Wednesday Dec 2, 2020

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

San Juan The

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Noah Hawley Isn’t Done with ‘Fargo’ P20-21

Historic Arecibo Observatory Radio Telescope Collapses Future Plans to Rebuild or Replace World Class Science Instrument Unknown

Photo: Maxar Technologies

Catastrophic Goodbye

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Mayors Recommend Juan Dalmau Calls NPP Status Bills Lockdown to Stop a Betrayal of the COVID Nightmare Puerto Rican People P4

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

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Wednesday, December 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

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December 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star, the only paper with News Service in English in Puerto Rico, publishes 7 days a week, with a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday edition, along with a Weekend Edition to cover Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The saddest goodbye to a science icon: Arecibo Observatory radio telescope collapses

Today’s

Weather

By THE STAR STAFF

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Day

Night

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74ºF

Precip 10%

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Wind: Humidity: UV Index: Sunrise: Sunset:

From E 11 mph 71% 7 of 10 6:41 AM Local Time 5:47 PM Local Time

INDEX Local 3 Mainland 7 Business 11 International 13 Viewpoint 18 Noticias en Español 19 Entertainment 20

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uerto Rico’s world class observatory didn’t want to be demolished by others. On Tuesday, another sad story for science history and boricuas was written.

Meteorologist Ada Monzón was giving the weather report early Tuesday morning when she stopped to announce that the Arecibo Observatory, an icon of the scientific community, had collapsed. Right there, she confirmed the news in a phone call with the observatory’s director Francisco Córdova as she fought to avoid crying in the middle of the report.

Following two cable failures over the past four months, the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope, a global astronomy facility, had collapsed, sending a wave of disbelief and sadness through the scientific community.

In an interview with Noticentro, Jonathan Friedman, a physicist who works at the observatory and lives nearby, said he heard a loud rumble that he compared to a train or an avalanche — or to the earthquakes that plagued Puerto Rico in January.

Images shared on Twitter by Deborah Martorell, a television meteorologist, compared views of the observatory taken yesterday — showing the 900-ton science platform suspended over the massive dish strung up on cables — and today, when only certain supporting beams can be seen standing.

None of the three towers collapsed fully, which was one of U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) key concerns about leaving the structure as it was. Martorell’s image does appear to show some damage in the knot of buildings at the base of one of the support towers, which includes administrative buildings and a public visitor’s center, although the buildings are still standing.

For his part, Ángel Vázquez, the director of operations, said the telescope collapsed when a 305-meter dish crumbled in different parts.

At a news conference, officials said that after the hurricane in 2017, some $14.3 million was appropriated to the facility but only $2 million was disbursed for repairs.

Officials wrote a proposal to get the rest of the funding but only $2 million was disbursed for the planning phase.

The facility, which has 130 workers, will continue to work as there is “megabytes of data” and pending publications to be completed. “The telescope will not be operating but its scientific component will be here,” officials said.

Carlos Padín, an official from the Ana G. Méndez Foundation, said the educational work will be done virtually.

The NSF, which owns the site, decided last month to close the observatory in response to the damage from the collapse of the cables, which engineers deemed too severe to stabilize without risking lives. But the NSF needed time to come up with a plan for how to safely demolish the telescope in a controlled manner. Since the first cable failure in August, Arecibo Observatory has enforced a safety zone at the facility, although its size changed as damage was incurred and evaluated, Ralph Gaume, di-

rector of NSF’s Division of Astronomical Sciences, said during a news conference on Nov. 19, at which the NSF announced its decision to decommission the telescope.

Scientists worldwide had petitioned U.S. officials and others to reverse the NSF’s decision to close the observatory. The NSF had said it intended to eventually reopen the visitor center and restore operations at the observatory’s remaining assets, including its two LIDAR (light detection and ranging) facilities used for upper atmospheric and ionospheric research, including analyzing cloud cover and precipitation data.

Last week, Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced fired off a letter to NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan asking him to reconsider the decision. Meanwhile, thousands had signed a letter last month as part of a campaign to convince the NSF to keep the structure that finally collapsed Tuesday, dashing all hopes for a resurgence of the facility.

“NSF is saddened by this development,” the agency wrote after the collapse. “As we move forward, we will be looking for ways to assist the scientific community and maintain our strong relationship with the people of Puerto Rico.”

The news elicited expressions of sadness from the scientific community.

“What a sad day for Astronomy and Planetary science worldwide and one of the most iconic telescopes of all time,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, wrote in a tweet. “My thoughts are with the staff members and scientists who have continued to do great science during the past years and whose life is directly affected by this.”

The loss of the Arecibo Observatory will have an impact on planetary defense in the effort to identify and mitigate threats to Earth from asteroid impacts. The Puerto Rico facility was one of only a couple such defense systems on the planet.

The moment when the historic radio telescope collapsed. (Photo: Deborah Martorell)

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Wednesday, December 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Mayors urge governor to order more COVID-19 restrictions to ‘break the infection cycle’

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

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ome 14 mayors and nine municipal legislators arrived Tuesday at the Governor Pedro Rosselló Convention Center in San Juan for a meeting called by Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced to address how to aggressively tackle the COVID-19 emergency in the Puerto Rico towns with the most cases.

Minutes before a long meeting that hadn’t yet ended at press time, some of the invited mayors suggested curfew extensions, partial lockdowns, and more aggressive travel restrictions.

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto said a 14-day total lockdown, along with a curfew that starts from 8 p.m., should be issued “to break the infection cycle.” She also suggested full lockdowns on Sundays.

“The governor must take advantage of the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] telling the world that Puerto Rico should not be visited to again ask the United States President to, due to the advice submitted by his own administration, not authorize trips to Puerto Rico for 14 days -- zero tourists,” Cruz Soto said.

The San Juan mayor said meanwhile that there must be legislation to impose a special tax on hotels “to decrease the number of irresponsible people who are arriving in Puerto Rico.”

“As a country, we must understand that if we keep celebrating Christmas with Mommy and Daddy, it might be their last Christmas to celebrate with their loved ones,” Cruz Soto said. “As a world, we’re still waiting for a vaccine to come.”

Ponce Mayor María “Mayita” Meléndez Altieri said her “Southern Task Force” recommends a “partial lockdown” and

full lockdown on Sundays.

“Everything should be for pickup. If you’re going to buy food, pickup; if you’re going to shop in a store, pickup, that’s the advice that my task force will announce,” Meléndez Altieri said as she told members of the press that the COVID-19 positivity rate spiked to 12 percent due to the mass gatherings that took place during Halloween, the general elections, and activities held by her political opponents.

Meanwhile, Meléndez Altieri said she turned Vázquez’s executive orders into municipal ordinances and imposed a $5,000 fine on any citizen not using a face mask outside, which is a violation of the executive order.

Villalba Mayor Luis Javier Hernández Ortiz said around $150 million is required for maintaining the COVID-19 contact tracing system that epidemiologist Fabiola Cruz designed and the Department of Health later adopted as the Municipal Case Investigation and Contact Tracing System (SMICRC by its Spanish initials).

“It has been the only [contract tracing] system that has worked, as it identifies the positive [COVID-19] cases, seeks isolation, identifies infection lines, and prevents spreadings,” Hernández Ortiz said about the system that is available in 77 of the island’s 78 municipalities.

He added that the Health Department also needs to allocate funds to deliver an “aggressive education campaign” as he considers current efforts to be “weak.”

“Even if we have all of the elements from executive orders, such as modifications, lockdowns, partial lockdowns, whatever, if there’s no effective contact tracing, the governmental effort will be worth nothing,” Hernández Ortiz said.

The Villalba mayor also said he would suggest being “more restrictive with travelers’ access to Puerto Rico.”

“If the CDC declared that Puerto Rico is on ‘red alert,’ we must take this opportunity to prevent needless trips to our country,” Hernández Ortiz said.

Guaynabo Mayor Ángel Pérez said the contract tracing system in San Juan needs to be stronger “on a municipal level.”

“My epidemiologist says that it’s been managed on a regional level and, therefore, there’s no proper follow-up to these cases,” he said. “Every employee, every visitor that you have from the city of San Juan, but that could be from Guaynabo, who had contact with someone from Guaynabo, that information is not clear enough because you don’t have a robust contact tracing system like in other municipalities.”

Gurabo Mayor Rosachely Rivera, meanwhile, suggested extending the curfew hours, starting at 7 p.m., and imposing a dry law order to prevent crowds of people in the central eastern town. She also suggested more COVID-19 testing in all towns to strengthen the SMICRC, the municipal contact tracing system.

When the Star asked if she would consider doing something when it comes to family gatherings, Rivera said “citizens and family members must assume responsibility because if you affect one, you will affect everyone else.”

“We are working on orientation and prevention campaigns on social media networks and around the communities,” she said. “Communities need to get involved with prevention.”

PDP elected lawmakers ask incoming Biden-Harris administration to secure SSI access for all PR residents

By THE STAR STAFF

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opular Democratic Party (PDP) Rep. Rafael “Tatito” Hernández Montañez and PDP representatives-elect Ángel “Tito” Fourquet Cordero and Kebin Maldonado Martiz wrote to U.S. president-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday asking him to order the U.S. Justice Department to withdraw a petition before the U.S. Supreme Court that seeks to exclude Puerto Rico from the Supplemental Security Income program.

“Today we ask President Biden to order the federal Department of Justice to withdraw the writ of certiorari before the Supreme Court of the United States, which seeks to revoke the decision that declared unconstitutional the exclusion of residents of the island from the supplemental security income program,” Hernández Montañez said. “We want Biden to declare a clear mandate that the island’s residents have to be included in the federal program.”

The U.S. Supreme Court is slated to evaluate on Dec. 11 whether or not to review a U.S. First Circuit Court of

Appeals ruling that declared that Congress’ decision not to extend the SSI program to Puerto Rico violates the Equal Protection Clause. The case is United States v. Vaello-Madero.

Hernández Montañez said he was confident that “Biden will honor his commitment to the Puerto Rican people and that his administration will take the correct steps to guarantee greater equity, respect and fair treatment by all government agencies toward our country and our people.”

Fourquet Cordero noted that in the Vaello-Madero case, the federal government sued for the return of $28,081 plus interest for not notifying the agency that he had moved to Puerto Rico from New York. SSI is available to residents of the 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the Northern Mariana Islands only.

There have been other rulings benefitting territories. In the case Pena Martinez et al. v. DHHS, U.S. District Court Judge William Young struck down the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services policy that denies Puerto Rico residents benefits under SSI, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicare Part D Low-

Income Subsidy programs solely due to their residency in Puerto Rico.

Young’s decision came on the heels of the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling in United States v. VaelloMadero. In Guam, U.S. Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood issued a similar decision in Schaller v. U.S. Social Security Administration, which tackled the same program.

For his part, Maldonado Martiz said “the inclusion of Puerto Rico in this program would have a positive impact of $2.3 billion annually on the island and would benefit nearly 300,000 Puerto Ricans.”

“In the times we are going through, the fact that this aid is extended to more citizens in Puerto Rico will be an achievement that will bring peace of mind, hope and social justice to the people,” he said.

“We firmly believe that Biden has the vision, fortitude and morals to correct the mistakes of the past, so our request is that the right thing be done for the welfare of the most vulnerable in the country …” insisted Maldonado, the representative-elect for District 20.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

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Dalmau: NPP status bills are ‘political roguery and a betrayal of the people of Puerto Rico’

By THE STAR STAFF

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uerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) candidate for governor Juan Dalmau Ramírez on Tuesday described as “scandal and treason” the announcement by the leadership of the New Progressive Party (NPP) regarding the filing of several measures related to the island’s political status that will be considered in an extraordinary session to be convened by the NPP legislative majority.

“The legislative initiatives, presented by the NPP, constitute political roguery and a betrayal of the people of Puerto Rico,” Dalmau said in a written communication.

“Senate Bill 1674 would make the Governor a colonial dictator,” he added.

“Its purpose is to revoke and trample on the will of the people expressed in the general elections, since it proposes to eliminate the already limited powers of the Legislative Assembly and all this against the will of two-thirds of the Puerto Rican electorate.”

“If the NPP wants to defend its statehood proposal in the United States, it should do so, but for what it does not have electoral or political legitimacy is to use cheating and trickery to unconstitutionally hogtie the next Legislative Assembly by delegating plenipotentiary powers to the Governor-elect,” Dalmau said.

Dalmau stressed that the bill gives the governor the power to call votes regarding the status of Puerto Rico, without the input of the Legislature, and establish the form and proposals of those votes with the criteria that he/she wishes.

“To top it all off, the bill adds insult to injury by assigning $1.25 million to a failed Equality Commission, to which originally the NPP did not allocate public funds because, with the country bankrupt, they knew that this would be electoral dynamite,” Dalmau said. “Now, after the electoral event and as they will be in the minority in the Legislative Assembly, they make a multimillion-dollar allocation of public funds.”

For his part, PIP Rep. Denis Márquez Lebrón said House Bill 2605, announced Monday, would force an election to be held in the first six months of 2021, putting the people of Puerto Rico on the hook for a multimillion-dollar expenditure for the election of congressional false congressional delegates.

“The leadership of the NPP acts without scruples. That is why they have lost the vote even of serious statehood supporters, who reject the trick and the trap,” Márquez said. “For things like this it is that obtaining statehood received 622,000 votes, the [NPP] candidate for governor got 406,000 votes; that is, 35 percent of statehooders did not vote for the NPP candidate. It is because of actions like these that this NPP leadership has been discredited to such an extent that not even the statehooders support it.”

Dalmau, meanwhile, announced an action plan to deal with the NPP initiative.

“This outrage and abuse of rights is unprecedented. That is why today I announce

specific actions that the Puerto Rican Independence Party will take: “I will be sending a communication to meet, individually, with the candidates for the Interior or the presidents of parties, to establish channels of dialogue on various issues. These topics include discussing actions in concert to address the status of Puerto Rico in an inclusive manner.

“Senator María de Lourdes Santiago and Representative Márquez will present in January a Resolution for the creation of a Special Committee to address the decolonization of Puerto Rico,” Dalmau said.

At transition hearing, Public Safety chief outlines agency achievements, work in progress

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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ublic Safety (DPS) Secretary Pedro Janer, participated in the government transition hearings Tuesday accompanied by the commissioners of the six DPS bureaus and their work team to report on achievements and pending projects in the agency he directs.

“The DPS’s mission is to coordinate the efforts of all the bureaus charged with the purpose of protecting, investigating and preventing criminal activities or emergency situations in Puerto Rico and working in an integrated manner with the United States national security agencies,” the DPS secretary said. “This has been possible thanks to a group of professionals committed to the Puerto Rican people, who have gone the extra mile to work on integration in a period of time in which our department has been addressing different major emergencies such as hurricanes Irma and Maria, earthquakes, the COVID-19 pandemic and other natural phenomena that, on a smaller scale, have affected Puerto Rico.”

Among the DPS’s most significant achievements at the administrative level, the secretary cited the review and approval of the department’s organizational chart, the administrative order promulgating the organizational, administrative and operational structure of the DPS, the integration in phases of personnel from the Management and Administration Area, integration of the

payroll of the bureaus and the budgets into the DPS account in the Treasury, and the purchase of new vehicle fleets, uniforms and equipment for the bureaus.

Janer said work is also progressing on the “civilization” process contemplated in the Fiscal Plan. That initiative consists of the recruitment of civilian personnel to carry out administrative tasks that are currently being carried out by members of the Puerto Rico Police Bureau so that uniformed personnel can return to performing the tasks for which they were recruited and trained, increasing the number of rank system personnel providing security to the Puerto Rican people.

So far, 83 new employees have been sworn in.

In addition to the recruitment of uniformed and civilian personnel for the Police Bureau, Janer said work is advancing on recruitment for other bureaus. For the Fire Department Bureau, the federal Financial Oversight and Management Board authorized the recruitment of 160

firefighters and allocated a budget of $3 million for these purposes.

A total of 317 applications have been registered, which are under evaluation to formulate the Eligible Registry. The Emergency Medical Corps Bureau is in the process of recruiting 22 dispatchers, 137 paramedical emergency medical technicians and 21 basic emergency medical technicians. As for the Forensic Sciences Bureau, during the past fiscal year, the DPS processed the swearing-in of 59 new permanent employees so that the bureau’s expert and administrative functions could be streamlined. For the Special Investigations Bureau, in June a call was opened for eight special investigative agent positions and three inspector positions, all in San Juan, Janer said.

“Once the process is complete, the selected personnel will begin what will be the first Special Investigation Bureau Academy,” Janer said. “We are in the process of preparing and evaluating the curriculum in coordination with the Puerto Rico Police Academy. The goal is to have specialized agents who have all the necessary training to carry out the ministerial functions of the Special Investigations Bureau.”

Among other DPS achievements, Janer cited the Back Office Consolidation Plan, which details the steps to follow with the expectation of compliance, so that the central offices for integration complete the necessary processes. In July 2018, an inventory of federal funds for all the

DPS bureaus was formulated, and unanswered audit reports and “high risk” designations were detailed as well. As regards technology and information technology, the DPS has completed projects to provide bureau offices with equipment and technology infrastructure that allow the interconnection of data and voice, with an investment that exceeds $4.7 million, Janer said.

“To face the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the department has also begun to implement an ambitious plan to replace the back office staff’s desktop computers, to provide them with laptop computers connected to a dock station with monitors so that teleworking is facilitated during emergency situations and the services provided by the department and the support received by each of the attached bureaus are not interrupted, with an investment of $2.1 million,” the DPS chief said.

Regarding the DPS’s relations with federal agencies, the secretary reported that relations with the law enforcement agencies at the federal level were re-established, managing to integrate their resources into the commonwealth department’s work scheme. In addition, more and better tools are being promoted for the bureaus, highlighting best practices, Janer said.

Thanks to these processes, good standing was achieved with the federal government for the Special Investigations Bureau and the Forensic Sciences Bureau, guaranteeing access to federal funds for both bureaus.

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Wednesday, December 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Health Dept. acquires traveling clinics to resume WIC services in earthquake-hit towns

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

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n order to reopen the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) clinics after the earthquakes that shook the south of Puerto Rico close to a year ago derailed their operations, the island Health Department announced Tuesday that two traveling clinics have been acquired to temporarily replace the clinics.

Puerto Rico District WIC Program Director Jeanette Canino said the traveling clinics were acquired after reviewing the barriers to the program’s ability to provide access and “guarantee our pregnant [women], infants and children’s health, which results in prevention and fewer health conditions in the midst of a pandemic like COVID-19.”

Canino said one of the clinics will travel to southern municipalities including Guánica, Yauco and Guayanilla as services in those towns had to be transferred to others such as Peñuelas and Ponce due to the tremors that began last December.

“We wanted to improve access to [WIC Program] services; therefore, the federal government awarded us with around $600,000 to acquire these mobile units,” Canino said.

She said the two units “should help us, through a well developed work plan, to move to places where there is opportunity within the community.” She noted that the number of WIC Program members has dropped due to fewer births and outmigration.

“We will develop community alliances and agreements with agencies such as the Department of Education, Department of Agriculture, Department of Housing, where we get the chance to have contact with prospective participants,” Canino said.

She said the traveling clinics, which are adjusted to federal requirements from the support program, include areas for anthropometric measurement, breastfeeding, food demonstration, a participant evaluation space, a bathroom and a television “to offer education on nutrition in an attractive manner and to capture children’s attention while they wait their turn.”

Due to hurricanes Irma and Maria, the local WIC Program was allocated $6 million in federal disaster relief funds to recover clinics and trucks that were damaged by the destructive storms, Canino said.

“One of the most affected clinics was the one in Caguas, and we used part of the funds to restructure the clinic and its

concept, as this is a satellite clinic because it moves around mostly to look out for and provide help to both participants and candidates,” Canino said, adding that the clinic located in Villa Blanca is open on Saturday until 8 p.m. so “working mothers won’t have to lose a work day to receive the program’s services.”

Meanwhile, Canino said there is $183 million in allocated funds -- “which is divided between administrative affairs and food” -- for the coming year’s term.

As for the funds that have been lost during the past five years due to a great reduction in participation, Canino said the WIC program lost around $28 million last year.

“In 2012, we had over 194,000 participants, now, we have 103,000 participants,” she said, noting that funds allocation depends on the number of program members.

The Star asked what other initiatives the WIC Program will use apart from the traveling clinics, given that 57 percent of children in Puerto Rico live in poverty. Canino said they were reinforcing their communication networks as the federal government has permitted the program to work remotely.

“As we are working remotely, now we can call possible participants and keep our current members informed; meanwhile, as participants have been able to receive their checks by mail, it has helped us to expand our program,” she said, adding that they have enrolled more than 3,000 new members during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Canino added that in 2022, WIC Program members will be able to receive their funds through an electronic benefit transfer card.

US District Attorney launches elder fraud prevention campaign focused on pandemic

By THE STAR STAFF

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he United States Attorney for the District of Puerto Rico, W. Stephen Muldrow, and the Elder Justice Task Force (EJTF) announced Tuesday the launch of an elder fraud education and prevention campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The public service campaign aims to raise awareness about the different types of fraud associated with the pandemic that have been prevalent during recent months, advise senior citizens and their caretakers on how to prevent becoming victims of these scams, and inform the different ways to report cases of fraud. The campaign encourages the public to provide information to federal and state authorities in a confidential manner.

“This educational campaign seeks to provide the elderly and the general public with the tools to prevent criminals from taking advantage of the crisis we are living through,” Muldrow said. “As I have stated on previous occasions, the well being of our elderly citizens during this pandemic is one of our main priorities. I commend the efforts of the Elder Justice Task Force and those who have joined our mission during this emergency.”

The acting secretary of the Puerto Rico Department of Justice, Inés del C. Carrau Martínez, urged Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries to protect themselves, be cautious and disregard any unsolicited calls or visits that offer COVID-19 testing, vaccinations, or medical equipment, if they suspect anything is amiss.

