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 U.S. Congress has approved an allocation of $7.5 million to build the Aerospace Research Institute at the Mayagüez Campus of the University of Puerto Rico (RUM-UPR).
The funds, which will arrive at the campus through the National Institute of Standards and Technology of the federal Department of Commerce, will be used to construct a building next to the Department of Mechanical Engineering (INME) that will house the vanguard institute.
“This assignment represents the transition point between a before and after in the aerospace issue at the Mayagüez University Campus and on the island,” said Sheilla N. Torres Nieves, an INME professor and manager of the proposal. “We have been trying to obtain funds from federal agencies for these purposes since 2017. At the university, we have joined many efforts to strengthen the aerospace sector and thus be able to help in the development of this industry, one of the fastest growing in the country.”
“This is the next level of what we want: undergraduate and graduate research on topics of interest to the industry,” she added. “The proposed facilities are the first step in creating this infrastructure from which we can better train our students, continue to do quality research, and continue to support the needs of the industry.”
Dr. Ubaldo M. Córdova Figueroa, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering who while serving as executive vice president of academic affairs and research at UPR collaborated in the search for funds and follow-up with the relevant agencies, concurred with Torres Nieves’ remarks.
“The most important part is having had the vision of Torres. She and others throughout the aerospace ecosystem had established that need,” he said. “After several attempts through various programs in multiple agencies, both local and federal, we were able to identify a way out through the federal government in preparing the budget. Thanks to the support of the resident commissioner, Jenniffer González, the project was accepted by the Appropriations Committee of the House of Representatives, and was presented in the federal budget approved in December.”
“Follow-through and perseverance were key here,” Córdova Figueroa added. “Also, for me, it was a com-
mitment made to the campus in my years as executive vice president. Hand in hand with the campus and with Dr. Torres, we achieved this great dream and this great asset for Mayagüez.”
UPR President Luis A. Ferrao and RUM Chancellor Agustín Rullán Toro praised the work of Torres Nieves for the initiative that places the Mayagüez campus in a significant position.
“Historically, the RUM has been recognized as a cutting-edge institution in science, engineering and aerospace research. This million-dollar allocation from the United States Congress solidifies our position as a leader in the world of academia since it allows us to expand our infrastructure, curricular offer, and research capacity,” Ferrao said. “This assignment is another example of how the UPR has been proactive in identifying external sources of financing for developing its infrastructure in times of economic challenges. I congratulate and thank the UPRM faculty, especially Dr. Sheilla Torres Nieves, who created the proposal, the students, and all the staff who worked in this process that today bears positive results for the UPR and for Puerto Rico.”
Comerío Mayor Josían Santiago, a top leader in the Popular Democratic Party, urged the island Legislature on Monday to stop the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority’s (PREPA) debt adjustment plan proposed by the Financial Oversight and Management Board that establishes an average $19 charge for some residential customers.
Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia, as well as the New Progressive Party delegation, have also come out against possible rate hikes resulting from the latest version of the debt adjustment plan.
As previously reported by the STAR, last Thursday the oversight board filed a “First Amended Title III Plan of Adjustment” for PREPA, accompanied by the “Amended Disclosure Statement.”
The plan proposes to cut PREPA’s more than $10 billion of debt and other claims by almost half, to about $5.68 billion. A so-called legacy charge for certain customers not currently benefiting from subsidized electricity rates would be, on average, about $19 a
month. The PREPA legacy charge, which will be used to pay bondholders, would exclude qualifying low-income residential customers from a connection fee and kilowatt-hour (kWh) charge for up to 500 kWh per month. For non-subsidized residential customers, the proposed PREPA legacy charge would be a flat $13 per month connection fee, and 75 cents per kWh for up to 500 kWh per month of electricity provided by PREPA, and 3 cents per kWh for electricity above 500 kWh per month.
For commercial, industrial and government customers, the proposed PREPA
legacy charge would entail a connection fee of $16.25 for small business customers, $20 per month for smaller industrial companies, and $1,800 per month for large businesses proportional to their current rate. They would pay between 97 cents and 3 cents per kWh per month for electricity provided by PREPA.
The new plan and amended disclosure statement also reflect the terms of the oversight board’s settlement with National Public Finance Guarantee Corp., add two new classes of claims, and incorporate a number of new or revised exhibits regarding PREPA’s proposed legacy charge and other components of its plan.
Santiago noted that his municipality has the island’s largest population living below the poverty line, and the announcement of an almost $20 increase is painful and unfair for this population.
“Comerío is part of the regions that have an economic lag in the country,” he said. “We have the largest amount of population below the poverty line, so you can imagine the announcement that is made that at least they will have an additional charge of almost $20 on the energy bill.”
“A sign that things have been done here, by the two main parties, we have to admit it, leaders who have made bad decisions … that have led us to a very regrettable decision …
that the people have to pay the consequences is very painful, very unfair,” the mayor said. “You have to review the laws; what they are saying is that since that is the law you have to comply with the law. Well, the law was made and can be replaced with another law.”
The oversight board has said it would be up to the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau to determine the rates.
Tomás Torres Placa, the consumer representative on the PREPA governing board, said in a radio interview that consumers could end up paying more than $19 because if a person uses 600 megawatts of power, he or she will pay the $19 plus the $13 connection charge.
He noted that some 600,000 customers will not be paying the legacy charge as long as they don’t use more than 500 kilowatts of energy, but the rest of the customers will pay.
National PFGC settlement
Regarding the settlement with National Public Finance Guarantee Corp. of some $1 billion in debt, National appears as two classes of bondholders in the debt deal. The documents note that National has agreed to receive 71.65% of its $836.1 million in debt as Series B bonds that would be issued once PREPA’s bankruptcy is confirmed. It has also agreed to take 20% in Series B bonds to satisfy a reimbursement claim whose amount has yet to be determined.
Education Secretary Eliezer Ramos
Parés announced on Monday the first Blind Students Meeting, in which, like the recently held meeting for deaf students enrolled in the island’s public education system, students, their parents, guardians and teachers will have the opportunity to meet, integrate and exchange ideas and life experiences.
The event will be held on Wednesday, at Luis Muñoz Marín Park, starting at 9 a.m.
“Without a doubt, the meeting of deaf students was emotional and of great benefit to our children and young people and their families, and we want to replicate that with the population of blind students that we have in our schools,” Ramos Parés said in a written statement. “It is necessary to promote these support spaces so that they know each other and strengthen bonds of friendship that help
them in their growth and formation. This is part of our commitment to giving visibility to this population and encouraging empathy on the part of all citizens.”
He added that there are currently 226 blind students participating in the Blind and Deafblind Service Program in the seven educational regions. The public school system has 52 teachers specializing in instruction for the blind.
Information tables will be set up in the park to guide the parents and relatives of the students. In addition, the National Federation of the Blind of Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rican Federation of Blind Athletes and the Center for Independent Living will be present. Adaptive physical education teachers, meanwhile, have designed a series of games and events for attendees, the Education chief noted.
Interim Assistant Secretary of Special Education Jessica Díaz said copies of the Guide for the Provision of Services to Students
with Visual Impairment will be available, “and we will have a committee of teachers specialized in the blind stationed there to screen students who are suspected of having
a visual disability.”
“This will be coordinated with the service centers’ registration and eligibility determination staff,” she said.
Says $19 charge for some residential customers poses ‘very painful’ burden
Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia acknowledged Monday that the central government has not yet disbursed the $1 million identified in a recent law that he signed to meet expenses incurred by each municipal government associated with the passage of Hurricane Fiona.
He said the delay in disbursing the funds is because the Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority (AAFAF by its Spanish initials) must issue a certification required by the Financial Oversight and Management Board.
Villalba Mayor Luis Javier Hernández Ortiz made a complaint about the undisbursed funds over the weekend.
“We are in a process with the [oversight] board,” Pierluisi told the press. “The board is evaluating the legislation and I understand that already the certification … we can confirm that the legislation is not inconsistent with the Fiscal Plan.”
The governor insisted that there is good communication with the oversight board.
“What we don’t want is to end up in court,” he said. “We want to convince the board that it is a good step.”
As previously reported by the STAR, Hernández Ortiz
recently called on Pierluisi to comply with the promise to finally allocate $1 million to each municipality to meet part of the expenses and commitments made after the passage of Hurricane Fiona last year.
“Recall that on November 15, 2022, the Senate approved, on the last day of the legislative work of the fourth regular session, House Joint Resolution 387 to allocate to the ‘Municipal Emergency Assistance Fund’ the sum of $78,000,000 for the municipalities of the country, at a rate of $1 million for each town, to cover expenses related to the response and recovery after Hurricane Fiona,” the Villalba mayor said. “On January 5, 2023, Pierluisi signed RCC 387 into law. More than a month later, that allocation has not been made, and the 78 municipalities are waiting.”
Hernández Ortiz pointed out that the municipalities need the allocation to be able to finish the current fiscal year without problems.
“It is recognized by all components of local and federal government that municipalities have been led into a fiscal crisis following the elimination of the Equalization Fund,” he said. “During the emergency of Hurricane Fiona we had to take out where there was none to address the situation and fulfill our obligation to the communities.”
The Comptroller of Puerto Rico issued a qualified opinion on the fiscal operations of the Municipality of Villalba alleging that the municipality informed the Department of Treasury of payments of $500 or more to theVolunteers of Villalba program.
A qualified opinion is issued when an individual or organizational breaches are significant but not widespread.
From 2015 to 2018, the municipality had issued payments of $2,527,975 to 458 volunteers of the program established by ordinance in 2007.
The situation was referred to the island Treasury secretary, who confirmed by letter that in effect the payments of over $500 made to volunteers must be reported to the department through the informative declaration required in Law 1-2011. The finding has the effect that it encourages tax evasion to the detriment of the Treasury.
The audit of three findings indicates that the municipality awarded contracts with employee characteristics to six pensioners for a total of $264,665 in the period
examined. That situation undermines the principle of merit, the comptroller said.
In fact, three of the pensioners did not inform the Teacher Retirement System of their return to active duty. The executive director of the system indicated to the Comptroller’s Office that they will process a collection action, since Law 160-2013 establishes that when a pensioner occupies a paid position in the government, the payment of the pension is suspended.
In addition, the municipality overpaid $19,900 to the pensioner who served as director of the Department of Public Works since, contrary to the regulations in force, the remuneration may not exceed half of the salary allocated to the same full-time job. For the position, a maximum payment of $2,144 per month corresponded to the term of the contract from 2016 to 2018.
For those actions, the officials who authorized the transactions and payments may be subject to penalties contemplated in the Autonomous Municipalities Law (81-1991).
The comptroller’s report also reveals that 16 payments were made improperly to four employees while they were on leave
without pay for $6,774. The municipality did not provide the auditors with evidence on internal controls, employee training, or payment plans granted to prevent such a situation from recurring.
The audit also comments on the accu-
mulated deficits in theVillalba Operational Fund of 66% in 2015, 74% in 2016, 91% in 2017, 67% in 2018 and 61% in 2019. In the budgets from 2017 to 2019, the municipality did not allocate the necessary appropriations to settle current deficits.
Sen. Rafael Bernabe Riefkohl called on the public to participate in a demonstration for fair wages today at noon in front of the Puerto Rico Restaurants Association offices in Caparra Mall, Guaynabo.
The aim of the protest called by the organizations Justicia Salarial (Salary Justice) and One Fair Wage is the repeal of the $2.13 minimum salary received by people who work for tips, particularly those in the gastronomy and hospitality industries.
Among the calls for salary justice is for the approval of Senate Bill 754, authored by Bernabe and fellow Citizen Victory Movement Sen. Ana Irma Rivera Lassén. The measure establishes that all people who work for tips receive the minimum wage. In addition, they demand the extension of labor rights to stop the massive exodus of labor in the gastronomic and tourist industries, effective protocols for the management and prevention of cases of sexual and workplace harassment endured by waitpersons
and bartenders by their superiors, co-workers and clients.
Likewise, the bill calls for the publication of work schedules one week in advance so that workers can effectively plan their lives in and outside the workplace, and for the right to organize under unions.
“Last year, we started with an increase in the minimum wage in Puerto Rico to $8.50 from $7.25. This progress is far from doing justice to our workers, but it is a step forward,” Bernabe said. “Unfortunately, this year also begins with a proposed increase in tolls, and electricity and water [rates], and the continuous increase in the cost of different daily needs. We see how this increase disappears because people’s purchasing power will remain unchanged,” he said. “In addition, we see the injustice against those who work for tips. The minimum wage applies to those who are supposed to receive that increase to $8.50, but our laws allow the employer to pay them only $2.13. We must overcome this precarious situation that forces thousands of people who work for tips to live with this salary.”
With the purpose of providing the leadership of companies with greater tools to address problems that concern working women, the founder and CEO of Women Who Lead, Frances Ríos, Labor and Human Resources Secretary Gabriel Maldonado González and federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Director William Sánchez began a series of roundtables this week.
The meetings, to be held in February and March, will focus on training on issues of harassment, pay equity, inclusion, growth opportunities and finances for women, Ríos said.
“The Survey of Working Women that we conducted in November revealed the challenges that women in Puerto Rico face in their workplaces and what prevents them from
developing,” island businesswoman said. “We heard their voices. It is time to act to achieve real changes.”
Ríos said that for the training effort, an initial group of 12 companies that have demonstrated a solid commitment to a better work environment for women was selected to discuss the results of the survey in depth, share tools and draw up work plans. The first meeting, held at American International Group (AIG Puerto Rico), was attended by its president and CEO, Agnes Suárez; the president of the Certified Public Accountants Association, Aixa González Reyes; the president-elect of the island Chamber of Commerce, Ramón A. Pérez Blanco; the director of administration of the Society for Human Resources Management, Ana M. Iglesias Díaz; and the senior manager of human resources at Metropistas, Aida R. Gómez, among others. The next roundtables will be at BASF; Lopito, Ileana & Howie; Boston Scientific; ManpowerGroup Puerto Rico; Sartorius, Baxter; RSM Puerto Rico; Estrella LLC; MotorAmbar; and Serrallés. There will also be other dialogues with the public sector component.
“The training process is open to other companies that want to join the effort,” Ríos said. “We want to raise awareness and start moving the wheel with the people who make decisions and can produce changes.”
The Labor secretary said that “for this administration it is extremely important to continue encouraging and promoting public policy initiatives that result in better working conditions for the thousands of women who represent 52 percent of our population, but who are not equally represented in our workforce.”
“That’s why the Department of Labor is joining Women Who Lead to continue adding allies in this cause and highlight the importance of promoting initiatives aimed at diversity, equity and inclusion in the private sector and government, while complying with the various state and federal laws that prohibit discrimination and other un-
wanted practices in the workplace,” Maldonado González said. “After the findings seen in the First Study of Working Women, we are committed to listening to the feelings of all sectors and designing strategies to achieve great advances that will open the way for future generations.”
Sánchez, the EEOC director, noted that “the statistics of the federal Department of Labor show that at present there is a wage gap between men and women. Of every dollar, a woman earns 75 to 79 cents, a difference of 21 cents less than a man.”
“In the 21st century we need that gap to be closed,” he said. “The commitment must come from companies, which recognize that women have much to contribute to the organization and compensate them adequately. The EEOC’s responsibility is to ensure that women and men have similar wages under similar conditions. The agency is committed to educating employers and employees to establish an equal work environment.”
White House officials said Monday that three unidentified flying objects shot down since Friday posed a “very real” threat to civilian air traffic but were not sending out communications signals.
John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, also said the military had not yet identified the source of the objects or what their purpose was. And he said there was no indication that Americans on the ground were in danger.
The shooting down by U.S. fighter pilots of more unidentified flying objects over the weekend has added to the mounting number of questions about the nature of the highflying orbs, the identity of their makers and the implications for national security. The episodes came after the weeklong drama of what the Biden administration said was a Chinese spy balloon that floated over the United States for several days before being brought down.
Kirby said President Joe Biden on Monday ordered an interagency team to study “the broader policy implications for detection, analysis and disposition of unidentified aerial objects that pose either safety or security risks.” He said the government would redouble efforts to understand the flying objects they have been shooting down.
Here are other key developments:
— Kirby said the objects over the weekend flew lower than the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the United States before being shot down this month so they posed a potential risk to civilian air traffic. Their altitudes ranged from 20,0000 feet to 40,000 feet; transcontinental air traffic flies at about 30,000 feet, he said.
— Kirby said the administration was regularly briefing members of Congress as well as leaders in states — indirectly pushing back against criticism from lawmakers that the administration has not been forthcoming enough about what they knew regarding the detection of airborne craft, particularly the spy balloon.
— Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed that the White House does not believe aliens are involved in the UFOs being shot down by the U.S. military. “There is no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns,” she said. (She also said she loved the movie “E.T.”)
— China accused the United States of regularly sending balloons into its airspace — more than 10 times since the start of last year, a foreign ministry spokesperson said Monday. But the United States rejected the idea: “Any claim that the U.S. government operates surveillance balloons over the PRC is false,” said Adrienne Watson, a National Security Council spokesperson, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
— After the spy balloon floated over the continental United States for a week before an F-22 shot it down Feb. 4, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, adjusted its radar system to make it more sensitive. As a result, the number of objects it detected increased sharply. In other words, NORAD is picking up more incursions because it is looking for them.
President Joe Biden on Monday fired J. Brett Blanton, the federal official responsible for the maintenance and operation of the Capitol complex, amid bipartisan calls for his resignation, after an investigative report accusing him of misusing his position and revelations that he avoided the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
Blanton, who was appointed in 2019 as the architect of the Capitol, had been under scrutiny for more than a year after a report by the inspector general of his office in 2021 documented evidence supporting serious allegations against Blanton, including that he had misused his office vehicle, misled investigators and impersonated a police officer on multiple occasions.
But concerns among lawmakers in both parties intensified at a 90-minute hearing on Friday in which Blanton gave noncommittal and at times contradictory answers about his conduct, including his decision to stay away from the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot.
On Monday morning, Speaker Kevin McCarthy said on Twitter that Blanton “no longer has my confidence to continue in his job,” and should resign or be removed by Biden.
A White House official said that after conducting due diligence on the matter, the president had directed that Blanton be fired.
Rep. Joseph D. Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which oversees Capitol operations, said in a statement that he agreed with the decision.
“President Biden did the right thing and heeded my call for action,” he said.
The architect of the Capitol’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Blanton’s removal.
The inspector general report found that Blanton and his family had repeatedly made personal use of a government-issued vehicle intended for day-to-day operations at the Capitol and official emergencies. Blanton, who used his vehicles to travel to locations including South Carolina and Florida, racked up mileage that was almost three times more than anticipated. The inspector general’s report found that the vehicle misuse
equated to about $14,000 in unreported tax benefits.
Blanton admitted to using his vehicle for personal trips, but said he had done so in case he had to rush back to the Capitol for an emergency.
At the hearing last week before the administration panel, as he tried to justify the use of his government car, Blanton further infuriated lawmakers when he admitted that he was not present during the Jan. 6 attack.
He said he had been corresponding with his team via a radio system installed in his official vehicle instead of coming to the Capitol that day because he thought it would not be “prudent” to drive to work as thousands of protesters blocked access to the complex.
That drew indignant responses from lawmakers in both parties.
“I’m trying to understand why you physically weren’t here on a pretty important day,” Rep. Terri A. Sewell, D-Ala., said at the hearing, “especially given the fact that you have access to information — being on the Capitol Police Board — about potential problems that we have on this campus.”
insisted that he is focused on governing Florida, where the legislative session is scheduled to run from March to May.
But DeSantis’ above-the-fray posture carries risk. One of the central tenets of the modern Republican Party under Trump has been the willingness to fight, ruthlessly and tirelessly.
While the Florida governor has successfully portrayed himself to conservatives as a cultural warrior, his actual experience mixing it up with powerful opponents is thinner. He was barely tested last year during his reelection bid, his first since emerging as a national political figure.
In a memorable debate moment, DeSantis stood by, stiffly staring ahead, as his Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, demanded that the governor say whether he would serve all four years of a second term. When called upon next, DeSantis shot off a sharp canned retort, but the exchange left Crist looking like the more nimble combatant.
out at his potential rival, albeit to a relatively small audience. He posted his most recent innuendo about the governor on Truth Social, where he has just under 5 million followers. And he has insulted DeSantis in casual conversations, describing him as “Meatball Ron,” an apparent dig at his appearance, or “Shutdown Ron,” a reference to restrictions the governor put in place at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump’s team has been amassing data about DeSantis’ actions in response to the pandemic, in part to try to depict him as a phony.
So far, DeSantis has countered Trump’s attacks with occasional needling aimed at the former president’s anxiety about being labeled a loser. While Republicans have suffered through three disappointing election cycles with Trump as the face of the party, DeSantis won reelection resoundingly in November.
By MICHAEL C. BENDER and MAGGIE HABERMANGov. Ron DeSantis of Florida prizes preparation and the way it allows him to control his political narrative. But suddenly, he was on the verge of going off message.
