Tuesday Aug 4, 2020

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

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3 Great Mysteries About Life on Mars P23

Bills Signed Like Thunder Days Before Primary

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A Powerless Power Utility P5

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

Governor Defends Investigation of 3,000 Facebook Accounts When She Was Head of DJ P4

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

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August 4, 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.

Governor takes fight with fiscal board over unspent money to US Supreme Court

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ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced told the U.S. Supreme Court recently that the Financial Oversight and Management Board’s (FOMB) opposition to allowing the Puerto Rico government to reprogram unspent money from earlier years to pay for unapproved expenditures is not just a question of pre-emption.

The governor made her remarks in a brief filed July 31. She was responding to an oversight board’s brief on July 20 in which it defended the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the elected government had no right to spend money that wasn’t approved by the board, even if it was using unspent money from prior years.

The board argued that federal law also gives it the right to make budget decisions and override the local legislature and governor.

Vázquez replied that the oversight board was trying to obscure the importance of the questions presented in the government’s petition, which are critical both to the debt restructuring process and

the island’s system of self-government.

By framing the case as a “routine” question of pre-emption, the government said the oversight board was ignoring that the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals’ entire pre-emption analysis turned on one of the key questions the government’s petition presents, namely whether the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) bans reprogramming requests for unspent funds from prior fiscal years.

“The First Circuit reached the issue of preemption only because it concluded that PROMESA imposes such a ban,” the governor said. “Tellingly, while the opposition contends that PROMESA on its face prohibits ‘reprogram[ming] unspent appropriations from prior budgets,’ the Opposition nowhere quotes the language in PROMESA instituting such a ban. That’s because there is none.

That is one critical reason why this Court should review and reverse the First Circuit’s decision.”

The government also noted in the brief the importance of the Supreme Court reviewing the decision because it goes into the vital powers of Puerto Rico. The government contends that the dispute boils down to whether the oversight board has the power to be an entity above the government of Puerto Rico, not within the government.

“The Oversight Board exposed its shockingly colonialist interpretation of its statutory powers in arguing that PROMESA does not even require the Oversight Board to ‘work together’ with the elected government on fiscal policy,” the government said.

“Of course, that is wrong. Numerous PROMESA provisions require the Governor first to draft fiscal plans, budgets, and other key PROMESA documents for the Oversight Board’s review.

Nothing in PROMESA allows the Oversight Board to adopt any document binding on the elected government without first providing the elected Government an opportunity to present its own plan,” the government said. “PROMESA crafted a delicate power sharing arrangement, because Congress was aware it was infringing upon Puerto Rico’s framework of self-government. Due to that extraordinary fact, the powers of the Oversight Board should be narrowly construed.”

The case is Wanda Vazquez vs. FOMB.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Governor signs 3 retirement payment bills days before primaries

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

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ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced on Monday signed three bills from the Senate that will ensure public employees, teachers, police officers, firefighters, custody officers and paramedics are paid once their retirement is confirmed.

The enactment of the legislation comes days ahead of Sunday’s primary elections, where New Progressive Party (NPP) voters will choose between the governor and former Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi to determine who will be the ruling party’s candidate for governor in November.

During a press conference that seemed more like a political rally, Vázquez announced her approval of Senate bills 1616, 1623 and 1432, describing each piece of legislation to applause and cheers from the audience.

The first law, the governor said, will establish a program by which eligible employees can, voluntarily, separate in an encouraging way from their employment before their retirement age and dispose of quoted requirements for years of service to qualify under this new program. The second will bring back lifelong pensions to police officers who served for 30 or more years while those who are 55 years or older will be able to retire with up to 55

percent of their salary. The third helps participants in the Teachers’ Retirement System direct the balance or excess of their sick leave to their retirement plan as time worked after using all their vacation hours.

When a member of the press asked if signing the bills was an opportunity to promote her bid for the NPP gubernatorial candidacy, she said it was her job to evaluate and sign any bills that arrive at La Fortaleza, not to keep an eye on a deadline.

“My work as a governor is continuous and I am not on the lookout for any dates. In particular, these bills were approved by the House and the Senate during a legislative session and signing these bills comes before they get to La Fortaleza to be analyzed,” Vázquez said. “We are not waiting [whether] the primary elections [are coming] or not; since I arrived on August 7, 2019, I have said that I wanted to protect pensioners, and every bill that would bring back their rights that have been revoked since 2013, we were going to work for it.”

Vázquez said further that although she signed the bills, she was still aware of the proposal that would amend the Constitution to elevate retirement payments to a higher level.

However, she said Sunday that the referendum will determine if retirement payments will be on the same level as government obligations.

When The Star asked if the proposal addresses

pensioners’ needs, as various organizations consider it a “hoax” and an “electoral move” because they believe it does not guarantee that pensions won’t be axed, she said the proposal was necessary because it would obligate future governments to address pensions along with the public debt.

“Probably, I don’t know if they [opponents of the proposal] had access to the bill, but, as of now, they have no guarantee,” the governor said. “Why are there budget cuts on pensions? Because there is no guarantee under the Constitution as the bill only establishes public debts, government obligations, and other bonds.

“As their [pension system] debt is not guaranteed by the Constitution, we don’t have the power to defend or negotiate this [system’s] bankruptcy. What we propose is that pensions have constitutional standing, where the government pays both its debts and pensions.”

When a member of the press asked why the NPP struggled during Saturday’s early vote for the primary elections, NPP President Thomas Rivera Schatz said that due to Tropical Storm Isaias and its effects on the island on Wednesday and Thursday, the State Elections Commission (SEC) had to shut down operations, causing delays during the event on Saturday.

“The delay of the arrival of ballots to the

municipalities was due to a shutdown that went into effect on Wednesday and Thursday before the early vote on Saturday. Instead of having a vehicle going out on Friday [to deliver the ballots], they went out on Saturday morning,” Rivera Schatz said. “Instead of having one vehicle per precinct or municipality, we had several, which provoked the delay.”

The Senate president added that SEC President Juan Ernesto Dávila, along with NPP Electoral Commissioner María Dolores “Lolín” Santiago, have determined that voters who were left out of early voting will be able to cast their vote on Sunday by preferential vote. Rivera Schatz said around 1,370 voting centers will be available for the aforementioned process and will be separated from the centers assigned for the main election that day.

Vázquez Garced: Intervention with Facebook accounts was ‘to comply with the law’ When she was secretary, a Justice Dept. probe related to 2017 UPR tuition protests involved almost 3,000 user accounts

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

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ov. WandaVázquez Garced said Monday that the island Justice Department’s intervention with almost 3,000 Facebook accounts as part of a criminal investigation against students who interrupted a meeting of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) governing board to protest a tuition payment increase in 2017 was “to comply with the law.”

Furthermore, she said, the intervention was due to a series of complaints reported by the social media outlet, as many users reported having their accounts hacked by unknown sources.

“We at the Department of Justice, back when I was secretary, we were complying with the law, and anyone who violated it, had to respond,” Vázquez Garced said. “If there was a complaint related to Facebook, our obligation as the secretary of Justice and the Criminal Division was to conduct

an investigation. If someone believed we did something wrong, they should let us know.”

Meanwhile, she said she guaranteed that prosecutors designated for the case against now ex-students Randiel Negrón, Thaliangelys Torres, Francisco Santiago Cintrón, Verónica Figueroa Huertas and Gabriel Díaz Rivera conducted an investigation to determine every “inappropriate intervention” with certain citizens who were involved with the aforementioned complaints.

“The Department of Justice did not start an investigation against anyone, because you all know how Facebook posts work; they have no names, they are identified confidentially to protect people’s identity,” she said. “This demand was not only in Puerto Rico, but also around the United States. What we did was to protect every Puerto RIcan who had their accounts hacked.”

According to independent news outlet Puerto Rico Te Quiero, although it was known that authorities obtained information from community managers of Facebook pages Centro de Comunicación Estudiantil, Pulso Estudiantil y Diálogo, such as credit card information, account numbers on the outlets and private conversations, Juan Ramón Acevedo Cruz, one of the lawyers representing the former UPR students involved in the case, said that inquest was meant “to open a massive number of files” against almost 3,000 individuals. It is worth noting that only 50 to 100 students were involved

in the protest inside the UPR office.

“The defense is ready to show soon, to a court and the people, a list that includes the names of every person whose Facebook accounts were raided,” Acevedo Cruz said. “We are saying that they, both the Department of Justice and the Puerto Rico Police [Bureau], searched for the data of almost 3,000 people that they saw on Facebook. It is a massive blacklist.”

Today, the case continues to be reviewed in San Juan Superior Court, Room 1105. It is expected that part of the review will reveal new information on the three-year old investigation.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

5

PREPA now headless in the middle of hurricane season

By THE STAR STAFF

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he Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) governing board on Monday accepted the resignation of the public corporation’s executive director, José Ortiz Vázquez, effective on Wednesday.

“We have accepted the resignation of Ortiz with appreciation for the job he has done,” said Ralph Kreil, chairman of PREPA’s governing board. “When Ortiz took over, PREPA had not even completed an integrated resource plan [IRP], and we were struggling to develop a working relationship with regulators, like the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau [PREB] and the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico.”

Ortiz said that when he was originally asked to become PREPA’s executive director, he committed to two years of service and 24 months have already passed.

“My resignation comes at an appropriate moment in the transformation of PREPA into the modern electric utility all Puerto Ricans deserve,” Ortiz said.

“Throughout these two years PREPA has committed itself to focusing on the reliability, sustainability, affordability and economic development envisioned in Law 17 of 2018.”

The executive director’s resignation comes amid criticism as thousands were left without power following the passage of a tropical storm last week. For many the incident was proof that the energy system is not ready for a major storm. Ortiz blamed the power outage on internal terrorism but was unable to support his claims.

Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced said at a press conference Monday that she met with Kreil over the weekend and had expressed her concern about PREPA’s response after the storm.

“We asked the [governing] board to review that response, not just from the CEO, but from all top management,” the governor said. “We are starting the peak of the hurricane season and I need an accurate and efficient response for all Puerto Ricans, so, yes, the engineer resigned. I know that the Board was consulted and so it was determined.” Ángel Figueroa Jaramillo, president of the Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union, which represents PREPA workers, said Ortiz’s resignation should not be a cause to celebrate or be happy.

“What the resignation of an executive director who was incapable, incompetent and a liar offers is to rethink the kind of PREPA that we want and its transformation under a public model,” Figueroa Jaramillo said.

He said Ortiz’s decisions have to be re-evaluated because he left “multi-million dollar contracts” all signed up, including contracts to cut grass and trees near power lines, which he said “were the cause of Tuesday’s power outage.”

Figueroa Jaramillo urged the government to find a new executive director who is willing to put the public interest ahead of his.

Kreil disagreed. After Ortiz took over the struggling utility, PREPA has had three fiscal plans approved by the oversight board and PREB is nearing the conclusion of its hearings on the IRP. “Working hand in hand with Ortiz, we developed

a strong working relationship in Washington, D.C., achieving credibility with the federal government,” Kreil said. “Among other accomplishments, PREPA created the Project Management Office, which has been critical in getting Costa Sur 5 back on-line, has kicked off the LUMA Concessionary Contract for better transmission and distribution service to our ratepayers, and has renegotiated the EcoEléctrica contract to improve reliability and reduce costs to consumers.”

“Also, Ortiz’s vision helped to bring the conversion of San Juan units 5 and 6 to natural gas and resolved long-standing renewable energy projects, moving most of the active projects a big step forward in becoming a reality for Puerto Ricans, while also implementing a more transparent procurement discipline at PREPA,” Kreil added.

Although sometimes Ortiz and the governing board may have had different points of view, Kreil said they were always able to find a way to work together positively in the best interest of ratepayers.

The PREPA governing board’s consumer representative, Tomás Torres, said the embattled utility’s transformation goes beyond the resignation of Ortiz.

He said it needs the approval of a debt restructuring agreement that does not entail high energy rates, an integrated resource plan that takes the utility away from the use of fossil fuels, the completion of repairs to Units 5 and 6 of the Costa Sur power plant and the allocation of federal funds. He also was critical of the lack of transparency that led to the contract with LUMA Energy, the private operator of PREPA’s transmission and distribution.

“The transformation of PREPA requires firm and forceful actions in favor of the consumer to develop a reliable and resilient electrical system in accordance with the New Energy Policy of Puerto Rico, Law 17 of 2019,” Torres said.

LUMA Energy, which took over the management of PREPA’s transmission and distribution system in June, said in a statement it will be working closely

with PREPA and will continue to work together with the new leadership, PREPA’s governing board, and the Public-Private Partnership Authority to stay focused on the goal of transforming the electricity delivery system for the people of Puerto Rico.

“LUMA brings proven skill and experience in building safe, reliable and sustainable electrical infrastructure, skilled workforce training, world-class utility operations, and customer service, as well as our deep knowledge of how federal disaster funds must be managed with efficiency, transparency and integrity,” the company said. “This current transition phase is expected to last until May 2021. During this phase, our team is working to assess and put together a detailed plan to transform the electricity transmission & distribution system in order to improve its overall sustainability, reliability and resiliency.”

Environmental groups also expressed happiness over the departure of Ortiz because they said it will help advance the transformation to renewables.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Lawmakers decry veto of funds to rebuild cancha in Río Grande

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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peaker of the House of Representatives Carlos “Johnny” Méndez Núñez, along with District 37 Rep. Ángel Bulerín Ramos, criticized on Monday the governor’s veto of a measure that assigned $206,673.65 to help residents of a lowincome community in the municipality of Río Grande.