“We are dealing with a serious and complex health issue,” she said. “We have to take care of our elderly so they don’t become a target for scams through false advertisements or offers.”

Puerto Rico Family Affairs Secretary Orlando López Belmonte said “[w]e have been very diligent in providing guidance to the population we serve and at senior centers so that they do not become victims of fraud.”

“Today we are doubling our efforts with this excellent task force in order to raise awareness about these illegal practices,” he said.

AARP PR State Director José R. Acarón called on “the family caretakers who support the elderly to be alert, because they are a key part in detecting, avoiding, and reporting these new scams associated with COVID-19 that threaten their own and their loved ones’ financial safety.”

Carmen Delia Sánchez Salgado, Puerto Rico’s ombudsman for the elderly, noted that “[t]his educational campaign is part of a preventive approach geared toward protecting the rights of the elderly population in Puerto Rico, and fighting crimes that target them.”

“There is a pressing need for education, particularly during the pandemic,” she said.

Other entities that have joined forces in the campaign are the Postal Inspector Service; the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General; the Federal Trade Commission (FTC); and the FBI. The campaign stems from the Elder Justice Initiative.

The EJTF’s mission is to support and coordinate the U.S. Department of Justice’s (USDJ) compliance efforts to combat abuse, neglect, financial fraud, and scams that target senior citizens in the U.S. and its territories. The EJTF in Puerto Rico is coordinated by Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacqueline Novas.

To report suspected fraud, citizens can call the following numbers: National Elder Fraud Hotline, 1-833-372-8311; National Center for Disaster Fraud, 1-866-720-5721; the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 1-800-225-5324; the FTC, 1-877-FTC-HELP (382-4357); and/or the HHS, 800-HHSTIPS (800-447-8477); or submit a report at the USDJ website www.Justice.gov/DisasterComplaintForm or through the FTC’s website ReporteFraude.ftc.gov.

Citizens can learn more about scams and how to protect themselves by visiting the fbi.gov/coronavirus and the FTC at ftc.gov/es/coronavirus.

Since President Trump signed the bipartisan Elder Abuse Prevention and Prosecution Act into law, the USDJ has participated in hundreds of enforcement actions in criminal and civil cases that targeted or disproportionately affected seniors. The USDJ has likewise conducted hundreds of trainings and outreach sessions across the country since the passage of the Act. More information about USDJ efforts to help American seniors is available at its Elder Justice Initiative webpage (https://www.justice.gov/elderjustice). Elder fraud complaints may be filed with the FTC at www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov or at 877-FTC-HELP.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

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Who will get the coronavirus vaccine first?

By ABBY GOODNOUGH

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fter months of deliberation and debate, a panel of independent experts advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to decide Tuesday afternoon which Americans it will recommend to get the coronavirus vaccine first, while supply is still short.

The panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, will vote in a public meeting and is expected to advise that health care workers be first in line, along with residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. If the CDC director, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, approves the recommendations, they will be shared with states, which are preparing to receive their first vaccine shipments as soon as mid-December, if the Food and Drug Administration approves an application for emergency use of a vaccine developed by Pfizer.

States don’t have to follow the CDC’s recommendations, but most probably will, said Dr. Marcus Plescia, the chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, which represents state health agencies. The committee will meet again soon to vote on which groups should be next to receive priority.

Here are answers to some common questions about the vaccine and its distribution.

Who will get the vaccine first?

Based on its recent discussions, the CDC committee will almost certainly recommend that the nation’s 21 million health care workers be eligible before anyone else, along with 3 million mostly elderly people living in nursing homes and other longterm care facilities.

A staggering 39% of deaths from the coronavirus have occurred in long-term care facilities, according to the committee.

But there won’t be enough doses at first to vaccinate everyone in these groups; Pfizer and Moderna, the two companies closest to gaining approval for their vaccines, have estimated that they will have enough to vaccinate no more than 22.5 million Americans

by January. So each state will have to decide which health care workers go first.

They may choose to prioritize critical care doctors and nurses, respiratory therapists and other hospital employees, including cleaning staff, who are most likely to be exposed to the coronavirus. Or they may offer the vaccine to older health care workers first, or those working in nursing homes, who are at higher risk of contracting the virus. Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said Monday that most of his state’s initial allocation would go to residents and employees of long-term care facilities, with a smaller amount going to hospital workers.

It’s important to remember that everyone who gets a vaccine made by Pfizer or Moderna will need a second shot — three weeks later for Pfizer’s, four weeks for Moderna’s.

Who gets it next?

The CDC committee hinted last week that it would recommend essential workers be next in line. About 87 million Americans work in food and agriculture, manufacturing, law enforcement, education, transportation, corrections, emergency response and other sectors. They are at increased risk of exposure to the virus

The panel is expected to recommend that the nation’s 22 million health care workers receive the Covid-19 vaccine before anyone else, along with three million mostly elderly people living in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. because their jobs preclude them from working from home. And these workers are disproportionately Black and Hispanic, populations that have been hit especially hard by the virus.

Individual states may decide to include in this group employees of industries that have been particularly affected by the virus. Arkansas, for example, has proposed including workers in its large poultry industry, while Colorado wants to include ski industry workers who live in congregate housing.

After essential workers, the priority groups likely to be recommended by the CDC committee are adults with medical conditions that put them at high risk of coronavirus infection, and people older than 65. But again, some states might diverge to an extent, choosing, for example, to vaccinate residents older than 75 before some types of essential workers. All other adults would follow. The vaccine has not yet been thoroughly studied in children, so they would not be eligible yet.

Who will make state-level decisions about priority groups?

Each state has a working group, composed largely of public health officials, that has been planning for months and making decisions about vaccination campaigns. Each state’s top health official and governor will probably sign off on final plans.

How long will states focus on one priority group before moving to the next in line?

States don’t need to reach everyone in one priority group before moving on to the next, according to the CDC advisory committee. But more federal guidance is expected on the subject.

When will the first doses of a vaccine be shipped, and where will they go?

Federal officials have said they plan to ship the first 6.4 million doses within 24 hours after the FDA authorizes a vaccine, and the number each state receives will be based on a formula that considers its adult population. Pfizer will ship special coolers, each containing at least 1,000 doses, directly to locations determined by each state’s governor. At first, almost all of those sites will probably be hospitals that have confirmed they can store

shipments at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, as the Pfizer vaccine requires, or use them quickly.

When will a vaccine be available to the general public, and where will people receive it?

Federal officials have repeatedly suggested that people who are not in the priority groups — healthy adults younger than 65 who don’t work in health care or otherwise qualify as essential workers — should have access to the vaccine by May or June, because there will be enough supply by then. But a lot will have to go right for that to happen. One factor is whether, or when, other vaccines besides Pfizer’s and Moderna’s are approved.

Can employers like hospitals or grocery stores require their employees to be vaccinated?

Employers do have the right to compel their workers to be vaccinated. Many hospital systems, for example, require annual flu shots. But employees can seek exemptions based on medical reasons or religious beliefs. In such cases, employers are supposed to provide a “reasonable accommodation”; with a coronavirus vaccine, a worker might be allowed to wear a mask in the office instead, or to work from home.

Three companies have announced preliminary data indicating their vaccines are effective, and there are dozens of additional candidates in clinical trials. Can I choose which vaccine I get?

This depends on a number of factors, including the supply in your area at the time you’re vaccinated and whether certain vaccines are found to be more effective in certain populations, such as older adults. At first, the only choice is likely to be Pfizer’s vaccine, assuming it is approved. Moderna asked the FDA for emergency authorization Monday; if approved, it would most likely become available within weeks after Pfizer’s.

Are there any side effects from the shot?

Some participants in both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s trials have said they experienced symptoms including fever, muscle aches, bad headaches and fatigue after receiving the shots, but the side effects generally did not last more than a day. Still, preliminary data suggests that, compared with most flu vaccines, the coronavirus shots have a somewhat higher rate of such reactions, which are almost always normal signs that the body’s immune response is kicking in. At the meeting of the CDC advisory committee last week, some members said it would be important for doctors to warn their patients about possible side effects and assure them of the vaccines’ safety.

How do I know it’s safe?

Each company’s application to the FDA includes two months of follow-up safety data from Phase 3 of clinical trials conducted by universities and other independent bodies. In that phase, tens of thousands of volunteers get a vaccine and wait to see if they become infected, compared with others who receive a placebo.

By September, Pfizer’s trial had 44,000 participants; no serious safety concerns have been reported.

The FDA will also review the data for each vaccine seeking authorization and share it with its advisory committee, which will meet publicly — in the case of the Pfizer vaccine, on Dec. 10 — to ask questions and make a recommendation to the agency. The FDA will then decide whether to approve the vaccine for emergency use.

8

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Prisons are COVID-19 hotbeds. When should inmates get the vaccine?

Nurses rallied at the entrance to Rikers Island jail in Queens, N.Y., this year, protesting the handling of Covid-19 patients and health care conditions at the correctional center.

By RONI CARYN RABIN

T

hey live in crowded conditions, sharing bathrooms and eating facilities where social distancing is impossible. They have high rates of asthma, diabetes and heart disease.

Many struggle with mental illness. A disproportionate number are Black and Hispanic, members of minority communities that have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

So should prisoners and other detainees be given priority access to one of the new COVID-19 vaccines?

With distribution expected to start as early as December, public health officials are scrambling to develop guidelines for the equitable allocation of limited vaccine supplies. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet Tuesday to make initial determinations about who gets the first shots.

There is broad consensus that health care workers who treat COVID-19 patients should be first in line. Other high-priority groups include residents and employees of long-term care facilities, essential workers whose jobs keep people fed and society running, and medically vulnerable and older adults — roughly in that order.

Prison inmates are not ranked in the top tiers of the federal criteria, even though some

of the largest outbreaks have occurred in the nation’s prisons. More than 2,200 inmates were sickened and 28 people died, for example, after an outbreak in the San Quentin State Prison in California over the summer.

Yet the CDC advisory committee has prioritized correctional officers and others who work in jails and prisons for the first phase of immunizations. The federal prison system will set aside its initial allotment for such employees, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The discrepancy raises a chilling prospect: another prison outbreak that kills scores of inmates after the only preventive was reserved for staff. Officials at the Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Now several groups, including the American Medical Association, are calling for coronavirus vaccines to be given to inmates and employees at prisons, jails and detention centers, citing the unique risks to people in confinement — and the potential for outbreaks to spread from correctional centers, straining community hospitals.

“We aren’t saying that prisoners should be treated any better than anybody else, but they shouldn’t be treated any worse than anybody else who is forced to live in a congregate setting,” said Dr. Eric Toner, co-author of a report on vaccine allocation published by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

The report lists prisoners as a priority group, Toner said, though not “at the very tiptop, but at the next tier down.”

Some states, in their own distribution plans, already are moving in that direction.

North Carolina, for example, plans to give first priority to health care providers, but also includes people at high risk for severe disease and high risk for exposure to the virus.

That list includes people in congregate living settings, such as migrant farm camps, jails and prisons, and homeless shelters, along with other “historically marginalized” populations.

Allocating precious medical resources to people who are serving time may be anathema to much of the public, but it is widely accepted that the nation has an ethical and legal obligation to safeguard the health of incarcerated individuals.

There is also a powerful public health argument to be made for prison vaccination: Outbreaks that start in prisons and jails may spread to the surrounding community.

“Prisons are incubators of infectious disease,” Toner said.

“It’s a fundamental tenet of public health to try and stop epidemics at their source,” he added.

One approach, under consideration by the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice, would be to prioritize vaccination only for prisoners and detainees whose medical conditions or advanced age put them at great risk should they become ill.

“This isn’t a criminal justice recommendation,” said Khalil Cumberbatch, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan group focused on criminal justice policy. “It’s a public health recommendation.

The virus is not in a vacuum if it’s in a state prison.”

The United States holds some 2.3 million individuals in prisons, jails and other detention centers, incarcerating more people per capita than any other nation. That includes nearly 500,000 people who have not been convicted of a crime and are awaiting trials, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. (Some jails have taken steps to reduce overcrowding since the pandemic started.)

The figure also includes some 44,000 youngsters who are held in juvenile facilities and an estimated 42,000 in immigration detention centers.

People held in confinement are uniquely vulnerable to the virus. Incarcerated individu-

als are four times more likely to become infected than people in the general population, according to a study by the criminal justice commission. Overall, COVID-19 mortality rates among prisoners are higher than in the general population.

So far, at least 200,000 inmates have already been infected with COVID-19, and at least 1,450 inmates and correctional officers have died from the virus, according to a database maintained by The New York Times.

Those numbers most likely underestimate the magnitude of the problem, because reporting requirements are spotty and vary from state to state, said Dr. Tom Inglesby, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and another co-author of the vaccine allocation report.

In Connecticut, doctors tested over 10,000 prisoners in state prisons and jails from March to June and found that 13% were infected with the coronavirus, according to research published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Inmates who lived in dormitory housing were at highest risk. Older inmates and Latino inmates also were more likely than others to be infected.

Even before the pandemic, many older inmates had poor health after decades of “hard living,” said Dr. Charles Lee, presidentelect of the American College of Correctional Physicians.

“From my experience, their physiological age is generally 20 years greater than their chronologic age — from drugs, from fights, from being incarcerated and homeless, and not getting health care,” Lee said.

Up to 40% of incarcerated adults are Black, Lee said, a group with higher rates of chronic diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and asthma.

Many argue that regardless of public health considerations, society has both legal and ethical responsibilities to protect the health of inmates.

“There are truly bad guys in prison, but the vast majority of people in prisons and jails are not what the media makes us think about — they are not mass murderers,” said Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. “Many people are about to get released soon. Many are in for petty crimes.”

“The ethical obligation is to protect the lives of prisoners, not just see them as sources of disease,” Caplan added.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

9

For Manchin, a divided Senate is a ‘golden opportunity’ for action

By LUKE BROADWATER

A

year ago, Joe Manchin III was ready to quit.

As the most conservative Senate Democrat, he saw nothing but dysfunction and inaction when he looked around on Capitol Hill. “This place sucks,” he repeatedly declared. As he often has since arriving in Washington, he openly mulled leaving to try to reclaim his old job: governor of West Virginia.

Instead, he stayed for a second term.

Now, with President-elect Joe Biden preparing to govern from the middle in a Congress whose thin majorities will force him to compromise on almost every priority, Manchin, a centrist, suddenly finds himself at the center of relevance in the nation’s capital.

In his office on a recent afternoon, seated not far from a framed quote from President John F. Kennedy stressing independence from political party, Manchin, 73, was feeling energized. He paged through a proposal he was developing for a new coronavirus relief deal and said he was imagining a more moderate course for Congress.

“I think we have a golden opportunity to bring the country back together and for us to work in the middle,” Manchin said excitedly.

“I’ll tell you the reason why: The numbers are so close with what the Democratic House members lost. For Nancy Pelosi, she’s going to have to work with people that have a more moderate view than some of the people that pushed her from the left.”

If Democrats are able to win two runoffs in Georgia in January and take control of the Senate, any plans to enact a liberal agenda — such as increasing the number of Supreme Court justices — will have to go through Manchin. Likewise, if Republicans win at least one of the Georgia races, allowing them to maintain Senate control, they will need centrists in both parties to help block progressive items or pass compromise legislation.

That is the situation that Manchin said he considered more likely. He is already preparing for a power dynamic that he asserted would give him and three moderate Republicans — Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah — a big role in determining what happens at the dawn of Biden’s presidency.

WithVice President-elect Kamala Harris empowered to break ties, Manchin noted that it would take only two Republican defections to hand Democrats a majority on any given measure.

“It behooves everybody to start working together,” he said during a wide-ranging interview in his office. “If they don’t, it doesn’t take many of us to say, ‘Guys, we’ve given all of you a chance. We haven’t done our job for the last 10 years, and we’re going to start.’”

In recent days, Manchin has been working to corral support for a new coronavirus stimulus package, racing around the Capitol asking his colleagues what price range they are comfortable with and directing his chief of staff, Lance West, to draw up proposals.

Manchin said he thought about $1.2 trillion might be acceptable to finally reach a deal — about half of what his party’s leaders had been pushing for before the election.

He has been in talks with a bipartisan group of senators to try to forge a deal. They include the three Republican moderates, as well as Sens. Bill Cassidy, R-La., Angus King, I-Maine, Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Mark Warner, D-Va. “Something needs to be done before Joe Biden becomes president,” Manchin said.

“I’ve got people who aren’t going to make it to February or March.”

He is also ready to do battle with the progressive left, whose ire he drew when, in an interview in November, he responded to a question about some liberals’ calls to defund the police with the phrase, “Defund, my butt.”

In response, Rep. Alexandria OcasioCortez, the progressive firebrand from New York, posted a photo on Twitter of her glaring at Manchin as he applauded during President Donald Trump’s second State of the Union address.

“I guess she put the dagger stare on me,” Manchin said. “I don’t know the young lady — I really don’t. I never met her. I’m understanding she’s not that active with her bills or in committee. She’s more active on Twitter than anything else.”

Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for OcasioCortez, said the congresswoman had submitted more amendments than 90% of other freshmen — including those promoting fair housing and a tear gas ban that passed the House — and had missed fewer votes than Manchin. “The congresswoman has earned a reputation as a tough, prepared member in committee hearings,” Hitt said.

Manchin is also a staunch opponent of another step for which progressives have advocated, having loudly spoken out against a move to change Senate rules so that the majority could muscle through legislation with a vote of 51, rather than requiring that bills meet a 60-vote threshold to advance. Should

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) speaks to reporters as she walks to the Senate Chamber at the Capitol in Washington, Nov, 12, 2020. Collins said she looked forward to working with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) on issues such as reducing the price of prescription drugs and a broad infrastructure package.

Democrats win control of the chamber, the change would allow Biden to circumvent Republican opposition and push through his policy priorities.

“I can assure you I will not vote to end the filibuster, because that would break the Senate,” Manchin said. “If you’ve got to blow up the Senate to do the right thing, then we’ve got the wrong people in the Senate.”

Instead, Manchin said he and a group of like-minded senators in both parties — including many of those with whom he is discussing a new relief package — were eyeing a different change to the rules to empower the rank and file. Their idea is to allow any bill approved by a committee with bipartisan support to advance to the floor. That would dilute the unilateral power of the majority leader — currently Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — to control which measures advance.

“Before we know definitely who is going to be the majority leader, we should make the changes of how the Senate should work,” Manchin said of the proposal, which is exceedingly unlikely to be successful.

Still, John C. Kilwein, chair of the political science department at WestVirginia University, said Manchin would be “incredibly important” in the event of a 50-50 Senate. His stances would also serve as useful cover for Biden and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the minority leader, from criticism they are likely to face for

not fully embracing the progressive agenda.

“He dashed progressives’ hopes already of doing away with the filibuster and packing the court,” Kilwein said.

This year, Manchin crossed party lines when he became the only Democratic senator to endorse Collins in her fourth reelection attempt against a strong challenger, Sara Gideon, whom many in Congress expected to win.

When Collins defied the polls, Manchin was one of the first to call and congratulate her.

“He’s courageous,” Collins said. “I admire he does the things he believes are right, even if he gets a lot of grief from the Democratic leader for it.”

Collins said she looked forward to working with Manchin on issues such as reducing the price of prescription drugs and a broad infrastructure package. But the obstacles are steep, with powerful groups on both sides of the political spectrum “demanding 100% compliance” with their views, she said.

Murkowski said she hoped a functioning Senate was not “a pipe dream from a bygone era.”

“For those of us more in the moderate camp, it’s a very important role that needs to be played, and I’m looking forward to playing a part in that,” she said. “I’m tired of the bitter partisan divide we’ve seen. I want to try to figure out how we are governing again for all the country, not just for the Republicans.”

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Biden’s inauguration: Expect smaller crowds and more social distancing

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and NICHOLAS FANDOS

T

he stage being built on the West Front of the Capitol can hold 1,600 spectators for a close-up view of Presidentelect Joe Biden as he takes the oath of office. The reviewing stand under construction in front of the White House will be ready for the inaugural parade and thousands of cheering onlookers as the marchers pass by. And the National Mall is prepared to accommodate many more.

But the traditional pomp and circumstance of America’s quadrennial version of a coronation is colliding with the grim reality of a pandemic that is likely to still be raging on Jan. 20. For that reason, Biden’s team is signaling that he wants a very different kind of inauguration.

If he had won reelection, President Donald Trump was expected to shrug off the health threats in favor of huge crowds for his inauguration. But Biden has already indicated that his will not be business as usual. In a statement Monday, the newly appointed chief executive of Biden’s inaugural committee hinted at the looming balancing act between health and politics.

“We will honor the American inaugural traditions and engage Americans

across the country while keeping everybody healthy and safe,” said Tony Allen, the president of Delaware State University and the committee’s chief executive.

What could that look like?

Aides to the president-elect are being coy. But Biden’s approach to campaigning during the pandemic — which included drive-in rallies, socially distanced news conferences and a largely virtual national convention — provides a blueprint for how events might be reshaped for the COVID era.

On Capitol Hill, where the official inaugural ceremonies are arranged by a bipartisan congressional committee, lawmakers and aides have quietly been at work since long before the election trying to reimagine what a transfer of power during a pandemic might look like.

The short answer is: quite a bit less crowded.

The organizers are determined that Biden take the oath of office and deliver an address to the nation outside the West Front of the Capitol, preserving an iconic tableau that has often set the tone for a new presidency. But to make it happen, they are likely to slash the number of officials flanking Biden. Those who do make the cut — Supreme Court justices, former presidents,

The inaugural platform under construction in Washington on Oct. 26, 2020. The pomp and circumstance of America’s quadrennial presidential inauguration is colliding with the grim reality of a pandemic that is likely to still be raging on January 20, 2021.

top House and Senate leaders and the Joint Chiefs of Staff among them — will be required to socially distance and wear masks.

Some may be asked to take coronavirus tests.

The most difficult challenge may be keeping away crowds. Congress typically distributes 200,000 tickets for seats near the platform. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., who is overseeing the planning on Capitol Hill, has indicated that number could be cut drastically.

