Monday Jul 13, 2020

Monday, July 13, 2020

San Juan The

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DAILY

Star

Did Venice Tourism Drown?

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When Democracy Loses and Discrimination Wins Local Democratic Primary: Voters Kept Home

by COVID-19 Fears P4

PDP Reps. Slam Gov’t for Lagging Effort to Test for Virus at Elderly Homes

Trans Woman’s Voter Registration Nightmare Calls Into Question SEC’s Commitment to Service, Equal Treatment

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NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

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July 13, 2020

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

PREPA consumer advocate: Scrap RSA, draft new fiscal plan

Today’s

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By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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From ENE 16 mph 71% 10 of 10 5:55 AM Local Time 7:04 PM Local Time

INDEX Local 3 Mainland 7 Business 11 International 13 Viewpoint 17 Noticias en Español 19 Entertainment 20

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he consumers’ representative on the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) governing board, Tomás Torres Placa, said Sunday that the fiscal plan approved

by PREPA on June 29 is ambiguous, confusing and sends a double message.

He also warned that the plan does not consider the debt for bond issues ($8.3 billion) in its cost projections, nor does it give any indication of withdrawing from the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act’s Title III processes, the agreement with the bondholders of PREPA in federal court that only cuts a maximum of 30 percent on that same debt.

Against this background, Torres Placa proposed taking forceful action and recommended withdrawing the agreement with the bondholders (RSA) from the court proceedings and starting a new restructuring plan that allows the development of the electricity system for the benefit of all consumers.

“On June 29, the Fiscal Plan of the Electric Power Authority (PREPA), certified by the Financial Oversight and Management Board, was published. This plan, cleverly, within the presented charts, excludes the payment of the debt to bondholders showing rates in the range of 22 cents per kilowatt hour until 2025 (approximately the current value, before the drop in costs caused by the temporary drop in oil prices), then increased to 27 cents per kilowatt hour by 2030. This, again, without considering debt,” Torres Placa said in a written statement. “However, although the Fiscal Plan excludes debt, it says nothing about withdrawing the debt restructuring agreement between PREPA and its bondholders (RSA), currently filed in federal court. This agreement, along with the proposal for the restructuring of the pension fund included in the Fiscal Plan, would increase the electricity bill by 20 percent immediately.”

He added that the approved fiscal plan does not fulfill its function of establishing a coherent roadmap for the development of PREPA. “This Plan is not only inconsistent in ignoring the agreement with PREPA’s bondholders, currently in federal court, and the economic effects of the agreement on the economy and PREPA itself,” Torres Placa said. “It also projects a deficit for this year of $132 million, and explains this deficit as a result of the agreement with the operator of PREPA’s transmission and distribution system.”

Torres Placa referred to a new report commissioned by the governing board and developed by Dr. Ramón Cao that assesses the sustainability of PREPA’s debt, considering the agreement with the bondholders. The report shows that PREPA is currently in a very high degree of insolvency,

with an approximate debt of $17.7 billion (of which $8.3 billion is for bond issues, as previously mentioned), and a difference between assets and liabilities reflecting a deficit of over $7.6 billion.

According to the report, the agreement with the bondholders does not solve PREPA’s insolvency problem. The level of insolvency is such that even after the proposed restructuring, and considering the infusion of billions of dollars of reconstruction funds by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, PREPA would remain insolvent.

“PREPA’s debt must be restructured beyond bond issues, since if this debt (of $8.3 billion) is eliminated, PREPA continues within insolvency parameters,” said Torres Placa, while indicating that according to national parameters, considered in the study, between the debt and assets ratio, PREPA could only operate with a debt -- after restructuring all its obligations -- of some $5.5 billion. “In other words, there is no organization that can function or operate adequately in these circumstances.”

Torres Placa maintained meanwhile that the report also briefly evaluated the bond issues considered within the agreement with the bondholders and their financial position at the time of the debt issue.

“According to the study, all debt related to the bondholder agreement was issued between fiscal years 2002 and 2016.

In line with PREPA’s audited financial statements, in all years after 2006, when issuing debt, PREPA was on the verge of financial insolvency or was already insolvent, and since fiscal year 2011 always showed an operational deficit,” Torres Placa said. “This means that, at the time of these issuances, PREPA did not have the capacity to cover its operating costs and debt service. Consequently, the report recommends that PREPA bond issues, after 2006, should be evaluated and audited before proposing any restructuring.”

“I call for forceful action to be taken and for the debt restructuring agreement with bondholders (RSA) to be withdrawn from court proceedings,” he said, “and for starting a new restructuring plan that will allow us to develop the electricity system.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

COVID-19 fears likely cause of low voter turnout for Democratic primaries

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Democratic Party primaries at Gilberto Concepción de Gracia School in Carolina and other metro area schools ran smoothly on Sunday but were characterized by a low voter turnout attributed to fears caused by the coronavirus pandemic and lack of information.

