With an eye on the high crime rate seen in the island capital, Manuel Calderón Cerame, the spokesman for the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) in the San Juan Municipal Assembly, presented four proposals on Sunday to reinforce security during the upcoming Fiestas de la Calles San Sebastián.
“Let’s remember that last Saturday, the residents of Old San Juan, as well as other visitors and tourists witnessed a murder on Norzagaray Street. We all want to celebrate during the fiesta, but the life and safety of the attendees is something we have to work on with the greatest responsibility,” Calderón Cerame said. “In San Juan, crime is through the roof and we have to use all available resources so that the crime wave that surrounds our capital city does not manifest itself during the festivities of Calle San Sebastián. That is why I present these real and concrete recommendations to avoid any tragedy during the holidays.”
The proposals are based on the following points:
1. Lighting: The lighting on the islet of San Juan, as well as in other areas of the rest of the Capital City, is off. It is important that the Luis Muñoz Rivera Park, the Linear Walk, as well as the Constitution Avenue area currently in the dark are illuminated. We must press for coordination between the central government and the Municipality of San Juan. Enough of the hot potato and excuses.
2. Collaboration: Request the assistance of federal authorities during the celebration of San Sebastián. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), as well as the federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Administration (ATF), must provide assistance to both municipal and state police. It is necessary that before Thursday this coordination meeting between these law and order enforcement agencies are all in tune.
3. Increase coverage: Implementing four rolling barracks on the islet of San Juan. Coordination has to be strategic because the rest of the Capital City can’t be left without a functioning security plan.
4. Use of Canine Unit: Activate the Police Bureau’s canine unit as a method of prevention at the points for collective transportation. It is necessary that in the parking lot of Hiram Bithorn Stadium, at Stop 26 in
The traditional Fiestas de la Calle de San Sebastián will take place from this Thursday through Sunday (Jan. 19-22).
“This event will be held after the year 2022 ended with San Juan being the jurisdiction with the most vehicle thefts, more Type 1 crimes and more cases of gender violence,” Calderón Cerame said. “The Anti-Crime Plan of [San Juan Mayor] Miguel Romero has not yielded positive results and as a result of this, sanjuaneros today feel more insecure in their communities, so it is up to us, beyond denunciations, to propose real and concrete alternatives for everyone in San Juan.
On Sunday, the municipal legislator sent the recommendations officially and by email and to the mayor with the intention of reinforcing the security plan for the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián.
“These proposals I make public and in turn I have already sent them to the mayor,” Calderón Cerame said. “Crime in San Juan is rampant and the municipal administration has not been seen taking serious action in this regard. Therefore, I fulfill the duty that falls to all of us, to ensure that these fiestas are for the enjoyment of all without having to live through any tragedy.”
The Puerto Rico Public Finance Corporation’s (PFC) Title VI qualifying modification has gone into effect, according to a notice from the court overseeing the entity’s debt restructuring.
U.S. District Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who is overseeing Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy cases, approved the qualifying modification on Dec. 30, 2022, which went into effect Jan. 12. The move puts Puerto Rico closer to resolving all of its bankruptcy proceedings.
Under the qualifying modification, the $1.5 billion PFC debt will be reduced significantly to a $13.8 million payment. The deal calls for a $47 million bond issuance from the Government Development Bank
Debt Recovery Authority (GDBDRA), according to court documents, but the ability of the GDBDRA to issue debt is still under litigation.
“Please take further notice that whether the DRA Bonds, as defined in the Qualifying Modification, if any, may be issued pursuant to the applicable documents and the Qualifying Modification, including whether any such DRA Bonds may be lawfully and validly issued in accordance with applicable law as contemplated by decretal paragraph 35 of the Approval Order, shall be determined by the Court in accordance with the timeframe established by the Court,” the notice said.
Under the deal, several commonwealth public corporations will be able to remove PFC debt liabilities from their balance sheets.
By THE STAR STAFF
Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia expects Puerto Rico residents to accept a contract that would put the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority’s (PREPA) generation plants under private management without knowing first whether the transaction benefits them, several lawmakers charged over the weekend.
Popular Democratic Party Reps. Jesús Manuel Ortiz González, José “Cheito” Rivera Ortiz, Héctor Ferrer Santiago, Ramón Luis Cruz Burgos, Sol Higgins Cuadrado, Juan José Santiago Nieves, Estrella Martínez Soto, Jorge Alfredo Rivera Segarra, Domingo Torres García, Orlando Aponte Rosario, Eladio “Layito” Cardona Quiles, Kebin Maldonado Martiz, Jessie Cortés Ramos, Jocelyne Rodríguez Negrón and Deborah Soto Arroyo criticized the governor’s actions.
They said the government has not learned from the experience that resulted from LUMA Energy managing the power utility’s transmission and distribution system. LUMA has been criticized over what some say is its deficient performance as a private operator.
“The Pedro Pierluisi government abandoned the country to its fate by not monitoring the LUMA contract, and we already know the result of that government’s inaction on the electrical system and on people’s quality of life,” the lawmakers stated. “Now they intend to do the same with PREPA’s generation [assets] without making public details about the contract, workers’
rights, plans to transition to renewable energy sources, without information about the cost of the contract for Puerto Rico and its possible impact on fees. Puerto Rico cannot accept another blank check like the one [given to] LUMA.”
The majority legislators warned that the government cannot repeat the mistakes resulting from the LUMA contract’s “leonine clauses” and “much less the ordeal PREPA employees and customers have had to live with.”
Energy customers have had to deal with an electrical system “in poor condition and managed by a company that could not provide proper service while utility bills increase,” they said.
“Therefore, it is necessary to know that the government will protect the rights of current Authority employees and that they will not be adversely affected,” they said.
The lawmakers noted there is a direct relationship between the quality of life in Puerto Rico and energy service. Citizens cannot afford to wait for the contract’s approval to learn its details and its impact on families, they said.
“Puerto Rico needs a modern, resilient electrical system, suitable for renewable energy sources and at an affordable price, but without sacrificing access to information and accountability, and without the wholesale delivery of our heritage.”
The lawmakers made their comments after Pierluisi said it was very likely that the Public-Private Partnership
Authority (P3A) board would approve the proposed public-private partnership for power generation last Friday.
The P3A board is one the entities whose approval is required for the proposed contract to move forward, the governor said.
He also said negotiations with the proposed operator of the legacy power plants are underway. Citing sources, the STAR reported that it was a consortium headed by New Fortress Energy called Encanto Power.
effect; will drastically reduce entity’s debt
The Public-Private Partnership Authority (P3A) board of directors has unanimously approved the contract that puts Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) legacy power plants under a private operator, P3A Executive Director Fermín Fontanés Gómez announced Sunday in a written statement.
Fontanés said the vote came after the board of directors discussed matters related to the contract, including the concerns of the two public interest members appointed by the Legislature.
The vote also came after a series of meetings in which the board discussed details of the project, the doubts of all the directors, and board members’ suggestions, the statement said.
Last week, Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia said he had instructed Secretary of State Omar Marrero Díaz, who heads the P3A board, to evaluate suggestions from the Legislature regarding the proposed generation public-private partnership (P3).
The Legislature controls two of the votes on the P3A board that were needed to approve and enable the P3, which was launched in 2020.
House Speaker Rafael Hernández Montañez and Senate President José Luis Dalmau Santiago at a news conference last week set conditions for the proposed P3. Those conditions seek to ensure transparency in the process of establishing the P3 contract, protecting the jobs and benefits of PREPA workers, and ensuring that savings resulting from the P3 contract are used to lower utility rates. They also proposed language that would
ban the operator from subcontracting its subsidiaries for work at PREPA. Another condition would require the votes of the two legislative members of the P3A board to approve contract extensions.
Hernández Montañez said in a statement Sunday that the Legislature’s suggestions were incorporated into the contract, whose contents were not revealed. The document has been under scrutiny as officials do not want a repeat of the problems encountered with LUMA Energy, the private operator of PREPA’s
transmission and distribution (T&D) system, whose performance has been criticized.
The P3A statement does not reveal the name of the company awarded the P3 contract, but STAR sources have said it is a consortium headed by New Fortress Energy. The governor said last week that he expected the P3A to approve the project.
The contract, nonetheless, still needs to obtain the formal approval of PREPA, the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau and the Financial Oversight and Management
Board.
“This is just one step in the approval process required under Act 29-2009 of the Public Administrations and Act 120-2018, Law to Transform the Electric System of Puerto Rico,” the P3A statement said. “After this approval, the Partnership Contract for the Operation and Maintenance of PREPA’s Legacy Generation Assets will be sent to PREPA’s Governing Board and, ultimately, to the Office of the Governor of Puerto Rico for its endorsement. Following the provisions of Act 29-2009, once said approvals are obtained, the details of the project will be communicated.”
The legacy generation assets have a total system-wide PREPA-owned dependable generation capacity of some 3,600 megawatts (MW). The plants include Palo Seco, Aguirre, Costa Sur, Mayagüez, Cambalache, Palo Seco, San Juan, Yabucoa, Daguao, Jobos and Vega Baja.
The contract calls for the operator to introduce private sector operational expertise; increase the safety, reliability, resiliency, power quality and efficiency of Puerto Rico’s legacy generation asset operations; and facilitate Puerto Rico’s transition to PREPA’s Vision for the Future of Power in Puerto Rico described in the Integrated Resource Plan.
The operator must also implement operational excellence of electricity generation facilities consistent with prudent industry practices, including improved safety and compliance with environmental and other applicable regulatory requirements, and increase cost efficiency while achieving operational objectives in coordination with LUMA Energy, the T&D system operator.
The Puerto Rico Mayors Association met late last week at the Villalba Fine Arts Center to outline the 2023 work agenda for the island municipalities led by mayors affiliated with the Popular Democratic Party (PDP).
“Our primary mission remains the same, to ensure services to our communities and defend the resources to fulfill that sacred obligation that is public service,” said Mayors Association President and Villalba Mayor Luis Javier Hernández Ortiz. “It is already recognized and accepted by all that municipalities are the first line of service to communities, and that is evident every day, but particularly when there are emergency situations and natural disasters. In this year 2023 we reaffirm our commitment and we want to share our work agenda, in order to broaden the discussion and so that everyone is part of the process.”
In 2023, the Mayors Association will concentrate on efforts related to the Essential Services Fund, such as through amendments to the Fiscal Plan, in order to guarantee funds for services to citizens. Added to this is the oversight of funds for improvements to public schools currently in use, particularly those affected by earthquakes in southern Puerto Rico, and the effective use of closed schools.
“This dynamic of responsible control will also continue to be applied to the issue of the country’s energy system, because in each municipality there are situations that must be managed, such as the subject of street
lights, which directly affects public safety,” Hernández Ortiz said.
The Mayors Association will also work on a plan for the decentralization of resources and services, with the purpose of ensuring that central government assets are used more efficiently, in direct collaboration with municipalities. That particular issue is tied to the Municipal Reengineering and Efficiency Plan.
“In this regard, it is important to point out that citizens constantly learn through the media about the million-dollar allocations that are made for particular cases, but from there until they can be accessed, it is a very complicated process that takes time, some-
times too much time,” Hernández Ortiz said. “What the mayors have demanded and will continue to demand is that there is reasonable flexibility in order to advance the processes.”
The COVID-19 pandemic, which at times seemed to have been overcome, is an issue that continues to be a challenge around the world, adding to the importance of vaccination and diagnostic tests. Given this reality, the PDP mayors agreed to remain in support of the Municipal Tracking System to address cases of COVID-19 and to highlight the importance of municipal public health offices in the island’s 78 towns.
“Beyond the pandemic, an Office of
Public Health can and should be allowed to work efficiently with other health conditions of high prevalence in Puerto Rico, such as diabetes, hypertension and asthma, among others,” Hernández Ortiz said. “We know that we have made great progress in prevention and municipalities are part of the solution.”
During Friday’s meeting, the mayors set aside time in the necessary analysis to propose substantial changes in the Municipal Revenue Collections Center (CRIM), with the purpose of carrying out a the complete restructuring of its operations so that it responds to the needs of the municipalities and so that the collection is efficient and measurable through clear metrics. The CRIM theme was also added to the proposals for healthy public administration measures and their implementation.
The working group also approved the initiative to provide services at the central level of the Mayors Association so that municipalities, regardless of their size, can access federal funds and programs on renewable energy and community development, among others. In fact, Hernández Ortiz confirmed his attendance at the 91st edition of the winter conference of the United States Mayors Association, which will be held in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 17-20, with the participation of senior Biden administration officials such as Energy the Secretary Jennifer Granholm, EPA Administrator Michael Regan, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and Ambassador Nina Lucine Hachigian, the first special representative for city and state diplomacy.
As part of its program for providing health services to all residents of the island municipality of Vieques, Mayor José “Junito” Corcino Acevedo announced that on Feb. 4, the organization Dentistas Misioneros de Puerto Rico will be providing dental services, at no cost, to all Vieques residents, including minors.
“The municipal administration of Vieques is constantly working to find resources to expand the medical [services] that our population receives,” the mayor said. “Dental
health is an essential part of keeping oneself in good physical and mental condition. Therefore, on Saturday, Feb. 4, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., a team from the nonprofit Dentistas Misioneros de Puerto Rico will be providing their services, free of all costs, to our people, both children and adults.”