Inaugural planners are still debating whether they can salvage a luncheon in National Statuary Hall at the Capitol, where more than 200 dignitaries and guests have honored the new president since the 1950s.

They may also alter or cancel a smaller signing ceremony in the ornate President’s Room off the Senate floor. A traditional military review on the East Front of the Capitol, on the other hand, may still go on in some form.

Given the worsening pandemic, it is unclear whether Biden might seek to proactively discourage Americans from traveling to the nation’s capital to witness the inauguration in person by gathering on the Mall in the shadow of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Those spaces are usually open to the public without restrictions during the ceremony.

In December 2008, the committee organizing the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama issued a news release announcing that “for the first time, the entire length of the National Mall will be opened to the public so that more people than ever before will be able to witness the swearingin of the president from a vantage point in sight of the Capitol.”

Biden’s committee has no plans to issue a statement like that.

One thing is definite: Biden’s inauguration will not be the kind of over-the-top celebration that Trump has often talked about wanting, with Army tanks and fighter jets. Instead, people close to Biden suggest that he will use the model of his campaign, which sought to preserve some of the excitement of big political events while devising them to minimize the spread of the virus.

After spending months warning about the dangers of hosting large gatherings indoors — and criticizing Trump for doing so — Biden is unlikely to host fancy inaugu-

ral balls where hundreds of supporters are crammed into ballrooms.

That would be a sharp departure from the past three inaugurations. Obama hosted elaborate galas attended by A-list Hollywood celebrities for both of his inaugurations, including a late-night concert at the Lincoln Memorial that hundreds of thousands of people attended. Trump held three official balls.

A parade is also in question.

Newly inaugurated presidents have often participated in a slow drive along Pennsylvania Avenue and then watched local marching bands and other floats from the reviewing stand near Lafayette Park.

The stand for January is ready, but hosting a parade would invite large crowds to gather along the route, something that Biden is likely to want to avoid.

A scaled-back celebration could also be cheaper to put on because of fewer security and travel costs, though Demissie said that producing video and broadcasting from remote locations for a more virtual inauguration would also be costly.

There were signs Monday that though Biden may not be trying to top his predecessor, who raised a record $107 million for his 2017 festivities, he would welcome donations from wealthy individuals and corporations.

Biden’s team indicated that it would accept donations of up to $500,000 from individuals and up to $1 million from corporations, according to an official involved in the planning. The cap is set by each president and has fluctuated over the years, as incoming executives have used the inauguration to set the tone for their presidencies.

Obama, for instance, banned corporate gifts altogether in 2009 and capped individual gifts at $50,000 before easing restrictions in 2013. Trump, on the other hand, accepted $5 million from Sheldon Adelson, the conservative casino mogul.

Biden’s team has sent something of a mixed message. His inauguration will not accept donations from fossil fuel companies, defined as “companies whose primary business is the extraction, processing, distribution or sale of oil, gas or coal,” or their executives — a group that gave Trump about $10 million. Nor will Biden accept funds from registered lobbyists.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

11

Facebook to acquire startup Kustomer as it faces antitrust Glare

By MIKE ISAAC

F

acebook is facing the glare of regulators for buying up promising startups and neutralizing them as a competitive threat. But that hasn’t stopped the social network from shelling out for more companies.

Facebook announced Monday that it planned to acquire Kustomer, a customer relationship management startup, to help it build its e-commerce business.

The deal values Kustomer at close to $1 billion, said two people with knowledge of the talks. Kustomer, which is based in New York, had raised roughly $170 million in venture funding, according to data compiled

by Crunchbase.

The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, could provide businesses and customers more support for interactions that occur on Facebook and its other apps, such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. More than 175 million people contact businesses using WhatsApp, Facebook said.

“Messaging provides a better overall customer experience and drives sales for businesses,” Dan Levy and Matt Idema, executives at Facebook and WhatsApp, said in a company blog post.

Facebook announced the deal even as the Federal Trade Commission and dozens of states prepare antitrust lawsuits against the company for maintaining its power through past mergers of nascent competitors.

The FTC and state attorneys general are expected to announce plans for legal action against the social network within days, several people briefed on the cases have said.

The cases are likely to focus on how Facebook came to dominate social media through its $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and its $18 billion purchase of WhatsApp in 2014, they said. The companies were not directly competing with Facebook but have since become highly popular apps with billions of users. A Kustomer deal, which would follow a $400 million acquisition of animated GIF maker Giphy this year, could heighten regulatory scrutiny of Facebook.

A Facebook spokesman said plenty of competition remains in technology, especially as Kustomer is not a social networking app and is adjacent to Facebook’s main business.

“This deal is about providing more choices and better products for consumers,” the spokesman said in a statement. “The key to Facebook’s success has always been innovation, with M&A being just a part of our overall business strategy, and we will continue to demonstrate to regulators that competition in the technology sector is vibrant.”

Founded in 2015, Kustomer built a business by simplifying the back-end software used by many For-

Facebook sees the acquisition of Kustomer as a way to build up its e-commerce operation. tune 500 companies to serve customers. The startup has presented itself as an alternative to other customer service software companies like Zendesk and Oracle.

Kustomer’s investors include Battery Ventures, Canaan Partners and Redpoint Ventures.

Facebook said Kustomer’s software could help support millions of business conversations, making it easier for customer support representatives to view and service the interactions.

In particular, Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging app, which has more than 1 billion users, has expanded to business messaging services. In recent months, WhatsApp built a special app for businesses as customers in Latin America, Southeast Asia and elsewhere increasingly conduct transactions through messaging apps. In India, where more people are buying smartphones and using WhatsApp, the messaging app sees an opportunity to expand its digital commerce offerings.

“People have made the shift to messaging, with more than 100 billion messages sent per day on WhatsApp,” Idema, who is chief operating officer of the company, said in an interview. “And they’re starting to use modern channels like messaging to talk to businesses. It’s a better experience than waiting on

hold, than not knowing if your email has been read.”

The demand for managing digital relationships with customers has also grown because of the coronavirus pandemic. Millions of people, having gone into quarantine or sheltering at home, have migrated to buying goods and communicating with businesses virtually rather than in person. That has led to a boom in deals for the makers of customer relationship software and workplace collaboration tools.

“It was going to happen naturally. It’s just been accelerated by COVID,” said Brad Birnbaum, a founder of Kustomer. “Instead of investing in expensive storefronts and retail locations, companies are investing more in digital tools and experiences.”

Salesforce, another company that sells customer service software, for instance, has been in talks to acquire Slack, the workplace productivity software provider, said two people with knowledge of the situation. A deal could be announced as soon as Tuesday, they said.

If that deal is completed, Slack will be Salesforce’s largest acquisition and among the biggest in the software industry. Slack was valued at more than $24 billion on Monday. Last year Salesforce acquired Tableau, a data analytics provider, for nearly $16 billion.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Bitcoin hits new record, this time with less talk of a bubble

By NATHANIEL POPPER

B

itcoin is back. Again.

Nearly three years after it went on a hair-bending rise and hit a peak of $19,783, the price of a single Bitcoin rose above that for the first time Monday, according to data and news provider CoinDesk. The cryptocurrency has soared since March, after sinking below $4,000 at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic.

Bitcoin’s latest climb is different from its last spike in 2017, which was driven largely by investors in Asia who had just learned about cryptocurrencies. Back then, the digital token soon lost momentum as people questioned what it could do other than allow for easy online speculating and drug and ransom payments.

While those questions remain, Bitcoin is now being fueled by a less speculative fever. Buyers — led by American investors, including companies and other traditional investors — are treating Bitcoin as an alternative asset, somewhat like gold, according to an analysis from data firm Chainalysis. Rather than quickly trading in and out of it, more investors are using Bitcoin as a place to park part of their investment portfolios outside the influence of governments and the traditional financial system, Chainalysis and other industry firms said.

“It’s a very different set of people who are buying Bitcoin recently,” said Philip Gradwell, chief economist at Chainalysis, which analyzes the movement of cryptocurrencies. “They are doing it in steadier amounts over sustained periods of time, and they are taking it off exchanges and holding it as an investment.”

The excitement has been underpinned by regulators and mainstream financial companies that are trying to make cryptocurrencies safer and more accessible. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a U.S. regulator, said this summer that banks would be allowed to hold cryptocurrencies for customers. And PayPal announced in October that it would follow its rival Square and allow people to buy and hold Bitcoin and a few other cryptocurrencies.

“Our move came as a result of con-

Nearly three years after it went on a hair-bending rise and hit a peak of $19,783, the price of a single Bitcoin rose above that for the first time on Monday, Nov. 30, 2020, according to the data and news provider CoinDesk. versations with government officials, and then seeing the dramatic shift into digital payments as a result of the pandemic,” Dan Schulman, chief executive of PayPal, said in an interview. More than 1 million people — three to four times what the company expected — joined a waitlist to use cryptocurrencies before the feature was started, he said.

Bitcoin’s rise is part of a broader exuberance in cryptocurrencies and stock markets, which are defying the gloom of a pandemic-induced recession. The Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq have hit record highs in November, with Wall Street buoyed by the presidential election and the news of potential coronavirus vaccines.

Bitcoin is a digital currency with software and rules that were released in early 2009 by a shadowy creator with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The computer code established that the total supply of Bitcoin would be limited. Only 21 million tokens will ever be created, distributed in

small blocks each day — through a process known as mining — to some of the computers that maintain the currency’s online infrastructure.

Like gold, Bitcoin can be created, moved and stored outside the purview of any government or financial institution.

Bitcoins exist on a financial ledger, known as a blockchain, which is maintained and updated by a volunteer network of people running thousands of computers worldwide — a system meant to ensure that no one computer or institution can change the rules or control the network.

The open nature of the system — and the fact that anyone can join it and create a wallet without providing so much as a name or a phone number — has made it popular for those who want to circumvent the traditional financial system. They have included terrorists, drug dealers and countries, like North Korea, Venezuela and Iran, that want to evade U.S. financial sanctions.

But Bitcoin’s stateless nature has also won over investors interested in legitimate uses of the technology. Some have been motivated by a libertarian distrust of governments. Others who are less ideological have gravitated to Bitcoin as an alternative to the financial system.

Still, Bitcoin is not backed by anything other than its computer network and the faith of people who buy it and give it value on exchanges. Many of these people are betting that someone else will be willing to pay them more for their Bitcoin in the future.

That has made Bitcoin prices volatile. It fell to its most recent low in March when fear over the pandemic hit global markets. Soon after, though, investors began talking about Bitcoin as a beneficiary of the global downturn.

In May, Paul Tudor Jones, one of Wall Street’s best-known hedge fund managers, said he had put almost 2% of his portfolio in Bitcoin. He said the cap on Bitcoin production made it an attractive alternative to the declining value of traditional currencies, which he thought was inevitable as central banks printed more money to encourage an economic recovery.

“Every day that goes by that Bitcoin survives, the trust in it will go up,” Jones told CNBC at the time. He did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Some public companies also dived into Bitcoin because of concerns about the value of the dollar. In August, MicroStrategy, a software company in Virginia, said it bought $250 million of Bitcoin to store some of the cash it had in the corporate treasury.

Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy’s chief executive, said in an interview that after knowing almost nothing about Bitcoin at the beginning of this year, he had become a believer in how the hard-coded limit on the number of tokens would help it hold its value over time. He became so enthusiastic that he put $175 million of his own money into the currency. MicroStrategy later bought another $175 million of Bitcoin.

“For anything that anybody invested in as a store of value, it starts to look like it is better to move that into Bitcoin,” Saylor said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

13 Stocks

S&P 500 ends down after rallying to best November ever

T

he S&P 500 index ended lower on Monday as investors took profits following a sharp rally in recent weeks that led to the benchmark’s best November ever.

Nine out of 11 of the major S&P 500 sectors fell, with the energy index tumbling 5.4% and leading losses, tracking a drop in crude prices.

The S&P 500 technology index rose 0.7%, thanks in part to a 2.1% rise in Apple Inc shares.

IHS Markit jumped 7.4% after data giant S&P Global agreed to buy the financial information provider in a $44 billion deal that would be the biggest corporate acquisition of 2020.

Month-end rebalancing of portfolios played into Monday’s weakness, analysts said, as investors cashed in on gains after a strong month marked by updates of COVID-19 vaccines making headway and hopes of a swift economic rebound next year.

A rotation into energy, industrials and financials, all expected by many investors to outperform as the economy recovers from its downturn, drove gains of almost 11% for the S&P 500 in November and helped the Dow Jones Industrial Average make its biggest monthly gain since 1987.

“I would attribute (Monday’s drop) to compounding concerns over the coronavirus, combined with the market just looking to digest some of the recent gains over the past month,” said CFRA Chief Investment Strategist Sam Stovall.

“When you sprint and get out of breath, you have to slow down to catch your breath.”

After an explosion in infections and business restrictions this month that stalled the U.S. labor market recovery, the focus has shifted to Tuesday’s address by Fed Chair Jerome Powell before the Senate Banking Committee, the Fed’s Beige Book on Wednesday and the monthly jobs report on Friday. Graphic: S&P 500 set for its best November ever The Nasdaq Composite dropped 0.06% to 12,198.74.

For November, the S&P 500 gained 10.8%, the Dow added 11.9% and the Nasdaq climbed 11.8%.

It was the biggest monthly gain for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq since April.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies surged 18.3% in November, its strongest monthly performance ever.

U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar said on Monday the first two vaccines against the novel coronavirus could be available to Americans before Christmas.

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14

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

‘Trump is better’: In Asia, pro-democracy forces worry about Biden

A protest in Hong Kong on July 1, 2020. The U.S. Treasury Department placed economic sanctions on Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, and others during the Summer of 2020.

By HANNAH BEECH

A

dissident once branded Enemy No. 1 by the Chinese Communist Party is spreading conspiracy theories about vote-rigging in the U.S. presidential election.

Pro-democracy campaigners from Hong Kong are championing President Donald Trump’s claims of an electoral victory.

Human rights activists and religious leaders in Vietnam and Myanmar are expressing reservations about Presidentelect Joe Biden’s ability to keep authoritarians in check.

It might seem counterintuitive that Asian defenders of democracy are among the most ardent supporters of Trump, who has declared his friendship with Xi Jinping of China and Kim Jong Un of North Korea.

But it is precisely Trump’s willingness to flout diplomatic protocol, abandon international accords and keep his opponents off-balance that have earned him plaudits as a leader strong enough to stand up to dictators and defend democratic ideals overseas, even if he has been criticized as diminishing them at home.

As Biden now assembles his for-

eign-policy team, prominent human rights activists across Asia are worried about his desire for the United States to hew again to international norms. They believe that Biden, like former President Barack Obama, will pursue accommodation rather than confrontation in the face of China’s assertive moves. And their proTrump views have been cemented by online misinformation, often delivered by dubious news sources, that Biden is working in tandem with communists or is a closet socialist sympathizer.

“Biden is president, and it’s like having Xi Jinping sitting in the White House,” said Elmer Yuen, a Hong Kong entrepreneur who has posted YouTube videos criticizing the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. “He wants to coexist with China, and whoever coexists with the CCP loses.”

With Trump’s presidential tenure in its twilight, these activists are calling for the administration to make a final stand against Asian autocrats, similar to a last-ditch effort to expand the border wall with Mexico.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took a five-nation swing through Asia in October in which he abandoned politesse and described the Chinese government as a “predator,” “lawless and threatening,” and

“the gravest threat to the future of religious freedom.” The tour was meant as a counterweight to China in a region where Beijing’s dollar diplomacy has bought significant influence.

In November, Lobsang Sangay became the first head of the Tibetan government-in-exile to visit the White House; the provocative invite infuriated Beijing, which considers Sangay to be a separatist.

In June, Pompeo attended a virtual gathering with Hong Kong democracy leader Joshua Wong and President Tsai Ingwen of Taiwan, both of whom are loathed by the Chinese government.

Trump’s popularity is particularly enduring among Christians, such as Chineseborn legal scholars chafing against communism’s atheist core and ethnic minority activists in Southeast Asia. Pompeo and other Trump administration officials, they believe, have been fulfilling a faith-based mission overseas.

Last year, Trump met in the White House with a group of religious leaders from across the world, including Hkalam Samson, president of the Kachin Baptist Convention, which represents the persecuted Christian Kachin minority in Myanmar.

“My experience in the White House, when I was given one minute to speak out about the Kachin, meant a lot, and it also meant that Trump cares about us,” Samson said. “Trump is better for the Kachin than Biden.”

Skepticism for Biden extends to those fighting for secular political rights as well.

The president-elect’s embrace of diplomatic custom will not work when only one side is playing fairly, they say.

“For Biden’s policies toward China, the part about making China play by the international rules, I think, is very hollow,” said Wang Dan, who helped lead the 1989 Tiananmen protests as a university student.

“As we know, the Chinese Communist Party hardly abides by international rules.

“The United States must realize that there will be no improvements on human rights issues in China if there is no regime change,” Wang added. He has continued to question Trump’s electoral loss, baseless claims shared by oth-

er prominent Chinese-born dissidents.

But others within the community, particularly in Hong Kong and China, said that backing Trump is hypocritical at best and dangerous at worst.

“Trump’s human rights record — what he does to migrant children, the Muslim ban, white supremacy, alternative truth — removes him from my support, but this is apparently not the popular attitude among many dissidents in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan,” said Badiucao, a Chinaborn political artist who now lives in selfexile in Australia.

Badiucao, who is known by a pseudonym to protect his family in China, has skirmished online with Wang and other well-known dissidents and has made the scuffle a topic for his art.

“These guys are utilitarian, and they believe that if Trump is waging war against the CCP then he’s right for them,” Badiucao said. “That mentality fits the whole ‘America First’ ideology, where it’s OK for other people to suffer if your goal is met, and their goal is overthrowing the CCP.” Foreign policy advisers to Biden say it is unfair to presume that he will continue the Obama administration’s moderate stance. It is, they say, a different era. The recent human rights legislation championed by the Trump administration has received broad bipartisan support.

And some Asian dissidents acknowledge that the antipathy toward Biden is driven in part by a deluge of online misinformation that paints the president-elect as a secret socialist or contends, without any proof, that foreign “communist money” turned the election against Trump. Such unsubstantiated claims have been repeated by niche online publications in Vietnamese, Chinese and other languages.

“The crisis of democracy in the world makes people, especially activists, confused and susceptible to the influence of conspiracy theories and information manipulation,” said Nguyen Quang A, a Vietnamese dissident who has been detained multiple times for his criticism of the country’s communist leadership. “Vietnam doesn’t have independent media, and people, especially activists, already hate mainstream media.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

15

Angry farmers choke India’s capital in giant demonstrations

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN,KARAN DEEP SINGH and HARI KUMAR

M

ewa Singh said he wasn’t going anywhere.

On Monday afternoon, Singh, who farms a small plot of land in northern India, sat in the back of a mud-splattered farm trailer, heaps of rice, lentils, fresh garlic and other spices piled around him, blocking one of the main arteries into India’s capital.

Part of an army of thousands of angry farmers who have encircled New Delhi, Singh vowed to keep protesting for however long it takes for India’s government, led

by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to reverse recently passed pro-market agricultural policies.

“Our land is our mother,” said Singh, growing emotional as he talked about the new policies, which he saw as part of an effort to hand farmers’ land over to big business. “It was passed on to us from our parents, who got it from their parents, and now Modi wants to acquire it and give it away to his rich friends.”

Even though Modi’s political party firmly controls the government, the growing farmers’ rebellion seems to have rattled his administration. In India, more than 60% of the population depends on agriculture to make a living. Farmers are a huge political constituency.

On Sunday, Modi’s top lieutenants hastily called a late-night meeting, and they have told the farmers that they were willing to negotiate.

But the crisis, which has snarled traffic leading into New Delhi for miles and cast a sense of uncertainty over the capital, has become a classic standoff of who lays down their arms first.

The Modi administration has indicated that it will not talk to the protesting farmers unless they move to a fairground on New Delhi’s outskirts and stop blocking the highways.

But the farmers have said that they will not move their tractors or trailers until negotiations start. They are digging in, resupplying themselves with food, fuel, firewood and medical supplies to stay put for weeks.

“Now we have leverage,” said Ramandeep Singh Mann, a farmers’ rights activist, who gazed across the protest zone Monday afternoon with a look of pride. “If we go to those fairgrounds, we will lose it.”

Many of the farmers, like Singh and Mann, hail from Punjab state, and they’re so furious at Modi that they have spent the past four days chugging hundreds of miles across northern India in their tractors, pulling concrete police barriers out of their way, weathering tear gas and water cannons, and curling up in blankets during the cold nights in the back of their trailers parked end to end for several miles.

The border of New Delhi and the neighboring state of Haryana, where countless motorists flow through every day, now resembles a siege.

Many farmers said the new rules, which the Modi administration pushed through Parliament in September, are the beginning of the end of a decades-old system that had guaranteed minimum prices for certain crops.

They allow farmers greater freedom to sell their produce outside state-controlled agricultural markets, but they also curtail farmers’ ability to challenge disputes in courts.

While the Modi administration has said that India’s farm policies need to be reformed to attract more investment, farmers say they were never consulted on the changes.

Several who were interviewed Monday spoke of their fear of being swallowed up by corporate titans such as Mukesh D. Ambani, India’s richest man, and Gautam Adani, who is not far behind, both known to be close to Modi.

Modi has tried to calm things down, saying in a radio address Sunday that the new policies “opened the doors to new possibilities” for farmers.

Farmers have been opposed to the changes from the very beginning. They see the laws as an attack on their identity and a means to fundamentally alter the way they have been farming for generations. The first protests started in July, in Haryana and in Punjab.

Many economists and agricultural experts support the farmers’ demand for a minimum assured price for their crops.

“There is no evidence in the world where the market price has benefited farmers,” said Devinder Sharma, an independent agricultural expert and author based in the northern city of Chandigarh.