“People are fearful of going out,” said Sandra Alvarez, the electoral college president for unit 108 at Gilberto Concepción de Gracia School.

While there were eight candidates on the Democratic primary ballot, former U.S.Vice President Joe Biden was expected to win as the other candidates, including independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have all thrown their support behind Biden.

Pedro Pierluisi, a gubernatorial primary candidate for the New Progressive Party, and Senate Minority Leader Eduardo Bhatia, a gubernatorial primary candidate for the Popular Democratic Party, voted for Biden.

Puerto Rico’s Democratic Party primary was originally slated for March but was rescheduled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

At polling station 108, about 40 voters cast their ballots, Alvarez estimated.

“I expected fewer people,” she said.

Unlike previous elections, Sunday’s vote followed stringent protocols. For instance, voters did not have to put a finger in ink as officials were using a droplet. Individuals were given hand sanitizer to disinfect their hands and then allowed to vote. They had to write their vote on both sides of the ballot

and place it in the voting machine. They also were required to wear masks to vote.

Gabriel Eterrich, the coordinator for the Program for the Defense and Protection of Handicapped Voters, told the STAR that he visited polling places in Carolina, Cataño, San Juan and Guaynabo to verify whether they were complying with the American Disabilities Act and the Help America Vote Act. He said there was a lack of adequate signage telling voters where to go and little voter education provided to the population.

At Gilberto Concepción de Gracia School on Sánchez Osorio Avenue, for instance, the voting room was located toward the back side of the school instead of near the entrance to facilitate access for the handicapped and the elderly.

Eterrich said some polling places, such as Nueva Urbana School in Guaynabo and the Senorial School in Cupey, were closed, presumably because of issues with COVID-19. He noted low voter turnouts at Ines María Mendoza School in San Juan, where by noon only four voters had cast ballots, and at Isaac Rosario School in Cataño, where only 28 voters had cast ballots by noon.

Eterrich noted that problems such as lack of signage and lack of accessibility “are all problems that can be fixed in time for the August primary.”

He also warned that because Metropolitan Bus Authority buses are no longer running on Sundays, officials have to find ways to help people reach polling stations to vote.

“July 15 [this Wednesday] is the last day to request advance voting and you can obtain transportation,” he said.

He praised, however, the professionalism of electoral of-

ficials. At Gilberto Concepción de Gracia School, for instance, there were three electoral officials and two observers.

Gubernatorial primary candidate for the PDP, Eduardo Bhatia, voted for Joe Biden.

Wednesday deadline to request early voting in Aug. 9 primaries

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

his Wednesday, July 15, is the deadline for voters who wish to request early voting for primary elections in Puerto Rico on Aug. 9, Popular Democratic

Party (PDP) Electoral Commissioner Lind Merle Feliciano announced on Sunday.

The option to vote in advance was expanded so that people over 60 years of age or with specific health conditions that represent high risk can vote the day before the primary, Merle Feliciano said Sunday afternoon in a written statement.

“If you are 60 years of age or older or if you have chronic diseases certified by a doctor authorized to practice in Puerto Rico, you can request early voting for the primaries on Aug. 9,” he said. “You only have to complete a form and some minimum requirements so that you can exercise your vote without having to be exposed [to the coronavirus] at the polling stations on the day of the electoral event.”

The PDP electoral commissioner added that “[t]he expansion of the [early voting] category is offered as a preventive measure to avoid infection due to the pandemic the country is facing.”

The following voters qualify to apply for early voting: people over 60 years of age; people with chronic lung diseases, moderate or severe asthma, or heart disease with complications; people with compromised immune systems such as cancer patients and any other vulnerable and/or high-risk health classification.

“I want to remind elderly people that the right to vote early belongs to the voter and not to the administrators of

the nursing homes or a boarding house,” Merle Feliciano said. “Although it is true that the Electoral Law recognizes ‘nursing homes’ as the home that a voter can claim as a domicile, that does not give the administrator authority to process an early vote request from the voters residing in the place.”

“Voting is free and voluntary and we must guarantee this principle,” he added.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

5

Trans woman’s struggle at JIP, SEC illustrates discrimination against LGBTQIAP+ community

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

J

ohanna Cifredo, a trans woman, shared her struggles to obtain her voter’s card on Friday at both the Permanent Registration Board (JIP by its Spanish acronym) office in Bayamón and the State Elections Commission (SEC) headquarters in Hato Rey after officials at both entities denied her passport as a valid document for registration.

