Monday Aug 3, 2020

Monday, August 3, 2020

San Juan The

50¢

DAILY

Star

The Mystery Behind Beyoncé’s ‘Black King’ P20

Dubious Beginning of Primary Elections More Concerns Over Early Voting and Alleged Lack of Communication from SEC Will the Rest of the Election Process Run Properly?

Retirees: Governor’s Constitutional Amendment Proposal P5 Won’t Solve a Thing

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

P4

FEMA Grants $2.5 Million to Airport for a Power Upgrade P5

2

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

Queremos ayudarte en la compra de tu nuevo hogar

EN COOP LAS PIEDRAS te lo podemos financiar... ¡Estamos aquí pa ti!

*Pregunta como puedes obtener hasta un 100% de financiamiento.

• RURAL • REHABILITACIÓN • TERRENO • COMERCIAL • CONVENCIONAL • VETERANO • CONSTRUCCIÓN COOP LP NMLS #787612

787.733.2821 EXT: 1918, 1223, 1224, 1231, 1251

CAGUAS • LAS PIEDRAS • SAN LORENZO • HUMACAO • TRUIMPH PLAZA • YABUCOA • HATO REY • CAROLINA Ciertas resticciones aplican. El financiamiento será basado en el tipo de producto hipotecario que aplique en la solicitud Los depósitos y acciones están asegurados por la cantidad de $250.000 por COSSEC. En caso de insolvencia, por estar asegurados con COSSEC estamos excluidos de todo seguro federal.

www.cooplaspiedras.com

GOOD MORNING

3

August 3, 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.

Oversight board to hold public meeting Tuesday

Today’s

Weather

By THE STAR STAFF

Day

Night

High

Low

90ºF

78ºF

Precip 20%

Precip 20%

Partly Cloudy

Mostly Clear

Wind: Humidity: UV Index: Sunrise: Sunset:

T

From ESE 14 mph 71% 10 of 10 6:02 AM Local Time 6:57 PM Local Time

INDEX Local 3 Mainland 7 Business 11 International 14 Viewpoint 18 Noticias en Español 19 Entertainment 20 22 Travel

Health Science Legals Sports Games Horoscope Cartoons

23 24 25 26 29 30 31

he Financial Oversight and Management Board announced over the weekend that it will hold its 20th public board meeting on Tuesday to discuss Puerto Rico’s audited financial statements, both in the context of ensuring urgent issuance of delayed audits and timely issuance of current audits, while reviewing the audit service quality of BDO Puerto Rico, as requested by members of Congress after allegations were made last summer against the firm’s former managing partner.

The oversight board had asked the commonwealth government during its public meeting on July 1 to present a plan for how the government intends to complete the significantly delayed annual reports for fiscal years 2017, 2018 and 2019, while ensuring the issuance of the 2020 audit on a timely basis. The island Treasury Department has since submitted an outline of its plan, which the oversight board is reviewing. The members of the board invited the Treasury secretary to discuss the government’s plan during the public meeting. The government’s proposal will be available on the oversight board’s website, https://oversightboard.pr.gov.

“It is alarming that these financial reports have not been completed despite efforts made to date by several treasury secretaries, and the Oversight Board would like to thank Secretary Francisco Parés Alicea for submitting the Government’s proposal for discussion,” said Oversight Board Executive Director Natalie Jaresko. “The Oversight Board has been patient in light of the many disasters that required

the Government’s full and primary attention. Nonetheless, the Oversight Board has pressed for process changes, for more accountability, and for more urgency. Puerto Rico will not regain access to the capital markets if its Government cannot provide timely audited financial statements, thus, it will be unable to meet the mandate of PROMESA [the federal Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act].”

Regarding BDO, the oversight board announced recently that an evaluation of the firm’s audits of commonwealth agencies did not violate any ethical rules. The evaluation was done after a top executive from BDO was arrested along with former heads of Education and health agencies on corruption charges. During Tuesday’s public meeting, the oversight board will respond to the government’s plan and outline its recommendations to enable compliance with the task of completing the issuance of delayed audits within a year and enabling the issuance of audits for fiscal years 2020 and 2021 on a timely basis.

The oversight board also said in a statement that it will present a fact-based, apolitical report on the opportunity to bring pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing to Puerto Rico in light of national concerns regarding supply chain security. The oversight board commissioned a report about a month ago as discussions in Congress began with regard to legislation that might influence companies to return or expand manufacturing in the United States.

4

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

PDP remains doubtful if primary elections will run properly as SEC struggles to respond

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

W

ith the State Elections Commission (SEC) unaware of how many voters were left out of the New Progressive Party’s (NPP) early primary election vote amid a series of inconveniences, Popular Democratic Party (PDP) Rep. Rafael “Tatito” Hernández said on Sunday that his party is doubtful about its primary elections going off smoothly as communication with SEC President Juan Ernesto Dávila has been poor.

When a member of the press asked if there were any concerns about the PDP’s early vote confronting similar difficulties as the NPP’s early vote on Saturday, Hernández said PDP municipal presidents have questioned what mechanisms the SEC has to guarantee that people who voted in the NPP primaries won’t vote in theirs. The party still has doubts given that the SEC has yet to respond to their concerns.

“Yesterday, they [SEC] determined that early voting will continue on the day of the main event, which means that their lists won’t include an exclusion list. In our case, the PDP will have its early vote on [Saturday] August 8.

What will the SEC do to guarantee that the updated lists will be available in every voting center the next day? We have great doubts on this,” Hernández said. “We will be submitting a letter early on Monday [today] asking for the commission to do its job. We hope they answer.”

However, the PDP spokesman in the House of Representatives said Dávila should not wait for the PDP, but rather should present alternatives to prevent mixed voting during Saturday’s primary elections. Meanwhile, he

called out the SEC president as he still has not responded to the San Juan Superior Court’s demands from various organizations, including the Citizen’s Victory Movement and the Puerto Rico Democratic Party, and has not been readily available to clarify how the SEC will safeguard citizens’ right to vote.

“He should present to the people what the alternatives are for ensuring that the lists, at the moment people are voting, will exclude voters who already voted in [Saturday’s NPP] primary. … Let’s not forget that the only way to control voters is through inking. If that voter was inked yesterday, they could arrive to vote as they appear on the lists again,” he said. “There could be double votes in the NPP or a mixed vote from someone who voted in the NPP’s primary election and then goes to the PDP to, probably, vote against the strongest candidate that the opposition has.”

SEC president insists early NPP vote was fair Amidst backlogs while handing out ballots, voting centers opening late, candidates transporting ballots to voting centers and damaged equipment in the NPP’s early vote, Dávila said that everything will be done to assure fair elections by Aug. 9.

“Today the SEC has had setbacks in the administration of the early vote of the NPP local primary,” Dávila said.

“However, we will guarantee that all voters can exercise their right to vote. The NPP Special Primary Commission approved by resolution that the voters who requested the early vote and [could] not exercise it [Saturday], will be able to vote on Aug. 9, 2020 through a preferential voting system.”

According to a written statement, the determination was consulted and approved by the electoral representa-

tives of the campaigns of the NPP gubernatorial primary candidates. Likewise, Dávila said that despite the adversities the SEC is dealing with, such as the lack of a budget, the COVID-19 pandemic, earthquakes and storm events, it will make sure that citizens exercise their right to vote.

“We will work tirelessly so that both the NPP and PDP local primaries, and the general election and the [statehood ‘yes or no’] plebiscite can be carried out correctly and the will of the people expressed in the ballot boxes is respected,” he said.

Since the process began, complaints have been received over a lack of materials or incomplete or late materials, and incomplete voter lists, among other issues.

At press time, the Electoral Commissioner of the NPP, María D. Santiago, announced that the second day of the early voting process was carried out without major setbacks.The votes of the people registered in the lists of Early Voting at Home were collected. These are voters with mobility impairments or bedridden. According to the NPP Primary Commission, there were more than 3,000 requests to vote at home. On Friday, August 7, 2020, the early vote of inmates will be administered in the different penal institutions of the Island.

PDP spokesman: ‘We must take the Rosselló-Pierluisi-Vázquez government out’

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

P

opular Democratic Party (PDP) Spokesman Rafael “Tatito” Hernández called on voters Sunday to go out and exercise their right to vote in the party’s primary elections this Saturday as doing so will “formulate the voting ballot that contrasts with the New Progressive Party (NPP) and defeat the most corrupt and incompetent government in the country’s history.”

During a Zoom video conference, PDP hopefuls for the House of Representatives had the chance to

share why they believe voters should exercise their right to vote in the party’s primary elections, as the party has 16 hopefuls with the chance of becoming members of the Puerto Rico Legislature. Meanwhile, Hernández pointed out that the main reason people should support these new candidates is to get rid of legislative bodies that are both operated by the NPP. “The NPP House and Senate, operated by Thomas Rivera Schatz and Carlos ‘Johnny’ Méndez, have turned their backs on the people with their inaction, looking the other way, and defending what’s indefensible,” Hernández said. “We are here to remind the country of the disaster from this corrupt government, and the Legislature’s complicity. We must take the RossellóPierluisi-Vázquez government out.”

Hernández insisted that people should go out and vote because Puerto Rico needs a new Legislature. He said the island should not be ruled by people who are the subjects of ongoing local and federal investigations.

“People of Puerto Rico: we must go out and vote next August 9 to forge together a new Legislature for Puerto Rico,” Hernández said. “We need a balanced Legislature, with good people with a career path, with causes, with life experiences; [we need] serious and committed people. That’s why I’m making this call today.”

The PDP house hopefuls are Enid Monge, Pedro

Irene Maymí, Carlos Javier Sánchez, Ángel Rodríguez Otero, Aníbal Ribot, Luis Luque, Juan Torres, Moisés Rodríguez, Benny Álvarez, José “Cheito” Rivera Madera, Ángel “Tito” Fourquet, Marlese Sifre, Estrella Martínez, Juan José Santiago, Norberto Olmeda, and Raymond Rivera Furte.

WE BUY OR RENT IN 24HRS

787-349-1000

SALES • RENTALS • VACATIONS RESIDENTIAL • COMMERCIAL PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (SOME RESTRICTIONS MAY APPLY).

FREE CONSULTS REALTOR

Ray A. Ruiz Licensed Real Estate Broker • Lic.19004 rruizrealestate1@gmail.com

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

5

FEMA grants $2.5 million for initial phase of power system upgrade at LMM airport

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Puerto Rico Ports Authority, which is responsible for Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, will receive more than $2.5 million under Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Hazard Mitigation Grant Program for a power system, the federal agency announced in a statement Sunday.

The funds are for the proposed design and installation of a combined heat and power generation system at the facility that will increase redundancy and reduce service interruptions at the largest international travel hub in the Caribbean, which in 2019 received some 9.2 million passengers.

Beyond the initial design phase, the completed project may include additional funding for construction costs, which will total an estimated $57 million.

Likewise, the completed project will also allow the airport to operate for seven days at 90 percent capacity in the event of an atmospheric event or other emergency that may cause power failure, the agency said.

“The international airport is an essential part of the local economy, which also connects residents of Puerto Rico with their families and loved ones living abroad,” said Alex Amparo, the federal disaster recovery coordinator for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. “Ensuring that this link is not affected is what inspires us to continue our mission of strategically strengthening the island.”

The cogeneration equipment that is part of this first planning phase will operate along with the existing power

grid. Engineering designs, electrical studies and permitting will be done in compliance with environmental and safety requirements during this initial period.

“Because we are an island, maintaining the operation of the main airport after an emergency is a high-priority project for the Authority,” said Ports Authority Executive Director Joel A. Pizá Batiz. “We are grateful to FEMA for this important funding allocation, which will allow for the reimbursement of the first phase of the project that consists of the study and design aspect.”

Ottmar Chávez, executive director of the Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resilience, stated that “mitigation projects are a fundamental part of the

process of rebuilding Puerto Rico.”

“Impacting critical structures and services raises the level of preparedness for future events,” he said.

Aerostar increasing airline fees The news comes after Aerostar Holdings informed airlines a month ago that it was going to increase airline fees until December even though the airport was assigned a $33.4 million subsidy for its operations under the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Aerostar Holdings called for an increase in airport fees because of a reduction in the volume of passengers as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The matter was discussed at a recent Ports Authority board meeting after Tourism Co. Director Carla Campos expressed concerns that the hikes could delay the recovery of the tourism sector and put in jeopardy the volume of flights coming to Puerto Rico.

Airport fees paid by the airlines are divided pro rata based on the number of passengers and other factors.

These funds are used to pay for the maintenance of airport facilities and help the operator cover its expenses.

Aerostar Holdings opted to increase airline fees as it must generate $60 million to make ends meet.

The fee increases are 91 percent for domestic flights, 78 percent for international flights and 29 percent for landing fees, but the exact amount of the fees varies.

The decision comes at a time when airlines are facing a complicated fiscal panorama because of the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Pensioners say governor’s constitutional amendment proposal for retirement plans won’t solve anything

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

P

ensions Defense Front spokesman Pedro Pastrana said Sunday that Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced’s proposal to put the retirement plans of public employees on a higher constitutional level is a hoax because it does not exempt pensions from being axed under bankruptcy and treats pensioners unfairly.

Pastrana and other members of the front called on Vázquez to comply with her commitment as announced in her budget speech on June 18, in which she supported House Bill (HB) 2434, the Law for a Dignified Retirement, and opposed cuts to active public employees’ and retirees’ pensions in the budget.

Pastrana deemed the governor’s proposal an electoral exercise.

“Once the Pensions Defense Front reviewed the proposal, we saw that it was a hoax because what they want to do is that they will put bondholders first,

our pensions go next, and, later, essential services,” Pastrana told the Star. “We are telling people that if this amendment is approved, although this is going to happen prospectively in a few years, this means that after the government pays its debt to bondholders and, then, we [public employees and pensioners] might get paid with what the government has left.”

Pastrana said the proposal puts the pensions into an unfair competition as retirees have to wait for the government to comply with other debts before their needs.

“It puts us in unfair competition because we want to save our pensions,” he said. “As it says in the Law for a Dignified Retirement, which was made to comply with the Financial Oversight and Management Board’s requirements, which demands that the most vulnerable should be protected, the elderly are supposed to be protected; and also, there has to be economic development. If the money stays here and we keep our 64,000 retirees investing here, we will be able to get

funds and pay for contractual obligations that the government needs.”

Meanwhile, Pastrana added that if there is to be an amendment to Puerto Rico’s Constitution, it should be “pensions and essential services come first,” although, he noted, it would not do much because the U.S. government could undercut that determination.

Pastrana also said retirees have sacrificed enough, so the government should do its part now.

“With special laws, the government took away our Christmas bonus, our contributions to our healthcare plan, and our summer bonus, which we made them save $10 million annually,” he said. “Going against our pensions is burdensome at this moment of our lives in order to pay for a debt that we had no involvement with.”

As The Star asked about their opinion on Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz not replying to how much the amendment might cost as it would be determined during the general elections on Nov. 3, Pastrana said that not putting HB 2434

in the Legislature’s special session and instead including a plebiscite is a waste of money, as the referendum might cost up to $5 million if it is approved.

“It’s incredible how they want to impose a referendum on a bankrupt country that will add $5 million more to the cost of general elections,” he said. “I can see now why we are under bankruptcy; our government doesn’t know how to manage budgets.”

6

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

Regulatory protocol for elderly care facilities during virus emergency becomes law

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

S

en. Miguel Romero Lugo on Sunday applauded the signing of a bill requiring that public and private establishments that house elderly people comply with protocols and necessary measures to respond to the COVID-19 emergency.

The measure includes homes for adults with disabilities that are licensed by the Family and Children Administration, and geriatric homes licensed by the Anti-Addiction and Mental Health Services Administration.

“Certainly, our elderly people require more attention and care during this pandemic,” the senator said. “This measure seeks that the establishments where they reside take all precautions at the administrative level, with the staff and with the residents to minimize as much as possible the possibilities of outbreaks of COVID-19 within these facilities.”

Romero Lugo also stated that “the measures to be implemented arise from experience and best practices to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.”

“It is imperative that minimum, clear and uniform measures be established so that all establishments protect those in their care,” he said.

As part of the protocols for facility residents, medical or nursing staff will screen all residents for coronavirus-related

symptoms, while guiding them to report any related symptoms.

The use of masks will be imperative for all personnel or visitors within the establishment, as will the use of gloves and constant hand disinfection.

In addition, a six-foot distance between residents will be maintained in the common area.

In the event that a resident has a fever or COVID-19 symptoms, they will be transferred to an isolated room with a closed door. If this is not possible, the greatest possible measures will be taken to achieve isolation. The staff dedicated to caring for an isolated individual may not have contact with the rest of the residents.

The establishments must notify the families or contact persons of the residents about a possible infection; the Health and Family departments will carry out the corresponding tests to determine the spread of COVID-19.

As for the personnel of the establishments, anyone who shows symptoms related to the coronavirus -- or who resides with someone who presents symptoms -must immediately notify the administration and will not be able to report to work. The information should be kept confidential; however, the establishment will notify the Department of Health to carry out the corresponding test for the staff or anyone in their homes.

All staff will take their temperature and

will be evaluated upon arrival at the establishment. In addition, social distancing of at least six feet of distance between each must be practiced, except in cases where a pressing situation prevents it.

The staff should also frequently practice handwashing for 20 seconds with soap and water, in addition to using hand sanitizer, which will be accessible to staff at all times.

Face-to-face meetings will also be avoided and, if necessary, should be held briefly and in a large area to accommodate staff remaining at least six feet apart.

The administration must limit access to visitors. During visits, restrictions due to the pandemic should be posted in a visible place.

Likewise, the administration must have

hygiene and cleaning stations, as well as easily accessible garbage cans. Staff will frequently clean and disinfect all highcontact areas.

It has been shown that the elderly population is the most at risk of presenting severe symptoms of COVID-19 if a person within a home is infected with the novel coronavirus.

