumas que surjan de la faz de la obligación hipotecaria y de la hipoteca que la garantiza, incluyendo la suma pactada para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado. j t La parte Demandante presentó para su inscripción

(787) 743-3346

25 en el Registro de la • Propiedad correspondiente, un A VISO DE PLEITO PENDIENTE (“Lis Pendens”) sobre la1 propiedad objeto de esta acción cuya propiedad es la siguiente: RUSTICA: Lote numero uno (1) : Parcela de terreno radicada en el barrio Morovis Norte, del termino municipal de Morovis, con una cabida superficial de mil cincuenta y nueve punto cuatro mil quinientos cuarenta y ocho (1,059.4546) metres cuadrados, equivalentes a cero punto dos mil seiscientos noventa y cinco (0.2695) cuerdas. En lindes por el NORTE, en veintinueve punto doscientos cuarenta y cinco (29.245) metros, con remanente de la finca principal de la cual se segrega; por el SUR, en treinta y uno punto trescientos • 1 • diez (31.310) metros, con Sucesión Marcos Hernández; por el ESTE, en treinta y dos punto novecientos cuarenta y seis (32.946) metros, con el lote numero dos (2) de esta segregación; por el OESTE, en cuarenta y cuatro punto cuatrocientos cincuenta y siete (44.457) metros, con la finca principal de la cual se segrega. Enclava casa. Inscrita al folio doscientos sesenta y cinco (265) del tomo ciento veintidós (122) de Morovis, finca número siete mil ochocientos catorce (7,814). Registro de la Propiedad de Manati. SE LES APERCIBE que de no hacer sus alegaciones responsivas a la demanda dentro del término aquí dispuesto, se les anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle. Además, como miembro de la Sucesión Wilfredo Batista Meléndez, se ha presentado una solicitud de interpelación judicial para que sirva en el término de treinta (30) días aceptaro repudiar la herencia. Se le apercibe que si no compareciera usted a expresarse dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de este edicto en torno a la aceptación o repudiación de fa herencia, se presumirá que han aceptado la herencia del causante Wilfredo Batista Meléndez y por consiguiente, responderán por fas cargas de dicha herencia conforme dispone el Art. 957 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. S2785. En Ciales, Puerto Rico, a 5 de agosto de 2020. VIVIAN Y FRESSE GONZALEZ, Secretaria Regional. Betzaida Laureano Muñiz, Sec Auxiliar.

SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS;

DEMANDANTE VS.

Sucesión de Herminia Ortiz Burgos, t/c/c Herminia Ortiz compuesta por Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal como posibles herederos desconocidos; Centro de Recaudación de Ingresos Municipales; y a los Estados Unidos de América.

Demandados CIVIL NÚM.: SJ2020CV03667.

SOBRE: DAÑOS Y PERJUICIOS; INTERFERENCIA TORTICERA CON RELACIÓN CONTRACTUAL; FRAUDE; ABUSO DEL PROCESO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. DEMANDADOS DE AMERICA EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO CIVIL NUM.: GM2019CV00251.

