Wednesday Aug 5, 2020

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

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How to Handle Anxiety Over Back-to-School Decisions

Star

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NPP Supporters Apply for Bench Seats

Former Gov’t Officials, Including Ex-Justice Secretary, and Family Members of Politicians Appear in Long List of Candidates to Become Judges P4

Tragedy in Lebanon: Powerful Explosion Rocks Beirut, Death P14 Toll Keeps Rising

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

Novello: Inoculations in US and Puerto Rico Dropped 50% Since Pandemic Began P3

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

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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.

Novello: Students should be vaccinated amid COVID-19 as ‘health is a human right’

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Ex-US surgeon general unites with teachers to call for parents to vaccinate children as inoculations in the US and Puerto Rico have dropped 50% since the pandemic began

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accinating your children is an act of love.”

Those are the words that teachers, school directors, and university professors said repeatedly to ex-U.S. Surgeon General Antonia Novello and the press during a Zoom videoconference that the VOCES Immunity and Health Promotion Coalition hosted on Tuesday to call for parents to keep their children’s vaccines up to date amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertainty of going back to on-site classes in mid-September.

Novello, who is also a VOCES spokeswoman, told The Star that the reason the coalition is using educators to spread awareness amid the global pandemic is an observed 50 percent reduction in vaccinations in the U.S. and Puerto Rico since the pandemic began in March. Likewise, she said teachers are saying that vaccinating is an “act of love” as it is the only way to protect children from infections that are unknown to new generations of parents in Puerto Rico.

“Vaccines are made to keep us safe from many infections, and many young parents have not seen these diseases, and they are not scared of what they can’t see. How many have seen a case of measles? How many have seen a case of whooping cough (pertussis)? Who has seen a case of pneumoconiosis?

‘If I don’t see it, I won’t have it, but I can get infected with COVID-19,’ that’s what they think,” Novello said. “Children’s health is in their parents’ hands; if they love their children, if they want to protect them, health is a [human] right and vaccination is another right the world provides for children to be healthy.”

The physician said the other reason that the coalition has collaborated with teachers was that both are obliged to check on students’ vaccine status in both public and private education systems; in doing so, they develop a connection that often substitutes for parents’ awareness.

Likewise, she also considers teachers and other school officials to be an extension of VOCES as they are capable of spreading awareness about vaccination to all children.

“This will be crucial at the moment we start school again; if the child comes from a family that gets along during the pandemic, they are more likely to be vaccinated than others who live with 71 aunts, where they witness fights, confront abuse from their parents, where the child’s survival [which involves having him or her vaccinated] is not prioritized,” the former surgeon general said. “That is why we used teachers, who are in charge of ensuring that these children are vaccinated, to deliver that call to action; if not, we will waste even more time than before. They’ll be the voices of VOCES, as they are

a part of my external group that spreads the message of the importance of vaccinating every child.”

When The Star asked if it was viable for students to start on-site classes on Sept. 15 as Puerto Rico has experienced spikes in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are occurring at an alarming rate, Novello said that although the U.S. Department of Education has advocated opening up schools to promote socialization and create safe spaces for students, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a set of guidelines for reopening schools while keeping infection rates low, for COVID-19, it would mean nothing.

“Even if we had a COVID-19 vaccine available, what would happen if we do not prevent other infections for which vaccines are available as a pre-emptive measure? We have to begin with the most important detail, that infection rates inside schools remain low, which would be less than 5 percent. In Puerto Rico, according to the Medical Task Force, the positivity rate for COVID-19 is at 10.2 percent,” she said. “As there is a great increase in positive cases, schools should only open up virtually, because, by attending on-site classes, children could infect teachers, children could infect each other, and, once they get back home, they could spread the disease to their parents and grandparents.”

The Star also asked Novello for her insight as 26 pharmaceutical corporations have released updates on vaccine trials for the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and are estimating availability by December 2020. The public health expert said some six to 12 corporations are in a second trial as some are waiting for results from around 30,000 subjects to develop antibodies against the infection. If the subjects develop enough antibodies, the companies will start developing vaccines to build a worldwide supply; however, this is a lengthy process as the government is expected to invest in in-depth research and the federal Food and Drug Administration must determine a vaccine’s efficacy and safety in order to start manufacturing, consumer education, distribution, and cost determinations.

“Even if the vaccine is proved to work in December, we have to wait for all these other phases. We could have access to vaccines around January or February 2021,” she said. “Vaccines from Pfizer and Astra Zeneca have shown positive results, and another one called Moderna is still in the second phase as they have vaccinated around 30,000 people in the United States since July 27; both vaccines from Moderna and Astra Zeneca are ahead in their experimentation phase.”

However, when The Star asked if there was a COVID-19 vaccine available at the moment, how they would handle naysayers (commonly known as “anti-vaxxers”) as misinformation on social media platforms has already developed resistance against vaccination, Novello said she is convinced it is difficult to change some people’s opinions. But, she said, as long as 90-95 percent of the population receive their vaccines, a herd immunity develops, which is enough to keep any infection controlled. She added that VOCES is having discussions with experts from different fields to raise awareness on vaccination.

“People think getting vaccinated is just to be able to go to school; no, vaccines are made to live a disease-free life that we haven’t seen in years,” Novello said. “I can’t convince anyone who’s blind to the truth.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

NPP supporters among candidates for judgeships in document released by La Fortaleza

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

A

list from the Office of Judicial Appointments released on Tuesday showed that various New Progressive Party (NPP) supporters, including former and current agency secretaries and family members of NPP politicians, requested to become judges back in February.

At an interview with WAPA Televisión, Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced said that it is mandatory to submit the aforementioned list to the public as it lets people comment on issues involving any of the applicants. She added that the applicants have not been nominated.

“It’s very important for people to understand that the list released has candidates from all political parties for every position,” the governor said. “It’s mandated by the law to release the list so any person who wants to comment

about any of the candidates should do so at the Office of Judicial Appointments.

It doesn’t mean that every candidate [on the list] will end up appointed.”

One of the candidates that appeared on the list was former Justice Secretary Wandymar Burgos Vargas, who resigned after pulling back reports from the Special Independent Prosecutor Panel (PFEI by its Spanish initials) that pointed at the governor for alleged obstruction of justice in the supply mismanagement case involving the Family Socioeconomic Development Administration (ADSEF by its Spanish acronym) in Ponce.

Meanwhile, another candidate on the list is former Family Secretary Glorimar Andujar Matos, who was dismissed from her position on Jan. 19 for not being aware of the status of warehouses that supplied items for the victims of the earthquakes in the southwestern part of the island, although a leaked PFEI report said the governor fired her for reporting former ADSEF administrator

Surima Quiñones, who helped NPP Sen. Evelyn Vázquez Nieves hand out supplies from the agency.

“I want the people to rest assured that I, as a lawyer, as a prosecutor, as [former] Justice secretary, as [former] women’s advocate, I will look for the best resources,” the governor said. “I want the judicial branch and the government, when it comes to prosecutors, to have the most competent professionals.

It makes it difficult because I am the one who has to do the analysis.”

According to the document, Corrections and Rehabilitation Secretary Eduardo Rivera Juanatey also requested a position in the San Juan Superior Court.

Ana Mateu Meléndez, meanwhile, an adviser at La Fortaleza and daughter of Ponce Mayor María “Mayita” Meléndez, appeared as a candidate for a position in the Aguadilla Superior Court, while Roger Iglesias Sepúlveda, son of former NPP Sen. Roger Iglesias, is a candidate for the Trujillo Alto Superior Court.

PREPA union calls for resignation of governing board

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

Á

ngel Figueroa Jaramillo, president of the Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union (UTIER by its Spanish acronym), the principal union representing Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) workers, asked Tuesday for the resignation of Ralph Kreil, chairman of the PREPA governing board, and of all the other members appointed by the Puerto Rico government, for

endorsing all the decisions and actions taken by outgoing PREPA chief José Ortiz.

Ortiz resigned from his post effective today following blackouts in various parts of the island before, during and after last week’s passage of Tropical Storm Isaias.

“The chairman of the Governing Board, Ralph Kreil had the gall to tell the people of Puerto Rico that he is grateful and satisfied with the work that José Ortiz did, but what job is he talking about?” Figueroa Jaramillo said in a written statement. “Giving million-dollar contracts to private companies knowing that there were cheaper options? Giving a contract of $1.5 billion to Luma to come to manage $18 billion in federal funds and raise the rate on the people? Blatantly lying to the people of Puerto Rico? Is the president of the Governing Board proud of that work? Well, if so, you also have to resign. PREPA needs a transformation, but by maintaining it and those who endorsed José Ortiz’s decisions, it cannot be achieved.”

Figueroa Jaramillo insisted that the transformation needed at PREPA must start with those who are directing it.

“Removing José Ortiz, but leaving Ralph Kreil and all the other members appointed by the government does nothing because the engineer Kreil and the Governing Board endorsed all the decisions that José Ortiz made,” the union leader said.

Figueroa Jaramillo contended that “[t]he only member who was always on the side of the people is Tomás Torres Placa, consumer representative on the Board.”

“He is the only one who deserves to stay; the others

have to resign,” he said. “We must transform PREPA’s governance model, something UTIER has repeated on countless occasions. We cannot let them continue to command PREPA because you know that José Ortiz and Ralph Kreil are the same. They are the same who believe in giving million-dollar contracts, who believe in the privatization of PREPA, who believe in rate increases for the people. We cannot let them continue to be in command of the Electric Power Authority.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

5

Oversight board shows how Puerto Rico could position itself to attract pharma manufacturers

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico on Tuesday presented a report on opportunities for Puerto Rico to take advantage of the current public debate in the U.S. Congress on legislation that seeks to bring pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing back to the United States from Asia as concerns regarding supply chain security grow.

The report, prepared by Boston Consulting Group and completed over four weeks, represents a concise and focused assessment of how Puerto Rico can best position itself to attract biopharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing companies in the face of COVID-19 and potential federal legislative action.

While oversight board member José Ramón González said he needed to hear more about what Puerto Rico can do to benefit itself and seek its inclusion in the legislation, Boston Consulting Group spokesman Daniel Acosta noted that the U.S. territory needs to make strides on its infrastructure, referring to energy, water and highway services.

González asked that the oversight board design a strategy seeking to attract manufacturing to Puerto Rico, to which the board agreed. According to a statement by the oversight board, Puerto Rico exported over $40 billion in biopharma products in 2019, including over $30 billion to the mainland U.S., more than twice the value of any foreign country or U.S. state. It exported about $3 billion in medical technology products.

“This is a unique potential opportunity for Puerto Rico,” said Carlos García, a member of the oversight board. “The current discussion around incentives to support U.S. manufacturing could provide the kind of economic development tool that has been missing in Puerto Rico for some time, particularly given the strong competitive advantages Puerto Rico offers investors.

Those include a strong existing manufacturing ecosystem and capacity that minimizes time and capital for product transfer;

specialized and cost-competitive labor with a strong pipeline of universities and labs; and a lower cost of manufacturing compared to U.S. states with established manufacturing hubs.”

In the current context, companies that are either medically necessary in the U.S., that have substantial supply chain risk they wish to manage, or that can easily adjust their supply chains should be the first priority. Like the makers of generic drugs, contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs), companies that manufacture drugs on a contract basis, also focus on cost and quality. CDMOs, therefore, benefit from the economically distressed zones legislation and could also take advantage of Puerto Rico’s manufacturing ecosystem.

The report notes that Puerto Rico is well positioned to compete with U.S. manufacturing locations in the Southeast and U.S. border states because of its experienced engineers, chemists, and biologists; its track record of reliability in manufacturing; and because of its existing, underutilized sites ready for businesses to use.

A proactive effort, however, needs to be made by both the government of Puerto Rico and the federal government to develop outreach strategies for companies with a higher likelihood of in-shoring in Puerto Rico. The report outlines how Puerto Rico is positioned compared to other potential in-shoring locations in the U.S.: labor and workforce, quality and reliability, infrastructure, operations risk, manufacturing ecosystem, manufacturing cost, tax climate, and ability to serve the U.S. market.

“Taking these realities into context, marketing Puerto Rico should focus on refining the misconceptions in the marketplace, emphasizing specific competencies in areas such as available talent and sites, and working to address persistent challenges such as infrastructure and permitting defined by the necessary structural reforms outlined in the certified Fiscal Plan,” Acosta said.

He stressed the need to highlight that Puerto Rico was declared an opportunity zone. On the federal side, the current

tax incentive proposals in Congress, which include credits for wage expenses and tax deductions for the decrease of the value of assets in economically distressed zones, could have great potential benefit to the U.S. broadly and Puerto Rico specifically, Acosta noted. Such credits are most attractive for cost-sensitive generics in small molecules and medical devices, areas in which Puerto Rico compares favorably to other economically distressed zones given its workforce and existing unused sites.

Legislation to support economically distressed zones could result in 1,000 to 3,000 new manufacturing jobs by 2026 and provide an additional $70 million to $220 million in annual tax revenue for Puerto Rico, the report estimates.

“We see this report as confirming what we have said,” said Omar Marrero, the head of the island’s Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority. “At the same time, we have said that we want to improve water, energy and roads. So we are in alignment.”

The oversight board also agreed to meet again in 15 days to discuss the strategy it will follow to ensure the prompt issuance of audited financial statements. The government has not issued audited financials for 2017, 2018 and 2019.

Another board member announces his exit After almost four years of service as a member of the oversight board, González announced Tuesday he has informed the White House that he will not be available to continue holding over in his current appointment beyond August 31, nor will he be available for renomination to a second term as board member.

“Being selected as a member of the oversight board has been a great honor and serving has been an exceptional experience and privilege,” said González, who was appointed to the oversight board on Aug. 31, 2016. “Working side by side with my fellow board members, who have been committed, despite all challenges, to fixing Puerto Rico’s fiscal deficiencies and restoring confidence among the people, businesses and capital markets, was an extraordinary opportunity to make a real difference and contribute to a better future for Puerto Rico, my home.”

Oversight board submits 2020 report to US gov’t with recommendations for exiting island’s bankruptcy

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico (FOMB) has submitted its 2020 report to President Donald Trump, the U.S. Congress and Puerto Rico’s Legislature with recommendations to help the U.S. territory exit bankruptcy.

“FOMB is committed to returning to the process of restructuring the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico’s debt as soon as reasonably possible. Exiting bankruptcy remains one of the most important near-term goals,” FOMB Executive Director Natalie Jaresko said.

“Further, FOMB will continue to push for reform and will ensure that government spending remains within Puerto Rico’s means.

Puerto Rico’s future depends on fiscal responsibility and sustainable economic growth.

“The Commonwealth 2020 Fiscal Plan lays out the critical fiscal and structural reforms needed to rebuild Puerto Rico’s economy, and it lays out the process to get the reforms done.”

The annual report discusses necessary reforms to meet the objectives of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, as well as the assistance provided by the oversight board. The report also encourages the federal government to support Puerto Rico in the following areas: * COVID-19: Extend federal COVID-19-related unemployment benefits and the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for small busi-

nesses. Provide additional Nutritional Assistance Program (NAP) funding to allow the Puerto Rico government to continue providing NAP benefits to the most vulnerable populations for another year while the island recovers from the economic distress of COVID-19.

Allow Puerto Rico to participate in the Pandemic-EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) program, so that Puerto Rico can better provide school meals. * Jones Act: Grant a temporary Jones Act waiver for shipment of liquefied natural gas within the U.S., allowing for the use of foreignflag vessels while American Jones Act-qualified carriers are built. * Medicaid: Legislate a long-term Medicaid program solution to mitigate the drastic reduction in federal funding for healthcare in Puerto Rico when the temporary extension expires and provide equitable treatment to residents of Puerto Rico in all Medicare programs. * Earned Income Tax Credit: Explore ways to extend a Federal Earned Income Tax Credit to residents of Puerto Rico to promote formal labor force participation, especially among low-to moderateincome workers. * Nutritional Assistance: Collaborate with the Puerto Rico government to institute a work/volunteer requirement for participants to receive the NAP, Puerto Rico’s largest welfare program.

Transition Puerto Rico into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to ensure equitable treatment in federal food

nutrition assistance. * Eligibility for housing assistance: Begin using the Department Health and Human Services Poverty Guidelines to set the income limits that determine who is eligible for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s housing assistance in Puerto Rico, as is done in most U.S. states. * Child Tax Credit: Extend the full federal Child Tax Credit to residents of Puerto Rico to provide the same treatment that is currently provided to families across the U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

Regarding social welfare programs, just this week U.S. District Court Judge William Young ruled that to deny Puerto Ricans access to Supplemental Security Income (SSI), SNAP and Medicare Part D Low-Income Subsidy (LIS) benefits solely due to their residency in Puerto Rico is unconstitutional.

“The Court enjoins the government from enforcing the unconstitutional provisions and implementing regulations of the SSI, SNAP, and LIS programs insofar as they exclude residents of Puerto Rico, against the plaintiffs and all similarly situated applicants residing in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico,” Judge Young said. “The Court grants the Government’s request for a 60-day administrative stay of the injunction, except as to the nine named plaintiffs in the case.”