The senator said that in the news media and social networks it has been shown how depressing the experience with the elderly population was in the state of New York.

Of the nearly 613 senior care facilities in New York State, more than half reported positive cases, for a total of 4,630 cases as of April 11. Those centers have recorded more than 1,439 deaths from the pandemic.

Here’s what to do if you receive unsolicited seeds from China

By THE STAR STAFF

P

uerto Rico Agriculture (DA) Secretary Carlos A. Flores Ortega confirmed over the weekend that citizens in Puerto Rico have reported the arrival of unsolicited seeds from China.

“In the past few days we have been seeing through the media and social networks packages sent from China to the United States with seeds that have not been requested by citizens. These seeds have arrived in Puerto Rico and as a precaution, we urge anyone who receives a package that has not been ordered by the recipient, to notify the corresponding authorities to immediately remove the contents,” the secretary said.

At this time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), Customs and Border Protection, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with other government entities, continue working on the investigation, identification and determination of risk that the arrival of these unsolicited seeds may entail.

DA Assistant Secretary Jesús Santiago Olivero noted that “we need to identify the seeds to ensure that they do not pose

a risk to the agricultural industry or the environment.”

“We are awaiting the evaluation [of seeds] by specialized scientific personnel to address the problem,” he said. “We urge that you do not experiment with planting the seeds because we do not have a clear picture of who is sending them and the purpose. Nor should they be thrown in the trash; they can contain pathogens, pests or invasive species that could be harmful.”

The DA Plant Health Division is working with federal entities to manage the collection of seeds in Puerto Rico and the corresponding evaluation.

Santiago Olivero noted that “it has been reported that the seeds began to arrive in the United States more than two weeks ago and the volume that has been reported already affects at least 22 states in the nation and Canada, which is worrisome because the variety of seeds that have been received can not be specified.”

The official urged any citizens who receive the seeds to follow these recommendations: * Keep and save the seeds in the original packaging, including the address where the seed was shipped from. * Do not open the package in which the seeds are stored.

* For no reason should the seeds be planted or manipulated. * Store the entire contents of the package in a sealed plastic bag. * Immediately contact the appropriate government entities.

According to press reports, the USDA said in a recorded statement released on July 29 that officials have identified 14 species of the seeds, such as herbs and other plants including hibiscus and mint.

“We have identified 14 different species of seeds, including mustard, cabbage and morning glory, and some of the herbs such as mint, sage, rosemary and lavender, then other seeds such as hibiscus and roses,” said Osama El-Lissy, a deputy administrator for the USDA’s APHIS, according to the online magazine Business Insider.

According to a USDA statement, the mysterious seeds are likely part of “’brushing scam’ in which people receive unsolicited items from a seller who then posts false customer reviews to boost sales.”

“USDA is currently collecting seed packages from recipients and will test their contents and determine if they contain anything that could be of concern to U.S. agriculture or the environment,” the statement said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

7

Suburban voters sour on Republicans in battle for the House

By EMILY COCHRANE and CATIE EDMONSON

F

or Heather Vaughn, a substitute teacher and graduate student, the decision last month to place the black sign with colorful lettering in her front yard — the one that said, “Black Lives Matter” and “Science is Real” — felt like an act of courage.

In previous years, such a placard might have drawn unwanted attention in her suburban, tree-lined neighborhood, where expansive homes with manicured gardens had been decked out with blue ribbons and signs of support for the police.

But now it is one of three on her block that reflect support for nationwide protests against police brutality and a growing sense of unease with President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus.

A self-described independent, Vaughn, 41, had supported Rep. Ann Wagner, her Republican congresswoman, in past years, but more recently soured on her.

This year, given her frustration and anger with Trump, Vaughn is confident she will not vote for Wagner and is wrestling with whether she in good conscience can vote again for any of the local Republicans down the ballot whom she would normally back.

“That is an issue that we’ve had my entire life and we still haven’t solved,” she said of the systemic racism that drove recent protests around the country, much as it did in 2014 in nearby Ferguson, Missouri. “It’s just going to get swept under the rug again unless we do something significant at the polls in November.”

Suburban districts like these have long been critical bases of Republican support, packed with affluent white voters who reliably chose Republicans to represent them in Congress. Democrats seized control of the House in 2018 by making inroads in communities like these, and Republicans have tied their hopes of reclaiming power to preserving their remaining footholds there. But as Trump continues to stumble in his response to the pandemic and seeks to stir up racist fears with pledges to preserve the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” such districts are slipping further from the party’s grasp, and threatening to drag down congressional Republicans in November’s elections.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) and State Sen. Lou Ann Linehan speak with a resident, center left, while canvassing in Omaha, Neb., on July 16, 2020.

Interviews with more than two dozen party officials, strategists and voters in areas like these help explain what recent polls have found: that Trump’s strategy is alienating independent and even some conservative voters — particularly women and better-educated Americans — who are turned off by his partisan appeals and disappointed in his leadership. From the suburbs of St. Louis to Omaha to Houston, they expressed deep concern about Trump’s approach to twin national crises, lamenting his confident declarations that the coronavirus was under control and his move to stoke racial divides after nationwide protests over police brutality against Black Americans.

One result is that House Republicans, who began the election cycle hoping to win an uphill battle to recapture their majority — or at the very least, claw back some of the competitive districts they lost to Democrats in 2018 — are instead scrambling to shore up seats that once would have required little effort to hold.

Analysts at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report recently forecast that November could bring “a Democratic tsunami,” and placed once safe Republican incumbents on an “anti-Trump wave watch list.”

“We feel that we’re not only going to hold the House, we are going to grow

the majority that we have,” Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, chairwoman of House Democrats’ campaign arm, said in an interview. “With each passing month, that number of seats that we think that we can gain continues to grow.

Michael McAdams, a spokesman for House Republicans’ campaign arm, contended in a statement that incumbent Republicans in those districts would be able to rise above the national trends and noted, “Voters don’t cast their ballots in July.”

In the suburbs of Douglas County in Nebraska, Derek Oden, 23, executive director of the local Republican Party, said he was working feverishly to expand his party’s outreach, acknowledging that the national rhetoric fueled in part by Trump’s inflammatory language “definitely convolutes things.” Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., has recently begun to distance himself from the president, openly breaking with him by leading the charge to remove the names of Confederate figures from military bases, a move that Trump has condemned.

“I think they’re leaning away from what used to be Republican standards — instead of leading the culture, they’re letting the culture lead them,” Nora Haury, 87, said of Republicans in an interview outside her home in Omaha. “I feel a

bit discouraged,” she added, though she said her concerns about how much the Democrats were influenced by their party’s left flank would keep her voting red come November.

Bacon will again face Kara Eastman, a progressive activist and nonprofit organizer, after defeating her by 2 percentage points in 2018. Armed with flyers and an arsenal of pork-related puns, the congressman spent one recent afternoon knocking on doors in blistering heat, trying to persuade moderate and independent voters that he deserved their votes.

Cheerfully reminding those who answered the door that their votes could make a difference, he made little unsolicited mention of the president, responding to entreaties to make the pandemic go away with reassurances about the promising, yet early, success of a vaccine trial and pointing to the $2.2 trillion stimulus law that Congress approved in March.

“I can just control my message and control my work ethic,” Bacon said, adding that he believed Eastman’s support for “Medicare for all” and other progressive proposals would repel independent voters.

“Trump will be a factor in this discussion, and I don’t know where it will be in four months, so I can’t worry about that.”

In Texas, where Democrats are targeting five seats that once were Republican strongholds explicitly gerrymandered to capture large sections of the suburbs, some steadfast conservative voters are now preparing to cast their first votes for Democratic congressional candidates, infuriated by the administration’s handling of the pandemic.

Cass Mattison and his wife, Samantha Mattison, who live in Sugar Land, just southwest of Houston, say they usually vote Republican, but they both plan to vote for Sri Kulkarni, a Democratic former Foreign Service officer running to replace Rep. Pete Olson, a Republican who is retiring. They cite their party’s “very poor handling” of the pandemic “from top to bottom.”

Samantha Mattison, who runs an in-home day care, said that she was particularly infuriated by how long Trump had waited to take the virus seriously, and upset that he refused for so long to wear a mask. “The lack of accountability kills me,” she said.

8

Monday, August 3, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Biden faces pressure from left over influence industry ties

By KENNETH P. VOGEL and GLENN THRUSH

I

t was one of the few issues on which President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden disagreed: how far to go in limiting the influence of lobbyists in government.

The vice president privately complained that his boss’s effort to slam shut the revolving door between K Street and the administration would deprive it of experienced talent, and he bristled when Obama’s aides tried to block him from hiring a well-connected Washington operator who had lobbied for pharmaceutical and insurance companies, credit agencies and others.

Eight years later, that same confidant, Steve Ricchetti, is helping to run Biden’s presidential campaign. Also involved to varying degrees are other advisers, operatives, fundraisers and allies with deep connections to Washington’s lucrative lobbying, communications and strategic consulting industry.

That puts Biden at odds with powerful elements of his party’s liberal base. Increasingly, they are expressing concern that the military contractors, Wall Street banks and other major corporations that paid members of Biden’s inner circle while they were out of government could hold disproportionate power in a Biden administration.

Politically, it could limit Biden’s ability to cast himself as the antidote to the anything-goes access peddling that has proliferated in President Donald Trump’s administration.

Under Trump, lobbyists and campaign donors have not only enjoyed access to the highest levels of the administration but also have been tapped to lead Cabinet departments and have exerted remarkable influence over policies of intense interest to their former employers.

“It’s worrisome, broadly speaking, that a Biden administration could end up abiding by the unfortunate bipartisan norms of putting people in posts where they oversee industries or employers they just left,” said David Segal, co-founder of the liberal group Demand Progress.

His organization was among those that sent a letter to the Biden and Trump campaigns this past week asking them not to appoint anyone to senior administration positions overseeing interests they served in the private sector.

The letter called out Trump’s administration for taking that dynamic “to new extremes,” but Segal added that Biden’s orbit includes “some folks with troubling track records.”

Biden has pledged, if elected, to “expand on and codify” the Obama administration lobbying executive order — the same policy he had privately complained about.

That plan barred lobbyists from going to work for agencies they had tried to influence within the previous two years and barred departing officials from lobbying until the end of the administration.

With scrutiny intensifying, some Biden allies are now distancing themselves from their corporate work to better position themselves for official roles with the campaign, transition team or in a potential Biden administration.

Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Biden’s campaign, said

Former Vice President Joe Biden the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, speaks in Darby, Pa., on June 17, 2020. the former vice president’s ethics proposal would be “the most ambitious” of “any administration in American history.”

Bates said Biden was “deeply proud” of the ethics policies enacted in the Obama administration and of his work in the Senate before that “to curtail the influence of lobbyists, money and special interests in government.”

But after eight years as vice president and decades in the Senate, Biden maintains extensive ties to Washington’s permanent political class of policy and political experts who move between government and private-sector positions.

Ricchetti spent years as a registered lobbyist and through a company called Ricchetti Consulting Group is being paid by both the Biden campaign and AT&T, his only corporate client over the past nine years. Anita Dunn, Biden’s chief campaign strategist, was also still doing work for AT&T in July.

As of Saturday Dunn is taking “an official leave” from her firm, which had been paid millions in recent years to help an airline advocacy group, while also providing communications advice to an Israeli spyware firm and fugitive Nissan executive Carlos Ghosn, for whom the firm had been registered to lobby. It ended all those client relationships in the past year.

A leading candidate to become defense secretary, Michèle Flournoy, started a firm whose website lists work for financial services, technology and pharmaceutical companies. Former CIA and Obama national security official Avril Haines, who consulted for the data-mining company

Palantir, on Saturday resigned from Flournoy’s firm to begin work on Biden’s transition team.

None of these advisers are registered as lobbyists, reflecting a trend in which major corporate and foreign players hire former officials as consultants or as legal counsel, allowing them to use their connections and expertise while avoiding the notoriety and disclosure requirements that come with formal lobbying. This phenomenon was exacerbated by Obama’s lobbying policy Biden’s more liberal challengers for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, both campaigned against K Street, in part to differentiate themselves from the candidate they now support.

Warren proposed a plan that would expand the definition of lobbying to include consultants and lawyers who try to influence government, while barring corporate lobbyists from joining the government for six years. Supporters of Sanders and Warren are pushing Biden’s team to go further than he has on those issues.

Jake Sullivan, who has been helping to develop the Biden campaign’s policy positions and moderating virtual fundraising events, resigned this year from a part-time job at the consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners. At the firm, he had negotiated with labor leaders on behalf of the ridehailing company Uber to try to exempt its drivers from being classified as full-time employees in California.

On Saturday, Antony Blinken, a deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration who is running Biden’s foreign policy operation, joined the campaign full time and took an unpaid leave of absence from his role as a managing partner in WestExec Advisors, a firm he co-founded with Flournoy.

Aaron Keyak, who was named director of Jewish engagement for Biden’s campaign last month, took a leave from his public affairs firm, Bluelight Strategies.

Early in the Trump administration, the firm had been paid $10,000 a month for Keyak’s help waging a public affairs campaign against the Gulf state of Qatar by Elliott Broidy, a Republican donor who owns a defense consulting firm.

Federal investigators have since looked into whether that campaign violated foreign lobbying laws, but Keyak has not been interviewed by prosecutors, the Biden campaign said.

Some Democrats argue a Biden administration would be wise not to wall itself off from people with both government and private-sector experience.

“We can’t all go to think tanks or into academia, and you wouldn’t want to fill the government entirely with people who came from ivory tower institutions that are detached from the mechanics of Washington,” said James Rubin, who had served as a foreign policy adviser to Biden in the Senate and then moved to the State Department in the 1990s before becoming a registered lobbyist.

In an effort to ease potential hurdles to joining a Biden administration, Rubin in recent weeks terminated his lobbying registrations for a range of clients.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

9

After a brief reprieve, the virus charges back

By JULIE BOSMAN, MANNY FERNÁNDEZ and THOMAS FULLER

F

irst, the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast were hit hardest as the coronavirus tore through the nation. Then it surged across the South. Now the virus is again picking up dangerous speed in much of the Midwest — and in states from Mississippi to Florida to California that thought they had already seen the worst of it.

As the United States rides what amounts to a second wave of cases, with daily new infections leveling off at an alarming higher mark, there is a deepening national sense that the progress made in fighting the pandemic is coming undone and that no patch of America is safe.

In Missouri, Wisconsin and Illinois, distressed government officials are retightening restrictions on residents and businesses, and sounding warnings about a surge in coronavirus-related hospitalizations.

In the South and the West, several states are reporting their highest levels of new coronavirus cases, with outbreaks overwhelming urban and rural areas alike.

Across the country, communities including Snohomish County, Washington; Jackson, Mississippi; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, have seen coronavirus numbers fall and then shoot back up — not unlike the two ends of a seesaw.

In Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker sounded an unusually somber note this past week as he delivered a warning that reverberated across the state: Even though Illinoisans had battled an early flood of coronavirus infections and then managed to reduce the virus’ spread, their successes were fleeting. As of Thursday, the state was averaging more than 1,400 cases a day, up from about 800 at the start of July.

“We’re at a danger point,” Pritzker said in Peoria County, where the total number of cases has doubled in the past month.

Gone is any sense that the country may soon gain control of the pandemic. Instead, the seven-day average for new infections hovered around 65,000 for two weeks. Progress in some states has been mostly offset by growing outbreaks in parts of the South and the Midwest.

“There’s a sort of collective tiredness and frustration, and of course I feel it, too — we all feel it,” said County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in Harris County, which includes Houston.

“So it’s difficult to know that there’s no real end in sight.”

In U.S. communities that saw improvement in June, such as Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, there was a widespread feeling of relief, said Dr. Ben Weston, the director of medical services for the Milwaukee County Office of Emergency Management.

But then mask-wearing and social distancing began to relax.

“There was a sense of complacency, like, ‘We’re finally beyond this; it’s finally getting better,’” he said. “We were seeing our numbers go down, but the reason is because of physical distancing.

It’s because people were being so careful. There was no reason to think that cases weren’t going to rise.”

On Thursday, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, made another attempt to get a handle on the outbreaks in his state, issuing an order that every Wisconsinite wear a mask indoors in public beginning Saturday.

Many states have traced new outbreaks to the loosening of the economically costly restrictions aimed at stopping the spread of the virus.

In California, which has had more than 500,000 coronavirus cases, more than any other state, the reopening has proved disastrous.

When the pandemic was ravaging the Northeast in March and April, California kept its daily case count around 2,000, and the state was praised for its early and aggressive actions to combat the virus.

The state is now averaging more than four times as many cases — 8,500 a day. Los Angeles County and other Southern California counties account for the majority of the state’s infections, but the virus is now everywhere.

That notion was reinforced Tuesday when health officials in one of the most remote parts of the state, Modoc County, which had been the last of California’s 58 counties without a known case, announced that the virus had arrived.

A waitress at the Brass Rail, a Basque restaurant and bar, tested positive, raising concerns about the virus’ spread in a tight-knit county with a population of 8,800 and where cows outnumber people 5 to 1. (A billboard there warning residents of the coronavirus tells people to stand one cow’s length apart.)

The waitress and her husband recently returned from a trip to the Central Valley, according to the co-owner of the Brass Rail, Jodie Larranaga, who said she assumed that the waitress was infected during her journey.

That the virus is now present in the evergreen forests of the northeastern corner of the state is testament to its inexorable spread, say the county’s residents. Alturas, the only incorporated city in Modoc County, is so isolated that its high school football team must drive as long as five hours to reach its opponents.

“We all felt very safe for a while,” said Juan Ledezma, the owner of a thrift shop on Main Street in Alturas. “Right now, it’s a little bit scary.”

The Northeast, once the virus’s biggest hot spot, has improved

considerably since its peak in April, when the region suffered more than any other region of the country. Yet cases are now increasing slightly in New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, as residents move around more freely and gather more frequently in groups.