SOBRE: Cobro de Dinero y EjeRICO. cución de Hipoteca por la Vía A: FULANA DE Ordinaria. MANDAMIENTO. ESTAL, POR SÍ Y EN TADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA REPRESENTACIÓN DE EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESLA SOCIEDAD LEGAL TADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO DE GANANCIALES RICO. Por Cuanto: Se ha dictado COMPUESTA POR ELLA en el presente caso la siguiente Orden: ORDEN: Examinada la Y JAVIER ROBLES demanda radicada por la parte LAUREANO Quedan emplazados y notifica- demandante, la solicitud de interdos que en este Tribunal se ha pelación contenida en la misma y radicado Demanda sobre daños examinados los autos del caso, el y perjuicios; interferencia tortice- Tribunal le imparte su aprobación ra con relación contractual; frau- y en su virtud acepta la Demanda de; abuso del proceso contra la en el caso de epígrafe, así como parte demandada JAVIER F. RO- la interpelación judicial de la parte BLES LAUREANO Y FULANA demandante a los herederos del DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL codemandado conforme dispone DE GANANCIALES COMPUES- el Artículo 959 del Código Civil, TA POR AMBOS, por las razones 31 L.P.R.A. sec. 2787. Se Ordena que se detallan en la demanda. a los herederos del causante a Se les advierte que este edicto se saber, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de publicará en un periódico de cir- Tal, herederos de nombres desculación general una sola vez y conocidos a que dentro de! térque, si no comparecen a contes- mino !egal de 30 días contados a tar dicha Demanda dentro del tér- partir de la fecha de la notificación mino de treinta (30) días a partir de la presente Orden, acepten o de la publicación del Edicto, a tra- repudien la participación que les vés del Sistema Unificado de Ma- corresponda en la herencia del nejo y Administración de Casos causante Herminia Ortiz Bur(SUMAC), al cual puede acceder gos, tic/c Herminia Ortiz. Se le utilizando la siguiente dirección Apercibe a los herederos antes electrónica: https://unired.rama- mencionados: (a) Que de no exjudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se presarse dentro del término de 30 represente por derecho propio, días en tomo a su aceptación o en cuyo caso deberá presentar repudiación de herencia la misma su alegación responsiva en la se- se tendrá por aceptada; (b) Que cretaría del tribunal, se le anotará luego del transcurso del termino la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia de 30 días contados a partir de concediendo el remedio así soli- la fecha de la notificación de la citado sin más citarles ni oírles. presente Orden, se presumirá La abogada de la parte deman- que han aceptado la herencia dante es la Lcda. Ana Deseda del causante y por consiguiente, Belaval, cuya dirección física y responden por la cargas de dicha postal es: Cond. El Centro I, Sui- herencia conforme dispone el te 801, 500 Muñoz Rivera Ave., Articulo 957 del Código Civil, 31 San Juan, Puerto Rico 00918; L.P.R.A. sec. 2785. Se Ordena a cuyo número de teléfono es (787) la parte demandante a que, en 946-5268, y su correo electrónico vista de que la sucesión del caues: anadeseda@bellverlaw.com. sante Herminia Ortiz Burgos, t/c/c Expedido bajo mi firma y sello de Herminia Ortiz incluyen como heeste Tribunal, en San Juan, Puer- rederos a Fulano de Tal y Sutano LEGAL NOTICE to Rico, hoy día 13 de agosto de de Tal, como posibles herederos ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE 2020. Griselda Rodriguez Colla- desconocidos, proceda a notificar PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE do, Secretaria. Mildred Martinez, la presente Orden mediante un edicto a esos efectos una sola PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SU- Sec Serv a Sala. vez en un periódico de circulación PERIOR DE SAN JUAN. LEGAL NOTICE diaria general de la Isla de Puerto AMERICAS LEADING ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE Rico. DADA en Guayama, Puerto FINANCE LLC PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE Rico, hoy día 28 de febrero de Demandante, v.

PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE 2020. Fdo. Oscar M. Gonzalez Rivera, JUEZ. Por Cuanto: Se JAVIER F. ROBLES GUAYAMA. le advierte a que dentro del térLAUREANO Y Finance of America mino legal de 30 días contados a FULANA DE TAL Y LA Reverse, LLC partir de la fecha de notificación

de la presente Orden, acepten o repudien la participación que les corresponda en la herencia del causante Herminia Ortiz Burgos, t/c/c Herminia Ortiz. Por Orden del Honorable Juez de Primera Instancia de este Tribunal, expido el presente Mandamiento, bajo mi firma y sello oficial, en Guayama, Puerto Rico hoy día 1 de mayo de 2020. Marisol Rosado Rodriguez, Sec Regional I.

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

AMERICAS LEADING FINANCE, LLC VS

JOEL SOSTRE REYES, SU ESPOSA FULANA DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

CIVIL NUM. SJ2020CV01928 (908). SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA Y EJECUCIÓN DE GRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO (REPOSESIÓN DE VEHÍCULO).

NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO POR SUMAC.

A: JOEL SOSTRE REYES, SU ESPOSA FULANA DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

EL SECRETARIO (A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 12 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 esta. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los diez (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 13 de agosto de 2020.

En San Juan, Puerto Rico, el 13 de agosto de 2020. GRISELDA RODRÍGUEZ COLLADO, Secretaria Regional. F/Denise M. Amaro Machuca, Sec Auxiliar.

26

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

The Nets are playing hard. But can they dethrone the Raptors?

T he Brooklyn Nets had a difficult regular season. Their two best players, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, missed all or most of the season. Their highly regarded coach, Kenny Atkinson, stepped down in March.

Caris LeVert missed significant time because of a thumb injury. Other key players, like Spencer Dinwiddie and DeAndre Jordan, did not make the trip to Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla. for the NBA restart after they tested positive for the coronavirus.