Services will be offered at the offices of Dr. Daphne Torres, and will be made by appointment. Those interested can send a text message to 787-741-1916 to set up an appointment.
“We thank the Misioneros de Puerto Rico group for the initiative and their will-
ingness to support the health of Vieques by offering their services for free,” Corcino said. “It is a tremendous opportunity for all residents of our island. We encourage anyone who requires them, including those for dental cleaning, to take advantage of the opportunity and schedule an appointment as soon as possible.”
The mayor said he will continue to identify alternatives to expand dental services in Vieques over the coming months, as part of the preventive health program instituted by his administration in January 2021.
Those last days were a blur of phone calls, meetings, farewell events, and visits to Ukraine and Switzerland. As he wrapped up his tenure as vice president in January 2017, Joe Biden was packing in as much as he could. The question now is: What else was being packed? And by whom? And why? And where was it going?
The appointment of a special counsel has focused new attention on Biden’s frenetic final stretch in the White House after eight years as the No. 2 to President Barack Obama. Somehow, a small number of classified documents would go not to the archives, where they belonged, but to Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and, later, a private office in Washington, where they did not.
With Biden back in the White House, he finds himself struggling to explain what happened. His administration kept the discovery of sensitive records secret from the public for two months until media reports revealed it, and has had to update its version of events multiple times over the past week. On Saturday, the White House said that after previously reporting that one page of classified material had been found in a room next to the garage at the Wilmington house, five more pages were discovered by Justice Department personnel who had come to collect the material.
Robert Hur, who was named special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday to investigate the mishandling of those papers, will undoubtedly labor to reconstruct the events of those winter days in 2017 when members of the outgoing vice president’s staff were rushing to pack up their files, turn in their badges, work with the incoming team and find new jobs for themselves. The White House has provided no explanation yet for how or why the documents wound up in the hands of Biden as a private citizen.
For Biden, January 2017 was a time of uncertainty. For the first time in 44 years, he would be out of government, no longer a senator, no longer a vice president, no longer at the center of the action, no longer with an obvious future ahead. He would write a book, sure, and start a think tank. Months would pass before he would resolve to run for president again. And in that period of transition, something went wrong.
Biden said this past week that “I was surprised to learn that there are any government records that were taken to that office.” No evidence has emerged publicly to indicate that he knew they had been taken improperly. If the vice president did not personally remove them when he left the White House, Hur will no doubt try to determine which aides were involved in packing his papers.
Even before Hur’s appointment, Justice Department officials had interviewed several Biden associates, according to people informed about the inquiry. Among them was Kathy
Chung, who was Biden’s executive assistant while he was vice president and now works for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, NBC News reported.
Chung was said to have helped pack up Biden’s office in January 2017, but there is no public indication whether she had handled the documents in question or knew that anything she was putting away for transfer was classified.
The White House has declined to answer questions beyond limited statements issued over the past week. “We have been transparent in the last couple of days,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters Friday.
But the White House had not been transparent in the past couple of months. The first classified documents were found Nov. 2 and a second batch on Dec. 20. After the initial discovery, the White House promptly notified the National Archives and Records Administration, which then informed the Justice Department.
However, lawyers had privately resisted going public on the grounds that they wanted to wait until a more complete picture emerged and did not want to alienate the Justice Department by seeming to litigate the matter in the media.
As Biden was preparing to leave the public sector, his vice presidential chief of staff, Steven Ricchetti, and other advisers helped him put together a blueprint for a post-White House life to channel his energies and efforts.
Among them was a memoir that Biden published in November 2017 called “Promise Me, Dad,” referring to his son Beau, who had died of brain cancer in 2015 and reportedly urged his father to stay in the public arena. Many former presidents and vice presidents seek to use government documents through a regular process to assemble their memoirs, but it is not clear whether the papers found in recent months were part of book research.
Another project that Biden took on after the White Hou-
se was the creation of a think tank associated with the University of Pennsylvania called the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which opened in February 2018. It was at his office at the Washington headquarters of the Penn Biden Center that the first batch of classified documents was found in November, more than three years after Biden had formally stepped down from the center to run for president.
The Obama-Biden White House had established a regular process for handling secret papers and the White House Office of Records Management worked closely with the archives to ensure that files were transferred appropriately.
Anything the president saw was archived. Classified papers would be returned and put in the National Security Council system or, if involving domestic policy, in the Office of Records Management system. The White House staff secretary’s office was charged with ensuring that documents were properly managed.
How much Biden was involved in the disposition of documents in the days leading up to his 2017 departure from the White House is not clear. He had a hectic schedule as he tried to squeeze in as much activity as possible.
of rain in the valleys and along the coast and up to 3 inches in the mountains, Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles declared a state of emergency, anticipating mudslides and flooding.
In Northern California, where the current storm system hit first, roads were a lethal maze of floodwater, landslides, downed trees, blowing snow, spinouts and closures. Authorities in San Luis Obispo County, citing unsafe conditions, temporarily paused the search for Kyle Doan, a 5-year-old who disappeared down a rushing creek Monday after being wrested from his mother’s arms as they tried to escape from floodwaters rising around their car.
At Donner Summit, scientists at the Central Sierra Snow Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, on Saturday reported more than 2 feet of snowfall in less than 36 hours, and state transportation officials were turning big rigs around amid deteriorating road conditions. At 7 a.m., more than 30 semitrucks were parked in a single file along the shoulder of eastbound Interstate 80 at the Nevada state line.
State, federal and local officials implored motorists to stay off roads that were filled with determined travelers bound for the slopes on a packed Martin Luther King Day weekend.
“If you can avoid travel, please consider staying home,” Mike Keever, chief deputy director of the state transportation agency, Caltrans, said at a news conference Friday. “Watch some football. Enjoy some time with your family.”
By SHAWN HUBLER, VICTORIA KIM and JUDSON JONESAfresh wave of storms inundated California again Saturday, swelling rivers, downing power lines and imperiling travelers during yet another holiday weekend as a procession of atmospheric rivers continued to wallop the state.
At least 19 people have died since late December, with the toll expected to increase, in a series of powerful storms that unleashed destructive downpours from the North Coast to the southern border over the past 2 1/2 weeks.
The state’s northern and central regions have sustained the most damage: Levees have broken, thousands of trees have toppled, towering waves have shattered piers and mudslides have blocked highways. Flash flooding has shut down critical roads in the valleys and coastal areas, and heavy snow has blocked passages east over mountain ranges.
As of Saturday evening, millions of residents from Eureka, in the far north of the state, to San Diego were under flood advisories. Across the state, emergency officials said, more than 75,000 people were under evacuation orders and warnings. More than 23,000 utility customers were without power statewide, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks power interruptions. A federal emergency declaration covered much of the state, with the cost of damage expected to reach hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars by the time skies clear.
The repeated lashings have left the ground beyond saturated in much of California, and the arrival of still more rain has threatened to compound the risk of flooding and mudslides. State emergency officials have sought to shore up hills, evacuate flood-prone communities and position rescue crews in vulnerable areas.
None of the current storms would be considered catastrophic individually, meteorologists say, but the cumulative impact of almost relentless precipitation and wind has posed a formidable challenge. State authorities said the storms, taken together, had claimed more lives than the entirety of the past two wildfire seasons. On Friday, Nancy Ward, director of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, described the onslaught as “among the most deadly natural disasters in the modern history of our state.”
One to 5 more inches of rain was expected to fall by Monday morning, with 2 to 3 more feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada and up to 6 feet in some places. In Southern California, where incoming storms were expected to bring up to 1 inch
Since the week after Christmas, California has been pummeled by eight atmospheric rivers, a weather phenomenon that summons moisture into a powerful band and then unleashes intense blasts of precipitation. At least five of the atmospheric rivers have been powerful enough to be categorized as “strong” or greater, said Chad Hecht, a research and operations meteorologist at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. That is nearly as many intense atmospheric rivers as the state normally sees in a year, Hecht said.
Forecasts promised an incoming respite.
“We are nearing the end of this active cycle — we just need to get through this weekend and Monday,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, noting that at least one more large storm system is expected to hit the state Sunday before a shift in weather patterns brings drier conditions.
But state officials warned that the weekend storms, on terrain that was already 95% saturated in some areas, had primed the ground for more disaster.
“We’re not out of the woods,” Gov. Gavin Newsom warned Saturday in Merced County, where thousands had been evacuated earlier in the week amid extensive flooding.
Rainfall totals throughout the past several weeks have been 400% to 600% above average, according to the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center. In some parts of Northern California, more rain has been recorded in the past three weeks than would normally fall in six months.
On the other hand, there has been an increase in the statewide average snowpack to 226% of the average for this time of year and a significant easing in the record drought that has gripped the state, according to environmental officials.
Asingle ticket holder in Maine won an estimated $1.35 billion in the Mega Millions drawing Friday night. The identity of the winner was not yet publicly known — and might never be — but
he or she joins a lucky few who beat nearly impossible odds to win one of the biggest jackpots in U.S. history. The winning numbers were 30, 43, 45, 46 and 61, and the gold Mega Ball was 14.
Huge jackpots have become increasingly common in the multistate Mega Millions and
Powerball drawings.
Since 2016, six lottery jackpots — split between Mega Millions and its competing lottery, Powerball — in the United States have surpassed $1 billion, including three in the past year.
Last week, the Mega Millions jackpot once again reached 10 figures, a breathtaking figure even after taxes.
After no winner in the previous 25 drawings, someone had a winning ticket for Friday night’s drawing. The jackpot offered a prize of roughly $1.35 billion, paid out over 30 years, with a cash option of $724.6 million if the winner chooses to be paid in one lump sum.
It was unclear who had won Friday night’s drawing, but it now represents the fourth-largest lottery prize in U.S. history, and the second-largest Mega Millions prize.
The first thing winners should do, according to experts, is seek advice from a lawyer, a financial adviser and an accountant. And winners should research the professionals they turn to for help, checking the status of their licenses and getting references. (Those
resources are online.)
States oversee lottery operations and have different rules for how winnings are taxed and whether the names of the winners must be made public.
It was not immediately clear what Maine’s rules are about making a winner public. In Maine, winners have up to one year from when the jackpot numbers are drawn to claim their prize.
The winning ticket was sold at Hometown Gas & Grill in Lebanon, Maine, according to state lottery officials.
Over the years, changes to the games and higher ticket prices have led to bigger jackpots. The starting prize for the Powerball jackpot doubled in 2012, to $40 million from $20 million, with a new ticket price of $2. In 2015, the matrix of the Powerball changed when the range of numbers to pick from increased to 1 to 69 from 1 to 59 for the first five numbers, and the Powerball number options changed to 1 to 26 from 1 to 35.
The Mega Millions in 2017 increased its starting jackpot to $40 million from $15 million, and raised the ticket price to $2 from $1.
AHawaiian Airlines pilot said that a cloud “shot up” like a smoke plume just before the airplane experienced severe turbulence that injured 25 people last month, according to a preliminary report by federal investigators.
The National Transportation Safety Board said in the report that the captain of the flight reported that conditions were “smooth with clear skies.”
Then, “a cloud shot up vertically (like a smoke plume) in front of the airplane in a matter of seconds, and there was not enough time to deviate,” the report said.
The captain alerted the lead flight attendant that the flight might experience turbulence and within one to three seconds the airplane encountered severe turbulence, the report said, citing the captain’s account.
“Shortly after the turbulence-related upset, the lead flight attendant informed the flight crew that there were multiple injuries in the cabin,” the report said. It added that a post-accident examination of the weather in
the area “revealed that there was an occluded frontal system with an associated upper-level trough” moving toward the Hawaiian Islands.
The turbulence left 25 people injured — six of them seriously — on the Dec. 18 flight from Phoenix to Hawaii that had 281 passengers and 10 crew members, according to the report. Previously, officials said that three dozen people were injured, 11 of them seriously, and that there were 238 passengers aboard.
The turbulence struck about 40 minutes before the flight was scheduled to land at Honolulu International Airport. The plane sustained minor damage, although the report did not provide details.
Investigators said that satellite and weather radars, along with lightning data, showed that “strong cells” were in the area and that the National Weather Service had issued a warning for thunderstorms. There were no previous reports of severe turbulence before the incident, the report said.
The NTSB will continue to investigate and issue a final report, usually within 12 to 24 months, according to the agency.
Turbulence, which is air movement that often occurs unexpectedly and cannot be seen, can be created by various conditions, including cold or warm weather fronts, thunderstorms and jet streams.
Between 2009 and 2021, at least 146 people, including passengers and crew members, were seriously injured by turbulence, according to Federal Aviation Administration data.
On a recent visit to Salt Lake City, Alexander Dyck ordered Chinese takeout and received a branded fortune cookie wishing him wealth and promoting FTX, presumably packaged before the crypto empire’s epic collapse. “I should have saved it,” he said regretfully.
Dyck is a professor of finance at the University of Toronto, who just published a provocative new study on the pervasiveness of corporate fraud. The study has been passed around in the world of academia in recent weeks and has become a fascination among general counsels, corporate leaders and investors.
It suggests that only about one-third of frauds in public companies actually come to light and that fraud is disturbingly common. Dyck and his co-authors estimate that about 40% of companies are committing accounting violations and that 10% are committing what is considered securities fraud, destroying 1.6% of equity value each year — about $830 billion in 2021.