Cifredo told The Star that the process to enroll in the electoral registry was humiliating and violent, and that no one from the LGBTQIAP+ community should ever go through an experience like hers. The community organizer also said officials from both offices she visited misidentified her gender, even when she corrected them by saying the pronouns that apply to her are “she” and “her.”

“I am a citizen, they are public servants, they work because of me. Do I pay for their salaries so that they end up referring to me as he/him? Trans youth should not be fighting this for five or 10 more years,” Cifredo said. “It is important that people are aware that the SEC is not there to challenge our right to vote. Their job is not to be a gatekeeper to democracy; it’s the other way around: the SEC is supposed to facilitate the process for democracy. This was not an easy process; it was humiliating.”

Cifredo went with her husband, Michael Fellman, to the JIP office in Bayamón as both wanted to register to vote for the first time in Puerto Rico. Although Fellman got his voter’s card swiftly, Cifredo had to wait as a JIP official looked for her birth certificate; even though she brought her passport, which includes her legal name and gender identity, the employee would not accept it because the JIP had to verify she has not registered before, and allegedly this could only be done using the Demographic Registry’s database.

“In order to vote, you must satisfy four requirements: that you’re 18 years or older, your identification, your American citizenship, and proof that you live here.

That’s all you need,” Cifredo said. “My passport is a federal document that the State is obliged to accept.”

While seeing that the JIP official was not able to find Cifredo’s actual name on any birth certificate, she told her that she

Joanna Cifredo exposed on Facebook the struggle she went through at the SEC. was not going to find it because she has not changed her name as she is a trans woman and the Registry did not let her change it, although the agency has had to adopt, since 2018, a criteria from the Department of Transportation and Public Works to help trans and non-binary citizens change their names and gender on their birth certificates, according to the Arroyo v. Rosselló case.

“I changed my name [on legal documents] years ago back in the United States; however, in Puerto Rico, they did not accept the court order and told me to hire a lawyer,” Cifredo said. “By the time I needed to get my voter’s card, I did not have time, but I read on the SEC’s webpage that they accepted passports and birth certificates from anyone who was not born in Puerto Rico.”

Cifredo’s discomfort grew as she noticed that JIP employees would misgender her when they were addressing her issue and even told her to come back later, so she and her husband decided to drive to the SEC headquarters in Hato Rey to solve the problem. There she found herself with more confrontations as SEC employees were unclear on what to do, misgendered her again and even pronounced her dead (former) name out loud.

“I told one of the employees that there was an incongruence between the Bayamón and Hato Rey offices, as the employers were bickering with their supervisor about how they were supposed

to handle my situation,” she said. “This lady asked me what my birth name was so she could find it in the Demographic Registry, even though she had it written on a small note, and instead of being discreet, she went on saying my dead name out loud. They disrespected my privacy with my husband next to me.”

Trans community unites for their human rights Wale Semidey, a transmasculine activist and artist, found out what happened to Cifredo when she called his wife, Lala González, crying after what happened to her at both the JIP and the SEC. Once he heard her story, he felt the need to organize the trans community in order to demand reparations and respect from the government agencies.

“I felt indignation as a trans man.

They messed with the wrong person.

Johanna knows her rights; she lived and worked in Washington. She has been an activist for many years,” Semidey said.

“They found a person who is aware of her rights, but the trans community does not have enough resources. She, like me, has a well paying job. [Because] I am paid well, I have transportation and can waste time and gas going from one place to another until I fix my problems.

Most trans people in Puerto Rico do not have this privilege.”

Semidey, who owns a home with González that works as a safe space for providing gender-reaffirming classes for

trans and non-binary people, said it was the right moment to form a coalition and fight for their human rights. Other trans activists such as Kery Jones Santiago and Ivana Fred have agreed to participate.

“This is a trans movement; although we want to separate this matter a bit from the LGBTQIAP+ initials, every ally is more than welcome to join our fight; whether you are cisgender, queer, non-binary, everyone is welcome,” he said. “With that said, we have to start the trans movement. More people have to occupy the streets, more trans people have to occupy political seats, we have no one who is fighting for us.”

A protest will be held on Thursday at 10 a.m. at the SEC entrance, where all trans people are invited to bring their documents as organizers will help them register to vote.

Bayolo: ‘This is unacceptable and unconstitutional’ Mayté Bayolo, a legislative and public policy issues attorney for the Puerto Rico National Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), deemed Cifredo’s situation “unacceptable and unconstitutional” as the situation should have never taken place and it was discriminating against her gender identity.

“Definitely, what happened there was discrimination,” Bayolo said. “What happened to her was embarrassing and it’s even more embarrassing that our public system still does not understand the rights that it must respect.”