Another player, Michael Beasley, was signed as a replacement only to also test positive before the restart, so he did not play either.

Jamal Crawford, the veteran scorer, was signed for bubble depth — and his debut lasted all of six minutes because of a hamstring injury.

It has been that kind of season for the Nets, who went 35-37 during the regular season. Even in what was supposed to be a bridge year, this kind of tumult was unexpected.

And yet, even with a skeleton crew in Florida, the Nets have been one of the most impressive teams inside the bubble under Jacque Vaughn, their interim coach. And now, as the No. 7 seed, they’re set to play the No. 2-seeded Toronto Raptors, the defending champions, in the first round of the playoffs.

The Nets went 5-3 in the seeding games — a series of eight games to finish the regular season. The last loss came Thursday night, when the Nets had nothing to play for with their seed locked in. Still, they nearly pulled out a win in an intense battle with a desperate Portland Trail Blazers team, which needed the victory to make the playoffs. LeVert carried the Nets to the tune of 37 points, and his last-second jumper rimmed out, allowing Portland fans to breathe a sigh of relief.

Vaughn has the Nets playing hard and competing. But what will that mean against the champs?

The Competition The Raptors barely missed a beat this year, even though Kawhi Leonard left in free agency. The only step back this season was on the offensive end: Last year, they were sixth in the league in offensive efficiency.

This year, they fell to 13th. But the team rode the league’s second-best defense to another two seed.

Pascal Siakam, a dynamic forward in his fourth season, made his first All-Star Game and averaged career highs in points, rebounds and assists. Kyle Lowry, at 34, put

Caris LeVert of the Nets, center, battled against a desperate Portland team on Thursday with the kind of performance his team will need from him to advance in the playoffs. together one of the best seasons of his career and made his sixth All-Star Game. Other players, like Fred VanVleet, Norman Powell and OG Anunoby broke out for career years as well. Even Serge Ibaka, now in his 11th season, averaged a career high in scoring (15.4).

And even with the downturn in efficiency, the Raptors were balanced offensively with six players averaging 10 or more points a game.

The Raptors will win if …

1. They rely on their talent advantage.

Toronto has more firepower than the Nets, both at the top and the bottom of the roster. And it is not talent with a penchant for lethargy either. Coach Nick Nurse is adept at getting the team to play hard. The Raptors are fourth in the NBA in net rating (essentially the average of how much they win games by).

2. Their defense continues to thrive.

The team played better defense this year than last year, even after losing one of the

best defenders in the league in Leonard. In the bubble, the Raptors had the NBA’s best defense entering their last regular-season game. It’s hard to get buckets on this team, especially without an elite shotmaker.

3. They stay healthy.

The Raptors do not have any significant injuries heading into the playoffs, except for Patrick McCaw, a reserve forward who left the bubble to receive treatment on his knee.

4. The Nets struggle defensively.

The Nets have been competitive in the restart, but this iteration of the team has not defended well, ranking 17th out of the 22 bubble teams in defense as of Friday.

The Nets win if …

1. The Monstars steal Toronto’s talent.

Maybe the entire Raptors team could oversleep and forfeit several games. Or the Nets could put Flubber on the soles of their shoes. I don’t know. You pick.

But the bottom line is that the Nets are — as another New York institution might

say — “outgunned, outmanned.” Even with Irving playing, the Nets would be huge underdogs in this series. But missing most of their best players? It would be one of the biggest upsets in NBA playoff history if the Nets won.

Everything needs to go right for the Nets at the same time that everything needs to go wrong for Toronto. The Nets have very little margin for error. But it is a weird year!

(The Raptors, of course, are familiar with this scenario of weird things happening from last year’s run: Leonard’s last-second shot that bounced in against the Philadelphia 76ers; the Golden State Warriors losing several key players to injury.)

2. Caris LeVert shows out.

LeVert is an absolute talent. There is likely an All-Star Game in his future. He is crafty at getting to the rim. He is difficult to guard in the open floor. He has even become a threat from deep, increasing his 3-point percentage to 36 percent this season from 32 percent his rookie year. And he has shown that he can take over games.

There is a world in which LeVert plays like he did against Portland on Thursday night throughout an entire playoff series, which would be dangerous for Toronto. But LeVert’s primary issues in his four-year career have been inconsistency and injuries.

The Nets have other established players who will need to be the best versions of themselves to make the most of a strong performance by LeVert: Jarrett Allen and Joe Harris. Allen had a solid season as a rimrunning, shot-blocking dynamo, averaging nearly a double-double (11.1 points, 9.6 rebounds) in only 26.5 minutes a game — all career highs. He’s going to need to be a presence at the basket on both ends.