“What people don’t get is how widespread the problem of corporate fraud is,” Dyck said about his study, which was published in the Review of Accounting Studies this month.
Last year, Trevor Milton, founder of electric-vehicle maker Nikola, and Elizabeth Holmes, founder of blood-testing company Theranos, were both found guilty of fraud in high-profile trials. Holmes’ sentencing coincided with the swift fall of FTX, founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, all of which left 2022 with a distinctly fraudulent flavor.
But the amount of fraud perpetrated at any given time stays pretty steady, Dyck said.
Dyck and his colleagues wanted to scratch the surface of misconduct in public companies to figure out how much of it goes undiscovered normally. To do this, they first examined a period of unique scrutiny in accounting history, the 2001 demise of auditing firm Arthur Andersen after the collapse of Enron.
At that time, the firm’s former clients were in the spotlight and new auditors were far more motivated to uncover wrongdoing, given the suspicions looming over companies that had worked with Arthur Andersen. That should make the rate of fraud they found more
accurate than other measures. But the probes didn’t uncover more wrongdoing among Arthur Andersen’s clients than at other businesses reliant on other auditors. The same ratio of fraud appeared in a set of comparisons with other research, which led them to conclude it is consistent. They used this rate of fraud to conclude that about one-third of corporate fraud goes unnoticed.
Given how common fraud is at audited public companies, Dyck said, misconduct is probably even more pervasive in privately held businesses, particularly in crypto, which is only loosely regulated.
In the trenches
Even people who have spent their careers digging into corporate wrongdoing have trouble estimating just how much fraud goes on in big business and how little is detected.
Allison Herren Lee, a former commissioner and interim chair at the Securities and Exchange Commission, has worked as an enforcement lawyer and inside a mismanaged business. She said she’s very familiar with how people in business try to push the limits but was surprised by the study’s estimate that one-third of misconduct goes unnoticed.
Still, it’s very difficult to prove misconduct and target everyone involved in wrongdoing, Lee said. People involved often feel they are just testing boundaries rather than violating the law and such schemes can be
sprawling in major corporations.
“To prosecute fraud you have to show intent,” she said. “In big public companies that’s tough, because it takes a village to commit fraud.”
One way to address this would be to eliminate the need to show criminal intent and make it easier to punish executives for permitting wrongdoing on their watch, a move proposed by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, DMass., in 2019. The bill got little traction.
Psychology of a fraudster Corporate crime fighters agree that fraud is a major problem. But some are critical of the new study’s expansive take on the term. The research relied on studies with varying definitions, that applied to a range of kinds of misconduct, including settled cases arising from accusations of accounting violations that were never ultimately proven by the prosecution.
“The use of the term ‘fraud’ in this article’s title is highly problematic. The authors themselves concede that they use the word ‘fraud’ ‘loosely’ and for ‘simplicity,’” said Joseph Grundfest, a Stanford Law School professor, former SEC commissioner and creator of a database that tracks federal securities fraud cases. “But events they call fraudulent include alleged frauds that weren’t frauds, honest mistakes and differences of opinion about accounting treatment. Calling all these
events ‘frauds’ is like ‘loosely’ calling a mouse an elephant for the sake of ‘simplicity’ and then rationalizing the overbroad categorization on grounds that both are mammals. Just as mice are not elephants, alleged frauds are not frauds, and differences of opinion are also not frauds.”
The mindset of a typical fraudster is at the heart of the definitional issues, said Donald Langevoort of Georgetown University Law Center, a former special counsel to the SEC who has written extensively about corporate crime and is familiar with the studies underlying the research by Dyck and his colleagues.
Legally speaking, prosecutors have to prove intent to defraud, but that’s not easy because perpetrators are often expert at lying to themselves and defiant about the rules, he said.
“People inside Enron were convinced accounting was bad and they are good,” he said. “Executives who think like that will cross the line.”
The SEC recently adopted a rule aimed at changing that mentality. When it goes into effect later this month, it will require registered companies to develop clawback policies. Such rules allow companies to recover incentive-based pay from current or former executives if it was based on wrongly reported financials and the business is forced to do an accounting restatement.
Knowing that their own bonuses are on the line will encourage even defiant executives to be more vigilant, Langevoort said. But the new rule, and other efforts to crack down on corporate fraud, leave some businesses untouched.
Take Bankman-Fried, now under house arrest at his parents’ home in California, awaiting trial on an array of criminal fraud charges. He’s accused of siphoning billions of dollars from his businesses, facilitated by the fact that there were few financial records. On social media, in interviews and in his new Substack newsletter, the fallen executive has insisted he didn’t steal funds and could have saved FTX if lawyers hadn’t forced him to cede his spot as CEO and file for bankruptcy in November.
“Self-deception has been rampant in crypto, but it’s not like in traditional finance where people say, ‘The bureaucrats are holding us back,’” Langevoort said. “It’s more like ‘There’s a brave new world to invent and you gotta break some eggs to make an omelet.’”
Some U.S. investors are looking abroad to capture better stock returns in the coming months, betting European and other international stocks hold more enticing valuations after a long period of U.S. dominance.
U.S. stocks have rebounded to start the year after a rough 2022, but still have lagged their international counterparts. Europe’s STOXX 600 index (.STOXX) has gained some 17% since the end of the third quarter, versus 11% for the U.S. benchmark S&P 500. MSCI’s gauge of global stocks excluding the U.S. has risen more than 20% over that time.
European stocks have benefited as a mild winter has so far helped the region avert a feared energy crisis, investors said. Moderating commodity prices have helped, as has the re-opening of China’s economy and a weaker dollar; some expect the strength to continue.
“Relatively speaking, we have got more money now chasing better opportunities outside the U.S., which was not the case the last several years,” said Martin Schulz, head of the international equity group at Federated Hermes.
Federated Hermes said this week it is shifting from a “modestly bearish” view on stocks to a “modestly positive” one, entirely by adding to international markets.
U.S. stocks have long held sway over international peers. The S&P 500 rose over 460% from lows during the great financial crisis in March 2009 through last year, compared with a 170% gain for Europe’s STOXX over that time.
That period largely coincided with rock-bottom interest rates, a backdrop that favored U.S. stock indexes which are far more heavily weighted in technology shares than stock gauges in Europe. The tech sector amounts to 26% of the S&P 500. The group is only about 7% in the STOXX 600, which is far more heavily geared toward financial and industrial shares.
But the playing field leveled dramatically over the last year, as central banks globally raised interest rates to fight inflation. Higher rates tend to particularly pressure the valuations of tech and other high growth stocks while potentially benefiting banks and other value shares heavily weighted in Europe.
“One of the secular elements that has helped U.S. equities was unconventional monetary policies, and those have come to an end,” said Alessio de Longis, senior portfolio manager for Invesco Investment Solutions in New York.
The firm last month rotated more into international equities as it increased its overall stock exposure, de Longis said.
International stocks were recently touted by investor Jeffrey Gundlach of DoubleLine Capital and BofA Global Research, which projected global stocks would “crush” their U.S peers in 2023.
Even with their recent strength, Europe’s STOXX still trades at a hefty discount, with a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 12 against a P/E of about 17 for the S&P 500, according to Refinitiv Datastream. That valuation gap is close to its widest ever and is over twice its historic average.
“Every single metric that you can follow from a valuation perspective shows that international stocks are historically
cheap versus the U.S.,” said Brent Schutte, chief investment officer at Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company.
Another lift for international stocks has come from the recent weakness in the dollar, which is down some 9% since the end of the third quarter after a huge run. The weaker greenback benefits U.S. investors when they convert foreign profits back into their home currency, and some investors believe the dollar could keep sliding if it appears the Fed is growing closer to pausing its rate increases.
Some investors think U.S. stocks will soon resume their dominance over equities linked to other regions. Since 2012, the United States has tended to outperform rest-of-world equities, with an average difference of 1.7 percentage points over a typical 50-day window, according to Nicholas Colas, cofounder of DataTrek Research.
“As much we can see the merits of lower valuation nonU.S. equity markets, their recent outperformance says investors should be cautious in chasing the recent rally,” Colas said in a note this week.
A widely expected global recession could be one factor that sends investors back into U.S. stocks, which many see as a relative haven during times of economic uncertainty, investors said.
Rescuers on Sunday continued to comb the rubble of a nine-story apartment building that was cut in half by a Russian strike, as the death toll from the attack in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro a day earlier climbed to 29. It was one of the largest losses of civilian lives far from the front line since the beginning of the war.
With the rescue effort approaching the 24-hour mark, at least one woman was pulled safely from the debris. The 27-year-old was taken to a hospital where she was being treated for severe hypothermia, local officials said.
The residential building was struck late Saturday afternoon as Russia launched dozens of missiles at cities across Ukraine in two waves of strikes that coincided with the Orthodox New Year and shattered the relative calm of recent days.
The regional Ukrainian military administration said in an afternoon update Sunday that 29 people had been killed. At least 73 people were injured, and an estimated 40 people were still missing, officials said.
The strike on the apartment building is one of a series of devastating large-scale attacks on residential areas of Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February. Russian strikes on targets such as train stations, theaters, shopping
Fmalls and residential neighborhoods have led to significant loss of civilian life, while the shelling of cities and towns near the front line has also caused a mounting civilian death toll.
Under international law, it is a war crime to deliberately or recklessly attack civilian populations and places where civilians would be likely to congregate.
More than 550 people were involved in the rescue operation as it passed the 24-hour mark, according to local officials.
On Sunday morning, five victims who had been pulled from the rubble in Dnipro were laid out in body bags in a small grassy area next to the destroyed building. A light dusting of snow began to accumulate on them as the hours went by and recovery efforts continued.
At least 400 people lived in the large apartment building and the immediate area around it, according to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, and 72 apartments were destroyed in the attack. The explosion also shattered the windows of surrounding buildings, leaving many more people displaced.
Volunteers set up a small humanitarian hub under tents where they distributed tea to the dozens of rescuers and civilians on the scene. Some huddled around open bonfires for warmth in the freezing conditions.
Dump trucks rolled in and out of the area, collecting
rubble and clearing the street surrounding the partially collapsed building.
Images of the devastation provoked anger and despair around the country, with one photo from the scene of the attack circulating widely and striking a particular chord. It shows a young woman clutching a stuffed animal and a golden Christmas garland as she stood in the ruins of the building, waiting to be rescued.
In a post on a verified account on Instagram, the woman, who gave her name as Anastasiia Shvets, said her parents were still missing. She described how she had escaped unharmed except for a small head wound and bruises on her legs.
“I have no words, I have no emotions, I feel nothing except a great emptiness inside,” she wrote, sharing images from her hospital bed. According to Shvets’ social media accounts, her partner was serving in the Ukrainian military and had been killed in action four months ago.
The missile that struck the building was a Kh-22 cruise missile, also known as an X-22 missile, according to Hanna Maliar, Ukraine’s deputy minister of defense. Five of these missiles were fired at Ukrainian territory on Saturday, with one hitting the building in Dnipro.
Immediately after the Dnipro strike, pro-Russian news outlets and influential military bloggers had argued that the apartment building had been struck by fragments of the missile after Ukrainian air defenses attempted to intercept it.
But Ukrainian forces were quick to deny that, and the evidence from the scene pointed to a direct strike on the building.
“The armed forces of Ukraine have no weapons capable of shooting down this type of missile,” Maliar said, adding that more than 210 missiles of that type have been used in attacks on Ukrainian territory since Russia invaded in February.
The same kind of missile was used to strike a shopping center in Kremenchuk in June, killing 18 people.
The Soviet-era missiles weigh about 2,000 pounds, can be fired from long distances and are intended for anti-ship operations. They are also capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
Maliar said the attack showed the need for anti-aircraft missile systems like the Patriot system — which Ukraine has long been lobbying its allies for.
Late last month, President Joe Biden said that the United States would supply Ukraine with the Patriot missile system. Ukrainian forces will begin training on the system in Oklahoma in the coming week.
While Dnipro continued to grapple with the aftermath of the massive attack, Russian forces continued to carry out strikes closer to the front lines in Ukraine on Sunday.
Shelling hit residential buildings in the southern city of Kherson, injuring at least seven people Sunday, according to the local military administration. An office where representatives of the Red Cross were working also was hit, according to Tymoshenko, the presidential adviser. A strike on that site in December killed one person.
Residents gather their belongings from their apartments the day after a missile struck a residential building in Dnipro, Ukraine, on Sunday, Jan. 15, 2023. (Nicole Tung/The New York Times) The San Juan Daily Star Monday, January 16, 2023 12authorities suspended the governor responsible for protecting the buildings and arrested two top security officials who worked for him.
While Brazil’s institutions formed a united front against any attempt by Bolsonaro to challenge the election’s results — the former president has absconded to a rental home near Disney World — his false claims about voter fraud have festered and spread across Latin America’s largest nation.
The morning after the riot, interviews with a dozen protesters showed that they were far from giving up and were even moving past the man who had once led them.
“We are not here for President Bolsonaro anymore. We are here for our nation, our freedom,” said Nathanael S. Viera, 51, who had driven 900 miles to fight against what he said was a communist plot. “Our future is being stolen. You understand?”
test, Dino learned from a news article that, in fact, Rocha had decided to open it to demonstrators.
The number of police officers, Dino later told reporters, was woefully inadequate “to let them go down the esplanade.”
Rocha has said the size of the force was Torres’ responsibility. On Saturday, Torres was in Florida for the start of a twoweek vacation.