“The representatives and senators by district, together with the mayors, are the elected officials who are closest to the people and know their needs thoroughly,” the House speaker said in a written statement. “With this veto, which we do not understand and which we censor, the Executive deprives the over 4,000 residents of La Dolores community in Río Grande of monies aimed at improving the quality of life in that community, especially for the youth. People in need should not be denied these resources. It is an inexplicable and incomprehensible move.”

House Joint Resolution 613 was approved on May 28 and vetoed by the gov-

ernor on July 24, despite being endorsed by the Financial Oversight and Management Board and the Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority of Puerto Rico.

The measure assigns the aforementioned amount to the Rural Infrastructure and Permanent Improvements Program, under the Land Authority, for the reha-

bilitation and reconstruction of the indoor ball court in the La Dolores community, located between Chile and Jericó streets in Río Grande.

The facility was almost totally destroyed by the impact of Hurricane Maria in September 2017. The resolution allows the removal and disposal of damaged and

useless structures, as well as the repair of the roof, installation of lighting fixtures and improvements to the surroundings of the facility.

“The residents of La Dolores community in Río Grande, especially children and young people, need their court repaired, which was almost totally destroyed by Maria and where they cannot recreate due to the danger at this structure, closed since 2017,” said Bulerín Ramos, who represents the municipalities of Río Grande, Loíza and Canóvanas. “That is an assignment that had already been discussed with the residents of the community and they were waiting to see their dream of playing on that court come true after three years. It is a lack of respect on the part of the governor to do this to these residents.”

He added that “[t]his matter cannot be dismissed the way it was, without signing the measure; that is, La Fortaleza vetoed it.”

“It is an abuse of the residents of La Dolores,” the lawmaker said. “We will continue fighting for these funds, and this won’t stop us.”

Report: While pharma firms benefit from island tax breaks, the COVID-19 tests they produce have gone elsewhere

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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recently published report reveals that the pharmaceutical companies Abbott and Roche, responsible for manufacturing molecular tests for COVID-19 in Puerto Rico, have benefited from large tax exemptions on the island despite the fact that the tests have allegedly been notably absent here.

Abbott and Roche are noted for largescale distribution of COVID-19 tests in the United States. However, the report suggests, the paucity of the tests on the island has raised doubts about the role that the two companies are alleged to be playing in the coronavirus crisis in Puerto Rico.

The report, published by the social activism organization Hedge Clippers, indicates that in 2019, exports from the pharmaceutical and medical products industries totaled $47 billion, or 74 percent of Puerto Rico’s exports. Pharmaceutical products represented 36 percent of the value of all

products manufactured in Puerto Rico.

In 2019, Abbott reported net earnings of more than $3.6 billion. A significant portion of those profits were reported from Puerto Rico, where Abbott has been operating since 1943.

Since the United States began to be affected by the pandemic, Abbott has been launching products to treat COVID-19, primarily tests to identify the virus. On March 18, three days after the curfew began and companies closed in Puerto Rico, Abbott announced that it received authorization from the FDA to distribute its molecular test.

The success of these tests was such that on April 25, Abbott announced that it had sent more than a million molecular tests to all 50 states. However, according to data from a report published in May by the Center for Investigative Journalism, none of these tests had reached Puerto Rico.

Meanwhile, Roche, a Swiss multinational company that has been in Puerto Rico since 1976, reported 2019 earnings of up

to $14.5 billion.

On March 12, three days before the economy closed in Puerto Rico, Roche received authorization from the FDA to distribute its molecular test. Four days later, Roche announced the start of its distribution in the United States with the shipment of 400,000 tests. As of the first week of May, allegedly none of those tests had arrived in Puerto Rico.

The pharmaceutical companies are part of the island’s manufacturing sector, which in 2017 alone obtained around $15.7 billion

in tax exemptions. That is much more than the government’s operating budget in any fiscal year.

The Hedge Clippers report indicates that the interests of Abbott and Roche are represented through two influential business associations: the Puerto Rico Manufacturers Association and the Puerto Rico Pharmaceutical Industry Association.

According to its website, Hedge Clippers is “a national campaign focused on unmasking the dark money schemes and strategies the billionaire elite uses to expand their wealth, consolidate power and obscure accountability for their misdeeds.”

“Through hard-hitting research, war-room communications, aggressive direct action and robust digital engagement, Hedge Clippers unites working people, communities, racial justice organizations, grassroots activists, students and progressive policy leaders in a bold effort to expose and combat the greed-driven agenda that threatens basic fairness at all levels of American society,” the website says.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

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What back to school might look like in the age of COVID-19

By DANA GOLDSTEIN

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typical American school day requires proximity: High school lab partners leaning over a vial. Kindergarten students sharing finger paints. Middle schoolers passing snacks around a cafeteria table.

This year, nothing about school will be typical.

Many of the nation’s largest districts plan to start the academic year online, and it is unclear when students and teachers will be back in classrooms. Others plan hybrid models, while some are determined to go five days a week.

When school buildings do reopen, whether this fall or next year, buses, hallways, cafeterias and classrooms will need to look very different as long as the coronavirus remains a threat. Even teaching, which has evolved in recent decades to emphasize fewer lectures and more collaborative lessons, must change.

“This is the biggest adaptive challenge in my career, and in the history of public education,” said Cindy Marten, superintendent of the San Diego public schools.

Education decisions are largely made at the local level, and leaders are relying on a host of conflicting federal, state and public health guidelines. There is still considerable uncertainty and debate over how easily children of different ages contract and spread the virus, and whether some of the recommended safety guidelines would help or are even necessary.

As a result, schools are adopting a wide range of approaches for the pandemic era. But those recommendations largely agree on at least some adaptations, and they all come down to eliminating one factor: proximity.

Riding the Bus For about half of American students, the school day typically begins with a bus trip. For many districts, getting children to school will be one of the most difficult logistical challenges during the pandemic. Parents will be asked to consider whether they can arrange other forms of transportation, like dropping their children off or arranging car pools.

Families should not cluster at the bus stop, as they might have in the past. And parents will be told: Do not send children to school if they have a fever, cough or other symptoms.

In nonpandemic times, a typical bus might carry 54 children. Enforce strict social distancing guidelines of 6 feet, and you’re down to eight. Some state guidelines sketch an alternative scenario in which masked students sit in a zigzag pattern to allow more on board.

Options are expensive. Schools in Marietta, Georgia, plan to spend $640,000 to hire 55 monitors to check students’ symptoms before they board. Dundee, Michigan, expects to spend more than $300,000 to add routes. In Odessa, Texas, there are plans for buses to run on continuous routes, like city transit, with students arriving and leaving school at staggered times.

When school buildings do reopen, whether this fall or next year, buses, hallways, cafeterias and classrooms will need to look very different as long as the coronavirus remains a threat.

Entering the Building When students arrive at school, most will be checked to see if they are running a temperature or showing other symptoms. If adults are dropping off children, they will likely remain behind a barrier. Public health experts agree that a key step in keeping the coronavirus out of schools will be limiting the number of visitors inside.

Temperature checks run the risk of missing asymptomatic or atypical coronavirus cases, raising false alarms about ordinary illnesses and taking up valuable time that students could spend learning. Nevertheless, most districts plan them.

About 60% of U.S. schools did not have full-time nurses on site in 2018, but many are hoping for additional federal stimulus money to rectify that amid the pandemic.

Students who fail the symptom check should be isolated while they await a caretaker to pick them up, guidelines say. Doing so may require real estate-strapped schools to designate both safe indoor and outdoor locations to hold ill and potentially contagious children.

In Elementary School Classrooms Young children may be the hardest to keep apart, given their frenetic energy, need for hands-on play and affectionate nature. And most guidelines acknowledge

that it is not realistic to expect them to wear masks all day.

Many schools will try to keep students in pods by limiting class sizes to about 12 students and by reducing interaction between classrooms. That way, they can avoid shutting down entirely if a single pod has a positive case.

Some guidelines suggest clear face shields as an alternative to masks for teachers. Seeing an adult’s mouth move helps children understand the connections between spoken sounds and the written word — a key concept in early reading.

Two students may sit at tables usually used by four or six, with individual boxes of materials that are typically shared, like art supplies — an expense that schools, teachers or families will have to bear.

Many schools plan to repurpose large spaces, like gyms and cafeterias, for socially distanced academic work.

Students will eat in their classrooms, either bringing food from home or receiving a boxed lunch. No buffet lines.

Districts are investing heavily in cleaning and hygiene supplies, such as hand sanitizer and portable air filters. Adults will disinfect surfaces several times a day.

Some districts are upgrading heating and cooling systems to install filtration features, a much more expensive fix.

In Middle and High Schools Older students typically move between classrooms during the day for different subjects. Instead, health guidelines call for them to remain in self-contained pods to the greatest extent possible. Schools will have to figure out another way to deliver an individualized curriculum.

Teenagers may be more at risk from the coronavirus than younger children are, recent research suggests, so physical distancing will be more important with this age group. Some districts are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on plexiglass desk dividers for classrooms in which students cannot stay 6 feet apart.

Some students could be remote learning even while in class. An algebra lesson could be taught at the front of the room, while those who have moved onto pre-calculus use laptops to participate in an online lesson in the back.

Schools are not planning to follow a traditional bell schedule. Instead, individual pods of students will travel through unidirectional hallways at specific times, including, in some cases, for prescheduled bathroom breaks.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Why the botched NYC primary has become the November nightmare

By JESSE McKINLEY

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lection officials in New York City widely distributed mail-in ballots for the primary on June 23, which featured dozens of hard-fought races. The officials had hoped to make voting much easier, but they did not seem prepared for the response: more than 10 times the number of absentee ballots received in recent elections in the city.

Now, nearly six weeks later, two closely watched congressional races remain undecided, and major delays in counting a deluge of 400,000 mail-in ballots and other problems are being cited as examples of the challenges facing the nation as it looks toward conducting the November general election during the pandemic.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other officials are trading blame for the botched counting in the city, and the Postal Service is coming under criticism over whether it is equipped to handle the sharp increase in absentee ballots.

Election lawyers said one area of concern in New York City was that mail-in ballots have prepaid return envelopes. The Postal Service apparently had difficulty processing some of them correctly and, as a result, an unknown number of votes — perhaps thousands — may have been wrongfully disqualified because of a lack of a postmark.

Thousands more ballots in the city were discarded by election officials for minor errors, or not even sent to voters until the day before the primary, making it all but impossible for the ballots to be returned in time.

In recent days, President Donald Trump has also jumped into fray, repeatedly citing the primary in New York City for his unfounded claims that mail-in voting is susceptible to fraud. There is no evidence that the primary results were tainted by criminal malfeasance, according to a wide array of election officials and representatives of campaigns.

Still, candidates and political analysts are warning that government officials at all levels need to take urgent action to avoid a nightmare in November.

“This election is a canary in the coal mine,” said Suraj Patel, a Democrat running for Congress in a district that includes parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, who has filed a federal lawsuit over the primary.

Patel trails the incumbent, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, by some 3,700 votes, though

more than 12,000 ballots have been disqualified, including about 1,200 that were missing postmarks, he said.

He is among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed in July that is asking a federal court to order election officials to count disqualified ballots. The lawsuit included testimony that election officials had mailed out more than 34,000 ballots one day before the June 23 primary.

A winner has also not been declared in a congressional district in the Bronx, where Ritchie Torres, a Democratic city councilman, holds a comfortable lead over several other contenders.

Other states and localities had voteby-mail primaries during the pandemic, with some scattered reports of problems — though nothing on the scale of New York City’s weekslong process. Even before the outbreak, the city’s Board of Elections had a reputation as a troubled agency that ran elections rife with problems.

New York City election officials insisted last week that they were doing their best under the extraordinary circumstances.

They pointed out the difficulties in protecting election workers from the coronavirus, and cited state laws requiring the disqualification of ballots for various small errors — including missing signatures on ballot envelopes or envelopes sealed with tape — for contributing to the high number of invalidated ballots.

Election officials also said the changing plans for the state’s presidential primary — it was initially canceled before being reinstated by the courts — had delayed the process of sending out absentee ballots.

The city’s Board of Elections is not expected to certify the vote until Tuesday.

Thirteen weeks later, on Nov. 3, the state and city could face another crush of absentee ballots.

Primaries were conducted across the state, but New York City seemed to encounter the biggest problems, in part because it had many closely contested races and substantial voter participation.

Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, acknowledged last week that the primary was flawed, likening mail-in voting to other “systems that we were working on but were not ready,” such as remote learning and telemedicine, and suggesting the problem

New York City Board of Elections worker counts absentee ballots in Brooklyn on Thursday, July 16, 2020. lay at a local level.

“We did have — not we — boards of elections had operational issues, some better, some worse, and they have to learn from them,” Cuomo said. “And we want to get the lessons and make the system better and make it better for November.”

A person familiar with the internal operation of the city’s Board of Elections, but not authorized to speak on the record, said that having to increase the number of mailin ballots had caused enormous struggles at the agency.

“Imagine saying, ‘I’m having a dinner party for 10 people,’ and then they say, ‘No, it’s 100 people,’” the person said. “It’s a very deep learning curve.”

The person added that the board made missteps along the way, including not hiring enough people to count the absentee ballots.

Even the vendors hired to produce the ballots seemed overwhelmed.

In comments Saturday, Cuomo said his administration had offered help to local election boards, including “personnel to do counting,” though no boards seemed to take the state up on its offer. He also noted that some boards did not start counting ballots until the second week of July. “Well, what was that?” he said.

Trump has repeatedly referred to the New York primary over the last two weeks,

warning that the “same thing would happen, but on massive scale” across the country on Nov. 3.