Same for Harris, the sharpshooter who averaged his career best 14.5 points a game and shot 42 percent from 3-point range. Harris is the kind of player who can turn a game single-handedly with his shooting. The Nets will need a couple of those games from him.

3. The Raptors are not prepared.

The Nets have several players, such as Chris Chiozza and Timothé Luwawu-Cabarrot, who have taken on bigger roles in the bubble. These are players who would not get much time normally, which also means scouting reports on them might be incomplete. Luwawu-Cabarrot scored 24 points against Orlando and 26 points against Milwaukee during the seeding games, so it’s possible the Nets could steal some games just by catching the Raptors off guard.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

27

Damian Lillard gets help moving Portland out of the Yacht Club

By MARC STEIN

T

he NBA and the league’s television partners did not get their dream first-round playoff matchup pitting LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers against Zion Williamson and the New Orleans Pelicans. The solace for those parties is that the fallback option will offer no shortage of offensive flammability and star power.

Damian Lillard and the Portland Trail Blazers secured the NBA’s last undecided playoff spot Saturday with a 126-122 victory over the Memphis Grizzlies at Walt Disney World — on an afternoon that Lillard received considerable help. CJ McCollum, Jusuf Nurkic and Carmelo Anthony all played major supporting roles to ensure that the Blazers, after Lillard scored a ridiculous 154 points in Portland’s previous three games, seized the No. 8 seed in the Western Conference.

It was the first playoff play-in game in NBA history, and the Grizzlies, as the West’s No. 9 seed, had to win to force a winnertake-all rematch with the Blazers on Sunday.

Despite holding Lillard scoreless for the final nine-plus minutes and unleashing Ja Morant, the presumptive Rookie of the Year award winner, for 35 points of his own, Memphis could not contain McCollum and Anthony late. The Blazers thus advanced to a firstround series with the top-seeded Lakers that begins Tuesday night.

McCollum, playing through a fracture in his back that he sustained July 31 in Portland’s first game of the restart against Memphis, scored 8 of his 29 points in the final 3:08, including two big shots over Morant.

Anthony, the former New York Knick whose career appeared to be over before the Blazers signed him in November, sank a clutch 3-pointer from the wing with 20.2 seconds remaining in regulation and finished with 21 points. And Nurkic, who announced via Instagram before tipoff that his grandmother had died from COVID-19 in his native Bosnia, was immense with 22 points and 21 rebounds — including 15 points and 17 rebounds by halftime.

Lillard, who still managed to lead Portland scorers with 31 points, gratefully accepted all that help on a day that began with the All-Star guard being named the outstanding player of the NBA bubble so far. The league handed out awards Saturday for the eight “seeding” games that each of the 22 teams played from July 30 to Friday. Lillard averaged 37.6 points in those eight games and was a unanimous winner of the bubble’s

The N.B.A. and the league’s tv companions didn’t get their dream first-round playoff matchup pitting LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers towards Zion Williamson and the New Orleans Pelicans.

MVP honors.

“We didn’t fight as hard as we did in the bubble to get the eighth seed and get beat up on,” Lillard said, quickly turning his attention to the looming showdown with James and the Lakers.

Nurkic, paying tribute to his late grandmother, said, “I didn’t want to play. I think she made me play.”

The Grizzlies arrived in Florida as the West’s No. 8 seed and held a 3 1/2-game lead over their closest pursuers, including Portland. But the new play-in concept gave teams such as Portland and the Phoenix Suns — who were 8-0 before being eliminated — playoff hope as the Grizzlies skidded to a 2-6 record while also losing Jaren Jackson Jr. (knee) and Justise Winslow (hip) to injuries.

Memphis fell behind by 16 points early Saturday but rallied to lead for much of the fourth quarter, exposing the defensive frailties that have plagued Portland despite one of the most prolific scoring runs of Lillard’s career.

Like Lillard, Morant received no shortage of assistance, too, with Jonas Valanciunas totaling 22 points and 17 rebounds, and Dillon Brooks and Brandon Clarke adding 20 points apiece.

The Blazers, though, have made a bubble habit of finding ways to escape in these sorts

of games. It was Portland’s fourth successive win — by a total of just 11 points — and a cruel ending for the Grizzlies. Memphis had been widely projected as a bottom-feeder coming into the season, only to exceed last season’s win total of 33 in nine fewer games.