He had traveled to a Central Florida warehouse last week to promote a $2 billion tax cut proposal when he was confronted with the inevitable: an especially ugly attack from former President Donald Trump that seemed to warrant a strong response.
Trump had insinuated on social media that DeSantis behaved inappropriately with high school girls while he was a teacher in his early 20s. As a reporter asked for his reaction, the Florida governor — standing amid kitchen stoves and boxes of baby diapers — inhaled sharply. He straightened the papers in front of him and raised his open palms to interrupt the question.
But instead of slamming the former president, DeSantis demurred.
“I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden,” he said. “That’s how I spend my time. I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans.”
For months, DeSantis has pursued a strategy of conflict avoidance with his top rival in the shadow 2024 Republican presidential primary, delaying what is likely to be a hostile and divisive clash that forces the party’s voters to pick sides.
But now he faces the pressing question of
how long this approach can work. Trump, who has spent weeks trying to goad DeSantis into a fight with rude nicknames like “Ron DeSanctimonious,” is stepping up his social media-fueled assault, even as polls and interviews show that DeSantis has become the leading alternative to the former president for many voters and donors.
DeSantis must also decide just how forcefully to counterattack once he engages with Trump and whether he has left himself enough room to effectively parry the former president’s taunts and smears without offending his loyal supporters.
Seventeen months before the Republican nominating convention, the future of Trump’s political movement seems likely to be decided by a battle between the 76-year-old former president, who has redefined the party in his image as centered primarily on grievances, and the 44-year-old governor, who has presented himself as a new and improved heir — younger, smarter and more strategic, policy-focused and disciplined.
Many conservatives who dislike Trump’s constant dramas, the myriad criminal investigations he is facing and the stain of his efforts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election have put their hopes in a DeSantis candidacy, in a way their predecessors never did with any of Trump’s challengers in 2016.
DeSantis has captured the attention of Republican voters and the party’s activist base by leaning into polarizing social issues from his perch as governor of a key battleground state, while so far refraining from attacking Trump and other potential 2024 rivals. He has instead
Some deep-pocketed Republican donors have privately expressed concern about how DeSantis will perform when forced to directly engage with an opponent as combative and unbothered by traditional rules of decorum as Trump.
“No Republican has ever emerged from an exchange with Donald Trump looking stronger, so the natural tendency is to deflect his attacks and avoid confrontation,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist.
“That’s easy to do and maybe even wise when his barbs are confined to Truth Social,” Donovan added, referring to Trump’s social media site, on which he has fired off many of his attacks. “The question is what happens when DeSantis finds himself on a debate stage opposite Trump and GOP voters want to see whether they are getting what they were promised.”
Trump’s efforts to undermine DeSantis began with the “DeSanctimonious” nickname as the governor concluded his successful reelection campaign. Many conservatives — who had cheered Trump’s behavior when it was directed at Democrats — reacted angrily and were protective of DeSantis.
It was a signal that Republicans might rally behind a single primary opponent to Trump in a way they did not in 2015 and 2016, when Trump called Ben Carson “pathological,” comparing him to a child molester, and insinuated that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father had been linked to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Since November, despite the criticism he faced at the time, Trump has periodically hit
“Go check out the scoreboard from last Tuesday night,” DeSantis told reporters days after the midterm elections, when he was asked about Trump’s criticism.
A spokesperson for DeSantis declined to comment. But a person familiar with the governor’s thinking said he was likely to stick with a measured approach. That means that Republicans hoping for a more aggressive stance by DeSantis, who is said to be keenly aware of how many of his supporters also like Trump, are almost certain to be disappointed.
“DeSantis has been getting the benefit of an announced presidential candidate — and all the media attention that comes with that — without having to get involved in every dogfight, because he is operating under the auspices of a governor who is doing his job,” said Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist and top adviser to Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader.
It’s unclear how long DeSantis can steer clear of the former president while both are anchored to Florida, their home state.
On Feb. 21, the super PAC supporting Trump’s presidential campaign will hold its first fundraiser of the 2024 election at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
But just days later, DeSantis will visit the same 16-mile-long barrier island, where he will host a dayslong “issues forum,” a private event for Republican donors and policy experts to meet with the governor and discuss issues that are likely to be central in a presidential campaign, according to two people who insisted on anonymity to discuss plans for an event that has not yet been announced.
In two unsuccessful bids for the White House, Sen. Bernie Sanders made no secret of his disdain for billionaires. Now, in what could be his final act in Washington, he has the power to summon them to testify before Congress — and he has a few corporate executives in his sights.
One is Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, who Sanders complains “has become a multibillionaire” by developing a coronavirus vaccine with government money. “I think Mr. Bancel should be talking to his advisers about what he might say to the United States Senate,” Sanders warned in an interview.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Howard Schultz, the on-and-off CEO of Starbucks, are also on his list. He views them as union busters whose companies have resorted to “really vicious and illegal” tactics to keep workers from organizing. He has already demanded that Schultz testify at a hearing in March.
Sanders, I-Vt., can put these men on the spot because he is the new chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. The job gives him sweeping jurisdiction over issues that have animated his rise in politics, such as access to health care, the high cost of prescription drugs and workers’ rights.
Sanders, 81, who identifies as a democratic socialist, has said he will not seek the Democratic nomination for president again if President Joe Biden runs for reelection — a position he reiterated in a recent interview in his Senate office. He is himself up for reelection in 2024 and would not say whether he would run again, which raises the prospect that the next two years in Congress could be his last.
Sanders is clearly operating on two tracks. Last week, in a move that might surprise critics who view him as unbending, he partnered with a Republican, Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana, to call on rail companies to offer seven days of paid sick leave to their workers — a provision that the Senate defeated last year when it passed legislation to avert a rail strike.
But he also sent a curt letter to Schultz, giving him until Tuesday to respond confirming his attendance at the hearing. That followed an earlier, angry letter in which Sanders urged the Starbucks chief to “immediately halt your aggressive and illegal union busting campaign.” A Starbucks spokesperson said the company was considering the request for Schultz to testify and was working to “offer clarifying information” about its labor practices.
Former Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, a Democrat who served as majority leader, said that Sanders could “bring a balance between the progressive and the pragmatic.”
“He will be progressive; he will be aspirational; he will continue to fight the fight,” Daschle said. “But at the same time, I believe Bernie Sanders wants to get things done.”
The chairmanship is the latest turn in Sanders’ long career in politics, a coda to his rise from a left-wing socialist curiosity to a national figure with respect, power and a devoted fan base. After three decades in Washington, he still manages to cast himself as an outsider. And while he may never ascend to the presidency, there is no question that he has left his mark on national politics, reviving and strengthening the American left.
But Sanders’ national following cuts both ways. He is both a darling of the progressive movement and fodder for conservatives, who are already gleefully caricaturing him.
“Medicare for All, baby!” crowed Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, referring to Sanders’ signature legislative initiative, a government-run health care program for all Americans. “I guarantee you Bernie Sanders will provide a wonderful target for Republicans to shoot at.”
He already has. Sanders’ rise has put him in the ranks of the very wealthy Americans he criticizes, in part thanks to a book he wrote, “Our Revolution,” in the wake of his first bid for the presidency. (“If you write a bestselling book, you can be a millionaire, too,” he said in 2019.)
With Republicans running the House and 60 votes needed to pass most bills in the Senate, Sanders has little hope of pushing major legislation through Congress. He intends to introduce a Medicare for All bill, as he has done in past Congresses, because he feels “it’s important to keep that issue out there,” as he put it. But he is well aware that it is going nowhere on Capitol Hill.
“We don’t have the votes,” he said matterof-factly. “We have no Republican support for it. And I would guess, you know, we have maybe half of Democrats who might support it.”
Sanders’ activist roots run deep, but after arriving in Washington in 1991 as Vermont’s lone member of the House, he quickly learned that being an outsider would only get him so far; he would have to deal with Democrats if he wanted any power. In the Senate, which he joined in 2007, he has worked his way up the ranks. In addition to leading the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, he has also served as chair of the Budget Committee.
No one — perhaps not even Sanders himself — could have predicted then that he would wage two credible runs for the Democratic nomination for president. In the interview, Sanders brushed aside questions of politics. He wanted to talk policy.
“We spend twice as much per capita on health care as the people of other industrialized nations, and yet we have 85 million who are uninsured or underinsured,” he said, adding, “So
you have a system that is not working.
“It’s propped up by the power of the insurance companies, some drug companies,” he continued, “and I will do my best to change it.”
Sanders wants to hear from Moderna, he said, about the company’s plan to sharply hike the price of its coronavirus vaccine. In a recent letter to Bancel, he assailed the vaccine maker for “unacceptable corporate greed” and urged the company to reconsider.
A spokesperson for Moderna said the company had always “been willing to engage in conversation with government stakeholders” and would continue to do so.
At the hearing in March, Sanders wants Schultz to explain why Starbucks has drawn scrutiny from the National Labor Relations Board. The board has been investigating Starbucks for various allegations of misconduct, including that it had illegally denied raises to union employees and had fired seven workers at a store in Memphis, Tennessee, for their union-organizing activity. A court later ordered Starbucks to reinstate those workers.
The health committee also has some mustpass legislation on its agenda, including the reauthorization of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, a 2006 law intended to improve public health and medical preparedness for emergencies, including acts of bioterrorism. The law was reauthorized in 2013 and must be reauthorized this year.
Joel White, a Republican strategist who specializes in health policy, said Sanders might be more bipartisan than some of his critics expect, adding, “I think Bernie probably wouldn’t have become chair of the health committee just
to throw bombs.”
Two Republicans on the panel, Braun and Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, both said in interviews that they thought they might find common ground with Sanders on matters like lowering the cost of prescription drugs and supporting community health centers.
And Daschle said Sanders had a counterpart he could probably work with: Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the top Republican on the committee. A physician who helped found a community health clinic to treat the uninsured, Cassidy was one of seven Republicans who voted to convict former President Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial.
As committee chair, Sanders said he intended to “take the show on the road” by having hearings in places other than Washington so he could hear from ordinary Americans, such as older people who have a hard time paying for prescription drugs, working families struggling to pay for child care and students who cannot afford to pay for college.
With the recent retirement of Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, a Democrat who served for 48 years, Sanders is finally the senior senator from Vermont. Asked how he felt, he said, “pretty good.” Then, ever combative, he shot back, “How do you feel?”
He said people who wonder about whether he will run again — and by people, he meant reporters — should “keep wondering.”
Why? “Because I’ve just told you, and this is very serious,” he said, wearing his trademark scowl. “If you think about my record, I take this job seriously. The purpose of elections is to elect people to do work, not to keep talking about elections.”
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
Christopher Ellington’s South Side photography studio crashed in 2020 with the onset of the pandemic. By March 2021, he was scraping by on a tax preparation and financial advice business when gunshots rang out one day as he was leaving work. Two bullets from a drive-by shooter pierced his head and left him permanently blind.
The creditors were closing in, the rent notices piling up. And then a helping hand came late last summer from Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration: the first of a year’s worth of monthly $500 checks, with no strings attached and almost no questions asked.
“Talk about shock,” said Ellington, 32. “It was ‘Hey, the government is doing this? Wait a minute. I don’t have to, you know, report this and report that, and you don’t have to go through all of my business and I don’t have to watch what I say?’ I was like, ‘This is how it should be.’”
Chicago and the surrounding suburbs of Cook County are conducting the largest experiment of its kind in the nation, an effort to supply thousands of residents with a basic level of subsistence, not in the form of food, housing or child care — just cash. Lightfoot’s $31.5 million Resilient Communities Pilot selected 5,000 city residents in August to receive a guaranteed cash income for a year. The first $500 checks from a separate program, a $42 million county pilot, went out in December to 3,250 residents concentrated in the near-in Chicago suburbs.
On Monday at its conference in Washington, which started over the weekend and runs through today, the National Association of Counties was to announce a network of county-level basic income programs to match the mayoral initiatives that have sprouted up in 50 cities.
Both Chicago and Cook County are tapping money sent to local governments through the 2021 pandemic relief law known as the American Rescue Plan. Both programs are administered by a group, GiveDirectly, that had been better known for helping poor people in developing nations. The city and county efforts are being assessed by social scientists at the University of Chicago.
“This was a once-in-a-lifetime moment for us to be bold and innovative,” said Brandie Knazze, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services.
For Democrats, the concept is a wager on big government at a time when faith in democratic governance is at a low ebb. For Republicans, it’s a return to discredited welfare handouts that waste money and foster dependency.
Whatever the outcome, the spread of basic income programs is a reminder of the growing divide between Democrats and Republicans, urban voters and rural conservatives, those who want more government in people’s lives and those who want less.
“There’s no indication that I see that the American public thinks what we really need is more aid to people who choose not to work,” said Robert Rector, a conservative public assistance expert at the Heritage Foundation who helped shape the welfare changes of the 1990s.
But in Democratic cities, in states deep blue and bright red, such as Columbia, South Carolina, Shreveport, Louisiana, and Birmingham, Alabama, political leaders are moving in the opposite direction. Lightfoot may be in the throes of a difficult campaign for reelection, but none of her eight rivals for the Democratic mayoral nomination before the first round of voting Feb. 28 have made an issue of her guaranteed income effort.
Instead, Lightfoot is picking a fight with the national Republican Party.
“These are the same people that didn’t want to expand health care, and look at the number of people in their communities, these ruby-red communities, that are suffering,” Lightfoot said. “These are the same people, frankly, that are attacking the very core of our democracy, demonizing being different, being the other, based upon your religion, your creed, who you love, your gender identity.”
She added: “I’m the mayor of the city of Chicago. I know what our people need.”
Adrian Talbott, associate dean for civicengagement at the Crown Family School of Social Work at the University of Chicago, called the effort “a prime example of Democrats’ assertion that government can work.” He added that the expectation was, “with big bets on behalf of traditionally marginalized, vulnerable populations in light of the pandemic, government can meet this moment.”
“For Chicago and Cook County,” Talbott said, “guaranteed basic income is the tip of the spear.”
The income cutoff for Chicago and Cook County is forgiving, 250% of the federal poverty level — $36,450 a year for an individual, $75,000 for a family of four — although acceptance was weighted toward certain groups such as homeless people, veterans and caregivers.
University of Chicago researchers are using surveys, in-person interviews and economic, labor, criminal, legal and educational data to track recipients of the money and an even larger control group not selected for the grants.
Lightfoot said the future of the pilot project would depend on the university’s assessment.
Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, insisted that the county project would not end when the federal funds were exhausted. The county will tap funds from newly legalized cannabis sales and other revenue streams to keep it going, using the university’s assessment to guide it and decide whether to expand it.
When she talks about the origins of the guaranteed basic income concept, Preckwinkle invokes not only Martin Luther King Jr. but the more confrontational Black Panthers.
“What’s happened in this country historically is these ideas get tried out at the local level, in cities and counties and states, and when there’s enough momentum, they get adopted by the federal government,” she said. “So that’s what we’re hoping will happen.”
To conservatives, it’s little wonder that a program funded by federal taxpayers that doles out money with no strings attached would be popular — to cities and recipients. But, Rector said, previous experiments in cash assistance, such as a “negative income tax” program for the poor in the 1970s, showed employment reduction and negative impacts on marriage that lasted long after the efforts ended. Programs such as the earned-income tax credit for lowwage workers and work requirements imposed in the 1990s were a corrective to those failures, he said.
The latest incarnation, guaranteed basic income, will keep its nondisabled recipients “in extended adolescence, and it’s really good if you could do it with a boatload of free federal money,” Rector said.
The proliferation of such programs “is a clear statement that we want a post-work economy,” he added.
Liberal academics have their own criticisms of such programs, which gained prominence when 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposed a $1,000-amonth universal basic income. A 2019 report by European labor unions expressed worry that unconditional cash assistance to create a universal income floor in a developed economy might render targeted social services obsolete, ending government functions that ensure equitable health care, child care and educational services.
With so many social service programs struggling under the weight of bureaucracy and inefficiency, the Chicago-area pilot programs are aimed not only at efficiently delivering assistance but at rescuing citizens’ faith in government at a time when democratic principles are being questioned, advocates say.
Ellington remembered getting his application in at the last moment, as one of 176,000 Chicagoans who applied in just three weeks. He heard back that he had been accepted just days later. The first check arrived within weeks, and because the programs do not count against other relief efforts, such as Social Security disability payments, that $500 a month is a true income boost.
“It completely transformed my view of the government, not only in Chicago but nationally,” he said. “It gave me an inkling of hope that things are happening.”
Attention-grabbing ads for cryptocurrency trading platforms were ubiquitous during last year’s Super Bowl.
Larry David reacted crankily to inventions in various old-timey outfits in an ad for FTX. A group of people swarmed like bees through the air in an ad for eToro. And a QR code bobbed around the screen for Coinbase.
At this year’s Big Game? Crypto ads are nowhere to be found.
In the months since the last Super Bowl, the crypto industry has fallen on hard times — especially FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange that declared bankruptcy in November. Its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was arrested in December on charges that he used billions of dollars of FTX customer deposits to finance political contributions, lavish real estate purchases and trading operations at his hedge fund. (He has pleaded not guilty to charges that he engaged in widespread fraud.)
In 2022, crypto companies spent a combined $39 million buying Super Bowl spots, according to an analysis from Kantar, a data and consulting firm. Alfredo Troncoso, an analyst for Kantar, said that “financial services had a very soft performance in 2022,” largely because crypto ads did not achieve a strong return on investment.
One of the few nods to the crypto industry in Sunday’s game was from Limit Break, a gaming company, which ran an ad saying that the company was giving away digital tokens.
Other advertisers have since taken their spots. Mark Evans, executive vice president of ad sales for Fox Sports, which broadcast the Super Bowl, said that “multiple units were in a category that had a spectacular explosion earlier in the year — the crypto category.” Their disappearance this year, he added, “created a little more inventory.”
— Between the chip ads, beer stunts and celebrity cameos, two ads with a different kind of message appeared during the Super Bowl: spots for the “He Gets Us” campaign promoting Jesus Christ.
The 30- and 60-second spots were part of a multimillion-dollar campaign from the nonprofit Servant Foundation, which also does business as an organization called the Signatry. The 30-second ad featured images and videos of children playing and embracing. The longer one showed a series of photographs of people arguing and confronting other people. At the end of the ad, the message “Jesus loved the people we hate” appeared on screen.
— The future is uncertain. The present is complex. But the past? That’s pretty safe terrain for Super Bowl advertisers.
This year — yet again — advertisers have reached into the cultural vaults of decades past. Several spots in Sunday’s game featured stars from, and references to, hits from the 1980s and 1990s.
“It’s just comfortable,” said Brad Adgate, a veteran media analyst. “You’re there to relax and enjoy the game and watch the ads. This type of strategy works.”
A Super Bowl ad for Michelob Ultra included a star-
studded reference to “Caddyshack,” the 1980 comedy about mischief at a country club. In the spot, Brian Cox of the TV show “Succession” tees off against tennis legend Serena Williams. Professional athletes Nneka Ogwumike, Jimmy Butler, Alex Morgan, Canelo Álvarez and Rickie Fowler, along with sports commentator Tony Romo, watch and taunt the competitors.
In another plaid-forward throwback, Alicia Silverstone, who starred in the role of Cher Horowitz in the 1995 romantic comedy “Clueless,” wears her character’s iconic yellowsuit look for Rakuten, a Japanese e-commerce giant.
An ad for workplace-software company Workday, a newcomer this year, featured old-school rockers such as Joan Jett and Ozzy Osbourne (as well as contemporary artist Gary Clark Jr.). Jokes about corporate “rock stars” ensued.
“People have a really emotional connection to the
music they listen to growing up,” said Pete Schlampp, the brand’s chief marketing and strategy officer. Workday’s buyers are “commonly from a more senior generation,” he said, adding that the ad aims to appeal to all ages.
“I tested early versions of this ad on my 15-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son,” Schlampp said. “They were laughing, and they knew who these people were.”
— Not all the major advertising action was on television. Much of it was on TikTok.
Brands have invested heavily on TikTok in promotions and partnerships surrounding the game.
State Farm, which did not run a television ad, did a TikTok promotion. The insurance company posted a video several days before the game inviting people to enter a contest. The winner will appear in a TikTok video with megapopular creator Khaby Lame.
Even brands that aired TV commercials during the game tried to engage audiences on TikTok to extend their ads’ reach. “If you’re going to invest that much money in a 30-second spot, you need to surround that with something else to make that investment worth it,” said Kelsey Chickering, an analyst at Forrester.
Twitter had been the primary second screen for many years, she said. People watching the game on TV were also keeping an eye on their Twitter feeds for real-time conversations, and advertisers poured money into ads on the service. But this year, she said, brands have turned to TikTok. “Consumers haven’t abandoned Twitter, but advertisers will prioritize TikTok,” she added.
Booking.com offered audiences a chance to win thousands of dollars in travel credits if they commented on the company’s TikTok and Instagram posts with mention of its “Somewhere, Anywhere” campaign. Pringles asked viewers to use the hashtag #StuckInPringles on TikTok to share stories of their hands getting stuck in Pringles tubes.