The ruling was issued Monday in the Peña Martínez et al. v Azar case, in which nine plaintiffs had sued to gain access to the programs.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Animal welfare groups urge governor to sign rescue bill

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he San Francisco de Asís Animal Sanctuary Inc. on Tuesday urged the signing of Senate Bill 1621, which would allow veterinarians from the United States and Canada to offer their services temporarily and free of charge in community benefit events such as the Spayathon for Puerto Rico.

The bill, authored by Sen. Miguel Romero, has been under consideration

by Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced since July 9.

As provided in the Puerto Rico Constitution, once the ordinary legislative session ends, the governor has 30 days to sign the bills that are sent to her for consideration. That 30-day period ends Friday.

“If it becomes law, this measure will allow animal welfare organizations to receive the help we need to continue

fighting against the overpopulation of animals in Puerto Rico and to prevent so many homeless dogs and cats from suffering and dying on the streets,” said Stella Ramírez, vice president of the San Francisco de Asís Animal Sanctuary.

“For this reason, we invite the governor to be a heroine of animal welfare and to sign Senate Bill 1621 into law,” she added. “On June 11, after a meeting with rescuers, she expressed full support for Spayathon for Puerto Rico; we trust

that she will honor those words by stamping her signature on the legislative bill.”

Since 2018, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) has conducted six rounds of the Spayathon for Puerto Rico, a free spaying and neutering initiative involving 52,524 dogs and cats.

“Spayathon has been designed as a series of temporary clinics: just one week, three times a year,” Ramírez said.

“In addition to being operated on, the strays are vaccinated against rabies.

More than 60 percent of the animals that come to these clinics have never received veterinary services. And it’s not because the guardians don’t love those pets. It is simply because they did not have the economic access or the resources to go to a veterinary clinic.”

According to HSUS data, 63.9 percent of the animals seen in the six rounds of Spayathon had never visited a vet; 70.72 percent of dogs and cats five months and older had never been vac-

cinated against rabies, and it was possible to prevent the birth of 316,680 animals (during the first year after the surgeries).

“Spayathon’s clinics have helped tens of thousands of animals. Beyond spay and neuter services, pets are also vaccinated and receive food, as well as other donations, totally free of cost,” Ramírez said. “Despite the fact that we have been able to attend to so many, much remains to be done.”

She also pointed out that all the people who work in the initiative do so voluntarily, either requesting vacation days or going without pay from their jobs.

“The teams have not earned any money for working at Spayathon,” Ramírez said. “The grant that each team receives [from USHS] per round is invested to cover the expenses of lodging and food for the volunteers and veterinarians, as well as in the purchase of resources and materials necessary for the optimal operation of the clinics.”

FEMA approves over $16 million in post-hurricane assistance

By THE STAR STAFF

F

aced with the recent weather disturbances, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), along with Puerto Rico’s Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resilience (COR3), approved over $16 million in additional grants for repairs after Hurricane Maria. The allocated funds are for the week of July 2430 and represent 88 projects related to the recovery and reconstruction of Puerto Rico.

Among the weekly obligations is about $115,000 to the municipality of Fajardo for asphalting and the replacement of concrete ditch along several roads that provide access to about 450 residents. Some of the repairs will be carried out on C Street in the Vista Hermosa sector, on the Reyito Rivera roadway in the Paraíso neighborhood and on Igualdad Street in Barrio Quebrada, among other roads.

Also noteworthy is the allocation of over $90,000 to the municipality of Yabucoa for its Women’s Affairs Office.

This allocation ensures the development and implementation of legal, social and economic equality for women and the strengthening of the family as a core insti-

tution on the island.

Projects across other parts of the island are also being considered. These include an obligation of about $14,000 for the municipality of Jayuya. The funds are intended to repair the Municipal Emergency Management office building, which represents about 16,000 residents located in zone 7 of that agency.

A portion of the obligated funds will be used to prevent future damage by implementing mitigation measures. In Fajardo, about $40,000 will be used to install a concrete curb and gutter, as well as a geotextile soil stabilization, among other actions to strengthen various roads.

Meanwhile, about $14,000 will be used in Yabucoa for the installation of an anchorage system for air conditioning units and waterproofing treatment for roofs.

In Jayuya, about $5,000 of the project is earmarked to add a second waterproof membrane to roof edges and additional anchors for air conditioners.

The most recent approved grants are broken down as follows: * More than $7.5 million for repairs to parks and recreational facilities. * More than $2.9 million for repairs to

public buildings and equipment. * More than $2.7 million for road and bridge repairs. * More than $1 million for emergency protection measures. * More than $843,000 for administrative expenses of municipalities and government agencies. * More than $809,000 for debris removal.

* More than $142,000 for utility repairs.

FEMA works with COR3 through the federal agency’s Public Assistance program to obligate recovery funds to private nonprofit organizations, municipalities and agencies of the Puerto Rico government for expenses related to hurricanes Irma and Maria. To date, over $7 billion has been awarded to Puerto Rico as part of FEMA’s Public Assistance program.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

7

NY mayor blames virus for shootings. Here’s what crime data shows.

By ALAN FEUER

I

n the past few weeks, Mayor Bill de Blasio and his police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, have blamed the steep rise in shootings in New York City on a breakdown in the criminal justice system that they contend has allowed criminals back out on the streets.

The mayor and commissioner have cited a range of causes that they have portrayed as outside their control: the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, as well as measures approved by the state Legislature, including one that eliminated cash bail for many defendants.

But a confidential analysis of police data, conducted by city officials but not released to the public, offers little if any evidence to back up their claims. In fact, the analysis, obtained

by The New York Times, suggests the state’s new bail law and the mass release of inmates from city jails in recent months because of the coronavirus outbreak played almost no role in the spike in shootings.

Of the 1,500 inmates let out of Rikers from March 16 to April 30, only seven had been rearrested on a weapons charge by mid-July, according to the confidential analysis.

Nearly 2,000 people who in July had open gun cases were allowed to go home to await trial, but only about 40 of those defendants were arrested on another weapons charge while they were out, the analysis said.

Instead, the analysis points to a different possible reason for the wave of shootings: The number of arrests for gun crimes has plummeted.

While murders and shootings have surged, reports of other major crimes have actually fallen in recent months. Still, the spike in gun violence has stirred deep fears that the city might be sliding back to an era of random violence on the streets. Recent shooting victims have included two teenagers going to play basketball and a baby boy.

New York City is not alone. Shootings have skyrocketed in major cities across the country, and that surge has led to intense political fights over whether efforts to rein in the police, including the Defund the Police movement touched off by the killing of George Floyd, are playing a role.

On Sunday, another 19 people were shot in New York City, one fatally. Through the first seven months of this year, shootings were up 72% over the same period last year and mur-

Brooklyn has seen some of the worst gun violence in recent weeks. ders rose 30%, even as reports of other violent crimes like rape, assault and robbery fell.

Police say feuds between street gangs are behind most of the incidents, and so far detectives have been unable to make enough arrests to stop reprisals. The pandemic and the need to divert investigators to cover widespread protests have set back investigations, police officials said.

In recent days, de Blasio has been particularly critical of the courts, saying that the lack of trials because of the pandemic and the inability of prosecutors to push cases forward with indictments were “a huge piece” of the spike in violent crime.

“The bottom line is our criminal justice system needs to get back to full strength,” de Blasio said. “Our courts not only need to reopen, they need to reopen as fully and as quickly as possible.”

But prosecutors, court officials and defense lawyers have pushed back against that theory.

Lawrence Marks, the state’s chief administrative judge, told the NY 1 cable news station that the mayor’s attacks on the courts were “false, misleading and irresponsible.”

Marks countered that the rise in violent crime was more likely a result of the sharp drop in gun arrests in recent months, a position that the department’s own data seems to buttress.

In mid-May, gun arrests citywide began to drop precipitously, the city analysis of police data shows. During the week of May 24, there were 113 gun arrests. During the week of June

7, there were 71 such arrests. By the week of June 28, there were only 22.

Over the same period, the data shows, shootings started rising. During the week of May 24, there were 23 shootings; in the week of June 7, there were 40. In the week of June 28, the number of shootings spiked to 63.

The confidential analysis that was obtained by the Times was prepared by city officials with Police Department data and shared with the city’s district attorneys’ offices. It was provided to the Times by an official who wanted to counter the mayor’s narrative, but wished to remain anonymous because the report was not intended to be released.

Asked about the analysis, Bill Neidhardt, a spokesman for de Blasio, maintained the mayor has always blamed the rise in violence on “a perfect storm” of causes, including the pandemic’s devastating effects on the city’s economy and daily life.

“He also talks about how a non-fully functioning criminal justice system is playing a role in this as well,” Neidhardt said.

But the city’s own analysis suggests the bail law, which allows many defendants accused of nonviolent crimes to be released before trial without posting bail, had little to do with the rise in violence. It notes that shooting incidents stayed relatively stable for more than four months after the legislation was passed.

The analysis also indicates that the courts are processing gun crimes at close to the same rate as before the pandemic. According to the

Police Department’s data, there were 2,181 unresolved gun cases in July — slightly fewer than the 2,285 gun cases that were open in December 2019.

Similarly, the courts handled 642 gun and murder arraignments from October 2019 to December 2019. Between April and June of this year, they handled 819 gun and murder arraignments — and all of them were conducted remotely by video.

“The way we are processing arrests has not changed at all,” said Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney. “In May, the volume and severity of the arrests we were handling was the same as it was in January.

We’re open.”

Court records in Brooklyn, which has seen some of the worst gun violence in recent weeks, suggest there is little sign that the release of people from jail was driving most of the shootings there.

From June 15 to July 15, according to court records, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office opened a total of five prosecutions of defendants for shootings or for homicides with guns.

None of the defendants, an analysis of the records showed, had been released from Rikers Island because of the pandemic or had been sent back home on a separate case under the new, more lenient bail law. Nor were they free because of the slowdown in court proceedings, the records showed.

Still, Michael LiPetri, the Police Department’s chief of crime control strategies, said that the virus’ effects on the criminal justice system were being felt on the streets.

Early in the pandemic, LiPetri said, many suspects arrested on gun charges who in the past would have been asked to post bail were instead released without bail to stem the spread of disease in jail.

So far this year, he said, 40% of all gun suspects were released on their own recognizance, compared to only 25% last year, and about 35% had bail set, compared to 55% last year.

The large number of people being sent home to await trial, even with a serious gun charge, he said, had created a permissive atmosphere, especially among gang members who the police believe are driving the wave of shootings.

“When people get arrested and then get out, their crew members start feeling comfortable carrying firearms,” he said.

8

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Distrust of the Minneapolis police, and also the effort to defund them

Kentrell Grimes with his 2-year-old son, Kentrell Jr., in Minneapolis on July 31, 2020. “How can you defund the police and then bring another group to police?” Grimes says.

By JOHN ELIGON

T

he burgundy Oldsmobile sped through an intersection in a tree-lined residential neighborhood on Minneapolis’ North Side, and Lisa Williams shook her head in disgust.

“Look at this,” she said, surrounded by four of her young grandchildren on the short stoop of her home. “They ride as fast as they can right down through here with no regard for the children.”

It is in such moments — when she is reminded of the many dangers in her community, from speeding cars to gunshots — that Williams, 50, would welcome the presence of police.

But then she recalls the time several years ago when she and her husband arrived home to find several police vehicles parked on their front lawn. Officers told them to mind their own business when they asked what was going on, leading to an argument that ended with her husband getting handcuffed and taken to jail.

Minneapolis’ North Side, with a majority Black population, has decidedly mixed opinions on the City Council’s effort, following the police killing of George Floyd, to significantly reduce the size and scope of Minneapolis’ police force.

Residents complain of rampant police mistreatment, but also of out-of-control crime and violence. That reality has left many Black residents here unenthusiastic about what has become known as the defund movement. Adding complexity to the debate, they say that they despise the police but need someone to call when things go awry.

“It does seem like a no-win situation,” Williams said.

Proponents of defunding argue that having considerably fewer — or no — police officers could actually reduce crime because those resources could instead be invested into communities struggling with poverty.

But that argument does not win over everybody.

In a survey last month of likely voters in 10 battleground states, just under half of Black respondents said they would be more likely to support a candidate who made defunding the police a priority, according to the poll commissioned by Run for Something, which supports young, progressive candidates, and Collective PAC, which backs Black candidates.

Reducing police department budgets drew support from 70% of Black Americans, according to a Gallup poll released in July. Yet only 22% of Black respondents supported the more drastic measure pushed by some activists of zeroing out police department budgets altogether.

“What are they suggesting would be the answer if we didn’t have police?” asked Bunny Beeks, whose mother was fatally shot in North Minneapolis four years ago. “I just don’t understand what that would look like.”

The Minneapolis City Council’s proposal would not totally eliminate the Police Department. But some council members have said they would like to replace the existing department, which has been widely criticized for its aggressive attitudes toward Black residents.

Most North Side residents say they hope for major reforms, including requiring officers to live in their community and better training them to interact with residents.

Tiffany Roberson, whose brother, Jamar Clark, was fatally shot by \police five years ago, suggested creating a community council that could work with and oversee the police in North Minneapolis.

Though skeptics say that decades of reforms have failed to create fundamental change, some residents said they had faith that Floyd’s death, and the outrage it has prompted, could make this time different.

Many residents say they have confidence in Chief Medaria Arradondo, the first African American to hold the position, saying he has shown an appetite for change that past police leaders have not. But a reform-minded chief cannot overhaul a department alone.

Speaking from a North Side street corner where young men sitting on lawn chairs chat on sunny summer days, Royal Jones, 32, said he had had many brushes with law enforcement. He compared his feelings about police to his relationship with his mother growing up. He said she might “whoop” him for doing something wrong, and he might get mad at her for it, but at the end of the day, he still relied on her.

Similarly, he said, if someone broke into his house, he would have to rely on law enforcement to handle it rather than

“go the street way,” which would just prompt more violence.

“Even a person like me might need the police,” he said.

Still, Jones said he believed that a better approach might be to employ community outreach workers to avert violence before it happens and interact with police officers once it occurs. Such efforts already exist, but Jones said they could be more robust.

Minneapolis proponents of defunding the police have said that these are the types of discussions that community members needed to have to decide what works best for public safety in their neighborhoods.

Some may see the need for armed officers. Others may come up with a different model. Kandace Montgomery, the director of Black Visions Collective, a leading advocate of defunding in Minneapolis, acknowledged the difficulty of getting people to envision a system of public safety different from the only one they have always known.

“We do have to imagine,” she said. “I recognize that is deeply scary.”

City Council members have worked closely with Black Visions Collective and other Black-led organizations in an effort to defund the Police Department. That has stirred tensions.

Many North Side civic leaders and legacy organizations, like the Urban League and several Black churches, have accused elected officials of ignoring the voices of their communities as they create a path forward for policing. They point out that some of the defund movement’s leaders are based on the South Side — where Floyd was killed by the police — which has a much smaller Black population.

“They’ve made this choice for us as Black people, when they don’t necessarily live or engage with Black people,” said Raeisha Williams, a North Side activist whose brother was fatally shot two years ago. “When my house is broken into, I want to be able to call the police. When my security alarm goes off, I want to know they’re going to arrive and protect my family.”

The council has proposed amending the City Charter to eliminate the Police Department as a core agency and replace it with a new public safety department. That move alone would not eliminate the police, but it would provide a blank canvas on which city leaders could create a new mechanism for public safety that could include social services and crime-prevention initiatives.

The two council members representing the North Side, Phillipe Cunningham and Jeremiah Ellison, have supported the effort to change the charter and defund the police.

“To say that Black North Siders have not had a voice erases the existence of two Black North Side council members,” Cunningham said.

He said his constituents have told him they want to see “transformative change in the way that the city keeps our community safe.”

He acknowledged that the police could not be eliminated in one fell swoop.

“We will likely need some form of law enforcement for the foreseeable future,” Cunningham said. Yet he envisioned a system in which greater investment in things like community workers, health, housing and education would stabilize the community and drive down crime.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

9

With jobless aid expired, Trump sidelines himself in stimulus talks

By MAGGIE HABERMAN, EMILY COCHRANE and JIM TANKERSLEY

O

n the first day of the first full week when tens of millions of Americans went without the federal jobless aid that has cushioned them during the pandemic, President DonaldTrump was not cajoling undecided lawmakers to embrace a critical stimulus bill to stabilize the foundering economy.

He was at the White House, hurling insults at the Democratic leaders whose support he needs to strike a deal.

Trump called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “Crazy Nancy,” charging that she had no interest in helping the unemployed. He said Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, only wanted to help “radical left” governors in states run by Democrats. And he threatened to short-circuit a delicate series of negotiations to produce a compromise and instead unilaterally impose a federal moratorium on tenant evictions.

The comments came just as Trump’s own advisers were on Capitol Hill meeting with Pelosi and Schumer in search of an elusive deal, and they underscored just how absent the president had been from the negotiations.

They also highlighted how, three months before he is to face voters, the main role that Trump appears to have embraced in assembling an economic recovery package is that of sniping from the sidelines in ways that undercut a potential compromise.

On Monday, Trump said he remained “totally involved” in the talks, even though he was not “over there with Crazy Nancy.”

But while White House officials say that he is interested in the talks and closely monitoring them, he has not sought to use the full powers of his office to prod a deal, and more often he has complicated the already sensitive negotiations.