On Monday, squads of riot police and paramilitary officers carrying assault rifles huddled behind barricades on the Delhi side of the border, but their orders were not to intervene, for the moment. They simply sat on a road divider, watching the crowd build.

The farmers’ original plan had been to march on the center of New Delhi, the seat of Modi’s power, and many seemed disappointed that they had been prevented from doing that.

“When we started our march, we felt we were going to our capital,” said Amrinder Singh, a young farmer who was wearing an Adidas tracksuit. “But they treated us like terrorists.”

Mewa Singh, 57, had traveled to Delhi in the back of a bumpy trailer along with two dozen men from his village in Punjab. They all insisted that they were just trying to exercise their democratic voice.

“I’m not going to say this isn’t tough; it is tough,” Singh said.

The nights were cold, he said, and he was losing money every day by not working on his small wheat farm.

“But if a child doesn’t cry,” he said, “how will his mother know he’s hungry?”

Tractors and trucks clogged the highway near Delhi on Sunday. Even though Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party firmly controls the government, the farmers’ rebellion seems to have rattled his administration.

16

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

In Nagorno-Karabakh peace deal, Putin applied a deft new touch

By ANTON TROIANOVSKI and CARLOTTA GALL

A

s a dilapidated old van pulled up at a hillside checkpoint, an Azerbaijani soldier inside scrubbed furiously at his fogged-up window, then cast a glowering look at an Armenian standing just a few feet away.

Just days before, they were on opposite sides of a bitter war. But now the Russian peacekeeper next to them was in charge. He waved the van through toward Azerbaijaniheld territory to the right. The Armenians traveled on to Armenian-controlled land to the left.

The vicious war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed mountain enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh has settled into a tense truce enforced by heavily armed Russian troops. For Russia, long a provocateur in the broader Caucasus region, the peacemaker role is a switch — a new test and opportunity for a country struggling to maintain its influence in the former Soviet lands.

“They say that things will be OK,” said Svetlana Movsesyan, 67, an ethnic Armenian who remained in the Nagorno-Karabakh capital of Stepanakert, even after narrowly escaping an Azerbaijani strike on the market where she sells dried fruits and honey. “I believe in Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.”

It was Putin, the Russian president, who by all accounts stopped the war that killed thousands this fall in the fiercest fighting the

southern Caucasus has seen this century. But he did so by departing from the iron-fisted playbook Russia has used in other regional conflicts in the post-Soviet period, when it intervened militarily in Georgia and Ukraine while invading and annexing Crimea.

Those tactics, which helped turn those countries into implacable adversaries, seem to have fallen out of fashion in the Kremlin, which analysts say is increasingly applying a more subtle blend of soft and hard power.

The Kremlin’s lighter touch has been visible in the recent Belarus uprising, where Russia refrained from intervening directly and offered only lukewarm support for President Alexander Lukashenko, whose violence against protesters was infuriating the population.

In the negotiations to end the recent war, Putin leaned on the threat of Russia’s military power, forcing concessions from both sides in the conflict but gaining a grudging measure of trust in the rival camps. Russia has a mutual-defense alliance with Armenia, but Putin insisted it did not apply to NagornoKarabakh. He has maintained close personal ties to President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan.

The strategy seems to have paid immediate dividends, providing the Kremlin with a military foothold in the region and welding Armenia firmly into Russia’s sphere of influence, without alienating Azerbaijan.

“This is an opportunity to play the role of peacekeeper in the classical sense,” said Andrei Kortunov, the director general of the

Armenian soldiers and a Russian peacekeeping soldier, on the vehicle, at a checkpoint in Nagorno-Karabakh, Nov. 17, 2020.

Russian International Affairs Council, a research organization close to the Russian government. “I want to hope that we are seeing a learning process and a change in the Russian strategy in the post-Soviet space.”

With Russian support, Armenia had won control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan inhabited by ethnic Armenians, after a yearslong war in the early 1990s that was precipitated by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Armenian forces also captured surrounding districts, expelling more than half a million Azerbaijanis.

After a quarter-century of diplomatic failures, Azerbaijan began an offensive Sept.

27 to retake the area by force, making rapid gains thanks in part to its sophisticated, Israeli- and Turkish-made drones.

In early November, Azerbaijani troops wrested the mountaintop citadel of Shusha from Armenian control, scaling the wooded slopes and fighting hand-to-hand in close combat through the streets. By Nov. 9, they were pummeling Armenian soldiers along the road to nearby Stepanakert, home to a peacetime population of some 50,000 ethnic Armenians, and an even bigger battle appeared imminent.

Then Putin, who earlier had tried to broker a cease-fire, stepped in. Azerbaijan that night accidentally shot down a Russian helicopter, potentially giving Moscow a reason to intervene. The Russian president delivered an ultimatum to Aliyev of Azerbaijan, according to several people briefed on the matter in the country’s capital, Baku: If Azerbaijan did not cease its operations after capturing Shusha, the Russian military would intervene.

The same night, a missile of unknown provenance hit an open area in Baku, without causing any injuries, according to Azerbaijani sources. Some suspected it was a signal from Russia that it was prepared to get involved and had the capacity to inflict significant damage.

Hours later, Putin announced a peace deal, and Aliyev went on television to announce that all military operations would stop. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia said he had no choice but to go along, facing the prospect of even more bloodshed on the battlefield.

Seared in almost every Azerbaijani’s memory are the bloody events of 1990, when Soviet tanks rolled over demonstrators in Baku’s central square. Russian troops have since intervened repeatedly in troubled corners of the Caucasus, often under the moniker of

peacekeepers but acting more like an invading army. Now Russia will be pivotal to the future of Nagorno-Karabakh, with the region’s long-term status still unclear.

“Russia doesn’t want to leave this alone.

They like this frozen state,” said Farid Shafiyev, a former diplomat and director of the government-financed Center for Analysis of International Relations in Baku. “They are going to meddle.”

But the deal with Putin appears to have suited Aliyev — only in part because Azerbaijani forces were already strung out and faced a tougher, wintertime fight ahead while bearing the added burden of managing a hostile ethnic Armenian population, one analyst said.

“I don’t think Aliyev needed much persuading,” Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow with Carnegie Europe, said. “He values his relationship with Russia.”

For Armenians, many of whom had looked to build closer ties to the West in recent years, the war was a harsh reminder that Russia remains critical to their security. Because Azerbaijan’s main ally, Turkey, posed what many Armenians considered to be an existential threat, Armenians have come back “to our default position: the reflexive perception of Russia as the savior,” said Richard Giragosian, a political analyst based in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.

It was Russia that offered refuge to and fought with Armenians against Ottoman Turkey during the Armenian Genocide that began in 1915.

“Armenia is now ever more firmly locked within the Russian orbit, with limited options and even less room to maneuver,” Giragosian said. “The future security of Nagorno-Karabakh now depends on Russian peacekeepers, which gives Moscow the leverage they lacked.”

The Nov. 10 peace deal says nothing about the territory’s long-term status, and ethnic Armenians who trickled back to their homes in buses overseen by Russian peacekeepers said they could not imagine life in the region without Russia’s protection.

Down the road from the Stepanakert military college now housing the Russian command, Vladik Khachatryan, 67, an ethnic Armenian, said there was a rumor going around Stepanakert that gave him hope for the future.

“Soon, we will get Russian passports,” he said. “We won’t be able to survive without Russia.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

17

Positive test rate of 11%? France’s schools remain open.

By NORIMITSU ONISHI, CONSTANT MÉHEUT and ANTONELLA FRANCINI

A

s a second lockdown appeared inevitable amid skyrocketing coronavirus infections, the scientists advising the French government in October warned that keeping students in their classrooms meant it would take longer to tame the surge.

The government kept the schools open anyway, even as the country became an epicenter of the second wave of the coronavirus in Europe. French leaders decided that they would try to subdue the surge, while also trying to minimize economic and academic damage by keeping children learning where they do it best: in school.

Five weeks into a second nationwide lockdown, France, like much of Europe, has proved that it is possible A socially distant Mass at the Church of Saint-Maclou in Pontoise, France on to bring the rate of known infections Sunday, Nov. 29, 2020, the first day of Advent. down, even with schools open.

It is a lesson that has been taken “The first lockdown was horrible,” ing number of people have challenged up late in the United States, where Chi- said Marine Huguenin, who was watch- restrictions on movement and business. cago, Boston, San Francisco and other ing her two daughters play at a Paris In Paris, keeping schools open has cities, have made it a priority to keep park, which was filled with strollers shifted the mood in a city that lived bars and restaurants open — though not and masked parents after school on a through one of the world’s strictest necessarily for indoor service or at full recent afternoon. lockdowns in the spring. capacity — even as they have closed During the earlier lockdown, the At the time, Paris felt like a ghost their schools. entire family was stuck inside, she said, town, with every inch of the city — from Many European countries, includ- with Huguenin and her husband looking small residential streets to the Champsing France, have made the opposite after their children during the day, then Élysées — deserted. This time, things choice: keeping schools open but closing catching up on work between 9:30 p.m. seem much nearer to normal. Chairs restaurants and bars. and 1 a.m. are stacked inside closed cafes and In France, 11% of coronavirus tests The numbers tell the story of restaurants. But neighborhoods come are coming back positive but students France’s progress so far. In early No- to life in the mornings and afternoons have kept going to school, while New vember, the number of new cases in as parents take their children to and York City shut its public schools on Nov. France in a seven-day period soared from school, and older students linger 19, after the positive test rate reached to more than 80 per 100,000 people; on sidewalks with studied indifference.

3%. as of Sunday it had dropped to 17 per Clusters have appeared in schools But recent studies have shown 100,000. throughout France, though not in “worthat young children, at least, are low “Obviously, the decline has been rying numbers,” said Yazdanpanah, the transmitters of the virus, and at least slower because schools are open, but infectious disease specialist. some U.S. officials are reconsidering we had to find a middle ground,” said With classrooms open, parents their approach: Mayor Bill de Blasio Yazdan Yazdanpanah, an infectious dis- have been able to focus on work at home of New York abruptly decided Sunday ease specialist and a member of France’s or commute to their workplaces, which to reopen elementary schools while Scientific Council, which advises the has helped blunt the second lockdown’s keeping upper grades closed, and other government on the pandemic. But, he blow to the economy. districts around the country have made added, the slower drop in infections has The Bank of France estimated that or announced similar moves. been offset by positive effects on educa- economic activity this month would be Allowing schools to remain open tion, mental health and the economy. 12% below normal — far less than the has been one of the most significant The trade-off has been generally 31% drop experienced in April. departures from Europe’s initial lock- well-accepted in an otherwise contenMost European countries, includdowns last spring. tious lockdown during which an increas- ing Britain, France, Germany and Spain,

have kept schools open even as the continent remains among the worst-hit.

A few countries, like Austria, the Czech Republic and Italy, have closed schools, in part or in full.

In France, as in much of the world, schools shut down during the first wave in the spring as scientists tried to figure out what role children played in transmitting the virus.

The country’s 12 million students in primary and secondary schools engaged in online learning, but soon, teachers and education officials warned that many children had fallen behind.

“It reinforced our conviction to keep the schools open, for education and social reasons,” said Sophie Vénétitay, a teacher and union official.

Meanwhile, new studies suggested that despite early fears, keeping schools open, while not without risk, could be relatively safe so long as rules to limit the spread of the virus were in place.

In August, a report released by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control said evidence “indicates that closures of child care and educational institutions are unlikely to be an effective single control measure for community transmission of COVID-19.”

Most studies on transmission now suggest that children younger than 10 spread the virus less efficiently than adults do, but that teenagers become infected and spread the virus just as much as adults. So keeping high schools open safely is trickier, especially if community transmission is high — making social distancing rules even more important.

After reining in the first wave of the epidemic, France saw infections begin rising again in August as people resumed socializing and the government failed to effectively carry out public health measures of testing, tracing and isolating.

By October, infections were skyrocketing across most of Europe.

But even after a warning from his scientific advisers, President Emmanuel Macron announced that France’s schools would remain open, as nonessential businesses were ordered closed. “Our children cannot be permanently deprived of instruction, education, contact with the school system,” he said.

18

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

A responsible withdrawal from Afghanistan

By THE NYT EDITORIAL BOARD

F

or years, the stalemate in Afghanistan has left U.S. officials torn between two bad options: Prop up a corrupt, hopelessly divided Afghan government indefinitely or admit defeat and go home, leaving the country to its fate. At 19 years and counting, the U.S.-led effort in Afghanistan is already the longest war in U.S. history. A consensus has been forming that it is time for U.S. troops to come home. But the speed of the withdrawal and whether any residual force will be left behind to carry out counterterrorism operations remain open questions.

The Trump administration has taken laudable steps toward a U.S. exit. In February, it struck a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces from the country within 14 months. In exchange, the Taliban agreed to cut ties with alQaida, prevent terrorists from using Afghanistan as a base for international attacks, help reduce violence and participate in talks with Afghanistan’s political leadership to try to end the conflict.

U.S. diplomats have been pressing the Taliban to live up to their end of the bargain. Qaida fighters are still believed to be embedded with the Taliban, although al-Qaida’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, may now be dead, according to Pakistani media. Intra-Afghan peace talks began in Doha, the capital of Qatar, in September but have stalled over a fresh wave of attacks and uncertainty over whether the Biden administra-

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tion will honor the deal with the Taliban. Over the weekend, the Taliban announced on social media that both sides had agreed to a set of guiding principles for the talks, but President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan has reportedly pushed back on that claim, denying that an agreement has been reached.

The two sides have yet to begin confronting a host of seemingly irreconcilable differences, including whether to be a theocracy or a republic, and the status of women and followers of the Shiite sect of Islam. The Taliban claim they now accept Shiites as fellow Muslims. But previously Taliban leaders have justified persecuting them as infidels. In 1998, Taliban commanders massacred thousands of Hazaras, an ethnic minority that predominantly follows Shiite Islam, when they took power in their region. Today, two commanders of that bloody operation are among the Taliban negotiators in Doha. Some Hazaras fear the Taliban are just going through the motions of peace talks until U.S. forces leave.

Efforts to hold the Taliban accountable for their commitments have been undercut by the Trump administration’s abrupt announcement that it will pull all but 2,500 U.S. troops out of the country by Jan. 15, regardless of whether the conditions the Taliban agreed to have been met. President Donald Trump, who spent Thanksgiving 2019 with U.S. soldiers at Bagram Airfield, wants to keep a promise to bring U.S. soldiers home before he leaves office. But NATO’s secretarygeneral, Jens Stoltenberg, expressed alarm at Trump’s announcement and said the alliance would continue to train Afghan security forces even with the planned U.S. reductions. NATO has 12,000 personnel in the country, about half of whom are often U.S. troops, and relies heavily on the U.S. military for transportation and logistics.

President-elect Joe Biden is unlikely to depart radically from the Trump administration’s exit plan.Biden opposed the Obama-era surge in Afghanistan and wrote in the spring in

Foreign Affairs magazine that “it is past time to end the forever wars.”

But a U.S. withdrawal does not have to mean ending financial support for the Afghan people or leaving the region in chaos. The United States has a moral obligation to work with regional partners to try to clean up the mess we are leaving behind.

Americans have the geopolitical luxury of flying away from a war they plunged into in 2001 in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Afghanistan’s neighbors do not. Six countries share a border with Afghanistan. Not one wants a failed state on its doorstep. Afghanistan has been at war almost continuously since 1978, partly because its powerful neighbors have all tried to manage the chaos inside it by funding proxies. A debilitating free-for-all might be prevented if Afghanistan’s neighbors work together to support a peace process.

This is a rare instance where Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan and the United States all share a common interest: the orderly departure of U.S. troops and preventing Afghanistan from imploding.

Trump, who has an allergy to multilateral cooperation and a zero-sum mentality toward Iran and China, has been unable to fully engage Afghanistan’s neighbors in the effort to stabilize the country. In March 2019, U.S. diplomats threatened to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution renewing the mandate of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan because it referred to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. And the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran scared off international investors in Chabahar, an Iranian port considered essential for increasing trade in landlocked Afghanistan.

Barnett Rubin, a former State Department official who is now the director of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Regional Project at New York University, argues that the United States would benefit from having a strategic vision for the region that was bigger than “no al-Qaida.”

“Stop looking at Afghanistan as either ‘war on terror’ or nothing and broaden the aperture to see that it is a country in a region with China, Russia, Iran, India and Pakistan — four nuclear powers,” he said. “They all have a very strong interest in trying to stabilize Afghanistan.”

The Biden administration is better positioned to test the limits of regional diplomacy. While it is far from clear that Afghan talks can negotiate a political settlement that will end the war between the Taliban and the Afghan government, a coordinated regional approach is more likely to produce success than a rapid unilateral American withdrawal. U.S. soldiers should not be held hostage to a peace agreement that might never come. But with U.S. troops down to 2,500 soldiers, some portion of which is needed as a security umbrella for the embassy, the costs of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan have fallen sharply. The Biden administration has time to craft a more responsible withdrawal.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

19

Se agotan fondos para rastreo de COVID-19 en Villalba Por THE STAR

E

l alcalde de Villalba, Luis Javier Hernández, señaló el martes, a la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced que el miércoles, 30 de diciembre termina la asignación de fondos para el rastreo de los casos de COVID-19 y que hay que tomar acción inmediata para asignar fondos adicionales.

“Ya el secretario del Departamento de Salud (DS), doctor Lorenzo González, había mencionado en las vistas de transición la necesidad de dichos fondos, para continuar con el rastreo o hasta que se administre la vacuna”, dijo Hernández Ortiz en declaraciones escritas.

Explicó que la cantidad de fondos necesarios es de $150 millones para cubrir los trabajos de rastreo desde el 30 de diciembre hasta el fin del año fiscal el 30 de junio de 2021.

“De no contar con el sistema de rastreo de enero

en adelante, nos enfrentaríamos a un aumento fatal de casos de COVID-19, sumado a la realidad de los hospitales que están prácticamente llenos. Hay que continuar los trabajos que los municipios están realizando de manera eficiente”, detalló.

El primer ejecutivo de Villalba sumó al gobernador entrante, Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia a su llamado, así como a la comisionada residente, Jenniffer González.

“Estamos dando una batalla monumental contra la pandemia y confío en que todos los funcionarios actuales y electos estarán dando el máximo en esta lucha”.

El martes, el DS informó que Puerto Rico ya ha perdido 1,122 vidas por la pandemia del COVID-19 y que hay 638 pacientes hospitalizados, el número más alto desde el inicio de la pandemia en marzo.

Hasta el momento, el país cuenta con 220 camas de hospital en el área de intensivo y 774 respiradores artificiales.

Alcalde de Fajardo ordena cierre de operaciones municipales por COVID-19 Por THE STAR

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l alcalde del municipio de Fajardo, José Aníbal Meléndez Méndez, informó el martes, que firmó una Orden Ejecutiva ordenando el cierre de las operaciones municipales desde 1 de diciembre.

“Hemos notado un aumento en los casos de empleados municipales que han tenido que realizarse la prueba COVID-19 por síntomas o por haber tenido contacto con un positivo al virus lo que podría representar un riesgo de contagio para otros empleados y la ciudadanía”, manifestó el alcalde en comunicación escrita.

La orden se firmó en respuesta a la emergencia creada por el COVID-19 y al aumento de los casos positivos en el municipio.

Meléndez Méndez, sostuvo una reunión ayer con el epidemiólogo del municipio, Manuel Laboy, y Miriam Vélez, directora de la Oficina de Manejo de Emergencias Municipal y parte del equipo de trabajo de rastreo y seguimiento de casos. El alcalde recibió varias recomendaciones de parte del epidemiólogo y luego se reunió con los funcionarios del municipio para hablar sobre las nue-

vas medidas a establecerse para el control de la propagación del COVID-19.

Ante el escenario de casos positivos entre empleados municipales y el aumento de casos en el pueblo, el alcalde, determinó el cierre de operaciones municipales. Meléndez Méndez, delineó

un plan de trabajo para no afectar los servicios esenciales.

Las nuevas disposiciones contempladas en la Orden Ejecutiva establecen el trabajo remoto de los empleados no esenciales de todas las dependencias municipales. No obstante, empleados

de las dependencias con servicios fundamentales como Obras Públicas, Policía Municipal, Oficina de Manejo de Emergencias, Dispensarios Médicos, Oficina de Transportación y Terminal Público continuarán presentándose en sus áreas de trabajo.

De igual forma, se presentará a trabajar un personal limitado en la oficina de Finanzas, oficina del alcalde, y en Compras y Suministros. Los empleados que deben asistir a sus áreas de trabajo lo harán con estrictas medidas de seguridad y protección. Según detalla la Orden Ejecutiva se evitará la aglomeración de más de diez personas en una oficina, se evitará utilizar las áreas comunes, se realizan pruebas de cernimiento bisemanal, monitoreo de temperatura y uso de mascarilla.

“Seguimos tomando medidas cumpliendo con nuestra responsabilidad de salvaguardar el orden público y proteger la vida, propiedad y seguridad de los ciudadanos, empleados y funcionarios del municipio de Fajardo”, añadió el alcalde. El primer ejecutivo municipal dijo que la Orden Ejecutiva estará en vigor hasta el cierre navideño contemplado para el 23 de diciembre o hasta un nuevo aviso.

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Wednesday, December 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Noah Hawley isn’t done with ‘Fargo’

By FINN COHEN

W

hen the third season of “Fargo” ended in 2017, the concept of “alternative facts” and “fake news” were clearing the way for what became the Trump presidency’s challenge to reality. The themes creator Noah Hawley explored in that season seemed oddly prescient, all the way down to Russians and disinformation, but he shrugged it off: “You can never predict the zeitgeist,” he said at the time.

“I just managed to land in it.”

Now he has managed to land in it again. During a pandemic-induced fivemonth interruption in filming, Hawley’s theme for Season 4 of “Fargo” — which ended Sunday on FX — again collided with current events. This time, a story set in 1950 featured Chris Rock as the head of a Black crime family in Kansas City locked in a battle with Italians — and both groups being demonized by white police officers and politicians. There are still plenty of Hawley’s trademark Easter eggs — ample references to the show’s previous seasons and the canon of Joel and Ethan Coen, who wrote and directed the 1996 film that inspired the series.