On Sunday morning, the mood on Brasília’s vast avenues was eerily calm.
Ana Priscila Azevedo, 38, an aspiring right-wing online influencer, had been posting one video after another in the leadup to the attack. In one, she said Bolsonaro supporters planned to shut down at least eight refineries around the country to choke off gasoline supplies.
By JACK NICAS and SIMON ROMEROAs the bus made its way from Brazil’s agricultural heartland to the capital, Andrea Barth pulled out her phone to ask fellow passengers, one by one, what they intended to do once they arrived.
“Overthrow the thieves,” one man replied.
“Take out ‘Nine-Finger,’” said another, referring to Brazil’s leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who lost part of a finger decades ago in a factory accident.
As the passengers described their plans for violence, more than a hundred other buses bulging with supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right former president, were also descending on Brasília, the capital.
A day later, on Jan. 8, a pro-Bolsonaro mob unleashed mayhem that shocked the country and was broadcast around the world. Rioters invaded and ransacked Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices, intending, many of them said, to spur military leaders to topple Lula, who had taken office a week earlier.
The assault showed that far-right extremism remains a grave threat.
Lula and judicial authorities have moved swiftly to reassert control, arresting more than 1,150 rioters, clearing the encampments that gave them refuge, searching for their funders and organizers and, on Friday, opening an investigation into how Bolsonaro may have inspired them.
The New York Times spoke with law enforcement, government officials, eyewitnesses and protesters, and reviewed dozens of videos and hundreds of social media posts to piece together what happened. The reporting shows that a mob swiftly and effortlessly overwhelmed a drastically outnumbered police presence.
It also shows that some officers not only failed to take any action against rioters, but they also appeared to be sympathetic, snapping photos as the mob tore through Congress.
The imbalance between protesters and police remains a central focus of the authorities’ investigation, and interviews with security officials yielded accusations of gross negligence and even active complicity in the mayhem. After the riot, federal
On New Year’s Day, Lula ascended the ramp to Brazil’s presidential offices and accepted the green and gold presidential sash from a woman who collects trash to recycle. Bolsonaro had already decamped for Florida.
Days later, calls went out across pro-Bolsonaro corners of the internet for an enormous Sunday demonstration in the capital, right where Lula’s supporters had celebrated a week before.
“The plan is to surround Brasília,” one person wrote in a Telegram group, attaching an aerial image of Congress, the Supreme Court and the Planalto Palace, headquarters of the presidency.
Yet the plans did not appear to overly alarm authorities.
Ricardo Cappelli, the No. 2 official at Brazil’s justice ministry, said that pro-Bolsonaro rallies had long taken on conspiratorial tones but had remained largely nonviolent. The planned protest’s location — the mile-long grassy esplanade that ends at Brazil’s Congress — has been the choice spot for Brazilians to vent their frustration for decades, sometimes with crowds in the hundreds of thousands.
Intelligence suggested that Sunday’s turnout would be just a few thousand.
While the esplanade is lined with the federal government’s most important buildings, a different entity has long handled security of demonstrations there: the district government that oversees Brasília.
The federal government pays the district $2 billion each year to provide security, and had been satisfied with the results.
Yet on Jan. 2, the district’s security chief was replaced with Anderson Torres, Bolsonaro’s former justice minister and a leading force behind the baseless claims that Brazil’s electronic voting systems are rife with fraud.
Torres quickly replaced much of his department’s senior staff.
On Jan. 6, the district held a meeting that yielded a fourpage plan placing much of the security responsibility on the district police, according to a copy obtained by the Times. Police would stop protesters before they reached Congress, the plan said, and would consider closing the esplanade.
Flávio Dino, Brazil’s new justice minister, said that the next day, the district governor, Ibaneis Rocha, told him the esplanade would be kept off limits. Then, shortly before the pro-
By Sunday morning, she was on the esplanade. At 11:20 a.m., she posted a video assuring followers that the stage was set for one of the most important moments of their lives. She had just spoken with two police officers, she said, and “they are completely on our side.”
Bolsonaro supporters began streaming en masse down the esplanade. As their numbers swelled, they grew more belligerent, chanting in unison, “We will die for Brazil!”
Around midday, Rocha, the governor, received an audio message from an official filling in for Torres, the security chief. “Everything is calm,” the official said.
Then, at 2:42 p.m., a surge of protesters reached one of the roadblocks. One group of protesters pulled the metal railing back, while another group pushed through the roadblock. A few police officers sprayed a chemical agent, but resistance was minimal.
Within seconds, the security line had fallen. The invasion had begun.
A surge of bodies rushed toward Congress. Many protesters ran directly to the wide ramp leading to the capitol’s flat roof.
As a mob tore through the capitol, another group headed about 300 yards to the Planalto, while a third headed 300 yards in the other direction to the Supreme Court. They easily broke into both.
By 3:45 p.m., the ramp to the Planalto was filled with rioters.
The government estimates there were roughly 5,000 protesters, said Cappelli, the justice ministry official, while the district later reported that it had assigned 1,300 police to the event.
But Cappelli said he believes there were “many fewer” than 1,300 officers present, and footage throughout the day shows them far outnumbered.
“The issue is not just the number — if the guidance is, ‘Stay there,’ or ‘Don’t get involved,’” he said. “It’s the command.”
The same forces had helped secure the inauguration and other protests, he added. What had changed was their new boss: Torres, a Bolsonaro ally.
Rocha also laid the blame on Torres and his team. “The governor was deceived,” said Alberto Toron, Rocha’s lawyer.
At 4:43 p.m., Rocha fired Torres, six days after he took the job.
Iran has executed Alireza Akbari, a former deputy defense minister and a dual British citizen, on charges of espionage for the British spy agency, the judiciary said early Saturday, in what appeared to be the first execution in decades of a high-profile Iranian official or dual citizen, and a move likely to raise tensions with the West.
Akbari, 61, was arrested in Iran in 2019. His detention and death sentence were revealed Wednesday. A former senior commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, he had served in a number of senior defense, nuclear and national security roles for nearly three decades.
Iran’s intelligence ministry called Akbari a “super spy” for MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, and accused him of passing classified national security information to the agency and receiving a payment of over 2 million euros (about $2.2 million). Iran’s state news media and his family said he had been arrested and detained for four months in 2008 on suspicion of spying for Britain, and later released on bail. He then traveled to Austria, Spain and finally Britain.
The statement from the judiciary said Akbari had spied for Britain from 2004 to 2009, as well as when he “fled the country” and moved to Britain. It said he had been recruited by British diplomats in Tehran under the guise of trade partnerships.
“I am just shocked, we saw no reason or indication for the charges,” Akbari’s wife, Maryam Samadi, said in a telephone interview Friday, referring to news reports that her husband had been executed. “We could have never imagined this, and I don’t understand the politics behind it.”
The British government reacted Saturday by condemning the execution as “barbaric.” It temporarily recalled its ambassador from Tehran, imposed sanctions on Iran’s prosecutor general and summoned Iran’s top diplomat in the U.K.
“Our response to Iran is not limited to today. We are reviewing further action,” British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said in a tweet. The U.S. and France also condemned the killing.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain called the execution a “callous and cowardly act,” saying on Twitter that it had been “carried out by a barbaric regime with no respect for the human rights of their own people.”
President Emmanuel Macron of France condemned the execution of Akbari as “a despicable and barbaric” act. “His name adds to too long a list of victims of repression and the death penalty in Iran,” Macron wrote on Twitter. “Solidarity with the UK. Solidarity with the Iranian people.”
Akbari moved to Britain a decade ago, but it remained unclear under what circumstances a senior Iranian defense official and Guard commander attained British citizenship. His brother Mehdi Akbari said in an interview that he was granted citizenship because he had made investments and created jobs in Britain. Iran said that his British passport had been issued as part of a spying deal.
“The accusations against him are purely based on forced confessions under extreme duress,” Mehdi Akbari said in an interview Friday night. “It’s all scenarios written by the intelligence ministry, and they have offered no proof or evidence.”
Akbari’s relatives were called to Evin Prison on Monday for a final meeting with him, Samadi said. He saw his mother, sister and daughter, said his goodbyes and relayed his final wishes, she said. He also had a last phone conversation with his wife, who is in London.
The execution is likely to escalate tensions between Iran and the West. Relations, already tense amid the lengthy suspension of nuclear talks, have worsened because of Iran’s violent crackdown and execution of protesters and its continued delivery of suicide drones to Russia for the war in Ukraine.
From page 13
About 6 p.m., Lula made an emergency decree. Cappelli was named the new head of district security and headed to the street, in a suit and tie, to direct the forces.
By that time, army soldiers, federal police and other reinforce-
ments had arrived and were retaking the buildings. Authorities arrested 210 people on the scene.
That night, the Supreme Court suspended Rocha for 90 days. Later the court approved a federal police request for arrest warrants against Torres and the district police chief. On Saturday, Torres was arrested upon arriving in Brasília from Florida.
In recent years, Iran has seen high-profile defections and arrests of senior officials accused of spying for foreign countries, but executing a senior official and a ranking member of the Guard is highly unusual. In June, The New York Times reported that a senior commander in the Revolutionary Guard, Brig. Gen. Ali Nasiri, had been secretly arrested on allegations of spying for Israel.
Akbari told the Times in a 2003 interview that he opposed the nuclear deal with the West on the grounds that Iran must not waver in its nuclear program because doing so would make its security program a target.
“If we retreat every time they put pressure on us, they will continue the pressure and push us farther back until we are completely disarmed and defenseless,” Akbari said in the interview.
Akbari’s brother said he later became the defense ministry’s liaison with embassies in Iran, especially Western ones, responsible for convincing ambassadors that Iran’s nuclear program was for peaceful energy purposes.
The execution puts Britain in an unusual position. It must confront Iran for executing its citizen, a former senior Guard member, even as the British Parliament voted unanimously Thursday to support the government’s imminent plan to list the Guard as a terrorist organization. Britain has accused the Guard of plotting to assassinate several British citizens in the past year.
Akbari was detained in 2019 on a visit to Iran and had been confined ever since, but his family had kept the news quiet in hopes of securing his release through their contacts, his family said.
A war of narratives emerged once the detention became known, with Iran’s state news media publishing a video of Akbari confessing to being recruited as a spy by British diplomats, and BBC Persian publishing audio footage of Akbari saying he had been tortured, drugged and forced at gunpoint to make the on-camera confession.
In one part of the edited confession video, Akbari said he had informed on the country’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was assassinated by Israel with a remote-controlled robot in November 2020. Iranian officials have repeatedly vowed to avenge Fakhrizadeh’s death.
Akbari said in the BBC Persian audio that he believed the charges against him were motivated by Iran’s desire to take revenge against Britain and by factional political score-settling in Iran.
During a search of Torres’ home, authorities found a draft of a presidential decree that sought to effectively overturn the election. Torres has suggested he received the document from a third party and planned to throw it away.
The morning after the riot, authorities swept a long-running protest camp outside the army headquarters, detaining 1,200 people.
‘We will die for Brazil’: How a far-right mob tried to oustAlireza Akbari in an undated photo. He was former defense minister in Iran and a dual citizen of Iran and Britain. By FARHAD MANJOO
The natural gas-powered appliances in your home may be slowly killing you and everyone you love. That’s the bad news. The worse news is this: It’s not clear exactly what you should do about it — if anything at all.
The dangers are well documented. Gas-fired water heaters — even the more efficient, tankless kind — regularly puff out clouds of methane, a greenhouse gas that, in the short term, traps at least 100 times more atmospheric heat than carbon dioxide (per unit). Every minute that it’s in your house, even when it’s turned off, your gas stove may be flatulating dangerous pollutants and climatewarming gases into your kitchen.
About 13% of cases of childhood asthma in the United States may be attributable to gas cooktops, a recent study found — a population-level effect similar to that of exposure to secondhand smoke.
So what’s a homeowner to do? If you spend time around environmentalists or energy experts, you’ll hear a simple answer: Electrify! Most gas appliances can now be replaced with healthier and more efficient alternatives powered by electricity — heat pumps instead of gasfired furnaces, for instance, or induction stoves instead of gas burners. Electrification is also crucial to the world’s plan for mitigating climate change: We’ll clean up how
we generate electricity (wind, solar) while electrifying everything we can (cars, factories, shopping malls, houses), the thinking goes. Add government incentives and stir.
In some sectors, like automobiles, electrification is catching on. At home, though? Despite growing recognition of the dangers of gas-powered appliances, electrifying our abodes is going to be much slower, more expensive and more complicated than electrifying other parts of our lives. There is also a growing political freakout — on Twitter and Fox News, right-wingers are swearing allegiance to gas stoves as if they were AR-15s.
But whatever your politics, I’m not sure gas stoves are a hill to die on. Some electric advances make clear sense — in a lot of places, getting rooftop solar panels is a no-brainer. But an induction stove? An electric water heater? It’s hard to say; experts I talked to said that whether people should adopt these climate-aiding systems depends on a lot of factors. Houses are like people; they’re all ailing in different ways, and some of them may be just too set in their ways to be rehabilitated.
Take cooking. Researchers have been documenting the dangers of natural gas-burning stoves for decades. Once, chefs and foodies justified gas for its superior culinary performance, but then came induction stoves, which use electricity to produce a magnetic current that heats certain types of cookware. Induction cooktops can heat up and cool down more quickly than gas; many home cooks and even professional chefs rave about them.