And last month, Doritos invited TikTok users to enter a contest to appear in its Super Bowl ad. More than 1 million videos were submitted in three days, a spokesperson for the brand said.
The winner, Angie Yadao-Payad, of the #DoritosTriangleTryout challenge was seen dancing about 41 seconds into the ad, which also featured rappers Missy Elliott and Jack Harlow.
Johnson Controls traces its origin to the late 19th century in Wisconsin, where a clever teacher and inventor named Warren Johnson designed an early thermostat to turn the heat on or off in his classroom.
Today, Johnson Controls is an international corporation and, like companies in every industry, increasingly a technology business. The company’s software and sensors monitor and manage heating and cooling equipment, fire alarms, security systems and thermostats — to reduce costs and carbon emissions.
Despite forecasts of a recession, Johnson Controls is not trimming its digital projects, as it seeks to make essential technology for smart buildings. Last year, the company added 500 software engineers and other technical staff to its team of 2,500 software engineers. It plans to hire 350 more tech workers.
“We have to continue to invest,” said Vijay Sankaran, chief technology officer of Johnson Controls. “You can’t do what we’re trying to do without technology.”
In recent interviews and surveys, the same theme was struck again and again. The economic outlook is uncertain. Contingency plans are in place. Some initiatives are being trimmed back or slowed down. But business investment in technology remains remarkably resilient, and that trend appears likely to continue in 2023.
In a recent poll of corporate technology managers in the United States by research firm IDC, 82% said they expected a recession this year. But 62% replied that technology spending at their companies would be the same or increase compared with 2022.
The managers who shape technology strategy and spending at companies nationwide hold an important swing vote in today’s economy. Their confidence could help stabilize the economy, even as consumers cut back and Silicon Valley companies trim their payrolls after a period of explosive growth fueled by the pandemic.
Technology plays a larger role in mainstream corporate operations and accounts for a larger share of business investment than in the last two recessions — in 2001 after the dot-com bubble burst and in the 2007-09 financial crisis.
The big difference is software. Business spending on software, including software developed by companies for their
own use, more than doubled over the past decade, to $567 billion in 2022, according to an analysis of government data by James Bessen, an economist at the Technology & Policy Research Institute at Boston University School of Law.
That is 37% more than businesses spent on factories and industrial equipment combined.
The role of technology, experts say, has also steadily evolved. It is less an electricity-style utility used to automate backoffice tasks and more a key ingredient that contributes to a company’s revenue and profits.
In recent years, new technologies like cloud computing, data analytics, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity software have become increasingly mainstream. Companies now see them as vital tools for conducting business.
“That’s going to be a counterbalance for the economy that didn’t exist in the last two downturns,” said David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School.
Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta are laying off workers. But that is not true of the broader tech economy.
Most technology workers do not work at tech companies. And while employment in tech occupations did slip slightly last month, by half a percentage point, it was 7% higher than in January 2022. Nearly 6.5 million people work in tech jobs in America, 430,000 more than a year ago, according to an analysis of go-
vernment statistics by CompTIA, a technology education and research organization. The unemployment rate in tech occupations is 1.5%, compared with 3.4% for all workers.
Even the tech giants, after making layoffs, will have significantly more employees than before the pandemic. Most other companies did not go on wild hiring sprees, but had added steadily to their tech workforces.
JPMorgan Chase, the big bank, has a technology staff of 55,000, up from about 50,000 before the pandemic. It has hired people with skills in cloud computing, data science, AI and cybersecurity, and the bank will continue to add people selectively, said Lori Beer, the bank’s global chief information officer.
Global technology surveys point to the weakness in spending on hardware. After a pandemic surge, sales of personal computers and smartphones for remote work and to consumers have fallen sharply. Two major technology research firms, Gartner and IDC, have lowered their growth forecasts in recent months, citing a continued slump in personal computers, the turbulent economy and a strong dollar.
But business investment, especially in software, remains fairly strong. JohnDavid Lovelock, Gartner’s chief forecaster, said spending was growing in every industry he tracks and called that trend “recession-proof.” His counterpart at IDC, Stephen Minton, said business investment in technology was not immune to a down-
turn but was “more resilient than it’s ever been.”
Sales of remote cloud computing and software may be slowing, but only from the stratospheric heights of the pandemic. Amazon reported this month that its highly profitable cloud business, Amazon Web Services, the industry leader, was generating revenue at an annual rate of more than $80 billion and had grown 20% in the fourth quarter. Microsoft, the second-largest cloud company, reported that sales of Azure, its flagship cloud product, had grown 31%.
The recent results for technology suppliers to business show a similar pattern. Suppliers focused on helping companies convert to digital operations and cloud computing are doing well, including Accenture, Oracle and ServiceNow. IBM announced job cuts but for businesses it is shedding; its cloud and AI sales are strong.
Salesforce, a maker of customer-management software, is cutting jobs and is a target of activist shareholders. But their argument is that Salesforce should reduce expenses to increase profits. The company’s revenue grew 14% in the most recent quarter.
The relentless advance of software in nearly every industry makes tech spending less cyclical.
Take the car business. A modern automobile is becoming “a vehicle that is really defined by software,” said Alan Wexler, a senior vice president for innovation and growth at General Motors.
A sizable portion of the $35 billion that GM plans to invest in electric and selfdriving cars and trucks through 2025 will be spent on software. The code will not only animate the cars, but also transmit entertainment, office-style communications services and automated driving upgrades to vehicles, as they increasingly navigate on their own.
BrightDrop, a GM startup that makes electric cargo vans, relies on software to plan routes, conserve energy and optimize package stacking in its electric delivery pallets. FedEx recently placed an order for 2,000 BrightDrop vans, and Walmart has reserved 5,000.
When GM last month announced record profits, the company also said it planned to trim expenses by $2 billion over the next two years. It is a prudent step in an uncertain economy, its executives said.
“But we’re not slowing down with these software-led growth businesses,” Wexler said.
Johnson Controls, which set up this booth at a 2018 expo in Shanghai, added 500 technology workers last year and plans to add 350 more.U.S. stocks are moving higher despite looming key January inflation data this week, which will begin with tomorrow’s consumer price inflation report. Ahead of the inflation reports the economic calendar is dormant today, while Q4 earnings season continues down the back stretch, with Check Point Software Technologies topping estimates and announcing an increase to its share buyback plan, while Fidelity National Information Services offered disappointing guidance. Treasury yields are mixed, while the U.S. dollar is lower. Crude oil and gold prices are trading to the downside. Asia finished mostly lower ahead of the U.S. inflation data and as tensions between the U.S. and China remained, though Europe is rebounding from last week’s decline.
At 10:45 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 Index are up 0.7%, while the Nasdaq Composite is trading 0.8% higher. WTI crude oil is down $0.28 to $79.44 per barrel, and Brent crude oil is trading $0.67 lower to $85.72 per barrel. The gold spot price is declining $6.10 to $1,868.40 per ounce, and the Dollar Index is decreasing 0.3% to 103.35.
Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (CHKP $128) reported adjusted Q4 earnings-per-share (EPS) of $2.45, above the $2.36 FactSet estimate, with revenues growing 7.0% year-over-year (y/y) to $638.5 million, topping the Street’s forecast of $636.1 million. The Information Technology security company said it delivered solid results for the quarter despite a volatile year-end macro-environment. CHKP also announced that it will expand its share repurchase program by $2.0 billion. Shares are choppy as the company on a conference call with analysts issued Q1 and full-year revenue and EPS guidance that had midpoints below the Street’s projections.
Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS $64) posted Q4 EPS of $1.71, one penny above expectations, as revenues rose 1.0% y/y to $3.71 billion, compared to the forecasted $3.69 billion. The financial services technology company said it delivered results consistent with its expectations in its banking and capital markets businesses. However, FIS said revenues and margins in its merchant solutions business came under slightly more pressure than anticipated as a result of increasing recessionary impacts in the U.K. and shifting of consumer spend from goods to services in the U.S. The company issued Q1 and full-year guidance that came in below estimates. Shares are falling. Separately, FIS announced plans to spin-off its merchant solutions business, to be named Worldpay.
Q4 earnings season will continue this week and is heading down the back stretch. Of the 347 S&P 500 companies that have reported thus far, about 55% have topped revenue estimates and approximately 69% have exceeded earnings projections, per data compiled by Bloomberg. Results have been mixed, along with guidance as corporations try to determine the ultimate impact of the aggressive
Fed monetary policy tightening on the economy and profit margins.
Treasury rates are mixed, as the yield on the 2-year note is up 3 basis points (bps) at 4.54%, and the yield on the 10-year note is dipping 1 bp to 3.72%, and the 30-year bond rate is decreasing 4 bps to 3.78%.
Treasury yields have jumped in the wake of this month’s monetary policy decision from the Federal Open Market
Committee (FOMC), where it raised its target for the fed funds rate by 25 bps. In comments last week at the Economic Club in Washington D.C., Fed Chair Jerome Powell reiterated the Committee’s stance that future increases are likely, despite the welcome sign of inflation ebbing, noting that a still-tight labor market, along with persistent inflation, have been drivers in its rate hike campaign. In the latest WashingtonWISE podcast, Economy Is Thriving but Fed Not Ready to Let Go, Schwab’s Chief Fixed Income Strategist Kathy Jones and Managing Director of Legislative and Regulatory Affairs Michael Townsend discuss how the economy is thriving, jobs and wages are growing, but the Fed is promising more rate hikes, and what the markets and investors are to make of these mixed messages.
One week after a powerful earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, a severe shortage of tents, housing and medical supplies is imperiling relief efforts and posing new dangers to survivors, many of them injured or living outdoors in extreme cold.
The death toll for both countries surpassed 35,000 on Monday, with more than 1 million people in Turkey alone left homeless, according to the Turkish government.
One of the most urgent needs was temporary shelter for homeless people in Turkey, which is in short supply. The Turkish Red Crescent, a humanitarian organization, said it was speeding up the production of tents to house those displaced after Turkish news media reported a shortage of temporary housing and poor sanitary conditions for homeless people.
While aid is flowing into Turkey, relatively little has reached opposition-held parts of northern Syria because of political divisions on the ground after years of civil war. And much of the aid that did go in to Syria did not always contain the most urgently needed supplies, such as food. Inside Turkey, damaged roads in the quake zone and closed airports over the past week in some areas have also slowed the flow of aid.
As President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey came under criticism for his government’s response to the earthquake, the country’s deadliest since 1939, Turkish officials Monday detained more property developers and others suspected of having a hand in shoddy construction that violated existing building codes, according to the state-run Anadolu News Agency. Experts have said that poor construction most likely exacerbated the deadliness of the earthquake.
One of the latest people to be detained was Ibrahim Mustafa Uncuoglu, a contractor of a collapsed building in the southern city of Gaziantep, Anadolu reported. Bekir Bozdag, Turkey’s justice minister, said Sunday that legal proceedings against more than 130 people were underway over their apparent ties to collapsed buildings.
Separately, Turkish police said in a statement on Twitter on Monday that authorities had detained 56 people and arrested 14 of them, without specifying charges, on accusations that they spread
disinformation about the earthquake.
The death tolls in Turkey, where more than 31,600 people have died, and in northwestern Syria, where more than 3,500 people have died, have been steadily climbing ever since the 7.8-magnitude quake struck a week ago. Hospitals, lacking sufficient medical supplies, have struggled to care for the large numbers of people requiring urgent help.
An anonymous Pakistani donor who walked into the Turkish Embassy in the United States gave $30 million for earthquake victims, according to Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan, who said
Sunday on Twitter that he was “deeply moved” by the contribution.
“These are such glorious acts of philanthropy that enable humanity to triumph over the seemingly insurmountable odds,” Sharif wrote.
The earthquake zone in Syria includes areas controlled by the government and other areas held by opposition forces backed by Turkey.
The government-held parts of Syria have received air shipments including food, medical equipment and fuel from the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Iran and Russia, according to the state-run Syrian news
agency SANA.
The Syrian government has tightly controlled what aid it allows into opposition-held areas, and Bab al-Hawa, the only border crossing between Turkey and Syria approved by the United Nations for transporting international aid into northwestern Syria, has been a lifeline for oppositionheld areas in the north.
The United Nations said it had approval from the government of Bashar Assad, the authoritarian president of Syria, to send aid convoys into opposition-held areas in northwest Syria, where about 4 million people were almost completely dependent on international aid even before the quake struck. But the U.N. said it was still negotiating with opposition groups for additional clearance needed to send the aid.
Over the past week, the U.N. has sent 52 trucks, with materials including blankets and medical equipment, across the border to Syria from Turkey, and at least six more trucks were sent to Syria on Monday.
Recovery efforts have been stymied by lack of machinery and vehicles and by lack of fuel, as well as aftershocks, which are reportedly continuing in northwestern Syria and forcing people to flee their homes, the United Nations said.
Mazen Aloush, a spokesperson for Turkish-backed opposition groups on the Syrian side of the border crossing, said food aid has not yet reached Syria from Turkey. “The only aid we received in the past days until this moment are tents, equipment, blankets and detergents and mattresses,” he said.
In Turkey, heavy damage to the Port of Iskenderun, a key point for getting supplies to Turkey and Syria, was also hampering efforts to get the necessary supplies to earthquake victims, said Murat Aymelek, an assistant professor in marine engineering at Iskenderun Technical University
More than 238,000 people from national and international crews are assisting with relief efforts, Turkey’s national emergency management agency, AFAD, said Monday. Even as teams were winding down their operations and focusing on removing debris and recovering bodies, there were occasional stories of people still being pulled alive from the rubble.
A team that included members of the Istanbul Fire Department rescued a woman who had been underneath rubble for 175 hours, Ekrem Imamoglu, Istanbul’s mayor, tweeted Monday.
For much of the winter, the war in Ukraine settled into a slow-moving but exceedingly violent fight along a jagged 600-mile-long front line in the southeast. Now, both Ukraine and Russia are poised to go on the offensive.
Russia, wary of the growing Ukrainian arsenal of Western-supplied weapons, is moving first.
Using tens of thousands of new conscripts in the hope of overwhelming Ukraine, its forces are attacking heavily fortified positions across bomb-scarred fields and through scorched forests in the east. They are looking for vulnerabilities, hoping to exploit gaps, and setting the stage for what Ukraine warns could be Moscow’s most ambitious campaign since the start of the war.
Ukraine must now defend against the Russian assault without exhausting the resources it needs to mount an offensive of its own.
Kyiv is training thousands of its own soldiers outside the country and scrambling to amass heavy weapons and ammunition, in advance of an assault meant to “break the bones” of Russia’s army, said Olexander Danylyuk, a former director of Ukraine’s national security council.
Military analysts say it is likely to try to split the enemy forces into two zones, hoping to smash through Russian lines in the south and put its supply lines running out of Crimea in jeopardy.
“There is little doubt that both sides want to go on the offensive,” said Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army major general who is a fellow at the Lowy Institute, a research institute, “but it really comes down to how much capacity both sides have to do that.”
Aided by Western intelligence, commercial satellites and a network of partisans working to undermine the Russian occupation, senior Ukrainian officials said Moscow’s immediate intentions are coming into focus.
Russia is massing tens of thousands of soldiers, including conscripts from a mass mobilization last fall, just outside the range of American-made precision mis-
siles. The formations suggest they could be preparing to encircle Ukrainian forces arrayed across the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian minister of defense, said he expected the Russian army to attempt the capture of the Donbas and then “announce the completion of their special military operation” and call for negotiations.
But, he noted, it will be the third attempt by Russia to capture the Donbas since the war began; the first two failed.
Britain’s defense intelligence agency said Tuesday that Russia had been trying to launch “major offensive operations” since early last month, but it had “only managed to gain several hundred meters of territory per week,” because of a lack of munitions and maneuver units.
Ukraine can afford to make tactical retreats, according to military analysts, as long as it does not risk suffering a total collapse of its lines in a way that would result in its troops being encircled.
Any battle to score a major break through Ukrainian lines would begin with even more intense Russian artillery barrages, bombing by ground-attack jets and sorties by low-flying helicopters, said Serhiy Hrabsky a former colonel in the Ukrainian army and commentator on the war for Ukrainian media. That would probably be followed by tank and infantry ground assaults across the buffer zone between trench lines, he said.
“The main effort will be on the ground, where Russians will use their traditional tactics, a massive concentration of tanks, armored personnel carriers and very intensive artillery fire,” Hrabsky said.
Russia is viewed as wanting to move quickly, with President Vladimir Putin pressuring his newly appointed commander in Ukraine, General Valery Gerasimov, to capture territory and signal success to a domestic and international audience, after months of embarrassing setbacks.
Russia faces other time pressures. Western weaponry that can make the difference in battles, such as German-made Leopard tanks and American Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, have been promised but not yet arrived.
Moscow is watching the announcements of Western weapons supplies, said
able to act before we get what we want.”
Ukraine’s options
Military analysts and former Ukrainian security officials point to Russia’s so-called land bridge — stretching across southern Ukraine from the Russian border to the Crimean Peninsula — as the most tempting target for a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Russia also believes that will probably be the line of attack, said Nataliya Gumenyuk, spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern military command.
Moscow is bringing in more soldiers to defend hastily erected defensive positions, but she said Ukraine has been able to limit its ability to bring in heavy equipment.
“We can see that they accumulate some equipment around Melitopol and in Crimea, but they can’t bring it closer,” she said in an interview. “They would like to, but our forces don’t give them a chance.”
Kyiv is hoping the West will quickly provide longer-range artillery that will allow its forces to once again disrupt
Russian positions, the way it did when Ukraine recaptured swaths of the south, including Kherson city, in November.
That offensive was clearly telegraphed. This time, Ukraine wants to keep Russia guessing as to where and when it might strike.
“Russians are waiting for active moves from our side in the south,” Gumenyuk said. “We maintain this tension. This is how we demoralize the enemy.”
A successful assault over the open steppe between the current front line and the Russian-occupied city of Melitopol, for example, would cut Russian-held territory in Ukraine into two separate zones, greatly complicating Russia’s already strained logistics.
Ukraine, said Hrabsky, will combine a ground offensive with long-range strikes, first softening defenses by firing precision artillery shells and rockets at command bunkers, garrisons and ammunition depots.
It would then seek to break through Russian lines and maneuver quickly, although the Russians are firmly entrenched in the south and would probably put up stiff resistance.
Danylyuk, and want to be “sure they will beSoldiers with the Free Russia Legion in a bunker near the front line in eastern Ukraine, Feb. 3, 2023.
His pronouncements could hardly sound more drastic. In interviews and public appearances, Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale University, has taken on the question of how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly aging society.
“I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said during one online news program in late 2021. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” Seppuku is an act of ritual disembowelment that was a code among dishonored samurai in the 19th century.
Last year, when asked by a school-age boy to elaborate on his mass seppuku theories, Narita graphically described to a group of assembled students a scene from “Midsommar,” a 2019 horror film in which a Swedish cult sends one of its oldest members to die by suicide by jumping off a cliff.
“Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer,” Narita told the questioner as he assiduously scribbled notes. “So if you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that.”
At other times, he has broached the topic of euthanasia. “The possibility of making it mandatory in the future,” he said in one interview, will “come up in discussion.”
Narita, 37, said that his statements had been “taken out of context” and that he was mainly addressing a growing effort to push the most senior people out of leadership positions in business and politics — to make room for younger generations. Nevertheless, with his comments on euthanasia and social security, he has pushed the hottest button in Japan.
While he is virtually unknown even in academic circles in the United States, his extreme positions have helped him gain hundreds of thousands of followers on social media in Japan among frustrated youths who believe their economic progress has been held back by a gerontocratic society.
Appearing frequently on Japanese online shows in Tshirts, hoodies or casual jackets, and wearing signature eyeglasses with one round and one square lens, Narita leans into his Ivy League pedigree as he fosters a nerdy shock jock impression. He is among a few Japanese provocateurs who have found an eager audience by gleefully breaching social taboos. His Twitter bio: “The things you’re told you’re not allowed to say are usually true.”
In written answers to emailed questions, Narita said he was “primarily concerned with the phenomenon in Japan, where the same tycoons continue to dominate the worlds of politics, traditional industries, and media/entertainment/journalism for many years.”
The phrases “mass suicide” and “mass seppuku,” he wrote, were “an abstract metaphor.”
“I should have been more careful about their potential negative connotations,” he added. “After some self-reflection, I stopped using the words last year.”
His detractors say his repeated remarks on the subject have already spread dangerous ideas.
“It’s irresponsible,” said Masaki Kubota, a journalist who has written about Narita. People panicking about the burdens of an aging society “might think, ‘Oh, my grandparents are the
ones who are living longer,’” Kubota said, “‘and we should just get rid of them.’”
Masato Fujisaki, a columnist, argued in Newsweek Japan that the professor’s remarks “should not be easily taken as a ‘metaphor.’” Narita’s fans, Fujisaki said, are people “who think that old people should just die already and social welfare should be cut.”