It’s difficult not to draw parallels to this summer’s social upheaval, but Hawley doesn’t see these issues as anything new.

“This show emerged into a country that was having an active and urgent conversation about race,” said Hawley last week. “But it’s also a conversation that we have been having for hundreds of years in this country, about this country. So I’m not sure that if this show premiered in 1986 or 1995 or 2007 that it would have been much different.”

The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Spoilers await — and if you didn’t watch the closing credits in Sunday’s finale, make sure to do so.

Q: How difficult was it to return after such a long break?

A: It presented some challenges. It’s helpful that we had nine hours that the cast could watch and everyone could understand, “Oh, that’s the show that we were making” — which you don’t

Chris Rock in the fourth season of “Fargo,” which ended Sunday night on FX. usually have. The crew and the cast, if you’re lucky, they might see the first hour while you’re filming. So in many ways, they were much more informed than they’ve ever been. I know that Jason Schwartzman never shaved that mustache because he was so dedicated.

Q: After George Floyd was killed and protests started this summer, there were a lot of conversations in journalism and entertainment about representation: Who gets to tell whose story?

As a white writer, were you at all concerned about how this season’s story would land in that climate?

A: Everyone has their own American story, their own American experience. My American experience starts on one side of my family with a grandmother who fled from Russia in 1895, as the Cossacks were coming. Everyone arrived here at a certain point, and in a different way. What I knew in exploring the immigration experience and the experience of Black Americans is that, to the degree that those are not my story, that I did want and need as many voices and as much understanding as possible to be able to tell those stories: in the writers room and among directors and actors and, you know, as much diversity as possible — an actual diversity of experience and opinion and perspective.

Q: Those conversations were so intense that I wondered if you felt like the story carried more weight.

A: You used the word “conversa-

tion,” and that’s what I’m trying to have.

And not everyone says the right thing in a conversation. But what was important to me, to the degree that this show has always been a show about America, was to continue to explore America from all points of view. On a very primal level, the reason that I write is to try to understand the world that I’m living in and to re-create the world in a fictional way, and then look at it and go, “Did I get this right?” That becomes the exploration — and the risk, because there’s a risk that you’re getting it wrong. But we can’t operate from a place of fear in terms of asking the hard questions.

I had a lot of conversations throughout the process with a lot of people that I really respected, who I knew would call me out if I was not being authentic.

If it was Chris Rock, writers, directors, or the other actors, if there had been a moment that didn’t feel authentic or felt like it was romanticized, then we would have those conversations.

We had an interesting conversation in the writers room about Ethelrida (E’myri Crutchfield). Some of the writers wanted, because she’s a teenage girl, to have her struggle with some moral issues of her own; maybe her aunt offers her a drink, and she takes it because she’s a teenager. There was a fear expressed that I was making her too honorable a character because she was Black. I said, “No, I’m making her that honorable a character because she

is the character this year that represents that pure goodness that Marge (Frances McDormand) represented in the movie, or Patrick Wilson represented in Season 2, or Carrie Coon in Season 3: decency.”

The struggle that she is going through is a struggle against exterior forces, but she is very comfortable with who she is. She knows that the path that she’s on, one mistake can throw her off it. So we had those conversations and, as in any good writers room or any good process, it forces you to justify the choices that you make.

As I said, we can’t live in fear. Writers have to be willing to take those risks and put ourselves out there because the reward is too great. To be able to put yourself into somebody else’s shoes, and to create that empathy in yourself and in others — that is the definition of good writing, I think.

Q: This season is set in a time and place, postwar America, that was superficially quite optimistic: “We can do anything.” But many of the characters are traumatized, which seems to say that America is actually a vicious place.

A: I came upon this equation when I was writing Season 3, which is that irony without humor is just violence. Think about the stories of Kafka.

But also think about the immigrant experience or the experience of Black people in America. We say it’s the land of the free and the home of the brave, and yet those freedoms are not available to everyone equally. What is that if not ironic? But there’s no humor to it.

When you tell someone that they have to be an American to be accepted, but then when they become an American, you say they’re not a real American — it has the setup for a joke, but the joke is on you. It’s not funny.

That comedic setup to a tragic payoff feels very much to me like what many of Joel and Ethan’s movies have that is unique, and something that I felt very much would translate from that fundamentally Jewish point of view to the experience of people of color and immigrants in this country.

The San Juan Daily Star Q: It was a pleasant surprise to see so many “Raising Arizona” references this season. As you’re writing, do you create Coen mile markers for yourself as templates?

A: It’s like the Talmud, right? You go to the big book of questions: “How has this problem been asked and answered before?” I knew that in setting up this epic season, with 21 main characters trying to look at the history of crime in America, that there was a lot of information I was going to have to deliver to the audience very quickly. So I tried to think, how had Joel and Ethan done that? My mind went to “Raising Arizona”: The first 11 minutes of that movie is this amazing narrated montage that tells you everything you know about H.I. McDunnough (Nicolas Cage), and Nathan Arizona and their quintuplets, and it brings you all the way up to the ladder on the roof of the car as they’re driving off to go get them a baby. It’s a comic masterpiece unto itself.

So I settled on this history-report format from Ethelrida, which allowed me both to tell the history of crime in Kansas City and also her history, and introduce all the important characters and ideas in about 24 minutes. Once I had “Raising Arizona” in mind, I thought it would be fun if we did a jailbreak with two women instead of John Goodman and William Forsythe, and rather than being H.I.’s buddies from prison, it’s Ethelrida’s aunt and her paramour. That led me into a story that drove those characters through the rest of the season.

Q: What about Mike Milligan (Bokeem Woodbine) made you want to close the season out with him?

A: He remains a kind of active conundrum, as this iconoclastic character that didn’t seem to belong anywhere.

He’s clearly a Black man in America in 1979. But you don’t get the sense that he really fits into that culture. He clearly doesn’t really fit into the white culture he’s part of, or at least he’s not respected there. And he also has this larger perspective on things. He’s a very thoughtful and erudite speaker who played the game — he went out and did what his boss told him; he won the war and he came home and he wanted his reward, and his reward was a tiny office with an electric typewriter. We left him in limbo, and when I thought about what to do this year, he was still there in that limbo. His story wasn’t done.

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

I didn’t set out to tell the Mike Milligan origin story per se. It was an element of this larger story in the same way that Season 2 was the Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman) origin story. There was a young girl named Molly Solverson, and she was in a few scenes, but it was mostly the story of her father and her mother.

It’s the same here. I think you can get from Satchel, whose story we’ve seen in Season 4, to the Mike Milligan that we see in Season 2, but it’s not the sum total of what the story was.

Q: Art Blakey’s “Moanin’” features prominently in the last two seasons, in two different formats. What about that album resonates with you?

A: Percussion has always been really attractive to me as a sonic element.

When it came time in Season 1 to introduce Mr. Wrench and Mr. Numbers, I asked (composer) Jeff Russo, I said: “I don’t want music, I just want a beat.

That’s their signature.” And it continued from there. In Season 2, we had a drum line, we brought in a marching band to record; Season 3, there was a lot of New Orleans-style music that was very rhythmic. Jazz is such a rhythmic form of music, so in figuring out what to set this season’s opening 24-minute montage to — which in “Raising Arizona” is “Ode to Joy” for banjo and whistling — I went to “Caravan” as a piece of music that you can hear for 24 minutes and not be tired of it. We can reinvent in different ways, and some of it is just percussion.

With “Moanin’,” in the third season I used a song version in the first hour.

This season, when we knew we were doing the jazz club and they asked me what piece of music I wanted to use, it occurred to me to use that same thing but to do it from an instrumental point of view. Again, it’s a kind of rhyme with the previous year, but there’s something about that music — it’s kind of the perfect piece.

Q: Are you definitely done with “Fargo”?

A: No, I don’t think so. I’ve been saying I’m done for three years and I haven’t been, so it feels obnoxious to say it again. The show has always been about the American experience, and there’s still a lot to say about it.

That said, I don’t have a timeline, and I don’t even really have an idea. But I find myself compelled to come back to this style of storytelling: to tell a crime sto-

21

Jason Schwartzman kept his “Fargo” mustache during the show’s pandemic production shutdown. ry, which is also a kind of character study and philosophical document exploration of our American experience. It’s not something I feel like I ever would have been allowed to do without the Coen brothers’ model in the beginning, and now I can’t think of why I would do it in any other format. The tone of voice is also unique: It’s that Kafka setup to a tragic punchline, with a happy ending. That feels like a magic trick, if you can do it right.

Q: Do you have much interaction with the Coens about the series, or feedback from them?

A: I do not. I have not spoken to

them in a while. In the first two or three years I would make my way to New York and have a breakfast or a quick conversation from time to time.

It’s never creative. It’s never about the show, other than they say, “You’re still making that thing?”

If they have something to volunteer, I’d love to hear it. But at the same time, their tacit neglect is — I still get a warm feeling from it. Because they’ve allowed me to do this.

This grand experiment in storytelling that has been so fulfilling and enriching for me.

“Everyone has their own American story, their own American experience,” said Noah Hawley, center, on the “Fargo” set.

FASHION The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, March December 4, 2020 2, 2020 Wednesday, 20 22

The SanThe JuanSan Daily JuanStar Daily Star

Halima Aden chooses faith over fashion

Halima Aden at a New York Fashion Week party in New York on Sept. 7 2019.

By DAN BILEFSKY

H

alima Aden, a model, is taking a step back from the fashion industry to focus on herself and her faith.

“If my hijab can’t be this visible — I’m not showing up,” Aden, 23, wrote on Instagram.

Aden, who was the first model to wear a hijab for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition and walk the runway for labels like Yeezy, shared on her Instagram story this past week that she felt like she had compromised her religious values and beliefs in order to fit in to the fashion industry.

She alluded to being too scared to speak up when she was influenced to change the way she dressed, including how she wore her head scarf.

“Looking back now I did what I said I would never do. Which is compromise who I am in order to fit in,” Aden wrote on the social media platform. “Just remember they call it a ‘hijab journey’ for a reason and it is never too late to reinstate your boundaries.”

The Somali American model was born in a Kenyan refugee camp and first rose to fame in 2016 after competing

in her hijab in the Miss Minnesota USA pageant. Since then, she’s been on the covers of American Vogue, Vogue Arabia, Elle and Allure.

There was, she said, struggle and discomfort that went into making many of those images a possibility. She also highlighted moments in which brands had instead covered her hair with pairs of jeans or other ornamental objects rather than her hijab and used heavy makeup on her when she would have preferred a more restrained look that

aligned with her modest principles.

She cited confusion, a sense of rebellion and a lack of fellow Muslim representation in the industry as leading factors in her internal battle.

“The pressure was getting unbearable, and I’m sad to say I went through a period of resenting the hijab,” Aden wrote on Instagram.

She went on to write that the pandemic and a break from the industry had led her to realize where she felt she went wrong in her own hijab journey.

Muslim women who choose to don a head scarf often have deeply personal and dynamic relationships with their hijabs, and Aden was met with a wave of support from many who had similar experiences on Instagram and Twitter.

“Halima’s decision to step away from the modeling scene has just reinforced my beliefs,” Aminah Bakhtair, 19, who wrote on social media about her admiration for Aden, wrote in a direct message. “I feel proud of her for taking a stance that many would hesitate to take, and to take back what the Hijab truly means and stand up for the religion of Islam.”

The act of simply wearing a hijab has often been met with discrimination on both a social and bureaucratic level, particularly in Europe. France has banned the hijab in public schools and the public workforce. German chancellor Angela Merkel said in 2016 that full-

Aden was the first model to wear a hijab for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition

face veils, sometimes worn by Muslim women as part of their hijab, should be banned.

In the United States, Muslim women have long reported instances of feeling as if they had been discriminated against for wearing their hijabs, and President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries is still in effect.

Asmaa Ali, 23, an observant hijab wearer for much of her life, has experienced Islamophobia both in person and online but said she felt inspired by Aden’s message and tweeted that she found the model’s story “beautiful.”

“The decision to take her hijab more seriously really inspired me to hold on to my faith and be unapologetic about my identity as a Black, Muslim woman,” Ali said. “I think the essence of what Halima was talking about is not necessarily that there’s a right way to wear a hijab or a wrong way to wear a hijab. I think the message is to stay true to yourself.”

Fellow hijabi models like Ikram Abdi Omar also weighed in on how Aden’s public revelation had impacted them.

“Honestly, Halima Aden’s insta story posts brought me to tears and I started looking back on my old pictures on Instagram and I miss that Ikram more than anything,” Abdi Omar shared on her Instagram story.

Rihanna, Gigi Hadid and Bella Hadid also reposted Aden’s story on their own Instagrams. Gigi Hadid wrote, “It is so important, as a hijabi or not, to self reflect and get back on track with what feels genuine to us — it’s the only way to feel truly fulfilled.”

Aden and her longtime agency, IMG Models, did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

According to her stories on the platform, the model plans to stop doing runway shows and traveling for fashion season.

“I owe no one but Allah SWT,” she wrote — the letters stand for the Arabic phrase “Subhanahu wa ta’ala,” meant to glorify God when mentioning his name.

“And y’all can literally kick rocks.”

The San Juan Daily Star con nueve pulgadas (60’9”), equivalentes a dieciocho metros ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE con cincuenta y dos centésimas PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE partes de otro (18.52m), con PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA el apartamento número diez SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN. (2203). Tiene su puerta de enBOSCO IX OVERSEAS, trada y salida por su lado Este.

Consta de tres (3) habitaciones, LLC BY FRANKLIN (2) baños, lavandería, coCREDIT MANAGMENT dos cina, comedor, sala y balcón.

CORPORATION AS Le corresponde a este apartaSERVICER mento un (1) espacio de estaDemandante, v. cionamiento identificado con el número diecisiete (17). A este ASTRID IVONNE RODRÍGUEZ GARCÍA apartamento le corresponde una participación en los elementos Demandado CIVIL NÚM. SJ2018CV00328. comunes del Condominio de SOBRE: EJECUCIÓN DE HI- unto cero cinco cinco cinco cero POTECA Y COBRO DE DINE- porciento (.05550%). Inscrito RO. AVISO DE PÚBLICA SU- en la Finca número 33,459 de Sabana Llana del Registro de BASTA. la Propiedad de San Juan, SecA: LOS CODEMANDADOS ción V. Dirección Física: 2202 DE EPIGRAFE Y AL Apto. Cond. Miradores de Venus PÚBLICO EN GENERAL: San Juan PR 00986. El siguienEl Alguacil que suscribe por la te pagaré consta inscrito en la presente anuncia y hace cons- propiedad antes mencionada y tar que en cumplimiento de una es el que se pretende ejecutar: Sentencia dictada en el caso de HIPOTECA: Por $106,650.00, epígrafe el día 22 de abril de con intereses al 6.25% anual, 2020 y de un Mandamiento de en garantía de un pagaré a faEjecución emitido el día 24 de vor de RM Actual Mortgage, agosto de 2020, que le ha sido Inc., o a su orden, que vence dirigido por la Secretaria del el 1ro de abril de 2038. Según Tribunal de Primera Instancia, escritura #77, otorgada en San Sala de San Juan, procederá a Juan, el 31 de marzo de 2008, vender en subasta, por separa- ante Rey Javier De León Colón, do, y al mejor postor con dinero inscrita al folio 107 del tomo 987 en efectivo, cheque de gerente o de Sabana Llana, inscripción letra bancaria con similar garan- 7ma. La referida hipoteca grava tía, todo título, derecho o interés el bien inmueble antes descrito. de los demandados de epígrafe Que según surge del estudio sobre el inmueble que adelante de título, la propiedad se ense describe. Se anuncia por la cuentra afecta a los siguientes presente que la primera subasta gravámenes posteriores: AVISO habrá de celebrarse el día 11 de DE DEMANDA: De fecha 23 de enero de 2021, a las 10:30 de la enero de 2018, dada en el Caso mañana, en mi oficina localizada Civil #SJ2018CV00328 (902), en el edificio que ocupa la Sala Tribunal de Primera Instancia, del Tribunal de Primera Instan- Sala Superior de San Juan; secia, Sala Superior de San Juan, guido por Scotiabank de Puerto sobre el inmueble que se des- Rico (demandante) versus Ascribe a continuación: URBANA: trid Ivonne Rodríguez García Condominio Miraflores de Venus (demandada). Se reclama el de Sabana Llana. Apartamen- pago de la deuda garantizada to: 2202. Cabida: 1172.84 pies con hipoteca de la inscripción cuadrados, equivalentes a cien- 7ma., por $106,650.00, reducito ocho metros cuadrados con da a $92,167.26, más intereses noventa y seis centésimas par- y otras sumas, o la venta de tes de otro (108.96 metros cua- esta f inca en pública subasta. drados). En lindes por el Norte, Anotada en el tomo Karibe de en veintidós pies con cuatro la Sección V de San Juan, finca pulgadas (22’4”), equivalentes #33459 de Sabana Llana, anotaa seis metros con ochenta cen- ción A y última, con fecha de 26 tésimas partes de otro (6.80m), de mayo de 2020. La subasta se con espacio exterior; por el Sur, llevará a cabo para con su proen dieciocho pies ocho pulga- ducto satisfacer al demandante, das (18’8”), equivalentes a cin- total o parcialmente según sea co metros con sesenta y nueve el caso, de la referida sentencia centésimas partes de otro (5.69 que fue dictada por las siguienm), con espacio exterior; por el tes sumas: $92,167.26 de prinEste, en sesenta pies con nueve cipal, más los intereses sobre pulgadas (60’9”), equivalentes a dicha suma al 6.25% anual, más dieciocho metros con cincuenta 5% de todo pago en atraso, más y dos centésimas partes de otro $10,665.00 como cantidad esti(18.52 m), con el apartamento pulada para costas, gastos y honúmero dieciséis (2201) y es- norarios de abogados, así como pacio exterior que da al área de cualquier otra suma que conpasillo del Condominio que lleva tenga el contrato de préstamo. al área de las escaleras que Y PARA CONOCIMIENTO DE brindan acceso al apartamento; LAS PARTES INTERESADAS y por el Oeste, en sesenta pies y del público en general, se ad-

LEGAL NOTICE

@

Wednesday, December 2, 2020 vierte que los autos de este caso y demás instancias están disponibles para ser inspeccionadas en la Secretaría del Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior de San Juan, durante las horas laborables. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad del inmueble y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes al crédito del ejecutante, incluyendo el gravamen por las contribuciones sobre la propiedad inmueble adeudadas, si los hubiere, continuarán subsistentes, entendiéndose que el rematante los acepta y queda responsable de los mismos sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá Libre de Cargas y Gravámenes posteriores. Los tipos mínimos a utilizarse para la subasta son los siguientes: El inmueble antes descrito ha sido tasado en la suma de CIENTO SEIS MIL SEISCIENTOS CINCUENTA DOLARES ($106,650.00) para que dicha suma sirva de tipo mínimo en la primera subasta a celebrarse.

De no producirse remate ni adjudicación en la primera subasta del antedicho inmueble, se celebrará una segunda subasta en el mismo lugar antes mencionado, el día 19 de enero de 2021, a las 10:30 de la mañana, sirviendo como tipo mínimo para dicha segunda subasta, una suma equivalente a las dos terceras (2/3) partes del tipo mínimo pactado para la primera subasta, o sea, la suma de SETENTA Y UN MIL CIEN DOLARES ($71,100.00) para la finca antes descrita. De no producirse remate ni adjudicación en la segunda subasta del antedicho inmueble, se celebrará una tercera subasta en el mismo lugar antes mencionado, el día 26 de enero de 2021, a las 10:30 de la mañana, sirviendo como tipo mínimo para dicha tercera subasta, una suma equivalente a la mitad (1/2) del tipo mínimo fijado para la primera subasta, o sea, la suma de CINCUENTA Y TRES MIL TRESCIENTOS VEINTICINCO DOLARES ($53,325.00) para la finca antes descrita. En testimonio de lo cual, expido el presente aviso, el cual firmo y sello, hoy 12 de noviembre de 2021, en San Juan, Puerto Rico. PEDRO HIEYE GONZALEZ, ALGUACIL.

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

E.M.I. EQUITY MORTGAGE, INC DEMANDANTE VS.

FILOMENA DEL CARMEN SAURA FABIÁN T/C/C FILOMENA SAURA

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

FABIÁN

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM.: SJ2019CV11842.