State and local governments have started to phase out natural gas hookups in new buildings, and the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act provides bi-
llions in new incentives for people to electrify their home appliances. A commissioner on the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission told Bloomberg recently that the agency will consider banning gas stoves. (The commission and the White House later walked back any talk of a ban.)
Does that mean you should go electric? I don’t know — I can’t even figure out if I should get an induction stove.
In homes that already have electric cooktops, switching to induction may be relatively easy. But in my home, as in millions of others piped for gas cooking, getting an induction range would require extensive electrical work and the capping of my existing gas line. Induction stoves also tend to cost slightly more than comparable gas stoves (but new tax credits could change that). Also, you don’t have to entirely replace your stove to mitigate the health dangers of cooking with gas — upgrading and always turning on your ventilation hood, if you have one, is a very good idea.
It’s no surprise, then, that induction stoves have struggled to take off; according to a survey by Consumer Reports, only about 3% of American households have them.
“It can be pretty involved and expensive, and I’m not sure the payoff is there for a lot of people,” said Liam McCabe, a journalist at the energy-advising guide EnergySage who writes often about his own efforts to upgrade his home from gas to electricity. McCabe said the article he wrote for Consumer Reports on his switch from a gas stove to induction could have been headlined: “Do-Gooder Pays Through the Nose to Boil Water a Little Faster.”
McCabe also pointed out that if you want to make a significant dent in your home’s environmental impact, cooking isn’t the place to start. Heating and cooling is. On average, about half of the energy used by American households goes to space heating and air conditioning; an additional 20% goes to heating water. Everything else — lighting, refrigeration, TVs, computers, clothes drying and cooking — accounts for less than 30% of the average household’s energy usage.
Instead of getting an induction stove, then, it might make a lot more sense for you to spend your money on a heat pump, an underappreciated and kind of magical electric device that can replace both a gas-powered furnace and an air conditioner. But there may be an even simpler and cheaper thing to do first: Weather seal your house. Ed May, a partner at the environmental consulting practice bldgtyp, told me that a lot of the ways to improve your home’s environmental impact are just “really not that exciting at all,” including “lots and lots of insulation.”
So, sure, your gas-powered stove may be out to get you. But it’s the furnace that may be a bigger menace. And don’t forget to insulate.
LA FORTALEZA – El gobernador Pedro Rafael Pierluisi Urrutia sale hoy domingo a la ciudad de Madrid, España y estará de regreso el próximo domingo 22 de enero. El secretario de Estado, Omar Marrero, fungirá como gobernador interino hasta la llegada del gobernador Pierluisi.
Pierluisi Urrutia formará parte de la Delegación de Puerto Rico que participará en la la Feria Internacional de Turismo en España (FITUR). El grupo lo componen: Discover Puerto Rico, Distrito de Convenciones, Rums of Puerto Rico, The Condado Collection, Bahia Beach Resort, Toro Verde, RST Destination Managet, Grupo Misla, E- Vacations, Esto es Vida properties y Vive la Van.
“Llevamos dos años con un crecimiento récord en nuestro sector turístico, por lo que es importante continuar aprovechando cada oportunidad para seguir promocionando a nuestra Isla. Tenemos mucho que ofrecer y es necesario continuar fomentando que cada vez más personas de todo el mundo nos visiten, y conozcan nuestra cultura y oferta turística. La Feria Internacional del Turismo nos abre la puerta para establecer más lazos comerciales en la industria turística, para darnos a conocer y para que se sepa todo lo que tiene Puerto Rico como un destino único en el Caribe”, sostuvo el gobernador quien será uno de los oradores principales en la Feria.
El evento contará con la participación de sobre 8,600 expositores, 110 mil representantes de la industria entrelos que figuran: líneas aéreas y de cruceros, mayoristas, agencias de viajes, operadores de excursiones, hoteleros, y medios de comunicación especializados en turismo, entre otros y está
abierta al público en general. También estarán presentes empresarios puertorriqueños interesados en continuar estableciendo alianzas de negocios entre Puerto Rico y España, así como otros destinos.
La agenda de la delegación de Puerto Rico incluye, entre otros compromisos de relevancia internacional, la participación del gobernador Pierluisi en la ceremonia oficial de apertura y corte de cinta en iFEMA Madrid. Además, el primer ejecutivo tendrá una participación en el panel de Sostenibilidad de FITUR en el cual hablará sobre los esfuerzos que ha estado implementando Puerto Rico en materia de desarrollo sostenible tanto a nivel de la industria turística como a nivel gubernamental y los grandes logros que ha tenido el sector del turismo en Puerto Rico en los pasados dos años. Igualmente, el gobernador tendrá varias reuniones con ejecutivos y funcionarios relacionados al turismo, así como entrevistas con medios europeros para continuar promocionando a la Isla.
Para maximizar la presencia de Puerto Rico durante FITUR 2023 se diseñó un moderno exhibidor de sobre 2,700 pies cuadrados, el cual combina elementos arquitectónicos tradicionales con alta tecnología y un decorado contemporáneo. Las fotografías, videos y colores utilizados en el mismo fueron seleccionados para resaltar la diversidad de la oferta disponible en la Isla. El espacio cuenta con dos pisos y un salón cerrado para permitir la realización de reuniones de negocio con hoteleros y operadores receptivos al tiempo que el público disfruta del programa de actividades que se ha preparado especialmente para el evento.
Como parte de las actividades promocionales que se han incluido en el programa de la semana, se destacan degustaciones de café cultivado por
empresas Agroturísticas certificadas por la Compañía de Turismo, clases de salsa, presentaciones en vivo de plena y música típica, y muestras de los sabores típicos de la comida criolla a cargo de El Casal de Pepa, un restaurante de comida puertorriqueña localizado en la ciudad de Madrid.
Por otro lado, durante su viaje el gobernador aprovechará además para firmar el Memorando de Entendimiento en materia de Archivos entre el Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte del Reino de España y el Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. Este acuerdo forma parte de la primera fase de la digitalización de documentos históricos sobre Puerto Rico del Archivo General de Simancas, el Archivo General de la Administración, el Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica y el Archivo General de Indias, así como de tantos de los que se encuentran en el Archivo General de Puerto Rico y en la Biblioteca Nacional de Puerto Rico.
También, en la ciudad de Toledo el gobernador Pierluisi junto al presidente del gobierno CastillaLa Mancha, Emiliano García-Page, hablarán sobre una alianza para promocionar ambos destinos turísticos y se hará un anuncio relacionado a la empresa Toro Verde.
CAROLINA
– El gobernador Pedro Rafael Pierluisi Urrutia dijo a fines de la semana pasada que le solicitó a la Oficina del Contralor a que examinen tanto la contratación como el proceso de ejecución y construcción del Puente Atirantado de Naranjito.
“En cuanto al asunto del Puente atirantado, quiero dejar claro, al igual que lo expresé anteriormente, que pienso que la Oficina de la Contralora debe examinar tanto la contratación como al ejecución de esa obra y hacer los hallazgos y señalamientos que correspondan. Es importante dada al tamaño de esa inversión y lo que
todos sabemos que ocurrió, que la contralora intervenga y rinda un informe sobre este asunto que reconozco que es importante”, dijo el gobernador a preguntas de la prensa.
“De mi parte lo que he hecho es asignar los fondos junto al director ejecutivo de la Autoridad de Carreteras para reparar el puente porque es importantísimo que ese puente esté segur y se puedan usar no solo dos carriles, sino los cuatro carriles del mismo y en eso estamos enfocados y será una realidad el año que viene”, añadió.
El mandatario explicó que tan pronto surgió la información tuvo una conversación con la contralora sobre
el asunto.
“Pienso que esta obra en particular debe ser objeto de un examen de la Oficina del Contralor, tanto la contratación como la ejecución”, concluyó.
El Nuevo Día reveló esta semana, las fallas estructurales que enfrenta el puente, así como reparaciones en las que se utilizó cartón. Otro de los problemas estriba en la corrosión de los cables de acero, entre otros. Actualmente, el puente solo mantiene dos carriles abiertos. La Autoridad de Carreteras y Transportación anunció que desde el 30 de enero de 2023 la vía será cerrada al tránsito para iniciar labores de mejoras en la estructura.
Gobernador pide a la Oficina del Contralor investigar ejecución y construcción del Puente Atirantado de Naranjito
By ED MORALES
In the fall of 1947, Dizzy Gillespie called on his friend, trumpeter-arranger Mario Bauzá, in search of a conga player for an upcoming Carnegie Hall concert where he planned to debut songs exploring the connection between Afro-Cuban music and jazz. Bauzá suggested Chano Pozo, a swaggering master of Yoruba rhythms, who had just arrived from Cuba.
It was a wildly fortuitous introduction: Dizzy and Chano’s team-up would mark a watershed moment in jazz history, what many refer to the birth of Latin jazz. Although neither musician could communicate in the other’s language, they shared a cultural connection, and suddenly bebop, Gillespie’s rebellious jazz experiment, became Cubop.
Arturo O’Farrill, leader of the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, which he formed in 2001 for Jazz at Lincoln Center, has long contemplated that meeting. It was a collaboration that united African diasporas, north and south, reconstructing ties broken by the slave trade. “There’s a saying, I’m sure you’ve heard it,” he said in a recent video interview, “where Dizzy says, ‘I don’t speak Spanish and Chano doesn’t speak English, but we both speak African.’”
On Saturday at Town Hall, O’Farrill commemorated that moment, just over 75 years ago, when Dizzy and Chano bonded over their ancestral past and took the music into the future, as well as the role his father, Chico, played in that evolution. The concert, which paid tribute to “The Original Influencers,” celebrated a Town Hall show similar to the Carnegie performance that took place in December 1947, and featured O’Farrill’s 18-piece orchestra, as well as special guests Pedrito Martínez on percussion, Jon Faddis on trumpet, Donald Harrison on saxophone, singers Daymé Arocena and Melvis Santa, and O’Farrill’s two sons, Adam and Zack, on trumpet and drums.
The Cuban-born Chico O’Farrill was the son of Irish and German immigrants to the island and was so taken with the fusions previously explored by Bauzá as musical director of Machito and His Afro-Cubans, that he persuaded the impresario Norman Granz to commission and record his “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite,” featuring Charlie Parker, Buddy Rich and Flip Phillips, in 1950.
“My father was fully European, living in an African country — because, you know,
Cuba’s basically an African country — and also falling in love with jazz,” O’Farrill said. “He was the perfect person to be in all three worlds.”
The elder O’Farrill joined up with Gillespie in the following years and became one of Latin jazz’s chief arrangers and orchestra leaders. Gillespie became Faddis’ mentor soon after he arrived in New York as an 18-year-old aspiring trumpeter. On Saturday, he will perform the “Manteca Suite,” Chico’s elaborate rearrangement of the Gillespie-Pozo classic written with Gil Fuller, “Manteca.” Faddis’ close association with Gillespie made him privy to Chico’s relationship with Pozo, who was tragically murdered in Harlem in 1948.
“Mario Bauzá would take Dizzy up to Spanish Harlem to hear bands like Alberto Socarrás’, and sit in,” Faddis said in an interview. “The collaboration with Chano was really important — I know there are many things that Chano taught him and the musicians in his band.”
Pozo clued in Gillespie’s band to the dense polyrhythmic patterns that permeate the Afro-Cuban music that he learned as a street drummer in the Black Cayo Hueso neighborhood of Havana. In his autobiography “To Be, or Not … to Bop,” Gillespie expressed a desire to recapture lost elements of African tradition, writing that he “always had that Latin feeling” but that his musical ancestors remained “monorhythmic,” because drums were not tolerated by U.S. slave masters, while the Afro-Cubans “remained polyrhythmic.”
Gillespie and Pozo shared other cultural bonds, too. “I think when you hear Dizzy and Chano play the Afro Cuban Suite, you hear the pattern of call and response,” Faddis added. “One of the main connectors between that Afro-Cuban lineage and American jazz is what you hear in the work songs, the prison songs and even the spirituals — the call and response in the church.”
Gillespie and Pozo’s reunion of different diasporic African traditions through jazz had many antecedents, particularly in New Orleans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when King Oliver and Lorenzo Tio visited Havana with a military band and absorbed Cuban influences. Ragtime pianist Jellyroll Morton famously referenced “tinges of Spanish” in his playing, and in New York, Bauzá had been steadily absorbing jazz techniques and sharing
Cuban rhythmic tradition as musical director of the Chick Webb orchestra in the 1930s. Both Gillespie and Bauzá had yearned to escape the predictability of danceable Latin ballroom and big band music, and in 1947, just as Gillespie was perfecting his notion of bebop, Pozo’s intervention helped jazz became an international genre. It would put Gillespie on a path that defined the rest of his musical career. By 1988, Dizzy founded the United Nations Orchestra, which over the years featured Latin jazz stars including Paquito D’Rivera, Giovanni Hidalgo, Arturo Sandoval, David Sánchez and Miguel Zenón among many others.
Pedrito Martínez, who performed two songs from his 2013 self-titled debut at the Town Hall concert, is evidence of Cubop’s internationalist legacy. He was inspired by Pozo, and even grew up in the same neighborhood in Havana. “I learned to play rumba in the street, like Chano did,” Martínez said in an interview. “He was someone from the marginal world who didn’t speak English, but he opened up doors for all of us.”