Despite a culture of deference to older generations, ideas about culling them have surfaced in Japan before. A decade ago, Taro Aso — the finance minister at the time and now a power broker in the governing Liberal Democratic Party — suggested that old people should “hurry up and die.”
Last year, “Plan 75,” a dystopian movie by Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa, imagined cheerful salespeople wooing retirees into government-sponsored euthanasia. In Japanese folklore, families carry older relatives to the top of mountains or remote corners of forests and leave them to die.
Narita’s language, particularly when he has mentioned “mass suicide,” arouses historical sensitivities in a country where young men were sent to their deaths as kamikaze pilots during World War II and Japanese soldiers ordered thousands of families in Okinawa to kill themselves rather than surrender.
Critics worry that his comments could summon the kinds of sentiments that led Japan to pass a eugenics law in 1948, under which doctors forcibly sterilized thousands of people with intellectual disabilities, mental illness or genetic disorders. In 2016, a man who believed those with disabilities should be euthanized killed 19 people at a care home outside Tokyo.
In his day job, Narita conducts technical research of computerized algorithms used in education and health care policy. But as a regular presence across numerous internet platforms and on television in Japan, he has grown increasingly popular, appearing on magazine covers, comedy shows and
in an advertisement for energy drinks. He has even spawned an imitator on TikTok.
He often appears with Gen X rabble-rousers like Hiroyuki Nishimura, a celebrity entrepreneur and owner of 4chan, the online message board where some of the internet’s most toxic ideas bloom, and Takafumi Horie, a trash-talking entrepreneur who once went to prison for securities fraud.
At times, he has pushed the boundaries of taste. At a panel hosted by Globis, a Japanese graduate business school, Narita told the audience that “if this can become a Japanese society where people like you all commit seppuku one after another, it wouldn’t be just a social security policy but it would be the best ‘Cool Japan’ policy.” Cool Japan is a government program promoting the country’s cultural products.
Shocking or not, some lawmakers say Narita’s ideas are opening the door to much-needed political conversations about pension reform and changes to social welfare. “There is criticism that older people are receiving too much pension money and the young people are supporting all the old people, even those who are wealthy,” said Shun Otokita, 39, a member of the upper house of parliament with Nippon Ishin no Kai, a right-leaning party.
But detractors say Narita highlights the burdens of an aging population without suggesting realistic policies that could alleviate some of the pressures.
“He’s not focusing on helpful strategies such as better access to day care or broader inclusion of women in the workforce or broader inclusion of immigrants,” said Alexis Dudden, a historian at the University of Connecticut who studies modern Japan. “Things that might actually invigorate Japanese society.”
In broaching euthanasia, Narita has spoken publicly of his mother, who had an aneurysm when he was 19. In an interview with a website on which families can search for nursing homes, Narita described how even with insurance and government financing, his mother’s care cost him 100,000 yen — or about $760 — a month.
Some surveys in Japan have indicated that a majority of the public supports legalizing voluntary euthanasia. But Narita’s reference to a mandatory practice spooks ethicists. Currently, every country that has legalized the practice only “allows it if the person wants it themselves,” said Fumika Yamamoto, a professor of philosophy at Tokyo City University.
In his emailed responses, Narita said that “euthanasia (either voluntary or involuntary) is a complex, nuanced issue.”
“I am not advocating its introduction,” he added. “I predict it to be more broadly discussed.”
At Yale, Narita sticks to courses on probability, statistics, econometrics and education and labor economics.
Neither Tony Smith, the department chair in economics, nor a spokesperson for Yale replied to requests for comment.
Josh Angrist, who has won the Nobel in economic science and was one of Narita’s doctoral supervisors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said his former student was a “talented scholar” with an “offbeat sense of humor.”
“I would like to see Yusuke continue a very promising career as a scholar,” Angrist said. “So my main concern in a case like his is that he’s being distracted by other things, and that’s kind of a shame.”
Creeping forward along a tree line late at night toward an entrenched Ukrainian position, the Russian soldier watched in horror as his comrades were mowed down by enemy fire.
His squad of 10 ex-convicts advanced only a few dozen yards before being decimated. “We were hit by machine-gun fire,” said the soldier, a private named Sergei.
One soldier was wounded and screamed, “Help me! Help me, please!,” the private said, although no help arrived. Eight soldiers were killed, one escaped back to Russian lines and Sergei was captured by Ukrainians.
The soldiers were sitting ducks, sent forth by Russian commanders to act essentially as human cannon fodder in an assault. There are two main uses of the conscripts in this tactic: as “storm troops” who move in waves, followed by more experienced Russian fighters, and as intentional targets, to draw fire and thus identify Ukrainian positions to hit with artillery.
Either way, they have become an integral component of Russia’s military strategy as it presses a new offensive in Ukraine’s east: relying on overwhelming manpower, much of it comprising inexperienced, poorly trained conscripts, regardless of the high rate of casualties.
In interviews last week, a half-dozen prisoners of war provided rare firsthand accounts of what it is like to be part of a sacrificial Russian assault.
“These orders were common, so our losses were gigantic,” Sergei said. “The next group would follow after a pause of 15 or 20 minutes, then another, then another.”
Of his combat experience, he said, “It was the first and last wave for me.”
By luck, the bullets missed him, he said. He lay in the dark until he was captured by Ukrainians who slipped into the buffer area between the two trench lines.
The New York Times interviewed the Russians at a detention center near Lviv, in Ukraine’s west, where many captured enemy soldiers are sent. From there, some are returned to Russia in prisoner exchanges. The Times also viewed videos of interrogations by the Ukrainian authorities. The prisoners are identified only by first name and rank for security reasons, because of the possibility of retribution once they are returned.
Although they are prisoners of war overseen by Ukrainians, the Russians said they spoke freely. Their accounts could not be independently corroborated but conformed with assessments of the fighting around the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut by Western governments and military analysts.
The soldiers in Sergei’s squad were recruited from penal colonies by the private military company known as Wagner, whose forces have mostly been deployed in the Bakhmut area. There, they have enabled Russian lines to move forward slowly, cutting key resupply roads for the Ukrainian army.
Russia’s deployment of former convicts is a dark chapter in a vicious war. Russia Behind Bars, a prison rights group, has estimated that as many as 50,000 Russian prisoners have been recruited since last summer, with most sent to the battle for Bakhmut.
In the early phases of the war, the Russian army had co-
pious armored vehicles, artillery and other heavy weaponry but relatively few soldiers on the battlefield. Now, the tables have turned: Russia has deployed about 320,000 soldiers in Ukraine, according to Ukraine’s military intelligence agency. An additional 150,000 are in training camps, officials said, meaning there is the potential for a half-million soldiers to join the offensive.
But using infantry to storm trenches, redolent of World War I, brings high casualties. So far, the tactic has been used primarily by Wagner in the push for Bakhmut. Last week, the head of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said he would end the practice of recruiting convicts. But Russia’s regular army this month began recruiting convicts in exchange for pardons, shifting the practice on the Russian side in the war from the Wagner private army to the military.
Some military analysts and Western governments have questioned Russia’s strategy, citing rates of wounded and killed at about 70% in battalions featuring former convicts. On Sunday, the British defense intelligence agency said that over the past two weeks, Russia had probably suffered its highest rate of casualties since the first week of the invasion.
Interviews with former Wagner soldiers at the Ukrainian detention center aligned with these descriptions of the fighting — and shed light on a violent, harrowing experience for Russian soldiers.
“Nobody could ever believe such a thing could exist,” Sergei said of Wagner tactics.
Sergei sat, shoulders slumped, on the sofa in the warden’s office of the Ukrainian detention center. He was balding and wore shoes without laces.
The soldiers arrived at the front straight from Russia’s penal colony system, which is rife with abuse and where obedience to harsh codes of conduct in a violent setting is enforced by prison gangs and guards alike. The same sense of beaten subjugation persists at the front, Sergei said, enabling commanders to send soldiers forward on hopeless, human wave attacks.
“We are prisoners, even if former prisoners,” he said. “We are nobody and have no rights.”
Sergei said he had worked as a cellphone tower technician in a far-northern Siberian city, living with his wife and three children. In the interview, he admitted to dealing marijuana and meth, for which he was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2020.
In October, he accepted an offer to fight in exchange for a pardon. The arrangement, he said, was not offered to rapists and drug addicts, but murderers, burglars and other prisoners were welcome.
“Of course, any normal person fears death,” he said. “But a pardon for eight years is valuable.”
The fighting would turn out to be far more dangerous than he had imagined.
In three days at the front south of Bakhmut, Sergei first served as a stretcher bearer, carrying out mangled, bloody former prisoners who had been killed or wounded in an omen of what awaited him when ordered to join an assault.
On the night of Jan. 1, they were commanded to advance 500 yards along the tree line, then dig in and wait for a subsequent wave to arrive. One soldier carried a light machine gun. The others were armed with only assault rifles and hand grenades.
The sequential assaults on Ukrainian lines by small units of former Russian prisoners have become a signature Russian tactic in the effort to capture Bakhmut.
“We see them crawl for a kilometer or more,” toward Ukrainian trenches, then open fire at close range and try to capture positions, Col. Roman Kostenko, chair of the defense and intelligence committee in Ukraine’s parliament, said in an interview. “It’s effective. Yes, they have heavy losses. But with these heavy losses, they sometimes advance.”
It could be, Kostenko said, that such infantry assaults on entrenched defenses will remain mostly confined to the fight for Bakhmut and that they are being used to conserve tanks and armored personnel carriers for the expected offensive. But they could also serve as a template for wider fighting.
The former convicts, Kostenko said, are herded into the battlefield by harsh discipline: “They have orders, and they cannot disobey orders, especially in Wagner.”
A private named Aleksandr, 44, who shaved three years off a sentence for illegal logging by enlisting with Wagner, said that before deploying to the front he was told he would be shot if he disobeyed orders to advance.
“They brought us to a basement, divided us into fiveperson groups and, though we hadn’t been trained, told us to run ahead, as far as we could go,” he said of his commanders.
His dash toward Ukrainian lines in a group of five soldiers ended with three dead and two captured.
Another captured Russian, Eduard, 22, enlisted to get four years cut from a sentence for car theft. He spent three months at the front as a stretcher bearer before being ordered forward. He was captured on his first human wave assault. From his time as a stretcher bearer, he said, he estimated that half of the men in each assault were wounded or killed, with shrapnel and bullet wounds the most common injuries.
Sergei said he had initially been pleased with the offer of a pardon in exchange for service in Wagner. “When I came to this war, I thought it was worth it,” he said.
But after his one experience in an assault, he changed his mind. “I started to think things over in a big way,’’ he said. “Of course, it wasn’t worth it.”
Indian state of Gujarat, in a horrific episode of violence in 2002, in which more than 1,000 people — most of them Muslims — were slaughtered over several weeks.
While many salient facts about the Gujarat rioting are well known, the BBC documentary revealed, among other things, a hitherto unknown British government report from 2002 that found Modi “directly responsible” for the tense environment that enabled rioting and that accused the Gujarat state government of leaning on the police not to intervene as Muslims were beaten, raped and burned to death. Modi has long denied any responsibility for the violence, and an investigative team appointed by India’s Supreme Court ruled in 2012 not to charge him because there was not enough evidence.
Modi, who was reelected in 2019 with a substantial majority for his Bharatiya Janata Party, remains extremely popular. But two decades later he has not been able to shake persistent questions about his role in the violence, especially as the government has suppressed an open discussion of his brand of Hindu nationalism. Instead, as a recent Human Rights Watch report noted, “the B.J.P.’s ideology of Hindu primacy has infiltrated the justice system and the media, empowering party supporters to threaten, harass, and attack religious minorities, particularly Muslims, with impunity.”
to China’s rising economic power. Apple, for example, has announced it will start producing its iPhone 14 in India in what analysts viewed as a gradual turn from its reliance on China.
Britain’s government has emphasized the independence of the BBC but stopped short of condemning the blocking of the documentary. When questioned about the film and about Modi’s responsibility for anti-Muslim violence by an opposition lawmaker, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak affirmed Britain’s general stance against persecution but added that he was “not sure I agree at all with the characterization that the honorable gentleman has put forward.” Reuters reported that the White House is holding discussions with India on a possible state visit by Modi later this year; New Delhi will host the G20 summit in September.
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The misuse of their powers to intimidate, censor, silence or punish independent news media is an alarming hallmark of populist and authoritarian leaders.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has fallen squarely into this camp, and his actions to suppress freedom of the press are undermining India’s proud status as “the world’s largest democracy.” Since Modi took office in 2014, journalists have increasingly risked their careers, and their lives, to report what the government doesn’t want them to.
India ranks 11th in the “global impunity index” of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a tally of reporters whose deaths remain unsolved, and in the annual press freedom index published by the organization Reporters Without Borders, India fell to 150 in 2022, its lowest-ever rank out of 180 countries. The United States is 42; Russia is just below India at 155, China 175.
As a result, self-censorship has spread, along with a shrill Hindu nationalism in news reports that echoes the government line.
The latest manifestation of the government intolerance for critical reporting was its invocation of emergency laws last month to block a BBC documentary titled “The Modi Question.” The documentary revived damning questions about Modi’s role, when he led the government of the
The two-part BBC documentary challenged all that. Though there had been no plans to air it in India, key portions promptly began circulating on social media. The government reacted with what has become its signature fury. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting blocked videos and links sharing the documentary, calling it “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage,” with a “colonial mindset.” It added that YouTube and Twitter had complied with the order.
BBC said in a statement that the documentary was “rigorously researched according to highest editorial standards.”
Preventing circulation of even snippets of the film had the predictable effect of creating far more interest in it than there had been. Human rights groups inveighed against what one opposition lawmaker in India called “raging censorship.” Student and opposition groups set about organizing viewings, triggering efforts to block them. At Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, the administration shut off electricity and internet access to block a screening of the documentary, but students watched it anyway on their mobile phones.
What began as a potential embarrassment for Modi has thus escalated into a furor over press freedoms — and into a test for the rest of the world. Modi has been actively seeking a greater role in world affairs, and he has been actively courted by leaders in the United States and Europe, whether for support for Ukraine in its war against Russia, on which Modi has been ambivalent, or as a counterbalance
India is a major power and a critical player as Russia and China work to change the balance of forces in the world. But in their necessary dealings with Modi, American and European leaders should remember that it is only as a democracy, with a free and vibrant press, that India can truly fulfill its global role. As Modi’s own party knows firsthand — the BJP was suppressed and many of its leaders jailed in the dark days of emergency rule from 1975-77 — when populist leaders invoke emergency laws to block dissent, democracy is in peril.
Telephones: (787) 743-3346 • (787) 743-6537 (787) 743-5606 • Fax (787) 743-5100
EL CAPITOLIO – El Senado de Puerto Rico aprobó una medida que busca enmendar el Código de Rentas Internas de Puerto Rico para permitir que la ciudadanía pueda retirar hasta $40,000 de sus cuentas individuales de retiro (IRA) o fideicomisos de empleados sin penalidad contributiva para la adquisición de equipos solares eléctricos y vehículos impulsados por energía alterna o combinada.
“Miles de negocios luchan por mantenerse a flote ante la realidad de que, en Puerto Rico, el 97% de la energía que consumen los hogares y negocios se produce con combustibles fósiles como el petróleo, gas natural y carbón, y la inmensa mayoría de los vehículos se propulsan con gasolina, cuyo precio ha venido subiendo de manera súbita y constante”, establece la exposición de motivos del Proyecto del Senado 962 de la autoría del senador por el Partido Popular Democrático (PPD), Juan Zaragoza Gómez.
Durante un turno sobre el proyecto, el senador independiente, José Vargas Vidot dijo que “cuando se habla de esta medida cabe señalar que la Asociación de Bancos insiste en poner un limitante… no estoy en contra, pero establecer la limitación de 30% no me parece lógico, lo que hace es limitar la medida… lo que quiero decir es que la
medida comenzó muy bien hasta que le aplicaron la limitación de 30%”.
Por otro lado, el cuerpo legislativo avaló el Proyecto del Senado 791 que propone enmendar la “Ley para la Atención de los estudiantes con Diabetes Tipo 1 y Tipo 2 en las instituciones escolares públicas y privadas en Puerto Rico” para establecer responsabilidades adicionales a las escuelas, encargados y tutores de estudiantes con esta enfermedad.
Según establece la medida del presidente del Senado, José Luis Dalmau Santiago, a pesar de que existe la Ley 199-2015, que atiende a estudiantes con diabetes tipo 1 y tipo 2, esta población enfrenta diariamente múltiples obstáculos que le dificultan lograr la excelencia académica y su desarrollo integral.
A esos fines, “la Asamblea Legislativa de Puerto Rico promulga la presente medida para establecer de forma clara y precisa las responsabilidades de las escuelas públicas y privadas del país, y de los padres, encargados o tutores de los estudiantes con diabetes tipo 1 y tipo 2, así como proveerle herramientas legales adicionales para que no se permitan los patrones de discrimen en las áreas de estudios de estos pacientes y garantizar el cumplimiento de esta Ley. Con este esfuerzo, buscamos garantizar que el derecho de acceso a la educación de los niños y jóvenes diagnosticados con
esta enfermedad crónica no se menoscabe por ninguna razón”.
Asimismo, se fue aprobada la Resolución Conjunta del Senado 338, de los senadores populares, Elizabeth Rosa Vélez y Juan Zaragoza Gómez, que propone ordenar al Departamento de Hacienda las cuantías en las remuneraciones y desembolsos de fondos públicos y los funcionarios y empleados del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, por concepto de viajes dentro de la jurisdicción de Puerto Rico, según establecidas en el Reglamento Núm. 7501 del 8 de mayo de 2008, a los fines de ajustar las tarifas pagadas a base de la inflación.
SAN JUAN – El secretario del Departamento de Justicia, Domingo Emanuelli Hernández, reco-
mendó el lunes a la Oficina del Panel sobre el Fiscal Especial Independiente (OPFEI) que designe un Fiscal Especial Independiente (FEI) para que investigue al exalcalde de Guaynabo, Ángel Pérez Otero, por incumplimiento del deber y malversación de fondos públicos.
La determinación es el resultado de una investigación preliminar de la División de Integridad Pública y Asuntos del Contralor (DIPAC) del Departamento de Justicia por alegaciones relacionadas con los hallazgos de una auditoría realizada en la Oficina de Auditoría Interna del Municipio Autónomo de Guaynabo.
Por ser Pérez Otero un funcionario a quien le aplica la Ley 2-1988, conocida como Ley de la Oficina del Panel sobre el Fiscal Especial Independiente, el secretario de Justicia refirió a la DIPAC una querella del alcalde de Guaynabo, Edward O’Neill Rosa, recibida el 18 de julio de 2022.
En la querella se alegó que Pérez Otero había cedido el uso de algunas facilidades del edificio Guaynabo Medical Mall a la empresa Provider Network Solutions of Puerto Rico, LLC, por 19
meses. Esta cesión se concedió sin el pago de los correspondientes cánones de arrendamiento, sin la debida autorización de la Legislatura Municipal de Guaynabo y contrario a las disposiciones legales pertinentes. Por esta razón, la compañía de referencia generó una deuda con el ayuntamiento ascendente a 1,452,149.00 dólares, por concepto de cánones de arrendamiento.
Finalizada la investigación preliminar, luego de evaluar la prueba recopilada y tras analizar todo el derecho aplicable, la DIPAC, entre otras cosas, determinó que la compañía Provider Network Solutions of Puerto Rico, LLC, utilizó por 19 meses varios espacios del edificio Guaynabo Medical Mall, propiedad del municipio, sin pagar cánones de arrendamiento. Además, se constató que entre estas partes no se otorgó contrato en el periodo de 1 de julio de 2018 al 30 de abril de 2019, a pesar de que dicha compañía utilizaba algunas de las facilidades del mencionado edificio. Posteriormente, se le otorgó un contrato a Provider Network Solutions of Puerto Rico, LLC, y se le eximió del pago de la renta.
Senado aprueba medida para facilitar compra de equipos solares y vehículos eléctricos
“Bitch Better Have My Money.” She was tethered to the platform, limiting her maneuvering, but even when she reached the ground she didn’t overemphasize dance, instead holding sturdy court at the center of 100-plus dancers, sharing in their movements but never outdoing them. During “Work,” she led them as if she were a tutor calling out moves but not participating in them.
Rihanna’s hits are plentiful — she has charted more than 60 times on the Billboard Hot 100 — and they are varied. But there was no true thematic through line to this casual revue of a dozen deeply beloved songs. Mostly, she leaned into the up-tempo side of her catalog — “Where Have You Been,” “Only Girl (in the World)” — with nods to her Caribbean heritage on “Work” and “Rude Boy.” At the set’s end, she emphasized her big-picture, oneword-title smashes, “Umbrella” and “Diamonds,” which prioritize melodrama over feeling.
Rihanna is many things — a new mother, a billionaire mogul in fashion and cosmetics, an astonishingly reliable pop star with a deep catalog. But she is not a current hitmaker. And she had not performed a show of this scale since 2016.