SOBRE: EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA “IN REM” (VÍA ORDINARIA). EDICTO DE SUBASTA. El Alguacil que suscribe por la presente CERTIFICA, ANUNCIA y hace CONSTAR: Que en cumplimiento de un Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia que le ha sido dirigido al Alguacil que suscribe por la Secretaría del TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE SAN JUAN, SALA SUPERIOR, en el caso de epígrafe procederá a vender en pública subasta al mejor postor en efectivo, cheque certificado en moneda legal de los Estados Unidos de América el 12 de enero de 2021, a las 10:00 de la mañana, en su oficina sita en el local que ocupa en el edificio del TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE SAN JUAN, SALA SUPERIOR, todo derecho, título e interés que tenga la parte demandada de epígrafe en el inmueble de su propiedad que ubica en: CONDOMINIO PUERTA DEL SOL, APARTAMENTO 302, SAN JUAN, PR 00926 y que se describe a continuación: URBANA: PROPIEDAD HORIZONTAL: Apartamento número 302 Apartamento residencial número 302 de forma rectangular localizado en el piso número 3 del Condominio Puerta del Sol, que ubica en la Carretera Estatal número 181 del Barrio Sabana Llana de Rio Piedras, Municipio de San Juan, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de 666.14 pies cuadrados, siendo sus medidas lineales 32 pies 10 pulgadas, por 22 pies 8 pulgadas de ancho; en lindes por el NORTE, en una distancia de 18 pies 4 pulgadas, con el apartamento número 303; por el SUR, en una distancia de 22 pies 8 pulgadas, con terrenos donde enclava el edificio; por el ESTE, en una distancia de 32 pies 10 pulgadas, con la escalera y pasillo; y por el OESTE, en una distancia de 32 pies 10 pulgadas, con terrenos donde enclava el edificio. La puerta principal del apartamento tiene acceso al pasillo central del piso. Esta unidad residencial consta de lo siguiente: sala-comedor, baño, pasillo con closet, cocina y tres cuartos dormitorios con su closet cada uno. El apartamento tiene un por ciento de participación en los elementos comunes generales de .0042873%. A este apartamento le corresponde como elemento común limitado el estacionamiento número 43. La propiedad antes relacionada consta inscrita al Tomo Karibe de Sabana Llana, finca número 32,112-A, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección Quinta. El tipo mínimo para la primera subasta del inmueble antes relacionado,

(787) 743-3346

23 será el dispuesto en la Escritura de Hipoteca, es decir la suma de $78,600.00. Si no hubiere remate ni adjudicación en la primera subasta del inmueble mencionado, se celebrará una segunda subasta en las oficinas del Alguacil que suscribe el día 20 de enero de 2021, a las 10:00 de la mañana. En la segunda subasta que se celebre servirá de tipo mínimo las dos terceras partes (2/3) del precio pactado en la primera subasta, o sea la suma de $52,400.00. Si tampoco hubiere remate ni adjudicación en la segunda subasta se celebrará una tercera subasta en las oficinas del Alguacil que suscribe el día 27 de enero de 2021, a las 10:00 de la mañana. Para la tercera subasta servirá de tipo mínimo la mitad (1/2) del precio pactado para el caso de ejecución, o sea, la suma de $39,300.00. Las hipoteca a ejecutarse en el caso de epígrafe fue constituida mediante la escritura de hipoteca número 90 otorgada en Carolina, Puerto Rico, el día 1ro de mayo de 2009 ante el Notario Pedro Juan Caride Cruz y consta inscrita al Tomo Karibe de Sabana Llana, finca número 32,112-A, en el Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección Quinta, inscripción Décimo Segunda (12da) y última. Dicha subasta se llevará a cabo para con su producto satisfacer al Demandante total o parcialmente según sea el caso el importe de la Sentencia que ha obtenido ascendente a la suma de $ $68,825.12 por concepto de principal, desde el 1ro de marzo de 2016, más intereses al tipo pactado de 4.50% anual que continúan acumulándose hasta el pago total de la obligación.

Además, la parte demandada adeuda a la parte demandante los cargos por demora equivalentes a 4.00% de la suma de aquellos pagos con atrasos en exceso de 15 días calendarios de la fecha de vencimiento; los créditos accesorios y adelantos hechos en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca; y las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado equivalentes a $7,860.00. Además, la parte demandada se comprometió a pagar una suma equivalente a $7,860.00 para cubrir cualquier otro adelanto que se haga en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca y una suma equivalente a $7,860.00 para cubrir intereses en adición a los garantizados por ley. Por razón de dicho incumplimiento, y al amparo del derecho que le confiere el Pagaré, el demandante ha declarado tales sumas vencidas, líquidas y exigibles en su totalidad. Por razón de dicho incumplimiento, y al amparo del derecho que le confiere el Pagaré, el demandante ha declarado tales sumas vencidas, líquidas y exigibles en su totalidad. Que los autos y to-

dos los documentos correspondientes al Procedimiento incoado estarán de manifiesto en la SECRETARIA DEL TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE SAN JUAN, SALA SUPERIOR durante las horas laborables. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titulación del inmueble y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante continuarán subsistentes entendiéndose que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio de remate.

La propiedad está sujeta a los siguientes gravámenes anteriores y/o preferentes según las constancias del Registro de la Propiedad. Condiciones Restrictivas sobre esta y otras fincas mediante la escritura número 54, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 23 de septiembre de 1992, ante el notario Alfredo Castro Mesa, inscrita al tomo móvil 975 de Sabana Llana, finca número 32,112-A, inscripción 3ra. Hipoteca en garantía de un pagaré a favor de la Autoridad para el Financiamiento de la Vivienda de Puerto Rico, o a su orden, por la suma principal de $5,000.00, sin intereses, vencedero el día 23 de julio de 2010, constituida mediante la escritura número 68, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 23 de julio de 2004, ante el notario Luis Felipe Matos Pacheco, e inscrita al tomo Karibe de Sabana Llana, finca número 32,112-A, inscripción 10ma. Sujeta a Condiciones de Subsidio bajo el Programa “Mi Nuevo Hogar”, por el término de 6 años. Por la presente se notifica a los acreedores desconocidos, no inscritos o presentados que sus derechos sobre los bienes hipotecados con posterioridad a la inscripción del crédito del ejecutante o acreedores de cargos o derechos reales que los hubiesen pospuesto a la hipoteca del actor y a los dueños, poseedores, tenedores de o interesados en títulos transmisibles por endoso o al portador garantizados hipotecariamente con posterioridad al crédito del actor que se celebrarán las subastas en las fechas, horas y sitios señalados para que puedan concurrir a la subasta si les conviniere o se les invita a satisfacer antes del remate el importe del crédito, de sus intereses, otros cargos y las costas y honorarios de abogado asegurados quedando subrogados en los derechos del acreedor ejecutante. La propiedad objeto de ejecución y descrita anteriormente se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores una vez el Honorable Tribunal expida la correspondiente Orden de Confirmación de Venta

Judicial. Y para conocimiento de licitadores del público en general se publicará este Edicto de acuerdo con la ley por espacio de dos semanas en tres sitios públicos del municipio en que ha de celebrarse la venta, tales como la Alcaldía, el Tribunal y la Colecturía. Este Edicto será publicado dos veces en un diario de circulación general en el Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, por espacio de dos semanas consecutivas. Expido el presente Edicto de subasta bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal en San Juan, Puerto Rico, hoy día 18 de noviembre de 2020.

EDWIN E. LOPEZ MULERO, ALGUACIL DE SUBASTAS, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, CENTRO JUDICIAL DE SAN JUAN, SALA SUPERIOR.

LEGAL NOTICE STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA COUNTY OF CUMBERLAND.

HECTOR MONREAL, Plaintiff, vs.

NEYDA L. ACEVEDO GONZALEZ

Defendant In the General Court of Justice District Court Division; File Number: 20 CVD 3227. NOTICE OF SERVICE OF PROCESS BY PUBLICATION.

TO: NEYDA L. ACEVEDO GONZALEZ - Defendant in the above entitiled action.

TAKE NOTICE that a pleading seeking relief against you has been filed in the above-entitled action. The nature of the relief being sought is an absolute divorce. You are required to make defense to such pleading not later than January 15, 2021, and upon your failure to do so the party seeking service against you will apply to the court for the relief sought. This the 25th day of November, 2020. Debra J. Radtke, HEDAHL & RADTKE, Attorney at Law, 1015 Arsenal Avenue Fayetteville, NC 28305. *

LEGAL NOTICE

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

BOSCO CREDIT X, LLC, representado por su Agente de Servicios FRANKLIN CREDIT MANAGEMENT CORPORATION Demandante vs.

MILAGROS PIMENTEL MILANO

Demandada CIVIL NÚM. SJ2019CV07361 (506). SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO (Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria). EDICTO DE SUBASTA.

Al: Público en General A: MILAGROS PIMENTEL MILANO; FULANO DE TAL y ZUTANO DE TAL, por tener Hipoteca en Garantía de Pagaré a su favor por la suma de $30,000.00

Yo, EDWIN E. LÓPEZ MULERO, ALGUACIL AUXILIAR, Alguacil de este Tribunal, a la parte demandada y a los acreedores y personas con interés sobre la propiedad que más adelante se describe, y al público en general, HAGO SABER: Que el día 17 de diciembre de 2020, a las 9:30 de la mañana, en mi oficina, sita en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de San Juan, San Juan, Puerto Rico, venderé en Pública Subasta la propiedad inmueble que más adelante se describe y cuya venta en pública subasta se ordenó por la vía ordinaria al mejor postor quien hará el pago en dinero en efectivo, giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del o la Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado, estarán de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal de San Juan durante horas laborables. Que en caso de no producir remate ni adjudicación en la primera subasta a celebrarse, se celebrará una segunda subasta para la venta de la susodicha propiedad, el día 14 de enero de 2021, a las 9:30 de la mañana y en caso de no producir remate ni adjudicación, se celebrará una tercera subasta el día 25 de enero de 2021, a las 9:30 de la mañana, de la mañana en mi oficina sita en el lugar antes indicado. La propiedad a venderse en pública subasta se describe como sigue: URBANA: Solar marcado con el número Cuatro (4), radicado en la Sección Norte del Barrio Santurce del término municipal de San Juan, Puerto Rico, con una extensión superficial de CIENTO CINCUENTA Y DOS PUNTO VEINTICINCO (152.25) METROS CUADRADOS; por el NORTE, mide quince punto quince (15.15) metros en colindancia, con el solar número Cinco (5) de don Rafael Segarra; por el SUR, mide quince punto treinta (15.30) metros, en colindancia con el solar número Tres (3) segregado y vendido a Guillermo Tirado Serrano; por el ESTE, en diez punto cero cero (10.00) metros , con propiedad de Onofre Rodrígue z; y por el OESTE, en diez punto cero cero (10.00) metros, con la Avenida Del Valle. Contiene una casa de madera y concreto dedicada a vivienda de una familia. ---La escritura .de hipoteca se encuentra inscrita al folio 137 vuelto del tomo 1111 de Santurce Norte, Registro de la Propiedad

24 de San Juan , Secc ión Primera , finca número 8,724, inscripción novena. ---Modificada la hipoteca relacionada ad-supra, por la suma de $154,557.00, que motivó la inscripción 9na. para modificar el principal que será ahora por la suma de $175,795.09, sus intereses serán al 4.875% anual , vencedero el día 1 ro. de diciembre de 2042, según la escritura número 180, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 24 de diciembre de 2012, ante el Notario Público José V. Gorbea Varona, inscrita al tomo Karibe de Santurce Norte, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan , Sección Primera, finca 8,724, inscripción 12a. ---Modificada la hipoteca relacionada nuevamente, por la suma de $154,557.00, en cuanto al principal que ahora será por la suma de $186,892.61, vencedero el día 1 ro. de junio de 2046, con su último pago por la suma de $37,378.52, según la escritura número 86, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 16 de junio de 2016, ante el Notario Público José V. Gorbea Varona, inscrita al tomo Karibe de Santurce Norte, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección Primera, finca 8,724, inscripción 13a. La dirección física de la propiedad antes descrita es: Villa Palmeras, 367 (antes Solar Número 4) Calle Del Val le, San Juan, Puerto Rico. La Subasta se llevará a efecto para satisfacer a la parte demandante la suma de $143,865.60 de principal, intereses pactados y computados sobre esta suma al tipo de 4.875% anual, desde el 1ro. de febrero de 2019, hasta su total y completo pago , contribuciones, recargos y primas de seguro adeudados y la suma de $15,455.70 por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogados, todas cuyas sumas están líquidas y exigibles. Que la cantidad mínima de licitación en la primera subasta para el inmueble será de $186,892.6 1 y de ser necesaria una segunda subasta, la cantidad mínima será equivalente a 2/3 partes de aquella, o sea, la suma de $124,595.07 y de ser necesaria una tercera subasta, la cantidad mínima será la mitad del precio pactado , es decir , la suma de $93,446.30. La propiedad se adjudicará al mejor postor, quien deberá satisfacer el importe de su oferta en moneda legal y corriente de los Estados Unidos de América en el momento de la adjudicación y que las cargas y gravámenes preferentes, si los hubiese , continuarán subsistentes, entendiéndose que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. La propiedad hipotecada a ser vendida en pública subasta se encuentra afecta al siguiente gravamen posterior: ---Hipoteca en Garantía de Pagaré a favor del Portador, o a su orden, por la suma principal de $30,000.00, sin intereses, vencedero el día

bunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los 30 días a partir de la publicación de este edicto.

Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Se le apacible que conforme al artículo 959 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. § 2787, usted tiene 30 días para aceptar o repudiar la herencia desde la publicación de este edicto.

A esos efectos, de no rechazarla, se tendrá la herencia por aceptada. Representa a la parte demandante, la representación legal cuyo nombre, dirección y teléfono se consigna de inmediato: BUFETE FORTUÑO & FORTUÑO FAS, C.S.P. LCDO. JUAN C. FORTUÑO FAS RÚA NÚM.: 11416 PO BOX 13786, SAN JUAN, PR 00908 TEL: 787- 751-5290, LEGAL NOTICE FAX: 787-751-6155 E-MAIL: ejecuciones@fortuno-law.com ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE En TOA ALTA, Puerto Rico a 17 PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE de noviembre de 2020. LCDA. PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, SUPERIOR DE TOA ALTA, Sec Regional. LIRIAM HERUNITED STATES NANDEZ OTERO, Sec Auxiliar DEPARTMENT OF del Tribunal.

31 de diciembre de 2007, según consta de la Escritura Número 50, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 7 de junio de 2007, ante el Notario Público Héctor Olán Couret, inscrita al folio 68 del tomo 1133 de Santuce Norte, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección Primera, finca número 8,724, inscripción 11 a. -Se posterga la hipoteca que motivó la inscripción 11 ma. a favor de las modificaciones que motivaron las inscripciones 12ma y 13ra, según consta de las Escrituras Número 180 y 186, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 24 de diciembre de 2012 y el día 16 de junio de 2016, ante el Notario Público José V. Gorbea Varona, inscrita al tomo Karibe de Santurce Norte, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección Primera, finca número 8,724, como nota marginal 11.2. La propiedad a ser vendida en pública subasta se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores.

EN TESTIMONIO DE LO CUAL, expido el presente Edicto para conocimiento y comparecencia de los licitadores, bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en San Juan , Puerto Rico, a 18 de noviembre de 2020. EDWIN E. LOPEZ MULERO, ALGUACIL, DIVISIÓN DE EJECUCION DE SENTENCIAS, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN. ****

AGRICULTURE RURAL DEVELOPMENT a/c/c LA ADMINISTRACION DE HOGARES DE AGRICULTORES DEMANDANTE VS.

MIGUEL NIEVES RODRIGUEZ; FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANO DE TAL COMO POSIBLES TENEDORES DEL PAGARE

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM.: TA2020CV00606.

SOBRE: SOBRE: CANCELACION DE HIPOTECA POR PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. ss.

A: MIGUEL NIEVES RODRIGUEZ; FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANO DE TAL COMO POSIBLES TENEDORES DEL PAGARE EXTRAVIADO BO. GALATEO RR 804, BOX 770 TOA ALTA, PR 00953

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tri-

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020 EN LA SUCESIÓN DE CONOCIDA MORAIMA LOURDES DEL CARMEN ARROYO ORTIZ; FULANO CUEVAS NATAL. DE TAL Y SUTANA DE BARRIO REAL ANON TAL COMO HEREDEROS URB. SOMBRAS DEL DESCONOCIDOS Y/O REAL 16-B, PARTES CON INTERÉS CALLE ALMENDRO EN DICHA SUCESIÓN DEMANDADOS PONCE PR 00780-2917.

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los 30 días a partir de la publicación de este edicto.

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

Además, se le apercibe que conforme al Artículo 959 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. § 2787, usted tiene derecho a aceptar o repudiar la herencia en un término de treinta (30) días. A esos efectos, de no rechazarla dentro de dicho término, se tendrá la herencia por aceptada pura y simplemente.

Representa a la parte demandante, la representación legal cuyo nombre, dirección y teléfono se consigna de inmediato: BUFETE FORTUÑO & FORTUÑO FAS, C.S.P. LCDO. JUAN C. FORTUÑO FAS LEGAL NOTICE RÚA NÚM.: 11416 ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PO BOX 13786, PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE SAN JUAN, PR 00908 PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA TEL: 787- 751-5290, FAX: 787-751-6155 SUPERIOR DE PONCE. SUN WEST MORTGAGE E-MAIL: ejecuciones@fortuno-law.com En Bayamón, Puerto Rico a 23 COMPANY, INC. de noviembre de 2020. LUZ DEMANDANTE VS. MAYRA CARABALLO GARSUCESIÓN DE LOURDES CIA, Sec Regional. EREINA DEL CARMEN CUEVAS AGRONT LEON, Sec Serv del NATAL, COMPUESTA Tribunal.

POR JOSE LUIS CUEVAS y CARMEN NATAL; FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANA DE TAL COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS Y/O PARTES CON INTERÉS EN DICHA SUCESIÓN

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NÚM.: PO2019CV03978.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. ss.

A: FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANO DE TAL, COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDO Y/O PARTE CON INTERÉS

CIVIL NÚM.: PE2020CV00069.

SOBRE: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA (IN REM). EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO, ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. ss.

rencia en un término de treinta (30) días. A esos efectos, de no rechazarla dentro de dicho término, se tendrá la herencia por aceptada pura y simplemente.

Representa a la parte demandante, la representación legal cuyo nombre, dirección y teléfono se consigna de inmediato: BUFETE FORTUÑO & FORTUÑO FAS, C.S.P. LCDO. JUAN C. FORTUÑO FAS RÚA NÚM.: 11416 PO BOX 13786, SAN JUAN, PR 00908 TEL: 787- 751-5290, FAX: 787-751-6155 LEGAL NOTICE E-MAIL: ejecuciones@fortuno-law.com ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE En Bayamón, Puerto Rico a 24 PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE de noviembre de 2020. LCDA. PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, SUPERIOR DE BAYAMON. Sec Regional. ANA L LOPEZ RIVERA, SubSecretaria.

ORIENTAL BANK fono se consigna de inmediato: BUFETE FORTUÑO & FORTUÑO FAS, C.S.P. LCDO. JUAN C. FORTUÑO FAS RÚA NÚM.: 11416 PO BOX 13786, SAN JUAN, PR 00908 TEL: 787- 751-5290, FAX: 787-751-6155 E-MAIL: ejecuciones@fortuno-law.com En Ponce, Puerto Rico a 17 de noviembre de 2020. LUZ MAYRA CARABALLO GARCIA, Sec Regional. EREINA AGRONT LEON, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal I.

A: MORAIMA ARROYO ORTIZ COMO HEREDERA CONOCIDA DE LA SUCESIÓN DE SANDRA DEMANDANTE VS. IVETTE ORTIZ SANTIAGO SUCESION DE CARMEN T/C/C SANDRA I. ORTIZ ORTIZ DELGADO SANTIAGO y FULANO COMPUESTA POR DE TAL Y SUTANO DE FULANO DE TAL TAL COMO HEREDEROS Y SUTANO DE TAL DESCONOCIDOS Y/O COMO HEREDEROS PARTES CON INTERES DE DESCONOCIDOS Y/O DICHA SUCESION PARTES CON INTERES PO BOX 1080, Peñuelas, DE DICHA SUCESION PR 00624-1080; DEMANDADA Bo. Cuevas, Carr. 390, CIVIL NÚM.: BY2020CV03136.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Km 0.6 Peñuelas, PR Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTE00624-0341; EMPLAZAMIENTO POR Bo. Quebrada Ceiba Sector CA. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS Corozal, Carr. 391, Km 3.5 DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE Peñuelas, PR 00624; DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO MORAIMA ARROYO ORTIZ LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. ss.

A: SUCESION DE Bo. Quebrada Ceiba Sector CARMEN ORTIZ Corozal, Carr. 391, Km 3.5 DELGADO COMPUESTA Peñuelas, PR 00624; POR FULANO DE TAL 1244-A, Wayland St. Y SUTANO DE TAL Beaven Dam, WI 53913; POR LA PRESENTE se le emCOMO HEREDEROS plaza para que presente al triDESCONOCIDOS Y/O bunal su alegación responsiva PARTES CON INTERES DE dentro de los 30 días a partir DICHA SUCESION de la publicación de este edicto.

URB. SANTA JUANITA Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del AU-10, CALLE 24 Sistema Unificado de Manejo y BAYAMON, PR 00956-4736

Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar LEGAL NOTICE su alegación responsiva en la ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE secretaría del tribunal. Si usted PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE deja de presentar su alegación PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA responsiva dentro del referido SUPERIOR DE PONCE. término, el tribunal podrá dictar UNITED STATES sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio soliciDEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE RURAL tado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejerDEVELOPMENT A/C/C cicio de su sana discreción, lo LA ADMINISTRACION entiende procedente. Además, se le apercibe que conforme al DE HOGARES DE Artículo 959 del Código Civil, 31 AGRICULTORES L.P.R.A. § 2787, usted tiene deDEMANDANTE VS. a aceptar o repudiar la heSUCESIÓN DE SANDRA recho rencia en un término de treinta IVETTE ORTIZ SANTIAGO (30) días. A esos efectos, de no T/C/C SANDRA I. ORTIZ rechazarla dentro de dicho térSANTIAGO COMPUESTA mino, se tendrá la herencia por POR SU VIUDO MANUEL aceptada pura y simplemente.

Representa a la parte demanARROYO VAZQUEZ, dante, la representación legal POR SÍ; SU HEREDERA cuyo nombre, dirección y telé-

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los 30 días a partir de la publicación de este edicto.

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

Además, se le apercibe que conforme al Artículo 959 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. § 2787, usted tiene derecho a aceptar o repudiar la he-

LEGAL NOTICE

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

MTGLQ INVESTORS, L.P. Demandante vs.

SUCESIÓN DE FERNANDO CAGIGAS DE JESÚS, compuesta por JOHN DOE y RICHARD ROE como herederos desconocidos, ANA PIZARRO GONZÁLEZ por si y como viuda de Fernando Cacigas de Jesus, ADMINISTRACION PARA EL SUSTENTO DE MENORES \’ CENTRO DE RECAUDACION SOBRE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES

Demandado (a) Civil Núm.: SJ2020CV00863.