Martínez had collaborated with Faddis in Steve Turre’s “Sanctified Shells” band, and had Faddis guest on his most recent album, “Acertijos.” He sees the connection between Afro-Cuban and jazz music as a kind of mystical fusion of spirit worlds. “I’ve seen a lot of Thelonious Monk videos, and he looked like a
rumbero,” Martínez said, referring to the way Monk would sometimes perform a spinning dance that suggested Yoruban dance and spirit possession. “He stood up to dance and played the piano with one hand and then the other. Jazz has a very spiritual connection to AfroCuban music, because it’s a way of feeling, of giving reverence to the ancestors.”
The rediscovery of common spiritual roots between African Americans and the Afro-Latin American diaspora is what keeps the Afro-Cuban jazz concept grounded and coherent. While there have been many debates about whether American jazz’s melodic and harmonic traditions and Afro-Caribbean rhythmic techniques dominate, it’s always been a back-and-forth conversation, an interhemispheric musical negotiation. It’s no surprise that Pérez Prado and Tito Puente’s mambo rose quickly in the wake of Gillespie and Pozo’s Cubop, and that it’s possible to hear Prado mambo elements in the early work of Afro-futurist pioneer Sun Ra.
What’s clear is that there’s no going back. “There are a lot of purists who want to keep jazz, jazz as jazz, they don’t want to mess with it,” O’Farrill said. “But I’ve been fighting this battle for 30 years, and I’m like, no, no, no. Jazz and Latin are the same trunk of the same tree. But it looks like we can never resolve this discussion. It can only go on and be explored to the end of time.”
The San Juan Daily Star Monday, January 16, 2023 17 Clockwise from left: Chico O’Farrill, Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo. The three musicians and their work pioneering Latin jazz were the focus of a concert in New York on Saturday.When Elvis Presley died in 1977, Lisa Marie Presley, his only child, inherited Graceland — an eight-bedroom, eight-bath Colonial revival house in Memphis, Tennessee, that became one of the most iconic pieces of real estate in American music history.
Graceland was the personal home of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll from 1957 until his death at the age of 42. For Lisa Marie Presley, rock ’n’ roll royalty who died Thursday in Los Angeles, Graceland was the castle where she spent holidays with her father, and notoriously had full daytime reign of its grand, chandelier-lit rooms while her night owl father slept.
She was back at Graceland just four days before her death — visiting the estate Sunday to celebrate what would have been her father’s 88th birthday. On Thursday, after what her family has described as a “medical emergency,” she was rushed from her home in Calabasas, California, to a Los Angeles hospital and, shortly after, was pronounced dead. She was 54.
Only 9 years old when her father died, Presley, a singer-songwriter in her own right who never escaped her late father’s shadow, assumed full control of her trust in 1993, on her 25th birthday. This included Graceland, as well as its eponymous 13.8-acre estate.
It became her life’s work through tumult and loss. Even as she stared down financial ruin, she held onto the estate.
She tapped her business manager Barry Siegel to manage the trust’s assets
— a move, she would say, that triggered an avalanche of debt and devastation. In 2005, Siegel sold an 85% stake in the Elvis Presley Estate. The stake included Elvis’ intellectual property, his image, likeness and the right to operate Graceland as a tourist attraction.
But the white-columned mansion remained hers.
The Elvis Presley Estate would go on to change hands again and is currently owned by Authentic Brands Group, a New York-based company that also owns the intellectual property for Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali. Even as Authentic Brands took control in 2013, Presley released a statement reasserting her ownership of the house itself.
“The licensing and merchandising as-
pect of this business is not to be confused with the fact that the property will always remain with me and my family. However, this is a great partnership for our family and Elvis fans worldwide,” she said at the time.
Authentic Brands and Joel Weinshanker, founder and CEO of National Entertainment Collectibles Association, now manage the estate through an entity called Elvis Presley Enterprises.
Reached by phone Friday, Weinshanker noted how important Graceland mansion was to Lisa Marie Presley.
“Elvis lived in many places, but Graceland was always his home, and Lisa felt the same way,” he said. “At times of difficulty, she slept in his bedroom. Twentyfive million people have visited Graceland, but it was always only home to one person,
and that was Lisa.”
In holding on to the home and grounds, she also held onto the final resting place of her closest family members. Elvis Presley, who died in a bathroom in Graceland, is buried on the estate, as is her son, Benjamin Keough, who died by suicide in 2020.
She is survived by her mother, Priscilla, and three daughters: actress Riley Keough, 33, whose father was Presley’s first husband, Danny Keough; and twin 14-year-old daughters, Harper Lockwood and Finley Lockwood, whom she shared with her fourth husband, guitarist Michael Lockwood.
The daughters will now inherit the mansion and its grounds, Elvis Presley Enterprises confirmed.
“The home itself, the mansion, was owned by Lisa. Even though we have a deal where we manage it and take care of it, that will stay with the trust,” Weinshanker said. “That trust will pass to Riley, Finley and Harper. And Harper and Finley are minors, so at the end of the day, the trust will be run by Riley.”
In 2003, in an interview with Playboy, Lisa Marie Presley joked that when she died, she would inevitably be buried at Graceland herself. And on Friday, a representative for Riley Keough confirmed that she would, indeed, be laid to rest on the mansion’s grounds, alongside her son, Ben.
“I don’t plan on anything. I’m sure I’ll end up there. Or I’ll shrink my head and put it in a glass box in the living room,” she said in the interview. “I’ll get more tourists to Graceland that way.”
Elvis Presley’s home at Graceland, in Memphis, Tenn., Feb. 28, 2006. Lisa Marie Presley, who died suddenly on Jan. 12, 2023, had visited the estate four days earlier to celebrate what would have been her father’s 88th birthday.Lemon, olive oil and garlic are the foundation of so many pantry meals, a harmonious trio I use to flavor pretty much everything — fish, chicken, vegetables, grains — stopping only at dessert because, well, garlic. Often spiked with chile flakes and Parmesan, the combination makes any dish taste deep and complex, without your having to do much to get there. It’s a nobrainer, easy alchemy that never fails.
Yet, as rock-solid as this grouping may be, there are times when a person gets the itch to shake things up. This is especially true in early January, when new ideas hold the promise of bold tomorrows, and dependable old habits suddenly need a refresh.
And so recently, while cooking up one of my go-to pastas, I reached right past my trusty bottle of extra-virgin and grabbed some butter from the fridge instead. I heated it in a skillet until it melted and browned, filling the kitchen with a sweet, nutty scent.
Then, in place of sizzling thin slivers of garlic in the fat as is my wont, I threw in sliced almonds, which resemble garlic but taste mellow, not pungent. I let them toast and turn golden, so they could accentuate the flavors of the brown butter and add crunch.
As for the lemon — the only part of the original trinity I kept — I stirred in both juice and zest. And then I zipped it all up with a shower of chile flakes and Parmesan.
Finally, to turn this into a one-pot meal, I threw in handfuls of arugula, watching it melt on the hot linguine, turning silky but keeping its peppery kick.
The final pasta tasted nothing like its olive oily, garlicky predecessor, but was bright and tangy, warm and buttery in its own delicious way — a brand-new take on a dish with venerable old roots.
Typically for this type of minimalist recipe, I’d urge you to seek out the very best ingredients: the finest ParmigianoReggiano, small-batch pasta extruded through some sort of heirloom bronze
die, fancy high-fat cultured butter and the like.
But after testing this multiple times with a wide spectrum of ingredients, I can vouch that the batches made with supermarket staples were nearly as good as the ones made from more expensive products. So use whatever you have. Your dinner will be delightful — which, after all, is what a pantry meal is all about.
Brown butter, crunchy almonds and tangy lemon make a rich but balanced sauce for this pantry-friendly pasta. The arugula lends freshness and rounds out the pasta, turning this into a quick onepot meal. If you want to increase the vegetables, you can double the arugula. (Just add a little more lemon juice.) And if you don’t have baby (or wild) arugula on hand, spinach or baby kale are fine, though slightly milder, substitutes. Don’t
stint on the red-pepper flakes; their spiciness helps bring together the flavors.
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Total time: 25 minutes Ingredients:
Fine salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 pound linguine or spaghetti
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 cup sliced almonds
2 fresh rosemary sprigs
1/4 teaspoon red-pepper flakes, plus more to taste
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice,
1 tablespoon finely grated lemon zest 4 to 5 ounces baby or wild arugula, coarsely chopped, or use baby kale or spinach (4 to 5 cups)
Grated Parmesan, for serving Preparation:
1. Bring a large pot of heavily salted water to a boil. Add pasta and cook until it is 1 minute shy of being al dente, usually a minute or 2 less than the package instructions. Scoop out about 1 1/2 cups pasta water, then drain pasta.
2. While the pasta cooks, in a large skillet or Dutch oven, melt butter over medium heat. Cook, swirling occasionally, until the foam subsides, the milk solids turn golden-brown and the butter smells nutty and toasty, 3 to 4 minutes. (Watch carefully to see that it doesn’t burn.)
3. Stir in almonds, rosemary and red-pepper flakes, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the nuts are toasted and slightly darker in color, about 1 minute.
4. Add about 1 cup pasta water to the skillet and bring to a simmer. Add lemon juice, zest, 1/2 teaspoon salt and a large pinch of black pepper, then add drained pasta and toss well. Add arugula, tossing until it wilts. Simmer for another minute, if needed, to thicken the sauce until it’s thick and glossy. If the mixture seems dry, add more pasta water 1 tablespoon at a time.
5. Taste and add more salt, red-pepper flakes and lemon juice, if needed. Serve topped with grated Parmesan and more red-pepper flakes, if you like.
When Ebola swept through eastern Congo in 2018, it was a struggle to track cases. Dr. Billy Yumaine, a public health official, recalls steady flows of people moving back and forth across the border with Uganda while others hid sick family members in their homes because they feared the authorities. It took at least a week to get test results, and health officials had difficulty isolating sick people while they waited.
It took two years for the country to bring that outbreak under control, and more than 2,300 people died.
A similar disaster threatened Congo in September 2021. Members of a family in North Kivu province fell ill with fevers, vomiting and diarrhea, one after the other. Then their neighbors became sick, too.
But that set off a series of steps that Congo put in place after the 2018 outbreak. The patients were tested, the cases were quickly confirmed as a new outbreak of Ebola and, right away, health workers traced 50 contacts of the families.
Then they fanned out to test possible patients at health centers and screened people at the busy border posts, stopping anyone with symptoms of the hemorrhagic fever. Local labs that had been set up in the wake of the previous outbreak tested more than 1,800 blood samples.
It made a difference: This time, Ebola claimed just 11 lives.
“Those people died, but we kept it to
11 deaths, where in the past we lost thousands,” Yumaine said.
You probably didn’t hear that story. You probably didn’t hear about the outbreak of deadly Nipah virus that a doctor and her colleagues stopped in southern India last year, either. Or the rabies outbreak that threatened to race through nomadic Masai communities in Tanzania. Quickthinking public health officials brought it in check after a handful of children died.
Over the past couple of years, the headlines and the social feeds have been dominated by outbreaks around the world. There was COVID, of course, but also mpox (formerly known as monkeypox), cholera and resurgent polio and measles. But a dozen more outbreaks flickered, threatened — and then were snuffed out. While it may not feel that way, we have learned a thing or two about how to do this, and, sometimes, we get it right.
A report by global health strategy organization Resolve to Save Lives documented six disasters that weren’t. All emerged in developing countries, including those that, like Congo, have some of the most fragile health systems in the world.
While cutting-edge vaccine technology and genomic sequencing have received lots of attention in the COVID years, the interventions that helped prevent these six
pandemics were steadfastly unglamorous: building the trust of communities in the local health system. Training local workers in how to report a suspected problem effectively. Making funds available to dispense swiftly, to deploy contact tracers or vaccinate a village against rabies. Increasing lab capacity in areas far from urban centers. Priming everyone to move fast at the first sign of potential calamity.
“Outbreaks don’t occur because of a single failure; they occur because of a series of failures,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, CEO of Resolve and a former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “And the epidemics that don’t happen don’t happen because there are a series of barriers that will prevent them from happening.”
Yumaine told me that a key step in shutting down Congo’s Ebola outbreak in 2021 was having health officials in each community trained in the response. The Kivu region has lived through decades of armed conflict and insecurity, and its population faces a near-constant threat of displacement. In previous public health emergencies, when people were told they would have to isolate because of Ebola exposure, they feared it was a trick to move them off their land.
“In the past, it was always people from Kinshasa who were coming with these
messages,” he said, referring to the country’s capital. But this time, the instructions about lockdowns and isolation came from trusted sources, so people were more willing to listen and be tested.
“We could give local control to local people because they were trained,” he said.
Because labs had been set up in the region, people with suspected Ebola could be tested in a day or two instead of waiting a week or more for samples to be sent more than 1,600 miles to Kinshasa.
Dr. Amanda McLelland, who leads epidemic prevention at Resolve, told me that when she heard of new Ebola cases in Guinea in West Africa in 2021, she feared disaster. An outbreak that began in Guinea in 2014 had spread to two neighboring countries, and by the time it was declared over, two years later, nearly 30,000 people had been infected and 11,325 had died.
But this time, although Guinea was already struggling to respond to COVID, it managed to bring the Ebola outbreak in check in six months, with just 11 deaths.