The situation reflects the dysfunctional dynamic thatTrump has developed with leaders of both parties in Congress. He has a toxic relationship with Pelosi, with whom he has not met face-to-face since last year. And Republicans have learned to eye their own president warily in delicate negotiations, knowing that he is prone to changing his position, bucking party principles and leaving them to suffer the political consequences of high-profile collapses.

In the stimulus talks, Trump’s ideas have often been out of sync with members of his own party. On Monday, he said he was considering acting on his own to eliminate payroll taxes, something a president does not have the power to do himself, and an idea that his advisers had

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin walks to the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), at the Capitol in Washington, Monday, Aug. 3, 2020, as negotiations continue on stimulus plans in the wake of the coronavirus. dropped from the talks in the face of near-unanimous opposition by Republican lawmakers.

The eviction moratorium he has championed was not a part of the Republican plan.

“I’ll do it myself if I have to,” Trump said Monday.

While that might be possible, virtually every other measure under discussion to stimulate the economy would require congressional approval.

The stakes of the negotiations could not be higher. Business leaders Monday pleaded with lawmakers to draft a sweeping recovery package to help the hardest-hit industries survive the crisis. And economists warned that the expiration of the $600-per-week enhanced unemployment payments could already be dragging down consumer spending.

On Monday, Pelosi floated a possible compromise to extend the benefits, saying that Democrats might be open to tying the weekly payments, which Republicans are pressing to cut substantially, to the unemployment rate, allowing the amount to fall in tandem with the jobless rate.

“That’s something to talk about,” Pelosi said on CNN. “Right now, today, we have an emergency. A building is on fire and they are deciding how much water they want to have in the bucket.”

Privately, she warned House Democrats

during an afternoon conference call that while she had hoped to reach a deal with the White House this week, she was no longer sure that was possible, according to two people on the call who described it on the condition of anonymity.

At the same moment that Trump was blasting her, Pelosi met on Capitol Hill with Schumer; Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff; and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, in search of a compromise. It was the sixth such in-person meeting in eight days, and following a rare Saturday session with the four negotiators.

Trump, who spent Saturday and Sunday on his golf course in Virginia, berated Democrats from the White House on Monday, accusing them of being blinded by a focus on “bailout money” for states controlled by Democrats, as opposed to extending unemployment benefits.

“All they’re really interested in is bailout money to bail out radical left governors and radical left mayors like in Portland and places that are so badly run — Chicago, New York City,” Trump said.

In their $3 trillion recovery package, Democrats have proposed providing more than $900 billion to cash-strapped states and cities whose budgets have been devastated in the recession, while Republicans did not include any money for them in their $1 trillion plan. But

it is Republicans who have proposed cutting the jobless aid, while Democrats are pushing to extend the $600 weekly federal payments through January.

Later in the day, Trump sounded a less hostile note, even as he repeated that he could halt evictions with an executive order.

“But we are having a very good discussion with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer,” he added during a late-afternoon briefing.

White House officials describe Trump as interested in the talks, but from a distance. He calls Meadows, a former House member, for updates nearly a dozen times on some days, and in general gets briefed in 10-minute increments from other aides. He makes frequent calls to allies like Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, and to Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader.

But he does not reach out to members of the House he is not personally close with to use the power of persuasion that comes with the presidency, they concede, and he is expending little energy of his own to move the ball forward.

Last Thursday, when Meadows was asked by reporters why the president did not simply bring congressional leaders to the Oval Office and keep everyone there until there was a deal, Meadows replied, “You’ve seen that movie before,” prompting laughter.

Congressional staff and lobbyists who are engaged in discussions said Monday that the talks between administration officials and Pelosi and Schumer had essentially frozen negotiations between top Democrats and Republicans on key committees who would have to hammer out the details of any deal.

That could leave the parties little time to flesh out any compromises over additional aid to businesses or individuals, yielding a plan that mostly consists of re-upping existing aid programs like the Paycheck Protection Program and direct payments to individuals.

A group of executives led by former Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz, which included several major business groups and top executives from companies like Alphabet and Facebook, sent a letter to congressional leaders on Monday urging more aggressive efforts such as long-term, federally guaranteed loans to help small businesses in any new rescue package.

“This is not a call for bottomless handouts,” they wrote. “It is a defining moment to show how capitalism can help all Americans, particularly entrepreneurs who have been forced to shutter or reduce the capacity of their businesses through no fault of their own.”

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Could a Californian be vice president?

Representative Karen Bass, who made history as the first Black woman in the country to serve as the speaker of a state legislature, has become a leading contender for vice president.

By JILL COWAN

J

oe Biden is expected to finally announce his running mate — well, if not this week, then soon.

And while one woman who represents California in Congress has shot to the top of the list, it may not be the one you thought.

Rep. Karen Bass, a respected consensus-builder who made history as the first Black woman in the country to serve as the speaker of a state legislature, has become a leading contender amid what my colleagues reported has been intense jockeying.

Bass’ credentials as an advocate for social justice and racial equity run deep: Her political career is rooted in her work as a community organizer in South Los Angeles during the 1990s, when the crack cocaine epidemic was ravaging the community and when rage

against racist policing bubbled over in the Rodney King uprisings.

Bass also explicitly worked to bring together Black and Latino community members, as Jose A. Del Real reported for The Washington Post.

Today, she’s a five-term congresswoman and chair of the Congressional Black Caucus who is close with Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

But Sen. Kamala Harris is by no means out of the picture. You may recall she also ran for president, and she still has many of the things going for her that made her a major candidate for the Oval Office: a barrier-breaking political career in which she has won multiple statewide races; sharp speaking skills, which she said she’d use to “prosecute the case” against President Donald Trump; and name recognition both within and outside California.

Still, some observers have said

Harris might be too focused on her own presidential aspirations to make for a second-in-command.

Politico reported that Sen. Chris Dodd, a member of Biden’s search committee, told a donor that Harris “had no remorse” for her comments in a dramatic exchange with Biden over busing during one of the Democratic primary debates. Over the weekend, though, Politico also reported that the senator’s allies talked with Biden’s vetting team in an effort to smooth things over.

“The Bidens are looking for somebody as loyal to them as they were to Barack and Michelle Obama,” Christine Pelosi, the daughter of the speaker, told The New York Times recently.

So, how does this all affect California?

Bass and Harris are not the only competitors, of course; the Biden

campaign is orchestrating an unusually public “veepstakes,” in which all the contenders are established public servants who would represent subtly different visions of the Democratic Party, said Raphael Sonenshein, the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles.

And Biden’s announcement during the primaries that he’d choose a woman for the job has helped head off less substantive discussion about a woman’s electability and instead focused it on which woman would be most likely to help Biden beat the president.

That, Sonenshein told me, is the biggest priority for many California Democrats.

Still, he said, it’s notable — nay, “exciting” — to have two Californians at the top of the list.

“What’s interesting is, historically, California has not been a site for Democrats to get on the national ticket,” he said.

Despite Democrats’ current dominance within the nation’s most populous state, when it comes to national elections, California has been a more powerful springboard for Republican politicians — think Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.

Now, Sonenshein said, no matter how the veepstakes shakes out, “a number of California politicians are going to get called to Washington — it’s probably long overdue.”

Harris and Bass, he said, represent parts of the Democratic base that haven’t gotten the attention they deserve: women in general, Black women in particular — and Californians.

“You could make a case for both of them,” he said. “Bass has a reputation as a first-class legislator, and Harris is a strong litigator.”

Sonenshein said he got out of the predictions business after 2016 (seems wise), but one thing is certain: If either Californian is tapped to join a Biden administration, it’ll set off a reshuffling of Democratic power in the Golden State.

If Harris leaves her Senate post, he said, “You’re going to see a game of musical chairs like you’ve never seen before.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

11

‘Closing isn’t even an option’: With no events, caterers rush to adjust

When cancellations rolled into her catering business, Holly Sheppard moved to upstate New York and is honing her barbecue skills. “I’m going to make it through all of this,” she said.

By JULIE CRESWELL

O

n a recent Saturday, petite lobster rolls on toasted brioche and coconut shrimp with mango aioli were to be passed among the guests at a 210-person wedding. A bar mitzvah party for 180 was going to conclude with torched s’mores and a chocolate fountain.

For David Cingari of David’s Soundview Catering in Stamford, Connecticut, the events, along with food for an anniversary party, should have brought in roughly $6,600 in profits.

Instead, he was dashing about, serving lobster rolls, blackened mahi-mahi tacos and smashburgers alongside cocktails like the Painkiller to socially distanced diners at a pop-up restaurant he opened in mid-June.

His take? About $600.

The restaurant, David’s at the Landing, is the third iteration of Cingari’s catering business since the coronavirus pandemic struck, bringing his $7 million-a-year company to a sudden stop.

“We were going to do $300,000 in graduation parties this spring,” he said. “That’s just gone.”

The pandemic has the nation’s caterers — roughly 12,000 individuals or companies with annual revenues of more than $60 billion — reeling. Many caterers say they expect their business to be down between 80% and 90%

this year. Corporate cafeterias that they provide food and staff to remain closed. Events like graduation and anniversary parties, bar mitzvahs, charity dinners and weddings have been canceled or pushed into next year.

And the ones that took place were on a decidedly smaller scale.

“We did one 50-person wedding,” Cingari said. “It was a clambake in the backyard. That was supposed to be a 250-person wedding.”

The collapse of the catering industry this year directly affects bartenders, wait staff and others who typically work these events as parttime employees.

The industry — a collection of large corporations like Aramark and Compass Group and thousands of smaller companies owned by individuals — is not tracking how many caterers have permanently closed because of the pandemic, but they say it will happen.

“If I look locally at South Jersey, I know of a few caterers and some venues that are severely struggling,” said Doug Quattrini, the president of the National Association for Catering and Events and an event producer at Sensational Host in Maple Shade, New Jersey.

While caterers say they are taking a financial beating, many feel better situated than those in the restaurant business. (Not surprisingly, many caterers worked in restaurants before switching jobs.) Instead of paying often

expensive rent in desirable locations like most restaurants, caterers typically pay less for large kitchens that can be off the beaten track.

Moreover, caterers tend to be a nimble group of entrepreneurs, adept at providing finicky couples with their every heart’s whim and overcoming the oddest of logistical challenges. Those traits have helped them during the pandemic.

“We have huge logistical expertise,” said Peter Callahan of Peter Callahan Catering, whose clients include some of New York’s wealthiest financiers and whose specialty is minifood like one-bite cheeseburgers and tiny grilled cheese sandwiches. “When you’re an off-premise caterer, you might be doing an event that requires barges to get to a private island with no vehicles.

“We’re creative thinkers, and right now people are thinking about how to shape their businesses for the need at hand,” he added.

As the traditional bar-mitzvah-andwedding circuit collapsed, caterers began to think about different ways to make money.

Cingari has been hustling in the food industry for four decades and has no intention of letting the coronavirus end his business.

After working as a hotel chef at the Grand Hyatt in New York, Cingari opened a restaurant, David’s American Food and Drink, in Stamford in 1987.

But after a decade of long hours, constant staff turnover and long nights worrying about paying his $13,000-a-month lease, Cingari, whose family owns ShopRite grocery stores in the area, decided to close the restaurant in 1997 and focus solely on his catering operation.

The business took off, and by the end of the year, David’s Soundview Catering had 85 employees preparing food out of a 6,000-square-foot commissary kitchen.

About 80% of the business came from delivering breakfast and lunches for corporate meetings and from preparing food for and staffing more than a dozen corporate cafeterias in the area. On weekends, Cingari’s calendar was filled with weddings, anniversary parties and bar mitzvahs.

The first inkling Cingari received that this year was going to be anything but normal came in late February when he was notified that the employees of a Japanese-based company in one of the buildings where he managed the cafeteria would be working from home as part of an emergency response trial. A week later, a large international bank said it would be doing the same thing.

“It was like wildfire,” he said. “Within

three weeks, every one of the cafeterias were closed and any event we had on the books was canceled.”

Cingari said he had received money from the federal Paycheck Protection Program to cover around 80 of his employees.

As companies shut down and people began staying at home in mid-March, Cingari shifted his business. He had noticed how people were raising money on social media to provide meals to hospitals and emergency medical workers, so he did the same. The money donated through the social media outreach paid for the cost of food and supplies.

“Since we had this large commissary kitchen, we could do huge numbers of meals,” he said, though he made no profit from it. “So we started making a few thousand meals a day for several weeks to feed hospital workers and others.”

That effort began to dry up as coronavirus cases declined in Connecticut in the late spring.

So Cingari shifted again, this time providing groceries, hard-to-find household items like toilet paper and Clorox disinfecting wipes, and take-home meals for $50 that could feed a family of four. In early June he would sell close to 60 meals on a Saturday night, he said.

“It didn’t even come close to what we were making before,” he said, “but it was something.”

But that business petered out when the state allowed outdoor dining. On the final weekend of that iteration of his business, Cingari sold five take-home meals.

So in early July, he shifted again. Through one of the buildings in a corporate office park where he manages the cafeteria, he had access to an indoor dining area and outdoor patio space overlooking the harbor in Stamford. He had used the space in the past for weekend events like birthday parties and bar mitzvahs.

Now, on that outdoor patio, Cingari has started a pop-up restaurant, David’s at the Landing. The restaurant is open Thursday through Saturday nights and serves a limited menu of appetizers, five entrees, cocktails, wines and beers. On a recent Saturday evening, the wait time for a table at the restaurant, which seats 65 with social distancing, was nearly two hours, he said.

“I can’t believe I’m back in the restaurant business,” Cingari said. “Shoot me. Still, the business is covering costs and making a little bit of money for the eight people who are working there.”

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Facebook bets on New York with lease of huge space

Facebook on Monday, Aug. 3, 2020, agreed to lease nearly all of the office space in the mammoth 107-year-old Farley Building in Midtown Manhattan.

By MATTHEW HAAG

F

acebook on Monday agreed to lease all the office space in the mammoth 107-year-old James A. Farley Building in midtown Manhattan, cementing New York City as a growing global technology hub and reaffirming a major corporation’s commitment to an office-centric urban culture despite the pandemic.

With the 730,000-square-foot lease, Facebook has acquired more than 2.2 million square feet of office space in the city for thousands of employees in less than a year, all of it on Manhattan’s West Side between Pennsylvania Station and the Hudson River.

Apple, Amazon and Google all lease space in the same area, an emerging tech corridor.

The timing of the deal’s announcement was somewhat of a surprise because Facebook, which had expressed interest in the Farley Building for months, has given most of its employees the option of working from home during the pandemic. Even after the pandemic subsides, Facebook has said that within the next 10 years up to half of its roughly 52,200 employees across the country would work from home.

New York’s economy has been cratered by the outbreak, and even as the virus has been contained and the city is slowly reopen-

ing, many companies have told their employees not to return to their offices until early next year if not later.

Much of Manhattan’s business district remains a virtual ghost town with only a small fraction of workers filling office towers.

But Facebook has more than 4,000 employees in its offices in Manhattan now, up from about 2,900 employees at the beginning of the year.

The company’s new office spaces in Manhattan, at the Farley Building and further west at Hudson Yards, could allow Facebook to move another 8,500 workers to the city.

The deal at Hudson Yards, signed late last year, includes 1.5 million square feet in three buildings.

“Vornado’s and Facebook’s investment in New York and commitment to further putting down roots here — even in the midst of a global pandemic — is a signal to the world that our brightest days are still ahead and we are open for business,” said Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in a statement. “This public-private partnership fortifies New York as an international center of innovation.”

A Facebook spokeswoman said it was too soon to estimate how many employees will end up at the Manhattan properties, given the uncertainties of the outbreak.

“Facebook first joined New York’s vibrant business and tech community in 2007,” the spokeswoman, Jamila Reeves, said.

“Since that time, we’ve continuously grown and expanded our presence throughout the city. The Farley Building will further anchor our New York footprint and create a dedicated hub for our tech and engineering teams.”

The Farley Building, most of which was built in 1913, is on Eighth Avenue across from

Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. A long-awaited, large-scale renovation of the building is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Over the past two years, the rapid growth of technology firms, both those from the West Coast and startups in the city, has turned a broad area of Manhattan into a vibrant tech hub.

Late last year, Amazon, which has continued to expand despite backing out of a plan to build a massive campus in Long Island City, Queens, in the face of strong community opposition, added 350,000 square feet in a building on 10th Avenue near Hudson Yards.

It is enough space to bring its workforce in New York City to more than 8,000 people.

Just south along the Hudson River, Google has built an enormous campus that spreads across several buildings in the Chelsea neighborhood.

Just before the pandemic, Apple signed a lease for 220,000 square feet at 11 Penn Plaza, a 1923 Art Deco tower a block from the Farley Building that is also owned by Vornado. It was Apple’s first expansion in New York City outside its office in the Flatiron district.

Julie Samuels, the executive director of Tech: NYC, a nonprofit industry group, said that Facebook’s decision on Monday was a vote of confidence in the future of New York and its growing tech industry.

“It’s great news that affirms what we’ve always known: even facing economic uncertainty and a global pandemic,’’ Samuels said, “New York is overflowing with the creativity and potential that will drive the growth of the next generation of technology companies.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

13 Stocks

Wall St. ends higher as investors eye stimulus

W

all Street ended higher after a choppy session on Tuesday, lifted by Apple and energy stocks but limited by declines in AIG and Microsoft while investors awaited more U.S. government stimulus to fight economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Apple (AAPL.O) climbed 0.7%, up for a fifth straight session as investors cheered the iPhone maker’s blowout quarterly report last week. The Silicon Valley heavyweight is around $120 billion away from becoming the first U.S. publicly listed company with a stock market value of $2 trillion.