Sala: 506. SOBRE: EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA POR LA VIA ORDINARIA Y COBRO DE DINERO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESION DE FERNANDO CAJIGAS DE JESUS

EL SECRETARIO (A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 24 de noviembre 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 diez (1 O) 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 25 de noviembre de 2020. En San Juan.

Puerto Rico, el 25 de noviembre de 2020. Griselda Rodríguez Collado, Secretario Regional. f/ Angela M. Rivera Hernández, Secretaria Auxiliar.

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

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante v.

ROBERTO BRAVO COLON, MARITZA MALDONADO RIVERA Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. TA2019CV01503.

SALA 402. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: ROBERTO BRAVO COLON, POR SI Y EN REPRESENTACION DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR MARITZA MALDONADO RIVERA MARITZA MALDONADO RIVERA POR SI Y EN REPRESENTACION DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR ESTA Y ROBERTO BRAVO COLON

(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 noviembre 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 24 de noviembre de 2020. En BAYAMON, Puer-

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

to Rico , el 24 de noviembre de FINANCIERA 2020. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA DESCONOCIDA; FULANO SANCHEZ, Secretario(a). LUREIMY ALICEA GONZALEZ, DE TAL, SUTANO DE TAL CIVIL NUM. SJ2020CV00273 Sec Auxiliar.

(908). SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN LEGAL NOTICE DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO. Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENRico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE CIA POR EDICTO POR SUJUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera MAC.

A: CORPORACIÓN FINANCIERA ANTONIO LOPEZ PEREZ DESCONOCIDA; FULANO Demandante v.

DE TAL, SUTANO DE TAL JOHN DOE Y RICHARD EL SECRETARIO(A } que suscribe le notifica a usted que el ROE O SEA LAS PERSONAS IGNORADAS 26 de OCTUBREd e 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, QUE PUEDEN SER Sentencia Parcial o Resolución TENEDORES DEL en este caso, que ha sido debiPAGARE EXTRAVIADO damente registrada y archivada

Instancia Sala Superior de CAGUAS.

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. CG2020CV01071.

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

A: 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 10 de noviembre 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 12 de noviembre de 2020. En CAGUAS, Puerto Rico , el 12 de noviembre de 2020. CARMEN ANA PEREIRA ORTIZ, Secretario(a). F/GLORIMAR RIVERA RIVERA, Sec Auxiliar.

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

EDUARDO LÓPEZ COLLAZO, ANA MERCEDES LÓPEZ COLLAZO, NORMA IRIS LÓPEZ COLLAZO Y OTROS vs

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO; CORPORACIÓN

en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de esta. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los diez (10) días siguientes a su notificación.

Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 16 de noviembre de 2020. En San Juan, Puerto Rico, el 16 de noviembre de 2020. GRISELDA RODRÍGUEZ COLLADO, Secretaria Regional. f / DENISE M. AMARO MACHUCA, Secretario (a) Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

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 25 de noviembre de 2020. En CAROLINA, Puerto Rico , el 25 de noviembre de 2020. LCDA. MARILYN APONTE RODRIGUEZ, Secretario(a).

F/LILLIAM ORTIZ NIEVES, Sec Auxiliar.

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

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante V.

LOURDES VELEZ RIVERA

Demandado(a) Civil: SB2019CV00103. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO - ORDINARIO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: LOURDES VELEZ RIVERA

Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto (Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera EL SECRETARIO(A) que susInstancia Sala Superior de CA- cribe le notifica a usted que 18 de noviembre de 2020 , este ROLINA. Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, DLJ MORTGAGE Sentencia Parcial o Resolución CAPITAL, INC. en este caso, que ha sido debiDemandante v. damente registrada y archivada SUCESION DE EDUARDO en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de CRUZ CLAUDIO Y/O los términos de la misma. Esta Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. CA2019CV03405. notificación se publicará una SALA 403. Sobre: COBRO DE sola vez en un periódico de cirDINERO; EJECUCION DE HI- culación general en la Isla de POTECA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificaSENTENCIA POR EDICTO. ción. Y, siendo o representando A: AWILDA CRUZ usted una parte en el procediCANCEL Y WANDA miento sujeta a los términos de CRUZ CANCEL COMO la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial MIEMBROS DE LA o Resolución, de la cual puede SUCESION DE EDUARDO establecerse recurso de revisión CRUZ CLAUDIO, JOHN o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir DOE COMO HEREDEROS de la publicación por edicto de DESCONOCIDOS DE LA esta notificación, dirijo a usted SUCESION DE EDUARDO esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de CRUZ CLAUDIO (Nombre de las partes a las que se le la publicación de este edicto.

Copia de esta notificación ha notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que sus- sido archivada en los autos de cribe le notifica a usted que el este caso, con fecha de 25 de 25 de noviembre de 2020, este noviembre de 2020. En SAN

GERMAN Puerto Rico, de noviembre de 2020.

NORMA G. SANTANA RRY, Secretario(a). Fi SANTIAGO MORALES, taria Auxiliar.

el 25 LCDA. IRIZALYDIA Secre-

LEGAL NOTICE

Interes de DORAL BANK, sucesor en interes De DORAL FINANCIAL CORPORATION, Sucesor en interes de Sana Investment Mortgage Bankers, Inc.; JOHN DOE & RICHARD ROE

Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL Demandado DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior de CIVIL NÚM.:CA2020CV02381.

SOBRE: Cancelacion de Pagare Guaynabo.

REVERSE MORTGAGE Extraviado. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PREFUNDING LLC SIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS Demandante v.

UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE SUCESION DE CESAR ASOCIADOS DE PUERTO RICO. ss.

AUGUSTO BERRIOS

LOPEZ, T/C/C CESAR BERRIOS LOPEZ T/C/C CESAR BERRIOS COMPUESTA POR CLAUDIA BERRIOS, TANYA ZREBIEC Y OTROS

Demandado(a) Civil: BY2019V07115. SALA 201. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA POR L A VIA ORDINARIA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. (Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 24 de noviembre 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 30 de noviembre de 2020. En GUAYNABO, Puerto Rico , el 30 de noviembre de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretario(a). F/ MAIRENI TRINTA MALDONADO, Sec Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

A: JOHN DOE & RICHARD ROE

Por la presente se emplaza y se les notifica que se ha presentado en la Secretaría de este Tribunal la demanda del caso de epígrafe solicitando la cancelación del Pagaré suscrito a favor de Sana Ivestment Mortgage Bankers, Inc., o a su orden, por la suma principal de $232,050.00, con vencimiento el 01 de junio de 2016, y habiéndose constituido por la escritura número 471 otorgada en San Juan, el 5 de junio de 2001, ante el Notario Público Angel L. Rolon Prado, inscrita al folio 114 vuelto del tomo 799 de Carolina, finca número 38587, inscripción 9na. Representa a la parte demandante la abogada cuyo nombre, dirección y teléfono se consigna de inmediato: ENEL M. PEREZ MONTE RUA 9019 GA 24 Ave. Ramirez de Arrellano Gardens Hills, Guaynabo PR 00966 Tel/Fax.: (787) 998-7415 Lcdaenelperez@gmail.com Se le apercibe que si no comparecieran ustedes a contestar dicha demanda dentro del término de 30 días a partir de la publicación de este edicto se le anotará la rebeldía y se le dictará sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado sin más citarle ni oirle. La parte demandada deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Administración y Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal, advirtiéndosele que de no hacerlo se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle. Dado en Carolina a 18 de noviembre de 2020. Lcda. Marilyn Aponte Rodriguez, Sec Regional. Solmarie Montero Castro, Sec Auxiliar.

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE LEGAL NOTICE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE CAROLINA. ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE JUAN JOSE PEREZ PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA MONTEJO Y SUPERIOR DE HUMACAO. CARMEN QUIÑONEZ

CASTELLANOS Demandantes vs.

BANCO POPULAR DE PR, como sucesor en

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO COMO SUCESOR EN DERECHO DE PUERTO RICO HOME

MORTGAGE T/C/C PR HOME MORTGAGE;

25 responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Administración y Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal Se le advierte que, si no contesta la demanda, radicando el original de la contestación en este Tribunal y enviando copia de la contestación a la abogada de la Parte Demandante, Leda. Belma Alonso García, cuya dirección es: PO Box 3922, Guaynabo, PR 00970-3922, Teléfono y Fax: (787) 789-1826, correo electrónico: oficinabelmaalonso@gmail.com, dentro del término de treinta (30) días de la publicación de este edicto, excluyéndose el día de la publicación, se le anotará la rebeldía y se le dictará Sentencia en su contra, concediendo el remedio solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y el sello del Tribunal, hoy 23 de noviembre de 2020 en Humacao, Puerto Rico. Dominga Gómez Fuster, Secretaria Regional. Karilin Morales Figueroa, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal I.

cesivo, el “Deudor”) constituyó hipoteca en garantía del Pagaré Hipotecario mediante la EscrituPARTE DEMANDANTE vs. ra de Hipoteca número 18 (en EL BANCO Y AGENCIA adelante la “Hipoteca”) otorgada DE FINANCIAMIENTO 30 de diciembre de 2014 inscrita al tomo Karibe de Caguas, DE LA VIVIENDA T/C/C Finca #46,737, inscripción 5ta.

AUTORIDAD PARA EL de! Registro de la Propiedad de FINANCIAMIENTO DE Puerto Rico, Caguas, Sección I LA VIVIENDA; FEDERAL (en adelante, el “Registro”). La Hipoteca mencionada grava la DEPOSIT INSURANCE siguiente propiedad: URBANA: CORPORATION Solar marcado con el número COMO SÍNDICO DE 23 del bloque NN de la UrbaniWESTERNBANK zación Villas de Castro radicada OF PUERTO RICO; en el barrio Tomás de Castro de la municipalidad de Caguas, HÉCTOR FONSECA Puerto Rico con una cabida suLEBRÓN, FULANO Y perficial de 374.29 metros cuaMENGANO DE TAL, drados, colindando por el NORPOSIBLES TENEDORES TE, con el solar número 24 en una distancia de 28.79 metros; DESCONOCIDOS DEL por el SUR, con el solar númePAGARÉ ro 22 en una distancia de 28.79 PARTE DEMANDADA metros; por el ESTE, con la CaCIVIL NÚM. HU2020CV00978 rretera Estatal Número 183 en (205). SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN una distancia de 13.00 metros DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO y por el OESTE, con la Cal!e POR LA VÍA JUDICIAL. ESTANúmero 26 en una distancia DOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL de 13.00 metros. Contiene una PRESIDENTE DE LOS E.E.U.U. casa residencial de concreto y EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO bloques. Finca Número 46,737, DE PUERTO RICO. EDICTO. inscrita al folio 60 del tomo 1318 A: FULANO Y de Caguas, Registro de la ProMENGANO DE TAL, piedad de Puerto Rico, Sección POSIBLES TENEDORES I de Caguas (en adelante, la LEGAL NOTICE “Finca 46,737”). El original del DESCONOCIDOS DEL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE pagaré hipotecario antes menPAGARÉ PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE cionado se ha extraviado sin el El 29 de enero de 1992, Hector PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA mismo poder sido localizado a Fonseca Lebrón, soltero, constipesar de las gestiones realizaSUPERIOR DE CAGUAS. tuyó una hipoteca en San Juan, das por la parte demandante y ACM CCSC OB VII Puerto Rico, conforme a la Esel ultimo acreedor conocido, y critura núm. 3 autorizada por la (Cayman) ASSET por ello comparece a este Honotaria Rita Lynne Rodríguez COMPANY; norable Tribunal solicitando su De La Rocha en garantía de Demandante V. sustitución y/o reproducción. un pagaré (no expresa número FULANO DE TAL Y Que se incluye a Fulano De Tal de testimonio) por la suma de MENGANO DEL CUAL; y a Mengano Del Cual como po$21,350.00 a favor de Banco y sibles tenedores desconocidos Demandados Agencia del Financiamiento de del pagaré hipotecario extraviala Vivienda de Puerto Rico, o a CIVIL NÚM. CG2020cv02427. do. POR EL PRESENTE EDICsu orden, con intereses al 8% SOBRE: SUSTITUCION DE TO, se le emplaza y requiere anual y vencedero el 1ro de fe- PAGARE HIPOTECARIO EXpara que conteste la Demanda brero de 2022, sobre la siguien- TRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO dentro del término de treinta (30) te propiedad: URBANA: Solar POR EDICTO. LOS ESTADOS días de la publicación de este marcado con el número I guion UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PREedicto notificándole con copia de diez (I-10) del plano de inscrip- SIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. EL dicha contestación al Lcdo. Luis ción del proyecto Santa María, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE G. Parrilla Hernández, PO Box denominado Santa María, radi- P.R. SS. 195168 San Juan, PR 00919A: FULANO DE TAL Y cado en el Barrio Calabazas del y/o 221 Avenida Ponce De término municipal de Yabucoa, MENGANO DEL CUAL, 5168 León, Piso 5, Hato Rey, Puerto Puerto Rico, con una cabida suo sea las personas Rico 00917; sin más citarle ni perficial de doscientos sesenta y desconocidas que oírle. Expedido bajo mi firma y cuatro punto cero cero (264.00) el sello del Tribunal de Caguas, metros cuadrados. En lindes por puedan ser tenedores de Puerto Rico, hoy 24 de noviemel NORTE, en una distancia de los pagarés extraviados. bre de 2020. Carmen A. Pereira veinte y cuatro punto cero cero POR MEDIO del presente edicto Ortiz, Sec del Tribunal. Carmen (24.00) metros, con el solar I se le notifica de la presentación L. Soto Planas, SubSecretaria. guion once (I-11); por el SUR, en de una Demanda en contra de una distancia de veinte y cuatro usted por la parte demandanLEGAL NOT ICE punto cero cero (24.00) metros, te en la que ésta alega que es ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE con parcela de facilidades ve- el acreedor de una facilidad PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE cinales; por el ESTE, en una de crédito garantizada, entre PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA distancia de once punto cero otros, por el siguiente pagaré SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN. cero (11.00) metros, con calle hipotecario garantizado por la FIRSTBANK número diez (10); y por el OES- siguiente hipoteca que se desTE, en una distancia de once criben a continuación: Pagaré PUERTO RICO punto cero cero (11.00) metros, hipotecario a favor de Oriental Demandante v. con el solar número I guion nue- Bank, o a su orden, mediante VICTOR M. ve (I-9). Enclava una casa. La afidávit 196, ante el Notario PúARROYO ALGARIN propiedad y la escritura de hi- blico Charles Edward Vilaró ValDemandados poteca constan inscritas al folio derrabano, por la suma principal CIVIL NÚM. SJ2019CV01411 235 del tomo 223 de Yabucoa, de $135,200.00, con intereses (802). Sobre: COBRO DE DIFinca 14093. Registro de la Pro- al 12%, y vencedero a la presNERO; INCUMPLIMIENTO DE piedad de Humacao. Inscripción tación. En la misma fecha y ante CONTRATO. EDICTO DE SUprimera. La parte demandada el mismo fedatario, Juan Carlos BASTA. deberá presentar su alegación Fontánez Rodríguez (en lo su-

AL PUBLICO EN

26 GENERAL; A LA PARTE DEMANDADA Y A LOS TENEDORES DE GRAVÁMENES POSTERIORES

Yo, ANGEL GOMEZ GOMEZ, Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Caguas, al público en general: CERTIFICO Y HAGO SABER: Cumpliendo con un Mandamiento de Venta de Ejecución de Sentencia del Secretario del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de San Juan, venderé en pública subasta al mejor postor en moneda legal de los Estados Unidos, el cual se encuentra en: Centro Industrial Rio Cañas, Calle North, Lote 1516, Carr.

175, Entrada Carrraizo, Caguas, Puerto Rico, el día 15 de enero de 2020 a las 10:30 de la mañana el siguiente bien mueble:

MARCA: FIAT MODELO: 500L AÑO: 2014 VIN: ZFBCFABHXEZ010299 TABLILLA: IIA-499

La venta se llevará a cabo para con su producto satisfacer hasta donde sea posible, para responder por las siguientes cantidades: $15,662.01; más la cantidad de $447.55 en intereses, los cuales se continúan acumulando hasta el total y completo pago de la deuda a razón de $3.20 diarios; más la suma de $562.47, por concepto de cargos por mora; más $30.00 por concepto de transacciones devueltas; más 5% del balance adeudado, equivalente a $835.10, por concepto de honorarios de abogado; para un total de $17,537.13, más intereses que se acumulen hasta el pago total y completo de la deuda. Por tal razón dicho producto será consignado judicialmente para que su desembolso esté condicionado a la ulterior resolución por el Tribunal con competencia sobre el caso de epígrafe. Se apercibe a todos los interesados que el vehículo objeto de la subasta se encuentra localizada en el Centro Industrial Rio Cañas, Calle North, Lote 1516, Carr. 175, Entrada Carrraizo, Caguas, Puerto Rico, por lo que todo aquel que quiera participar de su subasta podrá pasar por dicha localización, en horas laborables, previo a su celebración, para inspeccionarlo físicamente. La subasta se llevará a cabo el día y a la hora señalada habiendo las personas interesadas inspeccionado o no el mencionado bien. En adición, por la presente se informa que siendo la propiedad a subastarse un bien mueble no habrá tipo mínimo en la misma, por lo que el vehículo será adjudicado al mejor postor en ese momento.

La forma de pago deberá ser en efectivo, giro o cheque de gerente a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia. Si se declarase desierta la subasta, se dará por terminado este procedimiento pudiendo

adjudicarse el acreedor el vehículo dentro de los diez (10) días siguientes, si así lo estimare conveniente, por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada, si ésta fuera igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la subasta, y abonándose dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si ésta fuere mayor. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado estarán manifiestos en la Secretaría del Tribunal con competencia sobre el caso de epígrafe durante horas laborables. De acuerdo al mejor conocimiento de la parte demandante, la propiedad antes descrita que ha de venderse en subasta no tiene gravámenes anteriores, ni posteriores. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titulación y que las cargas preferentes, si alguna continuarán subsistentes; entendiéndose que el remanente los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad del mismo, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. Para la publicación de este Edicto en un periódico de circulación general una vez por semana durante dos (2) semanas consecutivas, y para la colocación del mismo en tres (3) sitios públicos visibles del municipio en que se celebre la subasta, al igual que en el municipio en que reside la parte demandada, libro el presente en Caguas, Puerto Rico, hoy 23 de noviembre de 2020. ANGEL GOMEZ GOMEZ, ALGUACIL, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE CAGUAS.

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

FIRSTBANK PUERTO RICO Demandante v.

JUAN E. MERCADO VELAZQUEZ

Demandado CIVIL NÚM. SJ2020CV00723 (802). Sobre: INCUMPLIMIENTO DE CONTRATO; COBRO DE DINERO. EDICTO DE SUBASTA.

AL PUBLICO EN GENERAL; A LA PARTE DEMANDADA Y A LOS TENEDORES DE GRAVÁMENES POSTERIORES

YO, ANGEL GOMEZ GOMEZ, Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Caguas, al público en general: CERTIFICO Y HAGO SABER: Cumpliendo con un Mandamiento de Venta de Ejecución de Sentencia del Secretario del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de San Juan, venderé en pública subasta al mejor postor en moneda legal de los Estados Unidos, el cual se encuentra en: Centro Industrial Rio Cañas, Calle North, Lote 1516, Carr.

175, Entrada Carrraízo, Caguas,

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Puerto Rico, el día 15 de enero la responsabilidad del mismo, de 2021 a las 10:00 de la maña- sin destinarse a su extinción el na el siguiente bien mueble: precio del remate. Para la publicación de este Edicto en un MARCA: PORSCHE periódico de circulación general MODELO: una vez por semana durante PANAMERA P400 dos (2) semanas consecutivas, AÑO: 2018 y para la colocación del mismo en tres (3) sitios públicos visibles NUMERO DE SERIE: WPOAE2A72JL127636 del municipio en que se celebre la subasta, al igual que en el TABLILLA: JFD-544 municipio en que reside la parte La venta se llevará a cabo para demandada, libro el presente en con su producto satisfacer hasta Caguas, Puerto Rico, hoy 23 de donde sea posible, para responNOVIEMBRE de 2020. ANGEL der por las siguientes cantidaGOMEZ GOMEZ, ALGUACIL, des: $159,212.27 de principal; TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSla cantidad de $374.80, por TANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE concepto de cargos por mora; CAGUAS. el 30% del total adeudado, por concepto de honorarios de aboLEGAL NOTICE gado según pactado, ascendente a $47,876.12; para un total ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE de $207,463.19, más intereses PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE que se acumulen hasta el pago PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA total de la deuda. Por tal razón SUPERIOR DE BAYAMON. dicho producto será consignado judicialmente para que su desembolso esté condicionado a la ulterior resolución por el Tribunal con competencia sobre el caso de epígrafe. Se apercibe a todos los interesados que el vehículo objeto de la subasta se encuentra localizada en el Centro Industrial Rio Cañas, Calle North, Lote 1516, Carr. 175, Entrada Carrraízo, Caguas, Puerto Rico, por lo que todo aquel que quiera participar de su subasta podrá pasar por dicha localización, en horas laborables, previo a su celebración, para inspeccionarlo físicamente. La subasta se llevará a cabo el día y a la hora señalada habiendo las personas interesadas inspeccionado o no el mencionado bien. En adición, por la presente se informa que siendo la propiedad a subastarse un bien mueble no habrá tipo mínimo en la misma, por lo que el vehículo será adjudicado al mejor postor en ese momento.

La forma de pago deberá ser en efectivo, giro o cheque de gerente a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia. Si se declarase desierta la subasta, se dará por terminado este procedimiento pudiendo adjudicarse el acreedor el vehículo dentro de los diez (10) días siguientes, si así lo estimare conveniente, por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada, si ésta fuera igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la subasta, y abonándose dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si ésta fuere mayor. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado estarán manifiestos en la Secretaría del Tribunal con competencia sobre el caso de epígrafe durante horas laborables. De acuerdo con el mejor conocimiento de la parte demandante, la propiedad antes descrita que ha de venderse en subasta no tiene gravámenes anteriores, ni posteriores. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titulación y que las cargas preferentes, si alguna continuará subsistente; entendiéndose que el remanente los acepta y queda subrogado en

FIRSTBANK PUERTO RICO Demandante v.