The president returned to the topic Thursday as means of justifying his suggestion that the general election might need to be postponed, a trial balloon that was widely panned by even his fellow Republicans.

The counting of absentee ballots is more labor intensive than machine counts of inperson votes, which in the past had made up more than 90% of New York’s election returns.

Jerry H. Goldfeder, a veteran election lawyer, said the board did not have enough money to hire workers to process absentee ballots.

“They could have asked for money and hired more staff, because they knew in advance they were going to get an avalanche of absentee ballots,” Goldfeder said. “There’s nothing magical about that.”

Bruce Gyory, a Democratic political consultant, said the state and city needed to drastically increase election staff for November. “This is logistics,” Gyory said. “It isn’t rocket science.”

He added that such steps could make it more difficult for Trump to cite problems in New York to dispute the results of the general election.

“He is trying to create doubt,” Gyory said. “Because he knows he’s going to lose the election if things don’t change.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

9

As federal agents retreat in Portland, protesters return to original foe: local police

By MIKE BAKER

L

ate on Saturday night, with protests in Portland continuing into their third month, one crowd of demonstrators gathered yet again in front of the city’s fortified federal courthouse while another group traveled miles east to a precinct used by local law enforcement.

At the federal courthouse, the crowd saw a third consecutive night of calm since the start of a plan to withdraw federal agents who had brought a militarized crackdown to the city. But at the police precinct, officers pointed bright lights into the crowd, warned protesters to disperse, then chased them through the streets, knocking people to the ground, using pepper spray and making arrests.

While the arrival of federal agents wearing camouflage last month outraged protesters and local government leaders alike, their presence also masked the more personal grievances that protesters have long had with their local police force.

Gia Naranjo-Rivera, who had been protesting for weeks, said that while she was appalled by the arrival of federal agents, she believed local police officers brought their own form of hypermilitarization and repressive tactics. She was arrested on Thursday by local police after breaking caution tape the police had put up to close two locked parks next to the federal courthouse.

Naranjo-Rivera said the protests needed to continue.

“If this movement doesn’t succeed right now, we are just kicking the can down the road to the next civil rights uprising,” Naranjo-Rivera said.

The city’s protests in June were largely about local policing, with crowds denouncing a criminal justice system that disproportionately harms Black people and a Portland Police Bureau that has embraced aggressive tactics to contain unruly crowds. The police have said the crowd had flung objects at officers, including bottles and fireworks.

Mayor Ted Wheeler, who serves as police commissioner and is largely reviled among protesters, said last week that he believed police had at times made mistakes in the past, including using tear gas indiscriminately, and he hoped the departure of federal officers brought a chance to bring renewed peace.

“My hope is we will all do an outstanding job of de-escalating tensions,” Wheeler said.

At the precinct on Saturday night, the crowd stood on the street and chanted. Officers set up bright lights to shine into the crowd, angering some. When it appeared one of the officers had brought out what looked like a camera to film the crowd, some protesters pointed lasers at the device. Police said someone threw a glass jar or bottle at officers.

The protest crowds have remained much larger

than they had been in the days before federal agents had arrived.

While protest crowds numbered in the thousands in early June, those figures waned over the month. But with the federal courthouse among the targets of some of the remaining demonstrators, and President Donald Trump issuing an executive order to protect statues and government property around the country, federal agents deployed at the beginning of July.

Their presence and tactics, including firing crowdcontrol munitions and swinging batons, infuriated the city, drawing thousands out to the streets once again to stand against what many saw as a troubling federal incursion into a city that didn’t want them. At that point, the epicenter of the protests shifted from a county justice center to the federal courthouse across the street.

Clashes at the courthouse, with nightly volleys of tear gas, continued to draw more people out to stand against the federal presence, including lines of mothers linking arms and a group of military veterans.

Last week, in an agreement between Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon and leaders from the Department of Homeland Security, the state found a pathway to withdraw federal agents, with Brown vowing to put state troopers in place to provide security around the courthouse.

Since that plan went into effect on Thursday, there has been a minimal law enforcement presence on the

streets. Protesters have continued to show up outside the fenced courthouse, chanting and giving speeches around a bonfire in the middle of the street. While some have occasionally thrown bottles over the fence toward the empty courthouse entrance or burned flags, others in the crowd have confronted them to keep things peaceful and focused on the Black Lives Matter cause that drew millions to the streets after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Demetria Hester, who led a group of women in chants in front of the federal courthouse over the weekend, said she was going to continue calling out people who lit fires, threw objects or burned flags.

“How is that helping?” Hester said. “The protest right now is about Black Lives Matter. Burning a flag is not about Black Lives Matter.”

Federal agents haven’t fully retreated. Federal leaders, including Trump, have said the agents won’t be gone until local officials contain the unrest.

On Saturday night, as protesters downtown marched peacefully through the streets, they noticed through the windows of a different federal building that Homeland Security agents were standing inside watching them.

Some in the crowd stopped to flash lights through the window. One agent appeared to respond by raising a middle finger.

Then the crowd continued on.

Protesters march outside the Multnomah County Justice Center in Portland, Ore., Aug. 1, 2020.

10

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Judge whose son was killed by misogynistic lawyer speaks out

By TRACEY TULLY

T

he federal judge whose son was killed by a misogynistic lawyer released her first statement about the shooting Monday, describing the horror that unfolded as her 20-year-old only child ran to answer the door and a “madman” opened fire.

The judge, Esther Salas, also issued a call for increased privacy protections for federal judges, saying the death of her son, Daniel, should not be in vain. Her husband, Mark Anderl, who was shot three times, remains hospitalized.

“Two weeks ago, my life as I knew it changed in an instant, and my family will never be the same,” Salas said in her video statement. “A madman, who I believe was targeting me because of my position as a federal judge, came to my house.”

She described a weekend celebration at their New Jersey home for Daniel’s 20th birthday that included several of his friends from Catholic University of America, who had stayed overnight.

“The weekend was a glorious one,” Salas added, choking back tears. “It was filled with love, laughter, and smiles.”

She and her son were in the basement talking when the doorbell rang.

“Daniel looked at me and said, ‘Who is that?’”

“And before I could say a word, he sprinted upstairs. Within seconds, I heard the sound of

Judge Esther Salas released a videotaped statement two weeks after her son was shot dead at their home. bullets and someone screaming, ‘No!’” Daniel’s final act, she said, was to protect his

father from the man she described as a monster.

“He took the shooter’s first bullet directly to the chest,” she said. “The monster then turned his attention to my husband and began to shoot at my husband, one shot after another.”

Salas said the man, believed to have been Roy Den Hollander, who later killed himself, was carrying a FedEx package in his hand — an apparent ruse to coax the family to open the door.

Until that moment on July 19, it had been an otherwise routine Sunday: Salas and her husband went to church, and Daniel, who was about to start his junior year in college, caught up on some sleep after his friends left for the weekend.

She said Den Hollander had compiled a dossier on her and her family, including their address in North Brunswick, New Jersey, and the church they attended.

Days before, Den Hollander, 72, had traveled by train to San Bernardino County, California, where he shot and killed a rival men’s rights lawyer at his home, authorities said.

Hours after the shooting in New Jersey, police found Den Hollander’s body off a road in upstate New York with a single gunshot to the head.

Den Hollander was a self-described “antifeminist” with a record of virulently misogynistic and hateful writing. He represented the most extreme element of the men’s right movement whose online discussions in recent years have become increasingly menacing toward women.

He was apparently angry at Salas for not moving quickly enough on a lawsuit he had brought challenging the constitutionality of the male-only draft.

Salas said she understood that judge’s decisions would be scrutinized.

“We know that our job requires us to make tough calls, and sometimes those calls can leave people angry and upset,” she said. “That comes with the territory and we accept that.

“But what we cannot accept is when we are forced to live in fear for our lives because personal information, like our home addresses, can be easily obtained by anyone seeking to do us or our families harm.”

She called for a national conversation on ways to safeguard the privacy of federal judges.

“My family has experienced a pain that no one should ever have to endure,” she said, “And I am here asking everyone to help me ensure that no one ever has to experience this kind of pain.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

11

In showdown between China and the west, HSBC gets caught in the middle

By ALEXANDRA STEVENSON

L

ike Hong Kong, HSBC has long sat at the crossroads between East and West, a big global bank based in Britain that has reveled in and profited from its deep relationship with China. And like Hong Kong, it is now caught in the middle of a new era of confrontation between Beijing and major Western governments.

In China, HSBC has been accused of “setting traps” to ensnare the Chinese tech giant, Huawei. In Britain, it has been admonished for lobbying on behalf of Huawei.

Straddling neutral ground is no longer an option. HSBC got called out in China for not publicly backing the new national security law in Hong Kong. When the bank eventually expressed support on its Chinese social media account, members of the British Parliament demanded an explanation and urged HSBC to rescind the statement.

Global businesses are increasingly under pressure to pick sides as the United States and its allies target the political and economic agenda of China.

American technology companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google and LinkedIn have pledged to defy data requests in Hong Kong under China’s new security law. Manufacturers have disentangled their supply chains to cut out Chinese companies that the U.S. government has banned over human rights violations or national security concerns. Big banks are scouring client lists to ensure compliance after the United States imposed sanctions on individuals considered to be eroding Hong Kong’s autonomy.

Many multinationals also worry that complying with U.S. law may mean breaking the new Chinese rules in Hong Kong — or cost them access to the second-largest economy in the world.

A recent survey by the American Chamber of Commerce found that nearly half of the firms it surveyed are “extremely concerned” about recent developments with the national security law.

“There are multiple tail winds pushing the global business world toward this highly geopolitically sensitive environment where the landscape has shifted fundamentally and you can no longer be agnostic.” said Jude Blanchette, a China scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It is the logical extension of this new paradigm where economic security is now considered national security.”

HSBC and Huawei declined to comment.

HSBC, which now derives most of its revenues in Hong Kong and China, has long navigated politics and profits.

During Japan’s occupation of Hong Kong during World War II, the head of HSBC was forced to sign bank notes for the Japanese government. He also secretly provided aid to military prisoners and bank employees.

As Britain and China negotiated the handover of Hong Kong in the early 1980s, HSBC was viewed with mistrust by the Chinese Communist Party for its role in helping to finance the trade of opium in the late 1880s. In a move that helped it win back Beijing’s favor, it made plans for a splashy new headquarters in Hong Kong.

HSBC also began to lend to the local businessmen who would go on to build the conglomerates that turned the city into a global financial center. As Hong Kong profited from its role as

HSBC, a big global bank based in Britain, has long reveled in and profited from its deep relationship with China. a gateway between China and the west, HSBC’s own business boomed.

But HSBC’s unique standing has become a pitfall. During the anti-government demonstrations last year, HSBC was targeted for its Beijing connections. Protesters smeared red paint on the bronze lions outside the bank’s headquarters and set one on fire.

One of HSBC’s clients, Huawei, has been the major source of political tension for the bank.

The Trump administration put Huawei and other Chinese technology companies on a so-called entity list over national security concerns, which prevents them from using American technology and software. In response, China created its own list and last year, Chinese state media suggested that HSBC be put on it.

As Washington lobbied Western governments to block Huawei from building their 5G networks, HSBC’s chairman, Mark Tucker, held private meetings with advisers to Prime Minister Boris Johnson on behalf of the Chinese company. Local British media and politicians lashed out at HSBC. One member of Parliament took to Twitter to write about it. “The binary choice being forced on companies like HSBC is not coming from the U.K. We are not asking private businesses to endorse policy or face punishment. We are not threatening to withdraw economic cooperation if a U.K. company fails in a bid,” wrote Tom Tugendhat, a member of the Conservative Party and chairman of Britain’s Foreign Affairs Committee.

Even before the back-channel gestures failed and Britain blocked Huawei, HSBC was in the crosshairs of China’s state-run media. “The HSBC chairman’s warning to Downing Street is farfetched and absurd, and seems more like a political statement than a business comment,” The Global Times wrote in an editorial on its English website.

In recent days, Beijing has hurled a series of accusations against HSBC for cooperating in the case against the Huawei chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who is in detention in Canada and fighting extradition to the United States.

Huawei is accused of flouting Iranian sanctions and misleading HSBC about its dealings with an Iranian company. Meng’s legal team has argued that Huawei did not hide anything from HSBC about its dealings in Iran.

“Wallowing in degradation and with its reputation at rock bottom, HSBC may struggle to continue to enjoy treatment in China,” one state-controlled newspaper warned. Piling on, other state controlled newspapers accused HSBC of malice and dishonesty.

The People’s Daily accused HSBC of “setting traps” and argued that the evidence filed to the court revealed that the case was “entirely a political case” with “fabricated criminal evidence.”

On its Chinese social media account, the bank offered a simple defense of its cooperation with prosecutors. “HSBC has no malice against Huawei, nor has it ‘framed’ Huawei,” it said in its statement.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Microsoft says it’ll continue pursuit of TikTok

A forced sale would be the latest in a series of punitive actions the Trump administration has taken against China.

By MIKE ISAAC, ANA SWANSON and MAGGIE HABERMAN

M

icrosoft said Sunday that it would continue to pursue the purchase of TikTok in the United States after consulting with President Donald Trump, clearing the way for a potential blockbuster deal between the software giant and the viral social media phenomenon.

The announcement came as Trump has expressed repeated concerns about TikTok and national security in recent weeks because of the app’s Chinese origins and backing; on Friday, Trump threatened to ban the app entirely within the United States, saying any decision could come as soon as Saturday.

Those plans appeared to change after several of Trump’s allies and Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, spoke over the weekend with the president.