So in its marketing, the Super Bowl amplified how it was a coup to land her most visible effort in years. During promotional teases, Apple Music’s Ebro Darden portentously intoned, “The wait. Is almost. Over.”
By JON CARAMANICAMoments after Rihanna stepped off the Super Bowl LVII halftime stage Sunday night at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, her representative confirmed what her performance had suggested: The singer is pregnant with her second child.
It was, as pregnancy reveals go, not quite on the theatrical level of Beyoncé’s belly rub at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards. But for Rihanna, who last year gave birth to her first child, it was a stroke of performance savvy nonetheless — maybe the only gesture that could outshine, and reframe, the show she had just given.
Rihanna hasn’t released an album since “Anti” in 2016, and many in her fervent fan base took her willingness to perform at the Super Bowl this year as a sign that her return to music might be imminent. Perhaps she would announce a new single or album, or maybe a tour.
Instead, she used one of pop music’s biggest stages to assert that despite all of that collective anticipation, she had other things to focus on: a private life to return to. So if her actual onstage delivery had been slightly weary, well, there were more important things to focus on.
In 13 minutes, Rihanna casually performed snippets of 12 hits, universally known songs that don’t require much in the way of fluffing or bombast. The closest she came to frisson, to sass, to authority, to verve came a little
after the halfway point of the set.
Just after the familiar horn fusillade of “All of the Lights” boomed from the speakers, Rihanna took a compact from the outstretched hand of one of her dancers with her right hand, applied two dabs of powder — a nod to Fenty Beauty, which has been a bigger professional focus for her than music in recent years — and returned it before grabbing the microphone with her left hand from another dancer.
Then she launched into the hook of “All of the Lights,” a decade-plus-old collaboration with Ye (formerly Kanye West), whose antisemitic remarks late last year have made him a pariah. She followed that song immediately with “Run This Town,” another collaboration with Ye (and Jay-Z).
A quick cosmetics ad? Sure. An implicit statement of support for an embattled peer? Why not. Rihanna — one of the crucial pop hitmakers of the 21st century — needs the Super Bowl less than the Super Bowl needs her, and her performance was a master class in doing exactly enough. She treated it like many people approach their professional obligations when their personal life is calling: dutiful, lightly enthused, a little exhausted, looking to work the angles ever so slightly.
The queen of nonchalance, Rihanna first appeared Sunday night on a stage floating above the 50-yard line (a gesture cribbed from Ye’s 2016 Saint Pablo tour) singing
In essence, the event was her appearance. The event was the event. There were no guests, despite the frequency and power of her collaborations. No costume changes, despite her standing as a fashion innovator — she wore an all-red outfit, removing and adding layers throughout.
Although the performance was brief and hurried, it nevertheless felt slow. There was little variation in tone or energy, no aesthetic nods to the lightly themed set list. It was a routine designed to trigger long-honed pleasure centers, not ignite new fervor — a triumph of foregone conclusion.
That Rihanna appeared at all is a testament to the ways in which the NFL has been successful in papering — or performing — over its controversies. She declined to perform at the Super Bowl in 2019, an era in which turning down a gig on one of the world’s biggest stages — a retort to the NFL’s response to Colin Kaepernick’s activism — felt political. But the involvement of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation with the league in the years following has remade the halftime show both musically and socioculturally.
From an entertainment perspective, that’s been for the best. And for Rihanna, playing halftime is a milestone befitting the scope of her achievements. But her show wasn’t overtly political, or even particularly celebratory of her litany of hits. Instead, it served as something of a placeholder. She’d come to perform, yes. But she also has more pressing things to attend to.
Rihanna’s backup dancers formed a sea of white hoodies around her during the Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday night.ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMER INSTANCIA SALA DE SUPERIOR DE FAJARDO
GOBIERNO MUNICIPAL AUTÓNOMO DE FAJARDO, REPRESENTADO POR SU ALCALDE, JOSÉ A. MELÉNDEZ MÉNDEZ Peticionario V. ADQUISICIÓN DE FINCA
6,238 DE LA CALLE AMPARO, DEL TÉRMINO MUNICIPAL DE FAJARDO; JOSÉ VÍCTOR VÁZQUEZ CARRASCO, CENTRO DE RECAUDACIÓN DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES
Parte con Interés
Civil Núm.: FA2022CV00756.
Sobre: EXPROPIACIÓN FORZOSA. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS.
A: JOSÉ VÍCTOR
VÁZQUEZ CARRASCO Y FULANA DE TAL Y/O
CUALQUIER PERSONA CON ALGÚN POSIBLE INTERÉS.
Se le emplaza y notifica que, con el fin público de erradicar el abandono y peligrosidad de propiedades declaradas estorbos públicos, el Municipio de Fajardo ha radicado en esta Secretaría una Petición de Expropiación Forzosa al amparo de la Ley General de Expropiación Forzosa del 12 de marzo de 1903, según enmendada, la Ley Núm. 107 de 14 de agosto de 2020 conocida como el Código Municipal de Puerto Rico, en su Artículo 2.018 [21
L.P.R.A. § 7183]; la Ordenanza Número 26, Serie 2014-2015, aprobada por la Legislatura Municipal de Fajardo, Puerto Rico el 4 de septiembre de 2014 y firmada por el su Alcalde el día 30 del mismo mes; y, la Ordenanza Número 13, Serie 2021-2022, aprobada por la Legislatura Municipal el 4 de noviembre de 2021 y por el que suscribe el día 28 del mismo mes; para adquirir la siguiente
Finca: “URBANA: Solar radicado en la Calle AMPARO del término municipal de Fajardo, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de aproximadamente 107.00 metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, en 12.95 metros, con un solar ocupado por Genara Félix; por el SUR, en 13.35 metros, con otro solar ocupado por Petra Guerra; por el ESTE, en 8.00 metros, con otro solar ocupado por Esteban
Vázquez y por el OESTE, en 8.15 metros, con la calle Amparo. FINCA NÚMERO 6,238, INSCRITA al FOLIO 290 del TOMO 176 de Fajardo. Catastro Número: 150-046-044-22001. Existiendo una Deficiencia de Deficiencia de $2,173.31, se consignaron $4,826.69 por la expropiación de la propiedad, la cual se tasó en $7,000.00. No habiéndose podido emplazar personalmente a las partes con interés antes relacionadas, por desconocer su paradero, este Tribunal ha ordenado que se le emplace por edicto, el cual se publicará una (1) vez por semana, durante tres (3) semanas consecutivas en un periódico de circulación diaria en Puerto Rico. Se le notifica que, si usted desea presentar objeción o defensa a la incautación de las estructuras descritas, debe presentar su contestación en este Tribunal dentro del término de 30 DÍAS, contados a partir de la última publicación de este edicto, debiendo notificar con copia de la misma a la parte peticionaria, a través de la LCDA.
JOSEPHINE M. RODRÍGUEZ
RÍOS - RUA 15,736: PO BOX
889 FAJARDO, PR 00728Email: josephine.rodriguez@ gmail.com. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a la Petición de Expropiación Forzosa dentro de los TREINTA (30) DÍAS contados a partir de la última publicación de este edicto, a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, 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 alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el Tribunal podrá dar por admitidas las alegaciones y dictar Sentencia, previo a escuchar la prueba de valor de la parte peticionaria en su contra, sin más citarle ni oírle, y conceder el remedio solicitado en la Petición, o cualquier otro, si el Tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Este Tribunal ha señalado la vista del caso para el día
26 DE MAYO DE 2023 A LAS
3:00 DE LA TARDE, mediante videoconferencia, en cuyo día se determinará el justo valor de la propiedad y las partes a ser compensadas. A dicha vista podrá usted comparecer y ofrecer prueba de valoración, aunque no haya contestado la petición.
De no comparecer, el Tribunal dictará Sentencia declarando CON LUGAR la Petición de Expropiación Forzosa en todas sus partes, sin más citación ni
vista. Expedida por Orden del Tribunal, en Fajardo, Puerto Rico a 1 de febrero de 2023. WANDA I. SEGUÍ REYES, SECRETARIA. KATHERINE ROBLES TORRES, SUB-SECRETARIA.
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO WILMINGTON SAVINGS FUND SOCIETY, FSB, D/B/A CHRISTIANA TRUST, AS INDENTURE TRUSTEE, FOR THE CSMC 2015-PR1 TRUST, MORTGAGE-BACKED NOTES, SERIES 2015-PR1
Plaintiff V. ANGEL GARCIA GARCIA Defendants
Civil Action Num.: 21-cv-01229. (FAB). Matter: FORECLOSURE OF MORTGAGE. NOTICE OF SALE.
To: ANGEL GARCIA GARCIA AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC:
WHEREAS: On July 13, 2022
Default Judgment was entered and grated on same day in favor of Plaintiff to recover from defendants the principal amount of $127,202.53 plus accrued interests at an annual rate 4.00%, since March 1st, 2020, to the present, a deferred principal balance of $2,114.68, which does not accrue interest at the time, plus late charges fees in the amount of 5.0% of each and any monthly installment not received by the note holder within 15 days after the installment was due, including the balance of the sum of $15,229.00, for costs, charges, disbursements, expenses and attorneys’ fees guaranteed under the mortgage obligations. The records of the case and of these proceedings may be examined by interested parties at the Office of the Clerk of the United States District Court, Room 150 or 400 Federal Office Building, 150 Chardon Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico.
WHEREAS: Pursuant to the terms of the aforementioned Judgment, Order of Execution, and the Writ of Execution thereof, the undersigned Special Master was ordered to sell at public auction for U.S. currency in cash or certified check without appraisement or right of redemption to the highest bidder and at the office of the Clerk of the Court, Room 150 or 400 – Federal Office Building, 150 Carlos Chardón Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, to cover the sums adjudged to be paid to the plaintiff, the following property described in Spanish: URBANA: Propiedad Horizontal:
Apartamento número ciento cuarenta (140), localizado en el tercer cuarto y quinto piso del Edificio I del Condominio Paseo Mónaco, situado en el kilómetro dieciséis punto seis (16.6) de la Carretera Estatal número ciento sesenta y siete Barrio Cerro Gordo del Municipio de Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Este apartamento está construido en hormigón reforzado. Tiene tres (3) niveles, con su puerta de entrada por el lindero Este, y por ella se accesa al área común general del Condominio. Este apartamento tiene un área total de mil quinientos sesenta y cuatro punto noventa y seis (1,564.96) pies cuadrados equivalentes a ciento cuarenta y cinco punto cuatrocientos cuarenta y dos (145.442) metros cuadrados.
Linderos: En el primer nivel del apartamento (tercer piso del edificio) por el NORTE, con el apartamento número ciento treinta y nueve (139); por el SUR, con área común general del condominio; por el ESTE, con área común general del Condominio entre la que se encuentra el área de ubicación de la puerta de entrada al apartamento y con el apartamento número ciento treinta y nueve (139); y por el OESTE, con área común general del Condominio. Los linderos en el segundo nivel del apartamento (cuarto piso del edificio) son por el NORTE, con el apartamento número ciento treinta y nueve (139); por el SUR, con el apartamento número ciento cuarenta y cuatro (144) y con área común general del condominio; por el ESTE, con el apartamento número ciento treinta y siete (137) y con el apartamento número ciento treinta y nueve (139); y por el OESTE, con el apartamento número ciento treinta y siete (137) y con área común general del condominio. Este segundo nivel se comunica con el primero a base de una escalera interior del apartamento. Los linderos del tercer nivel del apartamento (quinto piso del edificio) son por el NORTE, con el apartamento número ciento treinta y nueve (139); por el SUR, con el apartamento número ciento cuarenta y cuatro (144); por el ESTE, con el apartamento número ciento treinta y siete (137); y por el OESTE, con el apartamento número ciento treinta y nueve (139) y con área común general del condominio: Este tercer nivel se comunica con el segundo a base de una escalera interior del apartamento. Este apartamento consta de sala-comedor, balcón, cocina con clóset, tres cuartos con closets, dos baños, un medio baño, un área de lavandería, un clóset adicional fuera de los cuartos, escalera
interior, un área techada en la azotea del edificio y un área techada en laazotea del edificio, y un área de terraza descubierta en la azotea del edificio la cual está delimitada en su lindero por una pared. A este apartamento le corresponde dos espacios sencillos de estacionamientos, identificados cada uno con el número ciento cuarenta (140) en el área de estacionamiento ubicada al Este del edificio marcado I; J, K y L del condominio. Le corresponden a este apartamento como anejos, el estacionamiento número ciento cuarenta (140) para dos automóviles, uno detrás del otro y el área de terraza que ubica en el tercer nivel del apartamento, todo según ilustrado en el Plot Plan y planos del condominio aprobados por ARPE. A este apartamento le corresponde una participación de cero punto cinco mil quinientos cuarenta y ocho por ciento (0.5548%) en los elementos comunes del Condominio. The encumbered property is recorded at Page 35 of Volume 1918 of Bayamon Sur, Property Registry of Puerto Rico, lot number 79,880, First Section of Bayamón. Property address: Condominio Paseo de Monaco II, Apartament 140, Bayamón, P.R. 00960. The deed of mortgage and subsequent modifications are recorded at Page 35 of Volume 1918 and Page 55 of Volume 1922 both of Bayamón Sur, Property Registry of Bayamón, Third and Fourth Inscription respectively. WHEREAS: This property is subject to the following liens: Senior Liens: NONE. Junior Liens: NONE. Other Liens: NONE. Potential bidders are advised to verify the extent of preferential liens with the holders thereof. It shall be understood that each bidder accepts as sufficient the title and that prior and preferential liens to the one being foreclosed upon, including but not limited to any property tax, liens, (express, tacit, implied or legal) shall continue in effect it being understood further that the successful bidder accepts them and is subrogated in the responsibility for the same and that the bid price shall not be applied toward their cancellation. THEREFORE, the FIRST PUBLIC SALE shall be held on the 14TH DAY OF MARCH OF 2023 AT 8:45 AM. The minimum bid that will be accepted is the sum of $135,966.15. In the event said first auction does not produce a bidder and the property is not adjudicated, a SECOND PUBLIC AUCTION shall be held on the 21ST DAY OF MARCH OF 2023 AT 8:45 AM, and the minimum bid that will be accepted is the sum
$90,644.10, which is two-thirds of the amount of the minimum bid for the first public sale. If a second auction does not result in the adjudication and sale of the property, a THIRD PUBLIC AUCTION will be held on the 28TH DAY OF MARCH OF 2023 AT 8:45 AM, and the minimum bid that will be accepted is the sum of $67,983.01, which is one-half of the minimum bid in the first public sale. Should there be no award or adjudication at the third public sale, the property may be awarded to the creditor for the entire amount of its debt if it is equal to or less than the amount of the minimum bid of the third public sale, crediting this amount to the amount owed if it is greater. The undersigned Special Master shall not accept in payment of the property to be sold anything but United States currency (cash), or certified checks, except in case the property is sold and adjudicated to the plaintiff, in which case the amount of the bid made by said plaintiff shall be credited and deducted from its credit; said plaintiff being bound to pay in cash or certified check only any excess of its bid over the secured indebtedness that remains unsatisfied. WHEREAS: Said sale to be made by the undersigned Special Master subject to confirmation by the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico and the deed of conveyance and possession to the property will be executed and delivered only after such confirmation. Upon confirmation of the sale, an order shall be issued cancelling all junior liens. For further particulars, reference is made to the judgment entered by the Court in this case, which can be examined in the Office of Clerk of the United States District Court, District of Puerto Rico. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, 17th day of January of 2023. Pedro A. Vélez Baerga, Special Master, 787-672-8269.
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE TOA ALTA
BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO
Parte Demandante Vs. LA SUCESIÓN DE JUAN
SANTANA IDELFONSO COMPUESTA POR: MARÍA VICTORIA
SANTANA PADILLA, BETZAIDA SANTANA
PADILLA T/C/C CUCHI
SANTANA PADILLA, ERIC JOEL SANTANA staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com
Parte Demandada Civil Núm.: TA2022CV00346.
Sala: 201-A. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS. AVISO DE PÚBLICA SUBASTA. El Alguacil que suscribe por la presente anuncia y hace constar que en cumplimiento de la Sentencia dictada el 17 de octubre de 2022, la Orden de Ejecución de Sentencia del 5 de diciembre de 2022 y el Mandamiento de Ejecución del 5 de diciembre de 2022 en el caso de epígrafe, procederé a vender el día 12 DE ABRIL DE 2023, A LAS 10:00 DE LA MAÑANA, en mi oficina localizada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Toa Alta, en la Calle Muñoz Rivera, Barrio Contorno (al lado del Cuartel de la Policía) Toa Alta, Puerto Rico, al mejor postor en pago de contado y en moneda de los Estados Unidos de América, cheque de gerente o giro postal a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal; todo título, derecho o interés de la parte demandada sobre la siguiente propiedad:
RÚSTICA: Parcela marcado con el número 208-C en el plano de parcelación de la Comunidad Rural Candelaria del Barrio Candelaria del término municipal de Toa Baja, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de 672.90 metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, con la Calle Número 51 de la Comunidad; por el SUR, con la Parcela Número 207 de la Comunidad; por el ESTE, con la parcela número 208 de la Comunidad, según la Certificación Registral es la Parcela Número 208-B; y por el OESTE, con las Parcelas Números 82 y 83 del bloque B de la comunidad, según la Certificación Registral con las Parcelas 82 y 83 de la Comunidad. Inscrita al folio 5 del tomo 439 de Toa Baja, Finca Número 24987, Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección II. La escritura de hipoteca consta inscrita al folio 59 del tomo 540 de Toa Baja, finca número 24987, Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección II. Inscripción tercera y sexta. Dirección Física: 208-C MANCUN COMM., CANDELA-
RIA WD, TOA BAJA, PUERTO RICO 00949. El tipo mínimo para la primera subasta será de $43,000.00. De no haber adjudicación en la primera subasta se celebrará una SEGUNDA SUBASTA, el día 19 DE ABRIL DE 2023, A LAS 10:00 DE LA MAÑANA en el mismo lugar, en la cual el tipo mínimo será de dos terceras partes del tipo mínimo fijado en la primera subasta, o sea, $28,666.66. De no haber adjudicación en la segunda subasta, se celebrará una tercera subasta, el día 26 de abril de 2023, a las 10:00 de la mañana en el mismo lugar, en la cual el tipo mínimo será la mitad del precio pactado, o sea, $21,500.00. Si se declarase desierta la tercera subasta, se adjudicará la finca a favor del acreedor por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada si ésta es igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la tercera subasta, si el tribunal lo estima conveniente. Se abonará dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si ésta es mayor. Dicho remate se llevará a cabo para con su producto satisfacer a la demandante el importe de la Sentencia por la suma de $40,947.10 de principal, más intereses sobre dicha suma al 8.95% anual desde el 1 de enero de 2009 hasta su completo pago, más $2,347.09 de recargos acumulados, los cuales continuarán en aumento hasta el saldo total de la deuda, más la cantidad estipulada de $4,300.00 para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogados, así como cualquier otra suma que contenga el contrato del préstamo. Surge del Estudio de Título Registral que sobre esta propiedad pesan los siguientes gravámenes posteriores a la hipoteca que por la presente se pretende ejecutar: a. Hipoteca: Constituida por Juan Santana Ildefonso y su esposa, Fabiana Padilla Matías, en garantía de un pagaré a favor de Associates International Holdings Corporation, o a su orden, por la suma de $12,479.99, sus intereses al 13.97% anual y vencedero el 3 de febrero de 2014, según consta de la Escritura Número 14, otorgada en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, el 29 de enero de 2004, ante la Notario Adela Surillo Gutiérrez. Inscrita al folio 221 del tomo 560 de Toa Baja, finca número 24987, inscripción cuarta. b. Aviso de Demanda: Pleito seguido por Doral Bank antes Doral Financial Corporation Vs. Juan Santana Ildefonso y su esposa, Fabiana Padilla Matías, ante el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Toa Alta, en el Caso Civil Número CD09-0733, sobre Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca, en la que se reclama el pago de hipoteca, con un
suma mínima, se celebrará una SEGUNDA SUBASTA el día 14 DE MARZO DE 2023, A
LAS 9:00 DE LA MAÑANA, en el mismo lugar antes señalado en la cual el precio mínimo serán dos terceras (2/3) partes del tipo mínimo pactado en la escritura de hipoteca, la suma de $56,666.66. De no haber remanente o adjudicación en esta segunda subasta por el tipo mínimo indicado en el párrafo anterior, se celebrará una
TERCERA SUBASTA en el mismo lugar antes señalado el día 21 DE MARZO DE 2023, A
LAS 9:00 DE LA MAÑANA, en la cual el tipo mínimo aceptable como oferta será la mitad (1/2) del precio mínimo pactado en la escritura de hipoteca, la suma de $42,500.00. Si se declare desierta la tercera subasta se adjudicará la finca a favor del acreedor por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada si ésta es igual o menor que el monto del tipo mínimo de la tercera subasta, si el tribunal lo estima conveniente. Se abonará dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si ésta es mayor. El Tribunal dictó Sentencia declarando con lugar la demanda y, por consiguiente, ordenó a la parte demandada SUCESIÓN DE SERGIO MARTÍNEZ RIVEROS T/C/C SERGIO MARTÍNEZ COMPUESTA POR SU VIUDA GRACE ROJAS AGUILLAR T/C/C GRACE ROJAS DE MARTÍNEZ, POR SÍ; FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANA DE TAL COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS Y/O PARTES CON INTERÉS EN DICHA SUCESIÓN, a pagar a la parte demandante la suma de $293,280.64 de principal, intereses y recargos, los cuales se continuarán acumulando hasta el saldo total de la obligación, más otros cargos conforme al contrato de préstamos suscrito por los causantes. Esta suma continúa acumulando intereses al interés anual convenido de 8.00% hasta su completo pago. La suma adeudada también continúa acumulando recargos. Además, se le impone a la parte demandada el pago de costas a favor de la parte demandante, más 10% por honorarios de abogados, hasta el saldo total de su obligación. La parte demandante ha señalado que según el pagaré suscrito tiene derecho a un 10% del valor del pagaré hipotecario para las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogados. En autos esta cantidad equivale a $8,500.00. Se dispone que una vez celebrada la subasta y vendido el inmueble relacionado, el alguacil pondrá en posesión judicial a los nuevos dueños dentro del término de veinte (20) días a partir de la celebración de la Subasta. Si transcurren los referidos veinte (20) días, el tribunal podrá ordenar, sin necesidad de ulterior procedimiento, que se lleve a efecto el desalojo o lan-
zamiento del ocupante u ocupantes de la finca o de todos los que por orden o tolerancia del demandado/deudor la ocupen. El Alguacil de este Tribunal efectuará el lanzamiento de los ocupantes de ser necesario. Si la subasta es adjudicada a un tercero y luego se deja sin efecto, el tercero a favor de quién se adjudicó la subasta solo tendrá derecho a la devolución del monto consignado más no tendrá derecho a entablar recurso o reclamo adicional alguno (judicial o extrajudicial) contra el demandante y/o el acreedor y/o inversionista, dueño pagaré y/o su abogado. Si se anula la venta, el comprador tendrá derecho a la devolución del depósito de la venta judicial menos los honorarios y costos incurridos en el proceso de venta judicial. No tendrá ningún otro recurso contra el acreedor hipotecario ejecutante ni la representación legal de éste. Por la presente también se notifica e informa al Secretario de la Vivienda y Desarrollo Urbano (HUD), por éstos contar con una hipoteca a su favor por la suma de $85,000.00, intereses al 8.00% anual y a vencer a la presentación, según consta de la escritura #133, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, inscrito al folio 27 vuelto del tomo 147 de Toa Baja. Además, se notifica e informa a Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal, personas desconocidas que puedan tener derechos en la propiedad o título objeto de este edicto. La Venta en Pública Subasta de la referida propiedad se verificará libre de toda carga y gravamen posterior que afecte la mencionada finca, a cuyo efecto se notifica y se hace saber la fecha, hora y sitio de la Primera, Segunda y Tercera Subasta, si eso fuera necesario, a los efectos de cualquier persona o personas con algún interés puedan comparecer a la celebración de dicha Subasta. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante continuarán subsistentes. Se entenderá que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento del caso de epígrafe están disponibles en la Secretaría de este Tribunal durante horas laborables y para la concurrencia de los licitadores expido el presente Edicto que se publicará en un periódico de circulación diaria en toda la Isla de Puerto Rico por espacio dos (2) semanas y por lo menos una vez por semana y se fijará, además, en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Alcaldía y la Colecturía de Rentas Internas del Municipio donde se celebrará la Subasta
y en la Colecturía más cercana del lugar de la residencia de la parte demandada. EN TESTIMONIO DE LO CUAL, expido el presente que firmo y sello, hoy día 11 de enero de 2023.