The founder of Tu Voto No Se Deja, an ACLU campaign that invites citizens to learn and practice their right to vote, told The Star that she felt disappointed that government officials lack the training to attend to the general public, especially when a new Civil Code is coming into force soon. Likewise, the attorney said that when it comes to documentation, trans people feel uncomfortable because such processes expose them to discrimination and oppression.

“When governor Wanda Vázquez signed the new Civil Code, she told the press that every right should be respected and, furthermore, there were not going to be any restrictions against them [trans citizens],” she said. “These are the things that happen and, indeed, this should have never happened.”

At press time, attempts to reach the SEC for comments on the matter had not been successful.

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Monday, July 13, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Gov’t blasted for lagging effort to test for COVID-19 in long-term care homes

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

of great fragility and it is a captive population, so establishing a plan for carrying out these tests and establishing an effective protocol for proper management should not be so complex,” he said. “[Failure to do so] only shows a lack of will.”

López Arrieta stated that “the most unusual thing of all is that there are the resources, the personnel and the protocols to attend to these cases in a planned and scientific way, and the ineptitude of the central government is once again evident with the most vulnerable.”

“On January 19, they fired the Secretary of the Family Department and since then it has seemed like this agency no longer exists,” he added. “Again, we are talking about the lives of the most vulnerable, who are our elderly people.”

On April 19, Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced announced that, from that date, COVID-19 tests would be conducted in nursing homes (institutions and homes) throughout the island, for both residents and employees, by the Elder Justice Task Force.

However, as recently as July 6, health adviser Idania Rodríguez, an epidemiologist, said that of the 850 long-term care centers licensed by the Department of the Family, the government has done screening tests in 162. This represents only 19 percent of total facilities.

R

eps. Jesús Manuel Ortiz, Carlos Bianchi Angleró and candidate for an at-large seat in the House of Representatives, Gabriel López Arrieta, called on the government Sunday to reveal the status of the effort to test for the coronavirus in long-term care homes for older adults, at a time when COVID-19 infections are increasing and cases have been confirmed in some of those facilities.

“It is known to all that the population most at risk in this pandemic is the elderly. Having carried out tests in only 19 percent of the long-term care centers two months after announcing the initiative is an act of high irresponsibility and inefficiency,” Ortiz González said in a written statement. “Failure to do their job prevents the authorities from knowing the possible risk to which our older adults are exposed. The government has to explain the status of this operation and its strategy for protecting that population.”

Bianchi Angleró, meanwhile, emphasized that “the handling of this situation by the government has been at least an act of total disregard for the lives of its most vulnerable citizens.”

“The population in long-term care centers is one

Labor Dept., 17 towns sign pact to facilitate unemployment payments

By THE STAR STAFF

L

abor and Human Resources Secretary Carlos J. Rivera Santiago said Sunday his agency has signed collaborative agreements with 17 municipalities to streamline the paperwork processes for the payment of unemployment benefits to the thousands of individuals who have lost their jobs as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Several municipalities out of the 78 in Puerto Rico

will join the initiative in the coming weeks as the agency also intends to broaden the services contained in the original agreement with island mayors. The 17 collaborative agreements are currently in force with the municipalities of Aguadilla, Camuy, Canóvanas, Gurabo, Jayuya, Juncos, San Sebastián, Toa Baja, Vega Baja, Cayey, Coamo, Las Marías, Ponce, Hatillo, Caguas, Barceloneta and Villalba.

The municipalities of Morovis and Yabucoa are about to sign agreements, while Arecibo and Guaynabo have shown interest in joining the initiative.

Rivera Santiago said that following the impact of the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the significant hike in unemployment claims at the agency, the collaborative agreements with the municipalities have served as a strategy to streamline the processing of unemployment benefits.

“As requested by Governor Wanda Vázquez Garced, by speeding up the processes and services offered by the Labor Department during this emergency, the agency is in the process of signing a first amendment to the agreement that will allow the expansion of the provision of services to include processing regular unemployment claims and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC),” Rivera Santiago announced. “In this way the participating municipalities can provide support to the Employment Security Bureau in the processing of all kinds of unemployment applications, thus streamlining the process so that citizens can receive benefits quickly and efficiently.”

Under the agreement, municipalities provide a minimum of two municipal employees to provide services such as: receiving and/or making calls to claimants, filling out the forms that are necessary for the processing of requests or claims according to the information provided by the claimant, requesting missing documents or information to process the claim, entering the information in the

digital platform created for it, and resolving disputes. The municipalities enable the workplace for their employees, and provide the necessary equipment for rendering their services as well as the initial payment of their employees’ payroll. The Labor Department reimburses municipalities for payroll expenses for hours spent providing services under the agreement. Furthermore, due to the sensitive nature of the information received and exchanged with claimants, the agreement contains a confidentiality clause to protect claimants’ information.