“That was a fantastic example of learning those lessons and investing and building sustainably in the capacity,” McLelland said.
It should be celebrated, she added. While public health failures, such as those in the face of COVID, receive plenty of attention, she said, “our success is invisible.”
Nevertheless, progress can be fitful: A new Ebola outbreak is slowly being brought under control in Uganda, and neighboring nations have watched it with concern.
“I think what we’re seeing there is the unfortunate harvest of COVID,” he said.
“COVID broke a lot of things. It broke health care worker resilience, it broke the willingness of many people to follow public health advice, it broke trust in the health care system and communities that was there before. Progress is possible, but it’s also fragile.”
But Yumaine said he had growing confidence that even if Ebola were to spill back across the border from Uganda, Congo could respond swiftly, with surveillance systems that grow better all the time.
“We’re encouraged by our improvements,” he said. “But we’re not stopping there.”
Defendant
Civil No.: 3:20-cv-01253.
On January 4, 2021, this Court entered Default Judgment in favor of Bautista Cayman Asset Companny, now Bautista REO PR Corp. To date, Defendants have not satisfied the Judgment. Consequently, there is an outstanding balance of: (i) $151,861.20 in principal; plus (ii) accrued interests in the amount of $50,690.39, which continue to accrue daily at a rate of $33.75, until full payment of the debt; plus (iii) accrued late charges in the amount of $4,210.02; plus (iv) other costs in the amount of $8,024.50; plus (v) any other advance, charge, fee or disbursements made by Bautista on behalf of Defendant in accordance with the Mortgage Note, the Loan Agreement, as well as under the other loan documents, plus (vi) costs and agreed attorney’s fees under the Mortgage Note in the amount of $20,000.00. Pursuant to said judgment and/or the Order of Execution of Judgment, the undersigned appointed Special Master was ordered to sell, at public auction for U.S. currency in cash or certified check, without appraisement or right to redemption, to the highest bidder, at the office of the Clerk of the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, Room 150 - Federal Building, 350 Carlos Chardón Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, or at any other place designated by said Clerk, to cover the sums adjudged to be paid to the plaintiff, the following property: URBAN: Plot located in the Monacillos Ward of the Municipality of Rio Piedras before, today San Juan, Puerto Rico marked with the number 26-B of the AQ block of the Caparra Terrace Development, with a surface area of 237.50 square meters. In borders by the NORTH, in 9.50 meters, with the street 122 of the Development; by the SOUTH at 9.50 meters with lot 5 of the AQ block; on the EAST, at 25.00 meters with lot 26-A
of the AQ block; and on the WEST, at 25.00 meters with lot 27 of the AQ block. Contains a house. The property described above is recorded at page 58 of volume 417 of Monacillos, property number 15,714, Registry of Property of San Juan, Third Section. The Property is described in the Spanish language as follows: URBANA: Solar sito en el Barrio Monacillos de la Municipalidad de Rio Piedras antes, hoy San Juan, Puerto Rico marcado con el numero 26-B de la manzana AQ de la Urbanización Caparra Terrace, con un área superficial de 237.50 metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, en 9.50 metros, con la calle 122 de la Urbanización; por el SUR en 9.50 metros con el solar 5 de la manzana AQ; por el ESTE, en 25.00 metros con el solar 26-A de la manzana AQ; y por el OESTE, en 25.00 metros con el solar 27 de la manzana AQ. Enclava una casa. The property described above is recorded at page 58 of volume 417 of Monacillos, property number 15,714, Registry of Property of San Juan, Third Section. The property is subject to the following liens: BY ITS ORIGIN: PUERTO RICO RAILROAD LIGHT AND POWER AUTHORITY; RESTRICTIVE CONDITIONS OF USE AND CONSTRUCTION. BY ITSELF: MORTGAGE in guarantee of note in favor of DORAL BANK, or to its order, in the principal amount of $200,000.00, with a yearly interest rate of 8%, due on demand as per Deed No. 153, executed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on May 20, 2005, before Notary Public Nicolás A. López Peña, recorded at page 216 of volume 1036 of Monacillos, 11th inscription. MORTGAGE MODIFICATION: The object of this modification is the Mortgage for $200,000.00, which arises from registration 11th thru deed # 2, on March 9, 2011, before the Notary Public Maga Vanessa Alsina Figueroa, recorded on page 216, volume 1036 of Monacillos, 12th inscription. 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. The lien executed is over the property, and for the purposes of the first judicial
sale the minimum bid amount is as follows: The amount of $200,000.00, as set forth in the mortgage deed, shall serve as the minimum bidding amount for the first public sale. Should the first public sale fail to produce an award or adjudication, two-thirds of the aforementioned amount or $133,333.33 shall serve as the minimum bidding amount for the second public sale. Should there be no award or adjudication at the second public sale, the minimum bidding amount for the third public sale shall be $100,000.00. Said sale to be made by the appointed Special Master is 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 may be executed and delivered after the judicial sale. Upon confirmation of the sale, an order shall be issued canceling all junior liens. THEREFORE, public notice is hereby given that the appointed Special Master, pursuant to the provisions of the Judgment herein before referred to, will, on the FEBRUARY 17, 2023, AT 10:35 A.M., in the Office of the Clerk of the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, Room 150 - Federal Building, 350 Carlos Chardón Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, will sell at public auction to the highest bidder the property described herein, the proceeds of said sale to be applied in the manner and form provided by the Court’s Judgment. Should the first judicial sale set hereinabove be unsuccessful, the SECOND JUDICIAL SALE of the property described in this Notice will be held on the FEBRUARY 24, 2023, AT 10:35 A.M., in the Office of the Clerk of the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, Room 150 - Federal Building, 350 Carlos Chardón Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico. Should the second judicial sale set hereinabove be unsuccessful, the THIRD JUDICIAL SALE of the property described in this Notice will be held on the MARCH 3, 2023, AT 10:35 A.M., in the Office of the Clerk of the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, Room 150 - Federal Building, 350 Carlos Chardón Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico. The records of the case and of these proceedings may be examined by the parties at the Office of the Clerk of the United States District Court, Federal Building, Chardón Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, this 6th day of December, 2022. AGUEDO DE LA TORRE, APPOINTED SPECIAL MASTER.
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 13,908 DE LA CALLE AMPARO, DEL TÉRMINO MUNICIPAL DE FAJARDO; PETRA GUERRA CARRERAS ET ALS.
Partes con Interés Civil Núm.: FA2022CV00742. Sobre: EXPROPIACIÓN FORZOSA. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU., EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R., SS.
A: PETRA GUERRA CARRERAS 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 número 155 del Municipio de Fajardo, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de 118.15 metros cuadrados; y, en lindes por el NORTE, en 13.50 metros, con un solar ocupado por Petra Guerra; por el SUR, en 12.80 metros, con el solar número 153; por el ESTE, en 9.35 metros, con el solar ocupado por Herminio Cardona y por el OESTE, en 8.60 metros, con la Calle Amparo. FINCA NÚMERO 13,908, INSCRITA al FOLIO 166 del TOMO 321 de
Fajardo. Catastro Número: 150046-044-20-001. Existiendo una Deficiencia de Deficiencia de $15,023.93, no se ha consignado cantidad alguna por la adquisición de dicha propiedad, la cual se tasó en $9,000.00. 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 00728 Email: josephine.rodriguez@gmail.com. Tribunal ha señalado la vista del caso para el día 6 de abril de 2023, a las 10:00, en la Sala 307, 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 21 de diciembre de 2022. WANDA I. SEGUÍ REYES, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. LINDA I. MEDINA MEDINA, SUB-SECRETARIA.
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN
EX - PARTE
PETICIONARIO Civil Núm.: BY2022CV05250. Sobre: EXPEDIENTE DOMINIO. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS.
A: PERSONAS IGNORADAS, SUCESIÓN DE JOSÉ MARCELO SANTIAGO, COMPUESTA POR: ERNESTO SANTIAGO CRUZ,
CORNELIO SANTIAGO CRUZ, FRANCISCA SANTIAGO CRUZ, CORNELIA SANTIAGO CRUZ, FÉLIX SANTIAGO CRUZ; SUCESIÓN DE FÉLIX SANTIAGO CRUZ, COMPUESTA POR: EDWARD SANTIAGO CORDERO, ALEX SANTIAGO CORDERO, JESÚS MIGUEL SANTIAGO CORDERO, EDUEE SANTIAGO CORDERO, MELVIN SANTIAGO CORDERO; SUCESIÓN DE JOSÉ FIGUEROA ELÍAS.
Por la presente se le notifica a usted que se ha presentado ante este Tribunal el expediente arriba mencionado, con el fin de justificar e inscribir a favor del Promovente, el dominio que tiene sobre la siguiente finca: “RÚSTICA”: Predio de terreno radicado en el barrio Achiote del término municipal de Naranjito, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de MIL OCHENTA Y TRES PUNTO CERO, QUINIENTOS TREINTA Y SIETE METROS CUADRADOS (1,083.0537 mc), equivalentes a CERO PUNTO DOS MIL SETECIENTOS CINCUENTA Y SEIS CUERDAS (0.2765 cdas), en lindes por el NORTE, con servidumbre de paso y Edwin Rodríguez, por el SUR, con José Marcelo Santiago Pacheco, por el ESTE, con José Marcelo Santiago Pacheco y por el OESTE, con Sucesión de José Figueroa Elias. Enclava estructura para fines residenciales. Alega la parte Peticionaria que adquirió la finca descrita mediante escritura número 50, otorgada el 23 de agosto de 2022, en Naranjito, Puerto Rico, ante el Notario Jorge Manuel Díaz Rodríguez. Es abogado de la parte Peticionaria: LIC. JORGE M. DÍAZ RODRÍGUEZ, PO BOX 852, NARANJITO, P.R. 00719-0852, TELÉFONO: (787) 869- 4042, jorgemdiazrodriguez@gmail. com. Este Tribunal Ordenó que se publique la pretensión por tres veces durante el término de veinte días en un periódico de circulación general diaria, para los que tengan algún derecho real sobre el inmueble descrito, las personas ignoradas a quienes pueda perjudicar la inscripción, y en general, a todos los que quisieran oponerse, entre ellos los colindantes y dueños anteriores, puedan efectuarlo dentro del término de veinte días a partir de la última publicación del presente edicto. Por tanto, libre la presente en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, hoy 21
de diciembre de 2022. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. VERÓNICA MARTÍNEZ ORTIZ, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.
***
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE FAJARDO
FEDERAL NATIONAL MORTGAGE ASSOCIATION T/C/C FANNIE MAE Demandante Vs. SUCESION DE JUAN BELTRAN SAEZ COMPUESTA POR SUS HEREDERAS CONOCIDAS NELIDA REYES SALINAS T/C/C NELY REYES SALINAS, POR SI; JUANITA BELTRAN REYES; MAYLIN REYES SALINAS Y JUANITA REYES SALINAS; FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANA DE TAL COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS Y/O PARTES CON INTERES EN LA SUCESION Demandados Civil Núm.: FA2022CV00241.
Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EDICTO ANUNCIANDO PRIMERA, SEGUNDA Y TERCERA SUBASTA. El Alguacil que suscribe, funcionario del Tribunal de Fajardo, Puerto Rico, por la presente anuncia y hace saber al público en general que en cumplimiento con la Sentencia dictada en este caso con fecha 1 de julio de 2022 y según Orden y Mandamiento del 23 de agosto de 2022, librado por este honorable Tribunal, procederé a vender en pública subasta al mejor postor, y por dinero en efectivo, cheque certificado o giro postal a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal con todo título derecho y/o interés de la parte demandada sobre la propiedad que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar radicado en la Urbanización Río Grande Estates, situada en el Barrio Zarzal del término municipal de Río Grande, Puerto Rico, con el número, área y colindancias que se relacionan a continuación y contiene una casa de concreto reforzado, diseñada para una familia. Número del solar Doce del bloque “C”, con un área de trescientos veintisiete metros cuadrados con doce centímetros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, en nueve metros con once centímetros y en arco de cuatro
metros con cincuentidos centímetros con el solar número Treinta; por el SUR, en nueve metros con once centímetros y en arco de cuatro metros con cincuentidos centímetros con la calle número cuatro; por el ESTE, en veinticuatro metros con un centímetro con el solar número Once; y por el OESTE, en veinticuatro metros con el solar número Trece. Enclava casa. Afecta a una servidumbre de un metro con cincuenta centímetros por su colindancia Norte a favor de la Puerto Rico Telephone Company. FINCA NÚMERO: 10,744, inscrita al folio 288 del tomo 225 de Río Grande, sección III de Carolina. Dirección Física: RIO GRANDE ESTATES DEVELOPMENT, C-12, 4 STREET, RIO GRANDE, PR 00745. Se anuncia por medio de este edicto que la PRIMERA SUBASTA habrá de celebrarse el día 7 DE FEBRERO DE 2023, A LAS 2:30 DE LA TARDE, en mi oficina sita en el edificio que ocupa el Tribunal Superior de Puerto Rico, Sala Superior de Fajardo. Siendo ésta la primera subasta que se celebrará en este caso será el precio mínimo aceptable como oferta en la Primera- Subasta, eso es el tipo mínimo pactado en la Escritura de Hipoteca para la propiedad, la suma de $95,000.00. De no haber remanente o adjudicación en esta primera subasta por dicha suma mínima, se celebrará una SEGUNDA SUBASTA el día 14 DE FEBRERO DE 2023, A LAS 2:30 DE LA TARDE 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 $63,333.33. 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 22 DE FEBRERO DE 2023, A LAS 2:30 DE LA TARDE, 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 $47,500.00. 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. Examinadas las alegaciones de la Demanda y la prueba documental sometida, así como los emplazamientos a la parte demandada, habiendo vencido el plazo para contestar la demanda, a solici-
It did not seem outside the realm of possibility Friday night that oxygen deprivation could become an issue in Section 343 of the Alamodome. Fans had purchased tickets for seats that felt closer to the mesosphere than to the basketball court, which was far below them.