The S&P 500 energy index .SPNY jumped 2.45% and was the strongest performer among 11 sectors, while healthcare declined .SPXHC. Ralph Lauren Corp (RL.N) dropped 4.4% to its lowest since May after quarterly revenue plunged due to coronavirus-related store closures and a slowdown in global demand for luxury goods.

American International Group Inc (AIG.N) tumbled 7.5% after its quarterly adjusted profit slumped.

Notwithstanding those two reports, about 83% of the 352 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported quarterly results so far have beaten estimates for earnings, according to IBES Refinitiv data.

“Investors are still comfortable that the trajectory of earnings is on the right path and the 2021 outlook has remained intact. All that helps support the market at these levels,” said Lindsey Bell, chief investment strategist at Ally Invest.

“But there is an underlying level of uncertainty leading to a bit of caution,” Bell added.

Investors are awaiting a major new coronavirus-aid bill, with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer saying talks with the White House were moving in the “right direction.”

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.

“I do not expect U.S. equities to revisit the March lows,” Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz SE, told the Reuters Global Markets Forum chat room.

“I suspect the next big correction will likely be one triggered by corporate defaults and other capital impairment events that central banks cannot shield against,” he said.

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14

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Dozens killed, thousands wounded as explosions rock Beirut

By BEN HUBBARD

T

wo explosions shook Beirut on Tuesday, the second one with enough force to break windows over a radius of miles, damaging and shaking buildings, wounding hundreds of people and strewing debris over a wide area.

Lebanon’s health minister, Hamad Hassan, said that at least 63 people were killed and 3,000 were injured. With the wounded still streaming into hospitals and the search for missing people underway, the figures were likely to go higher.

Videos showed a shock wave erupting from the second explosion, knocking people down and enveloping much of the center city in a cloud of dust and smoke. Cars were overturned and streets were blocked by debris, forcing many injured people to walk to hospitals.

Flames continued to rise from the rubble well after the explosions, and a cloud of smoke, tinted pink in the sunset, rose thousands of feet into the sky.

Videos of the aftermath posted online showed wounded people bleeding amid the dust and rubble, and damage where flying debris had punched holes in walls and furniture. On social media, people reported damage to homes and cars far from the port.

The Lebanese Red Cross said that every available ambulance from North Lebanon, Bekaa and South Lebanon was being dispatched to Beirut to help patients. Hospitals were so overwhelmed that they were turning wounded people away, including the American University Hospital. Patients were transported to hospitals outside Beirut because those in the city were at capacity.

The disaster may have started with a fire at a warehouse, state-run media said.

“Highly explosive materials,” seized by the government years ago, were stored where the explosions occurred, said Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, the head of Lebanon’s general security service, according to the National News Agency. President Michel Aoun confirmed his statement.

Ibrahim did not say what those materials were, but he warned against getting “ahead of the investigation” and speculat-

Beirut explosion kills dozens, injures thousands. ing about a terrorist act.

Prime Minister Hassan Diab said in a televised statement, “Facts on this dangerous depot, which has existed since 2014 or the past six years, will be announced.”

“What happened today will not come to pass without accountability,” Diab said.

“Those responsible will pay a price for this catastrophe.” he said. “This is a promise to the martyrs and wounded people. This is a national commitment.”

Diab announced that Wednesday would be a national day of mourning. The Lebanese presidency said on Twitter that Aoun had instructed the military to aid in the response and called an emergency meeting of the Supreme Defense Council on Tuesday evening, which declared Beirut a disaster area.

At least one explosion, at about 6 p.m., stemmed from a fire at a warehouse at Beirut’s port, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency. Then a second one, much larger than the first, carried enough force to overturn cars, damage and shake buildings across the city and strew, debris over a wide area.

The larger explosion blew out the glass from balconies and windows of buildings several miles away from the port and at least one building collapsed from the force of the blast. One resident said the streets looked like they were “cobbled in glass.”

There were local reports that the warehouse contained fireworks, and in several videos posted online, colored flashes could

be seen in the dark smoke rising from the fire, just before the second explosion.

The governor of Beirut, Marwan Abboud, speaking on television, could not say what had caused the explosion. Breaking into tears, he called it a national catastrophe.

The secretary-general of the Kataeb political party was killed in the blast, and among those injured was Kamal Haye, the chairman of the state-owned electricity company, who was in critical condition, the news agency reported.

Hassan announced that his ministry would cover the costs of treating the wounded at hospitals, the National News Agency reported. It said the decision covered both hospitals that have contracts with the ministry as well as those that don’t.

St. George Hospital in central Beirut, one of the city’s biggest, was so severely damaged that it had to shut down and send patients elsewhere. Dozens of patients and visitors were wounded by falling debris and flying glass.

“Every floor of the hospital is damaged,” said Dr. Peter Noun, the chief of pediatric hematology and oncology. “I didn’t see this even during the war. It’s a catastrophe.”

The explosions hit Beirut’s northern, industrial waterfront, little more than a mile away from the Grand Serail palace, where Lebanon’s prime minister is based. Many landmarks, including hospitals, mosques, churches and universities are nearby.

They erupted next to a tall building called Beirut Port Silos, at or near a structure identified on maps as a warehouse.

Videos showed only twisted metal and chunks of concrete where that warehouse had been, some of it identifiable as the remains of trucks and shipping containers.

When the explosion struck, meetings were in full swing less than a mile away, at the hillside headquarters of the Kataeb Party, a Christian political group that was once one of Lebanon’s most powerful.

The blast shook the building so badly that party members thought a bomb had gone off inside. As they collected their nerves and their belonging, they saw that the party’s general secretary, Nazar Najarian, had been wounded by falling debris.

Najarian, known by the nickname Nazo, died of his injuries.

“He had been through explosions, assassination attempts, wars with the Palestinians and Syrians, Nazo saw it all,” said Elias Hankach, a Kataeb parliamentarian.

“Our headquarters looks like a bomb went off inside. The inside is a mess, it’s madness.”

He said the party was waiting for clarity on whether the blast was an attack, the kind of crude tool used for decades to shape Lebanon’s political landscape, or just an accident resulting from mismanagement. If it turned out to be accidental, he said, then the disaster is not particularly surprising, the product of “cumulative nonchalance at all levels.”

“Whether you talk about the economy, safety standards, the port, the corruption — none of the country’s issues have had a serious attempt at resolution,” Hankach said. “We are living in this doomed management of the country.”

The severity of the explosions recalled the days when bombings and mayhem were a regular fact of life in Beirut, both during its 1975-1990 civil war and its aftermath, including sporadic conflicts between Israel and Hezbollah.

But if the latest explosions Tuesday were intentional, they would shatter a prolonged stretch of relative calm in the Lebanese capital. An Israeli intelligence official denied any Israeli involvement in the incident.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

15

What lockdown 2.0 looks like: harsher rules, deeper confusion

By DAMIEN CAVE

A

ustralia’s second-largest city, Melbourne, grappling with a spiraling coronavirus outbreak in a country that once thought it had the pandemic beat, has now imposed some of the toughest restrictions in the world.

But as officials cast about for ways to break the chain of infections, the city has become a confounding matrix of hefty fines for disobedience, minor exceptions for everything from romantic partners to home building, and endless versions of the question: So, wait, can I ____?

Restaurant owners are wondering about food delivery after an 8 p.m. curfew began Sunday. Teenagers are asking if their boyfriends and girlfriends count as essential partners. Can animal shelter volunteers walk dogs at night? Are house cleaners essential for those struggling with their mental health? Can the COVID-tested exercise outside?

“This is such a weird, scary, bizarro time that we live in,” said Tessethia Von Tessle Roberts, 25, a student in Melbourne who admits to having hit a breaking point a few days ago, when her washing machine broke.

“Our health care workers are hustling around the clock to keep us alive,” she said. “Our politicians are as scared as we are, but they have to pretend like they have a better idea than we do of what’s going to happen next.”

Pandemic lockdowns, never easy, are getting ever more confusing and contentious as they evolve in the face of second and third rounds of outbreaks that have exhausted both officials and residents. With success against the virus as fleeting as the breeze, the new waves of restrictions feel to many like a bombing raid that just won’t end.

For some places, risk calculations can change overnight.

In Hong Kong, officials banned daytime dining in restaurants last month, only to reverse themselves a day later after an outcry. Schools in some cities are opening and closing like screen doors in summer.

But in many areas where the virus has retreated and then resurged, the future looks like a long, complicated haul. Leaders are reaching for their own metaphors to try to explain it.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has compared his opening and shutting of businesses to a “dimmer switch.” Dan Andrews, the premier in Victoria, where Melbourne is the capital, has repeatedly referred to “pilot light mode” for industries like construction and meatpacking, which have been ordered to temporarily reduce their workforces.

Whatever the metaphor, it’s dark. Melbourne, a city of 5 million that is considered a capital of food and culture, is becoming a prime example.

It, and the rest of Australia, was once a shining victor, believing the virus to have been licked as of late June. Then Melbourne’s hotel quarantine program broke down, with returning travelers passing the virus to security guards, who carried the contagion into their neighborhoods.

The spread continued even after Melbourne started a so-called Stage 3 lockdown in early July — until recently, the highest level of restrictions — with no large gatherings and most people working from home. Officials grew increasingly angry as they discovered that the perception of a problem solved had

produced complacency.

Traffic data showed people in Melbourne driving more in July than they had during the first Stage 3 lockdown, in March and April. Even worse, almost 9 out of 10 people with COVID-19 had not been tested or isolated when they first felt sick, Andrews, the state’s top leader, said in late July. And 53% had not quarantined while waiting for their test results.

“That means people have felt unwell and just gone about their business,” Andrews said.

He made face masks mandatory the next day, on July 22.

Still, infections have continued to rise. They peaked at 753 new cases July 30 and have hovered around 500 a day ever since, with the death toll in Victoria now standing at 147, after 11 deaths were recorded Monday.

Those figures have paved the way for a Stage 4 lockdown — what officials are calling a “shock and awe” attack on the virus — that will last at least six weeks.

Overwhelming force, with precision, seems to be the goal. The chief modelers of the pandemic response in Australia have found that the virus can be suppressed only if more than 70% of the population abides by social distancing guidelines and other public health rules.

Andrews said the new restrictions would take 250,000 more people out of their routines, in the hopes of reaching the necessary threshold.

So retail stores will be closed. Schools will return to athome instruction. Restaurants will be takeaway or delivery only.

Child-care centers will be available only for permitted workers.

Those are the restrictions that are already well understood.

The rules requiring more explanation are tied to the curfew and industries that have to cut back.

Large-scale construction projects of more than three stories, for example, will have to reduce their on-site workforce by 75%, and workers will not be able to work at more than one location.

Small-scale construction cannot have more than five workers.

On Tuesday, Andrews answered questions from reporters

about dog-walking (allowed after curfew, sort of, only near home) and other subjects of great confusion at a news conference in Melbourne.

Thanking those who complied with the new rules and scolding those who did not, he announced that no one in self-isolation would now be allowed to exercise outdoors. A door-knocking campaign to check in on 3,000 people who had COVID-19 or were waiting for test results found that 800 of them were not at home.

All 800 have been referred to the Victoria police for investigation. The fine for violators, he said, will be 4,957 Australian dollars ($3,532).

Working, even legally, will also become trickier. Other than, say, hospital workers with formal identification, everyone traveling for a job deemed essential during the lockdown must carry a formal document — a work permit signed by the employer and employee.

For Cara Devine, who works at a wine store that closes at 8 p.m., that means carrying a government form with her everywhere and hoping that the police recognize her task as essential when she heads home after the curfew. But she also worried about the Uber drivers who take her back and forth.

“Even before the newest restrictions, I’ve had two Uber drivers being really late picking up from the shop because they got stopped by the police, taking about an hour out of their work time,” she said.

The police are already confronting opposition. On at least four occasions in the past week, they reported having to smash the windows of cars and pull people out after they refused to provide a name and address at a police checkpoint. The Victoria police commissioner, Shane Patton, said a 38-year-old woman had also been charged with assault after attacking a police officer who had stopped her for not wearing a face mask.

Some criminologists are questioning whether the harsher enforcement will help. Mostly, though, Melburnians are just trying to endure.

What Lockdown 2.0 Looks Like: Harsher Rules, Deeper Confusion.

16

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

When COVID subsided, Israel reopened its schools. It didn’t go well.

People, some wearing face masks, begin to walk outside in Tel Aviv, Israel on May 5, 2020. As countries consider back-to-school strategies for the fall, a coronavirus outbreak at a Jerusalem high school offers a cautionary tale.

By ISABEL KERSHNER and PAM BELLUCK

A

s the United States and other countries anxiously consider how to reopen schools, Israel, one of the first countries to do so, illustrates the dangers of moving too precipitously.

Confident it had beaten the coronavirus and desperate to reboot a devastated economy, the Israeli government invited the entire student body back in late May. Within days, infections were reported at a Jerusalem high school, which quickly mushroomed into the largest outbreak in a single school in Israel, possibly the world.

The virus rippled out to the students’ homes and then to other schools and neighborhoods, ultimately infecting hundreds of students, teachers and relatives.

Other outbreaks forced hundreds of schools to close.

Across the country, tens of thousands of students and teachers were quarantined.

Israel’s advice for other countries?

“They definitely should not do what we have done,” said Eli Waxman, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science and chairman of the team advising Israel’s National Security Council on the pandemic. “It was a major failure.”

The lesson, experts say, is that even communities that have gotten the spread of the virus under control need to take strict precautions when reopening schools. Smaller classes, mask wearing, keeping desks 6 feet apart and providing adequate ventilation, they say, are likely to be crucial until a vaccine is available.

“If there is a low number of cases, there is an illusion that the disease is over,” said Dr. Hagai Levine, a professor of epidemiology and chairman of the Israeli Association of Public Health Physicians. “But it’s a complete illusion.”

“The mistake in Israel,” he said, “is that you can open the education system, but you have to do it gradually, with certain limits, and you have to do it in a very careful way.”

The United States is facing similar pressures to fully reopen schools, and President Donald Trump has threatened to withhold funding for districts that don’t reopen. But the U.S. is in a far worse position than Israel was in May: Israel had fewer than 100 new infections a day then. The U.S. is now averaging more than 60,000 new cases a day, and some states continue to set alarming records.

Israel’s handling of the pandemic was considered success-

ful at first. The country of 9 million quickly closed its borders, shuttered schools in mid-March and introduced remote learning for its 2 million students. In April, Passover and Ramadan were celebrated under lockdown.

By early May, infection rates had fallen from over 750 confirmed cases a day to double digits. The youngest students, grades 3 and under, and older students taking final exams returned in small groups, splitting the week to take turns using classrooms.

Emboldened by the dropping infection rates, the government completely reopened schools on May 17, the day a new government was sworn in.

In his inaugural speech, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised a new budget that would deliver three things: “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” His new education minister, Yoav Gallant, said that the school system’s “immediate mission” was to allow parents to return to work with peace of mind.

Inna Zaltsman, an Education Ministry official, said administrators also wanted “to return the children to routine as much as possible, for their emotional and pedagogic well-being.”

Shopping malls, outdoor markets and gyms had already reopened, and soon houses of worship, restaurants, bars, hotels and wedding halls did too. Netanyahu told Israelis to grab a beer and, while taking precautions, “Go out and have a good time.”

In hindsight, that advice was wildly premature.

That same day, a mother phoned a teacher at Jerusalem’s Gymnasia Ha’ivrit high school. Her son, a seventh-grade student there, had tested positive for the virus.

By the next day, the school confirmed another case in the ninth grade. Ultimately, Israeli officials said, 154 students and 26 staff members were found to be infected.

“There was a general euphoria among the public, a sense that we had dealt with the first wave well and that it was behind us,” said Danniel Leibovitch, Gymnasia’s principal. “Of course, that wasn’t true.”

The Education Ministry had issued safety instructions: Masks were to be worn by students in fourth grade and higher, windows kept open, hands washed frequently and students kept 6 feet apart whenever possible.

But in many Israeli schools, where up to 38 children squeeze into classrooms of about 500 square feet, physical distancing proved impossible.

Unable to comply with the rules, some local authorities ignored them or simply decided not to reopen at full capacity.

Then a heat wave hit. Parents complained that it was inhumane to make children wear masks in steaming classrooms where open windows nullified the air conditioning.

In response, the government exempted everyone from wearing masks for four days, and schools shut the windows.

That decision proved disastrous, experts say.

“Instead of canceling school in those days, they just told the kids ‘OK, well you have to stay in the class with the air conditioning on and take your masks off,’ so you have no ventilation really,” said Dr. Ronit Calderon-Margalit, a professor of epidemiology at Hebrew University-Hadassah Braun School of Public Health.

“You have the ideal circumstances for an outbreak.”

The Gymnasia became a petri dish for COVID-19.

When the first case was discovered, the student’s classmates, teachers and other contacts were quarantined. After the second case, which was not directly linked to the first, the school was closed and everyone was instructed to quarantine for two weeks. All students and staff were tested, often waiting

in line for hours.