“We should be proud of what we did this season,” said Morant, who revealed afterward that he had been playing with a fractured right thumb for the past four games.

Along with the other five teams in Florida that did not hold a playoff spot when the regular season was suspended indefinitely in March in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Portland has been staying at the Yacht Club, widely regarded as the third-choice property out of the trio of hotels that are housing NBA teams at Walt Disney World.

But turning back the Grizzlies has earned the Blazers an upgrade. In coming days, they will be moved into the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa, Disney’s flagship resort and where the Grizzlies had been staying.

“We played worthy of that hotel throughout the season,” McCollum said of the Yacht Club, referring to the Blazers’ 29-37 record through March 11.

At 7-2 in the bubble and with Nurkic back from a bad leg injury, Portland has frequently been promoted by NBA pun-

dits, most notably Charles Barkley of Turner Sports, as a team that can push the Lakers despite its defensive issues and mounting fatigue.

“We knew when we got here that we had real action if we can take care of our business,” McCollum said. “We can compete with anyone; we know that.”

Blazers coach Terry Stotts said, “What we’ve done in these two weeks is really special. I couldn’t be more proud of a group of guys, because we were up against it every game, nine straight games, where our season was basically in the balance.”

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28

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

He needed to train. David Duchovny’s pool was out there.

By MATHEW FUTTERMAN

I

t was the weekend after the Fourth of July and Rudy Garcia-Tolson was still searching for a place to swim in Southern California. With all the public pools near his home closed, his attempt to come out of a three-year retirement at age 31 and make a fifth United States Paralympic team was stuck in first gear.

He’d started swimming and surfing in the ocean, plenty fun and a tough workout but hardly the best way to prepare to face elite competition in the 200-meter individual medley and the 100-meter breaststroke.

Then Garcia-Tolson’s phone lit up notifying him of an Instagram message. David Duchovny, best known for playing Special Agent Fox Mulder on TV’s “The X-Files,” was reaching out. Duchovny, a fellow swimmer and triathlete, had read the article in The New York Times detailing GarciaTolson’s efforts to find a place to train. The actor had an idea.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Rudy Garcia-Tolson: I was still trying to find a pool when I got one of the great messages of my life. It was from a woman who said she worked with the actor David Duchovny, telling me to get in touch with her about finding a pool to train in.

She gave me his number and told me to reach out. When I did, he told me he had a 25-meter, one-lane pool in his backyard. I was welcome to use it whenever I wanted. I just needed to give him a little notice.

The funny thing is I actually met David at the Malibu Triathlon when I was a kid.

I was there with the Challenged Athletes Foundation. He didn’t remember that when I told him, but then I showed him a picture of us, and then he totally did. How crazy is it that I met this guy like 20 years ago and now I am training in his pool?

So far I’ve gone about 12 times. I text him, tell him when I am going to be there. I park in his driveway, next to the garage. I go right to the pool.

The first few times we talked some.

Now it’s less and less. I uncover the pool, get my equipment out, and within five minutes I jump in. I do my 90-minute, or maybe a two-hour workout and I am done. It’s pretty nice.

The first few days I was in awe that I was in Malibu, at an outdoor private pool.

After I got over that, I was able to get into my zone.

Rudy Garcia-Tolson doing the backstroke in David Duchovny’s backyard pool in Malibu, Calif.

It’s my fourth week now. I feel tired and sore, but it’s the good type of tired and sore that I really missed and enjoy. I’m hitting my intervals and going fast, and feeling good again.

After being off for basically 3 1/2 years, it’s not easy. All my workouts are between 4,500 and 6,000 meters, but the surprising thing to me is I am all alone and mentally I am able to stay in it.

Usually when you are training, you can pace off your teammates, you got a coach yelling at you, the clocks are right there in front of you. Being alone it’s very easy to zone out and forget about the effort, and I’m not doing that.

How do I know that? There is a little digital clock next to the side of the pool.

Everything I do is based on the clock. I can see I am getting better at hitting my intervals. I will try to do 10 sets of 100 meters, starting another one every 90 seconds. I can already hit 1:15 or 1:20 for the first three or four. Then I start to fall off.

I also do longer sets. I’ve done 10 intervals of 400 meters, starting each one every

6 1/2 minutes.

I’ve got a routine. On the odd number I come in at 5:40 or 5:50. On the even numbers I attach a pull buoy, which lifts my hips, or my hand-paddles, which force me to pull more water, or my snorkel, so I don’t have to break to breathe. I also use my fin sometimes, so I can kick using my abs, and use the parachute, which slows me down and makes me focus on my arms.