“Microsoft fully appreciates the importance of addressing the president’s concerns,” the company said in a statement. “It is committed to acquiring TikTok subject to a complete security review and providing proper economic benefits to the United States, including the United States Treasury.”

Microsoft said it would pursue the deal over the coming weeks, and expected to complete the discussions no later than Sept. 15. Such a deal would involve purchasing the TikTok service in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, would continue to own the social media app’s operations in Beijing and other markets.

Microsoft may also bring on a series of outside investors,

which would hold minority stakes in any deal. In recent weeks, investors from Sequoia Capital, SoftBank and General Atlantic have all held talks with TikTok to discuss participating in an acquisition of the company, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

Such a deal would be a boon for the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, which has pursued corporate and enterprise computing lines of business under the leadership of Nadella, who took over as chief executive in 2014. Though it has dabbled in consumer acquisitions — Microsoft purchased Minecraft in 2014 and bought LinkedIn in 2017 — the purchase of TikTok would be largely new ground for Nadella. More than 800 million people regularly use the app to watch viral videos, with some 100 million of those users in the United States.

The forced sale is the latest in a series of punitive actions the Trump administration has taken against China, which the president blames for allowing the coronavirus pandemic to spread and damage the U.S. economy, diminishing his reelection chances. As the election nears, Trump has increasingly challenged China over security, technology and commercial relations in an attempt to persuade voters that he will be tougher in taking on Beijing than former Vice President Joe Biden.

But a ban on TikTok, which could target its presence in the Apple and Google app stores, would come with other difficulties, including irking millions of young Americans who share viral videos and dance clips on the service. It also most likely would prompt legal challenges, anger prominent Republican lawmakers and dismay the business community.

Those tensions spilled into the open over the weekend as Washington awaited a decision from Trump.

Surrounded by few White House aides Friday night as he returned to Washington aboard Air Force One, Trump caught several advisers by surprise when he told reporters he planned to “terminate” the ability of TikTok to operate in the United States using emergency economic powers or an executive order.

Several advisers were furious, and suggested that Peter Navarro, the top trade adviser who often has Trump’s ear, and other people in the president’s inner circle had helped shortcircuit the president’s approval of a possible sale to Microsoft, according to White House officials and others close to the president. Those who opposed the deal had focused on the idea of punishing China, not what could happen to a popular platform. Navarro did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As the president played golf at his club in Virginia on Saturday, his advisers discussed how to persuade him to sign off on the Microsoft deal — and to convey the political repercussions of simply turning off a service for tens of millions of people in the United States, according to a person familiar with what took place.

Several people, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, reached out to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and an informal adviser to Trump, to ask him to intervene.

After speaking with Microsoft officials a few times, Graham eventually tweeted about the deal, saying that Trump was “right to want to make sure that the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t own TikTok and most importantly — all of your private data.”

He added: “What’s the right answer? Have an American company like Microsoft take over TikTok. Win-win. Keeps competition alive and data out of the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.”

The tweet caught Trump’s eye, prompting a call between the two in which Graham told the president that he agreed that the platform was a national security risk, but he stressed the political risks of banning the app.

Some of Trump’s closest political advisers, including Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow, the chief of the National Economic Council, had also urged the president to allow a sale of TikTok. In a bid to sway the president, several business leaders and prominent Republican lawmakers, including Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida weighed in Sunday.

“I was among the first to warn of danger posed by TikTok last year,” Rubio wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “As I have shared with POTUS & @WhiteHouse if the company & data can be purchased & secured by a trusted U.S. company that would be a positive & acceptable outcome.”

Myron Brilliant, the executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, tweeted Sunday that a sale would “be a good solution that helps to address some security concerns, strengthens the US #digitaleconomy, and preserves an app enjoyed by millions of Americans.”

On Sunday, Trump spoke with Microsoft officials after becoming convinced that he was heading off a political issue and solving a security risk, according to a person familiar with what took place.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

13 Stocks

Nasdaq hits record high close as traders eye M&A and stimulus

T

he Nasdaq surged to a record high close on Monday as a rebound in multibillion-dollar deals, including Microsoft’s pursuit of TikTok’s U.S. operations, lifted sentiment, and efforts to hammer out a coronavirus relief bill resumed.

Microsoft (MSFT.O) jumped 5.6% after it said it would push ahead with talks to buy the U.S. operations of Chineseowned TikTok. President Donald Trump reversed course earlier on a planned ban of the short-video app.

ADT (ADT.N) soared over 56% on news that Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google was buying a nearly 7% stake in the home security firm for $450 million in a deal that will allow it to provide service to customers of its Nest home security devices.

Varian Medical Systems Inc (VAR.N) jumped 22% after a $16 billion buyout by Germany’s Siemens Healthineers (SHLG.DE), while Kansas City Southern (KSU.N) gained after a report a group of buyout investors were considering a takeover bid in a deal of about $20 billion.

“The market is revolving around M&A activity possibly picking up,” said Jake Dollarhide, chief executive officer of Longbow Asset Management in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “It means CEOs are more confident about the future. Otherwise, why would they lay out billions of dollars?”

Apple Inc (AAPL.O) climbed 2.5%, expanding its rally following stunning quarterly results and announcing a fourfor-one stock split. The tech giant is about $140 billion short of hitting $2 trillion in market capitalization.

The S&P 500 information technology index .SPLRCT jumped 2.5%, far outpacing other sector indexes.

Congressional Democrats and Trump administration officials resumed talks aimed at hammering out a coronavirus relief bill after missing a vital deadline to extend relief benefits to tens of millions of jobless Americans.

A rally in tech-related stocks and trillions of dollars in monetary and fiscal stimulus have lifted the S&P 500 to within about 3% of February’s record high.

The Labor Department’s monthly employment report is due on Friday, on the heels of last week’s weekly jobless claims data that showed a recovery in the job market appeared to have stalled in late July.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI rose 0.89% to end at 26,664.4 points, while the S&P 500 .SPX gained 0.72% to 3,294.61.

The Nasdaq Composite .IXIC climbed 1.47% to 10,902.80, beating its previous record high close on July 20.

With the U.S. corporate earnings season now past its half-way mark, a record number of companies have beaten dramatically lowered estimates, but the second quarter is still set to be the low point for earnings this year.

Drug distributor McKesson Corp (MCK.N) jumped 6.5% after boosting its full-year earnings forecast.

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14

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Poland’s Supreme Court declares presidential election valid

President Andrzej Duda of Poland was elected to a second term in the country’s closest presidential election since the end of communist rule in 1989.

By MONIKA PRONCZUK

P

oland’s Supreme Court on Monday upheld the results of President Andrzej Duda’s narrow victory in last month’s presidential elections, the country’s closest contest since the fall of communism in 1989, a decision that clears the path for the country’s conservative Law and Justice party to continue in power.

Thousands of supporters of the opposition candidate and rights groups had filed legal challenges in the country’s highest court demanding the election be reassessed after Duda edged Rafal Trzaskowski, the opposition candidate and the liberal mayor of Warsaw. Duda secured 51.03% of the vote, while Trzaskowski won 48.97%, in a mid-July runoff.

Opponents of Duda pointed out to many irregularities during the campaign and

during the election, including pushing forward with the vote despite the coronavirus pandemic, limited access to the vote for Poles abroad, and the role of the public media and government officials in the campaign.

The court’s decision was not a surprise in light of sweeping changes to the country’s judicial system introduced by the governing party, moves that drew widespread condemnation from the European Union and international human rights organizations, as well as from Poland’s opposition and some of its judges.

The country’s judges had been selected for decades by an independent council, but legislation signed by Duda in 2017 introduced changes that gave the president given more direct power over the Supreme Court.

Joanna Lemanska, who heads the chamber of the Supreme Court that ruled on the validity of the election — and who was

appointed by Duda — had stepped away from the process, but critics said her departure was not enough to remove the likelihood of bias.

“I had no doubt what the decision would be,” said Michal Wawrykiewicz, a lawyer from the Free Courts Initiative and the Committee for Defense of Justice. “We are not talking here about an independent court but a party tribunal.”

Wawrykiewicz pointed out that the court ruled that an overwhelming majority of complaints did not fulfill the formal criteria and was not even assessed on the grounds of their merit.

“The European Court of Justice will rule on September 22 whether the chamber of the Supreme Court fulfills the criteria of an independent court, which will give us answers to many questions,” Wawrykiewicz said.

Given the margin of defeat, almost half

a million votes, the supporters of Trzaskowski who lodged complaints after the election said the move was not intended to overturn the result of the election but to publicly question the validity of the vote and demonstrate that the elections were unfair.

“These elections were not equal, didn’t meet democratic standards; they were dishonest,” Borys Budka, the head of the main opposition party, Civic Platform, said following the election. “Because of that, we demand that they are declared invalid.”

The majority of issues with the election were reported by voters from abroad, where tens of thousands of a record 520,000 ballots may have gone uncounted.

In Britain, more than 30,000 ballots — or 16.6% of the total number of registered Polish voters in that country — went missing, according to the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. Cezary Tomczyk, the head of Trzaskowski’s campaign, said it had also received reports from across Poland of ballots that were not properly stamped, a requirement for them to be validated.

Some of the claims filed to the court that questioned the validity of the election concerned the role of the country’s public media in what was viewed by critics as an unfair electoral campaign.

Representatives from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which sent an election monitoring mission to Poland, noted that the public media “failed in its duty to offer balanced and impartial coverage.” Instead, it said, it “acted as a campaign vehicle for the incumbent and frequently portrayed his main challenger as a threat to Polish values and national interests.”

Even if the vote itself is considered fair, “the use of public funds, the engagement of the so-called public media, caused the situation to be unequal,” said Budka of the opposition.

Aleksander Stepkowski, the spokesman for the Supreme Court, announced Sunday that the court had processed all of the complaints and found 93 out of the 5,847 complaints valid, not enough to influence the overall result of the election.

The complaint filed by Trzaskowski’s campaign committee did not contain sufficient proof to sustain its claims, the court added.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

15

Abductions, censorship and layoffs: Pakistani critics are under siege

By MARIA ABI-HABIB

W

hen Prime Minister Imran Khan boasted last year that Pakistan had one of the “freest presses in the world,” journalists were quick to object, saying that intimidation of reporters across the country was intensifying.

It has only gotten worse since.

Two years into Khan’s term, censorship is on the rise, journalists and activists say, leaving the country’s heavyhanded military and security forces unchecked as they intimidate the news media to a degree unseen since the country’s era of army juntas.

The security forces frequently pressure editors to fire or muzzle reporters, journalists say, while the government starves critical news outlets of advertising funds and refuses to settle previous bills worth millions of dollars.

The abduction of a prominent reporter by state security officers in late July, coupled with the disappearance of a rights activist in November, has heightened those concerns.

In June, Pakistan’s Military Intelligence agency admitted that it had detained the activist and that he is awaiting trial in a secret court on undisclosed charges.

“Disappearances are a tool of terror, used not just to silence the victim but to fill the wider community with fear,” said Omar Waraich, the head of South Asia for Amnesty International.

“In Pakistan, the military’s intelligence apparatus has used disappearances with impunity,” Waraich said, adding: “Civilian politicians look on helplessly, affecting concern and promising to investigate. Unable to uphold the rule of law as Imran Khan vowed to do, their authority erodes.”

On July 21, the reporter, Mattiullah Jan, had just dropped off his wife at her job in an upscale neighborhood in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad when several men, some in plain clothes, others in counterterrorism police uniforms, dragged him from his car, bundled him into one of their vehicles and sped away.

Jan, 51, is a vocal critic of Khan’s governing party, the judiciary and the military, which critics accuse of working together to preserve their power and stamp out dissent.

Footage from a security camera clearly shows the police’s involvement in the abduction, working alongside men in civilian clothes that many believe are Pakistani intelligence officers. The footage culminated in a pressure campaign on social media and Jan was released 12 hours later. He released a vague statement saying he had been abducted by forces that are “against democracy.”

Multiple requests to the Pakistani government and military to comment for this article went unanswered.

Pakistan’s security forces have not publicly commented on Jan’s abduction.

Under Pakistani law, state-directed abductions like Jan’s are lawful. The detentions often go unexplained, leaving the families of the victims wondering for months or even years whether their loved one was killed in something as commonplace as a hit-and-run accident or secretly detained by the security forces.

While Pakistan has long had a poor track record on

press freedom, it has gotten notably worse under Khan’s administration, which has been widely seen as a high-water mark for military influence in the past decade. Pakistan slipped six spots since 2017 — the year before Khan took office — to 145th place out of 180 countries in the 2020 world press freedom index compiled by Reporters Without Borders.

In the last five years, 11 journalists have been killed in Pakistan, seven of them since Khan was sworn in as prime minister two years ago. Anchors have frequently seen their newscasts cut off in the middle of broadcasting — a level of censorship not seen since the era of military dictatorships in Pakistan.

Instead of establishing an outright dictatorship, human rights groups say, Pakistan’s generals are effectively imposing their will through their allies in a government that they helped usher into office.

During the 2018 elections, the military was accused of meddling to ensure victory for Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party and to virtually dismantle the party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who had tried to curb the military’s powers. The military has denied those accusations.

As those elections drew near, the military accused reporters of being anti-state, an allegation that was swiftly condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists. After a series of articles detailing the military’s political and electoral interference, the security forces disrupted the distribution of Dawn newspaper across the country.

Over the past year, the country’s remaining critical

news outlets have been gutted by the combination of a devastated national economy and the sudden elimination of government advertising dollars. Media organizations have laid off dozens of journalists, and the combination of heavy pressure and job insecurity has led many reporters to avoid critical or controversial subjects.