Across the country, deaths from the coronavirus continue to rise. The country was averaging about 500 per day at the start of July.

Over the past week, it has averaged more than 1,000 daily, with many of those concentrated in Sun Belt states. On Wednesday, California, Florida and Texas reported a combined 724 deaths, about half the national total.

Houston, the fourth-largest city in the country, has been adjusting to a new normal where the only thing certain is that nothing is certain. After cases and hospitalizations seemed to level off and even decrease in recent days, Harris County on Friday broke a single-day record with 2,100 new cases.

“I think to a certain extent, we saw a spike because people were fatigued over it,” said Alan Rosen, who leads the Harris County Precinct One constable’s office. “They were fatigued over hearing about it every day. They were fatigued about being cooped up in their house and being away from people.”

People there have been coping with the lulls and peaks of a physical, emotional, fiscal and logistical crisis from an invisible foe nearly three years after surviving Hurricane Harvey, one of the worst disasters in U.S. history.

“It is a roller coaster,” said Rosen, who recovered after getting infected with the virus in May. “It’s not like a hurricane that’s coming through and we know what to do. We know we got to clean up and rebuild and everybody is accustomed to the time frame. But with this, there are just so many unknowns.”

People at Clearwater Beach in Clearwater, Fla., on Monday, July 27, 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic.

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

Homeland Security reassigns official whose office compiled intelligence on journalists

By ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS and ADAM GOLDMAN

the intelligence examination, the administration official said. Wolf has also asked the Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General to investigate any efforts by the intelligence branch to collect information about protesters or journalists.

The ouster came after The Washington Post reported that Murphy’s office compiled reports that in part targeted The New York Times’ publishing of an intelligence analysis indicating that the Homeland Security Department had little understanding of the situation in Portland when it deployed teams of tactical agents in camouflage to face crowds of protesters.

In addition to summarizing the tweets of a Times reporter, the intelligence reports also included a tweet by Benjamin Wittes, the editor-in-chief of Lawfare, a blog about law and national security, who had shared an internal memo that warned Homeland Security officers not to leak to the press.

The reports also included a tweet from

Wittes that showed an email from Murphy telling the intelligence officers to refer to individuals attacking the federal courthouse in Porthe head of the Department of Homeland land as “VIOLENT ANTIFA ANARCHISTS.” Security’s intelligence branch was remoMurphy’s conclusion about the motived from his position after his office comvations of the individuals in Portland came piled reports about protesters and journalists just days after intelligence officers issued the covering the Trump administration’s response memo reported by The Times that said the to unrest in Portland, Oregon, last month. agency had “low confidence” that the attacks Brian Murphy, the acting undersecretary against the federal courthouse reflected a brofor intelligence and analysis, was reassigned ader threat. to a new position in the department after his The issue prompted the Senate Intellioffice disseminated to the law enforcement gence Committee to send a letter to Murphy community “open-source intelligence reports” questioning the intelligence-gathering effort of containing Twitter posts of journalists, noting journalists and protesters. they had published leaked unclassified docuSeparately, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., ments, according to an administration official the chairman of the House Intelligence Comfamiliar with the matter. It was not clear what mittee, said in a statement Saturday that his Murphy’s new position would be. committee had been “conducting rigorous Chad Wolf, the acting secretary for the oversight of the Office of Intelligence and Department of Homeland Security, made the Analysis, including actions by Acting Undersedecision Friday after ordering the office to halt cretary Murphy prior to his abrupt and apparent reassignment.

“In light of recent public reports, we are concerned that Murphy may have provided incomplete and potentially misleading information to Committee staff during our recent oversight engagement,” Schiff continued, adding that the committee would “be expanding our oversight even further in the coming days.”

The Department of Homeland Security has already faced widespread backlash for the aggressive behavior of the tactical teams in Portland, as well as investigations by the inspectors general for the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice.

Murphy, formerly with the FBI, led an office with the Homeland Security Department charged with sharing information about potential national security threats with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. Such a coordinating effort was one of the motivations in creating the department after the Sept. 11, A federal officer searches a protester encampment near the U.S. District Cour- 2001, attacks.

In 2015, Murphy joined FBI headquarthouse in Portland, Ore., on July 29, 2020.

T

dsdfasd

ters to work on an effort known as Countering Violent Extremism, or CVE, after serving as an assistant special agent in charge of counterterrorism in Chicago. Murphy was known as an ambitious investigator who was once profiled in a self-aggrandizing article about a terrorism case he had worked on. But some former agents and Justice Department officials familiar with Murphy’s work at the time, who requested anonymity to discuss internal discussions at the agencies, expressed concern about some CVE proposals, his tendency to ignore the rules and failure to coordinate his activities.

One agent at the time raised an alarm that Murphy wanted to prepare materials for Chicago public schools without disclosing the FBI’s participation, according to an internal bureau document provided to The New York Times. That would have violated FBI policy requiring such outreach to be public or overt.

Other former officials said that Murphy wanted to tap coaches, therapists, social workers and religious leaders in several cities to help steer people under the sway of Islamic extremism away from a potentially violent future.

That was not a bad idea, the former officials said, but Murphy pushed internally to make those community leaders sign memorandums of understanding with the FBI. By doing so, Murphy would then have been able to track whether those people in the program were headed down the wrong path again. That would have essentially deputized community leaders to be arms of the bureau, former FBI and Justice Department officials said, a move that would have only stoked existing concerns in the Muslim community that the bureau was using outreach to spy on people. Officials eventually scrapped Murphy’s plan, calling it ill-conceived and legally problematic.

One former official said that Murphy “didn’t have a good sense of what the blowback would be.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

11

More than 1,000 companies boycotted Facebook. Did it work?

By TIFFANY HSU and ELEANOR LUTZ

T

he advertiser boycott of Facebook took a toll on the social media giant, but it may have caused more damage to the company’s reputation than to its bottom line.

The boycott, called #StopHateForProfit by the civil rights groups that organized it, urged companies to stop paying for ads on Facebook in July to protest the platform’s handling of hate speech and misinformation.

More than 1,000 advertisers publicly joined, out of a total pool of more than 9 million, while others quietly scaled back their spending.

The 100 advertisers that spent the most on Facebook in the first half of the year spent $221.4 million from July 1 through July 29, 12% less than the $251.4 million spent by the top 100 advertisers a year earlier, according to estimates from the advertising analytics platform Pathmatics. Of those 100, nine companies formally announced a pullback in paid advertising, cutting their spending to $507,500 from $26.2 million.

Many of the companies that stayed away from Facebook said they planned to return, and many are mom-and-pop enterprises and individuals that depend on the platform for promotion. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has emphasized the importance of small business, saying during an earnings call Thursday that “some seem to wrongly assume that our business is dependent on a few large advertisers.”

Facebook said that the top 100 spenders contributed 16% of its $18.7 billion in revenue in the second quarter, which ended June 30. During the first three weeks of July, Facebook said, overall ad revenue grew 10% over last year, a rate the company expects to continue for the full quarter.

The boycott complicated planning for advertisers.

Kansas-based digital agency DEG had “a whirlwind of a month” as its small to midsize clients grappled with whether they could reach enough customers without Facebook, said Quinn Sheek, its director of media and search. Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram make up more than one-third of digital spending for DEG clients.

Of the 60% of DEG clients that joined the July boycott, 4 out of 5 are planning to return to Facebook in August, with many having “decided it’s too much for them during a difficult economic time to remain off,” Sheek said. Still, the boycott helped amplify discussion of toxic content on Facebook. The issue was raised in a congressional hearing this past week and in repeated meetings between ad industry representatives and Facebook leaders. In the face of the pressure, Facebook released the results of a civil rights audit last month and agreed to hire a civil rights executive.

“What could really hurt Facebook is the long-term effect of its perceived reputation and the association

with being viewed as a publisher of ‘hate speech’ and other inappropriate content,” Stephen Hahn-Griffiths, executive vice president of the public opinion analysis company RepTrak, wrote in a post last month.

In addition to the prevalence of hate speech on the platform, its critics have also focused on the company’s treatment of user privacy and foreign election interference.

“You could argue that Facebook has a bloodied nose and two reputational black eyes,” Hahn-Griffiths wrote.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said during the company’s earnings call that, like the boycott’s organizers, “we don’t want hate on our platforms, and we stand firmly against it.”

The ad industry was already in upheaval when the boycott began, as businesses closed, layoffs swept through the economy, and homebound consumers slowed their shopping. Before they reduced spending on Facebook in July, advertisers like Microsoft, Starbucks, Unilever and Target took a temporary break from the platform in June as many companies were reacting to pandemic-related marketing budget cuts and widespread protests over racism and police brutality.

Disney’s spending on Facebook has mostly trended downward since late March, according to Pathmatics.

Last month, large advertisers like Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Walmart and Geico sharply curtailed paid advertising on Facebook without joining the official boycott, according to Pathmatics. Others, like Her-

shey and Hulu, beefed up their spending on alternate platforms like Twitter and YouTube.

Companies like Beam Suntory and Coca-Cola have vowed to continue pressuring Facebook, especially as the presidential race heats up. On Thursday, ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s said it planned to keep withholding spending on product promotions through the end of the year “to send a message.”

The advertiser boycott “was a warning shot, an opening salvo,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the civil rights group the Anti-Defamation League, which helped set up the boycott. Organizers and other groups now plan to expand the boycott into Europe, to include Facebook users, and to address other concerns, like the presence of child sexual abuse on the platform.

Half the companies that work with agency Allen & Gerritsen in Boston and Philadelphia participated in the boycott, said Derek Welch, its vice president of media. Many felt it was important to “do something that is meaningful and tangible in a sea of brands putting out very well-meaning statements,” he said.

Welch said the agency’s clients typically spend $150,000 to $200,000 a month total on Facebook. Several plan to continue boycotting.

“The big companies that have signed on have been great for visibility and getting the word out,” he said. “But this is really all about these small businesses in aggregate who are spending $30,000 here or $50,000 there, whose decisions wouldn’t normally make too much of a difference.”

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

A better year for Trump’s family business (last year, that is)

Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., June 26, 2020. The president’s family business showed modest gains in 2019, according a months-delayed annual financial disclosure report released late on Friday, July 31, 2020.

By BEN PROTESS, STEVE EDER and MICHAEL H. KELLER

B

efore the coronavirus ripped through the country, upending President Donald Trump’s family business and the broader hospitality industry, the company last year showed modest gains, according to Trump’s annual financial disclosure report released late Friday.

The report, which offers the only official public detailing of the president’s personal finances, had been delayed for months after Trump received two extensions.

The delay came in part based on questions the Office of Government Ethics had raised about, among other issues, the value of pro bono legal work provided to the president

by Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, according to people with knowledge of the delay.

As the U.S. economy was humming in 2019, the Trump Organization reported revenues of at least $446.3 million, up more than 2% from $434.9 million, in 2018. In 2017, he reported at least $452.6 million in revenues.

All told, the report shows that last year’s revenues, while an improvement over 2018, still reflect the toll Trump’s divisive presidency has taken on his brand.

The president reported assets worth at least $1.35 billion, down narrowly from 2018 and 2017.

In a statement, Eric Trump, the president’s son and a senior executive at the company, called it a “fantastic year for our country and one of the best years in the history of The

Trump Organization.”

While providing no specific historic comparisons for the privately held company, he described the revenue as “strong” and noted that the company had “very low levels of debt.”

Overall, the company’s golf business performed well — a number of properties registered double-digit revenue gains — and Trump emphasized that “our core businesses were up considerably year-over-year.”

The report also includes the unusual disclosure by the president that the Office of Government Ethics had pressed him to address the free legal services provided by Giuliani over the last two years. Some legal experts had argued the president had potentially broken the rules by not disclosing the gift last year.

“Although we did not believe and do not believe that any pro bono publico counsel is reportable as a ‘gift,’ at the request of OGE, we note that as has been widely reported in the media, Rudy Giuliani provided such pro bono publico counsel in 2018 and 2019,” the report says, referring to pro bono legal services and the Office of Government Ethics.

Normally, if such a gift of free legal services has been provided, the federal government official is required to disclose the value of the gift. Trump declined to do so, with the disclosure report saying “Mr. Giuliani is not able to estimate the value” of the services, so “therefore, the value is unascertainable.”

The disclosure, required every year under federal ethics

rules, was originally due May 15. The White House blamed the delay on the coronavirus pandemic, but it also followed conversations between ethics officials and representatives for Trump about a draft of the filing, including the discussions over Giuliani’s free legal work, according to the people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly.

The 78-page disclosure was the sixth by Trump since he announced his candidacy for president in 2015.

Unlike the past six presidents, Trump has refused to release his tax returns, leaving additional gaps in the public record of his finances, and even went to court to block their release. The Supreme Court ruled in early July that congressional Democrats could not, at least for now, see some of the president’s financial documents, likely shielding the records from public view before the election.

For much of Trump’s presidency, his family business was stuck in neutral. The family name was stripped from several properties. The pipeline of potential new deals had dried up.

And Trump’s polarizing politics had generated a red-blue divide among many properties, leaving his hotel in Chicago struggling, for instance, while his golf club in North Carolina thrived.

Results were mixed once again last year, according to the disclosure statement.

Revenues grew about 2% at both the North Carolina club and Trump National Doral Miami, the company’s biggest money generator. The resort, which includes a hotel and four golf courses, had been particularly stung by the divide over the president’s politics, as revenues sagged after his election.

Another golf club, at Bedminster, New Jersey — which Trump often visits during the summer — saw revenues rise by 12.6%, while his club in Jupiter, Florida, was up 11.9%.

But at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, where Trump often spends time during the winter months, revenues were $21.4 million, down 5.5% from 2018, continuing a downward trend from 2017.

At the Trump International Hotel in Washington, just blocks from the White House, revenues were $40.5 million, falling just shy of 1% from 2018.

At the company’s only remaining New York hotel, on Central Park West, revenue on the commercial space was between $1 million and $5 million, the same range as reported for 2018. Last year, the company agreed to downsize the “Trump” signs on the premises after some owners of the adjoining condominium tower complained that the branding was hurting their property values.

At best, the disclosure provides a general view of Trump’s business interests. Such statements offer inexact accounting, as dollar amounts are often reported in ranges, and they do not reflect profits or losses, making it difficult to assess the bottom line.

The report, for example, does not fully reflect the revenues from a pair of office towers in New York and California, where Trump is a partial owner. Both properties have been a substantial source of revenue in recent years, making up for weaknesses in other business lines.

The disclosure shows the Trump Organization’s debt remained unchanged from the previous year.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

13 Stocks

After monster rally, investors cautious as U.S. recovery wobbles

I

nvestors are preparing their portfolios for a potentially rocky patch in U.S. stocks, worried that a dramatic rebound in equities may stall amid dimming economic data and rising political uncertainty.

Most money managers are wary of cutting equity exposure too drastically in a market that has rallied more than 40% since late March and stands near all-time highs despite widespread economic devastation and a global coronavirus pandemic.

Still, the continued divergence between stocks and the real economy has worried some investors. U.S. growth took its worst hit on record in the second quarter, while more recent data points to fading consumer confidence and jobless claims back on the rise. The S&P 500 .SPX, meanwhile, stands some 4% below all-time highs, though its weekly advances have grown progressively smaller in July.

That disconnect is pushing some investors to beef up cash positions or tilt their portfolios toward Europe, where economic prospects appear to be brighter than in the United States.

The performance of options strategies designed to profit in sideways markets - such as the “iron condor,” which involves long and short positions on both calls and puts - has also improved. The iron condor strategy has drawn controversy and prompted investigation by some legal firms following its poor performance during sharp sell-offs, such as in December 2018.

“The longer (economic weakness) persists, the more permanent the structural damage becomes,” said Michael Hans, chief investment officer at Clarfield Citizens Private Wealth in Tarrytown, New York. “For the moment, a range-bound scenario makes sense.”

Concerns over the U.S. presidential election are also mounting. On Thursday, President Donald Trump suggested on Twitter that the Nov. 3 vote be delayed, though he has no direct authority to do so.

Net outflows from equity funds were $1.8 billion in the fourth week of July, while bond funds took in $17.2 billion and money market funds received $5.5 billion, according to EPFR. Market participants hope the Labor Department’s July payrolls report, due next Friday, will shed more light on the state of the recovery.

Some investors who have racked up big gains during the equity rally of the last few months are now turning cautious.

Eric Marshall, portfolio manager at Hodges Capital in Dallas, has sold some of the stocks he purchased earlier in the year and added to cash positions, convinced that rewards have diminished for buying even the most beaten-down shares.

“We’ve taken profits, and we’ve been very slow to redeploy that money back,” he said.

Uncertainty over the near-term outlook for equities and Treasury yields near record lows have prompted Charles Day, a private wealth manager at UBS in New York, to raise cash holdings to between 5% to 10% in the portfolios he manages.

MOST ASSERTIVE STOCKS

PUERTO RICO STOCKS

COMMODITIES

CURRENCY

LOCAL PERSONAL LOAN RATES Bank

LOCAL MORTGAGE RATES Bank

FHA 30-YR POINTS CONV 30-YR POINTS

BPPR Scotia CooPACA Money House First Mort Oriental

3.00% 0.00 3.50% 0.00 3.50% 2.00 3.75% 2.00 3.50% 0.00 3.50% 0.00

3.50% 000 4.00% 0.00 3.75% 2.00 3.75% 2.00 5.50% 0.00 3.75% 5.50

PERS.

CREDIT CARD

AUTO

BPPR --.-- 17.95 4.95 Scotia 4.99 14.99 4.99 CooPACA

6.95 9.95

2.95

Reliable

--.-- --.--

4.40

First Mort 7.99 --.-- --.-Oriental 4.99 11.95 4.99

14

Monday, August 3, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Under pressure, Brazil’s Bolsonaro forced to fight deforestation

Timber on a ferry crossing the Pacajá River, a popular transportation route for legal and illegal logging, near the city of Portel in Brazil’s Pará state, in October 2019.