The agreements will be in force until Dec. 31, or until the need for the service ends, whichever comes first.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

7

Coronavirus fears stem the flow at Las Vegas’ oldest bar

By ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON

A

t midnight on Friday, bars across Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada, shut down for a second time in six months. With the coronavirus surging, the governor of Nevada had ordered it, and Las Vegas’ oldest free-standing bar, Atomic Liquors, was no exception.

On the one hand, Atomic was lucky. The governor’s new ban excluded bars that serve food, so Katie Cruz, Atomic’s operations director, began herding patrons from the inky neon lounge to the garden of its attached restaurant, only a few feet away. But there was loss, too: Atomic’s bar, the historic core of the business, complete with mementos of the stars who imbibed there when Fremont Street was the heart of Las Vegas, is its biggest draw.

In a city that is all about tourism and entertainment, the coronavirus response has felt like an especially risky roll of the dice. The bars were closed, then opened, then closed again. Now in watering holes like Atomic, tavern license #00001, it was painfully hard to be sure what might come next or whether the regulations — including loopholes — would make much difference.

“It feels unfair,” Cruz said. “We’ve been following all the rules to a T, trying to protect our regulars.”

The picture in the state, though, is bleak: Cases in Nevada have reached their highest levels yet in recent weeks, with more than 700 being announced on an average day. Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, has been hit hardest, accounting for more than 22,000 of the state’s 26,845 total cases.

Cruz has spent months nursing Atomic and its staff through coronavirus-related crises. She trained bartenders to serve food in the adjoining restaurant when bars closed for the first time this spring. She taught servers to clean booths “the Katie way,” twice over with strong disinfectant. She’s spent long nights on the phone with staffers and friends out of work and in debt. She said she has been trampled and bruised by “really mean” people who refuse to wear masks.

Atomic Liquors has seen plenty of history. It was founded in 1947 by Stella and Joe Sobchik, who named it Virginia’s Cafe after Stella’s mother. In 1952, they turned it into Atomic Liquors, a package goods store with a “pouring license.”

In the 1950s, locals used to sit on the roof of the Atomic, drink Joe Sobchik’s “atomic” cocktail concoctions and watch the nuclear test blasts mushrooming up from the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles away in the desert.

Atomic catered to its working class neighbors, but also grew into a retreat for Vegas’ glitzy performers who wanted to unwind away from the spotlight. The Rat Pack — Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop — were said to kick back at Atomic after their shows. So did Clint Eastwood, Hunter

Katie Cruz wipes down a chair at Atomic Liquors in Las Vegas, July 10, 2020. At closing time on Friday it was hard to escape the sense that the ban was a roll of the dice, a desperate measure against a virus ravaging an economy built on risk, close contact and the fantasy of invulnerability.

S. Thompson and the Smothers Brothers. The only bar stool with a back — now emblazoned with a star — was reserved for Barbra Streisand, who, legend holds, played pool late at night. Scenes from the Martin Scorsese film “Casino” were filmed inside Atomic and its next-door garage, now the restaurant.

The bar’s regulars see it as home.

“This bar is my living room. It’s all of ours,” said Jessica Baldwin, who lives in the apartment building next door. Most nights Baldwin and two of her friends gather at one of their homes, then decamp to Atomic.

Preferring the old bar, dim and intimate, over Atomic’s newer restaurant, the trio said they will wait out the closure in one of their homes, as they did earlier this spring when it closed before.

Sean Foley, 49, said he had come to Las Vegas from his home in Utah for a medical conference. As he got off the plane he received two pieces of bad news: his meeting had been scratched, and Las Vegas bars were closing at midnight.

Seized by nostalgia, he headed for Atomic. “My grandfather used to come here,” Foley said. He was a judge who wore a coat and tie every day, Foley said of his grandfather, who died in 2014 at age 97.

“He was a gentleman’s gentleman,” he said, adding that his grandfather sipped drinks on the roof of Atomic in the days before Fremont Street was eclipsed by the strip.

Fremont Street is an arts district now, and the home of Zappos, the shoe company whose headquarters is in Las Vegas’ old town hall, and whose employees are among Atomic’s clientele.

It was nearly 2 a.m. when Cruz issued the last drinks call of the evening on the restaurant-side of the operation.

The bar side had long since been shuttered.

Beyond the bar, the pandemic has hit home for Cruz. She said that her godmother, a 61-year-old teacher in Arizona, had died from the virus. And her father, Bill Cruz, lives in town, but “I haven’t seen him since March,” Cruz said. “I would not be able to live with myself if he got infected.”

Cruz said she was thankful to be able to shift operations to the restaurant. Not a single employee has gotten sick, she said. But the need for social distancing and the surging virus has cut her customers, and contributed to “so much uncertainty,” she said.