Like many Pakistani reporters, Jan claims that he lost his job as a popular talk show host just months after the election because of his hard-hitting reporting. He now runs his own YouTube channel.

“This is the first time in the 31 years of my career where I’ve seen a structural takeover of the media industry,” said Talat Hussain, a former Geo TV news anchor who has been critical of the military and government.

Hussain said his company fired him under pressure from the military shortly after Khan’s election. He has remained unemployed, with newspapers and TV shows refusing to host his work.

“We have dealt with fairly tyrannical regimes that were elected and dealt in repression, but it was episodic,” Hussain said. “This time it is structural and complete and it’s hard to breathe.”

Eventually, the authorities came after Hussain’s former boss. In March, Mir Shakil-ur-Rehman, the owner of the Jang Group, which owns Geo TV and The News newspaper, was detained over accusations of corruption, which Rehman has denied. Rehman has been held for over 100 days without charges, and several bail hearings have been postponed.

Kaneez Sughra, wife of the seized Pakistani journalist Matiullah Jan, shows a photograph of her husband.

Mr. Jan was abducted from a street in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, in late July.

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Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Jailbreak attack by ISIS rages on in eastern Afghanistan

Afghan security forces near the site of an attack on a jail compound in Jalalabad, on Monday. The casualties included civilians, inmates and security forces, officials said.

By ZABIHULLAH GHAZI and MUJIB MASHAL

A

militant assault on a prison complex in eastern Afghanistan turned into a gunbattle that was still raging 16 hours later Monday, as officials scrambled to recapture hundreds of prisoners, including many from the Islamic State and the Taliban.

The attack started at the prison in Jalalabad on Sunday night with a car bomb explosion that breached its security perimeter, as attackers with assault rifles streamed in and started a gunbattle with guards. As of Monday, at least 21 people had been killed and 43 others wounded, according to Attaullah Khogyani, a spokesman for the government of Nangarhar province. The casualties included civilians, inmates and security forces, officials said.

“After the car bomb, two of the fighters who had suicide vests, machine guns and RPG launchers climbed a plaza across from the prison and have been fighting from there,” said Ahmad Ali, the head of the Nangarhar provincial council, referring to rocket-propelled grenade launchers. “Inside the prison, from what I have heard, there are 11 attackers who are fighting, but that is difficult to confirm exactly now.”

The assault was claimed by loyalists of the Islamic

State group, also known as ISIS, whose territory has been constricted significantly by a campaign of military operations against them over the past couple of years. But that group was not necessarily the biggest winner in the jailbreak: A senior Afghan official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that only a third of the prison’s population of 1,500 were ISIS loyalists. The rest were split among Taliban prisoners and criminals. And for a while, at least, all of them got a chance to break free.

On Monday afternoon, Khogyani said that nearly 1,000 prisoners who had tried to escape had been rearrested. But with the prison still broken open, and with the area under tight military restrictions, his claim was difficult to verify.

A military official said that about 300 inmates who were trying to escape had been taken to an army base nearby. Local news media was flooded with reports of individual prisoners who had made it to their villages.

The jailbreak came just as prisoners have become a headline issue in Afghanistan. Disagreement over the last batch of a release of Taliban prisoners has delayed the next steps of an agreement reached in February between the United States and the Taliban, and the start of direct talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

Afghan prisons have been crucial targets for combatants through decades of war, and during the Taliban insurgency of recent years, the insurgents have freed up to hundreds of their prisoners at a time in such attacks.

On Monday, a Taliban spokesman denied having anything to do with the attack on the Jalalabad prison.

Nangarhar has been a stronghold of the Islamic State in Afghanistan. Intense operations by Afghan forces, often backed by U.S. air power, shrank the group’s presence significantly. Afghan officials said Saturday that they had killed a senior leader of the group in the province.

While the Taliban and ISIS have fought bloody turf wars in eastern Afghanistan, Afghan officials have long claimed that elements of the two groups have overlapped, at times sharing networks and resources for urban attacks.

The murky identity of ISIS’ branch in the country has made it a spoiler threat to the peace process. During the first cease-fire between the Taliban and the Afghan government in 2018, the Islamic State claimed a deadly bombing in Nangarhar that killed nearly 40 people.

The attack came during the final hours of another three-day cease-fire between the Taliban and the Afghan government for the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha. Afghan officials said that violence during the cease-fire had dropped significantly, with fewer than a dozen attacks reported over the first two days.

The U.S.-Taliban deal called for the Afghan government to free 5,000 Taliban prisoners in exchange for 1,000 Taliban-held members of the Afghan security forces. The swap was supposed to take place early this year over 10 days, after which the Taliban and the government were expected to have direct negotiations.

The Afghan government at first resisted the prisoner release, and then gave in to a phased release under much pressure from the Trump administration. More recently, President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan said that he would not release the last 400 of the 5,000 people on a list provided by the Taliban, as they were accused of serious crimes. It wasn’t immediately clear whether any of the 400 prisoners at issue were held in the prison under attack.

One Afghan official said that while it was possible that a few of those Taliban could be in Nangarhar, most of the high-profile prisoners were usually held at the central jail in Kabul or at a highly protected facility near the U.S. military base in Bagram.

While the Taliban have completed the release of the 1,000 prisoners they had committed to, Ghani has offered a compromise. He is releasing 500 other Taliban members instead of the 400 on the list presented by the insurgents, and he is calling a council of elders from across Afghanistan to consult on whether to free the 400 accused of grave crimes, as well. The grand consultation, called a Loya Jirga, is expected to happen this month.

It was not clear whether Ghani’s compromise was acceptable to the Taliban as a way to open a path for direct negotiations, expected around Aug. 10.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

17

Russia sets mass vaccination for October after shortened trial

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

R

ussia plans to launch a nationwide vaccination campaign in October with a coronavirus vaccine that has yet to complete clinical trials, raising international concern about the methods the country is using to compete in the global race to inoculate the public.

The minister of health, Mikhail Murashko, said Saturday that the plan was to begin by vaccinating teachers and health care workers. He also told the RIA state news agency that amid accelerated testing, the laboratory that developed the vaccine was already seeking regulatory approval for it.

Russia is one of a number of countries rushing to develop and administer a vaccine. Not only would such a vaccine help alleviate a worldwide health crisis that has killed more than 680,000 people and badly wounded the global economy, it would also become a symbol of national pride.

And Russia has used the race as a propaganda tool, even in the absence of published scientific evidence to support its claim as a front-runner.

“I do hope that the Chinese and the Russians are actually testing the vaccine before they are administering the vaccine to anyone,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States, warned a congressional hearing Friday.

State television in Russia has for several months promoted the idea of Russia leading the competition. In May, a government report claimed that the first person in the world to be vaccinated against the virus was a Russian researcher who had injected himself with a vaccine early in the development process.

Russia will start Phase III trials of the vaccine in early August, said Kirill Dmitriev, a senior official with Russia Direct Investment Fund, a government-controlled investor in the country’s vaccination effort. A Phase III trial is the only way to determine if a vaccine is effective.

The World Health Organization maintains a comprehensive list of worldwide vaccine trials. But there is no Russian Phase III trial on the list.

Still, a Russian regulatory agency is expected to approve the vaccine this month, Dmitriev said. That is far earlier than timelines suggested by Western regulators, who have often said a vaccine would become available no sooner than the end of the year.

“We believe it will be one of the first vaccines with regulatory approval,” Dmitriev said.

But with limited transparency in the Russian program, separating the science from the politics and propaganda could prove impossible. Critics have drawn attention to Russia’s tradition of cutting corners in research on other pharmaceutical products and accusations of intellectual property theft.

The U.S., Canadian and British governments have all accused Russian state hackers of attempting to steal vaccine research, casting a shadow over Russia’s claim to have achieved a medical breakthrough. Russian officials have denied the accusation and say their leading vaccine is based on a design developed by Russian scientists to counter Ebola years ago.

Russia was once at the forefront in virology and vaccinations. In the Soviet era, its doctors led the world in some areas of research, but spending has shriveled in recent decades.

Medicines are sometimes approved with limited or no testing.

Russian researchers have continued to advance a range of vaccines since the beginning of the pandemic. The candidate to be given in October is similar to a vaccine developed

by Oxford University and AstraZeneca.

The Russian vaccine was developed by the Gamaleya Institute in Moscow. It uses two strains of adenovirus that typically cause mild colds in humans. Adenovirus vaccines are in trials in various countries. They are genetically modified to cause infected cells to make proteins from the spike of the new coronavirus.

The Gamaleya Institute tested its vaccine on soldiers, raising ethical questions about consent, although the Defense Ministry said all of the soldiers had volunteered. The institute’s director, Alexander Gintsberg, went on television in May to say he tried the vaccine on himself before announcing the completion of trials in monkeys.

“There is an escalation in the geopolitics of vaccine research,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of Eurasia Group, a risk consulting firm. But “what remains of the vast scientific complex of the Soviet period is a shadow of what it was,” he said.

Countries with vaccine production capacity — abundant in Russia and India — could wind up inoculating their populations by copying a successful vaccine, even if they did not in fact develop it. In April, the Serum Institute in India

announced that it had plans to mass-produce a vaccine, with permission from the developer, before clinical trials had ended.

“In all likelihood, the country producing on their soil will be the first to get it, even if they don’t own it,” Kupchan said. “I don’t know how much international law and patent protection will apply here. People are pretty desperate.”

Dmitriev, of the Russia Direct Investment Fund, has attributed Russia’s research success to the Soviet Union’s once-formidable scientific study of viruses.

“We have this very significant legacy of Russia being a leader of vaccines in the Soviet time and today,” he said.

“We don’t have to create many things from scratch.”

He contrasted that history with Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed program, which is financing experimental research by Pfizer and Moderna for a genetic vaccine.

“In the last 20 years, the world took a turn toward molecular biology,” said Aydar A. Ishmukhametov, director of the Chumakov Institute, a Russian vaccine-maker. “The Russian school has preserved virology.”

Russia also has an advantage, Ishmukhametov said, in its vast, Soviet-era industrial base for growing viruses for vaccines. In the pandemic, the country has turned to a secretive laboratory in Siberia with roots in the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program, which included the study of anthrax to target humans and plant pathogens that would destroy U.S. crops.

The laboratory, Vektor, is now testing whether viruses that cause influenza, measles or vascular stomatitis — a livestock disease — can be put to use for a coronavirus vaccine.

An employee working at the Gamaleya Institute in Moscow in 2017. A Russian regulatory agency is expected to approve a vaccine developed by the Gamaleya Institute for use outside of trials.

18

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Trump forecasts his own fraud

By CHARLES M. BLOW

T

his election is in danger of being stolen. By Donald Trump.

Trump is a win-at-all-costs kind of operator. For him, the rules are like rubber, not fixed but bendable. All structures — laws, conventions, norms — exist for others, those not slick and sly enough to evade them, those not craven enough to break them.

Trump is showing anyone who is willing to see it, in every way possible, that he is willing to do anything to win reelection, and will cry foul if he doesn’t, a scenario that could cause an unprecedented national crisis.

Trump has been on a rampage over voting by mail. Last week he tweeted: “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

Setting aside the fact that Trump has no power to delay the election, he is clearly seeking to undermine the legitimacy of the outcome should he lose. If he wins, he’ll say he did so despite fraud, and if he loses, he’ll claim he did so because of it.

In Trump’s world, he is never to blame for failure. He is the best, the greatest ever, like no one has ever seen before. He doesn’t fail. In reality, his life is chock-full of failure.

At the same time Trump is attacking voting by mail, he

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President Trump walking on the South Lawn of the White House last week. is undermining the mechanism by which it would be done: the United States Postal Service. This is fueling concerns by many that the Postal Service is being damaged precisely because of Trump opposition to mail-in voting.

As Barack Obama said in his eulogy for John Lewis: “But even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrictive I.D. laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the Postal Service in the run-up to an election that is going to be dependent on mailed-in ballots so people don’t get sick.”

Trump is afraid of what the data say: according to a May Gallup poll, 83% of Democrats would favor their state allowing all voters to vote by mail or absentee ballot in this year’s presidential election, while only 40% of Republicans would.

Trump wants to suppress the votes of those opposed to him because he fears there won’t be enough votes in support of him.

Polls now consistently show him losing to Joe Biden, not only nationally but also in battleground states.

These polls aren’t enough to lock in a victory for Biden, but they have been enough to rattle Trump.

A couple of weeks ago, Trump even suggested in an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace that he may not accept the election results in November, saying, “I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election, I really do.” When Wallace pressed and asked specifically if Trump was suggesting that he might not accept the election results, Trump said, “I have to see.”

For months now people have been gaming out what will

happen if Trump lost the election, doesn’t concede and refuses to leave the White House.

One concern is that he might view the results as invalid and challenge the election in court, which could lead to protracted litigation.

Trump hinted at the prospect of litigation last week, when he said he wanted to know the winner of the election on election night, adding, “I don’t want to see that take place in a week after Nov. 3, or a month or, frankly, with litigation and everything else that can happen, years.”

This could happen. We should put nothing past this man.

The words “far-fetched” and “outlandish” don’t exist in the Trump universe.

This is a man who, during the last election, invited assistance from Russia. Since taking office, he has repeatedly doubted or refused to accept his own intelligence services’ conclusion about Russian interference in that election. He has met privately with Putin without the world knowing fully what was discussed.

He has instituted policies favorable to Russia. He was even impeached over issues surrounding the assistance from Russia.