By ERNESTO LONDOÑO and LETICIA CASADO

A

year ago, as fires engulfed the Amazon, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil reacted to criticism from abroad with indignation.

“The Amazon is ours,” he said, arguing that the fate of the rainforest was for his country to decide.

Much has changed in a year.

Under pressure from European governments, foreign investors and Brazilian companies concerned about the country’s reputation, Bolsonaro has banned forest fires for the four months of the dry season and set up a military operation against deforestation.

The new stance represents a notable turnaround by a government that has drawn widespread global condemnation over its environmental policies.

Environmentalists, experts and foreign officials who have pressed Brazil on conservation matters are skeptical of the government’s commitment, afraid these actions amount to little more than damage control at a time when the economy is in deep trouble.

Bolsonaro and many of his political allies have long favored opening the Amazon to miners, farmers and loggers, and his government has openly worked to undermine the land rights of indigenous communities. Deforestation has spiked under his tenure.

But as the political and business costs of policies that prioritize exploration over conservation escalate, some activists see an opportunity to slow, or even reverse, that trend by promoting private sector support for greener policies.

“Brazil is becoming an environmental pariah on the global stage, destroying a positive reputation that took decades to build,” said Sueley Araújo, a veteran environmental policy expert who was dismissed as the head of the country’s main environmental protection agency soon after Bolsonaro took office.

Brazil’s worsening reputation on the environment has also put in jeopardy two important foreign policy goals: the implementation of a trade deal with the European Union and its ambition to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a 37-country group.

Both deals require Brazil to meet baseline

standards on labor and environmental policies.

A striking sign of the potential economic damage to Brazil’s interests came in late June, when more than two dozen financial institutions that collectively control some $3.7 billion in assets warned the Brazilian government in a letter that investors were steering away from countries that are accelerating the degradation of ecosystems.

The message has clearly registered within Brazil. The country’s three largest banks announced this past week a joint effort to press for and fund sustainable development projects in the Amazon.

And a group of former Brazilian finance ministers and central bank presidents argued in a joint statement in July that the best way to jump-start the economy is by investing in greener technologies, ending fuel subsidies and drastically reducing the deforestation rate.

But the clearest sign of the shifting politics on the issue lies in the fate of Ricardo Salles, Bolsonaro’s environment minister, who is fighting for his political survival amid criticism of Brazil’s growing deforestation.

Salles, the face of the Bolsonaro administration’s efforts to weaken environmental protections, was expelled from his party in May over his leadership of the ministry. He is also facing a legal complaint from federal prosecutors who are seeking his removal, arguing that Salles’ actions in office amounted to a dereliction of duty.

Brazilian leaders have often bristled at foreign-led campaigns to save the rainforest, regarding such efforts as an underhanded way to hinder the economic potential of the vast nation, which is a leading exporter of food and other commodities.

In July 2019, Bolsonaro told a round table of international journalists that the rate of deforestation in the Amazon should concern Brazil alone.

“The Amazon is ours,” he snapped.

During the first six months of this year, loggers razed approximately 1,184 square miles of the Amazon, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Re-

search. That area — slightly smaller than the state of Rhode Island — is 25% larger than the forest cover lost during the same time period in 2019.

Environmental experts say the military operation to curb deforestation, which includes more than 3,600 troops and law enforcement agents, will at best make a dent in deforestation and fire trends this year. To fundamentally reverse them, they say the government would need to make sweeping changes to bolster the staffing level, tools and political backing of the environmental protection agencies.

The association of government environmental protection agents and federal prosecutors say that Salles is largely responsible for the rise in deforestation during the Bolsonaro administration.

On his watch, they asserted in separate statements issued recently, career specialists have lost tools and autonomy.

Career law enforcement agents at the main environmental agencies were demoted or dismissed earlier this year after operations against land invaders that drew a political backlash.

Criticism of Salles reached a boiling point in May following the release of a video recording of a cabinet meeting during which he said the coronavirus pandemic had created an opportune distraction to make headway on environmental deregulation without drawing much scrutiny from the press.

In a 126-page complaint filed in early July, federal prosecutors accused Salles of spending money inefficiently, retaliating against effective enforcement agents and issuing the fewest fines for environmental crimes in 20 years, even as invasion of protected lands surged.

“The destruction of the system of Brazil’s environmental protection system was the result of the acts, omissions and statements by the accused,” federal prosecutors wrote in their complaint, which seeks to prevent Salles from occupying public office.

Salles, who did not respond to a request for an interview, called the allegations baseless and accused prosecutors of meddling in policies of the executive branch.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

15

Ethiopian workers are forced to return home, some with Coronavirus

By SIMON MARKS

U

nemployed and shunned as possible coronavirus carriers, Ethiopian migrant laborers are returning home by the thousands, placing a huge strain on Ethiopia’s poorly equipped medical system.

More than 30,000 workers have re-entered Ethiopia since mid-March, according to the government, some of them after suffering abuse and detention in unhealthy conditions in the countries they left, often on the Persian Gulf or in other parts of Africa.

At least 927 migrant laborers were infected with the virus when they returned, Ethiopian officials say, but the true number is probably much higher. The government has not updated that figure for more than a month, and it does not include those who have slipped back into the country unnoticed.

Ethiopia has had more than 16,000 confirmed infections and 250 COVID-19 deaths, according to figures compiled by The New York Times. Those are very low counts for a nation of 115 million people, but the numbers are rising and many cases go undetected by the country’s sparse testing.

Doctors fear the outbreak may be primed to explode, fueled in part by returning migrants whose journeys often include crowded, unsanitary conditions — jails in the countries where they worked, informal migrant camps in countries like Yemen and Djibouti and quarantine centers once they arrive back in Ethiopia.

Dr. Yohanes Tesfaye, who runs a government COVID-19 treatment center near the eastern city of Dire Dawa, said that within a month of opening, the center had treated 248 infected migrants. And, he warned, “we have a long border, so we can’t be sure” whether many more people with the virus are entering the country undetected.

All this is occurring in a country that has just one respiratory therapist, ill-equipped public hospitals and few medical resources in rural areas, and is also suffering the economic blow of the pandemic. Major hotels in the capital city, Addis Ababa, are almost empty, jobs in tourism and construction have disappeared and the flow of money sent home by workers overseas has dried up.

Adding to Ethiopia’s struggles have been deadly conflicts between ethnic groups that prompted the government to shut down the internet for more than three weeks before recently restoring it.

Hundreds of people died in clashes and anti-government protests following the killing in June of the singer Hachaluu Hundessa, who was particularly revered by the Oromo ethnic group.

Many of the migrants have returned voluntarily, suddenly unable to work abroad after the pandemic shut down entire economies. Whether out of economic hardship or fear of contagion, employers have abruptly laid off migrant domestic workers, often leaving them at their countries’ embassies.

But many others have been rounded up, confined and deported by host governments that had previously tolerated them. In interviews, senior government officials, doctors, health workers and more than a dozen returnees from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Djibouti and Lebanon describe scenes of workers being mistreated in detention before being sent back to Ethiopia.

“The police were throwing racial slurs at us. They called me an animal,” said Selam Bizuneh, 26, who worked as a maid in Kuwait until her employer stopped paying her. She said she spent 40 days in a detention center in Kuwait City’s al-Farwaniyah

district in May and June, adding, “we were roughed up and forced to stand.”

Shortly after arriving back in Ethiopia in late June, she said, she tested positive for the coronavirus.

Birhan Tesfay, 27, left Ethiopia hoping to find work in Saudi Arabia, but turned back as the pandemic spread. He said he paid smugglers $300 to cross the Red Sea from Yemen to Djibouti in the middle of the night on June 5.

“We were shot at by Djibouti’s navy on our way back,” he said in a telephone interview from a quarantine center. “One migrant died while the smugglers attempted to escape.”

His account was verified by a United Nations staff member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss it. Birhan was arrested by Djiboutian security forces and returned to Ethiopia.

Before the pandemic, about 100,000 Ethiopians made the perilous trip each year to other parts of the world to find work — often illegally — as maids, construction workers, drivers, hairdressers, guards and more. The largest number make their way to the Arabian Peninsula, though workers have also been sent back this year by Lebanon, India, Pakistan, the United States, Kenya and other countries.

Coronavirus travel restrictions adopted by Saudi Arabia have left many migrants stranded in Yemen and Djibouti. In Yemen, in particular, African migrants have been scapegoated as virus spreaders, and some have been shot by the Houthi militia, as it tries to chase them out of the parts of the country it controls.

Saudi Arabia alone said in May that 12,000 Ethiopians were in the country illegally and were to be repatriated, though not all of them have been.

The Ethiopian government said on July 20 that it had helped 30,087 of its citizens return home since the pandemic began.

The government and the United Nations have been in talks with other nations about managing repatriation in a way that does not overwhelm Ethiopia.

“Mass movements at a time like this will only exacerbate the spread of COVID-19,” said Maureen Achieng, chief of mission in Ethiopia for the International Organization for Migration, an arm of the United Nations. “In this regard, government-to-government discussions will be critical to reaching agreement on a common approach to containing COVID-19.”

Even if they are healthy and free, returning migrant workers face uncertain prospects in a poor country facing a multitude of challenges.

Zeytuna Kemal, 33, said she left her job as a maid in Kuwait after her employer failed to pay her for three months of work.

She decided to flee the country, she said, but the police arrested her and jailed her for four days without food or water.

Then she was transferred with dozens of other Ethiopians to a detention center near the international airport and eventually flown back to her home country. “I am now lost and confused,” she said. And she is worried about providing for her children and mother.

“I will not find a job here.”

Ethiopian migrants in Aden, Yemen, in June. The return of Ethiopian migrant workers to their home country, some sick from the coronavirus, is straining Ethiopia’s healthcare system.

16

Monday, August 3, 2020

Indian billionaires bet big on head start in Coronavirus vaccine race

A grounded plane has been installed as an office room for Adar Poonawalla at Serum Institute in Pune, India, July 10, 2020.

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

I

n early May, an extremely well-sealed steel box arrived at the cold room of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine maker.

Inside, packed in dry ice, sat a tiny 1-milliliter vial from Oxford, England, containing the cellular material for one of the world’s most promising coronavirus vaccines.

Scientists in white lab coats brought the vial to Building 14, carefully poured the contents into a flask, added a medium of vitamins and sugar and began growing billions of cells. Thus began one of the biggest gambles yet in the quest to find the vaccine that will bring the world’s COVID-19 nightmare to an end.

The Serum Institute, which is exclusively controlled by a small and fabulously rich Indian family and started out years ago as a horse farm, is doing what a few other companies in the race for a vaccine are doing: mass-producing hundreds of millions of doses of a vaccine candidate that is still in trials and might not even work.

But if it does, Adar Poonawalla, Serum’s chief executive and the only child of the company’s founder, will become one of the most tugged-at men in the world. He will have on hand what everyone wants, possibly in greater quantities before anyone else.

His company, which has teamed up with the Oxford scientists developing the vaccine, was one of the first to boldly announce, in April, that it was going to mass-produce a vaccine before clinical trials even ended. Now, Poonawalla’s fastest vaccine assembly lines are being readied to crank out 500 doses each minute, and his phone rings endlessly.

National health ministers, prime ministers and other heads of state (he wouldn’t say who) and friends he hasn’t heard from in years have been calling him, he said, begging for the first batches.

“I’ve had to explain to them that, ‘Look, I can’t just give it to you like this,’” he said.

With the coronavirus pandemic turning the world upside down and all hopes pinned on a vaccine, the Serum Institute finds itself in the middle of an extremely competitive and murky endeavor. To get the vaccine out as soon as possible, vaccine developers say they need Serum’s mammoth assembly lines —

each year, it churns out 1.5 billion doses of other vaccines, mostly for poor countries, more than any other company.

Half of the world’s children have been vaccinated with Serum’s products. Scale is its specialty. Just the other day, Poonawalla received a shipment of 600 million glass vials.

But right now it’s not entirely clear how much of the coronavirus vaccine that Serum will mass-produce will be kept by India or who will fund its production, leaving the Poonawallas to navigate a torrent of cross-pressures, political, financial, external and domestic.

India has been walloped by the coronavirus, and with 1.3 billion people, it needs vaccine doses as much as anywhere. It’s also led by a highly nationalistic prime minister, Narendra Modi, whose government has already blocked exports of drugs that were believed to help treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Poonawalla, 39, says that he will split the hundreds of millions of vaccine doses he produces 50-50 between India and the rest of the world, with a focus on poorer countries, and that Modi’s government has not objected to this.

But he added, “Look, they may still invoke some kind of emergency if they deem fit or if they want to.”

The Oxford-designed vaccine is just one of several promising contenders that will soon be mass-produced, in different factories around the world, before they are proven to work. Vaccines take time not just to perfect but to manufacture. Live cultures need weeks to grow inside bioreactors, for instance, and each vial needs to be carefully cleaned, filled, stoppered, sealed and packaged.

The idea is to conduct these two processes simultaneously and start production now, while the vaccines are still in trials, so that as soon as the trials are finished — at best within the next six months, though no one really knows — vaccine doses will be on hand, ready for a world desperate to protect itself.

U.S. and European governments have committed billions of dollars to this effort, cutting deals with pharmaceutical giants such as Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Sanofi and AstraZeneca to speed up the development and production of select vaccine candidates in exchange for hundreds of millions of doses.

AstraZeneca is the lead partner with the Oxford scientists, and it has signed government contracts worth more than $1 billion to manufacture the vaccine for Europe, the U.S. and other markets. But it has allowed the Serum Institute to produce it as well. The difference, Poonawalla said, is that his company is shouldering the cost of production on its own.

But Serum is distinct from all other major vaccine producers in an important way. Like many highly successful Indian businesses, it is family run. It can make decisions quickly and take big risks, like the one it’s about to, which could cost the family hundreds of millions of dollars.

Poonawalla said he was “70 to 80%” sure the Oxford vaccine would work.

But, he added, “I hope we don’t go in too deep.”

Unbeholden to shareholders, the Serum Institute is steered by only two men: Poonawalla and his father, Cyrus, a horse breeder turned billionaire.

More than 50 years ago, the Serum Institute began as a shed on the family’s thoroughbred horse farm. The elder Poon-

awalla realized that instead of donating horses to a vaccine laboratory that needed horse serum — one way of producing vaccines is to inject horses with small amounts of toxins and then extract their antibody-rich blood serum — he could process the serum and make the vaccines himself.

He started with tetanus in 1967. Then snake bite antidotes.

Then shots for tuberculosis, hepatitis, polio and the flu. From his stud farm in the fertile and pleasantly humid town of Pune, Cyrus Poonawalla built a vaccine empire, and a staggering fortune.

Capitalizing on India’s combination of cheap labor and advanced technology, the Serum Institute won contracts from UNICEF, the Pan American Health Organization and scores of countries, many of them poor, to supply low-cost vaccines. The Poonawallas have now entered the pantheon of India’s richest families, worth more than $5 billion.

Initial trial results of the Oxford-designed vaccine showed that it activated antibody levels similar to those seen in recovering COVID-19 patients, which was considered very good news.

Serum has already produced millions of doses of this vaccine for research and development, including large batches for the ongoing trials. By the time the trials finish, expected around November, Serum plans to have stockpiled 300 million doses for commercial use.

But even if this vaccine fails to win the race, the Serum Institute will still be instrumental. It has teamed up with other vaccine designers, at earlier stages of development, to manufacture four other vaccines, though those are not being mass produced yet.

And if all of those fail, Adar Poonawalla says he can quickly adapt his assembly lines to manufacture whatever vaccine candidate does work, wherever it comes from.

“Very few people can produce it at this cost, this scale and this speed,” he said.

Under the AstraZeneca deal, Serum can make 1 billion doses of the Oxford vaccine for India and lower- and middleincome countries during the pandemic and charge an amount that is no more than its production costs.

After the pandemic passes, Poonawalla expects that he will be able to sell the vaccine at a profit — if it works — but his biggest concern is the near term and covering his cash flow.

He estimates that he is spending around $450 million to massproduce the Oxford vaccine.

Many of his expenses might never be recouped, like the costs for the vials holding the vaccine and the chemicals used in the process. For the first time, the Poonawallas say they are considering turning to sovereign wealth or private equity funds for help.

Analysts said it was likely that Serum would eventually get some financial help from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which supports global immunization programs, or maybe the Indian government. Both declined to comment.

But any deal will probably be far smaller than what the big pharmaceutical companies have landed. Another difference is that those companies are vaccine developers and producers. Serum’s role, at least for the Oxford vaccine, is purely production.

Either way, Adar Poonawalla said he felt an obligation to take this risk.

“We just felt that this was our sort of moment,” he said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

17

Italy draws a line under Genoa tragedy, shunting aside the Benettons

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

L

ess than two years after the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa killed 43 people, Italy will draw a line under the tragedy on Monday when it inaugurates a replacement. But that public celebration has been accompanied by a behind-thescenes deal that will reshape the running of Italy’s highways as it exacts retribution on the former bridge’s managers.

The 5-Star Movement, the populist party that leads Italy’s government, has leveraged the lingering anger over the calamity to engineer the transfer of the controlling share of the company that managed the bridge, Autostrade per l’Italia, or Highways for Italy, from private hands back to those of the state.

The deal for control of Autostrade, which manages more than half of Italy’s 4,000 miles of toll roads and was blamed for failing to keep the bridge safe, has yet to be finalized, but it was meant to specifically punish its majority shareholder, the Benetton family.

For 5-Star, the accord is a political triumph, a trophy to exhibit to its dwindling supporters ahead of elections in September in the Liguria region, where Genoa is the capital. But some critics say that the ways Autostrade’s contract was changed by the government has sent a troubling message to potential investors in a country that has long shown itself capricious about business rules.

There was also the question of whether the government was in fact up to running an aging highway and infrastructure system badly in need of investment — one of the reasons its management had been privatized in the first place.