FRANCES TORRES CONTRERAS, ALGUACIL #325, SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU-
NAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE MAYAGÜEZ
ORIENTAL BANK
Demandante V. SUCESION DE ASTER
MANUEL VEGA SNACHEZ Y SUCESION DE JUANITA CRUZ RODRIGUEZ COMPUESTA POR FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANO DE TAL COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS ASTER MANUEL VEGA CRUZ POR SÍ Y COMO HEREDERO CONOCIDO DE AMBAS SUCESIONES Demandado(a)
Civil: MZ2022CV00202. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.
A: ASTER MANUEL VEGA CRUZ, POR SI Y COMO HEREDERO CONOCIDO DE LA SUCESION DE ASTER MANUEL VEGA SANCHEZ Y LA SUCESION DE JUANITA CRUZ RODRIGUEZ; FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANA DE TAL COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS O TERCEROS CON INTERES SOBRE AMBAS SUCESIONES.
(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 ENERO DE 2023, 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 06 DE FEBRERO DE 2023. EN MAYAGÜEZ, PUERTO RICO, EL 06 DE FEBRERO DE 2023. LCDA. NORMA G. SANTANA IRIZARRY, SECRETARIA. ALEXANDRA M. LÓPEZ, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante Vs. SUCESION DE FERDINAND BERMUDEZ RIVERA T/C/C FERDINAD BERMUDEZ RIVERA COMPUESTA POR SU VIUDA LUZ DELIA SANTOS CARABALLO T/C/C LUZ D. SANTOS CARABALLO, POR SI; MAGALY BERMUDEZ PEREZ Y DAGMARI BERMUDEZ PEREZ; FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANA DE TAL COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS Y/O PARTES CON INTERES EN LA SUCESION Demandados
Civil Núm.: BY2022CV05172.
Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU., EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R., SS.
A: DAGMARI BERMUDEZ PEREZ, COMO HEREDERA CONOCIDA Y/O PARTE CON INTERÉS EN LA SUCESION DE FERDINAND BERMUDEZ RIVERA T/C/C FERDINAD BERMUDEZ RIVERA; FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANO DE TAL COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS Y/O TERCEROS CON INTERES. URB. LEVITTOWN SOLAR 45 BLOQUE BU, TOA BAJA PR 00949. DIRECCIÓN
POSTAL: 45 BU DR MANUEL ALONSO LEVITTOWN LAKES, TOA BAJA PR 00949; COND. QUINTANA, EDIF. B, APT 504, SAN JUAN PR 00917; COND. QUINTANA, EDIF. B, APT 504, SAN JUAN PR 00928; URB. RIO PIEDRAS HEIGHTS, CALLE SEGRE, RIO PIEDRAS, PR 00926; URB. RIO PIEDRAS, 1689 CALLE PARANÁ, SAN JUAN Y 1693 CALLE
SEGRE, SAN JUAN, PR. 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. Se le apercibe que conforme al artículo 1578 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. §11021, 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 3908, GUAYNABO, PR 00970
TEL: 787- 751-5290, FAX: 787-751-6155
E-MAIL: ejecuciones@fortuno-law.com
En Bayamón, Puerto Rico a 24 de enero de 2023. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. MILITZA MERCADO RIVERA, SUB-SECRETARIA.
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE CAGUAS SALA SUPERIOR ORIENTAL BANK COMO AGENTE DE SERVICIO DE THE MONEY HOUSE, INC Demandante Vs. LA SUCESION DE
LUIS ANGEL GARCIA PEREZ COMPUESTA POR ZULEIKA GARCIA; FULANO Y FULANA DE TAL COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESION; CENTRO DE RECAUDACION DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (CRIM)
Demandados Civil Núm.: CG2023CV00087.
Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA (VÍA ORDINARIA). EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO Y MANDAMIENTO DE INTERPELACIÓN. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. A La Parte CoDemandada:
A) ZULEIKA GARCÍA COMO MIEMBRO DE LA SUCESIÓN DE LUIS
ANGEL GARCÍA PÉREZ; A LAS SIGUIENTES
DIRECCIONES: (A) LOT
27 A CARR. 174 HM 16.4
BARRIO SONADORA AGUAS BUENAS, PR 00703; (B) HC 3 BOX
17355 AGUAS BUENAS, PR 00703-8321; (C)
PO BOX 353 AGUAS BUENAS, PR 00703;
(D) 74 PEQUOT AVE.
CUMBERLAND, RHODE ISLAND 02864; (E) LOT 40 SR 792 K 2.9 BARRIO SONADORA AGUAS BUENAS, PR 00703.
B) FULANO Y FULANA DE TAL COMO
POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESIÓN DE LUIS ANGEL GARCÍA PÉREZ, A LAS SIGUIENTES
DIRECCIONES: (A) LOT
27 A CARR. 174 HM 16.4
BARRIO SONADORA AGUAS BUENAS, PR 00703; (B) HC 3 BOX
17355 AGUAS BUENAS, PR 00703-8321; (C)
PO BOX 353 AGUAS BUENAS, PR 00703;
(D) 74 PEQUOT AVE.
CUMBERLAND, RHODE ISLAND 02864; (E) LOT
40 SR 792 K 2.9 BARRIO SONADORA AGUAS BUENAS, PR 00703.
Por la presente se le(s) notifica que se ha radicado en la Secretaría de este Tribunal una Demanda en Cobro y Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca por la vía ordinaria en contra de la La Sucesión de Luis Angel García Pérez, en la cual se alega que
adeuda a la parte demandante por concepto de hipoteca la suma de $112,774.74 por concepto de principal, desde el 1ro de abril de 2020, más intereses al tipo pactado de 5.25% anual que continúan acumulándose hasta el pago total de la obligación. Además La Sucesión de Luis Angel García Pérez 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 $11,329.80.
Además La Sucesión de Luis Angel García Pérez se comprometió a pagar una suma equivalente a $11,329.80 para cubrir cualquier otro adelanto que se haga en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca y una suma equivalente a $11,329.80 para cubrir cualquiera otros adelantos que se hagan en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca número 191, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 25 de octubre de 2019, ante la notario
Pedro J. Díaz García, inscrita al Folio 33 del Tomo 204 de Aguas Buenas, finca número 9,682, Registro de la Propiedad de Caguas, Sección Segunda. 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. Este Tribunal ha ordenado que se le(s) cite a usted(es) por edicto que se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general. Quedan emplazados y notificados de que en este Tribunal se ha radicado una demanda enmendada en su contra. Se les ordena a que dentro del término de treinta (30) días, a partir de la notificación de la presente Orden, acepten o repudien la participación que les corresponda en la herencia de Luis Angel García Pérez. Los co-demandados miembros de La Sucesión de Luis Angel García Pérez se incluyen en la demanda enmendada ya que como herederos responden por las cargas de la herencia según lo dispuesto en Nuestro Ordenamiento Jurídico. Se les apercibe y notifica que, de no expresarse dentro de ese término de 30 días en torno a su aceptación o repudiación de herencia, la herencia se tendrá por aceptada. También se les apercibe que luego del transcurso del término de 30 días antes señalado contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden, se presumirá que han aceptado la herencia del causante y, por consiguiente, responden por las cargas de dicha herencia conforme el Artículo 1578 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. 2785.
Se ordena a la parte demandante a que, en vista de que La Sucesión de Luis Angel García Pérez, se incluye a los herederos y herederos desconocidos de Luis Angel García Pérez denominados Zuleika García como miembro de la Sucesión de Luis Angel García Pérez; Fulano y Fulana de Tal como posibles herederos desconocidos de la Sucesión de Luis Angel García Pérez, proceda a notificar la presente Orden mediante publicación de un edicto a esos efectos una sola vez en un periódico de circulación diaria general de la Isla de Puerto Rico. Se le(s) emplaza y requiere que dentro de los sesenta (60) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto excluyendo el día de la publicación de este edicto conteste(n) la demanda radicando el original de la contestación en este Tribunal y enviando copia de la Contestación de la Demanda a las oficinas de CARDONA & MALDONADO LAW OFFICES, P.S.C. ATENCION al Lcdo. Duncan Maldonado Ejarque, P.O. Box 366221, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00936-6221; Tel (787) 622-7000, Fax (787) 6257001, Abogado de la Parte Demandante. 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. Se le(s) advierte que si dejare(n) de contestar la Demanda en el periodo de tiempo antes mencionado, podrá dictarse contra usted(es) Sentencia en Rebeldía, concediéndose el remedio solicitado sin más citarle(s) ni oírle(s). EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y con el Sello del Tribunal. DADA hoy 8 de FEBRERO de 2023, en Caguas, Puerto Rico. LISILDA MARTÍNEZ AGOSTO, SECRETARIA. LIZ WHARTON ROSA, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA
CENTRO JUDICIAL DE CAROLINA
CARMONA SANTIAGO
T/C/C CARMEN
CARMONA SANTIAGO
T/C/C CARMEN
CARMONA T/C/C
CARMEN MARGARITA
CARMONA; LA
SUCESION DE CARMEN
MARGARITA CARMONA
SANTIAGO TIC/C
CARMEN M. CARMONA
SANTIAGO T/C/C
CARMEN CARMONA
SANTIAGO T/C/C
CARMEN CARMONA
T/C/C CARMEN
MARGARITA CARMONA
COMPUESTA POR ANGEL
XAVIER RODRIGUEZ
CARMONA Y ANNELIESE
MARIANA RODRIGUEZ
CARMONA; FULANO Y FULANA DE TAL COMO
POSIBLES HEREDEROS
DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESION; CENTRO DE RECAUDACIONES DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (CRIM)
Demandados
Civil Núm.: CA2022CV04131.
Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA (VÍA ORDINARIA). EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO Y MANDAMIENTO DE INTERPELACIÓN. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.
A La Parte Co-
Demandada: FULANO Y FULANA DE TAL COMO
POSIBLES HEREDEROS
DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESIÓN DE CARMEN
MARGARITA CARMONA
SANTIAGO T/C/C
CARMEN M. CARMONA
SANTIAGO T/C/C
CARMEN CARMONA
SANTIAGO T/C/C
CARMEN CARMONA
T/C/C CARMEN
MARGARITA CARMONA:
A LAS SIGUIENTES
DIRECCIONES: (A)
URB. VILLA PRADES
#697 CALLE JULIO C.
ARTEAGA SAN JUAN, PR 00924; (B) URB. VALLE
ARRIBA HEIGHTS Q-2
CALLE HIGUERO (54)
CAROLINA, PR 00983.
Por la presente se le(s) notifica que se ha radicado en la Secretaría de este Tribunal una Demanda en Cobro y Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca por la vía ordinaria en contra de Angel Rodríguez Rojas, por sí y en la cuota viudal usufructuaria y La Sucesión de Carmen Margarita Carmona Santiago t/c/c
Carmen M. Carmona Santiago t/c/c Carmen Carmona Santiago t/c/c Carmen Carmona t/c/c Carmen Margarita Carmona compuesta por Angel
Xavier Rodríguez Carmona y Anneliese Mariana Rodríguez Carmona; Fulano y Fulana de Tal como posibles herederos desconocidos de la Sucesión, en la cual se alega que adeuda a la parte demandante por concepto de hipoteca la suma de $132,492.32 por concepto de principal, desde el 1ro de marzo de 2020, más intereses al tipo pactado de 5.00% anual que continúan acumulándose hasta el pago total de la obligación. Además Angel Rodríguez Rojas, por sí y en la cuota viudal usufructuaria y La Sucesión de Carmen Margarita Carmona
Santiago t/c/c Carmen M. Carmona Santiago t/c/c Carmen
Carmona Santiago t/c/c Carmen Carmona t/c/c Carmen
Margarita Carmona compuesta por Angel Xavier Rodríguez
Carmona y Anneliese Mariana
Rodríguez Carmona; Fulano y Fulana de Tal como posibles herederos desconocidos de la Sucesión 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 $13,759.10. Además
Angel Rodríguez Rojas, por sí y en la cuota viudal usufructuaria y La Sucesión de Carmen Margarita Carmona Santiago t/c/c
Carmen M. Carmona Santiago t/c/c Carmen Carmona Santiago t/c/c Carmen Carmona t/c/c
Carmen Margarita Carmona compuesta por Angel Xavier
Rodríguez Carmona y Anneliese Mariana Rodríguez Carmona; Fulano y Fulana de Tal como posibles herederos desconocidos de la Sucesión se comprometió a pagar una suma equivalente a $13,759.10 para cubrir cualquier otro adelanto que se haga en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca y una suma equivalente a $13,759.10 para cubrir cualquiera otros adelantos que se hagan en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca número 61, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 21 de agosto de 2017, ante la notario Vicente A. Sequeda Torres, consta inscrita al Folio 45 del Tomo 184 de Carolina, finca número 6,625, Registro de la Propiedad de Carolina, Sección Primera. 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. Este Tribunal ha ordenado que se le(s) cite a usted(es) por edicto que se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación
general. Quedan emplazados y notificados de que en este Tribunal se ha radicado una demanda enmendada en su contra. Se les ordena a que dentro del término de treinta (30) días, a partir de la notificación de la presente Orden, acepten o repudien la participación que les corresponda en la herencia de Carmen Mar-
garita Carmona Santiago t/c/c
Carmen M. Carmona Santiago
t/c/c Carmen Carmona Santiago t/c/c Carmen Carmona t/c/c
Carmen Margarita Carmon. Los co-demandados miembros de La Sucesión de Carmen Margarita Carmona Santiago t/c/c
Carmen M. Carmona Santiago
t/c/c Carmen Carmona Santiago t/c/c Carmen Carmona t/c/c
Carmen Margarita Carmon se incluyen en la demanda enmendada ya que corno herederos responden por las cargas de la herencia según lo dispuesto en Nuestro Ordenamiento Jurídico. Se les apercibe y notifica que, de no expresarse dentro de ese término de 30 días en torno a su aceptación o repudiación de herencia, la herencia se tendrá por aceptada. También se les apercibe que luego del transcurso del término de 30 días antes señalado contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden, se presumirá que han aceptado la herencia del causante y, por consiguiente, responden por las cargas de dicha herencia conforme el Artículo 1578 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. 2785. Se ordena a la parte demandante a que, en vista de que La Sucesión de Carmen Margarita Carmona Santiago t/c/c
Carmen M. Carmona Santiago t/c/c Carmen Carmona Santiago t/c/c Carmen Carmona t/c/c
Carmen Margarita Carmona, se incluye a los herederos conocidos de Carmen Margarita Carmona Santiago t/c/c Carmen
M. Carmona Santiago t/c/c Carmen Carmona Santiago t/c/c
Carmen Carmona t/c/c Carmen
Margarita Carmona denominados Fulano y Fulana de Tal, proceda a notificar la presente Orden mediante publicación de un edicto a esos efectos una sola vez en un periódico de circulación diaria general de la Isla de Puerto Rico. Se le(s) emplaza y requiere que dentro de los sesenta (60) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto excluyendo el día de la publicación de este edicto conteste(n) la demanda radicando el original de la contestación en este Tribunal y enviando copia de la Contestación de la Demanda a las oficinas de CARDONA & MALDONADO LAW OFFICES, P.S.C. ATENCION al Lcdo. Duncan Maldonado Ejarque, P.O. Box 366221, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00936-6221; Tel (787) 622-7000, Fax (787) 6257001, Abogado de la Parte Demandante. 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/surnac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Se le(s) advierte, que si dejare(n) de contestar la Demanda en el periodo de tiempo antes mencionado, podrá dictarse contra usted(es) Sentencia en Rebeldía, concediéndose el remedio solicitado sin más citarle(s) ni oírle(s). EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y con el Sello del Tribunal. DADA hoy 09 de febrero de 2023, en Carolina, Puerto Rico. LCDA. MARILYN APONTE RODRÍGUEZ, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. MARICRUZ APONTE ALICEA, SECRETARIA AUXILAIR.
LEGAL NOTICE
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO WILMINGTON SAVINGS FUND SOCIETY, FSB, NOT IN ITS INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY BUT SOLELY AS CERTIFICATE TRUSTEE OF BOSCO CREDIT II TRUST SERIES
2017-1, BY FRANKLIN CREDIT MANAGEMENT CORPORATION AS SERVICER
Plaintiff V. UNKNOWN HEIRS, FORCED HEIRS, DEVISEES, GRANTEES, ASSIGNEES, LIENORS, CREDITORS, TRUSTEES AND ALL OTHER PARTIES CLAIMING AN INTEREST BY, THROUGH, UNDER OR AGAINST THE ESTATE OF EDUARDO ORTIZ DE LEON, DECEASED ; CARMEN L. LOPEZ MORALES; CENTRO DE RECAUDACION DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (CRIM)
Defendants Civil No.: 19-CV-1733. (ADC). FORECLOSURE OF MORTGAGE (IN REM ONLY). NOTICE OF SALE.