And yet, he has said that he would accept assistance from foreign governments again. And yet, when it was reported that there was some intelligence that Russia may have placed a bounty on our troops, Trump refused to condemn that and said that he didn’t even raise the topic in a discussion with Putin.

All of this was unfathomable just a few years ago, and now it’s the reality we are all living. There are no norms under Trump but the consistently abhorrent.

Put nothing past Trump, not even the destruction of the American electoral process.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

19

Tribunal acoge petición de Espacios Abiertos contra la CEE Por THE STAR juez Anthony Cuevas, del Tribunal de Primera E48 lInstancia de San Juan, dió el lunes un plazo de horas a la Comisión Estatal de Elecciones (CEE) para contestar por qué no debería fallar a favor de la solicitud de información que hizo Espacios Abiertos (EA) en junio y una moción para reducir el término de entrega de los documentos.

La directora ejecutiva de EA, Cecille Blondet Passalacqua, indicó que ante la inacción de la CEE la organización radicó un escrito ante el tribunal el pasado viernes, 31 de julio ante para hacer valer el derecho constitucional de acceso a información pública que le asiste a todos los ciudadanos y ciudadanas de Puerto Rico.

Dijo que la petición al foro judicial se hizo de conformidad con el procedimiento que establece la Ley de Transparencia y Procedimiento Expedito para Información Pública, Ley Núm. 141 de 1 de agosto de 2019. Explicó que ante la inminencia de la primarias, Espacios Abiertos también solicitó que se acorte el término de 10 días que establece la ley para contestar.

Blondet Passalacqua se mostró complacida con la agilidad con la cual el tribunal acogió ambas peticiones que hiciera la organización aunque lamentó que haya que llegar y ocupar al foro judicial con estas situaciones.

“No hay ninguna razón válida de la CEE para impedir el acceso a información que debe ser pública, como lo son las fotografías oficiales que se utilizarán en las papeletas para identificar a los

candidatos y candidatas. Es un contrasentido que la propia agencia que debe promover el ejercicio de los derechos democráticos de los ciudadanos y ciudadanas de este país a través del voto, limite el derecho de todos y todas a conocer, con su nombre y su foto, quiénes son las personas que aspiran a representar al pueblo. Tener que llegar, una vez más hasta el tribunal para hacer valer nuestro derecho de acceso a información pública es muestra de que en Puerto Rico prevalece una cultura de opacidad por parte del gobierno, sus agencias y sus funcionarios”, puntualizó Blondet Passalacqua.

Las fotografías de los candidatos y aspirantes a candidatos es el único elemento que falta en la plataforma QuienMeRepresentaPR.com, edición Elecciones 2020, que desarrolló Espacios Abiertos y que está accesible desde la semana pasada para que las personas, utilizando su código postal, puedan ver y conocer más sobre todos los candidatos y candidatas que aspiran a representarnos a nivel municipal, estatal y federal como funcionarios electos a partir de enero 2021. Actualmente, para las primarias y elecciones generales hay casi 700 personas postulándose para ocupar 158 escaños.

La oferta de aspirantes es amplia, ya que más que cuadruplica los escaños disponibles. Si a los 158 escaños añadimos los 888 adicionales que suponen las legislaturas municipales, en noviembre se eligen sobre 1,000 personas para representar a la gente.

“La participación política es reconocida como un derecho humano en la Declaración Universal de las Naciones Unidas. Participar es nuestro derecho. Informarnos sobre los candidatos y candida-

Cecile Blondet, directora de EA

tas antes de ejercer el derecho al voto, es nuestro deber. Para seleccionar a las personas que mejor nos representan, la gente necesita llegar a la caseta de votación armada de información”, expresó la portavoz. “ QuienMeRepresentaPR.com ofrece a cada elector la oportunidad de acceder en un solo lugar información sobre las casi 700 personas que aspiran a representarnos a partir de enero. Como organización no promovemos ni endosamos ningún candidato, partido o colectividad. Sabemos de la necesidad que hay de fortalecer la capacidad de todos y todas en Puerto Rico para actuar más eficazmente en el marco político, social e institucional, y con esta herramienta buscamos promover la participación electoral informada”, sostuvo Blondet Passalacqua.

Alegan uso de agentes de Rentas Internas de Hacienda como guardias de seguridad Por THE STAR l secretario del Departamento de Hacienda, FranERentas cisco Parés Alicea, alegadamente usa agentes de Internas para que cubran los puestos y hagan

Secretario de Hacienda, Francisco Parés

las funciones de guardias de seguridad en las oficinas de la agencia, ya que no se han renovado los contratos a la compañía de seguridad privada. Así lo denunció el presidente de la Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), Gerson L. Guzmán López.

“En una acción sin precedentes en el Gobierno de Puerto Rico el Secretario quiere poner de guardias de seguridad a los agentes de Rentas Internas. Nosotros reconocemos el importante papel que cumplen los agentes de Rentas Internas en el Departamento de Hacienda y no vemos la lógica de pretender poner en vigor esta directriz. Esto, claro está, sin menospreciar la labor del guardia de seguridad. En primer lugar, esta no es la misión que tiene asignada este personal. En segundo término, el secretario, mejor que nadie, conoce la reducida cantidad de Agentes de Rentas Internas con los que hoy cuenta el Departamento de Hacienda. En tercer lugar, este personal tiene en este momento particular, donde

se ha incrementado el contagio con el coronavirus, la importante misión de participar en los operativos que se desarrollan en los diferentes establecimientos para hacer cumplir las medidas dispuestas en la Orden Ejecutiva de la Gobernadora y proteger así a la población”, explicó presidente de la UGT. Guzmán López detalló que los Agentes de Rentas Internas tienen también la importante misión de ser los encargados de velar por el cumplimiento de las normas y reglamento del Negociado de Rentas Internas y de Impuesto al Consumo del Departamento, lo que los convierte en los funcionarios que aseguran los ingresos recurrentes de Hacienda.

“Tenemos el convencimiento de que el secretario Parés Alicea comprenderá lo contraproducente de la asignación que se pretende cumpla el reducido personal disponible. Hoy le solicitamos públicamente lo que en privado le hemos requerido en innumerables ocasiones, celebrar una reunión donde podamos discutir esta situación y otros importantes asuntos que actualmente afectan el desempeño de este grupo de trabajadores. Esperamos que la reunión solicitada se verifique a la mayor brevedad posible”, precisó.

20

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

It’s a book. It’s a podcast. It’s a three-act play, in your ears.

Finn Wolfhard in a recording studio on Jan. 31, 2020.

By ELISABETH EGAN

I

f you’re missing the chilly joy of ducking into a movie theater on a sweltering day, welcome to the club.

Ditto for attending concerts, plays, sporting events and awkward variety shows on the last day of summer camp. Our usual forms of entertainment are scarce right now, but here’s a fresh alternative: Jesse Eisenberg’s Audible Original, “When You Finish Saving the World.”

The idea for the five-hour, 17-minute audio drama, available Tuesday, grew out of a conversation between Eisenberg — the star of movies such as “The Social Network” as well as an author and playwright — and a friend who confessed that he had no emotional connection to his newborn daughter.

“He was mortified and felt terribly guilty. I thought this was an interesting dynamic to explore,” Eisenberg said in a phone interview. “Then I met these great producers who told me about a new format which is fiction created exclusively for audio. The internal struggle of a character who is emotionally a bit stifled seemed perfect for that medium.”

“When You Finish Saving the World” tells the story of the Katz family over 30 years. First, we hear from Nathan (voiced by Eisenberg), a young father struggling to connect with his newborn son; then Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard), that baby now grown into a 15-year-old blundering through adolescent angst in 2032, which makes the present look downright blissful; and, finally, Rachel (Kaitlyn Dever), a wide-eyed, well-intentioned student trying to get her bearings at Indiana University in 2002.

Her path is about to make a zigzag that will lead her to become Nathan’s wife and Ziggy’s mother.

Each character takes shape through his or her own series of audio files. Nathan’s are intended for a couples’ therapist and Ziggy’s for a futuristic bot therapist he has been “sentenced” to see. Rachel’s cassette tapes are in-

tended for her high school boyfriend, who is awaiting deployment to Afghanistan.

These dispatches are whispered and wept from a variety of locations, including a guest room, a bathroom and a Subway sandwich shop. They give you the forbidden thrill of reading someone else’s mail, with the bonus of being able to hear the sender’s voice. The experience is reminiscent of watching a play — the intimacy and urgency of “Dear Evan Hansen” come to mind — to the extent that brief pauses between sections are as jarring as the house lights coming up in a hushed theater.

Rachel Ghiazza, the head of U.S. content at Audible, said Eisenberg’s approach is “genre-bending” and “pushes the boundaries of what audio storytelling can do.” This podcast-weary walker would have to agree.

One might wonder about the logistics of producing anything during a pandemic, let alone a three-part drama with music and sound effects such as a baby crying, a party raging, a button clicking on an old-fashioned tape recorder. (Keen-eared Subway enthusiasts may question the crinkly noise of a sandwich being unwrapped — it sounds like it may be the wrong paper.)

Here’s how it all came together. Eisenberg spent several months writing the script, even meeting with veterans to find the right military base for Rachel’s story.

“When a friend who was stationed in Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan told me about his experiences, I knew I had the right location,” Eisenberg said. “All of the military stories are based on friends’ experiences, and I lined them up on the same timeline as U.S. politics in 2002, so Rachel would have to struggle to navigate two opposing worlds: a boyfriend stationed overseas and an antiwar, liberal college campus.”

In the early weeks of 2020, Eisenberg recorded his part in a Newark, New Jersey, studio, then traveled to Vancouver’s Gastown neighborhood to record with Wolfhard in a studio owned by singer-songwriter Bryan

Eisenberg’s audio drama, “When You Finish Saving the World,” is coming to Audible ahead of a film adaptation with Julianne Moore.

Adams. Wolfhard’s section happens to include singing and a slew of made-up slang delivered with a fluency only an actual teenager could muster.

Wolfhard, 17 and best known as Mike Wheeler on the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” said: “It was therapeutic. I got to be kind of a brat for a change. Hopefully I’m not as much of one in real life.”

Of his invention of the hipster lexicon of the future, Eisenberg said, “Ziggy is one of these pretentious kids who adopts something before general society agrees that it’s palatable. My only inconvenience was, any time I came up with a new word, I would immediately search in Urban Dictionary and discover that it meant something that was horribly sexually perverse.”

Wolfhard put Eisenberg in touch with Dever (a Golden Globe nominee for “Unbelievable”) and, in March, she and Eisenberg met up at a Los Angeles coffee shop, Joan’s on Third, to discuss the project. “Jesse was the last person I shared a cookie with in the real world,” Dever said.

“It was classic chocolate chip,” Eisenberg recalled.

“Had I known the world was about to change, I would have gotten something else.”

With California on lockdown, logistics presented a challenge. “Where the suspense came in was figuring out how to record Kaitlyn’s part of the story,” Ghiazza said. The team at Audible put together a kit containing “everything she needed to turn her home into a professional recording studio” — including a microphone, audio interface, monitor, Bluetooth mouse, pop filter, microphone stand, headphones and cabling.

Dever said she could hear Eisenberg in her headphones, but otherwise she was on her own in a bedroom closet. “There was something about being in the comfort of my own home that made everything more relaxed and casual. It took the pressure off,” she said.

“When You Finish Saving the World” is also being made into a movie, with some adjustments — like taking place in the present day. Other details will remain the same: Julianne Moore, who plays Ziggy’s mother, runs a shelter for victims of domestic violence in the film, just as Rachel does in the audio version.

“She’s a mother who is a hero to thousands of people but feels less comfortable as a mother to one,” Eisenberg said.

As for what listeners take away from “When You Finish Saving the World,” Eisenberg hopes it is empathy. “In stories that take place from multiple characters’ perspectives, where you see the same world through different eyes, I think there’s a macro message that the world is full of complicated people, not heroes and villains,” he said. “Everybody’s trying their best. If you try to understand their intentions, you might understand their behavior better.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

21

The most soothing man on TikTok

By JON CARAMANICA

S

ome of the most illuminating, purely pleasurable videos on TikTok this month have been Larry Scott’s awed observations of cooking, where the teen from Florida looks on as a meal is lovingly prepared al fresco: hand-rolled pasta dough, spices arranged by color, a knife assuredly having its way with a pepper or onion. The recipe videos have quick cuts, and with each new move, Scott’s eyes widen. His brow furrows just a bit while he tries to suss out what’s being made. He eases into a million-dollar smile when something catches his fancy.

“Oh,” he says, with a sparkle of realization. “Nice.”

That’s it. That’s the thing.

TikTok is a decentralized medium, but Scott’s gentle, perspective-slowing reaction videos have a way of imposing just a touch of reason to it, and untold joy. Using the duet — the TikTok function that allows a user to watch someone else’s video and record a response in real time — as his métier, Scott is an equal opportunity reactor. Dance videos, romantic montages, a call to arrest the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor, weirdo nonsense quasi-art clips, an a cappella group singing Alicia Keys, a rack of doughnuts getting slathered in glaze: Scott has nice’d them all.

Under the TikTok handle @larryakumpo, Scott posts several videos per week. They are maybe the most calming thing on the internet and, on some days, maybe the only calming thing on the internet. He radiates pure equanimity. No matter how eye-popping the video is, he’s never judgmental — curious, shocked, secondhand embarrassed, maybe a little worried, but he basically never deviates from the sweetness of wonder.

And then there’s the “nice” itself, which he rolls out with the slithering embrace of a purr. It’s not wry or ironically detached — it’s the sort of utterance that slips out almost imperceptibly when you’re overcome by what you’re seeing.