For these first few months, the focus is to stay consistent and put in yardage. I am going about 20,000 meters a week, which is about half of what I would be doing if I hadn’t taken most of the last three years off.

But I have to understand and accept the process of rebuilding. I have to be hitting the Paralympic standards by January and be ready for the trials in less than a year. I can’t afford to get injured. I don’t have the time.

My original plan was to be in Colorado training by now. But since I’ve got access to this pool and we have no idea what is going to happen with the virus rates, I am going to push that back a month.

I’m living in my childhood bedroom in

Bloomington, Calif., but I have no urge to leave right now. I get a stipend from being an ambassador with the Challenged Athletes Foundation. If I can make the national team again I will be eligible for a little money, which helps.

I might be able to pick up some speaking engagements, but I am late for this Olympic cycle and most of the sponsors are committed elsewhere.

It’s going to be a tough year financially.

I know that. I’m not very good with money and finances. I haven’t saved my whole life and once I go to Colorado, I’ll have to be paying for my own place, even if eventually I am swimming at the Olympic Training Center.

For now, I am going to keep doing what I am doing. I’ve got so much more experience. It’s going to come. It’s a process. In two weeks I will bump the training up to five or six times a week.

I’ve got so much more perspective now.

I’m really doing this for myself. I haven’t had any contact with a coach. That’s fine. There is nothing to talk about right now.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 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 miss hugging friends and being with friends the way it used to be. You long for some kind of normality. Life still feels strange and out of balance. Throw a barbecue for a small group of friends. Keep guidelines in place to keep everyone safe while enjoying being together.

Taurus

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 17, 2020

(April 21-May 21)

You’re finding it harder to keep a friend who insists on living in the past, cheerful. Despite reminding them of the blessings around them, they still complain about life not being as good as it used to be. Their negative attitude is starting to pull you down too. You may have to step away from this friendship to protect your general well-being.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Before agreeing to a proposition someone puts to you, take time to think how you feel about it. People want you to be honest with them. If you sense there is something wrong or there is someone you can’t trust, you can be diplomatic but truthful. Someone might thank you for your observations.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

It will take gentle persistence to get a partner or close friend to reveal their true feelings. Ignoring your intuition would be a big mistake.

You will sense someone’s words aren’t what they are thinking. Trust your intuition and with some quiet encouragement you will get the truth out of them.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

You’ve lost your trust in a friend and this is hurting you badly. You have confided in them for years and never imagined they would betray you. When someone goes behind your back and does something they said they’d never do, there’s nothing much you can do about it. Do give yourself time to grieve.

Until you face up to problems that are holding you back, you will feel frustrated and discouraged. Whether it is a relationship, a joint arrangement or restrictive conditions is immaterial. The important thing is to work out what is causing the issue and then deal with it. To move forward, you need to face up to past problems.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

You’ve been doing too much and you’re exhausted. Not only this, but you’re tired of having to put boring tasks in front of having fun. After all the work you’ve been doing recently, you’re entitled to take some time off.

Even a walk in the park or walking your dog will feed your soul.

People at home and at work are unpredictable. It might feel as if you’re surrounded by negative influences. A youngster in the family is moody, a colleague is miserable and a neighbour is temperamental. The less time you spend with others and the more time you spend on your own, the better.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

You’re trying to be objective but this isn’t easy when dealing with a highly emotional situation. Taking things too personally will stop you making sensible decisions. Getting emotionally involved in a friend’s predicament could make you ill. You’re doing too much for others and not enough for yourself..

Brainstorming sessions will be enjoyable. Share your hopes and dreams with your family and friends. Someone will have ideas that will make it easier for you to be creative. Take any opportunity to exercise your imagination.

Creative outlets like baking, painting, gardening and writing make it easier to handle daily stress.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

You aren’t happy about a decision or commitment recently made. You’re spending a lot of time going over everything in your mind. If you regret this decision it is time to let other people know how you really feel. It isn’t too late to pull out. Don’t continue with anything that makes you uneasy or uncomfortable.

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Don’t count on anyone else to do a job you should be doing yourself. It will be tempting to let someone else do this for you but either you will get into trouble or their workmanship will leave a lot to be desired. The sensible thing to do is just get on with it on your own.

In the end, you will feel better about this too.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Monday, August 17, 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

Monday, August 17, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star