“From the political point of view it’s a masterpiece,” said Alberto Mingardi, director of the Bruno Leoni Institute, an Italian think tank. “The 5-Star can tell their militant voters that they’ve brought home a very prestigious scalp,” he said.

But in terms of rule of law and transparency, the agreement had been a disaster, he said.

“From the point of view of the prime minister it’s a great coup, but many political operations have trodden on rights,” Mingardi said.

When the middle-of-the-night accord was reached between the government and Autostrade in July, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said in a post on Facebook that it affirmed a principle “trampled in the past” — ‘‘that public infrastructure is a precious public good that must be managed responsibly and guarantee security and efficient service.”

The 5-Star Movement and other critics of Autostrade have long contended that the Benettons, originally known for their retail clothing chain, had been given a sweetheart deal when part of the national highway authority was privatized in the 1990s.

The family did not do itself favors or engender public sympathy when it waited two days after the bridge collapse to express its condolences to the victims, through Edizione, the family holding company.

Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s foreign minister and a prominent 5-Star leader, used Facebook to vaunt the deal, which would vastly reduce the stake of the Benetton-controlled infrastructure group Atlantia, which controls 88% of Autostrade, to allow the government to gain control. The Benettons now own 26.6% of Autostrade and their share is expected to drop to around 11%.

“The Benettons have accepted the government’s condi-

tions,” Di Maio said. “This means the Benettons will no longer manage our highways. It was our main goal and we achieved it.”

“After many battles, let me say that it’s an excellent result,” he wrote.

But while 5-Star and some others may be pleased by the outcome, the path to the deal and some of its terms have made many uncomfortable.

One of the biggest obstacles to wresting Autostrade from the Benettons was that their original contract stipulated that the government pay them out if the agreement was terminated before its scheduled end in 2038.

That would have required the government to pay Autostrade some 20 billion euros, around $23.6 billion, to go away — a fact that drew considerable outrage in Italy when it came to light in the tragedy’s aftermath.

The 5-Star government’s remedy was simply to pass a law in December — without negotiating with the company — that vastly diminished the payout, reducing it to about 7 billion euros.

The accord also states that Atlantia, the infrastructure group in which the Benettons are the majority shareholders, will forego any claim or damage in connection with ongoing litigations, including challenging the change in the law.

The government made clear that should Atlantia not live up to its end of the bargain, it was prepared to revoke the license outright.

When Conte had raised such a possibility ahead of the deal, it spooked the markets, prompting a 15% plunge in Atlantia shares.

“The way the whole story was managed, in my view, still leaves some big questions as for any future government intervention on regulated businesses,” Lorenzo Codogno, former chief economist of the Italian treasury and currently of LC Macro

Advisors, wrote in a note.

The government “disregarded the risk of undermining the rule of law and producing long-lasting consequences on doing business in Italy.”

The original agreement, posted by the government on its website, also calls for a reduction of tolls, as well as a considerable program of investment and maintenance of the highways.

Much of Italy’s infrastructure is showing its age, and requires investments that will likely grow over time, said Andrea Colli, a professor of business history at Bocconi University in Milan. “The state is bringing home that problem too,” he said, something investors will be considering when the company goes on the market.

The collapse of the bridge, built in the 1960s, is the subject of a criminal inquiry, and employees of Autostrade as well as officials from the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport are under investigation.

Prosecutors are also looking into the safety reports compiled

by Spea Engineering, a Milan-based company that performed inspections on the bridge. Spea is owned by Atlantia.

Some analysts suggested that the government should have waited until the case went to court and a verdict had been reached before trying to negotiate a change in ownership.

Marco Ponti, a professor of transport economics at Polytechnic University in Milan, said that state control of Autostrade was not necessarily a bad thing, “as long as they don’t abuse their mandate using tolls as a government ATM by bleeding the users.”

In the end, what emerges, said Mingardi of the Bruno Leoni think tank, is “that in Italy, you do business only if you are a friend of the government, and at that point, it’s better to do business with the government.”

A piece of the Morandi Bridge, which narrowly missed residential buildings under the east side of the bridge when it collapsed, in Genoa, Italy, Aug. 23, 2018.

18

Monday, August 3, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

John Lewis was the anti-Trump

By JAMELLE BOUIE

I

n his final essay, published on Thursday in The New York Times, Rep. John Lewis of Georgia offered welcome words of encouragement and wisdom for everyone protesting discrimination and injustice. He also made a crucial point about our political system, one that bears repeating as we face powerful threats to self-government and the rule of law.

“Democracy is not a state,” Lewis wrote. “It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.”

Americans have lived with democratic institutions for so long that it’s become easy to think of democracy as something that is defined and embodied by those institutions.

But the Constitution and Congress and elections and courts aren’t democracy themselves as much as they’re instruments for its realization. Democracy itself is something larger and more expansive; it is an ethic, a way of living and, as Lewis wrote, an act, something that you must do in order to summon it into existence.

I am reminded, by all of this, of John Dewey, the American philosopher and psychologist who devoted his long career to the explication of life in a modern industrial democracy and its implications for a wide range of social and

PO BOX 6537 Caguas PR 00726 Telephones: (787) 743-3346 • (787) 743-6537 (787) 743-5606 • Fax (787) 743-5100

Dr. Ricardo Angulo Publisher Manuel Sierra

Ray Ruiz

General Manager

Legal Notice Director

María de L. Márquez

Sharon Ramírez

Business Director

Legal Notices Graphics Manager

R. Mariani

Elsa Velázquez

Circulation Director

Reporter

Lisette Martínez

María Rivera

Advertising Agency Director

Graphic Artist Manager

People lined up outside the U.S. Capitol to pay their respects to John Lewis. political activity.

In “The Ethics of Democracy,” an 1888 essay written while he was teaching at the University of Michigan, Dewey described his expansive vision of democracy. Against contemporary skeptics who saw democracy as little more than simple majority rule by ignorant, isolated individuals, he argued that we should understand democracy as “a form of moral and spiritual association” that takes “personality” — meaning individual potential — as its “first and final reality.”

Democracy recognizes the “infinite and universal possibility” within each person and seeks to foster its expression, not for “mere self-assertion” or “unregulated” desire but for “an individualism of freedom, of responsibility, of initiative to and for the ethical ideal.”

For Dewey, democracy was an ethical project for individual and collective flourishing. And a democratic society was one in which people could develop their “distinctive capacities” to the fullest and then use them for the sake of their communities.

Of course, Dewey knew that American democracy was far from this ideal. And to the extent that the United States could be an example to the world, it was only if it demonstrated progress toward “securing and maintaining an ever-increasing release of the powers of human nature, in service of a freedom which is cooperative and a cooperation which is voluntary.”

The only way to make this happen, Dewey argued, was to live this democratic belief in the “potentialities of every human being” and work to “provide the conditions that will enable these potentialities to come to realization.”

Decades later, in 1941, as the world battled fascism, Dewey wrote that democracy “is a faith which becomes sentimental when it is not put systematically into practice every day in all the relationships of living.”

The reason to connect Lewis to Dewey is to highlight and emphasize this idea of democracy as a social and ethi-

cal commitment, something that cannot be limited to the ballot box, something that must be lived and practiced in all spheres of life. Marching, speaking, deliberating, educating, persuading — these are just some of the actions that help make democracy real. They’re also the tools we’ll need to defend democracy against the looming threat of autocracy.

Just a few hours before Lewis’ funeral in Atlanta, President Donald Trump denounced mail-in voting, in one of his now regular attempts to delegitimize the upcoming election. He also raised the idea of pushing the election back, to another date. “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” he wrote on Twitter. “It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote??”

There’s no legal way the president can delay or postpone the election. Its date is set by state and federal law and moving it would require a herculean political effort.

Trump lacks the patience or capacity to coordinate. But that doesn’t mean his language isn’t dangerous. Trump is sowing chaos. He’s undermining public faith in the election process and building a constituency of supporters who will treat any result short of his reelection as evidence of fraud and misconduct. And he’s been backed thus far by an attorney general who repeats his false claims and gives ominously conditional answers to questions about honoring the democratic process. Asked during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday what he would do if Trump loses the election but refuses to concede, Bill Barr answered “If the results are clear I would leave office,” a response that leaves open the possibility of unclear results and a contested outcome.

It’s fair to say that over the last 3 1/2 years our democratic “norms” have done little to restrain Trump’s most corrupt and authoritarian instincts. Our “checks and balances” have proven inadequate in the face of a president who sees the Constitution as merely a few pieces of paper. As we’ve seen with child separation on the border or secretive federal police in Portland, Oregon, Trump has tried to extend and expand his authority as much as he can, daring the political system to stop him each time.

But while many of our institutions have not been up to the task of confronting Trump, our democracy, meaning individuals and communities and civil society, has. Protest put Trump on the defensive in the days after he took office; protest drew attention to his abuses at the border; and protest over the last three months has helped galvanized many millions more against him. If Trump is defeated, and if he does leave office, it will be because Americans understood, and took seriously, the idea that democracy is a way of living as much as it is a form of government, that it is, as Lewis told us, an act and not a state.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

19

Alcaldes ofrecen recomendaciones al Departamento de Educación ante inicio de labores para los maestros Por THE STAR

E

l vicepresidente de la Asociación de Alcaldes de Puerto Rico, Luis Javier Hernández hizo público un llamado al secretario del Departamento de Educación (DE), Eligio Hernández ante la falta de garantías de salubridad para los maestros y empleados del sistema público de enseñanza, que inician labores mañana lunes.

“Ante el aumento de casos positivos a COVID-19 que se están experimentando en todo Puerto Rico, responsablemente estamos haciendo varias recomendaciones en ánimo de aportar al proceso”, explicó el Alcalde de Villalba.

Las recomendaciones, que surgieron luego de consultas con maestros activos y personal del DE, son las siguientes.

La alcaldesa de Loíza, Julia Nazario Fuentes propuso que todos los maestros y demás personal a trabajar en las escuelas, tenga acceso a mascarillas quirúrgicas y medidas de protección. “Hay que procurar además que, en la medida en que

sea posible, aquellos maestros con hijos menores de edad y con condiciones crónicas puedan realizar trabajo desde sus casas”.

La alcaldesa de Salinas, Karilyn Bonilla señaló que es las regiones escolares deben asegurarse que todos los niños tengan acceso a una computadora y un servicio de internet en sus casas.

“Entendemos que las medidas de educación en línea afectan directamente a los estudiantes de clase pobre y media, ese sector más necesitado requiere atención especial porque sabemos que el acceso a la educación es un derecho constitucional”, detalló la también exdirectora de la Agencia Estatal para Manejo de Emergencias y Administración de Desastres (ahora Negociado).

Por su parte, el segundo vicepresidente de la Asociación y alcalde de Guayanilla, Nelson Torres Yordán, señaló la viabilidad de concretar acuerdos para que brigadas de desinfección municipal puedan ser parte de la solución y realizar limpieza en las escuelas. El también alcalde de Villalba añadió que se deben incluir las escuelas

en el sistema de rastreo municipal.

“Conviene crear una división exclusiva para monitoreo de casos en las escuelas, de manera que se pueda tomar acción rápida en casos de contagios”.

Hernández señaló que el gobierno central ya cuenta con acuerdos con los municipios que actualmente manejan el rastreo de pacientes de COVID-19 con epidemiólogos y salubristas. A su juicio, el añadir una división que trabaje el monitoreo de casos en las escuelas de cada municipio le brinda al DE tener un control mayor y evitar la creación de brotes o cierres de facilidades. De igual manera, brinda a los directores las herramientas adecuadas del manejo de la pandemia.

“Hay fondos federales del Cares Act que están disponibles para todo esto. Las recomendaciones que hoy estamos haciendo son concretamente para esta fase y luego vamos a presentar medidas adicionales con relación a las clases presenciales que están señaladas para iniciarse el 17 de agosto”, finalizó Hernández.

Pocos cambios en la nueva Carta Circular emitida por el Departamento de Recreación y Deportes Por THE STAR a secretaria del Departamento de Recreación y Adriana G. Sánchez Parés, emitió la LCartaDeportes, Circular número 2020-007, con las reglas y

normas aplicables a la realización de las actividades físicas y deportivas a partir de este sábado, hasta el 15 de agosto.

“Conforme a la nueva Orden Ejecutiva emitida por la Gobernadora (Wanda Vázquez), es nuestro deber evitar poner en riesgo la salud de nuestros deportistas. Por lo tanto, se mantienen las disposiciones previamente emitidas en la Carta Circular que venció en el día de ayer (viernes). Manteniendo los entrenamientos individualizados y en lugares abiertos”, informó Sánchez Parés en declaraciones escritas.

En esta nueva orden, se mantiene el entrenamiento deportivo y recreativo individualizado sin contacto físico, con el uso de mascarilla, con una distancia de seis a nueve pies entre participante. El horario autorizado será el permitido por el toque de queda de 5:00 de la mañana a 10:00 de la noche de lunes a sábado. Las actividades deberán realizarse al aire libre, en parques o en canchas bajo techo con flujo de aire natural.

De igual forma, se mantiene la prohibición de eventos deportivos competitivos profesionales y no profesionales. Asimismo, como parte de las nuevas medidas, se ordena el cierre de las instalaciones deportivas y recreativas comunes, incluyendo piscinas y gimnasios, en las urbanizaciones, condominios y complejos residenciales, estén sometidos o no al régimen de Propiedad Horizontal. Igualmente, se or-

dena el cierre de todas las instalaciones deportivas y recreativas los domingos.

En el caso de los entrenamientos en grupo, para los adultos se mantiene la norma de seis personas con un entrenador por un tiempo limitado de dos horas. Los menores están autorizados a practicar un máximo de cuatro participantes y un entrenador por una hora. Durante los entrenamientos se prohíbe el contacto físico entre deportistas, solo se podrán practicar destrezas del deporte mediante simulaciones, los atletas deberán mantener en todo momento una distancia de seis a nueve pies, uso de mascarillas,

entre otros parámetros establecidos.

Adicional, se conserva la autorización de practicar en la playa los deportes como correr, caminar, surfing, vela, remo y buceo, entre otros. Mediante esta Carta Circular se añaden: nado en aguas abiertas, “snorkeling”, kayak y paddle boarding, mientras que se aclara que el surfing incluye todas sus modalidades. Los deportistas utilizarán el método de entrada y salida del agua “keep moving” y mantendrán el distanciamiento social en el agua. No obstante, las playas y balnearios permanecerán cerrados los domingos.

20

Monday, August 3, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Beyoncé’s ‘Black is King’ is no secret, but still comes with mystery

“The events of 2020 have made the film’s vision and message even more relevant,” Beyoncé wrote of her latest project, “Black Is King.”

By BEN SISARIO

T

he playbook is familiar, though the particulars are new: Beyoncé unveils a new project. Details, though scant, are pored over for clues.

Social media immediately bubbles with anticipation and debate.

On Friday, Beyoncé will release “Black Is King,” a visual album connected to Disney’s remake last year of “The Lion King,” on the Disney+ streaming platform. Announced a month ago, “Black Is King” is a typically ambitious latter-day project for Beyoncé — she wrote and directed it, and is executive producer — that adapts the “Lion King” story to a wider narrative of African history and heritage. It also represents Beyoncé’s latest move as a self-directed business figure, aligning herself with a major media partner, as she has done before with Tidal, HBO, Apple and Netflix.

“Black Is King,” which is based on songs that Beyoncé created for “The Lion King: The Gift,” a companion album to last year’s remake, carries added weight since Beyoncé herself has made a case for its topical significance.

“The events of 2020 have made the film’s vision and message even more

relevant,” she wrote in a rare explanatory post on Instagram. “I believe that when Black people tell our own stories, we can shift the axis of the world and tell our REAL history of generational wealth and richness of soul that are not told in our history books.”

Beyoncé and Disney have offered few details about the project itself. It was made with an international creative team, including many Africans, and its cast has boldface names like Lupita Nyong’o, Pharrell Williams, Naomi Campbell, Jay-Z and Tina Knowles-Lawson, Beyoncé’s mother. The list of directors who worked with Beyoncé on the project includes Emmanuel Adjei, Blitz Bazawule, Pierre Debusschere, Jenn Nkiru, Ibra Ake, Dikayl Rimmasch, Jake Nava and Kwasi Fordjour.

Even basic points remain mysterious. Officially called a visual album, it appears to be a series of music videos linked through a narrative sequence, though it is not clear even how many songs or films are included. Representatives for Beyoncé and Disney declined to comment.

But a lack of information has only stirred the pot, as online commentators — having seen just two brief trailers — have debated topics like whether Be-

yoncé is exploiting African stereotypes, and whether the apparent presence of a white butler at a Black women’s tea party is a sign of racism.

In some ways, that reflects one of Beyoncé’s great talents — stoking public conversation with her art, while explaining very little about it.

“She is allowing her art to speak for itself,” said Treva Lindsey, an associate professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Ohio State University, who has commented frequently on Beyoncé’s work. “I always see Beyoncé as opening up space for robust conversations. It often says more about us as consumers and critics than it does about her.”

What is more clear, however, is Beyoncé’s media strategy, which she has been developing in plain sight over the last decade. After beginning her career as a teenager in Destiny’s Child — and doing what is expected of all rising stars, like giving interviews — by the early 2010s she had largely abandoned the standard pop-star script, and remade herself as a self-contained cultural brand. She now almost never speaks to the news media.

Part of her approach has involved leapfrogging from one platform to another to suit the needs of each project.

In early 2013, HBO showed her autobiographical film “Life Is but a Dream”; later that year, she melted the internet — and upended the music business — by releasing her album “Beyoncé” on Apple’s iTunes with no notice.

“Lemonade,” her 2016 album, was first released on Tidal, the streaming service taken over by Jay-Z, her husband, in which she is a partner, and had a companion film shown on HBO, with segments directed by Mark Romanek, Jonas Akerlund, Melina Matsoukas and others. Last year, Netflix carried “Homecoming,” the film of her performance at Coachella from 2018.