“We’re in this position because people didn’t follow the rules,” she said. “I know we’ll withstand this. But I don’t know if it will be the same afterward.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

They’re fighting hunger across New York

By JANE MARGOLIES and ALIX STRAUSS

T

he number of food-insecure New York City residents has doubled to about 2 million since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. But just as quickly as the need escalated, so too did new solutions.

Those who help feed the hungry are up early, clipboards in hand, checking on deliveries.

They work the phones, begging for donations.

They direct staff and a growing army of volunteers. And they try to keep their wits about them, despite the long hours, the long to-do lists and the long lines that are becoming all too common.

Here are some of their stories.

In Queens, a Pastor on a Mission In late March, the Rev. Andrew Marko, pastor of Evangel Church in Long Island City, Queens, converted the 100,000-square-foot building that houses the church and shuttered school into a mammoth operation to feed those in need.

On a recent day, a forklift unloaded pallets of rice from a box truck into the building. Dairy and meat go into a walk-in refrigerator-freezer in the multipurpose room. The gym, cafeteria, classrooms and hallways also store food.

But it doesn’t stay long.

Dozens of volunteers, most of whom are placed here via the nonprofit New York Cares and have no prior connection to the church, pack bags of groceries. Up to 5,500 people a day are served.

In the Bronx, It’s About the Groceries Growing up, Caesar Tobar-Acosta studied martial arts at the Kingsbridge Heights Community Center in the Bronx. Now Tobar-Acosta, 23, works as an AmeriCorps volunteer coordinator there.

In mid-March, the center expanded its once-a-week pantry into a daily operation.

Regular patrons have been joined on the line by those furloughed or laid off.

“In the beginning, they were uncomfortable,” said Tobar-Acosta, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, of the people who were not used to asking for help. Hot meals, either donated or prepared in the center’s kitchen, are distributed along with bags of groceries.

“The thing everyone wants is the groceries,” they said. “They want the rice, they want the pasta so they can make the things they want, when they want it, how they want it. That allows people to get some degree of control back.”

An Expanding Social Agenda in Brooklyn When LaToya Meaders and Femi Rodney Frazer started Collective Fare, a catering company run out of the Brownsville Community Culinary Center in Brooklyn, they aimed to empower locals interested in healthy cooking, create job opportunities and run a successful business, too.

Things were going well until April, when the company, which specializes in plant-based African diaspora fare, lost more than $150,000 in catering jobs. But the financial setback paled in comparison with what was happening to

Alade Kinard, left, and Sade Walcott, who are part of an effort to feed food-insecure residents in Brownsville, Brooklyn, prepare meals for residents on June 20, 2020.

many Brownsville residents, who had suddenly become food insecure.

“An elderly neighbor called our hotline and said she had not eaten in four days,” Meaders said.

“I got my team to drop food off to her that day.”

The duo knew the problem would likely get worse, so they dug into their savings and also partnered with nonprofits like Rethink Food NYC to prepare and distribute free meals. Now some 30 Collective Fare employees are working out of the 1,000-square-foot culinary center to provide around 2,000 free meals weekly.

Repurposing a Barge on the Hudson River Brigitte Griswold, executive director of the environmental nonprofit Groundwork Hudson Valley, spent her childhood on a farm in South Carolina, where her family grew corn and raised chickens. So it is perhaps not surprising that her thoughts turned to sourcing food when the pandemic shut down the Science Barge, her organization’s floating educational center just north of the city, in Yonkers.

Could Groundwork ramp up its demonstration gardens, normally used to teach children about agriculture, to produce substantial amounts of food?

In late March, Groundwork employees planted seeds for tomatoes, cucumbers and kale in trays on windowsills in their homes. By the end of June, the vegetables had been transferred to the barge. Now triple the amount of produce is growing there, according to Griswold.

The harvest, which will be ready in a few weeks, will go to the women’s shelter at theYWCA of Yonkers, whose chief executive, it turns out, is another South Carolina native, Charlie Knight. As a child, Knight watered her own grandmother’s garden — not that she liked it.

But, she said, “I’ve matured. I’ve come to appreciate fresh fruits and vegetables,” especially for her clients, who are mostly Black and Latino.

“One thing we’ve learned from this pandemic is that the communities hit the hardest are people of color.”

In Harlem, Converting Schools Into Meal Hubs In 2005, Wall Street equities trader Rhys Powell founded Red Rabbit, a Harlem-based company that provides meals for schoolchildren.

He was working with 180 educational institutions, including many charter schools, serving 22,000 meals and snacks a day when the schools were shut down in March.

Powell, 40, had to figure out how to continue the organization’s work.

“We were not set up to distribute,” he said.