About 60% of infected students were asymptomatic. Teachers suffered the most and a few were hospitalized, the principal said.

Parents were furious. Oz Arbel told Israel’s Army Radio that for a school project, his daughter’s classmates sat at a table and passed around a cellphone with a teacher who was showing symptoms. His daughter and wife became infected.

Seeking to contain the contagion, the Education Ministry vowed to shut any school with even one COVID-19 case. It ultimately closed more than 240 schools and quarantined more than 22,520 teachers and students.

When the school year ended in late June, the ministry said, 977 pupils and teachers had contracted COVID-19.

But the Health Ministry, lacking the infrastructure and resources, did not make contact tracing a priority. In the Gymnasia case, Waxman said, nobody even identified which buses the students had ridden to school on.

Outside school walls, the coronavirus returned with a vengeance. COVID wards that had closed with festive ceremonies in late April began filling again, with confirmed infections spiraling to about 800 a day by late June and over 2,000 a day by late July.

Some blamed the hasty school reopening as a major factor in the second wave. Siegal Sadetzki, who resigned in frustration last month as Israel’s director of public health services, wrote that insufficient safety precautions in schools, as well as large gatherings like weddings, fueled a “significant portion” of second-wave infections.

But others said singling out schools was unfair when the real problem was that everything reopened too quickly.

“The single super-spreader event in the Gymnasia just happened to be in a school,” said Dr. Ran Balicer, an Israeli health care official and adviser to the prime minister on the pandemic.

“It could have happened in any other setting.”

Now Israel is confronting the same questions as other countries, trying to learn from its mistakes in planning for the school year that begins Sept. 1.

Public health experts worldwide have coalesced around a set of guidelines for reopening schools.

A major recommendation is to create groups of 10 to 15 students who stay together in classrooms, at recess and lunchtime, with teachers assigned to only one group. Each group has minimal contact with other groups, limiting any spread of infection. And if a case of COVID-19 emerges, one group can be quarantined at home while others can continue at school.

Other key recommendations include staggering schedules or teaching older students online, keeping desks several feet apart, sanitizing classrooms more frequently, providing ventilation and opening windows if possible, and requiring masks for staff and students old enough to wear them properly.

Israel has already moved in that direction.

The government recently appointed a coronavirus czar, Dr. Ronni Gamzu, who transferred responsibility for virus testing and investigation from the Health Ministry to the military. “This is an operation, not medicine,” he declared.

Israel is plunging ahead. Only one option has been ruled out: closing the schools.

“This is a long-term pandemic,” said Dr. Nadav Davidovitch, a pandemic policy adviser to the government. “We cannot close schools for a year.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

17

‘I am scared’: Italian sex workers face poverty and illness in the pandemic

By EMMA BUBOLA

W

hen the mayor of Modica, a Sicilian town known for its chocolates and churches, learned that a sex worker in the area had tested positive for the coronavirus, he immediately started to worry about an outbreak.

He made a frantic public appeal for clients to get tested, assuring them that their wives wouldn’t find out.

But contact tracing proved difficult as the mayor, Ignazio Abbate, began receiving anonymous phone calls from men “asking for a friend” what the sex worker looked like.

The secrecy and stigma around unregulated sex work put “everyone in danger,” Abbate said.

Modica has so far not experienced a new outbreak, but as the sex worker recovered in a hospital in Perugia last month, news of her situation and occupation spread throughout the country, highlighting the ways in which the pandemic has affected some of the most vulnerable and marginalized communities in Italy, and the dangers of keeping sex work in the shadows.

“Of course I am scared,” said Fernanda Ponciano, a 31-year-old sex worker from Torre del Lago, in Tuscany.

Ponciano started taking clients again after a three-month hiatus during the lockdown. She works as a maid in the morning and as a sex worker in the afternoon, she said. She also supports her mother, her sister and a niece in Brazil.

“The fear of ending up homeless is bigger than that of COVID,” Ponciano said.

In Italy, prostitution is not illegal nor is it regulated as an official occupation, making the country’s 70,000 sex workers largely ineligible to receive economic relief.

Many have been forced to take their chances by returning to work in order to avoid poverty.

In other European countries, such as the Netherlands and Germany, sex workers can enter formal contracts with their clients. During the lockdown, those who were officially registered with the government were eligible for economic relief.

Scotland also included sex workers in its relief programs. In Greece, where prostitution is legal and regulated, brothels were allowed to reopen June 15, provided that sex workers kept their clients’ names and contact details for four weeks for tracing purposes.

In Italy, various charities and associations have raised money for groceries, medicines, bills and rent to benefit the country’s sex workers. But for the most part, Italian sex workers, who are often from immigrant communities, have had to fend for themselves.

In March, Regina Satariano, a 60-year-old sex worker in Tuscany, started hearing about colleagues who hadn’t eaten and a landlord who had threatened to evict a group of 17 housemates, all sex workers who were out of work because of the pandemic.

Satariano put together her savings and bought bags of pasta, tomato sauce, chicken and soap to distribute to her colleagues. But without support from the state, she said, many sex workers will continue to go hungry. If officials

In Italy, where prostitution is legal, but not officially recognized as a job, the roughly 70,000 sex workers are largely ineligible to receive coronavirus economic relief, forcing them to choose between poverty and endangering themselves and others. don’t change things now, she added, “they never will.”

A recent report by the Sex Workers’ Rights Advocacy Network and the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe showed that many sex workers defied lockdown rules in order to work, putting both themselves and their clients at risk.

The day after the sex worker from Modica was hospitalized in Perugia, a young woman in the Veneto region, who authorities said was involved in prostitution, was also hospitalized with COVID-19. Reports soon spread about another sex worker with the virus near Venice.

Last month, Antonio Guadagnini, a Conservative councilor in the Veneto region, said reopening brothels — illegal in Italy since 1958 — and regulating prostitution would protect society. In Sicily, Ruggero Razza, the top regional health official, said that authorities should reflect on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in highrisk, unregulated occupations such as sex work.

“Once again we were excluded from the system,” said Pia Covre, a former sex worker and the founder of the Committee for the Civil Rights of Prostitutes, which promotes the legal recognition and regulation of sex work.

She added that, after being excluded from government economic support, sex workers were also deprived regular coronavirus tests and the opportunity to keep a record of their clients for contact tracing.

The regulation of sex work is opposed by those who argue that it would lead to more exploitation and human trafficking. The pandemic, they say, hasn’t changed that.

Sen. Alessandra Maiorino, spokeswoman for the 5-Star Movement, Italy’s governing political party, has said that up to 90% of sex workers are victims of human trafficking. Last June she signed a petition to demand that Escort Advisor, Europe’s largest sex worker review website, be shut down.

She and others argue that hitting demand is the only way to end prostitution while also protecting victims of human trafficking. But rights organizations claim that abolition would only put sex workers more in danger by pushing the industry underground.

Francesca Bettio, a professor of economics at the University of Siena who specializes in issues related to sex work and human trafficking, said that the regulations in the Netherlands and Germany, while better than those in Italy, are not perfect.

Even in those countries, she said, many sex workers, especially those who are living in the country illegally, have fallen through the cracks of the welfare system during the coronavirus crisis. And no approach has eliminated the persistent stigma around sex work.

In the hunt for those who might be spreading the virus, she said, “sex workers are the perfect target.”

18

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Trump doesn’t need the most votes. What if he doesn’t even want them?

By JAMELLE BOUIE

N

early everyone involved in reporting on, analyzing or forecasting the upcoming presidential election agrees that Donald Trump could win another term in office. But no one save his most dedicated sycophants thinks he could do so with a majority of the public on his side. We have accepted, as a matter of course, that Trump could be constitutionally reelected through the Electoral College, but not democratically selected by the voting public.

That’s how he won in 2016, and the reason is straightforward. Enough of the president’s base is concentrated in swing states like Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Because of that fact, he can lose by as many as 5 million votes and still win an Electoral College majority.

As much as this contradicts our democratic expectations, you can imagine a scenario where, aware of his minority position, Trump governed with an eye toward consensus and popular legitimacy. The Electoral College misfire would have been a problem, but not a dangerous one. Instead, Trump and his allies embraced this plainly anti-democratic feature of our political system to liberate themselves from majoritarian politics and coalition building. It’s not just that they can win with a plurality, but that they intend to, with no interest in persuading the majority of American voters and no concern for the consequences of that choice.

It was clear from the start of his administration that Trump

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President Trump walking on the South Lawn of the White House last week. saw his Electoral College advantage as license for an intentionally divisive style of politics, stoking anger and racial prejudice whenever it seemed politically advantageous. He bases key governing decisions on whether he won a state or group of states in the previous election. If the United States does not have a national strategy for the pandemic, it is at least in part because — as a report in Vanity Fair suggests — the administration originally believed the problem was restricted to “blue” states.

All of this has obviously carried over into the president’s reelection campaign. Trump has made no attempt to win a majority of voters, no effort to bring a skeptical public to his side. Instead, he has directed his energy toward suppressing opposition in hopes of winning by technical knockout for a second time. His chief target right now is the United States Postal Service, whose operation, it almost goes without saying, is critical for the success of mail-in voting.

Because it lowers the barrier to participation and encourages modestly higher turnout, Trump sees vote-by-mail as a threat.

“MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE,” he tweeted several months ago in a typical attack. “IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY. WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR NATION.” Similarly, after Nevada approved a plan on Monday to send mail-in ballots to all active voters in November, Trump denounced the plan as an “illegal late night coup” that will “make it impossible for Republicans to win the state.”

As if to make his attacks reality, Trump has taken steps to undercut the Postal Service. His newly installed postmaster ge-

neral — Louis DeJoy, a major campaign donor — has imposed new rules that greatly reduce the flow of mail. In some parts of the country, like Philadelphia, mail collection and delivery has slowed down considerably. For a critical city in a critical swing state, this is deeply concerning.

The Republican Party is all in on the effort to keep the anti-Trump public from casting anti-Trump votes. The Republican National Committee has established a program to “protect the vote” by monitoring polling places, challenging voters deemed suspicious and blocking efforts to expand vote-by-mail or relax voting restrictions. The Trump campaign, likewise, is suing to shape mail-in voting in a way that might give the president a strategic advantage. In Pennsylvania, for example, it wants to keep voters from using officially designated drop boxes for their ballots, forcing them to go through the mail system.

There are still other ways in which Trump is trying to optimize for minoritarian victories. On Monday, his Census Bureau announced it would end all counting efforts a month early, in order to “accelerate completion of data collection and apportionment counts.” It’s a last-minute change that threatens the accuracy of the census, and there’s a strong chance that any undercount will disadvantage Black and immigrant communities, robbing them of resources and representation that will go, instead, to whiter and more rural areas. This won’t affect the upcoming election, but it would shape American politics for the next decade in the Republican Party’s favor.

If all of this succeeds — if he sabotages voting just enough to eke out another Electoral College victory — then Trump will be the first president since the advent of a presidential “popular vote” to win two terms without also winning the most votes. It would be the third such misfire since 2000, another instance in which Democrats won the largest share of voters without winning power.

Yes, everyone knows the rules of American presidential elections. But those rules survived, in part, because this divergence was extremely rare. Before the 2000 election, it had happened only three times: 1824, 1876 and 1888. The Electoral College may not have been the most modern way to conduct a national election, but its outcomes did not consistently violate our democratic intuitions, our collective expectation that one person equals one vote.

For Trump to win, again, without winning the most votes would shatter whatever remaining faith millions of Americans have in the political system. Our simmering legitimacy crisis would almost certainly heat to a boil. After such an outcome, how could you say this was a democracy? How could you prefer the terminology of the 18th century, that this was a republic?

It is true our system was meant to hedge against the “tyranny of the majority.” But that’s why it has multiple and overlapping spheres of representation. The goal was balance, not a system where the arbitrary distribution of voters could meet the abuse of power to produce an almost permanent advantage for one side over the other. That is the tyranny of the minority, which is just another way of saying tyranny.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

19

PRFAA y PRPA discuten medidas de control de pasajeros con el comité de transportación e infraestructura de la Cámara en medio de la pandemia Por THE STAR

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a Administración de Asuntos Federales de Puerto Rico (PRFAA por sus siglas en inglés) y la Autoridad de Puertos de Puerto Rico (PRPA por sus siglas en inglés) participaron el martes, en una llamada con el Comité de Transportación e Infraestructura de la Cámara de Representantes Federal, Subcomité de Aviación.

El gobierno de Puerto Rico discutió la llegada de pasajeros y turistas a la isla durante este momento de preocupación por la salud pública en medio de la pandemia del COVID-19.

“Estamos muy preocupados por esta situación y el aumento en los casos de COVID-19 que estamos viendo, y así expresamos esas preocupaciones al Subcomité de Aviación y la FAA”, dijo la directora ejecutiva de la Administración de Asun-

tos Federales de Puerto Rico, Jennifer Storipan., Esq en comunicación escrita.

“Tenemos una gran diáspora en el estado de Florida, con la cual estoy muy familiarizada ya que PRFAA le brinda servicios a miles en nuestra oficina regional, no obstante, es vital controlar temporalmente a los pasajeros que vienen a nuestra isla desde estos hot spots para proteger a las personas que viven en la isla”, continuó.

“Queremos continuar estableciendo diálogos con el gobierno federal en aras de establecer soluciones creativas dentro de un marco legal viable,” dijo el director ejecutivo de la Autoridad de Puertos de Puerto Rico, Joel Pizá-Batiz.

“Confiamos en que nuestras contrapartes federales tomarán las medidas correspondientes para proteger mejor a la gente de Puerto Rico”, concluyó.

Presidente de la Cámara lamenta muerte de profesor Carlos Colón de Armas Por THE STAR

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l presidente de la Cámara de Representantes, Carlos ‘Johnny’ Méndez Núñez, lamentó el martes, el fallecimiento del profesor en economía y apasionado defensor de la estadidad, Carlos Colón De Armas.

“Puerto Rico hoy perdió una de las mentes más privilegiadas de los últimos 40 años. Sus contribuciones a la economía, desde puestos en el gobierno, como vicepresidente del Banco de Desarrollo Económico a finales de los noventa, así como su labor en la Autoridad de Transportación y Carreteras y sus brillantes columnas en múltiples medios de comunicación, tanto en Puerto Rico como a nivel nacional, será parte de un legado que perdurará por generaciones”, dijo Méndez Núñez en comunicación escrita.

“Carlos fue un apasionado defensor del derecho de todos los ciudadanos americanos nacidos en

Puerto Rico a alcanzar la admisión. Luchó con tenacidad y perseverancia para promover el ideal de la estadidad y esa contribución a nuestra causa jamás será olvidada”, añadió.

“A nombre de la Cámara de Representantes que

me honro en presidir, así como el de mi familia, extendemos a la familia y amigos de Carlos nuestro más sentido pésame y oramos por su familia y amistades. Hasta luego Carlos, vas a hacer mucha falta”, concluyó.

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Wednesday, August 5, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

The wild story of Creem, once ‘America’s only Rock ’n’ Roll magazine’

By MIKE RUBIN

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n Jaan Uhelszki’s first day at Creem magazine in October 1970, she met a fellow new hire: Lester Bangs, a freelance writer freshly arrived from California to fill the post of record reviews editor.

His plaid three-piece suit made him look like an awkward substitute teacher, she thought, and certainly out of place among the hippies and would-be revolutionaries using the publication’s decrepit Detroit office as a crash pad.

Uhelszki, still a teenager, was majoring in journalism at nearby Wayne State University, and had been sent to the fledgling rock magazine by editors at the student newspaper. “They said with a sneer, ‘We can’t publish you, you don’t have any clips, but Creem will publish anybody, why don’t you go walk down the street,’” Uhelszki said in a phone interview. “So my first clips were Creem. I started at the top.”

She’d arrived at the headquarters of “America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine,” as Creem’s front covers would soon proclaim. What began as an underground newspaper soon evolved under Bangs, editor Dave Marsh and publisher Barry Kramer into a boisterous, irreverent, boundary-smashing monthly that was equal parts profound and profane. During his half-decade at Creem, Bangs would publish many of the pharmaceutically fueled exegeses that made him “America’s greatest rock critic” — including his epic three-part interview with his hero/nemesis Lou Reed. By 1976, it had a circulation of more than 210,000, second only to Rolling Stone.

The magazine’s roller-coaster arc and its lasting impact on the culture is the subject of a spirited new documentary directed by Scott Crawford, “Creem: America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine,” which Uhelszki co-wrote and helped produce. The film opens Friday for virtual cinema and limited theatrical release, and comes to video on demand Aug. 28.

As a teenager, Crawford bought old issues of Creem from used bookstores near his home outside Washington, D.C. His first film was “Salad Days,” a 2014 documentary about the city’s hardcore punk scene.

“I was aware of the personalities involved,” he said of the Creem crew. “I’d heard stories over the years of their fights, literal fistfights, so I knew that this would make for a hell of a film because in addition to how much they contributed to music journalism, a lot of the writers were just as interesting as the artists that they covered.”

The documentary traces how Creem’s high-intensity environment mirrored that of the late 1960s Detroit rock scene, which was centered around the heavy guitar assault of bands like the MC5, the Stooges and Alice

In an undated image provided to The New York Times, an assortment of covers from Creem’s history. A new documentary traces the rise and fall of the irreverent, boundary-smashing music publication where Lester Bangs did some of his most famous work.