In this trajectory, Disney+ is simply the next hot media platform with something to offer Beyoncé, said Dan Runcie, who writes about the business of streaming and hip-hop on his

site Trapital.

“This is well within the wheelhouse of the Beyoncé empire,” Runcie said, “given how much she’s not locked herself into one particular partner, but thought of herself as a broader enterprise and kept her options open.”

With greater control, Beyoncé has changed her musical priorities. No longer chasing pop hits, she has used her albums and multimedia projects to explore challenging material, and made issues like gender and race central topics of her art, with the Black experience — and Black womanhood, in particular — becoming her overarching theme in recent years.

This has, perhaps paradoxically, made Beyoncé even more famous and influential, with her every appearance, utterance or Instagram post scrutinized for hidden meanings. That fame can bring more attention to her themes of Black lives and Black struggles — like her Black Panther-inspired dancers at her Super Bowl appearance in 2016, or images invoking the toll of Hurricane Katrina from the video of her song “Formation” — said Robin M. Boylorn, an associate professor of communications at the University of Alabama.

Boylorn also pointed to Beyoncé’s Coachella appearance, where the star performed an ode to the dances and marching bands of historically Black colleges and universities — with signifiers that may have gone over the heads of many white people in the audience, though their use by Beyoncé drew attention and led to wide media coverage.

“Her taking a space like Coachella, that is inherently white, and making it a celebration of Blackness,” Boylorn said, “speaks to her being able to shift the narrative and also literally shift the face of the conversation. That is just a remarkable use of her platform.”

What statement Beyoncé makes with “Black Is King” remains to be seen (at least for one more day). But that statement is likely to come primarily through the film and not any comment.

“She says less,” Lindsey said, “as she has more power.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

21

Muppet meta mania, revived for the streaming era

By JAMES PONIEWOZIK

W

hat is a Muppet made of? One of the first corrections I ever had to make in this newspaper, and still the best, involved my review of the 2015 ABC sitcom “The Muppets.” I referred to the covering that makes up the outside of Jim Henson’s creations as felt; a reader informed me that it was, in fact, fleece. Noted.

That truth, however, is only skin-deep. What Muppets are really made out of is television.

This goes back to the earliest days of “Sesame Street,” in the 1960s, when the creators conceived a kids’ show with the metabolism and spirit of “Laugh-In,” full of TV parodies and faux sponsorships. It continued through that ill-fated ABC comedy, an unsettlingly edgy behind-the-scenes look at a talk show starring Miss Piggy.

And that maniacal meta spirit powered “The Muppet Show,” a comedy about a faux variety show that was also, itself, one of TV’s best variety shows (and the inspiration for a series of movies). Stressed-out Kermit, melodramatic Piggy, hyperactive Animal and the rest lovingly embodied the craziness of showbiz for a mass-media era when TV delivered dance, romance and seltzered pants for audiences of all ages under one big tent.

As the show’s original pitch reel to TV executives promised, accurately, “Small children will love the cute, cuddly characters! Young people will love the fresh and innovative comedy!

College kids and intellectual eggheads will love the underlying symbolism of everything!”

Cut to 2020, when TV is splintered and siloed, and so are the Muppets as a property. The kids’ end of the franchise, “Sesame Street,” belongs to HBO Max after a move to the gentrified neighborhood of HBO in 2016. The kids-of-all-ages end, populated by “Muppet Show” alumni, wear the sigil of House Disney.

So what, in the streaming era, is a Muppet now? That’s the question of, appropriately, “Muppets Now,” on Disney+, which recaptures some of the bomb-throwing brio of the 1970s “Muppet Show,” but in a more compartmentalized format.

Like its forebear, this is a show about the making of the show that you’re watching. This time, the puppety pals are not putting on a giant theater-scaled production but uploading a package of miniepisodes, on an unforgiving deadline, to a streaming service. Goodbye, Rainbow Connection; hello, broadband connection.

Kermit and his lieutenant Scooter still sweat deadlines and suffer fools, but virtually, through a teleconferencing screen.

There are so many chat windows in the new show, you might think it was developed under coronavirus quarantine. It wasn’t, but it all seems awfully familiar right now.

Each half-hour episode collects a handful of recurring, Quibi-size segments. Miss Piggy hosts a lifestyle (rather, “lifesty”) minishow, with sporting appearances from Taye Diggs and Linda Cardellini (the latter joined by a talking hunk of brie).

The Swedish Chef is ruining dishes and endangering lives on a celebrity cooking-competition show. Gonzo is shooting a wilderness survival show that we may never see because bringing along a camera “would be cheating.”

“Muppets Now” improves on the ABC sitcom because

In “Muppets Now,” classic characters star in short reality TV parodies. it understands what the Muppets are and why we love them.

They’re not mopey stand-ins for us but wild, demonic imaginings of ourselves, unburdened by impulse control and the laws of physics. Like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, the bespectacled scientist of Muppet Labs, this show knows there’s no point in getting access to a budget and a camera if you’re not going to blow things up.

But with the segmented format of “Muppets Now,” you lose the big-scale interaction among characters that animated the 1970s variety show. The connective tissue here mostly consists of Kermit and Scooter teleconferencing. There are some nice throwaway jokes there. (Scooter’s shared computer desktop includes the random folder “UFOs?”) But just like all the Zoom webinars you’re attending these days, it’s not quite the same.

The best segments don’t lean too hard into the “Now” part of “Muppets Now” but use the premise of quickie reality TV to resurrect the old-fashioned appeal of entertainment made by maniacs. Pepe the King Prawn steals the new episodes as the host of a game show whose complicated rules and questions he invents on the fly. (“What was Christopher Columbus’ maiden name?”)

The Muppet Labs update, “Field Test,” finds an apt realityvideo corollary: the alleged science show whose real purpose is creative destruction. Features include “Will It Melt or Will It Burn?,” a question to which the only legitimate Muppet answer is, “Fetch me a blowtorch.” You may retain the odd scientific fact from it, but Honeydew captures the show’s, and the Muppets’, true spirit: “Let’s stop learning, and let’s start burning!”

HBO Max, meanwhile, is putting its intellectual property to use in a show for younger viewers that calls back to an older form of TV. “The Not-Too-Late Show With Elmo” imagines that, for around 15 minutes before bedtime, the ticklish young star of

“Sesame Street” hosts a full-on talk show from his home. (Farfetched? Tell John Krasinski.)

You may remember Elmo as the adorable/exasperating toddler-Muppet who gradually hijacked “Sesame Street” starting in the 1980s. If you’re not a fan to begin with [raises hand], “Not-Too-Late” will not convert you.

But it’s charmingly true to the character, who in retrospect has the kind of insistent energy, nosiness and thirst for attention that makes him perfect for late-night. “Not-Too-Late” is actually closer than “Muppets Now” to the format of the old “Muppet Show,” with chaos backstage and Bert and Ernie squabbling in the control room. But the spirit is all Elmo.

Each episode has a featured guest, a well-chosen group that includes Andy Cohen (in disguise as Grover) and John Mulaney, fresh off his own brilliant “Sack Lunch Bunch” kids’ show sendup. There are also musical guests, delivering sweetly oddball covers of lullabies and “Sesame Street” standards, like Lil Nas X taking “Elmo’s Song” down the Old Town Road.

Elmo, however, remains the star. He high-fives his MC, Cookie Monster; he croons a good-night song; he tells knockknock jokes. (“Who’s there?” “Tank.” “Tank who?” “You’re welcome!”) Like Jimmy Fallon (who visits the first episode), he challenges his guests to games and goofy races.

Part of me, I will admit, fantasizes a more snarky, more adult — more “Muppet Show” — version of this series that looked at Elmo as a Larry Sanders-esque, needy diva exploring his hunger for attention, his thirst for validation, his insistence on seeing all the world as Elmo’s World.

That version will have to wait for another reboot. TV will keep morphing and evolving. But the Muppets, it seems, will always be there for it — sometimes with a lullaby, sometimes with a blowtorch.

22

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

Longer, slower, farther: Savoring the prospects of future travels

By ELAINE GLUSAC

B

eth Warren, a middle school history teacher in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, had been looking forward to a much-anticipated trip this summer to Egypt, a country she vowed to show her husband and friends after her first visit several years ago. She was deep into organizing the trip with High End Journeys when the pandemic struck and has since shifted the visit to summer 2022, in part to make sure the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza is open.

“2022 sounds really far away,” she said. “But once I saw Egypt, I couldn’t get enough of it.”

People have always planned big trips months or even a year ahead of time, but now many are extending that timeline even further. In the travel stasis induced by the pandemic, future travelers have taken to tackling their bucket lists with big trips that are more distant and longer than usual — and planned further in advance. Optimists are targeting 2021. For others, their next big trip will be in 2022.

Before the pandemic, according to the American Society of Travel Advisors, most travelers booked trips six months ahead or more, on average, and longer for elaborate honeymoons or very special events like the solar eclipse passing over South America in December.

Some travel companies say longer-term bookings have recently rebounded. For instance, Red Savannah, a British luxury travel agency that organizes custom trips, says it is up 160% over bookings this time last year.

These days, even spontaneous types have more time to think about where they want to go and put a plan in place.

“I’m trying to go big with my trips,” said Rayme Gorniak of Chicago, who is currently laid off from his work managing fitness studio franchises.

Anything short and normally easy to plan might bring disappointment as the pandemic continues, he reasoned, but a far-horizon destination — he’s considering Jordan for June 2021 — offers

Egypt is on the bucket list of Beth Warren, a middle school history teacher in Lookout Mountain, Ga. She’s planning a trip for 2022. hope. The trip also represents a personal conquest for Gorniak, who is gay and worried about the persecution of LGBT people in some Muslim countries.

“Jordan’s been on my radar because of the rich history, and off it because of the potential risk I would have,” he said.

“But I’ve been doing research on Amman and seeing, as strict religious standards go, it’s a little bit more lax on tradition,” he said.

For Lori Goldenthal of Wellesley, Massachusetts, changing plans meant changing the destination. She had originally planned a trip in and around Vietnam for her husband’s upcoming 60th birthday. But after the pandemic hit, she worked with the agency Extraordinary Journeys to book a two-week trip to Namibia for 2021.

“Namibia was on my bucket list and it seemed like a better idea than going to all these big cities in Asia,” she said.

“I believe we will go, but who knows,” she added, noting generous cancellation policies that made her more comfortable booking the trip. “Having something to look forward to is fantastic.”

Other forward-looking travelers are simply picking up a year later.

There are psychological benefits to

planning activities, especially travel, according to Shevaun Neupert, a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University. Future-oriented thinking is equated with proactive coping, a means of reducing stress through detailed planning, such as learning which flights to book to avoid layovers, and gathering the resources — including time and money — to make it happen.

“Being able to think about and imagine something positive in the future has benefits in the present,” she said.

The pandemic, too, may have shown travelers that what they thought they could always do — namely, see the world — isn’t such a certainty.

“Maybe they thought it would always be available, which was previously true. Now we’ve experienced restrictions and realize, oh, I need to make this happen,” she added.

Advance planning is also a practical way to turn vague desires into concrete plans. The travel adviser network Virtuoso offers a program called Virtuoso Wanderlist, an online survey that friends or family seeking to travel together take individually. (Since the pandemic, Virtuoso has made the online planning tool free.)

The program asks where they want

to go, their interests and the kinds of activities they prefer. It then compares the results to identify mutual preferences and priorities that a travel adviser will analyze and, in consultation with the clients, use to come up with a five-year plan for tackling the bucket list.

Jim Bendt, the managing director of Virtuoso Wanderlist, equates travel planning with financial planning in the sense that both seek to maximize precious resources. In the case of travel, the currency is time.

“It takes away the stress,” said Karen Walkowski, a health care manager in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, who took the Wanderlist survey with her husband. “It turns a bucket list into a plan.”

In addition to compounding their wanderlust, many travelers and planners say the pandemic has revealed travel’s environmental impact and are planning more mindfully.

“Our current situation has made me even more committed to focusing exclusively on sustainability going forward,” Rose O’Connor, a travel adviser in Granite Bay, California, wrote in an email.

“On one hand, we have seen how tourism can be vital to conservation efforts in certain destinations,” she wrote, noting the uptick in poaching in Africa in the absence of tourism revenue. On the other hand, she added, traveling from a hot spot like the United States particularly to remote or developing countries “is an ethical issue.”

Jeremy Bassetti, a professor of humanities at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, has a sabbatical coming up in fall 2021 and plans to use miles to get to China and then travel overland to Tibet, Nepal and India for several months.

While big trips often accompany sabbaticals, Bassetti has rethought his to “travel longer, farther and more slowly in 2021,” he said.

“Why wouldn’t we want to travel more to connect more” when assumptions about being free to travel are “disappearing before our eyes?” he added.

“If you want to experience new cultures, you can’t do it very quickly.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

23

The lightness of being a couch potato may work to keep us fat

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

I

n an interesting new study of overweight adults, those who donned a weighted garment for three weeks dropped pounds, without consciously changing their diets, moving more or otherwise altering their lives.

The study, which grew out of research with rodents, suggests that our bodies are capable of judging how much we should weigh and, if we abruptly rise above that level, nudging us into dropping pounds. But the findings also raise questions about why, then, so many of us pack on uncontested pounds during adulthood, and whether aspects of our modern lifestyle, such as long hours of sitting, might contribute.

Anyone who has shed pounds and then grimly watched them return has experienced the pull of homeostasis. A well-established biological concept, homeostasis refers, in essence, to our bodies’ stubborn desire to keep things the way they have been. If a physiological process worked before, the body typically tries to reset to it when something within our bodies changes.

In practice, homeostasis means that if, for instance, we manage to trim some body fat, various homeostatic mechanisms in our brains and cells recognize the loss and start sending out messages that increase hunger or prompt us to move less until, inexorably, that original weight creeps back on.

But for some reason, the opposite homeostatic reaction rarely occurs. If we overshoot our original weight or, in the course of normal modern living, pack on some pounds, our innate weight management mechanisms rarely kick in, alert our bodies and rid us of those added pounds. Instead, the homeostatic system seems almost to shrug and accept that extra body mass as the new normal.

There are many theories about why extra pounds are so intractable, and the full mechanisms are still mysterious. But a few years ago, researchers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden started to wonder about sitting. Being sedentary for multiple hours a day is associated with heightened risks for weight gain and obesity, in part because sitting burns few calories.

But the Swedish researchers wondered if immobility perhaps also fools bodies into thinking they weigh less than they do, since chairs support a portion of someone’s weight. To study the issue, they first undertook extensive experiments a few years ago with overweight rodents.

The scientists implanted lead pellets into the animals, instantly rendering them heavier.

Within two weeks, most of the animals had dropped enough body fat that their weight, including the pellets, was about the same as it had been a month before. After the pellets were removed, the animals regained the lost weight. Their homeostatic weight management had worked.

Sitting may confuse cellular sensors into thinking we are lighter than we are, prompting the body to put on weight.

But when the researchers performed the same experiment on animals bred to have few bone cells of a specialized type that senses outside pressure on the skeleton, they lost little weight after pellet implantation.

Their bodies’ sense of how much they weighed appeared to have been thrown off.

The researchers speculated that, normally, the animals’ bone cells would have provided what they called a “gravitostat,” using the body’s pressure against the earth to sense its weight and send messages to the brain about whether that weight had grown or declined. Without those bone cells at work, the rodents did not realize how heavy they had become.

People are not rodents, though. So, for the new study, which was published recently in EClinical Medicine, the same scientists recruited 69 overweight adults and, in lieu of lead pellets, asked them to wear weighted vests. Some of these vests added 11% to a person’s body weight; the others added about 1% and served as a control. The volunteers were asked to wear the vests throughout the day but not otherwise change their diets or lives.

After three weeks, the men and women wearing the heavier vests had dropped about 3 pounds of fat, on average, which was less than the weight of their vests but substantially greater than among the other group, whose weight loss was negligible. Some of this successful loss likely was a result of the fact that people in

the heavier vests carried more mass now, the scientists believe, meaning they burned more calories whenever they moved.

But the results also intimate that, like the animals in the earlier experiments, humans may contain a gravitostat, said John-Olov Jansson, a professor at the University of Gothenburg who oversaw the new study. If so, our bodies and bones rely on the relative dent we make against the ground to know if our mass has changed and if, for the sake of homeostasis, we should gain or drop a bit.

In that case, the broad implication is that we may need to stand and move in order for our gravitostat to function correctly, Jansson said. When you sit, “you confuse” the cellular sensors into thinking you are lighter than you are, he said.

The idea of an internal gravitostat is still speculative, though, he said. The researchers did not look at volunteers’ bone cells in this study. They also did not compare their diets and sitting time, although they hope to in future experiments. Plus, the study was short-term and has practical limitations. Weighted vests are cumbersome and unattractive, and some of the volunteers complained of back pain and other aches while wearing them.

But the researchers expect that wearing a weighted vest is not necessary to goose someone’s gravitostat into action, Jansson said. If they are right, getting out of your chair could be a first step toward helping your body recalibrate your waistline.

24

Monday, August 3, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Whence came stonehenge’s stones? Now we know

A section of Stonehenge, roughly 5,000 years old, on the Salisbury Plain near Amesbury, England, on Aug. 6, 2014.

By FRANZ LIDZ

B

ack in the ‘30s — the 1130s — Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth created the impression that Stonehenge was built as a memorial to a bunch of British nobles slain by the Saxons. In his “Historia Regum Britanniae,” Geoffrey tells us that Merlin, the wizard of Arthurian legend, was enlisted to move a ring of giant mystical stones from Mount Killaraus in Ireland to what is commonly believed to be Salisbury Plain, a chalk plateau in southern England, where Stonehenge is located.