“So we positioned ourselves as an organization

that can prepare and reached out to other organizations who had the expertise we didn’t.”

City Harvest and World Central Kitchen, among other nonprofits, took an interest. Additional kitchens were created. Red Rabbit also started making meals for adults for the first time.

Schools acted as food hubs, and meals were distributed to emergency workers, their children and others in the community. Now 90,000 meals are prepared weekly.

Thousands of Deliveries in the Heights Forty years ago, Yvonne Stennett worked as a youth advisory counselor at the Community League of the Heights, which provides affordable housing and after-school programming, among other services, to Washington Heights residents.

Today she is the executive director.

Since the pandemic started, the Community League’s food pantry program has expanded from offering 250 meals two days a week to preparing 500 meals five days per week. Stennett’s team of 80 volunteers and 20 staff members hand out and deliver canned beans, rice, vegetables and fruit to neighborhoods in the Bronx as well as in Inwood, Washington Heights and Hamilton Heights, all in Manhattan. Many recipients are disabled and homebound seniors.

“The first month was the hardest because there was a line and we were running out of food,” said Stennett, 65. Grants and partnerships helped the program continue.

“The fear was giving people a false sense of hope,” she said. “We open at 9 a.m. People were there at 6.”

But she remains optimistic. “When the last person in line has food in their hand from us,” she said, “that’s a good moment.”

In Lower Manhattan, Stagehands Get Busy In mid-April, Jon Harper, director of operations and facilities for the Abrons Arts Center, was one month into a sojourn in North Carolina with his family when he was called back to New York. Abrons is part of Henry Street Settlement, a social services organization on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Another neighborhood group, Vision Urbana, had asked Henry Street for help expanding its food-distribution effort.

The next day, Harper drove back to the city, and by the following week he had set up a satellite operation in Henry Street’s shuttered youth center. Drawing on his contacts in the arts world, Harper hired out-of-work lighting designers and theater technicians. A message he posted on an arts networking site led him to a man on Long Island who lent him 20 shopping carts. Those carts now carry about 500 bags of groceries every week.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

9

Fear and anger as teachers feel pressure to return to class

By DANA GOLDSTEIN and ELIZA SHAPIRO

M

any of the nation’s 3.5 million teachers found themselves feeling under siege this week as pressure from the White House, pediatricians and some parents to get back to physical classrooms intensified — even as the coronavirus rages across much of the country.

On Friday, the teachers’ union in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest district, demanded full-time remote learning when the academic year begins on Aug. 18, and called President Donald Trump’s push to reopen schools part of a “dangerous, anti-science agenda that puts the lives of our members, our students and our families at risk.”

Teachers say crucial questions about how schools will stay clean, keep students physically distanced and prevent further spread of the virus have not been answered. And they feel that their own lives, and those of the family members they come home to, are at stake.

“I want to serve the students, but it’s hard to say you’re going to sacrifice all of the teachers, paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers and bus drivers,” said Hannah Wysong, a teacher at the Esperanza Community School inTempe, Arizona, where virus cases are increasing.

School systems struggling to meet the financial and logistical challenges of reopening safely will need to carefully weigh teachers’ concerns.

A wave of leave requests, early retirements or resignations driven by health fears could imperil efforts to reach students learning both in physical classrooms and online.

On social media, teachers across the country promoted the hashtag #14daysnonewcases, with some pledging to refuse to enter classrooms until the coronavirus transmission rate in their counties falls, essentially, to zero.

Now, educators are using some of the same organizing tactics they employed in walkouts over issues of pay and funding in recent years to demand that schools remain closed, at least in the short term. It’s a stance that could potentially be divisive, with some district surveys suggesting that more than half of parents would like their children to return to classrooms.

Big districts like San Diego and smaller ones, like Marietta, Georgia, are forging ahead with plans to open schools five days per week.

Many other systems, like those in New York City and Seattle, hope to offer several days per week of in-person school.

Adding to the confusion, optional guidelines released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in May set out ambitious safety

precautions for schools. But the president, and many local school system leaders, have suggested they do not need to be strictly followed, alarming teachers.

Many doctors, education experts, parents and policymakers have argued that the social and academic costs of school closures on children need to be weighed alongside the risks of the virus itself.

The heated national debate about how and whether to bring students back to classrooms plays upon all the anxieties of the teaching profession. The comparison between teachers and other essential workers currently laboring outside their homes rankles some educators. They note that they are paid much less than doctors — the average salary nationwide for teachers is about $60,000 per year — but are more highly educated than delivery people, restaurant workers or most staffers in child care centers, many of whom are already back at work.

Now, as teachers listen to a national conversation about reopening schools that many believe elevates the needs of the economy and working parents above the concerns of the classroom work force, many are fearful and angry.