Sometimes he adds an “oh” or a “yeah” — it’s like psychological ASMR. This earnest observational device is a pushback to TikTok’s infinite scroll.

Scott is a watcher, trapped in the box just

Larry Scott’s TikTok videos are maybe the most calming thing on the internet and, on some days, maybe the only calming thing on the internet. like the rest of us. If we weren’t already obsessed with our phones, the last few months of isolation have made absorbing endless content the default national mode. We are passive in our liminal misery — waiting to be distracted, entertained, vaccinated, liberated.

Unlike television, which requires a metacommentary that’s pithy and interruptive — think “Beavis and Butt-Head” or “Mystery Science Theater 3000” — TikTok is already pithy and interruptive, which is why the most effective sort of metacommentary slows down its rhythm, encouraging reflection.

And Scott’s clips are, without fail, beatifically tranquil. Sometimes his hair is tied up, sometimes it falls in front of his face in a loose tangle. Often he’s reclined in bed or on a couch. His face fills up the majority of the screen, so there’s no ambiguity about how he’s feeling.

When he lets out a “whoa,” his eyes get big, and he leans back, as if a gust of wind has caught him off guard, nudging him gently. When his face broadens into a smile, it has a way of almost obliterating the video he’s reacting to with its guilelessness. When he’s frazzled, which is very, very rarely, one single worry line creases his forehead.

Even though the rhythm of his clips is familiar, Scott meets them with full presence. In an interview with Buzzfeed last week, he said he doesn’t pre-watch the videos he duets with, so as to preserve the integrity of his reaction.

In an ecosystem as ruthless as TikTok, with creators jockeying for likes, followers, clout and whatever monetary privileges follow those things, Scott’s videos are solely about encouragement, a dollop of pure love. (The only time he’s said “not nice” was to a freestyle by the rapper Smokepurpp that went viral for its awkwardness.)

Scott started posting videos to the app last summer — videos about heartbreak, Frank Ocean, whether he looks like Bronny James. (He doesn’t.) His observational duets began in March, and the catchphrases took hold in June, not long after he graduated from high school. Now he’s got 1.4 million followers, almost all of which he acquired this month, as his wholesome nurturing has rapidly coursed through TikTok. As happens often in the erratic and limitless world of social media, Scott’s ascent is accelerating rapidly. He’s beginning to generate his own meta-content — other users riff on his “nice,” and

in one post, he talks about people alerting him to copycats who lack his “natural flow.”

Still, how much wonder can one young man express? Last week he appeared in a video with the Pump Bros, a Hans & Franz of social media who took Scott and a friend for a workout session.

After watching Scott work through some triceps kickbacks, one of them, Will Savery, turns to the camera and declares, “The ‘oh nice’ guy is getting swole.” Elsewhere in the video, Savery runs through barbell curls while Scott looks on and exclaims: “Oh, nice. Yeah. Nice.”

There is, here, just the tiniest tiny bit of sourness, a light curdling. The sentience that comes when a thing you’ve been doing unconsciously, or at least without much scrutiny, suddenly becomes a catchphrase, a meme, a thing.

An albatross you’ll carry for a week or a month or maybe a lifetime.

In order for the “nice” to work, it has to be moving at a different speed from everything else. It has to be the thing that reorients your sense of time. In its steadfast but charming resistance, it’s an encouragement that maybe you, too, should slow down. Wonder is all around you. Take it in. Nice.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Japan confirms first cases of COVID-19 in pets as two dogs test positive

T

wo pet dogs belonging to two coronavirus patients have tested positive for the coronavirus, a pet insurance company said Monday, marking the first cases in which infection of a pet has been reported in Japan.

The two dogs have not shown any symptoms and one has already shown negative results in more recent tests, Anicom Holdings Inc. said.

While COVID-19 cases have been confirmed among pet cats in a number of countries including the United States, Belgium and France, fewer cases have been reported involving dogs overseas, according to the company.

The Anicom group launched a new service in April allowing coronavirus patients to entrust their

pets to the care of its employees for free while the owners are in the hospital or isolation.

A total of 42 pets — 29 dogs, 12 cats and one rabbit — have been taken care of under the Stay Anicom program.

The company said the two dogs were entrusted to it in late July and it has continued to look after them in isolation after they tested positive. No employees who had contact with the dogs or other animals have developed health problems.

Overseas, most of the pets found infected reportedly showed mild symptoms and they are believed to have contracted the virus from humans.

In China, media reports have said some owners abandoned their pet dogs and cats apparently be-

lieving pets can transmit the virus to humans.

However, a Japanese Environment Ministry official said there has been “no evidence identifying pet animals as the source of infection” among COVID-19 cases that have been reported.

“Pet owners need to be careful so as not to catch the virus while avoiding excessive contact with their pets” to protect the animals, the official added.

Anicom said it is still premature to determine whether the two dogs have been truly infected with the virus as their owners’ virus might have temporarily entered their mouths to trigger positive results in PCR tests. Antibody test results will be necessary to make a definite diagnosis, according to the company.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

23

3 Great mysteries about life on Mars

By BECKY FERREIRA

M

ars is the most explored planet in the solar system other than Earth.

With all of our robotic visitors there, we’ve discovered that it is a world far too dry, cold and irradiated to support the scheming humanoids or tentacled invaders once imagined by science fiction.

But our trips to Mars have opened a window into the deep past of the red planet, when conditions were far more conducive to life.

This summer, NASA will launch its latest rover, Perseverance, on a seventh-month journey to Mars. Like its predecessor, Curiosity, Perseverance will touch down in the remains of an ancient Martian lake bed.

What it finds there — along with missions launched by China and the United Arab Emirates — could help us Earthlings understand what Mars was like as a young planet some 4 billion years ago and whether life ever blossomed on its surface.

How habitable was early Mars?

It’s a serene image: A river flowing into an expansive lake that fills a crater basin.

Waves lapping at the shoreline; sediment piling into a delta. A lake bed caked with clay.

This is the type of aquatic environment that might support life, and it was once a familiar sight on Mars.

“The evidence for the lakes and rivers is incontrovertible,” said Ken Farley, project scientist on Perseverance and a geochemist at the California Institute of Technology.

Although Mars was once a wet planet, there is substantial debate about the origins, extent and life span of its long-lost bodies of water.

For instance, early Mars might have been warmed by the gassy belches of active volcanoes, which thickened its atmosphere and caused Martian permafrost to melt. Cataclysmic asteroid impacts might have also unleashed 900-foot mega-tsunamis that flooded the planet’s terrain. There’s even disputed evidence that an ocean once covered its northern lowlands.

“Was it weird, short, transient events, or was there an ocean?” Farley said. “I would say there’s no consensus. There’s a lot of ideas out there, and we really need a

lot more data to sort it out.”

One major question concerns the longevity of Mars’ liquid water. Nobody knows how much time is required for life to emerge on a planet, including on Earth. But the odds of life forming get better the longer that stable bodies of water persist.

During Curiosity’s eight-year journey across Gale Crater, an ancient lake bed, the rover discovered sediments that suggest water was present for at least a few million years. Curiosity also detected organic compounds, key ingredients for life as we know it.

“What we’ve learned from Curiosity suggests that Mars was habitable,” said Dawn Sumner, a planetary geologist at the University of California, Davis, and a member of the Curiosity science team.

Of course, “habitable” does not nec-

essarily mean “inhabited.” The surface of Mars is exposed to damaging solar and cosmic radiation, which could have reduced the odds of complex, multicellular life ever forming.

“If life did exist on Mars, there would be a strong evolutionary force toward being resistant to radiation,” Sumner said.

Why did Mars become less habitable?

The bygone oases of Mars are now mirages of a distant past, and modern Mars is a dried-up husk. Earth, in contrast, has been habitable to microbes for most of its life span and has positively burst at the seams with biodiversity for eons. Why did these sibling worlds experience such different outcomes?

As baby planets, Mars and Earth were each swaddled in two protective blankets: a relatively thick atmosphere and a strong magnetic field. Earth has held on to both

comforts. Mars has neither.

Mars mysteriously lost its magnetic mojo billions of years ago. With no magnetic sheath to protect it from solar wind, the Martian atmosphere was stripped away over time, though it still maintains a thin shell of its past skies.

These changes have left Mars relatively inert for billions of years, while Earth reinvents itself through tectonic activity, atmospheric shifts and the ingenuity of life.

Could Mars host life now?

Robot explorers on Mars have turned up countless insights about the red planet, but they have never found clear-cut signs of creatures currently residing there. Life, at least as we know it on Earth, simply does not seem probable on the Martian surface.

“If there’s any life on Mars now, it needs at least some liquid water,” Sumner said. “The surface of Mars now is very dry.

Just incredibly dry. If there’s life on Mars now, it would be in the deep subsurface.”

There’s some evidence that liquid water is locked away in subterranean reservoirs, so perhaps there are sunless ecosystems lurking there. If these habitats exist, they are beyond the direct reach of our rovers and landers.

Recent detections of methane and other gases in what’s left of Mars’ atmosphere are “a tantalizing potential signature,” Farley said, bolstering speculation about subterranean Martians. Many microbes on Earth produce methane, so it is possible that whiffs of the gas on Mars could be traced to alien life forms deep underground.

The discovery of life on Mars, either in the form of ancient fossils or subterranean reservoirs, would be one of the most momentous breakthroughs in human history.

At last, we would have another example of a living planet, even if it only flourished in the past, implying that, at the very least, life can strike twice in the universe.

But even if we never find Martians, “Mars is a place we can go to answer some of the questions about life on Earth,” Sumner said. The red planet remains an eerie time capsule of the era when life first sprouted on our own world and the direction it could have gone had all the factors that made our world possible not turned out just the right way.

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Tuesday, August 4, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Why one team named the Indians won’t be changing its name

By DAVID WALDSTEIN

M

any sports teams using names and mascots invoking Native Americans do so over the longstanding and strenuous objections of people who say it is racist. Some teams, after years of stubborn refusal, have recently relented, like the Washington Football Team of the NFL, which abandoned its nickname earlier this month.

Then there are the Spokane Indians.

The minor league baseball team in Washington state has been collaborating with the Spokane Tribe of Indians in what it hopes is a respectful manner of honoring the local Indigenous population.

Can that be done? Some say it is not possible, but the Spokane Indians may be as close to an understanding as any team has come.

“They came and listened to the elders, and that is what really developed the relationship over time,” said Carol Evans, the chairwoman of the Spokane Tribal Council, “and it has grown like a family partnership unit, where we have a lot of respect for one another.”

But Suzan Shown Harjo, an advocate for Native American rights who has led the fight against Indigenous team names and mascots in sports for decades, said no matter the good intent, the name should still be changed.

“There is no such thing as respectable treatment of any mascot or team name that has a native theme in sports,” she said. “There is just no such thing, no matter how you package it.”

The Cleveland Indians of Major League Baseball said they were having discussions about the “best path forward” regarding their name.

The Spokane Indians have had such talks, too, even volunteering to abandon the name 14 years ago but eventually deciding to keep it with the support of tribal leadership.

The Spokane Indians were founded in 1903 and are now a Class A affiliate of the Texas Rangers (an awkward and painful historical connection because the original Texas Rangers, a law enforcement division, were known to hunt down Native Americans). Decades ago, the Spokane team logo featured a grotesque caricature of a Native person. But there are no longer any such depictions associated with the team.

Since 2006, the team has actively engaged with the Spokane Tribe, many of whom live on a reservation about 40 miles from the city of Spokane. Meetings are held with government leaders at least once a year, and the team has made several changes and innovations to their uniform design, stadium exhibits and cultural outreach programs, based on recommendations from the Spokane leaders.

The current uniform has Sp’q’n’i’ emblazoned on the front. It is the spelling in Salish, the local Native American language, for Spokane, which is pronounced Spo-kaNEE, according to Evans. One of the jerseys hangs at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and is said to be the first example of Native American language on a

The word “Spokane” is written in the Salish language on Spokane Indian team jerseys. professional baseball uniform.

The team adopted a mascot dressed as a trout, a traditional food source of the Spokane people, in part to raise awareness for redband trout conservation in the area. The logo includes a feather inspired by the art of a member of the Spokane community, and one version has Salish words on it. Some signs in the stadium, like for the team store, the concession stand and the restrooms, are in English and Salish.

All of it was done in consultation with the Spokane people, said Evans and Otto Klein, a senior vice president and part owner of the team.

“In the early conversations, we had everything on the table, including a name change,” Klein said. “The partnership you see today is where it ended up, and we are very proud of it from our side.”

Klein said the team had joined in an effort to restock local rivers with salmon, the Spokane Tribe’s historical food source until the construction of dams in the 20th century cut off the supply.

With the Spokane team, the straightforward narratives that often apply to teams with Native nicknames are upended by seeming paradoxes and nuance. While the team has endeavored to erase all Native American imagery, one image still exists on a scoreboard, but it is an advertisement for the Spokane Tribe of Indians, and

it depicts a traditional member of the Spokane nation in headdress.

On the reservation, the nickname of the public Wellpinit High School is Redskins, arguably the most offensive nickname used by sports teams. (Evans hopes the younger generations will one day change the name, which has often gotten a shrug from members of the community.)

Klein said the team, which is not playing this year after the minor league season was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, also helps finance charitable efforts on the reservation, including a fund for children, and they are helping to rebuild the local baseball field.

But Harjo said donations from teams to local Native groups could be used to induce the endorsement of local groups. She pointed to contributions made by Florida State University to the Seminole people (Florida State’s teams are known as the Seminoles).