Cooper. Barry Kramer, a working-class Jewish kid with a chip on his shoulder and a volatile temper, was a key local figure: He owned the record store-cum-head shops Mixed Media and Full Circle.

“I liked Barry a great deal, and in fact I wanted him to manage the MC5,” the band’s guitarist Wayne Kramer, who is not a relation, said in a phone interview. (He also handled original music for the film.) “He had a vision and saw ways that this emerging counterculture could be monetized.”

The original idea for Creem came from a clerk at Mixed Media, Tony Reay, who persuaded Barry Kramer to put $1,200 into the venture, which began in March 1969. When cartoonist Robert Crumb wandered into Mixed Media in need of cash, Reay offered him $50 to draw the cover of issue No. 2. Crumb’s illustration included an anthropomorphized bottle of cream exclaiming “Boy Howdy!,” which became the magazine’s mascot and catchphrase.

Reay soon departed over creative differences, and the magazine briefly took on a more political flavor, thanks to Marsh, a 19-year-old Wayne State student. The arrival of Bangs in 1970 was explosive.

“They both had different ideas of what Creem should be,” Uhelszki said. “Lester just saw us as bozo provocateurs, and David wanted it to be a more political magazine and saw us as foot soldiers of the counterculture.”

Rolling Stone felt comparatively stuffy, preoccupied with movies and politics and reluctant to cover loud and snotty subcultural movements like punk and metal, whereas Creem’s pages first coined those genre’s names: “punk rock” by Marsh, about ? and the Mysterians, and “heavy metal” by Mike Saunders, about Sir Lord Baltimore, both in the May 1971 issue.

The reader mail page provided a ribald frisson between the writers and their audience. The most infamous exchange came in 1977, after writer Rick Johnson opened his review of the second Runaways album, “Queens of Noise,” by declaring “These bitches suck.

That’s all there is to it.” An infuriated Joan Jett visited the Creem office to confront him; when told Johnson wasn’t there, she settled the score in the letters column.

Musicians were not only the subject of the publication, they were often its authors; Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye became contributors. And Creem writers sometimes scaled the fourth wall themselves. J. Geils Band singer Peter Wolf invited Bangs to “play” his typewriter onstage; Uhelszki was gussied up by Kiss in full “Hotter Than Hell” makeup and played (unplugged) guitar onstage for her August 1975 story “I Dreamed I Was Onstage With Kiss in My Maidenform Bra.” Uhelszki said making the documentary revealed that musicians devoted to the magazine were empowered by what they read. “The people who made the magazine, we thought we were equals to the bands in the early years,” she said. “Rock stars were just like us but they had better clothes than we did.”

As the 1970s expired, all the hard partying took a toll. Bangs, who had departed Detroit and Creem in 1976 for New York, died of an accidental painkiller overdose in 1982. After a long spiral of drinking and drugging, Barry Kramer overdosed on nitrous oxide in 1981. He left the magazine to his 4-year-old son, JJ, who was listed on the masthead as the chairman of the board.

An intellectual-property lawyer, JJ Kramer spent 20 years gathering the rights to the old material, and is eager to make the magazine’s archive available for a new generation. To coincide with the film’s release, a limitededition best-of-Creem issue will be available on newsstands on Nov. 1, and additional print editions are being considered, as well as a TV show.

“I view the documentary as very much the beginning, not the end,” he said. “We’re all looking for something to capture our attention and our passion, so to me that feels like a really strong signal that the world might need Creem more than ever.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

21

Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’ is No. 1 with a blockbuster debut week

Taylor Swift threw out almost her entire playbook for “Folklore,” yet still rocketed to the top of the Billboard album chart.

By BEN SISARIO

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new Taylor Swift album usually arrives with a monthslong marketing rollout: radio singles, corporate tieins, a string of media appearances — all carefully choreographed to send her to No. 1.

For her latest release, “Folklore,” Swift threw out almost her entire playbook, yet still rocketed to the top with sales that most artists can only dream of.

“Folklore,” which came out on July 24 with less than 24 hours’ notice, opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s latest album chart with a whopping 846,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen Music. That’s the third-highest weekly total for any album in four years, beaten only by

Swift’s last two albums: “Reputation” (1.2 million in 2017) and “Lover” (867,000 a year ago).

By comparison, Drake’s “Scorpion,” a monster streaming hit, opened with the equivalent of 732,000 sales in 2018, while Kendrick Lamar’s “DAMN.” notched 603,000 the year before that.

Selling more than 1 million copies in a single week — once a Swift specialty — may no longer be possible in the streaming era, but through canny marketing Swift has kept her numbers as high as almost anyone can. (One exception: Adele, who had stratospheric numbers the last time around, and has a new album in the works.)

“Folklore” may also be one of the last blockbuster releases to take full advantage of one of Nielsen and Billboard’s

most contested rules, over the so-called bundling of albums — selling a copy of an album along with another item, like merchandise or a concert ticket. Billboard is set to stop counting most of these deals in October.

When her album was announced, Swift’s website was fully primed to deliver her album in an array of deals for items like a $49 cardigan and a $15 phone stand. In addition, Swift sold 17 physical versions of “Folklore” — eight CDs, eight LPs and a cassette tape — that surely lured large numbers of collectors and fans. Swift’s 846,000 sales total is a composite number that includes 615,000 copies sold as a full album.

Yet Swift’s surprise release strategy brought its own momentum, and in the days after its release it was a legitimate

sensation online — as well as a critics’ favorite, for the most part — that drew 290 million streams. The “Folklore” single “Cardigan” also debuted at No. 1 on the Hot 100.

Swift did manage to avoid one piece of potential competition in her opening week. Kanye West, her eternal celebrity nemesis, had announced a new album, “Donda: With Child,” for the same day, but so far it has not materialized.

Also this week, Logic’s “No Pressure” opened at No. 2 with the equivalent of 221,000 sales. Juice WRLD’s “Legends Never Die” falls to No. 3 after two weeks at the top, and another posthumous rap album, Pop Smoke’s “Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon,” is No. 4. The “Hamilton” Broadway cast album is No. 5.

FASHION The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, March 4, 2020 Wednesday, August 5, 2020 20 22

The TheSan SanJuan JuanDaily DailyStar Star

Secondhand shoppers worry about their favorite local spots

The exterior of Crossroads Trading, a consignment store with used and new clothing, in Studio City, Calif., July 23, 2020.

By JESSICA SCHIFFER

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or the last four months, Laurie Sigelman, an accountant in her late 40s who lives in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles, has been waiting impatiently for her favorite stores on Melrose Avenue to reopen.

It isn’t a fresh pair of Newbury boots from Rag & Bone or a summery sheath from Marc Jacobs that she’s been gunning for, but their timeworn, wallet-friendly counterparts lining the shelves at resale shops like Wasteland and Crossroads Trading Co. “I’m allergic to paying retail prices,” Sigelman said over the phone while driving around to check in on her favorite secondhand spots, an almost daily ritual.

The heightened focus on hygiene and worries about contamination since the pandemic have not changed that, she said.

“I’ve done my research, and I’m not at all reticent,” she said.

“The virus doesn’t seem to sit on a piece of clothing for very long.”

Sigelman is one of a select group of shoppers whose loyalty to the secondhand market, with its good deals, ecological cred and emphasis on individual style (in a world dominated by copycat fast fashion), will not be swayed by the coronavirus.

Online resellers like Poshmark and Thredup have thrived during the pandemic, providing the stir-crazy and housebound with an easy closet clean-out option through the mail. But for some secondhand shoppers, nothing can compare to the hunt IRL. Michelle Plantan, a social media director living in the Venice section of Los Angeles who has bought a few items of vintage clothing on online platforms and Instagram over the past few months, said the experience just doesn’t compare to the in-store search.

“There’s so much magic in just browsing and trying on pieces in real life,” Plantan, 31, said. “And when shopping secondhand or vintage, you really want to see the fabric and quality up close, which is harder to do online.”

Determining sizes can also be hard on online platforms,

given that many secondhand and vintage items have been previously worn or were made by older brands with different sizing systems.

“When you buy a used pair of Diesel jeans, they’re not going to fit the same way they would if they were brand-new,” said Gabriel Block, chief executive of Crossroads Trading Co., a resale chain founded in 1991 that has 37 locations in the United States.

Still, online resellers are well on their way to winning over any reluctant consumers, with the category expected to jump from $30 million in the United States this year to $70 million by 2027, according to research from Future Market Insights, a retail analytics firm. If that comes to pass, the online market will outpace traditional in-store thrift and resale, which is expected to drop from $57 million this year to $50 million by 2027.

The pandemic, which has decimated the sales of many small businesses, if not closed them entirely, may well accelerate this shift.

“I’m worried about the viability of these businesses existing in big cities like New York and Los Angeles,” said Jessica Tran, founder of Ghost Vintage, which has sold predominantly at outdoor thrift markets in New York and, now, online. “It seems far-fetched that they’ll be able to keep paying rent with a possible second wave and people shopping less.”

Shopping for clothing of any kind has been scaled back over the last few months, with factors like unemployment (now 11.1%) and a recent rise in coronavirus cases slowing reopenings across the country. According to a July survey from Mintel, 33% of people have stopped buying clothes entirely, while 32% have concerns about shopping for clothes in a store.

This bleak reality, however, has led some of the secondhand market’s most loyal shoppers to view continued in-store shopping as a moral imperative to keep the small businesses that underpin the market alive.

“It’s personal for me to support them and see how they’re doing because I’ve shopped there so much,” Sigelman said. She is on a first-name basis with the staff at many of the secondhand shops scattered across Los Angeles, where she has found treasured pieces like an Alexander McQueen peplum blazer for $750 and a pair of Ann Demeulemeester boots for $50.

At resale chains like Buffalo Exchange, Crossroads Trading Co. and Wasteland, which are more corporate than one-off, hole-in-the-wall shops, in-store capacity has been reduced to about 50%, with fitting rooms closed and extended return policies implemented to make up for the inability to try things on.

Masks and social distancing are required, with many locations using signs and floor stickers to guide traffic in an effort to eliminate the usual jams. Items carried around the store but not purchased get quarantined in the back for 24 hours, a timeout that owners aren’t even sure is necessary. Many stores are discouraging or outright refusing cash payments to lessen contamination risk.

Some of these new guidelines seem moot: Many businesses report doing 50% or less of their pre-pandemic business on a good day, with no expectations of that number increasing anytime soon.

“People are still trying to get used to this new normal, figuring out how to do the things they used to do in a different way, and if they even want to,” said Block of Crossroads.

Inventory, though, is high, with time-rich and moneystrapped customers eager to clean out their closets for cash or credit. Wasteland, a California chain known for selling the offloaded designer pieces of celebrity stylists and costume designers, had two of its stores in Los Angeles looted during the George Floyd protests in May, leaving both locations nearly empty. But after a few weeks, the stores were fully restocked.

Before the pandemic, lines to sell at many of these stores trickled out the door and around the block, often with an anticlimactic conclusion (most buyers are picky, with $30 considered a high payout). With selling now moved to appointment only at most of these stores, with a 40-to-50-piece limit on the number of items sellers can bring in, friction on both sides of the exchange has been lessened.

“We’re finding that customers are actually bringing us a better selection of clothing to start with than they were before,” said Rebecca Block, vice president of Buffalo Exchange (and Gabriel Block’s cousin). The chains are now considering implementing this format permanently.

Clothing sold to these stores is placed on hold for 24 hours, in the hopes that any viral contamination lingering on the fabric will dissipate before it goes on sale. Shoes and sunglasses get sprayed with disinfectant where possible. It’s a tedious, uncertain process but one that store owners believe they can’t afford not to do.

Research on how the coronavirus interacts with different surfaces is still in its infancy and has been largely inconclusive, particularly when it comes to fabric, but most experts say that aerodynamics make it unlikely for a droplet of the virus to settle on clothing and that, if it does, it may not survive very long.

Still, of all the industries grappling with newfound shopper hesitations, the secondhand market may be most familiar with such stigmas: It’s a market that customers have historically either loved or found Windex-worthy. Even before the pandemic, 55% of shoppers worried about cleanliness when buying pre-owned items, according to Mintel, the market research firm.

“There’s long been a taboo around shopping secondhand; people see it as dirty and time-consuming,” said Tran of Ghost Vintage. “My own mother used to tell me I could get diseases from shopping vintage!”

The 2008 recession and subsequent price consciousness in consumers made discount-driven flash-sale sites like Gilt and Groupon more popular. This time around, it will be the secondhand market that thrives as a cheaper option that has the added benefit of being better for the environment, said Alexis DeSalva, a senior research analyst at Mintel.

Those perks are expected to outweigh any distaste shoppers have for used goods, which sites like eBay, Etsy and TheRealReal have helped assuage.

“All of this time at home has left people considering how wasteful the fashion industry is,” DeSalva said. “When people do treat themselves during this period, they can rationalize it more when it’s better for both their wallets and the environment.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

23

How to handle anxiety over back-to-school decisions

By POOJA LAKSHMIN

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combination of dread, panic and sheer exhaustion. This is what I see on the faces of patients (and friends and colleagues) when the conversation turns to the most pressing topic on every parent’s mind: what to do about school in the fall.

I’m a psychiatrist specializing in women’s mental health, and I have yet to speak to anyone who feels satisfied with the options presented to them or who feels particularly confident in the choices they’ve made.

The information on children and the coronavirus has been evolving since March, with the most recent data suggesting that children are less likely to become infected by the virus and less likely to have a severe course when infected. But, those words “less likely” suggest that children are at some, albeit smaller, risk.

And, the United States still has not come up with an adequate solution to protect teachers, many of whom are high risk.

As I see it, school stress for parents boils down to two main points: Deciding what to do, and then what to do with the uncomfortable feelings that could arise after that decision. As a psychiatrist, I’m admittedly not so helpful when it comes to the decision of whether to send your kids to in-classroom learning this fall. Where I can help is how to deal with the uncertainty and difficult feelings that accompany this process.

A risk assessment system, like the one described by Emily Oster, Ph.D., a professor of economics and public policy at Brown University, can be a useful guide when making decisions with scarce data. Instead of focusing on the illusion of “one right answer,” this framework can give you a reliable process for making hard parenting decisions by focusing on evaluating and mitigating risks, and assessing benefits. While no parent is feeling particularly confident about the school options available to them, it is possible to feel good about the process you use to make those decisions.

In an interview, Oster wrote, “By making clear the choices, the costs and benefits, we can reason our way to better decisions.

But I really think even more important is the fact that we can make our way to more confidence in these decisions by articulating a good process.”

Once you’ve delineated a plan, then you’re faced with the task of coping with the onslaught of feelings, like worry, guilt, fear and uncertainty. For this, here are some strategies, many of which come from acceptance and commitment therapy, a form of behavioral therapy that teaches people to accept their difficult thoughts and feelings as opposed to struggling against them, and to prioritize taking actions that are in line with their values.

Accept uncertainty Part of healthy emotional coping during a pandemic is to accept that you will feel conflicted about the decisions that are in front of you. The truth is that even your pediatrician can’t make guarantees or promises.

Rachel Pearson, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of pediatrics at UT Health San Antonio, part of the University of Texas System, said: “I wish so much that I could give parents certainty.

I wish so much that there was abundant solid data that I could point to saying this is how we’re going to keep the kids safe and our community safe.”

It’s helpful to remember that in times of chaos, the dogged search for certainty can itself lead to distress. Pearson pointed out

While parents may be feeling unsure about school options this fall, there are ways to feel better as you make the tough decision. that the goal is not to guarantee that your child will never be exposed to a virus particle. That is impossible. The goal is to make a realistic plan that will holistically keep teachers, families and children as safe as possible.

Distinguish between productive and unproductive worries Spending time considering how you will navigate the logistics of blended learning come fall is productive if you are engaged in problem solving and making concrete decisions. Ruminating about the social distancing precautions each family in your kid’s school is taking is less productive, for you don’t have any control there. Especially in times of uncertainty, it’s seductive to believe that if you worry about something for long enough, you can affect the outcome, but this is a fallacy.

Stop fighting with your feelings Many of my patients are coming to me asking how they can get rid of that nagging feeling that they aren’t making the right choice for their kids. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s not how feelings work. You can’t just turn them off.

To be a parent during a pandemic is to be worried and uncomfortable. But the good news is that it’s not the worry itself that’s the problem, it’s what you do with it. When those unproductive worries or overwhelming feelings arise, do you let them drag you down into doomscrolling or reassurance seeking? If you fall into these habits, practice getting space by doing daily exercises to create psychological distance.

One strategy for distancing is called defusion. The goal is to avoid being “hooked” by any one thought or feeling, and instead to view yourself as an observer of your mind. You can imagine that your thoughts are like leaves, floating down a stream, or like plates of sushi, moving along a conveyor belt. When your mind starts moving into the slippery slope of unproductive worries, try naming them: “There goes my mind again.” This highlights the difference between “having a thought” and “buying a thought.” When unproductive worries strike, you don’t have to go down that rabbit hole of trying to disprove them or reassure yourself. You can just let them be. It’s not bad feelings or thoughts that are the problem.

It’s what we do with them that causes more suffering.