Back in the ‘50s — the 1950s — a chunk of rock went missing from the magical tumble of megaliths that now comprise Stonehenge. The chunk, a 3 1/2-foot cylindrical core, had been drilled out of one of the site’s massive sarsen stones during repairs and taken home by an employee of the diamond-cutting firm that carried out the work.

The core, recently repatriated after 60 years, turned out to be pivotal to an academic paper published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The study pinpointed the source of the sarsens, a mystery that has long bedeviled geologists and archaeologists.

Although the project did not identify the specific

spot where the stones came from, Mike Pitts, editor of the magazine British Archaeology, believes that the discovery makes the search for sarsen quarries a realistic option. “If we can find them, we could learn about how they were dressed and moved, and importantly we might be able to date that activity,” he said. “Dating matters, because then we can say what else was present in the landscape at the same time, what was old or gone and what was still to come — other sites are better dated — and of course who actually built the thing.”

Two kinds of stones make up the roughly 5,000-yearold monument known as Stonehenge. A small inner horseshoe consists of 2- to 4-ton blocks of varied geology, called bluestone after the bluish-gray hue they have when wet or freshly broken. The sarsens, sandstone slabs that weigh 20 tons on average, form Stonehenge’s enormous central horseshoe, the uprights and lintels of the ragged outer circle, as well as the outlying Heel Stone, Slaughter Stone and Station Stones.

Geologists determined nearly a century ago that the bluestones were dragged, carried or rolled to Stonehenge from somewhere in the Preseli Hills in western Wales, some 180 miles away. Last year a team of archaeologists led by Michael Parker Pearson of University College Lon-

don revealed evidence of the exact location of two of the quarries.

As for the sarsens, conventional wisdom holds that they derived from deposits on the highest points of the Marlborough Downs, 18 miles north of Stonehenge.

David Nash, a geomorphologist at the University of Brighton and lead author on the new sarsen study, said the idea that the slabs hailed from the Downs dates to the writings of William Lambarde, a 16th-century antiquarian.

“Lambarde came to that conclusion based on little more than the appearance of the stones on the Downs and their similarity to those at Stonehenge,” Nash said. “This idea has stuck around for more than 400 years but has never been tested.”

Nash has traced the source of almost all the sarsens to West Woods, on the southern edge of the Downs and several miles closer to Stonehenge. His team analyzed the geochemical fingerprint of the 52 sarsens that remain in situ at the ancient site.

The breakthrough came last summer when the longlost core from Stone 58 was returned to English Heritage, the charity that manages Stonehenge. The sarsen cylinder offered Nash the unique opportunity to analyze a sample unaffected by surface weathering, which can slightly alter the chemical composition. Drilling through the ancient stones is now discouraged.

“There are literally thousands of pieces of sarsen sitting in museums across Britain,” he said. “However, to my knowledge, the core from 58 is the only piece where we can identify precisely which stone it came from.”

To determine its chemical makeup, researchers used a variety of noninvasive spectrometry techniques. Once the geochemical signature was established, they sampled sarsens from 20 locations across southern England, including six on the Downs. A data set comparison resulted in a single match, West Woods.

Only two of the sarsens, Stones 26 and 160, appear to have come from elsewhere in the region. “The biggest surprise for me was finding out that the chemistry of the remaining sarsens was so consistent,” said Nash. “I expected a little more variability.”

The only other authority thought to have linked West Woods and Stonehenge is John Aubrey, biographer and philosopher who surveyed the monument in the 17th century and was the first to record a ring of 56 chalk pits, now called Aubrey Holes. “Aubrey reckoned that he’d found the source of Stonehenge’s sarsens, a large quarry pit just 14 miles north of Stonehenge,” said Parker Pearson. “Given that West Woods is around 15 miles away, it’s very possible that he got it right the first time! And it’s taken us 340 years to find out again.”

For his part, Nash writes it off to archaeologists “not seeing the wood for the trees.”

Or perhaps leaving stones unturned.

The San Juan Daily Star PIEDAD HORIZONTAL: Apartamiento #908. Es un apartaESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO mento residencial localizado DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL en el lado Norte del edificio GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRI- Condominio Golden Tower que BUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTAN- mide 25’6” de largo por su parCIA SALA DE CAROLINA. te más larga medido desde la puerta de entrada hasta el balORIENTAL BANK cón más 5’de balcón por 24’9” Demandante V. de ancho más una entrada de MINERVA MARÍA que hacen un área de 785 VELAZCO VILLANUEVA; 8’9” pies cuadrados, equivalentes a JOHN DOE Y RICHARD 72.96 metros cuadrados. Sus ROE lindes y distancias son los siDemandados guientes: por el NORTE, en una CIVIL NÚM. CA2020CV01361. distancia de 25’6”, con el patio SOBRE: SUSTITUCIÓN DE Norte del edificio; por el SUR, PAGARÉ HIPOTECARIO. EM- en una distancia de 34’3” con el PLAZAMIENTO. ESTADOS apartamiento #906 y el corredor UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL del edificio que da a los ascenPRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. sores y escaleras que a su vez UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASO- dan al piso terrero y al área de CIADO DE P.R. SS. estacionamiento; por el ESTE; en una distancia de 24’9”, con A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE, personas el patio este del edificio; y por el OESTE, en una distancia de desconocidas que se 33’6” con el apartamiento #910. designan con estos Este apartamiento consta de nombres ficticios, que balcón, dos cuartos dormitorios con closet, sala, comedor, puedan ser tenedor o un cuarto de baño y catenedores, o puedan tener cocina, lentador. El baño está equipado algún interés en el pagaré con bañera lavamano y servicio hipotecario a que se hace sanitario. La cocina tiene estureferencia más adelante fa, fregadero y gabinetes. La en el presente edicto, que puerta de entrada de este apartamiento está en su lado sur y se publicará una sola vez. por ella se sale al pasillo que da Se les notifica que en la Delos elevadores a las escaleras manda radicada en el caso y de allí se sale al exterior. Este de epígrafe se alega que un apartamiento tiene una partipagaré hipotecario otorgado el cipación en los elementos coI de marzo de 2005, Minerva munes generales de 0.00304% María Velazco Villanueva otoren los elementos comunes gó en Carolina, Puerto Rico un limitados que le corresponde pagaré hipotecario por la suma de .00295%. Finca 37197 insprincipal de $81,000.00, con crita al folio 113 del tomo 979 intereses a razón del 6.50% de Carolina I, Registro de la anual, a favor de la Oriental Propiedad de Carolina, SecBank and Trust (hoy Oriental ción I. URBANA: PROPIEDAD Bank), o a su orden, con venHORIZONTAL: Apartamiento cimiento el I de marzo de 2035, de Estacionamiento #169. Del ante el Notario Wilson A. GalarCondominio Golden Tower, tieza Galarza, mediante el afidávit ne un área superficial de apronúmero 632, se extravió, sin ximadamente 160.56 pies cuaembargo la deuda evidenciada drados, equivalentes a 14.92 y garantizada por dicho pagaré metros cuadrados. Colinda por hipotecario no ha sido salda, el NORTE, en una distancia de por lo que la parte demandante 8’ 11” lineales, con el área de visolicita que se ordene la sustiraje del estacionamiento; por el tución del mismo. En garantía SUR, en una distancia de 8’ 11” de dicho pagaré el 1 de marzo lineales, con el apartamiento de de 2005, Minerva María Velazestacionamiento #162; por el co Villanueva constituyó hipoteESTE, en una distancia de 18’ ca número 142 ante el Notario lineales, con el apartamiento Wilson A. Galarza Galarza en de estacionamiento #170; y por garantía del pago del pagaré el OESTE, en una distancia de antes descrito, inscrita al folio 18’ lineales, con el apartamien#113 del tomo #979 de Carolina to de estacionamiento #168. El I, finca #37197, inscripción 6ta, apartamiento está destinado al Registro de la Propiedad de Caestacionamiento de automórolina, Sección I (respondiendo viles. Este apartamiento tiene la finca 37197 por $80,000.00); una participación en los eleinscrita al folio #114 del tomo mentos comunes generales de #979 de Carolina I, finca #37 .00055% y en los elementos 198, inscripción 6ta, Registro comunes limitados que le code la Propiedad de Carolina, rresponden de .00604%. Finca Sección I (respondiendo la fin37198 inscrita al folio 114 del ca 37198 por $1,000.00). La tomo 979 de Carolina I, Regishipoteca que garantiza dicho tro de la Propiedad de Carolina, pagaré grava las propiedades Sección 1. POR LA PRESENinmuebles que se describen a TE se le emplaza para que precontinuación: URBANA: PRO-

LEGAL NOTICE

@

Monday, August 3, 2020 sente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los 30 días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento, excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramaiudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

LCDO. JAVIER MONTALVO CINTRÓN RUANÚM. 17682 DELGADO & FERNÁNDEZ, LLC PO Box 11750, Fernandez Juncos Station San Juan, Puerto Rico 00919-1750 Tel. (787) 274-1414; Fax (787) 764-8241 E-mail: jmontalvodelgadofernandez.com Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 22 de julio de 2020.Lcda. Marilyn Aponte Rodriguez, Secretaria Regional. Denisse Torres Ruiz, Sec Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

ponsiva a la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento, excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra, y conceder el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

Se le advierte que dentro de los diez (10) días siguientes a la publicación del presente edicto, se le estará enviando a usted por correo certificado con acuse de recibo, una copia del emplazamiento y de la demanda presentada al lugar de su última dirección conocida: Urb. Covadonga, 2B15 calle Márquez De Santa Cruz, Toa Baja, PR 00949-5349. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y el sello del Tribunal en Toa Alta, Puerto Rico, hoy día 4 de marzo de 2020.

Lcda. Laura I Santa Sanchez, Sec Regional. Nelida Jimenez Sanchez, Sec Auxiliar.

25 términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 27 de julio de 2020. En Mayaguez, Puerto Rico , el 27 de julio de 2020.

LCDA. NORMA G.SANTANA IRIZARRY, SEC REG. INT. F/ BETSY SANTIAGO GONZALEZ, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE BAYAMÓN SALA DE FAMILIA Y MENORES

CARMEN IRIS ANDINO RODRIGUEZ T/C/P CARMEN IRIS ANDINO, CARMEN ANDINO Demandante Vs.

ROGELIO JESUS DELGADO RANGEL T/C/P ROGER DE JESÚS DELGADO, ROGER JESÚS DELGADO, ROGER DELGADO

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO LEGAL NOTICE DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA Estado Libre Asociado de PuerSALA DE TOA ALTA. to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL ORIENTAL BANK, DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de PriDemandante, v. mera Instancia Sala Superior Demandado de Mayaguez.

JOSE E. Civil Núm.: BY2019RF01050.

E.M.I. EQUITY Sobre: DIVORCIO (RUPTURA MARREROO RTIZ, IRREPARABLE). EMPLAZADemandados MORTGAGE INC MIENTO POR EDICTO DEL CIVIL NUM.: BY2019CV06453.

Demandante v.

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO HECTOR MANUEL DE PUERTO RICO. POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. EM-

AYALA BELTRAN, JOEL

PLAZAMIENTOPO R EDICTO. MORALES DIAZ Y ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMEESTADOS UNIDOS DE RICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIAMERICA BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO Demandado(a) RICO. SS. Civil Núm. MZ2019CV02206.

Sobre: COBRO DINERO Y A: JOSE E. EJECUCION DE SENTENCIA MARRERO ORTIZ POR MEDIO del presente edic- (VIA ORDINARIA) . NOTIFIto se le notifica de la radicación CACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR de una demanda en cobro de EDICTO. dinero por la vía ordinaria en la que se alega que usted adeuda a la parte demandante, Oriental Bank, ciertas sumas de dinero, y las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado de este litigio.

El demandante, Oriental Bank, ha solicitado que se dicte sentencia en contra suya y que se le ordene pagar las cantidades reclamadas en la demanda.

POR EL PRESENTE EDICTO se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación res-

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

A: HECTOR MANUEL AYALA BELTRA Y JOEL MORALES DIAZ

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 06 de julio 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

(787) 743-3346

A: ROGELIO JESUS DELGADO RANGEL T/C/P ROGER DE JESÚS DELGADO, ROGER JESÚS DELGADO, ROGER DELGADO. II ETAPA VALLE HONDO #12-3 CABUDARE BARQUISIMETO ESTADO LARA, VENEZUELA.

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva a la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento, excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electróni-

ca: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaria del Tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

VÁZQUEZ & ASSOCIATES LAW OFFICES Edif. Comercial Flamboyán Ste. 3 Calle Marginal B-16 Manatí, Puerto Rico 00674 Tel: (787) 854-0949 vazquezyasociadosmanati@ gmail.com LCDA. LEILANYS HERNANDEZ BERMUDEZ RUA 19,809 Se le apercibe que de no hacerlo, se podrá dictar Sentencia en rebeldía concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda, sin citarle ni oírle más. EXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA Y EL SELLO DEL TRIBUNAL, en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, hoy día 12 de diciembre de 2019. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA REGIONAL.

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 28 de julio de 2020. En ARECIBO, Puerto Rico, el 28 de julio de 2020 Vivian Y. Fresse González, Secretario(a) . f/Madeline Santiago Feliciano, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

A: THE MORTGAGE LOAN CO.; FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, COMO POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ

Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior de ARECIBO.

JAVIER CORTES PEREZ Demandante v.

CATALINA HERNANDEZ

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. AR2019RF0001.

Sobre: DIVORCIO-SEPARACIÓN. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: CATALINA HERNANDEZ

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 24 de julio de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma.

Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará

LEGAL NOTICE

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

LUNA ACQUISITION LLC Demandante v.

JORGE RODRIGUEZ RIVERA, JOMARIE TORO SANTIAGO Y LA SLG COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL Demandado(a) DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior Civil: Núm. CA2018CV01872. de San Juan.

SALA 408. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO EJECUCION DE HIBANCO POPULR DE POTECA .NOTIFICACIÓN DE PUERTO RICO SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. VS

THE MORTGAGE LOAN CO.; FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, COMO POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ

CIVIL NUM. SJ2020CV00701 (802). SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA JUDICIAL. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO POR SUMAC.

EL SECRETARIO (A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 28 de JULIO 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 29 de julio de 2020. En San Juan, Puerto Rico, el 29 de julio de 2020. GRISELDA RODRÍGUEZ COLLADO, Secretaria Regional. f/ DENISE M. AMARO MACHUCA, Secretario (a) Auxiliar.

A: JOMARIE TORO SANTIAGO POR SI Y EN REPRESENTACION DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR ESTA Y JORGE RODRIGUEZ RIVERA, JORGE RODRIGUEZ RIVERA POR SI Y EN REPRESENTACION DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR ESTE Y JOMARIE TORO SANTIAGO.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 28 de julio de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 29 de julio de 2020. En CAROLINA, Puerto Rico , el 29 de julio de 2020.

LCDA MARILYN APONTE RODRIGUEZ, Secretario(a).

F/DAMARIS TORRES RUIZ, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

26

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

‘The better I got in sports, the worse the racism got’

By MARC STEIN

T

here were a few must-pack accessories for Patty Mills of the San Antonio Spurs for his stay at Walt Disney World. Mills brought a stack of books on Black history in the United States and his native Australia. He made sure to carefully transport his favorite flat-brimmed hat, which bears two flags representing Australia’s Indigenous populations.

Mills also arrived for the restart of the NBA season with what he referred to as “my shield” — his internal defense mechanism to ward off hurtful words and actions. The shield, he said, is a byproduct of a lifetime of racial abuse that began on his first day of kindergarten, soon after Mills’ parents had moved to the Australian capital of Canberra to take jobs with the federal government.

“I’m the only Black kid in the room,” Mills said of that first day. “It didn’t take long before the biggest kid in the room walked up to me and threw a straight uppercut to the guts, completely knocking the wind out of me and leaving me in all sorts of tears.”

“I saw this boy coming from the left, and he came from a fair distance,” said his mother, Yvonne Mills, who was against a wall nearby, observing alongside other parents. “I can still feel the punch in my stomach, too.”

More than 25 years later, with a slew of similar stories to tell from throughout his life, Mills trusts his shield as much as his jump shot. That is no small thing given Mills’ ability to produce instant offense off the bench, which has enabled him, as a 6-foot, 180-pound guard, to last for nine seasons as a trusty change-of-pace option for the Spurs and become one of the most feared scorers in international basketball.

“A lot of things that are said just bounce off me because of the shield I’ve created,” Mills said. “I just need to work out the appropriate times to lower it, or when to take it off completely.”

This moment is one of those times. Mills, 31, has joined the global push to focus on social matters as much as his basketball job in Florida will allow — even if that means revealing painful tales from the past. He has been finding his voice as an activist in recent years and pledged to join the many NBA players who are determined to use the platform of the league’s rebooted season to fight against racism and police brutality.

“It’s the same battle on two continents,” Mills said, referring to his home nation seve-

“Given the unfortunate events that have happened in this country, we have the ears of people,” Mills said. ral time zones away.

The Spurs may play as few as eight games at Disney World because they are a long shot to make the playoffs, which they have not missed since 1997. Yet Mills has ensured that his time here will resonate no matter how short. He is donating his remaining salary of about $1 million to Black Lives Matter Australia, Black Deaths in Custody and a new campaign — We Got You — he helped launch to show support for athletes as they fight racism in Australian sport.

After participating in the first game of the NBA restart last Thursday night, Utah’s Donovan Mitchell mentioned Mills and Jrue Holiday of the New Orleans Pelicans as emerging leaders of the NBA’s social justice movement. He lauded both for agreeing to donate the remainder of their salaries to Black causes and said players who are speaking out are “not really asking for permission.”

“Given the unfortunate events that have happened in this country, we have the ears of people,” Mills said, referring to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, who were killed by the police. “For the first time in my career, I’ve had teammates, old teammates, coaches, old coaches, even old friends — the almost universal question they ask is: ‘What can I do to help?’ Just by so many people saying that, I feel like there is a tide change.”