From that great distance, you could just barely decipher those rare moments when the San Antonio Spurs scored. Or whenever Golden State’s Draymond Green was annoyed about something. At least Donte DiVincenzo, Green’s teammate, did the nosebleed denizens a favor by wearing bright-orange sneakers, making him more easily identifiable.
But if there were challenges — seeing the players, hearing the whistle, combating vertigo — few seemed to mind. Because the game, billed as “Back Home in the Dome,” was also a party.
“Once we heard about the game, I said, ‘Let’s go ahead and be a part of it,’” said Cliff Scott, 62, a hospital technician who sat with his daughter, Autumn, 11, in the upper, upper deck.
For nine seasons, from 1993 to 2002, the Spurs played their home games at the Alamodome, a cavernous structure just east of downtown San Antonio. Back then, the court was situated at one end of the building, with a giant curtain blocking about half of the seating.
On Friday, the Spurs celebrated their 50th anniversary by returning to the Alamodome for the first time in decades — and they went big. They plopped the court smack dab in the middle of the lower level and opened the doors to 68,323 fans, setting a single-game NBA attendance record in the process. The Spurs fell to Golden State, 144-113 — but what was one more loss in a season already full of them?
“I thought it was a great night,” said Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, who could tell, even as the game sped toward a lopsided result, that fans were enjoying themselves. “There must have been a lot of beer sales.”
About three years ago, Casey Heverling and his colleagues at Spurs Sports and Entertainment began to brainstorm ways to commemorate the team’s 50th anniversary. They knew they needed to incorporate the Alamodome, but how? Put a plaque on the building? Do some sort of photo shoot?
“And then someone said, ‘Well, maybe we can play a game there,’” said Heverling, who oversees the day-to-day operations of the AT&T Center, where the Spurs now play their home games. “And then someone else said, ‘Does anyone know what the largest attendance is for an NBA game?’”
The answer was 62,046 for a game on March 27, 1998, when Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls faced the Atlanta Hawks at the Georgia Dome. One caveat: The 2010 NBA AllStar Game at Cowboys Stadium, a retractable-roof colossus in Arlington, Texas, now known as AT&T Stadium, drew an announced crowd of 108,713. But the attendance record for a regular-season game seemed possible to Spurs officials.
“I’m convinced there’s no other community in the country that would show up like San Antonio has shown up for this team,” said Becky Kimbro, the team’s senior vice president for brand engagement.
Still, any concerns that Kimbro might have had about fans’ showing up were eased in early September, when the Spurs sold nearly 25,000 tickets on the day they were made available to the general public. In recent weeks, the team unleashed a final advertising blitz by flooding the airwaves and social media. (Props to anyone from San Antonio who somehow avoided hearing about the game.)
“We pulled pretty much every lever in the marketing handbook,” Kimbro said.
On Friday, the Spurs took the court to the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize,” an old-school song that fit the event’s throwback feel. Many of the San Antonians who turned out wore jerseys from yesteryear — Tim Duncan jerseys and Sean Elliott jerseys and Manu Ginobili jerseys, as well as T-shirts with an unmistakable image of David Robinson rising above hapless defenders.
Simply being back at the Alamodome — known locally as the Dome — jogged memories for longtime fans. Memories of Robinson’s quadruple-double in 1994. Memories of the water cannon that doused fans at the home opener to the 1994-95 season after some pregame pyrotechnics triggered the fire safety system. Memories of Duncan, fresh out of Wake Forest, gracing the building as a rookie phenom in 1997-98. And memories of the franchise’s first championship in 1999, a title run that Elliott galvanized by sinking a game-winning 3-pointer in the Western Conference
finals — a shot long celebrated as the Memorial Day Miracle.
The Spurs were 13-30 after Friday’s game and are struggling this season, which made the festivities even more special. The good times, now and then, were worth savoring.
“It feels like a Finals atmosphere,” said Cordero Maldonado, 36, who was dressed in a robe as “Spurs Jesus,” and had seats with his wife, Karsen, 27, in multiple locations. “We’ll be omnipresent.”
The game included an appearance by one of the Spurs’ more distinguished employees: their mascot, the Coyote, who rode around on a small motorcycle and stationed himself at half-court before the start of the fourth quarter to assist Robinson in announcing the official attendance. The Coyote unfolded a white poster to reveal the handwritten number, a scene that bore vague shades — intentional or not — of Wilt Chamberlain’s posing for his iconic photograph after scoring 100 points in 1962.
After Golden State went about their more prosaic business of winning a basketball game, Spurs officials began to prepare for their return to the AT&T Center, with three more home games in a six-day stretch, starting Sunday against the Sacramento Kings.
Fans, meanwhile, stuck around for a fireworks show, which was staged outdoors this time.
“It feels like a finals atmosphere,” said Cordero Maldonado.
Jacksonville coach Doug Pederson decided his team was too far out for a game-winning field-goal attempt.
Instead, he called for Jacksonville’s workhorse, running back Travis Etienne Jr., to carry his team closer to a victory.
“I feel like the running back, when it gets to that point of the game, you’re supposed to be the closer,” Etienne said. “Coach believed in me on that fourth-and-1, to give me the ball. I had to make something happen for my teammates.”
Etienne did. He took the handoff from Lawrence and bounced outside to the right sideline for a 25-yard scamper that made for easy work for field-goal kicker Riley Patterson.
With three seconds on the clock, Patterson booted a 36-yard field goal for the victory that finished the season for the Chargers.
The Jaguars? They can forget a dismal first half. They are playing on, advancing to the AFC divisional round for the first time since the 2017 season.
After tight first half, 49ers roll over Seahawks to advance to divisional round
By JOE DRAPE and KRIS RHIMThis was not the kind of history Trevor Lawrence wanted to make in his first playoff appearance: The Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback became the first player in the Super Bowl era to throw three interceptions in the first quarter of a playoff game.
It got worse.
Lawrence threw a fourth interception in the second quarter, and by the time 30 minutes of football was in the books, Jacksonville was in a 27-7 hole.
Three of the interceptions went to Asante Samuel Jr., who became the first player with three defensive interceptions in a playoff game since New England’s Ty Law and Carolina’s Ricky Manning both did it on Jan. 18, 2004.
No worries. Lawrence led Jacksonville to 24 second-half points to complete the third biggest playoff comeback in NFL history to defeat the Los Angeles Chargers 31-30.
Instead of quitting, Lawrence and the Jaguars forgot about their first-half yips and mounted a determined effort to advance to the divisional round of the AFC playoffs.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Lawrence, who finished 28 for 47 for 288 yards and four touchdowns. “You couldn’t
write a crazier script.”
Lawrence, in his second year in Jacksonville, had led the Jaguars to their fourth division championship since the franchise’s inception in 1995. Despite the awful first half, the Jaguars regrouped at halftime.
They had been down and out before — starting the season 4-8 before winning their last five games and earning their place in the playoffs. At halftime, Lawrence reminded his teammates of their penchant for finding success when their backs were against the wall.
“We said in the locker room that’s kind of how our season’s going. We’re never out of the fight. I’m kind of speechless, honestly, just to see what belief can do and to see when a team believes in each other what you can accomplish,” Lawrence said.
In the second half, Lawrence guided Jacksonville down the field with three sustained and efficient drives. He threw touchdown passes to Zay Jones, Christian Kirk and Marvin Jones.
Lawrence then added a 2-point conversion leap over the pile to make it 30-28 with 5:25 to go. When the Jaguars’ defense forced a punt, Lawrence had 3:09 left in the game and the ball at his own 21-yard line.
It did not take long for Jacksonville to find their way into Chargers’ territory. With 1:28 left in the game and facing fourth-and-1 from the Chargers’ 41-yard line,
The storms that have battered California for two weeks and knocked out power for thousands of residents, including San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle, were supposed to significantly affect Saturday’s early wild-card game between the 49ers and the Seattle Seahawks. But just before kickoff, the rain paused, and as the sun shined, the 49ers went on to dominate the Seahawks 41-23 to advance to the divisional round.
Brock Purdy, the 49ers’ rookie quarterback, also shined in his playoff debut. Purdy, who was selected with the last pick of the 2022 NFL draft and began the season as the team’s third-string quarterback, threw for 332 yards and three touchdowns. Running back Christian McCaffrey added 119 yards on the ground, and receiver Deebo Samuel collected 165 total yards and a touchdown.
Seattle led 17-16 after the first half, but San Francisco responded with 25 unanswered points to start the second.
Purdy’s best play of the game came in the fourth quarter when he spun out of what looked like a surefire sack and found 49ers running back Elijah Mitchell for a touchdown. Purdy then threw a pass to Kittle on a successful 2-point conversion to put the 49ers up by 14. Later in the quarter, Samuel caught a short pass and ran for a 74-yard touchdown.
The game effectively ended after that drive. Seahawks quarterback Geno Smith threw an interception on the Seahawks’ next possession. Smith threw for 253 yards and two touchdowns, and receiver DK Metcalf caught 10 passes for 136 yards and two touchdowns.
SUNDAY’S EARLY NFL WILD-CARD GAME Bills 34, Dolphins 31
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
21-April 20)
Today’s Quarter Moon in Libra, puts the emphasis on a close relationship. You may be in a dilemma about your next move, especially if you both want different things. This is a good time to talk it all over and to find a compromise. Reaching an agreement now, will give you the green light to push ahead to the finish line. Plus, a social event can sizzle with promise, Aries.
The changes that are coming seem positive, but you might feel apprehensive, Taurus. You may need to learn new skills, build relationships and generally find your feet, which will take you out of your comfort zone. There could be a lot of adjustment needed so that you can fit your plans into your current schedule. Still, if you feel the results are worth it, be bold and pull out all the stops.
Reflecting on a developing relationship? This bond may be at a crucial stage where you’re wondering whether to take things further. The Sun in an emotional zone, could make you aware of all the reasons to go ahead. Yet the Moon in balanced Libra, can find you undecided. Are you overthinking this? If you are, it might mean you’re not able to hear your intuition right now.
Cancer (June 22-July 23)
eflecting on a developing relationship? This bond may be at a crucial stage where you’re wondering whether to take things further. The Sun in an emotional zone, could make you aware of all the reasons to go ahead. Yet the Moon in balanced Libra, can find you undecided. Are you overthinking this? If you are, it might mean you’re not able to hear your intuition right now.
A conflict could either be seen as a reason to give up on something or as an obstacle to be overcome. A decision can bring an idea or project to an end or find you ready to bring it to a successful conclusion. Give up now though, and you might regret it. On a travel note, Jupiter encourages you to make the most of this time to go on new adventures. It will recharge you.
A project or business idea may have reached the stage where it has become so engrossing, that it’s difficult to tear yourself away. Before you go in too deep, think about the cost. If this side of things is under control, you can continue. If it’s getting out of hand, make sure it’s worth the effort. If you’re going to gain from it further down the line, then it could be a fab investment.
The Quarter Moon in your sign, brings heightened awareness of your family’s needs. You’ll be keen to improve communication and understanding of those close to you. And yet you may have big plans and be very eager to see them through. Whether you’re thinking of a move, planning a vacation or keen to give your place a makeover, make sure everyone agrees first, Libra.
Trust your intuition to give you insights just when you need them most. Today’s lunar phase could see you bringing a deal to a close or finalizing arrangements. A combination of practical thinking along with your instincts, may net you a great result. Plus, Jupiter’s presence in your wellness zone might have ramped up energy levels. Feel like exercising? Get out and enjoy it!
How much do you gain by being a member of a group or club? If you feel the price you’re paying in terms of time, money or other resources is worth it, you’ll want to continue. But what if it isn’t? Today’s lunar phase might inspire you to end any associations where you seem to be giving more than you’re getting back. It won’t be any great loss, instead you’ll be the winner.
As the Moon angles towards the Sun, you may be on the verge of a victory after a time of hard work. You’re on the home stretch, and just need to tie up a few loose ends before you cruise across the finish line. If there are any issues that are bothering you, get help, especially if others are more experienced than you. That way, the result can be even better than expected, Capricorn.
You may sense it’s time to take that leap of faith, but perhaps hadn’t considered exactly what this involved. Today’s Quarter Moon in your sector of adventure, can be helpful for inspiring you to make your move anyway. It could seem easier to stay as you are and to dream of what might be, but you’ll miss out on so much if you don’t take this chance now, Aquarius.
Friends may be very keen for you to support them, and could turn on the charm or resort to flattery. And while it might be tempting to go along with their ideas, only do so if you set the terms. There is a suggestion that you can be drawn into doing more than you fair share, and this is something to be avoided at all costs. Don’t let guilt cause you to make an unwise decision.