Cultivate compassion Instead of spending time chasing certainty and secondguessing your decisions, work on being self-compassionate;

nurture a sense of goodwill toward yourself for facing this hard decision. Monitoring your self-talk is a key component of selfcompassion. Are you holding yourself to an impossible standard by trying to predict the future? Are you blaming yourself for a situation that is completely out of your control? Let go of self-judgment and try developing some positive self-talk, such as: “I’m making the best choice for my family with the information I have” or “This decision works for us and our level of risk tolerance.”

Pay attention to grief For some parents, their grief and guilt around a lost school year has morphed into obsessive researching or catastrophizing. It can be less confronting to rage over the prospect of more homeschooling than to let yourself feel the sadness of your child not getting to have a full kindergarten experience. Recently, one of my patients broke down crying because she wouldn’t be able to see her son’s pre-K classroom and because he wasn’t allowed to decorate his cubby. We realized that her grief was masquerading as anxiety, and once she let herself feel that sadness she felt some relief.

Practice flexible thinking Many parents haven’t yet heard about what’s happening at their children’s schools for the fall. Others have been told schools are reopening with remote learning or some in-classroom work, but this is subject to community virus levels and how social-distancing measures can realistically be implemented. Psychological flexibility refers to one’s ability to recognize and respond to changing demands in real time. A study conducted during the pandemic found that people with a low capacity for flexibility are at higher risk for mental health issues.

Psychological flexibility is a skill that is worth honing for parents in particular, experts say. One way to nurture flexibility is to reflect on other situations in your life when you’ve been faced with uncertainty and unexpected change. What helped you get through those times? What did you learn about yourself?

Focus on your values and find sources of meaning Instead of thinking about the ways in which the upcoming school year may not measure up, or what your family has lost, connect with your values. If you weren’t worried or ruminating about the school year, what else could you be doing?

Five years from now, how would you like to have shown up for your family during the pandemic? How do you want your children to remember this time? Put your energy into what’s working and what’s meaningful to you.

One of my patients will be sending her son to prekindergarten in a classroom with 10 other students. She already knows five of the families and has been doing social-distanced play dates in preparation for the fall. Instead of ruminating about the five families she doesn’t know, my patient is actively focusing on how happy to her son is to be with friends. While not all families have the luxury of a small class size, taking positive action forward in a way that is aligned with your values helps take your mind off the lack of control and certainty.

When it comes to parenting, every risk feels too big. The global pandemic has only intensified what parents everywhere have long known: Parenting is an exercise in surrender. Developing these coping skills will not only help you to buoy yourself during these uncertain times, they’ll also serve you well into the future.

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Wednesday, August 5, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Lizard popsicles, anyone?

In an undated photo from Joshua Rapp Learn, a Liolaemus magellanicus lizard in El Chalten, near Mount Fitz Roy in Argentina.

By JOSHUA RAPP LEARN

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tephan Halloy was conducting surveys on plants and wildlife on the high plateaus around San Miguel de Tucumán in northwestern Argentina in the 1970s when he first encountered lizard popsicles.

The mountains around the Argentine city climb rapidly to elevations of 13,000 to 16,400 feet, packing a multitude of ecological niches into a relatively small area. The plateaus at the top can be hot in the afternoon but quickly drop to below freezing at night — not exactly the type of place you would expect to find a lizard.

Nonetheless, Halloy, now a senior adviser with the New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries, caught a few and placed them in a box outside his tent overnight. “When I opened the box the next morning they were hard as wood — you couldn’t bend them,” Halloy recalled recently. “They looked absolutely dead.”

But once the sun came up, the lizards began to thaw and were soon running around in the box just like normal.

“Obviously I found that very surprising,” Halloy said.

In the 1990s, Robert Espinoza, a biologist at Cal-

ifornia State University, Northridge, heard this story from Halloy, and he has been studying lizard popsicles ever since. The lizards belong to the genus Liolaemus, and research by Espinoza and his colleagues has revealed that the lizards are indisputably the coolest on the planet — able to supercool their bodies, tolerate freezing and live farther south and at higher elevations than any other known lizard species.

“They’re real record holders,” Espinoza said.

Liolaemus species have been found on the island of Tierra del Fuego, at the southern end of the Americas, and one researcher has even heard stories of them walking on Perito Moreno, a glacier in Patagonia. Most Liolaemus are found in Argentina and Chile, although some are found as far north as Peru.

Containing more than 272 documented species, Liolaemus is the second-largest genus among all mammals, birds and reptiles, after only anoles, another type of lizard.

Espinoza is still investigating how these lizards survive such cold climates. In one experiment, his team fitted models of lizards, made of hollow copper, with temperature loggers and placed them at one area at 13,369 feet in Salta province. The models recorded temperatures as low as minus 11.2 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface and 15.8 Fahrenheit underground. (The lizards usually spend the night

in burrows.)

The team then tested the cold adaptations of six species from varying elevations. They found that some could survive cooling as low as 21.2 degrees Fahrenheit, although Espinoza suspects that wild lizards can withstand colder temperatures. Liolaemus huacahuasicus, the species that Halloy initially encountered, lives on a mountain about 1,640 feet higher than the highest species Espinoza looked at — a presumably colder area.

Halloy noted in a 1989 publication that Liolaemus huacahuasicus could survive freezing at 14 degrees Fahrenheit but only when at an elevation of 13,944 feet; the lizards died when cooled to 26.6 degrees Fahrenheit at tests conducted at 1,476 feet.

Espinoza and his co-authors found that Liolaemus lizards have adapted abilities to deal with the cold through three mechanisms. Some lizards avoid extreme cold by going underground. Others use a process of supercooling; by staying completely still, they can allow their bodies to drop below freezing without actually freezing solid. Finally, some can also tolerate full-body freezing for short periods of time. Espinoza said that some Liolaemus species likely made use of more than one mechanism, depending on the conditions.

The strategy of full-body freezing is quite likely similar to that seen in North American wood frogs, which stay frozen over winter thanks to an antifreezelike glucose solution that protects the cells; Espinoza still needs to investigate this hypothesis to be sure.

The world’s southernmost gecko, Darwin’s marked gecko, another Argentine lizard that Espinoza has studied, most likely adopts the supercooling strategy.

The reason Liolaemus lizards can withstand such cold temperatures and high elevations may also explain why there are so many of the lizards.

Whereas there were only about 50 described to science when Halloy worked on them in the late 1970s, there are now 272 species.

Espinoza and others have discovered a number of species, and his occasional co-author Fernando Lobo, a zoologist at the National University of Salta in Argentina, has discovered 30 or more species of Liolaemus and its close cousin, the genus Phymaturus. In one case, Lobo discovered a species under his tent, in cloudy, frozen weather in the Argentine province of Santa Cruz near the Chilean border.

“They didn’t look like any of the others,” Lobo said. “We suspected they were a new one. We’ve had that excitement dozens of times in these 25 years.”

At the current rate of discovery, Liolaemus will likely become the most numerous genus of living mammals, reptiles and birds in coming years.

The San Juan Daily Star oírles. La abogada de la parte demandante es la Lcdo. GerarESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO do M. Ortiz Torres, cuya direcDE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- ción física y postal es: Cond. El NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA Centro I, Suite 801, 500 Muñoz SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN Rivera Ave., San Juan, Puerto JUAN. Rico 00918; cuyo número de teléfono es (787) 946-5268, el AMERICAS LEADING facsímile (787) 946-0062 y su FINANCE, LLC correo electrónico es: gerarDemandante, v. do@bellverlaw.com. Expedido JOSÉ LUIS LÓPEZ bajo mi firma y sello de este RODRÍGUEZ, SU ESPOSA Tribunal, a 28 de julio de 2020.

FULANA DE TAL Y LA Griselda Rodriguez Collado, Secretaria Regional. Sonia I RiSOCIEDAD LEGAL vera Gambaro, Sec del Tribunal DE GANANCIALES Confidencial.

LEGAL NOTICE

COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandados CIVIL NÚM.: SJ2020CV03229.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA Y EJECUCIÓN DE GRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO (REPOSESIÓN DE VEHÍCULO). EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. DE AMERICA EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO SS.

A: JOSÉ LUIS LÓPEZ RODRÍGUEZ, SU ESPOSA, FULANA DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS.

Quedan emplazados y notificados que en este Tribunal se ha radicado Demanda sobre cobro de dinero por la vía ordinaria en la que se alega que los demandados, José Luis López Rodríguez, su esposa, Fulana de Tal y la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales compuesta por ambos, le adeudan solidariamente al Americas Leading Finance, LLC, la suma de principal de $8,415.22, más los intereses que continúen acumulando, las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado según pactados.

Además, solicitamos de este Honorable Tribunal que autorice la reposesión y/o embargo del Vehículo. Se les advierte que este edicto se publicará en un periódico de circulación general una sola vez y que, si no comparecen a contestar dicha Demanda dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación del Edicto, a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https:// unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia concediendo el remedio así solicitado sin más citarles ni

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LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN.

AMERICAS LEADING FINANCE LLC Demandante, v.

WILNELIA BERRIOS ORTIZ, SU ESPOSO FULANO DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Wednesday, August 5, 2020 Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia concediendo el remedio así solicitado sin más citarles ni oírles. La abogada de la parte demandante es la Lcdo. Gerardo M. Ortiz Torres, cuya dirección física y postal es: Cond. El Centro I, Suite 801, 500 Muñoz Rivera Ave., San Juan, Puerto Rico 00918; cuyo número de teléfono es (787) 946-5268, el facsímile (787) 946-0062 y su correo electrónico es: gerardo@bellverlaw. com. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal, en Bayamon, Puerto Rico, hoy día 28 de julio de 2020. Lcda. Laura I Santa Sanchez, Secretaria Regional. Amalyn Figueroa Nieves, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL. DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA Demandados SALA SUPERIOR DE FAJARCIVIL NÚM.: BY2020CV01857. DO. SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO MIDFIRST BANK POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA Y Demandante vs.

EJECUCIÓN DE GRAVAMEN LA SUCESION DE MOBILIARIO (REPOSESIÓN EDUARDO MARIN DE VEHÍCULO). EMPLAZARIVERA COMPUESTA MIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL POR SUS HEREDEROS PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. EDITH ANYINIT MARIN DE AMERICA EL ESTADO LIMALDONADO, ENITH BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO MARIN MALDONADO RICO. SS.

A: Wilnelia Berrios Ortiz, su esposo, Fulano de Tal y la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales compuesta por ambos.

Quedan emplazados y notificados que en este Tribunal se ha radicado Demanda sobre cobro de dinero por la vía ordinaria en la que se alega que los demandados, Wilnelia Berrios Ortiz, su esposo, Fulano de Tal y la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales compuesta por ambos, le adeudan solidariamente al Americas Leading Finance, LLC, la suma de principal de $15,178.06, más los intereses que continúen acumulando, las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado según pactados. Además, solicitamos de este Honorable Tribunal que autorice la reposesión y/o embargo del Vehículo.

Se les advierte que este edicto se publicará en un periódico de circulación general una sola vez y que, si no comparecen a contestar dicha Demanda dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación del Edicto, a través del Sistema

Y SUS HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DENOMINADOS COMO FULANO DE TAL y SUTANA DE TAL, LA SUCESION DE LILLIAM MALDONADO SERRANO t/c/c LILLIAN MALDONADO SERRANO COMPUESTA POR SUS HEREDEROS EDITH ANYINIT MARIN MALDONADO, ENITH MARIN MALDONADO Y SUS HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DENOMINADOS COMO JOE Doe y RICHARD DOE, y CENTRO. DE RECAUDACIÓN DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (CRIM)

Demandados CIVIL NÚM: FA2020CV00434 (303). SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANA DE TAL COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESIÓN EBUAROO MARIN RIVERA Y JOE DOE Y RICHARD DOE COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA. SUCESION DE LILLIAM MALDONADO SERRANO t/c/c LILLIAN MALDONADO SERRANO Dirección Desconocida

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza y se le notifica que se ha presentado en Secretarla de este Tribuna! la Demanda del caso de epígrafe solicitando la ejecución de hipoteca y el cobro de dinero relacionado al pagaré suscrito a favor de Pan American Financiar Corporation o a su orden, por ~a suma principal de $89,294.00 más intereses computados sobre la misma desde su fecha hasta su total y completo pa~o a.razón de la tasa fija de 6.5 % anual, obligándose además a tres (3) pagos ·de $8,929.40 por concepto de costas, gastos y, desembolsos de litigio, más honorarios de abogados, y 4.00% por concepto de cargos por demora después de tos quince (15) días de vencimiento del pago. Este pagaré fue suscrito bajo et affidávit 1969 ante notario público José M. Birriel Barreto. Lo anterior surge de la hipoteca constituida mediante escritura número 144 otorgada en Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, el dla 23 de Junio de 2003, ante notario José M. BlHiel Barreta. Se les advierte que este edicto se publicará en un (1) periódico de circulación general una (1) sola vez. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos ‘(SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramaludicial. pr,salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegaclón responsiva en la secretarla del tribunal y· notifique copia de la Contestación a la Demanda a las oficinas del Ledo. Juan B. Soto Balbás, RUA Número: 7340, JUAN . B. SOTO LAW OFFICES, P.S.C ., 1353 Ave. Luis Vigoreaux, PMB 270 , Guaynabo , PR 00966, TEL: (787) 273-0611, FAX: (7.87) 273~1540, E-mail: lsoto@jbsblaw.com, abogado de la parte demandante dentro del término de sesenta (60) días a partir de la publicación del Edicto, apercibiendo que de no hacerlo así

(787) 743-3346

25 dentro del término indicado, el Tribunal podrá anotar su Rebeldía y dictar Sentencia, concediendo el remedio asl solicitado sin más citarte ni oírle. EXPEDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y el Sello del Tribunal, hoy día 27 de julio de.2020. Wanda l. Segui Reyes, Sec Regional. Ivelisse Serrano Garcia, SubSecretaria.

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

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante v.

YANITZA SERRANO VIRUET POR SI Y EN REPRESENTACION DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR ESTA Y FULANO DE TAL Y OTROS

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. AR2019CV02110.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO ORDINARIO .NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: YANITZA SERRANO VIRUET, FULANO DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 17 de julio de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 17 de julio de 2020. En ARECIBO, Puerto Rico, el 17 de julio de 2020.

VIVIAN Y FRESSE GONZALEZ, Secretario(a). F/BRUNILDA HERNANDEZ MENDEZ, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

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

MARISOL ELIZABETH BONILLA PINEDA Demandante v.

VICTOR FRANCISCO

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. SJ2020RF00042.

Sobre: DIVORCIO, RUPTURA IRREPARABLE. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: VICTOR FRANCISCO

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 28 de julio de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 31 de julio de 2020. En SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, el 31 de julio de 2020.

GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, Secretario(a). Melliam Collazo Huertas, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

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

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante v.

SECRETARIO DE LA VIVIENDA Y DESARROLLO URBANO, ETC

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. TA2019CV00893.

Sobre: CANCELACION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: JOHN DOE & RICHARD ROE

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que sus-

cribe le notifica a usted que el 30 de ENERO de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 3 de agosto de 2020. En TOA ALTA, Puerto Rico, el 3 de agosto de 2020.

Lcda. Laura I Santa Sanchez, Secretaria Regional. Gloribell Vazquez Maysonet, Sec del Trib Conf I.

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

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Y OTROS Demandante v.

THELMA ANTIA PAZ MORALES T/C/C THELMA A. PAZ Y OTROS

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. CA2020CV00106.

SALA: 403. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE SENTENCIA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: THELMA ANTIA PAZ MORALES T/C/C THELMA A. PAZ. REEF TOWER CONODMININUM APT. 9-D CAROLINA PR 00979.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 31 de JULIO de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de

la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto.

Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 31 de julio de 2020. En CAROLINA, Puerto Rico, el 31 de JULIO de 2020. LCDA. MARILYN APONTE RODRIGUEZ, Secretaria Regional. MARICRUZ APONTE ALICEA, Sec Auxiliar.

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

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante v.

CUNA MUTUAL MORTGAGE CORPORATION, JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. MZ2019CV02160.

Sobre: CANCELACION DE PAGARE. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: CUNA MUTUAL MORTGAGE CORPORATION, JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 23 de JULIO de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 3 de agosto de 2020. En MAYAGUEZ, Puerto Rico, el 3 de agosto de 2020.

LCDA. NORMA G.SANTANA IRIZARRY, Secretaria Regional. F/BETSY SANTIAGO GONZALEZ, Sec Auxiliar.

26

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

As the virus spreads through MLB, so does frustration

By TYLER KEPNER Major League Baseball is like a beleaguered landlord with 30 frightened tenants. Flooding in one apartment damages several others. The pipes get fixed, and then mold spreads in the room down the hall. Nobody wants to condemn the building, but everyone knows it might collapse.

So it was Monday, when the Miami Marlins worked out in Baltimore, the Philadelphia Phillies prepared for a game in the Bronx — and the St. Louis Cardinals’ outbreak of positive coronavirus cases swelled to 13, forcing the postponement of four games this week in Detroit.

The Cardinals have been quarantined since Thursday at their hotel in Milwaukee, where their three-game series with the Brewers was postponed last weekend after St. Louis’ first cases were confirmed. MLB announced Monday that seven Cardinals players and six staff members had tested positive, another body blow for the league after 20 people in the Marlins’ traveling party — 18 players and two coaches — tested positive last week.