He formed We Got You with both Black and white athletes in part because campaigning against racism, Mills said, is much

tougher for Black athletes in Australia. Adam Goodes, a former Australian Rules football star, was an anti-racism advocate who in 2015 began to be relentlessly booed by opposing fans. The backlash ultimately prompted Goodes, at 35, to retire suddenly, one year after he had won the country’s Australian of the Year award for national good citizenship.

Of course, as Mills has also learned, speaking out invariably leads to the sort of storytelling that requires “putting yourself in a vulnerable position because you have to relive traumatic experiences.” Shield down.

Mills’ mother is aboriginal, and his father is from the Torres Strait Islands. The two flags on the hat Patty Mills brought with him to Florida represent his two identities.

In a one-hour conversation after a recent practice, Mills shared some of the names he was called during his childhood, including “darkie,” “blackie,” “petrol sniffer,” “monkey,” “chimp,” “abo” (a derogatory term short for aboriginal) and other disparaging terms that he was called “regularly at school or on the sporting fields.”

“The better I got in sports,” Mills said, “the worse the racism got.”

The Mills family moved to Canberra because his parents got jobs working in aboriginal affairs for the government. “It was a bit like going to Washington,” said Benny Mills, Patty’s father.

Yet leaving their home on Thursday Island in Torres Strait — where, Patty said, everyone “looked like me and spoke like me” — landed him in that kindergarten classroom where he was first punched.

“It was the very beginning of how I was going to be treated for the rest of my time at school, not only by students but, more appallingly, by teachers and principals,” Mills said.

Within a few years, when Mills was 9, his parents began explaining the traumatic past of his mother, Yvonne Mills. One of five siblings born to a white man and an aboriginal woman, Yvonne and the other four children were taken from their mother, Gladys Haynes, in 1949 after their parents had separated. Yvonne, the youngest, was 2 years old. The children were moved to group homes as wards of the state and sent to separate foster families in a government-sponsored social engineering program designed, in effect, to assimilate aboriginal children into white society.

Throughout their childhoods, Yvonne and her siblings were told that their mother did not want them. The falsehoods were ex-

posed by a government inquiry in the mid1990s, which confirmed decades of human rights violations that made Yvonne part of what became known as Australia’s “Stolen Generations” — although she said she did not receive a written acknowledgment of such status from the South Australian government until 2018. Yvonne had virtually no contact with her mother between the ages of 2 and 17; Haynes died in 1979.

Learning about his mother’s torment, Mills said, was “a turning point.” His athletic talent was already blossoming in the basketball and social club his parents founded in Canberra for Indigenous Australians called Shadows, but Mills said that was when he began to realize “why I’m being treated differently at school.”

In his youth, Mills’ instinct was to “let my game do the talking.” In adulthood, he is trying, like his parents did, to more forcefully influence change. Just staying visible, Mills said, is a big part of it — to give aspiring Indigenous basketball players in Australia someone to emulate. Mills was only the third Black Australian to represent the country in basketball at the Olympics, joining Michael Ah Matt (1964) and Mills’ uncle Danny Morseu (1980 and 1984).

“My Uncle Danny played 30 years before I did,” Mills said. “I don’t want another 30 years to go by before another Indigenous Australian plays for Australia.”

He has thrust himself into anti-racism causes across sports in Australia with the support of Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, whose bond with Mills was cemented on the eve of the 2014 NBA finals. Popovich stunned Mills when he began a crucial practice by introducing the story of Eddie Mabo to the team. Mabo, who was Mills’ great-uncle, is revered by Indigenous Australians to such a degree that his landmark campaign for their land ownership rights has long prompted calls for a national holiday in his name.

“It’s been very satisfying to watch Patty grow into someone who is much more interested in our world than basketball,” Popovich said. “He has grown into a great citizen of the world. And Patty’s story is pretty important and very timely, because normally all we think about is the race problem here.

It’s in many places.”

Mills said he feels fortunate to play for a franchise and a coach — and in a league — that encourages him to “speak out on these things.” The Spurs, he said, urge him “to continue to show who I am as a Black Australian.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

27

WNBA rookie showdown halted by Ionescu injury

By GINA MIZELL

S

abrina Ionescu accidentally stepped on Betnijah Laney’s foot near midcourt, then dropped to the floor after rolling her left ankle.

What was supposed to be an early-season showdown between Ionescu, the Liberty guard, and the Atlanta Dream’s Chennedy Carter, two of the top WNBA rookie of the year contenders, took an abrupt turn in the second quarter Friday night.

Ionescu, unable to put weight on her left leg, slung her arms around the shoulders of two team staff members as they helped her off the floor. She was found to have a sprained ankle, and underwent X-rays as the game at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., continued. The team said Saturday that doctors believed the sprain would not require surgery.

Carter also could not finish her third professional game. She struggled early, converted a string of key buckets down the stretch, and then fouled out with less than two minutes to play.

Ionescu and Carter illustrated that, even for the most promising young players, WNBA life can be rocky.

“You got to grind night in and night out in this league,” Atlanta coach Nicki Collen said after her team’s 84-78 victory.

“You can say, ‘Would it have been different if Ionescu played?’ Sure, it might have been different. It’s hard to say. But you play the cards that are dealt to you and you find ways to win.”

Ionescu and Carter are both expected to play crucial roles on their rebuilding teams.

It has been years since a player entered the league with as much fanfare as Ionescu. Thanks to a multidimensional skill set, she set the NCAA record for career triple-doubles while leading Oregon to the 2019 Final Four. She was poised for another deep NCAA tournament run with Oregon this season, before the event was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Liberty drafted her first overall in April, and Ionescu was immediately tasked with anchoring a New York team that went 10-24 last season and recently hired a new coach, Walt Hopkins. The Liberty have six other rookies, and played Friday without 2019 All-Star Kia Nurse, who sprained her ankle in last week’s opener against Seattle.

It took only two games for Ionescu to

Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu hurt her left ankle in the second quarter against the Atlanta Dream after stepping on the feet of an opposing player. unleash her first breakout performance: She totaled 33 points, seven rebounds and seven assists in Wednesday’s loss to Dallas.

Yet Ionescu remained matter-of-fact in her self-assessment.

She made 4 of 17 shots in her WNBA debut against Seattle, and acknowledged she “didn’t have much confidence” and rushed while shooting. She thanked the Storm, a championship contender, for immediately showing her how much faster, stronger and more athletic professional players are compared with college athletes. She said she felt more comfortable during the Dallas game but that building chemistry with a new group takes time.

“My teammates know it took us some growing pains at Oregon, as well,” Ionescu said.

When asked Friday about the prospect of a lengthy Ionescu absence, Hopkins did not mince words.

“There’s not a lot of ready-to-go options hanging around,” Hopkins said.

“We’re going to have to huddle up and see if we can get Kia right. Hopefully it’s not serious with Sabrina.”

Carter, the fourth overall draft pick out of Texas A&M, has an attacking, score-

first style that earned her the nickname Hollywood.

She has become the primary ballhandler for an Atlanta team that is trying to up its playing pace after finishing last season 8-26 and overhauling its roster. The Dream have 11 new players, and are just introducing Courtney Williams and Glory Johnson to the mix after both players cleared testing protocol for the coronavirus.

Carter totaled 18 points, eight assists and five rebounds in her WNBA debut, a victory against Dallas. She then struggled shooting in a 30-point loss to Las Vegas.

Collen said she has challenged Carter to improve her shot selection and, at times, her defensive engagement. Carter believes she is “a little bit underrated” as a passer, and hopes her first outing indicates she can also facilitate as a point guard.

“We’ve put in a lot of work in training camp, and I’m starting to really know them and find them,” Carter said. “It’ll all come together.”

Carter finished with 17 points on 6-of-15 shooting and three assists Friday, a performance with rough stretches and dynamic moments.

She missed shots early. But with less than five minutes to play, she drew a foul

on a drive, finished a scooping layup and buried a nifty pullup jumper at the elbow to help the Dream maintain their advantage. With 1:25 to play, though, Carter made contact with New York’s Jazmine Jones as Jones rose for a jumper, which sent Carter to the bench with her sixth foul.

Before her injury, Ionescu appeared to be on her way to another impressive performance.

She scored 10 points in 12 minutes, mixing aggressive drives with outside shooting. During one excellent sequence, she finished at the basket, sprinted back and jumped to snag a steal, then delivered an overhead pass down the floor — while still airborne — to Layshia Clarendon for a layup.

But by the fourth quarter, the Liberty needed their other rookies to produce with Ionescu injured. Jones finished with 20 points, two steals and two blocks off the bench, while Jocelyn Willoughby added 14 points, three steals and two blocks.

“It’s been exciting to see, every night, somebody else has stepped up,” Hopkins said. “What we’ve talked about with consistency, with a younger team, it’s about getting those types of efforts.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

This sledding team trained hard for gold in 2010. Some regret it.

By MATTHEW FUTTERMAN

T

he chance to host the 2010 Winter Games was supposed to be a godsend for Canadian athletes who compete in skeleton, the headfirst sled run down a twisting track.

While most competitors get access to the track for just a handful of days leading up to the Olympics, the host country gets to practice far more, because its athletes are logistically closer and the sport’s rules allow it. The home team can memorize every detail of every turn on run after treacherous run.

Mellisa Hollingsworth, who was favored to win a medal that year in skeleton, said she and her teammates took as many as 11 runs a day down the track, the fastest in the world, at Whistler, British Columbia, about 75 miles north of Vancouver. When a training session ended, they were so worn out they struggled to put sentences together. Noise was intolerable. Their brains felt scrambled.

And that’s how Hollingsworth, now 39, and her teammates became case studies in a process that is beginning to realign how neuroscientists and a handful of coaches and athletes understand the connection between brain injury and sliding sports.

“We overdid it,” said Nathan Cicoria, a high performance coach for Canada’s bobsled and skeleton team from 2006-14.

“I just wish we knew then what we know now. You learn things.”

During the last decade, football and other contact sports have received most of the attention and research interest for traumatic brain injuries in sports.

By comparison, sliding sports, niche activities that require athletes to careen down twisting tracks of ice on sleds at 80 mph, have been largely ignored. And yet, for years, elite competitors have talked about the mental fog, headaches, inability to eat or speak effectively, and sensitivity to light and sound that a day of training, or, for some, even a single routine run can produce.

They called it “sled head.” It was just something they had to accept, like cold weather, or sore muscles.

Now, in retirement, many of these athletes continue to struggle with many of those same symptoms, as well as forgetfulness, depression and mental illness.

Former top competitors like Hollingsworth, who finished fifth in skeleton at

Mellisa Hollingsworth, 39, suffers from memory loss and other post-concussion symptoms, likely from injuries she incurred while competing in skeleton. the Vancouver Games, Pascal Richard, also of Canada, and Katie Uhlaender, a four-time Olympian from the United States who wants to make one last Olympic team, wonder whether those symptoms are connected to their dramatic crashes and the brain-rattling runs.

They have watched teammates descend into depression and die by suicide.

Since 2013, three former elite North American bobsledders have taken their lives. Another attempted it, and two others died of overdoses, a remarkable number given that just a few hundred athletes participate seriously in sliding sports at any level at once.

“It’s almost like the boxers all over again,” said Peter McCarthy, a neurophysiologist at the University of South Wales who has studied the dynamics of skeleton by attaching motion sensors to the athletes.

“What you are doing is taking someone’s head and giving it a really good shake around, but in this case it lasts for a minute.”

McCarthy has been working closely with Mark Wood of Britain, who has

coached multiple medalists in skeleton and is now on a crusade to make people understand that allowing an athlete to train or compete with “sled head” is akin to subjecting someone with concussion-like symptoms to 500 more slaps to the head.

People within the sport keep telling him he is going to ruin it.

“I say, ‘No I’m not. I’m going to make it safer,’” said Wood, who has coached for Canada, Britain and China. “The more data we get, the better information we can give.”

Tyson Plesuk has seen enough skeleton to be convinced that too many runs can pose serious danger to the brain.

Plesuk, a top sports physiotherapist in Canada, grew up playing hockey. He suffered three diagnosed concussions, and probably many that went undiagnosed. In 2010 when he became a physiotherapist with Canada’s skeleton team, he knew little about the sport.

As Plesuk began spending time with Hollingsworth and other team members, he noticed how much they needed to sleep when they were not training, how some-

times they could not eat or talk to each other during their lunch breaks.

“It’s not normal behavior, but we needed someone from the outside for us to understand that,” Hollingsworth said.

As Plesuk and Duff Gibson, the team’s head coach and the 2006 Olympic skeleton champion, got to know the athletes better during the 2010-11 season, they noticed that many who struggled the most with the concussion symptoms had participated in the high-volume training leading up to the Vancouver Games.

Gibson and Plesuk decided to limit runs to three per day for every athlete who competed for Canada. If an athlete didn’t seem “right,” they pulled her from competition, no matter the circumstances.

“If you see stars, that is not normal, and if you have a headache after a run, that is not a normal condition,” Gibson said.

Heading into the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Hollingsworth got pulled from a race, which resulted in a lower starting slot and may have contributed to her 11th-place finish.

Hollingsworth knew Gibson and Plesuk had made the right call. Leading up to those games in Russia, she struggled to wake from naps after a hard morning of training. Hours passed before she could walk 10 normal steps. One afternoon she came down with vertigo while visiting a sporting goods store and ended up curled in a ball on the floor.

She retired after Sochi. She can struggle to remember details of even recent experiences. She recalls little of what happened during the few years leading up to Vancouver; even races she won, moments that should stand out, are a blur, or have disappeared altogether. She has no recollection of her first skeleton run when she was a teenager.

She can’t be in loud or busy places. After a concert, she can’t sleep for a night or two. A small restaurant with a lot of chatter can make her ears ring.

She will not recruit athletes to compete in the sport that was once her life.

Last year, WinSport, Canada’s winter sports organization, began dismantling the Calgary bobsled and skeleton track where Hollingsworth started. After 30 years, it was deemed at the end of its life cycle.

As the track came down, Hollingsworth said she felt nostalgia, but also something else — comfort that no one would get hurt there anymore.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 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

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

You’re doing your best to please others but you also need to think about pleasing yourself. If you feel restricted by family arrangements, let others know it. You’re an impulsive soul who likes to rush into whatever takes your fancy. It would be a shame to commit yourself to an arrangement that stifles your creativity.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Accepting a spontaneous offer is your chance to break out of a rut. A friend is being secretive about plans they are making. You will enjoy the element of mystery especially when they promise you that you’re going to love what they have in mind. They could well be right.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Scorpio

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Avoid discussing past events if at all possible.

You will find it hard to explain your part in a contentious matter to your partner or other members of your family. A friend who was also involved won’t be of any help and may in fact make the situation worse by revealing some private information.

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Leo

Aquarius

You’re growing bored with activities you used to enjoy. Now they are becoming monotonous. Make it a priority to change plans so you have more chance to be spontaneous.

This should delight a partner or friend who was expecting to settle into your usual routine. Some of your ideas will seem dramatic but they will be fun.

You’ve been thinking about the role other people play in your life and the impact you have on their lives. Recent events have put you in contact with some interesting people and it will feel good to widen your social circle. Younger family members are showing you more respect which makes family life more harmonious.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

(July 24-Aug 23)

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Financial matters come under the spotlight.

Buying, selling, income and material security are issues that come under discussion. There will be benefits from some discreet developments on the job front. Accept an invitation to explore new territory. If you aren’t able to travel, studying an unfamiliar practice will be stimulating.

A possessive friend or partner is determined to plan your long-term future together.

You aren’t likely to have any say in this and that’s why you are deliberately avoiding the subject. You aren’t ready to make the serious commitment they’re demanding from you.

Find the courage to break off a toxic relationship.

You aren’t keen on the ideas a relative is talking about. They’re planning their own life and it’s important for them to feel free to follow their heart. If they look to you for advice and approval, put yourself in their shoes.

Remember it’s not you they are talking about, but them.

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

New commitments are making it difficult for you to keep up with regular joint arrangements. You may have to pull out of some plans for the time being. A friend will not be offended if you do so and you will feel less anxious about your life starting to spin out of control.

A few carefully chosen words will help slow down a relationship that’s going too fast for you. You cannot have your independence curbed just because you are now part of a twosome. If you are in a committed relationship you may need to put some distance between you to give yourself a chance to reconnect with your true self.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Accept a friend’s invitation to meet up and you will have a memorable time. Expanding your social network will pave the way for some great future opportunities. Follow up an exceptional offer and prepare to burst into flower. It will take time for a new relationship to settle into a comfortable routine.

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

You’re confused about circumstances relating to the past when you are sure you haven’t been told everything. You sense someone is deliberately hiding information from you but is your imagination running away with you?

Try not to accuse someone of something they didn’t do. You won’t do yourself any favours by listening to gossip.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Monday, August 3, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, August 3, 2020

Disfruta el Verano PS4

Super Sonic 32”

LG 65 ó Samsung .00

$189

.00

$789

TV Mount desde

$29.00

Nintendo Switch lite

$399

.00

$299

.00

Máquina Lavado a presión .00

QFX Remote Controlled Motorized 360 Rotating Outdoor Antenna

$149.00

Estufa de Gas 30” Mabe

$449

$29.00

Samsung A10s

I Pad Generación 7 .00

$449

$389.00

TOPE de Gas

$489.00 LG CM4360

$169

.00

Super Bass 2MH 3000

$89.00

Radio Bluetooth

Nevera BIZT

$289.00

$29

.00 Abanico recargable

Incluye kit de bocina, pendrive y tweeter

$69.00

$129.00

Licuadora OSTER

$49.00

Smart-tv-kit

$99.00

Lasko 18” Elegance Performance

$69.00 ¡Disfruta el mejor Perfortmance!

Abanico Industrial

Model RL-20IFF

$39.00

DEALER AUTORIZADO EN PIEZAS Y SERVICIO