To: UNKNOWN HEIRS, FORCED HEIRS, DEVISEES, GRANTEES, ASSIGNEES, LIENORS, CREDITORS, TRUSTEES AND ALL OTHER PARTIES CLAIMING AN INTEREST BY, THROUGH, UNDER OR AGAINST THE ESTATE OF EDUARDO ORTIZ DE LEON, DECEASED ; CARMEN L. LOPEZ
MORALES; CENTRO DE RECAUDACION DE INGRESOS
WHEREAS: Consent In Rem Final Judgment was entered in favor of Plaintiff to recover from the Defendants the sum of Principal Balance of $286,338.24, Deferred Principal of $2,073.69, Interest Due through December 18, 2020 of $19,012.19, Funds owed by Borrower $2,024.59, Late Charge Payment of $1,318.80, NonSufficient Funds Fee of $30.00 and Attorney fees and Costs of 10% in the total amount of $30,273.17 plus interest thereafter at the daily accrual rate of 3% until final payment, and costs, and that plaintiff have execution therefore due in the above cause, plus all expenses and advances made by the plaintiff. The records of the case and of these proceedings may be examined by interested parties at the Office of the Clerk of the United States District Court, Room 150, Federal Office Building, 150 Chardon Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico. WHEREAS: Pursuant to the terms of the aforementioned Judgment, Order of Execution of Judgment and the Writ of Execution of Judgment thereof, the undersigned Special Master was ordered to sell at public auction for U.S. currency in cash or certified check without appraisement or right of redemption to the highest bidder and at the office of the Clerk of the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, Room 150 – Federal Office Building, 150 Carlos Chardon Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, to cover the sums adjudged to be paid to the Plaintiff, the following property:
URBANA: Solar marcado con el numero veintiocho de plano de Urbanización levantado por el Doctor Rafael Bernabe y cuyo solar mide cuatrocientos sesenta y tres punto veinte metros cuadrados. En lindes por el Norte en una distancia de veintinueve punto noventa metros con el solar numero veintiséis; por el Sur, en una distancia de veintiocho metros con el solar numero treinta; por el Este en una distancia de dieciséis metros con la calle número dos; por el Oeste en una distancia de dieciséis punto once metros con el solar numero doce. Enclava una casa. Consta inscrita al Folio 219 del tomo 244 de Rio Piedras Norte, Finca número 692, de Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección Segunda. WHEREAS: This property is subject to the following liens: Senior Liens: None. Junior Liens: None. Other Liens: None. Plaintiff’s mortgage in
the amount of $281,000.00 was recorded at the San Juan Property Registry, Page 70, Volume 1477 of Rio Piedras Norte, property number 16,889, 4th inscription. The loan since then was modified pursuant to mortgage constituted by deed number 443, executed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on September 30, 2016, before notary public Julio E. Pijem Berrios, which MODIFIED it regarding its interests and due date, being now its new principal in the amount of $302,731.72 accruing interest at a 3% annual rate, starting on November 1, 2016 through September 1, 2021 and then will accrue interest at 3.375% until its due date on December 1, 2044, which was presented for recording on October 13, 2016 at entry 2016-101894SJ02 at Karibe. Deed of Clarification number 538 executed on November 14, 2016, which clarifies the due date of the first period of interest related to the Deed of Modification number 443, it should read accruing interest at a 3% annual rate from November 1, 2016 to November 1, 2021, which was presented for recording on November 15, 2016 at entry 2016-115031-SJ02 at Karibe. Potential bidders are advised to verify the extent of preferential liens with the holders thereof. It shall be understood that each bidder accepts as sufficient the title and that prior and preferential liens to the one being foreclosed upon, including but not limited to any property tax, liens, (express, tacit, implied or legal) shall continue in effect it being understood further that the successful bidder accepts them and is subrogated in the responsibility for same and that the bid price shall not be applied toward their cancelation. THEREFORE, the FIRST PUBLIC SALE shall be held on the 14 DAY OF MARCH, 2023 AT 9:15 AM. The minimum bid that will be accepted is the sum of $281,000.00. In the event said first auction does not produce a bidder and the property is not adjudicated, a SECOND PUBLIC AUCTION shall be held on the 21 DAY OF MARCH, 2023 AT 9:15 AM and the minimum bid that will be accepted is the sum of $187,333.33, which is two thirds of the amount of the minimum bid for the first public sale. If a second auction does not result in the adjudication and sale of the property, a THIRD PUBLIC AUCTION will be held on the 28 DAY OF MARCH, 2023 AT 9:15 AM and the minimum bid that will be accepted is the sum of $140,500.00, which is one half of the minimum bid in the first public sale. Should there be no award or adjudication at the third public sale, the property may be awarded to the creditor for the entire amount of its debt if it is equal to or less
than the amount of the minimum bid of the third public sale, crediting this amount to the amount owed if it is greater. The Special Master shall not accept in payment of the property to be sold anything but United States currency or certified checks, except in case the property is sold and adjudicated to the Plaintiff, in which was the amount of the bid made by said Plaintiff shall be credited and deducted from its credit; said plaintiff being bound to pay in cash or certified check only any excess of its bid over the secured indebtedness that remains unsatisfied. WHEREAS: Said sale to be made by Special Master subject to confirmation by the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico and the deed of conveyance and possession to the property will be executed and delivered only after such confirmation. Upon confirmation of the sale, an order shall be issued cancelling all junior liens. For further particulars, reference is made to the judgment entered by the Court in this case, which can be examined in the Office of the Clerk of the United States District Court, District of Puerto Rico. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, this 9th day of February of 2023. PEDRO A. VELEZ-BAERGA, SPECIAL MASTER.
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE CAGUAS
GLADIRY QUIRONES VELAZQUEZ, JOSUE ISRAEL VAZQUEZ COTTO Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR
AMBOS
Demandante V. ISMAEL VICENTE URILES, BARBARA MARZAN NIEVES, Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR
AMBOS
Demandado(a)
Civil: CG2021CV02341. Sala: 705. Sobre: EXPEDIENTE DE DOMINIO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.
A: ISMAEL VICENTE URILES Y SU ESPOSA BARBARA MARZAN NIEVES Y/O SUS HEREDEROS.
(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 7 de febrero de 2023, 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 7 de febrero de 2023. En Caguas, Puerto Rico, el 7 de febrero de 2023. LISILDA MARTÍNEZ AGOSTO, SECRETARIA. LIZ WHARTON ROSA, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE CAGUAS BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO
Demandante V. JUAN RAMÓN RUIZ, SUGEILY FONTÁNEZ SÁNCHEZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS
Demandados Civil Núm.: ECD2012-0536. Sala: 612. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS. AVISO DE SUBASTA. El que suscribe, Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior, Centro Judicial de Caguas, Caguas, Puerto Rico, hago saber, a la parte demandada y al PÚBLICO EN GENERAL: Que en cumplimiento del Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia expedido el día 16 de agosto de 2022, por la Secretaría del Tribunal, procederé a vender y venderé en pública subasta y al mejor postor la propiedad que ubica y se describe a continuación: URBANA: Urbanización Los Paisajes de Ciudad Jardín de Gurabo, Puerto Rico. Solar:128. Cabida: 786.12 metros cuadrados. Linderos: por el NORTE, en una distancia de 24.226 metros, con la Calle Jardín; por el SUR, en una distancia de 28.048 metros, con el Lote 118 y con el lote 117; por el ESTE, en una distancia de 27.989 metros, con el Lote 127; y por el OESTE, en una distancia de 29.115 metros,
sello del Tribunal, en Humacao, Puerto Rico, hoy día 17 de enero de 2023. Ivelisse C. Fonseca Rodríguez, Secretaria Regional Auxiliar. Karilin Morales Figueroa, Secretaria Auxiliar Del Tribunal I.
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE HUMACAO SALA SUPERIOR BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO
Parte Demandante Vs. RICHARD LUIS
GONZÁLEZ KNEIFEL, NORMA IRIS OYOLA TIRADO Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS
Parte Demandada
Civil Núm.: HU2022CV00541. (205). Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS. AVISO DE PÚBLICA SUBASTA. El Alguacil que suscribe por la presente anuncia y hace constar que en cumplimiento de la Sentencia en Rebeldía dictada el 24 de agosto de 2022, la Orden de Ejecución de Sentencia del 13 de enero de 2023 y el Mandamiento de Ejecución del 17 de enero de 2023 en el caso de epígrafe, procederé a vender el día 20 DE ABRIL DE 2023, A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA en mi oficina, localizada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Centro Judicial de Humacao, Sala Superior, en la Avenida Nicanor Vázquez (frente al Centro de Bellas Artes), Humacao, Puerto Rico, al mejor postor en pago de contado y en moneda de los Estados Unidos de América, cheque de gerente o giro postal a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal; todo título, derecho o interés de la parte demandada sobre la siguiente propiedad:
URBANA: Solar marcado con el Número Noventa y Cinco (95) de la Urbanización Las Villas de Río Blanco, radicada en el Barrio Río Blanco del término municipal de Naguabo, Puerto Rico, con una cabida de 558.6914 metros cuadrados, equivalentes a 0.1421 cuerdas. En lindes por el NORTE: en 13.92 metros lineales con el Solar Número Ochenta y Uno (81); por el SUR: en 20.75 metros lineales con la Calle Número Tres (3) del proyecto; por el OESTE: en 26.51 metros lineales con el Solar Número Noventa y Cuatro (94) del proyecto; y por el ESTE: en 19.48 metros lineales y un arco de 2.81 metros con la Calle Nú-
mero Uno (1) del proyecto. Enclava una estructura para fines residenciales diseñada para viviendas de una familia, construida conforme a planos y especificaciones aprobadas por las agencias e instrumentales gubernamentales pertinentes.
Inscrita al folio 127 del tomo
233 de Naguabo, Finca 13184. Registro de la Propiedad de Humacao. La escritura de hipoteca consta inscrita al tomo Karibe de Naguabo, Finca 13184. Registro de la Propiedad de Humacao. Inscripción tercera.
Urb. Reparto Valencia, Villas de Río Blanco, 95 Calle 3, Naguabo PR 00718. Número de Catastro: 52-229-095-193-09-000. El tipo mínimo para la primera subasta será de $82,163.00.
De no haber adjudicación en la primera subasta se celebrará una SEGUNDA SUBASTA, el día 27 DE ABRIL DE 2023, A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA en el mismo lugar, en la cual el tipo mínimo será de dos terceras partes del tipo mínimo fijado en la primera subasta, o sea, $54,775.33. De no haber adjudicación en la segunda subasta, se celebrará una TERCERA SUBASTA, el día 4 DE MAYO DE 2023, A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA en el mismo lugar, en la cual el tipo mínimo será la mitad del precio pactado, o sea, $41,081.50. Si se declarase desierta la tercera subasta, se adjudicará la finca a favor del acreedor por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada si ésta es igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la tercera subasta, si el tribunal lo estima conveniente. Se abonará dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si ésta es mayor. Dicho remate se llevará a cabo para con su producto satisfacer a la demandante el importe de la Sentencia por la suma de $76,251.82 de principal, más intereses sobre dicha suma al 4.25% anual desde el 1 de junio de 2020 hasta su completo pago, más $492.38 de recargos acumulados los cuales continuarán en aumento hasta el saldo total de la deuda, más la cantidad estipulada de $8,216.30 para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogados, así como cualquier otra suma que contenga el contrato del préstamo. Surge del Estudio de Título Registral que sobre esta propiedad pesa el siguiente gravamen posterior a la hipoteca que por la presente se pretende ejecutar: a. Bitácora: Al Asiento 2022-061128-HU01, el 10 de mayo de 2022, Demanda de fecha 26 de abril de 2022, ante el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Humacao, en el Caso Civil Número HU2022CV00541, seguido por Banco Popular de Puerto Rico
Vs. Richard Luis González
Kneifel y su esposa Norma Iris Oyola Titado, sobre Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca, en la que se reclama el pago de hipoteca, con un balance de
$76,251.82 y otras cantidades, o la venta en pública subasta de la propiedad. Pendiente de anotación. Se notifica al acreedor posterior o a su sucesor o cesionario en derecho para que comparezca a proteger su derecho si así lo desea. Se le advierte a los interesados que todos los documentos relacionados con la presente acción de ejecución de hipoteca, así como los de Subasta, estarán disponibles para ser examinados, durante horas laborables, en el expediente del caso que obra en los archivos de la Secretaría del Tribunal, bajo el número de epígrafe y para su publicación en un periódico de circulación general en Puerto Rico por espacio de dos semanas y por lo menos una vez por semana; y para su fijación en los sitios públicos requeridos por ley. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad 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 del remate. La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores. Y para el conocimiento de los demandados, de los acreedores posteriores, de los licitadores, partes interesadas y público en general, EXPIDO para su publicación en los lugares públicos correspondientes, el presente Aviso de Pública Subasta en Humacao, Puerto Rico, hoy 25 de enero de 2023. WILNELIA RIVERA DELGADO, ALGUACIL AUXILIAR PLACA #249. JOSÉ LUIS RODRÍGUEZ HERNÁNDEZ, ALGUACIL REGIONAL.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE COMERĹO
LIME HOMES, LTD.
Parte Demandante Vs. SUCESIÓN DE CARMEN
LYDIA SANTOS RIVERA
T/C/C CARMEN LIDIA
SANTOS RIVERA, COMPUESTA POR MARIA DEL CARMEN CABRERA
SANTOS Y GUSTAVO
LUIS CABRERA SANTOS Y RAMON VAZQUEZ
FIGUEROA POR SI Y COMO CONYUGUE SUPERSITE EN CUANTO A LA CUOTA VIUDAL USUFRUCTUARIA; CENTRO DE RECAUDACIONES DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (CRIM)
Parte Demandada
Civil Núm.: CR2019CV00388.
Salón Núm.: (001). Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA “IN REM”. EDICTO DE SUBASTA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R., SS.
A: SUCESIÓN DE CARMEN LYDIA SANTOS RIVERA T/C/C CARMEN
LIDIA SANTOS RIVERA, COMPUESTA POR MARIA DEL CARMEN CABRERA SANTOS Y GUSTAVO LUIS CABRERA SANTOS Y RAMON VAZQUEZ FIGUEROA POR SI Y COMO CONYUGUE SUPERSITE EN CUANTO A LA CUOTA VIUDAL USUFRUCTUARIA; CENTRO DE RECAUDACIONES DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (CRIM); DEPARTAMENTO DE HACIENDA: Y AL PÚBLICO EN GENERAL: El Alguacil que suscribe, certifica y hace constar que en cumplimiento de Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia que me ha sido dirigido por la Secretaría del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Comerio, procederé a vender en pública subasta y al mejor postor, por separado, de contado y por moneda de curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América. Todo pago recibido por el (la) Alguacil por concepto de subastas será en efectivo, giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del (de la) Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia. Todo derecho, título, participación e interés que le corresponda a la parte demandada o cualquiera de ellos en el inmueble hipotecado objeto de ejecución que se describe a continuación: RÚSTICA: Predio de terreno radicado en el Barrio Cejas del término municipal de Comerío, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de QUINIENTOS METROS CUADRADOS (500.00MC). En lindes por el NORTE y ESTE, con la finca principal de la cual se segrega; por el SUR, con la Carretera Estatal número setecientos noventa y uno (791); y área dedicada a uso público; y por el OESTE, con Martín Rodríguez. Enclava una estructura en cemento dedicado a comercio. Consta inscrito al folio 211 del tomo 122 de Comerío, finca número #8,012. Registro de la Propiedad, Sección de Barranquitas. La propiedad objeto de ejecución está localizada en la siguiente dirección: KM 4.7 PR 791, CEJAS WAR, COMERIO, PR 00782. Se informa que la propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravamen posterior, una vez sea otorgada la escritura de venta
judicial y obtenida la Orden y Mandamiento de cancelación de gravamen posterior. (Art. 51, Ley 210-2015). En relación a la finca a subastarse, se establece como tipo mínimo de licitación en la Primera Subasta la suma de $25,000.00, según acordado entre las partes en el precio pactado en la Escritura de Hipoteca #43, otorgada en Comerío, Puerto Rico, el día 18 de julio de 2007, ante el notario José Humberto Martínez Camacho, e inscrita al folio 216 del tomo 158 de Comerío, finca número 8,012, inscripción 4ª. La PRIMERA SUBASTA, se llevará a cabo el día 5 DE MAYO DE 2023 A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA, en mis oficinas sitas en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Comerío, el tipo mínimo para la primera subasta es la suma de $25,000.00. Si la primera subasta del inmueble no produjere remate, ni adjudicación, se celebrará una SEGUNDA SUBASTA el día 12 DE MAYO DE 2023 A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA, en el mismo sitio y servirá de tipo mínimo las dos terceras partes del precio pactada para la primera subasta, o sea, la suma de $16,666.66. Si la segunda subasta no produjere remate, ni adjudicación, se celebrará una TERCERA SUBASTA el día 19 DE MAYO DE 2023 A LAS 11:00 DE LA MAÑANA, en el mismo lugar y regirá como tipo mínimo de la tercera subasta la mitad del precio pactado para la primera, o sea, la suma de $12,500.00. Dicha subasta se llevará a cabo, para con su producto satisfacer a la parte demandante el importe de la Sentencia dictada a su favor, a saber: Suma Principal de $12,488.26 la cual se desglosa a continuación: $12,023.26 de principal, con intereses a 8.4670% anual, desde el 7 de septiembre de 2017, hasta el presente y los que se continúen acumulando hasta su total y completo pago, la suma de $465.00 (pago residual), hasta la subasta y así cubrir la deuda, más los cargos por demora que se corresponden a los plazos atrasados desde la fecha anteriormente indicada a razón de la tasa pactada de 5% de cualquier pago que éste en mora por más de quince (15) días desde la fecha de su vencimiento, más una suma equivalente a $2,500.00, por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado, más cualquier otra suma que resulte por cualesquiera otros adelantos que se hayan hecho la demandante, en virtud de las disposiciones de la escritura de hipoteca y del Pagaré hipotecario. Para más información, a las personas interesadas se les notifica que los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado, estarán de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal, durante las
horas laborables. Este EDICTO DE SUBASTA, se publicará en los lugares públicos correspondientes y en un periódico de circulación general en la jurisdicción de Puerto Rico. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los referentes, si los hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante continuarán subsistentes. Se entenderá, que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. Se procederá a otorgar la correspondiente Escritura de Venta Judicial y el Alguacil pondrá en posesión judicial al nuevo dueño, si así se lo solicita dentro del término de veinte (20) días, de conformidad con las disposiciones de Ley. Si transcurren los referidos veinte (20) días, el tribunal podrá ordenar, sin necesidad de ulterior procedimiento, que se lleve a efecto el desalojo o lanzamiento del ocupante u ocupantes de la finca o de todos los que por orden o tolerancia del deudor la ocupen. Se informa que la propiedad objeto de ejecución se adquiere libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores. Expedido en Comerío, Puerto Rico, a 31 de enero de 2023. ANDRÉS VÁZQUEZ SANTIAGO, ALGUACIL PLACA #998.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN
REVERSE MORTGAGE FUNDING, LLC
Parte Demandante Vs. SUCESION IRIS
FRANCISCA AÑESES
ARRACHE T/C/C IRIS F.
AÑESES ARRACHE T/C/C
IRIS F. AÑESES ARACHE
T/C/C IRIS AÑESES
ARRACHE T/C/C IRIS F. AÑESES, Y OTROS
Parte Demandada
Civil Núm.: SJ2022CV01112.
(604). Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.
UU., ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R., SS.
A: IVONNE RAMIREZ AÑESES; JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO
POSIBLES MIEMBROS
DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESION IRIS
FRANCISCA AÑESES
ARRACHE T/C/C IRIS F.
AÑESES ARRACHE T/C/C
IRIS F. AÑESES ARACHE
T/C/C IRIS AÑESES
ARRACHE T/C/C IRIS F. AÑESES.
Queda emplazado y notifica-
do de que en este Tribunal se ha radicado una demanda de EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA en su contra. Se le notifica que 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 Superior de Puerto Rico, Sala de San Juan y enviando copia a la parte demandante: Greenspoon Marder, LLP; Lcda. Frances L. Asencio-Guido, TRADE CENTRE SOUTH, SUITE 700, 100 WEST CYPRESS CREEK ROAD, FORT LAUDERDALE, FL 33309, Telephone: (954) 343 6273, Frances.Asencio@ gmlaw.com. Se le apercibe y notifica que si no contesta la demanda radicada en su contra dentro del término de treinta (30) días de la publicación de este edicto, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda, sin más citárseles, ni oírseles. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, a 2 de febrero de 2023. Griselda Rodríguez Collado, Secretaria. Brenda Hernández Zavala, Secretaria De Servicios A Sala.
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE FAJARDO LUNA RESIDENTIAL II LLC
Demandante V. TAIRIGNA SAEZ MARTINEZ
Demandada Civil Núm.: FA2023CV00006. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU., EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R., SS. EDICTO.
A: TAIRIGNA SAEZ MARTINEZ. 2-C APT. COND. LA COSTA, FAJARDO, PR 00738; CALLE LAS PALMAS APT 236, FAJARDO, PR 00738-5145.
POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los 30 días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento, excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.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. Representa a la parte demandante el Lcdo. Javier Montalvo Cintrón, Delgado & Fernández, LLC, PO Box 11750, Fernández Juncos Station, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00910-1750. Tel. [787] 2741414. DADA en Fajardo, Puerto Rico, a 2 de febrero de 2023. Wanda Seguí Reyes, Secretaria Regional. Ivelisse Serrano García, Secretaria Auxiliar Del Tribunal.
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN
CARMEN MILAGROS
MALDONADO CRUZ, ETC.
Peticionaria EX-PARTE
Civil #: BY2022CV05851. 705. Sobre: EXPEDIENTE DE DOMINIO. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU., ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS.
A: LAS PERSONAS IGNORADAS Y DESCONOCIDAS A QUIENES PUDIERA PERJUDICAR LA INSCRIPCIÓN DEL DOMINIO A FAVOR DE LA PARTE PETICIONARIA EN EL REGISTRO DE LA PROPIEDAD DE LA FINCA QUE MÁS ADELANTE SE DESCRIBIRÁ Y A TODA PERSONA EN GENERAL QUE CON DERECHO PARA ELLO DESEE OPONERSE A ESTE EXPEDIENTE. POR LA PRESENTE: se les notifica para que comparezcan, si lo creyeren pertinente, ante este Honorable Tribunal dentro de los veinte (20) días contados a partir de la última publicación e este edicto a exponer lo que a sus derechos convenga en el expediente promovido por la parte peticionaria para adquirir su dominio sobre la finca que se describe más adelante. Usted deberá presentar su posición 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
On Thursday night, Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs won his second NFL MVP award, cementing him as the most accomplished passer of a new crop of young quarterbacks dominating the league. Three days later, he added the second Super Bowl victory of his career, throwing for 182 yards and three touchdowns to beat the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35.
The game in Glendale, Arizona concluded a tumultuous season for the NFL in which Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field from a cardiac arrest during a game and high-profile hits to Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa renewed criticisms of how the league handles players’ health, especially concussions.
Mahomes fought through the playoffs with an injury of his own, a high ankle sprain sustained in the divisional round last month that was aggravated in the second quarter Sunday.
Philadelphia dominated the first half. Yet, with Kansas City facing a 10-point deficit to begin the third quarter, Mahomes marshaled a resilient performance in a game noteworthy for pitting him against another emergent passer, Jalen Hurts, in the first Super Bowl contested between two Black starting quarterbacks.
In the end, Mahomes further enshrined himself as the face of the league as he embraced teammates under cascading red and gold confetti, especially after seven-time champion Tom Brady retired (for good, he said) 11 days before the Super Bowl.
Like Brady, Mahomes delivered a thrilling comeback, this time from a 10-point second-half deficit, which earned him game MVP honors.
“To be down to a team like that and come back and win the game,” Mahomes said, “I wish I’d make it easier and not be down, but I play better when we are down.”
With just over one minute left in the first half and Kansas City trailing 21-14, Mahomes scrambled outside the pocket but Eagles linebacker T.J.
Edwards tackled him by his right ankle. Mahomes had injured that ankle Jan. 21 against the Jacksonville Jaguars, and had been compromised for the AFC championship game against the Cincinnati Bengals the next week.
Mahomes said his injury rehabilitation had gone well leading into Sunday’s game, but after the Edwards tackle he lay on the ground for a few moments before limping to the sideline. Kansas City punted on the drive, leading to an Eagles field goal that extended their lead to 24-14. As Mahomes reached the bench, he took off his helmet and grimaced in distress. Until that point, he had thrown for 89 yards, including an 18-yard touchdown pass to star tight end Travis Kelce in the first quarter.
Mahomes said in a postgame news conference that he did not receive a painkilling injection from trainers in the locker room during halftime, but “did some stuff to get it ready,” including taping the ankle.
“He grew up in a locker room,” coach Andy Reid said of Mahomes, whose father, Pat, played Major League Baseball for 11 seasons. “He’s seen the greats and he strives to be the greatest. Without saying anything, that’s the way he works. He wants to be the
greatest player ever.”
In the first half, Hurts had seemed to own the moment, propelling the Eagles with scoring runs of 1 and 4 yards and a 45-yard touchdown pass to A.J. Brown at the start of the second quarter. Since being acquired via an offseason trade with the Tennessee Titans, Brown had bolstered the Eagles’ offense and became a primary target of Hurts. He caught 11 touchdown passes — half of the scores Hurts threw — in the regular season and, on Sunday, caught six passes for 96 yards.
Their pairing had helped Hurts develop into one of the league’s best quarterbacks in his third season and second as the full-time starter. Hurts’ one mistake Sunday came with just under 10 minutes remaining in the first half, when he fumbled and Kansas City linebacker Nick Bolton returned it 36 yards for a touchdown, tying the score at 14 after the extra point.
“You never know what play it will be, but it hurt us,” said Hurts, who finished with 304 passing yards and four touchdowns. He set a record for most rushing yards by a quarterback in the Super Bowl, with 70. “You look back and you reflect on the things maybe you could have done something more, maybe you could have tried to do
something that could change the outcome of the game and that’s the way it was.”
While Hurts’ team added a star receiver before the season who ended up playing a key role in a Super Bowl run, Mahomes saw a top target, the speedy Tyreek Hill, traded to Miami. With the additions of Marquez Valdes-Scantling and JuJu Smith-Schuster in free agency, Mahomes adapted his style to look for shorter throws, which proved effective throughout the season and helped fuel Kansas City in the second half Sunday.
On the first drive after halftime, Mahomes returned to the big-game daring that is his calling card. Rookie running back Isiah Pacheco and undersized veteran back Jerick McKinnon ignited the offense with short bursts before Mahomes tested that ankle by scrambling for a 14-yard gain on a second down in the red zone to extend the series. The scamper seemed to embolden Mahomes against the Eagles’ stout defense before Pacheco ran in a 1-yard score to narrow Philadelphia’s lead to 3 points.
The Eagles responded with a 17play drive that ended when Jake Elliott kicked a 33-yard field goal to give Philadelphia a 27-21 lead late in the third quarter.
With 12 minutes remaining in the game, Mahomes orchestrated a nineplay, 75-yard drive that concluded with a 5-yard touchdown pass to Kadarius Toney to take a 28-27 lead.
Kansas City’s defense forced the Eagles to punt with just over 10 minutes remaining, and Toney collected the ball and wove through Philadelphia’s coverage team down the right sideline for a 65-yard gain, the longest punt return in Super Bowl history. Three plays later, Mahomes threw a 4-yard touchdown to rookie Skyy Moore to give Kansas City a 35-27 lead with just over nine minutes remaining.
Hurts battled back, connecting with DeVonta Smith on a 46-yard pass to set up a touchdown on the series. Hurts carried in a 2-yard run, his third touchdown carry, before punching in a 2-point conversion that tied the game at 35-35 with just over five minutes remaining.
“To me, Jalen played the best game I’ve seen him play in the two years that we’ve been together,” Eagles coach Nick Sirianni said. “He was outstanding. I really thought he was in complete control.”
The back-and-forth affair exemplified the symmetry and parallels between the two teams. Perhaps fittingly, both coaches each attempted to beat teams that once employed them.
Reid coached the Eagles from 1999 to 2012, and led the team to a Super Bowl berth in the 2004 season. But Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie fired Reid after the team posted a 4-12 record in 2012, the worst campaign in Reid’s tenure. Reid joined Kansas City just days afterward and, as part of installing a new staff, fired Sirianni, then the receivers coach.
But since trading up to select Mahomes in the first round of the 2017 NFL draft, Kansas City has creat-
ed a dynasty. Since becoming the full-time starter in 2018, Mahomes has appeared in five consecutive AFC championship games and three of the last four Super Bowls.
The Eagles determined much of the pace of Sunday’s game, possessing the ball nearly 12 minutes longer than the Chiefs did. But on Kansas City’s final drive, Mahomes controlled the clock with short passes before breaking through with a 26-yard run to position Kansas City inside the red zone with a little over two minutes remaining. The Eagles’ defense, which amassed 70 sacks during the regular season, did not record a single sack of Mahomes in the game.
Philadelphia’s defense held Pacheco to a 2-yard gain on the next play, and Mahomes’ next pass to Smith-Schuster fell incomplete. Facing third-and-8, Mahomes again targeted Smith-Schuster with a short
throw but cornerback James Bradberry was called for defensive holding on the play, a penalty which gave Kansas City a new set of downs.
“It was a holding,” Bradberry said of the pivotal infraction. “I tugged his jersey. I was hoping they,” the game officials, “would let it slide.”
McKinnon found daylight on a first-down run from the Eagles’ 11-yard line and could have scored but tiptoed to the 2-yard line where he stopped short to keep the clock running and force the Eagles to use their final timeouts. Mahomes knelt on the next two downs before Harrison Butker kicked a 27-yard field goal to provide the final score.
In the locker room after the game, as Kansas City’s players sparked cigars and sprayed Champagne, Mahomes unwrapped a championship wrestling belt, another award in a growing collection.
Sometimes, a team can win the regular season and lose the postseason. That’s what the Philadelphia Eagles learned Sunday, when the Kansas City Chiefs and their hobbled yet transcendent quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, ripped the Lombardi Trophy out of their grasp and won their second Super Bowl title in four years.
The Eagles were riding high all year with a top-tier offense led by quarterback Jalen Hurts and receiver A.J. Brown and with a dominant defense. They steamrollered through the regular season to earn the top seed in the NFC and dominated their first two playoff games. Then they raced out to a 10-point lead in the first half of the Super Bowl in Glendale, Arizona, and seemed to be on their way to a championship when Mahomes aggravated a right ankle injury just before halftime.
But in the second half Mahomes showed why he is the best player in the NFL, even on a bad ankle. He engineered four scoring drives with grit, creativity and, presumably, a lot of pain, leading Kansas City to a 38-35 victory. Like a host of NBA teams that lost to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, the Eagles ran into a oncein-a-generation player at the top of his game.
“They have one of the best players on the planet, so he’s going to make some big plays,” Eagles coach Nick Sirianni said of Mahomes.
Eagles center Jason Kelce had nothing but admiration for Mahomes and the Chiefs.
“That team has everything that’s coming to them,” he said in a somber Eagles press zone after the game.
The Eagles didn’t lose because of a lack of effort. But like in so many title games, mistakes can change the trajectory. By all accounts, Hurts had the best game of his professional career, and against another team, his effort might have been enough to salt away the game.
He amassed 374 total yards and four touchdowns, three rushing and one passing. His only blemish, however, was major. He fumbled in the second quarter, and Kansas City’s Nick Bolton picked up the ball and returned it for a score to tie the game. Instead of push-
ing the Eagles lead to 21-7, the Chiefs tied the score at 14.
“It did hurt us, it hurt us,” Hurts said afterward.
Still, the Eagles went into halftime ahead by 10 points, and with their front line dominant and Mahomes hobbled, Philadelphia seemed in a good position.
But the 29-minute break gave the Chiefs time to collect themselves, and for trainers to work on Mahomes’ ankle.
“That 29 minutes literally brought us together,” Chiefs receiver JuJu SmithSchuster said.
On the opening drive of the second half, Mahomes led Kansas City on a 10play drive that included, to the amazement of nearly everyone, a 14-yard
scramble by Mahomes to the Eagles’ 4-yard line.
“He made some great plays,” Eagles linebacker Hasson Reddick said of Mahomes. “He dropped some dimes in there.”
The Eagles didn’t go quietly. Hurts engineered an eight-play, 75-yard drive in just over four minutes, capped with him running for a 2-yard touchdown and then scoring a 2-point conversion by running the ball into the end zone. Those efforts tied the game at 35-35.
In NFL games with evenly matched opponents, the team with the ball last often wins. Mahomes and the Chiefs used nearly all of the 5:15 remaining after that score to march down the field and set up a game-winning 27-yard field goal by kicker Harrison Butker.
After Kansas City’s late drive and field goal, the Eagles had one last chance. But Hurts’ Hail Mary pass fell far short, and the game ended with red and yellow confetti falling from the rafters.
Hurts walked slowly to the bench — alone. Then he put his helmet down and paced back and forth — alone. His teammates seemed to sense that he needed some space. A coach approached him and appeared to say something, but only briefly. For a short while, Hurts watched Kansas City’s players and coaches celebrate amid the falling confetti. Then, he made his way off the field, breaking into a slow trot on his way out — alone again.
“You either win or you learn,” Hurts said. “We had a big-time goal that we wanted to accomplish, and we came up short.”
The wind was whipping like a blender working overtime on a margarita Thursday morning, and the more than 17,000 people bellied up to the 16th hole at the Phoenix Open in Scottsdale, Arizona acted as if it were last call.
If you want cemeterylike quiet, kneel politely before the golf gods at the Masters’ “Amen Corner.”
This is the People’s Open, and the 16th is the loudest hole on the rowdiest stop on the PGA Tour. Jon Rahm, a U.S. Open champion, said the decibels have risen exponentially from year to year.
“Very few sporting events in the world can comfortably happen in the same week as the Super Bowl and still have the impact that they have like this one,” Rahm said. “With that said, I don’t think it’s everybody’s favorite — I think either you love it or hate it. There’s no in between. With my case, I love it.”
The tournament is an annual destination for fans who refuse to bow to stuffy golf etiquette and, for that reason, the fairways at the TPC Scottsdale course are lined with younger and rowdier attendees than anywhere else in golf. With the Super Bowl in town, golf’s party capital was not only supercharged, but it also helped the 91-year-old tourna-
ment sell out its second- and third-round tickets for the first time.
Nate Orr, a lawyer, traveled from Kansas City, Missouri, with his friends Jared Kenealy and Micheal Lawrence. They’re Chiefs season-ticket holders who sprung for Super Bowl seats Sunday but found themselves in a box on the edge of the 16th green, where they watched golf balls ricochet off the panels beneath them and trickle into sand traps.
“Bucket list stuff,” said Lawrence, an executive at a nonprofit.
Tony Finau, the world No. 13, was greeted like a gladiator at the so-called coliseum hole after knocking his tee shot 16 inches from the flag. When he sunk the gimme for a birdie, the crowd roared as exuberantly as it had in Arrowhead Stadium last month when Harrison Butker booted the game-winning field goal that landed Kansas City in Sunday’s Super Bowl.
Rory McIlroy was booed for merely backing off his ball as the wind gusted.
When Jordan Spieth, ranked No. 17, yanked his 5-or-so-foot birdie putt, however, the boos reached a crescendo. How to describe the crowd’s ardor? Imagine Philadelphia Eagles fans greeting Chip Kelly’s return. It was that venomous.
Chants of “Go Chiefs” and “Fly Eagles Fly” were part of the tournament’s
already-booming soundtrack as football fans were among those in the long lines of people waiting to secure seats in the Coliseum’s general-admission grandstand.
The crowd was just as rough on the celebrities who competed in the Pro-Am on Wednesday. Olympic great Michael Phelps, retired Arizona Cardinals receiver Larry Fitzgerald and Carli Lloyd, a former soccer star of the U.S. women’s national team, were announced at the tee box with DJ music, but they were razzed and roared at as they made their way to the green.
Name another hole where it can rain suds and thunder beer cans as it did last year when Sam Ryder aced the 16th in the third round to set off a delirious celebration that halted play for 15 minutes so volunteers could pick up the cans.
Alas, aluminum cans inside the Coliseum were banned this week and replaced with plastic cups.
Where else are gallery members enlisted to remove a boulder as they were in 1999 so Tiger Woods could get a clear
shot at the green? It took a dozen of them, and the blessing of a rules official, but after a few heave-hos Woods got his birdie.
Enclosed from tee to green by a grandstand that reaches three stories, an army of aggressive and clever beer vendors helped lubricate the crowd Thursday.
“I got a Coors with your name on it — what’s your name?” went one’s singsong mantra.
Unlike the golfers they came to watch, patrons of the People’s Open do not even have to make it through all 18 holes. The Birds Nest, a party tent near the course’s entrance, starts throbbing in late afternoon as tournament goers get ready to dance into the night to performances by Machine Gun Kelly and the Chainsmokers.
Yes, the Phoenix Open has its charms. Ask McIlroy.
“If I wasn’t a player and I wanted to come to one PGA Tour event,” he said after shooting 2-over in his opening round, “this would probably be the one that I’d want to come to.”
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
Down
1. Use a doormat
2. Cut ____ (dance)
3. Crooned
4. Part of NIN
5. Everest or Kilimanjaro
6. Dying down
7. This, in French
8. Popeye's approval
9. Currency exchange abbr. 10. Kids' sandwich, for short
Across
1. "What ____ thinking?!"
5. Hong Kong neighbor
10. Third addendum to a letter, briefly
14. "____ This" (rapper Birdman single)
15. Does the bidding of
16. Actress Lynn
17. Put stress on
19. Easy as falling off ____
20. Easter event
21. Not a secret
22. Sewn up
26. Small clearings?
30. "Forget it!"
34. Heidi Klum, e.g.
35. Judy Garland's real surname 36. Swimming aid
37. Dickinson and others
39. Pivoted
42. Final letter
43. "Don't take ____ seriously!"
47. Largest tributary of the Missouri
48. Work aide
51. Less candid
52. Rhythm section members
54. Comedian Smirnoff
57. Pedicurist's target
62. Put ____ on (use eBay)
63. Professed
66. Gift-giving time
67. Bond portrayer Roger
68. Stitch's caretaker
69. FBI personnel
70. From Zurich, e.g.
71. Mythological underworld waterway
Aries (Mar 21-April 20)
The Moon in Scorpio aligns with Neptune, so this may be a day when secrets are shared either on purpose or by accident. You might even pick them up on the airwaves, as this blend of energies makes us very sensitive to such things. Plus, the Quarter Moon encourages you to be open with a friend if you need help. Their perspective could change everything.
Taurus (April 21-May 21)
If you want someone’s support, then you’ll need to work at it, as they aren’t going to be easily persuaded. Today’s lunar phase can make it easier to capture their attention, and if you appeal to their emotions, you have a chance. With Saturn and Pluto in the mix, you’ll need to be realistic about the issues you face. Having a can-do approach will also help you succeed.
Gemini (May 22-June 21)
You may have lots on your plate, but your attention could be drawn to something elsewhere that captures your interest. Before you get excited about a new project, relationship or opportunity, finish what you’re doing. It may be a drag, but today’s Quarter Moon will assist you in tying up loose ends and completing tasks. You’ll then have time for exciting options.
Cancer (June 22-July 23)
With a Quarter Moon in your romance sector, you may be ready to call time on a relationship that is going nowhere. It’s also possible you’re about to take a bond to a new level of commitment, and are thinking deeply about what this might entail.
Leo (July 24-Aug 23)
If someone tries to convince you of something, you don’t have to buy into it if their idea sounds dodgy. As the Moon in Scorpio aligns with aquatic Neptune in your sector of secrets, look into the details, as they may be keeping something from you. Trust your gut, as a lunar phase suggests you may need to question key points, especially if they don’t add up, Leo.
Is a friend trying to micromanage your social schedule, and expecting you to turn up to events they want you to attend? Do you even have any say in the matter? This is not an ideal situation, especially if they become manipulative when you decline. A sparkling aspect can inspire you not to give in, even if it means more hassle. Say no now, and it should be easier next time, Virgo.
Have you held back from sharing creative talents? Today’s Quarter Moon in your skills zone, suggests it’s time to be more assertive and to allow yourself the chance to showcase your abilities. You never know what might come of it. Having Saturn in your sector of self-expression may have caused you to dread others’ criticisms. Just let go, and go with the flow.
Scorpio (Oct 24-Nov 22)
The Sun/Moon angle is an opportunity to stop what you’re doing and get your bearings. If a domestic project is almost finished, you’ll want it to be as successful as possible. Pausing now can help you to take stock and make sure that everything is on track, so you can enjoy the fruits of your efforts. Delayed finishing something? Do it today and you can relax, Scorpio.
Sagittarius (Nov 23-Dec 21)
Head and heart may seem to be in conflict, but are they? Sometimes the only way to know what to do about a situation, is to apply logic and listen to your feelings. What you need is a balanced perspective, as it will allow you to make the best decision. Keen to reach an agreement on the end phase of a key project? It’s time to finalize the details and complete it.
Capricorn (Dec 22-Jan 20)
As the Moon aligns with Neptune, someone might appreciate you taking the time to listen, especially if they’re worried or anxious. The words you speak can help dispel confusion, enabling them to know what to do next. You could find yourself at a crossroad too, regarding a membership or other big expense? If it’s too costly, there may be better options.
Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19)
With a Quarter Moon in a prominent zone a personal plan may reach a turning point, and the coming days could coincide with a time of change. Use this lunar phase to tie up loose ends and complete current projects, so you can start on something that promises to be very exciting. It could turn out to be very lucrative too, and far more than you originally imagined.
Pisces (Feb 20-Mar 20)
Are your beliefs letting you down? Today’s lunar phase suggests it’s time to let them go. You’re ready to embrace more life-enhancing options that will push you out of your comfort zone and inspire you to engage with new possibilities. Plus, a chat with someone who has just returned from their travels could be the encouragement you need to get away for a break.