JUAN ANTONIO HERNANDEZ REYES T/C/C JUAN A. HERNANDEZ REYES T/C./C JUAN HERNANDEZ REYES

Demandados CIVIL NÚM. BY2018CV03622 (502). Sobre: INCUMPLIMIENTO DE CONTRATO; COBRO DE DINERO Y REPOSESION. EDICTO DE SUBASTA.

AL PUBLICO EN GENERAL; A LA PARTE DEMANDADA Y A LOS TENEDORES DE GRAVÁMENES POSTERIORES

YO, ANGEL GOMEZ GOMEZ, Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Caguas, al público en general: CERTIFICO Y HAGO SABER; Cumpliendo con un Mandamiento de Venta de Ejecución de Sentencia del Secretario del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Bayamón, venderé en pública subasta al mejor postor en moneda legal de los Estados Unidos, el cual se encuentra en: Carr. #1 Intersección Carr. 175, Parque Industrial Rio Cañas, Caguas, Puerto Rico, el día 15 de enero de 2021 a las 11:00 de la mañana el siguiente bien mueble:

MARCA: KIA MODELO: RIO AÑO: 2014; TABLILLA: IHB-793 VIN: KNADM4A3XE6325214

para honorarios de abogados incurridos por FirstBank en este procedimiento. Por tal razón dicho producto será consignado judicialmente para que su desembolso esté condicionado a la ulterior resolución por el Tribunal con competencia sobre el caso de epígrafe. Se apercibe a todos los interesados que el vehículo objeto de la subasta se encuentra localizada en el Carr. #1 Intersección Carr. 175, Parque Industrial Rio Cañas, Caguas, Puerto Rico, por lo que todo aquel que quiera participar de su subasta podrá pasar por dicha localización, en horas laborables, previo a su celebración, para inspeccionarlo físicamente.

La subasta se llevará a cabo el día y a la hora señalada habiendo las personas interesadas inspeccionado o no el mencionado bien. En adición, por la presente se informa que siendo la propiedad a subastarse un bien mueble no habrá tipo mínimo en la misma, por lo que el vehículo será adjudicado al mejor postor en ese momento. La forma de pago deberá ser en efectivo, giro o cheque de gerente a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia. Si se declarase desierta la subasta, se dará por terminado este procedimiento pudiendo adjudicarse el acreedor el vehículo dentro de los diez (10) días siguientes, si así lo estimare conveniente, por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada, si ésta fuera igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la subasta, y abonándose dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si ésta fuere mayor. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado estarán manifiestos en la Secretaría del Tribunal con competencia sobre el caso de epígrafe durante horas laborables. De acuerdo al mejor conocimiento de la parte demandante, la propiedad antes descrita que ha de venderse en subasta no tiene gravámenes anteriores, ni posteriores. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titulación y que las cargas preferentes, si alguna, continuarán subsistentes; entendiéndose que el remanente los acepta y queda subrogad o en la responsabilidad del mismo, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. Para la publicación de este Edicto en un periódico de circulación general una vez por semana durante dos (2) semanas consecutivas, y para la colocación del mismo en tres (3) sitios públicos visibles del municipio en que se celebre la subasta, al igual que en el municipio en que reside la parte demandada, libro el presente en Caguas, Puerto Rico, hoy 23 de noviembre de 2020.ANGEL GOMEZ GOMEZ, ALGUACIL, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE CAGUAS.

La venta se llevará a cabo para con su producto satisfacer hasta donde sea posible, para responder por las siguientes cantidades: $13,606.60 de principal, más $1,428.04 de intereses acumulados hasta el total y completo pago de la deuda, más LEGAL NOTICE $160.42 de cargos acumulados hasta el pago total y completo de ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE la deuda, más una suma equiva- PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE lente al 5% del total adeudado PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA

SUPERIOR DE PONCE.

REVERSE MORTGAGE FUNDING LLC. Demandante vs.

ANA ANGELICA DIAZ CARDONA; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA

Demandados CIVIL NUM. PO2020CV01619.

SOBRE: EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: ANA ANGELICA DIAZ CARDONA

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al Tribunal su alegación responsiva a la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de este edicto. 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: http://unired.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberé presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaria del tribunal.

Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

Greenspoon Marder, LLP Lcda. Frances L. Asencio-Guido R.U.A. 15,622 TRADE CENTRE SOUTH, SUITE 700 100 WEST CYPRESS CREEK ROAD FORT LMJDERDALE, FL 33309 Telephone: (954) 343 6273 Frances .Asencio@grnlaw. corn Expedido bajo mi firma, y se111o del Tribunal, en Ponce, Puerto Rico, hoy día 17 de noviembre de 2020. LUZ MAYRA CARABALLO GARCIA, Sec Regional.

Ereina Agront Leon, Sec Aux del Tribunal I.

DE RECAUDACION DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (CRIM)

Demandados CIVIL NUM. PO2020CV01813.

SOBRE: EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: RAMONA SEPULVEDA TORRES POR SI Y EN LA CUOTA VIUDAL USUFRUCTUARIA; JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO POSIBLES MIEMBROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESION CARLOS RAUL TORRES HERNANDEZ T/C/C CARLOS TORRES HERNANDEZ

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al Tribunal su alegación responsiva a l a demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de este edicto. 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: http://unired.rama-judicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso debe representar su alegación responsiva en la secretaria del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

Greenspoon Marder, LLP Lcda . Frances L. Asencio-Guido R. U. A. 15,622 TRADE CENTRE SOUTH, SUITE 700 100 WEST CYPRESS CREEK ROAD FORT LAUDERDALE, FL 33309 Telephone: (954) 343 6273 LEGAL NOTICE Frances.Asencio@gmlaw . com ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE Expedido bajo mi firma, y sello PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE del Tribunal, en Ponce, Puerto PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA Rico, hoy día 23 de noviembre SUPERIOR DE PONCE. de 2020. LUZ MAYRA CARABAREVERSE MORTGAGE LLO GARCIA, Sec Regional.

FUNDING LLC. Demandante vs.

SUCESION CARLOS RAUL TORRES HERNANDEZ T/C/C CARLOS TORRES HERNANDEZ COMPUESTA POR JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; RAMONA SEPULVEDA TORRES POR SI Y EN LA CUOTA VIUDAL USUFRUCTUARIA; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AME RICA ; CENTRO

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

ASOCIACIÓN DE TITULARES DEL CONDOMINIO LE MANS Demandante vs.

RAMÓN PONCE FANTAUZZI, ZAHIDEE FANTAUZZI GONZÁLEZ, SOCIEDAD LEGAL GANANCIALES PONCEFANTAUZZI

Demandados CIVIL NÚM. IS2019CV00233.

SALA: 404. SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO (Ordinario). EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: RAMÓN PONCE FANTAUZZI, ZAHIDEE FANTAUZZI GONZÁLEZ SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES PONCEFANTAUZZI Ave. Agustín Calero # 96, Isabela, Puerto Rico, 00662

POR MEDIO del presente edicto se le notifica de la radicación de una demanda en cobro de dinero por la vía ordinaria en la que se alega que usted adeuda a la parte demandante, Asociación Titulares Condominio Le Mans, ciertas sumas de dinero, y las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado de este litigio. El demandante, Asociación Titulares Condominio Le Mans, ha solicitado que se dicte sentencia en contra suya y que se le ordene pagar las cantidades reclamadas en la demanda. POR EL PRESENTE EDICTO se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva a la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento, excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra, y conceder el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. El abogado de la parte demandante es: Luis Raúl Albaladejo, RUA número 11614; Dirección: Cond. Le Mans, Oficina 504, Ave. Muñoz Rivera 602, San Juan, PR 00918; Teléfono: (787) 758-1698; Correo electrónico: lralbaladejocyahoo.com.

Se le advierte que dentro de los diez (10) días siguientes a la publicación del presente edicto, se le estará enviando a usted por correo certificado con acuse de recibo, una copia del emplazamiento y de la demanda presentada al lugar de su última dirección conocida: Ave. Agustín Calero #96, Isabela, Puerto Rico, 00662. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 17 de noviembre de 2020. SARAHI REYES PÉREZ, Secretaria Regional.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

27

Can the Giants’ tenuous grasp of the NFC East hold?

By GILLIAN R. BRASSIL

B

y the skin of their teeth, the New York Giants (4-7) entered Monday sharing the top spot in the NFC East, riding a three-game winning streak that they hope to extend in a plea for a postseason berth.

To get there, they just need to be the best of the worst. It’s not going to be easy.

They were side by side with the Washington Football Team (4-7), with the Philadelphia Eagles (who lost to the Seattle Seahawks on Monday night) and the Dallas Cowboys on their heels each with three wins, in what might be a divisional sprint to six victories. The NFC East’s teams have a tough slate of games left against NFC West challengers, and it is possible that the division winner could make the postseason with fewer than seven wins. That has never happened in a 16-game regular season.

Giants coach Joe Judge had been confident that the team was rounding into form entering Sunday’s 19-17 win against the Cincinnati Bengals, rebounding from losing their first five games.

“This is really the starting point for the division,” Judge said in a call with reporters last week. “The only thing that matters is what we do from this point forward.”

That optimism was tempered when starting quarterback Daniel Jones went down in the third quarter of Sunday’s game with a hamstring injury that could potentially keep him out for this coming Sunday’s game against Seattle.

“There are more question marks than answers right now,” Judge told reporters Monday. “We’ve got to wait to see how he responds in a couple days.”

Jones had an MRI test that indicated a strain, but Judge declined to comment on how long Jones could be out, saying that two factors would determine his status: if playing would make the injury worse and if Jones is able to defend himself on the field.

“If we asked him today, I’m sure he’d put duct tape on it and try to go at it,” Judge said.

Jones was relieved in Sunday’s game by Colt McCoy, a likely replacement under center. But Judge said he was considering several options — from bringing in a free agent to preparing another player on

Giants offensive lineman Nick Gates leapt into Coach Joe Judge’s arms to celebrate a win over Washington earlier this month that changed the team’s trajectory. the roster to take over as an emergency quarterback — all of which are harder now that the team had to conduct virtual meetings Monday and Tuesday to comply with more stringent NFL guidelines amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The potential quarterback change comes just as the Giants seemed to have pieced an offense together by emphasizing ball safety. The Giants had lost running back Saquon Barkley to a season-ending injury in their second game of the season, but Wayne Gallman has rushed for a touchdown in five consecutive games, becoming a reliable red zone option for a team that has struggled to identify reliable targets. The Giants have rushed for more than 100 yards in each of their past six games.

Jones, too, had seemed to learn from his past turnover woes, going without an interception in the Giants’ three wins and not fumbling in their past two. The Giants accumulated 386 yards of total

offense against the Bengals, their highest total of the year and a positive sign for a team that had ranked 30th in the NFL in yardage per game entering Sunday.

It was also a mark of progress for an offensive line that has struggled since Eli Manning was the franchise’s starter and that is now under new tutelage, since Judge fired Marc Colombo on Nov. 18 amid a reported practice dispute. Dave DeGuglielmo, the new offensive line coach, held the same position with New England in 2014 and 2015, when Judge was also an assistant there, and had been brought to the Giants as a consultant.

“Anybody who’s watched us play has seen the progression with those guys up front blocking much better in the running game, the protection has improved as the year has gone on, and we’ve played better as an offense as a result,” Jason Garrett, the offensive coordinator, said Friday.

The successful pivot also points to Judge’s hold on the Giants’ helm. In his first year as an NFL head coach, he has made a name for himself as enthusiastic, quirky and quick-witted; someone who is not afraid to pull a viral stunt to keep his team engaged, as he drew clicks for when he was videotaped sliding in the mud for a fumble recovery drill.

That Joe Judge juice seems to go a long way for the Giants, who have not had a postseason appearance since 2016.

In the face of a slow start, narrow wins and losses and virus cases, he has kept Giants players positive by never giving a negative quote to the news media, cracking jokes and making sure all players keep their cameras on during the team’s videoconference calls.

“We’re a Joe Judge team,” defensive back Logan Ryan said in a call with reporters Friday. “We’re going to keep working every day; he’s not going to let your head get too big.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

This Los Angeles team wants to diversify cycling. They’re starting with its podiums.

By ANDY COCHRANE

J

ustin Williams is a professional American cyclist, a celebrated national champion and a standout for another reason he wishes were not so: He is one of the few Black racers in the sport.

Now, he is bent on changing that.

After setbacks and a long journey through professional cycling, Williams formed his own team of professional riders in Los Angeles in 2019 with his younger brother Cory. The team, called L39ION (pronounced legion), has 14 riders, including 10 professionals, who race the full gamut of events — criteriums, road, gravel and cross.

“L39ION doesn’t force riders to conform to white norms,” or the expectations of what professional cyclists should look, act, or sound like, Williams said. He brought old rivals, former teammates and friends together to form the Los Angeles-based team, a roster that includes Black, Latino, Pacific Islander and white cyclists. “We wanted to win races while making the sport inclusive.”

This month, L39ION announced plans to form a squad that will compete in one of three tiers of racing overseen by the Union Cycliste Internationale, the governing body of cycling.

Williams said he aims to bring diversity to a sport in which few Black riders have cracked through. He is leading a new generation of bike racing that’s a far cry from the long-tenured traditions of the Tour de France, circuits that have historically been filled with predominantly white, European athletes.

“I’ve been fighting all my life, why would I stop now?” said Williams, 31.

As one of the most successful riders in the country, Williams focuses on criteriums, or crits, which are short road races often looping around a city or neighborhood.

Getting to where he is today wasn’t easy.

Williams charted a winding career path, one in which he repeatedly refused to conform to the mores in professional cycling.

Williams, who is from South Los Angeles, got his first bike when he was 13, learning to ride from his father, Calman, an amateur racer. Biking was one of his few escapes from a rough neighborhood.

“I remember it being unpredictable. A lot of gang members in the community and kids selling drugs on the street,” Williams said. “Other than our time riding bikes, my parents kept us inside, focused on studying.

They didn’t trust us to go out, which feels justified now. You could easily be caught in

the wrong place and end up dead or in jail.

I remember bullet holes in our street sign. I don’t know what I would have done without a bike.”

Near the end of high school, Williams’ cycling career started to take form. He focused on road racing, eyeing iconic European stage races with a dream of becoming the next Lance Armstrong. “But it was different for me,” he said.

“I was isolated, didn’t have support, and everything felt foreign,” Williams said. “Trying to develop as a young man and an athlete was impossible. It was so far from how I grew up.”

The numbers are stark. Only five of the 743 riders on cycling’s elite World Tour are Black. None of the 113 professional riders licensed by USA Cycling are Black. (In 2020, L39ION was not licensed by USA Cycling.)

This year, there was one lone Black athlete, French cyclist Kévin Reza, out of 176 riders on the start line of the Tour de France.

Williams got his start as an amateur at local crits, and in 2006, won the Junior Track National Championship.

Despite his promise in the closed circuit race scene, Williams continued to dabble in a mix of disciplines from time trials to multiday stage races, an anomaly for most riders who tend to specialize in one event.

With his race results improving, Williams moved to Europe in 2009, following the template for talented, young riders who dream of being the next great American cyclist. But even with moderate success, Williams frequently felt ostracized. “In Europe I was called ‘difficult,’” Williams said. “They called me a charity case and stereotyped me as an angry Black man.”

“I was written off faster than other riders and watched a lot of guys get on teams that never won a race. As a Black man from the ’hood, I was typecast before managers even got to know me,” he continued.

Williams returned to the U.S. in 2010 after spending a year abroad, putting his cycling ambitions on the back burner to study graphic design at Moorpark College near Los Angeles. He would race again when he was ready, he figured.

When that day came in 2016, he exploded back on the scene as part of the Cylance Pro Cycling team, winning 15 races at the highest echelon of the sport in both road races and crits.

Despite his meteoric rise, Williams found himself frustrated with contracts that paid a minimum wage and did not allow for him to have any real say in his race calendar

“We wanted to win races while bringing more people of color into the sport,” Williams said of his team, L39ION. He won the Tulsa Tough race in 2019. or roles within the team. “I wanted a voice that wasn’t moderated,” he said. Without a predictable salary, he gambled on his own training, hoping it would pay off in prize money. He went on to win back-to-back national championships in 2018 and 2019, a feat that few have accomplished.

Williams believes the lack of diversity in cycling, and inaction, starts at the top, with team managers, race organizers and cycling power brokers at the wheel. “Not one has spoken up about the racial justice movement because they don’t have to,” Williams said.

With L39ION serving as a bellwether, that may be beginning to change.

In April, Saint Augustine University became the first historically Black college to add a cycling team. The EF Pro Cycling team, a Colorado-based team known for their pink jerseys and sustained success on the World Tour, recently started two cycling programs at historically black and tribal colleges and universities with support from Cannondale and USA Cycling.

“We took a hard look in the mirror and asked ourselves what type of role we would play in making change,” said Dennis Kim, global vice president for marketing at Cannondale, referring to the wave of social action spurred by the killing of George Floyd.

“We looked at everything from supporting youth teams to feeder teams to the World Tour, but after conversations with EF and USA Cycling, we decided working with HBCUs would create more impact. It would

be amazing if this program one day created an Olympic champion, but a better sign of success is a graduate of the program returning to their community and starting their own team.”

On a similar timeline, two organizations have sprung up in the wake of social justice protests around the world. Bike Rides for Black Lives organizes mass rides around the country, and Ride for Racial Justice creates access to cycling resources and education.

“We want everyone to feel safe on a bicycle. The fact of the matter is, that many don’t,” said Massimo Alpian, a board member of Ride for Racial Justice. “Change only happens if we work grassroots with communities and top-down with brands and local governments. To make cycling more inclusive we must change social norms, offer education and create more representation.”

The movements echo the work Williams has led with L39ION. The team has a partnership with Outride, a nonprofit that aims to get children on bikes through school programs and support young cyclists who can’t afford travel costs or entrance fees to races around the country.

But there’s more to be done, Williams said.

“As a kid, cycling freed me from so many things. It connected me with people from all walks of life and helped me grow,” he said.

“In terms of impact, we’re not making nearly enough, honestly. We’re not reaching the level we want yet.”

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Wednesday, December 2, 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

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(Mar 21-April 20)

Planetary shifts from today, suggest that your mood can become lighter and brighter after a time of intense emotions. With expressive Mercury moving into adventure-seeking Sagittarius, your quest for something different, such as a trip or a life-enhancing opportunity, gets underway. A desire to experience out-of-the-ordinary ideas and places could inspire you to bigger challenges.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

As quicksilver Mercury enters an intense zone, it also moves into the sign of Sagittarius, which suggests that on the surface you might make light of issues, even though they may be causing some emotional discomfort. Gently looking into such matters could make a world of difference. The process of doing so involves being honest with yourself Taurus, and acting accordingly.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

You may sense that a key relationship is at a turning point, and this could cause you to wonder where things might go from here. However, from a cosmic perspective, it can be best not to overthink this, and to allow things to develop naturally. With expressive Mercury your guide planet moving into your relationship zone, it’s wise to keep talking over the coming weeks.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

With inquisitive Mercury entering Sagittarius, you may be drawn to people or ideas that have something fresh and different about them. Equally, you might also be attracted by an opportunity that requires you to learn new skills. The key to finding something that appeals can also hinge on the willingness to move out of your comfort zone, and doing so could be deeply rewarding.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

An encounter could change your life in a positive way, even though you might meet for a short time only and your conversation seem rather trivial.

Destiny may play its hand, with the influence of yesterday’s Eclipse ongoing. Don’t be surprised if you keep bumping into them and eventually strike up a friendship. If things do go this way, this is where it can get interesting.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Inquisitive Mercury your ruler moves into your home zone from today, which can see you taking a step back and reconsidering aspects of your life from a more personal perspective. It also continues to link with taskmaster Saturn in your sector of creativity.

Therefore, you’ll want to put a bold idea to the test before you commit to it, but you’ll be very excited by its potential.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

A shift in focus encourages you to seek out fresh opportunities by taking a leap of faith. There can also be much to explore closer to home that gives you many options, involves new friendships or that makes life easier. The Moon in Gemini and its link to Mars, might find you taking someone’s advice and learning a useful skill, or trying out a new and life-enhancing experience.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

With the festive season now underway, Mercury’s move into your money zone can be a call to get organized, so that the coming weeks allow you to enjoy yourself without breaking the bank. If you really want to save money, then this lively planet could encourage you to use any artistic skills you have to make gifts that might be more appreciated than anything shop-bought.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Today can be one of pleasant surprises, Archer. With thoughtful Mercury entering your sign, this may be a good time to take stock of your life and your priorities, and to consider what your next project might be. If yesterday’s Eclipse makes you question a key bond, Mercury encourages you to talk, but to do so in a way that brings you closer rather than keeping you apart.

If you’ve endured a situation for a while, then tackling it yourself or getting help, could be a gamechanger. Moving through this experience may have enabled you to tap into a wealth of resources, and given you confidence to face other situations. No matter how daunting they appear, your faith in yourself can be the key to resolving them, and to making your dreams a reality.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Your curiosity about certain people can encourage you to join groups, and connect with anyone whose bold spirit aligns with your positive perspective.

As the planet of talk and thought enters a sociable zone, the coming weeks may find you fascinated by ideas, interests and people who have wide-ranging experiences, views and opinions, all of which could broaden your mind, Aquarius.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

It can seem that you’re handling many responsibilities, and that you are the only one capable of doing so. However, unexpected help may come your way over coming days, so consider taking it up, as it could make life so much easier. Allowing someone else to handle the smaller tasks enables you to focus on those things you excel at, and to take the credit where it is due, Pisces.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

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Ziggy

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Wednesday, December 2, 2020

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