“It always makes me sad to hear that Native people, especially tribal leaders, have been sold a bill of goods when it comes to stereotypes,” she said. “There really is no such thing as a good stereotype.”

Stephanie Fryberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, is a member of the Tulalip Nation in Eastern Washington, a group that is part of the Coastal Salish people. Her research has shown that an overwhelming majority of Native Americans who are engaged in cultural practices are offended by Native sports teams names and logos.

She said that as a scientist, she would need more data to fully evaluate the Spokane situation — including surveys of people’s feelings and opinions — but on the surface, she said there appears to be a respectful approach by the team.

“This seems to be a different story,” Fryberg said, contrasting the Spokane situation with many other more contentious team names and mascots. “I would still like to change the name, but I think there is a place for specific Native names. The goal isn’t to get rid of them completely, but to use them appropriately. You can’t use a mascot appropriately.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

27

‘Everyone can do better’: Baseball searches for blame amid outbreaks

By JAMES WAGNER

W

ith the Major League Baseball season becoming more precarious seemingly by the day amid a slow but steady stream of new coronavirus cases among the teams, the league’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, issued something of a rallying cry.

“We are playing,” Manfred told ESPN on Saturday.

“The players need to be better, but I am not a quitter in general and there is no reason to quit now. We have had to be fluid, but it is manageable.”

Those words bothered some players in the sport and some health experts outside it. Two outbreaks — 20 cases among the Miami Marlins and six among the St. Louis Cardinals, as of Sunday afternoon — less than two weeks into the season have wreaked havoc on the schedules of eight teams and raised questions about MLB’s protocols and the role of the players’ individual responsibilities in stopping the virus.

In saying the games would go on, Manfred thrust the onus on the players.

“I don’t know Rob’s situation, and I don’t want to put my foot in my mouth on that one,” Chicago Cubs pitcher Jon Lester told reporters Saturday. “But I do know we — not only the players, but families — are making sacrifices day in and day out. I don’t want to put my foot in my mouth. I guess I’ll stop there.”

MLB’s 113-page operating manual for the 2020 season, which was crafted with input from the players’ union, has details on everything from how a team should travel to proper spacing in the dugout to what to do if a player tests positive. But it does not explicitly state what should happen after an outbreak or what the threshold is for postponing games.

Kathleen Bachynski, an assistant professor of public health at Muhlenberg College, took issue with Manfred’s comments, writing on Twitter that the virus thrives “when people insist on sticking with a poor plan to the bitter end.”

Bachynski said in a phone interview that her biggest concerns were about the plan itself. She said she was shocked when she read that the MLB manual did not detail steps for the league and players to follow after an outbreak.

MLB stopped the Cardinals, who registered their first two positive cases Friday, from playing the Milwaukee Brewers, and put the brakes on the Philadelphia Phillies, who have not had a player test positive, for seven days because of their exposure to the Marlins.

But on July 26, the fourth day of the season, the Marlins played the Phillies despite knowing they had four players test positive, a decision that has been questioned by some non-Marlins players and health experts.

“It doesn’t matter how quick the testing turnaround time is if you’re not taking appropriate actions based on the results of those tests,” Bachynski said.

Since their series against the Marlins a week ago, the Phillies have had three staff members test positive. But MLB said Saturday that it appeared that two of those tests were false positives, and “it is unclear if the third individual contracted COVID-19 from Marlins players and staff based on the timing of the positive test.” The Phillies were set to re-

Dodgers players wore masks on the field after the final out of a game against the Diamondbacks on Saturday. sume play Monday against the New York Yankees.

“The protocols are a series of little things that people need to do,” Manfred told The Associated Press on Saturday. “We’ve had some problems. In order to be better, it’s another series of little things. I think it’s peer pressure. I think it’s players taking personal responsibility.”

He said he also had a “constructive conversation” with the players’ union chief, Tony Clark, on Friday.

Several players have decided to opt out of the season after seeing the virus infiltrate team rosters. Yoenis Cespedes of the New York Mets on Sunday became the fourth player to opt out since the Marlins’ outbreak, joining more than a dozen who had made the decision before opening day.

After news of the Marlins’ outbreak surfaced, David Price, the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher who opted out of the season before it began, tweeted: “Part of the reason I’m at home right now is because players health wasn’t being put first. I can see that hasn’t changed.”

Among those who are still playing, there is some acknowledgment that both protocols and personal behavior can improve.

“Everyone can do better. This is a learning process,” Yankees outfielder Giancarlo Stanton said Sunday. “We learn things every day from how to do better with this on both sides. Both sides can be better. And by the time the season is over, there can still be improvements of what we could’ve done better.”

From the start, MLB and the players’ union recognized the season’s policies would evolve. The manual’s opening

page states that it does not address every aspect of the season’s operations and that additional guidance may come throughout the year. Last week, MLB informed teams of tightened regulations, including designating a compliance officer for each club. More changes could be coming.

The Marlins were found to have been lax in following protocols: At least some of them did not strictly adhere to all of the rules. But players on many teams have been spotted high-fiving or spitting or getting too close too often in the dugout — all in violation of the manual.

While high-fives or fist bumps are lower-risk activities and health experts believe players and staff members are more likely to be infected away from the stadium, Bachynski said she worried that those smaller lapses suggested a larger culture of ignoring the rules even away from the field.

“If your leadership is showing how important it is and you’ve got the front office, like we have here, taking it very seriously, then that’ll trickle down to the players taking it seriously,” said Yankees pitcher James Paxton, who sits on the players’ union executive subcommittee.

Mike Zunino, a catcher for the Tampa Bay Rays who has two young children, said he thought often about not continuing to play this season after the Marlins’ and Cardinals’ outbreaks.

“I’d be lying if I told you it didn’t cross your mind every day when you see positive tests come out,” he said, adding later: “I have a lot of trust in the team here, the guys, we’re doing stuff the right way. It’s a real conversation I have every day just to see how the dynamic of the league is going.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Britain tried to bring fans back to indoor sports. That lasted a day.

By KAREN CROUSE The 2020 world snooker championship, which began Friday, had a familiar feel.

The stage of the intimate Crucible Theatre, the event’s home for more than 40 years, was bathed in klieg lights, the green cloth of the snooker tables and the red carpeting so brightly illuminated it was like stepping inside a Skittles bag. Judd Trump was back to defend his title, and for the first time in months, there were fans in the seats.

On opening night, the event had a bigger audience than the one in the theater. Originally scheduled for April but delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, it had been designated by the British government as the first indoor test event for the phased return of live crowds. That made the championship, a staple of the British sports scene and a riveting television miniseries with a global audience of more than 300 million, suddenly of great interest to leagues and championship organizers in dozens of other sports, especially those held indoors, all of them invested economically and emotionally in the return of spectators.

How well the 17-day championship fared with a reduced fan presence, they knew, might set the stage for similar experiments in other sports in other places, like basketball and hockey in Europe and netball and badminton in Asia.

The experiment lasted one day, undone by outside forces, renewed virus fears and governmental second thoughts.

“You can feel that something is not quite right,” Trump said.

Ticket-holding fans, who were not subjected to temperature checks or testing before entering the theater, emerged from Friday’s three sessions and spoke of the subdued atmosphere, as if their church had turned into a funeral parlor.

There had been only 137 spectators at the first night session, including a few family members and friends of Trump’s who watched him close out his first-round match.

To make the test event happen, the World Snooker Tour had walled off its event as well as it could. It instituted regular coronavirus testing for players, their

Social distancing and small crowds were the order of the day when the world snooker championship opened on Friday. A day later, the fans were gone. support staff, contractors and television personnel, and competitors were urged to maintain proper social distancing measures and to self-isolate as much as possible.

Hand sanitizer was as ubiquitous as cue chalk, and the spectators holding tickets for each session — limited to 300, about a third of the Crucible Theatre’s capacity — were required to provide contact tracing information and to wear face coverings until they were in their seats. Some of the restrictions defied logic. There were no concession stands, the better to limit interactions between strangers, but one fan in the evening match, in desperate need of a pick-me-up, left the arena briefly and slipped into a convenience store around the corner for a coffee that he brought back to his seat.

The one factor the tour could not control, however, was the behavior of those well outside the theater. This led to the surreal juxtaposition Friday of the prime minister of Britain, Boris Johnson, announcing a policy U-turn and the end of the pilot program for live sports during

a news conference at the same moment that, roughly 180 miles away, spectators were watching Trump and Tom Ford play the first nine frames of their match.

Citing concerns about a second coronavirus outbreak and rising infection numbers, Johnson announced that he was ordering a halt to the programs the government had approved for select snooker, horse racing and cricket events.

“We can’t just ignore this evidence,” Johnson said. The restrictions will remain in place for at least two weeks, leaving a glimmer of hope for snooker fans that they might still get to see their favorite players in person before the championship ends.

The government’s policy shift came a day after a snooker player with a high profile, five-time world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan, had referred to the players as “lab rats” in an interview. O’Sullivan, who opened play Sunday, made his comments in a video teleconference with reporters, but many suspected his words were directed at government officials.

“He does carry a huge amount of influence in the U.K.,” said Shaun Murphy,

the 2005 world champion. “When he speaks, people listen.”

Even when the Crucible is packed and the fans in the first row are close enough to nearly reach out and touch the players, the atmosphere at snooker — a billiards game played on a 6-foot-by-12-foot table and scored by players’ pocketing 21 colored balls to earn points — can have the solemnity of a church service.

Spectators clap for well-executed shots, but it can grow so quiet at tense moments that the players can hear a commentator’s voice leaking from a front-row fan’s earpiece. Fans don’t often open their mouths unless it’s to cough, which in normal times can make spectators feel, rather bizarrely, as if they were sitting in a doctor’s office and a snooker match broke out.

When O’Sullivan spoke to reporters last week, he recounted the experience of riding in an elevator with someone who started coughing. It reminded him, he said, of the risk every player is taking to compete. His mother, Maria, has pneumonia, O’Sullivan said, and he worries about infecting her.

“I defy anybody, if they have been keeping their distance from people for four months, to say, ‘Oh, right, now you’ve got to go into a room full of people,’ unless you have got a death wish, and some people have in many ways, and they just don’t care,” O’Sullivan said.

And if the general public just don’t care, said Django Fung, Trump’s manager, it doesn’t matter how many precautions sports leagues take. “You need the people of the country to be sensible to keep the numbers down,” he said.

By the time Fung spoke Saturday, the government’s edict had dispersed the small snooker crowd like red balls on a poor opening break.

Hours earlier, Chris Ellis, a security guard at the Crucible, had been stationed outside the theater’s entrance when a fan with a ticket approached him. The man explained that he had traveled from Ireland and had tickets for a week of sessions. How could he get in? he asked.

It was left to Ellis to tell him that he couldn’t. It was a safety shot he took no joy in executing.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, August 4, 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

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

Going along with what everyone wants or expects of you isn’t going to suit you now. You have your own thoughts and ideas and no one is going to get to influence you no matter how hard they try. Even when dealing with people with powerful personalities, you will not be pushed further than you intend to go.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Your persistence and determination will surprise your friends. Now you’ve decided what you want to do, you won’t let anything stand in your way. A strong sense of purpose will keep you focused on your goal. Colleagues admire your determination to get ahead. Exercising your independence feels empowering.

Your hard work will pay off.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Finding faults with your partner’s friends or family will cause tension in many relationships. Your words will be passed on to others.

Misunderstandings at home could lead to a change of plans you won’t be happy about.

To save yourself upset and stress, think before you speak. It’s as simple as that.

Financial matters need attention. A joint bill has gone overlooked. You thought your partner had taken care of this; they thought you had cleared it. Disagreements over money are getting you down. Talking to a money manager will be helpful. A friend has bizarre ideas.

Leave them to pursue unconventional paths without you.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

It is time to get organised. Go through paperwork and throw away correspondence you no longer need. File the rest. If everyday chores are getting on top of you delegate work within the family. Reduce household tasks.

Sharing routine chores with workmates will make the job go faster and the work more enjoyable.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Someone you meet online fascinates you.

Conversations between you are intriguing and you are always left wanting to discover more. Once you meet in person, you could get involved in many interesting things together. Until then, it’s unlikely you will run out of things to talk about. You have met a kindred spirit.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Recent changes have turned your world upside down. You feel strangely powerless. You’ve been constantly challenged by changing events and difficult people. It is time to assume control. Refuse to let anyone tell you what you should be doing. Start making your own decisions. If you’re recovering from an illness, every day you will get a little stronger.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

You’re doing too much for people who take your kind nature for granted. The next time someone demands a favour from you, turn them down. You don’t even have to give a reason for doing so. Joining an online chat platform will introduce you to people who share your interests. Through this you will make new friends.

Things aren’t happening fast enough for you.

You’re tired of feeling as if your life is on hold.

Indulge yourself by spending time visualising the future you want for yourself. If you can imagine it, it may come about. If a loving relationship has lost its sparkle, suggest working on a creative project together. It could be surprisingly amusing.

You’re getting bogged down with annoying details. Stop working so hard. You’re taking everything too seriously and you have forgotten how to relax. You’ve been spending too much time alone and you need some company. Show an interest in what people around you are doing and the more rewarding your relationships will be.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

You’re determined to finish a job you’re working on and this will keep you behind the scenes. Someone will wonder whether you’re trying to avoid them. What they don’t realise is you’re working hard to avoid letting people down. Once you’ve caught up on your work, you will be happy to keep them company.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

You are clear about what you want and because of this, your expectations are likely to be met. Friends and family can see how important it is that you reach a self-set target. With you being more assertive about following your own desires, there’s a strong likelihood you will achieve.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

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Ziggy

32

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star