“I think everyone is trying to look for someone or something to blame, and there isn’t one person or one thing to blame,” Derek Jeter, the Marlins’ chief executive, said Monday. “This is a health crisis that we’re all dealing with — a health crisis that not only our country is dealing with, but our world is dealing with.”

Baseball wants to insulate itself from that world, but its 30 teams are traveling throughout the United States to stage a 60-game season. The league determined that a so-called bubble approach was impractical, and the areas it considered months ago — Arizona, Texas and Florida — to carry out a season in a contained environment have since become hot spots for the virus, anyway. Yet road trips have increased the risk of infection.

“We weren’t perfect,” Marlins manager Don Mattingly said. “We were in Miami for three weeks and we didn’t have one positive. So I think we felt like we were being good at it. Obviously, we weren’t being good enough — and then we got hit in a big way.”

Jeter said the Marlins had been unfairly maligned for playing in Philadelphia on July 26 after they learned of four positive tests within their traveling party; in fact, he said, the Phillies and MLB were also aware of those test results. He also disputed that the Marlins had acted recklessly in Atlanta, where they played two exhibitions before flying to Philadelphia.

Mostly, Jeter said, the Marlins were careless, failing to adhere strictly to mask-wearing and social distancing. While there was “no salacious activity” in Atlanta, he said, some players did leave the hotel for coffee or shopping. The subsequent outbreak, however it originated, has been sobering for a young team.

“If there’s any group that understands the seriousness of what we’re dealing with, it’s our group, because we’ve seen how it’s gone through our clubhouse,” Jeter said. “We’ve talked to our guys once again about the importance of being disciplined on the road. We’ve talked to them over and over again. In terms of giving

“I think everyone is trying to look for someone or something to blame, and there isn’t one person or one thing to blame,” Derek Jeter, the Marlins’ chief executive, said of his team’s outbreak. them warnings, they’ve seen it. It comes down to discipline. I don’t think there’s any secret formula for a team to be successful through this. You have to be extremely disciplined.”

The Marlins’ infected players took a bus home to Miami over the weekend, before the rest of the team left Philadelphia — at last — for Baltimore on Sunday night. To fill out the roster, Michael Hill, the Marlins’ president of baseball operations, brought in six new players and promoted several others, including Eddy Alvarez, a 30-year-old infielder who won a silver medal at the 2014 Winter Olympics as a short-track speedskater and has never played in the majors.

“In our jobs, we always plan for Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, and that’s normally one or two players at a time,” Hill said. “To encounter the numbers that we had to place on the injured list and respond to that has been a challenge.”

The Marlins’ crisis also affected the Phillies, who stayed idle for a week as they underwent extensive testing. A coach and a clubhouse staffer tested positive, but no Phillies players have. First baseman Rhys Hoskins acknowledged Monday that players sometimes wondered if the league was being overly cautious in sidelining them, but he stopped short of blaming the Marlins.

“Look, I think everyone would be lying if they said they weren’t frustrated, but we knew the volatility of the virus coming into the season, and we knew these things were a possibility,” Hoskins said. “Not ideal, but here we are. We get to play again. We’re getting ready to — hopefully — continuously play throughout the rest of the season.”

Phillies manager Joe Girardi said he wondered how sharp his players would be after another unexpected layoff in a year now full of them. Yet he said he felt empathy for the Marlins, not resentment.

“I don’t think it’s something they tried to go out and do,” Girardi said. “There’s 18 players that are affected, and they all want to play and they can’t play for at least two weeks. So I feel for what they’re going through; to have to ride home on a sleeper bus, and their healthy guys probably wondering every day, ‘Am I going to be sick tomorrow? Am I going to be shut down?’ They were locked up in a hotel, basically.

“And the one thing I’ve learned through this, in talking to people, is I think there’s a sense of guilt, sometimes, when a player gets it. And that’s a tough way to live, because there are so many ways to contract this, and a lot of times you don’t know if someone around you has COVID.” That is the strange and sad reality of playing in a pandemic. There are so many ways it can fall apart, and you never know how long you’ll stay safe.

JOSÉ BURGOS Técnico Generadores Gas Propano

787•607•3343

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

27

Aaron Judge is nearly unstoppable. He thinks he can be better.

By JAMES WAGNER

S

ix home runs over five games is more than enough proof that a batter is locked in at the plate. But New York Yankees star outfielder Aaron Judge, perhaps guided by humility or a constant search for perfection, insisted it was not.

After blasting two more home runs Sunday, including a two-run shot in a 9-7 win over the Boston Red Sox, Judge said he was still searching for that final bit of comfort while hitting. Baseball, after all, is a sport of daily failure.

“Locked in for me is if I’m going 5 for 5 every night,” he said. “I still got out a couple times and chased a couple pitches. So there’s some times where I’m not really locked in.”

Those around him, though, felt otherwise.

“There’s a reason he almost won the MVP, and he’s in a groove right now,” said Yankees first baseman Luke Voit, referring to the award Judge narrowly missed out on in 2017. “I’m excited to see what he can do in 60 games this year with how he’s raking right now. He’s a guy you don’t want to take your eyes off when he’s hitting.”

Had the Major League Baseball season started as planned March 26, Judge would not have been on the field, still recuperating from an injury. He fractured his rib during a play in the outfield last September, which led to a partially collapsed lung. He fought through some lingering discomfort in his side and shoulder the rest of the season, the playoffs and throughout the offseason.

The fracture, however, was not identified until spring training, after nearly a dozen tests. So while the start of the MLB season was delayed for four months because of the coronavirus pandemic, Judge used the extra time to recover. When he was cleared by doctors just before summer workouts began July 4, it “lit another fuse” for Judge, Yankees manager Aaron Boone said.

Injuries have kept Judge off the field for parts of the previous two seasons. He missed 45 games in 2018 after a pitch fractured his wrist and was out for 54 games last year with an oblique strain. He still hit 27 home runs with an on-base-plusslugging percentage over .900 in each of those seasons.

“He’s really on a mission right now,” Boone said. “When he got that clean bill of health right before summer camp started and started ramping up, there’s just been an intensity level and an energy level to the work. He’s just a great player that you can tell is feeling really good.”

Judge said Giancarlo Stanton, right, had offered him some hitting tips while carpooling.

Entering Monday’s 6-3 win over the Philadelphia Phillies, who had not played since July 26 because of the ripple effects of the Miami Marlins’ coronavirus outbreak, no one in baseball had more home runs (six) or RBIs (14) or was hitting the ball harder (an average exit velocity of 98.3 mph) than Judge. He was on pace to smash 45 home runs this season — which would amount to (a very unrealistic) 122 over a normal 162-game season.

Judge has accomplished all of this without one of his favorite hitting tools: ingame video. Because of MLB’s health and safety protocols for this season, the replay review room at each stadium is closed to players and coaches at all times to ensure social distancing and to keep them isolated from other personnel. (Following the Houston Astros’ cheating scandal, MLB and the players union have worked on new rules governing these rooms.)

During past games, Judge said that he, like many other players, would run to that room after an at-bat to check his swing or the pitch he swung at or — in his words — slam his fist down and get mad at himself. But now after he makes an out, Judge turns to his companions in the dugout for

their feedback. He said it might even be more helpful than the video that has become so prevalent in modern baseball.

“This is kind of taking us back to the travel ball days,” Judge said.

Case in point: Judge, 28, said he was riding home with his fellow Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton, who is also off to a resounding start after an injury-marred 2019 season, after a recent game and mentioned how he was not hitting some breaking balls properly. Stanton offered a small tip — keep your head down a click longer — which Judge said proved fairly useful.

“We don’t have the video like we usually do,” Judge said. “But now it’s just us, using your teammates’ eyes and your own eyes, and just talking some baseball.”

(Players and coaches can still watch video on MLB-supplied tablets, but not real-time footage from a live game since the content is loaded only before or after games.)

Judge has a few factors working in his favor, too: After starting the season against the defending champion Washington Nationals, the Yankees have faced two opponents (the Baltimore Orioles and the

Red Sox) with poor pitching, and he is sandwiched in the lineup between other talented Yankees’ hitters — 2019 All-Star infielders D.J. LeMahieu and Gleyber Torres, and Stanton.

After possessing MLB’s highest-scoring offense last season, the 8-1 Yankees are off to a similar start this year. Judge said he was simply trying to do his part.

He more than has: Five of his six home runs have given the Yankees the lead.

Entering Monday night’s game, he had homered in five straight games — the first Yankee to do so since Alex Rodriguez in 2007.

Judge did not extend that streak Monday against the Phillies, but he went 2 for 4 — raising his season average to .314 — in support of ace Gerrit Cole, who allowed one run over six innings in his home debut as a Yankee. Gio Urshela had a pivotal three-run homer in the sixth inning.

“For me, right now, it’s about not missing my pitch,” Judge said after Sunday’s game. “Pitchers are making really good pitches and hitting their corners. But when there’s times they leave one over the plate, I’ve got to do some damage on it. Fortunately enough, I’ve been able to do that.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Ja Morant’s dunks are amazing. His misses are even better.

By SCOTT CACCIOLA

J

a Morant of the Memphis Grizzlies had already spent several months showcasing his hops when he and his teammates faced the Los Angeles Lakers in February. By then, Morant’s willingness to challenge some of the NBA’s most towering figures was no secret.

But Morant, 20, was about to take his fearlessness to a new level. As he slipped toward the lane, he caught a backdoor bounce pass and gathered himself before bounding toward the rim.

A defender was impeding his path. Morant behaved as if no one was there at all, even though that no one happened to be Anthony Davis, one of the league’s most ferocious rim protectors.

“Just a guy standing in my way,” Morant said in an interview. “I don’t care about a name or who it is. I’m just trying to finish a play.”

Nearing the apex of his flight, Morant shoved his left forearm into Davis’ neck as he tried to jam the ball over the top of him. He missed in spectacular fashion: The ball banged off the backboard as Davis and Morant tumbled to the court. But the building in Memphis was abuzz.

“The A.D. one was kind of the one where you were like, ‘Oh, wow, he really doesn’t care who’s down there,’” the Grizzlies’ De’Anthony Melton said. “If you’re in his way, you’re in his way.”

A rookie point guard, Morant is leading the Grizzlies in their pursuit of one of the final playoff spots in the NBA’s restart at Walt Disney World in Florida.

But for all the weirdness of the so-called bubble, the atmosphere feels oddly familiar now that Morant is once again soaring for dunks — and not just for the ones he makes.

In only his first season in the league, Morant has pulled off a remarkable feat: Few players have ever made missed dunks look cooler.

“They’re all just so disrespectful,” Melton said.

The aesthetics of Morant’s dunks (both the makes and the misses) are captivating because of his size. In a league populated by redwoods, Morant — listed at 6-foot-3 and 174 pounds — is more of a spruce tree. It is one thing for point

Memphis Grizzlies guard Ja Morant is 6-foot-3 but has dunked on — or at least tried to dunk on — big men like Anthony Davis and Kevin Love. guards to dunk on breakaways, in the open court. It is another thing for someone like Morant to have the confidence to scale the likes of Davis, a 6-foot-10 colossus, and Kevin Love, a 6-foot-8 power forward for the Cleveland Cavaliers whom Morant nearly posterized earlier this season.

“I knew he was athletic, but damn,” Love told reporters after the game. “He legit jumped over me.”

When the Cavaliers hosted the Grizzlies in December, Love had a couple of thoughts that surfaced when Morant collected a loose ball near the 3-point line and began to accelerate toward the basket with a hard dribble.

The first was that Love wanted to draw a charge. (In the past, Love said, the Cavaliers had awarded players $100 for such feats.) The second was fear in the form of a haunting image: the 7-foot2 Frederic Weis getting demolished by Vince Carter at the 2000 Summer Olym-

pics, the so-called dunk of death.

Sure enough, Morant tried to vault himself over Love and spike the ball through the hoop. But the ball ricocheted off the back of the rim and straight into orbit.

“Probably the best missed dunk ever,” the Grizzlies’ Tyus Jones said.

After the play, Love reached down to help bring Morant to his feet, a sign of respect — and relief.

“I was so glad he missed,” Love said.

Pete Pranica, the Grizzlies’ television play-by-play announcer, recalled in an interview how Tony Brothers, one of the referees, made his way to the scorer’s table during a subsequent timeout and shook his head in disbelief. As the season wore on, Pranica advised referees who were new to the Morant experience to stay on high alert.

“You might see something tonight,” Pranica recalled telling them, “that you’ve never seen before.”

When Morant had his near-dunk over the Lakers’ Davis in February, he was on his way to collecting 27 points and 14 assists in a lopsided win. Afterward, he exchanged jerseys with the Lakers’ LeBron James, who called him “super special.”

Four days later, Morant seemed to levitate against the Nets in Brooklyn, corralling an alley-oop lob from Jones before violently misfiring off the back iron. The Nets’ Timothé Luwawu-Cabarrot was whistled for nudging him, and the Grizzlies went on to win by 39. And while the clip of his missed dunk went viral online, Morant avoided watching the replay. He never watches any of them, he said, even though his teammates do.

“I only like makes,” he said. “I don’t get cool points for misses.”

NBA players dunk all the time, but there is still a mystique to the craft — even for the practitioners themselves. In fact, most players can remember their first time. Jones and Melton said they both first dunked as high school freshmen, and their memories are vivid.

Melton, for example, dunked on an alley-oop from a teammate after practice.

“Man, it was exciting,” Melton said.

“Because when you get up there, it changes the whole game. You’ve suddenly got that confidence to finish at the rim, no matter what.”

In that sense, Morant was a late bloomer. He said he did not start dunking until the summer before his senior year of high school.

“It was just a basic rim grazer,” he said. “I’d say it was a hard layup.”

These days, Morant’s misses are tantalizing because he has shown that he can finish, too. He proved as much against the Phoenix Suns in December, when he found himself being defended by Aron Baynes, a 6-foot-10 center, on the perimeter after a switch. Morant seized on the mismatch by taking a couple of aggressive dribbles into the paint, then soaring over Baynes. The dunk came in the final minute of a nipand-tuck game, sealing the win for the Grizzlies.

“That one was nasty,” Jones said.

“He’s a dog. He just goes after it full throttle with no remorse, every single night.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

29

Sudoku How to Play: Fill in the empty fields with the numbers from 1 through 9.

Sudoku Rules: Every row must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every column must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every 3x3 square must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

(Mar 21-April 20)

Finding things to occupy your mind keeps restlessness at bay. Being creative is essential if you aren’t going to get bored which is a strong possibility. Think of ways to create a fun atmosphere, entertain children or liven up your life. You might draw on your imagination to beautify your surroundings.

Taurus

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Wednesday, August 5, 2020

(April 21-May 21)

Distractions at the start of the day will stop you from getting on with your original plans.

You have established a comfortable routine and you aren’t keen for this to change. This may cause you to complain without considering the reason for these changes. Events beyond other people’s control will mean they need your support.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Life is starting to get going again now and you are relieved to break out of a boring rut. You had almost given up hope on some projects ever starting. Now they have the go-ahead, the future looks brighter and you feel more positive. Friends welcome your high spirits as you light up their lives too.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

New work interests take off at the same time as you are invited to join in with new leisure activities. It will feel as if everything is happening at once. Still, you won’t have any problem fitting everything in. It feels good to be able to get your teeth into something new and different.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

You can’t accept a senior colleague’s excuses for making decisions that many people will disagree with. When they say they have no other option, you can see a number of different possibilities. It will make matters worse to argue. Sometimes, as difficult as it can be for a talkative person like you, it’s best to keep your mouth shut.

Gossip is in the air; don’t get involved. Not all of this will be positive and people will try to draw you into the conversation. This is difficult when you like the person who is gossiping but you don’t like what they are doing.

Take a stand and the tittle-tattle will stop.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

You need to be alert and to put more thought into complicated areas of your life. Romance especially is confusing. What appeared to be a straightforward and easy-going relationship has turned out to be a complex web of intrigue. You aren’t sure if this is right for you.

Don’t feel obliged to remain in a situation that makes you uncomfortable.

You’ve been through a tough time financially speaking. You work hard for your money but most of your income has been swallowed up by everyday expenses and clearing past debts.

The good news is: a positive change is on the horizon. Money that is due to you is winging its way in your direction.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

A neighbour will offer to help sort out a family-related issue. Their handling of the situation will be better than you could have managed yourself. What surprises you most is that you didn’t realise this person had it in them to be so bold and assertive. You will be both impressed and grateful by their actions.

Something is brewing. You feel a change is in the air and you won’t say you aren’t ready for this. New beginnings could mark an important turning point in your life. It has felt recently as if some matters were out of your hands as other people have been pulling the strings. Now you are ready to take back control of your life.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

You can make a job more interesting by sharing ideas with others you work with. Just as in a social group, whether online or in your community, everyone needs to have an input in joint issues. Don’t hold back your opinions.

In doing so, there’s a strong chance decisions will be made to suit just a few rather than the majority.

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

A project or foundations laid for a specific purpose could be postponed yet again. Once health and safety guidelines have been considered, some will not be practical or feasible. People will be disappointed by this delay including yourself. You wish life could return to normal although it’s difficult to know now how to describe normality.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Wednesday, August 5, 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

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

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