They point out that so far Congress has dedicated less than 1% of federal pandemic stimulus funds to public schools stretching to meet the costs of reopening safely.

The message to teachers, said Christina Setzer, a preschool educator in Sacramento, is, “Yes, you guys are really important and essential and kids and parents need you. But sorry, we don’t have the money.”

Earlier in the shutdown, Trump acknowledged the health risks to teachers over the age of 60 and those with underlying conditions, saying at a White House event in May that “they should not be teaching school for a while, and everybody would understand that fully.”

But this week, as the administration launched a full-throated campaign to pressure schools to reopen in the fall — a crucial step for jump-starting the economy — it all but ignored the potential risks teachers face. More than one-quarter of public schoolteachers are over the age of 50.

Teachers say many of their questions about how schools will operate safely remain unanswered. They point out that some classrooms have windows that do not reliably open to promote air circulation, while school buildings can have aging heating and cooling systems that lack the filtration features that reduce virus transmission.

Although many districts are spending millions this summer procuring masks, sanitizers

Caution tape blocks a hallway area inside Marietta High School in Marietta, Ga., July 7, 2020. and additional custodial staff, many teachers say they have little faith that limited resources will stretch to fill the need.

They also worry about access to tests and contact tracing to confirm COVID-19 diagnoses and clarify who in a school might need to isolate at home in the event of a symptomatic student or staff member.

The CDC has advised against regular testing in K-12 schools, but Wednesday, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said the Trump administration was exploring whether testing being developed for other vulnerable environments, like nursing homes, could be used in schools.

Indeed, educators have had to process a head-spinning set of conflicting health and safety guidelines from Washington, states and medical experts.

The CDC has recommended that when schools reopen, students remain 6 feet apart “when feasible,” while the American Academy of Pediatrics released guidelines suggesting that 3 feet could be enough space if students wore masks.

Health and education experts who support reopening schools have sometimes questioned the need for strict physical distancing, pointing in recent weeks to emerging research suggesting that children may be not only less likely to contract COVID-19, but also less likely to transmit it to adults.

In interviews, many teachers said they were unaware of or skeptical of such studies, arguing that much about the virus remains unknown, and that even if teachers do not catch coronavirus in large numbers from children, it could be spread

among adults working in a school building, or during commutes to and from schools via public transit.

The education systems in Germany and Denmark have successfully reopened, but generally only after local virus transmission rates were brought under control.

American schools currently have a variety of plans for welcoming students back to campuses, ranging from regular, five-day schedules with children using desk partitions to stay distanced, to hybrid approaches that seek to keep students physically distanced by having them attend school in-person only a few days per week, and spend the rest of their time learning online from home.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last week that the nation’s largest school system would reopen only part-time for students this fall, but teachers would most likely be back in classrooms five days a week.

The teachers’ union president, Michael Mulgrew, has said he does not believe schools can reopen at all if the city does not receive additional federal funding this summer.

With many teachers reluctant to return to work, according to polls, staffing will be a major challenge for districts across the country. New York estimates that about 1 in 5 of its teachers will receive a medical exemption to teach remotely this fall.

Matthew Landau, a history teacher at Democracy Prep Charter High School in Harlem, hopes he will be one of them. He survived stage four cancer several years ago and said he does not feel comfortable going back to his classroom.

“I feel there’s no way to keep immunocompromised teachers safe,” he said.

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

California parents agree to plead guilty in college admissions scandal

The Blakes are the latest parents to be swept up in the nation’s largest college admissions prosecution, which has ensnared wealthy financiers, lawyers and celebrities.

By MICHAEL LEVENSON

A

California couple have agreed to plead guilty to charges that they paid $250,000 to fraudulently gain their daughter’s admission to the University of Southern California as a volleyball recruit, prosecutors said.

If the agreement is approved by a federal judge, the couple, Diane Blake, 55, and Todd Blake, 54, of Ross, California, will be the 27th and 28th parents to plead guilty in the nation’s largest college admissions prosecution, which has ensnared wealthy financiers, lawyers and celebrities.

Court documents described Todd Blake as an entrepreneur and investor and Diane Blake as an executive at a retail merchandising firm.

Todd Blake has agreed to serve four months in prison and Diane Blake six weeks, prosecutors said. They have also agreed to each pay a $125,000 fine, submit to supervised release for two years and complete 100 hours of

community service, prosecutors said.

The couple have agreed to plead guilty to one count each of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and honest services wire and mail fraud, prosecutors said. Todd Blake has also agreed to plead guilty to an additional charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The University of Southern California declined Saturday to comment on the agreement. Four lawyers listed in court documents as representatives of the Blakes did not respond to emails. No one replied to messages left at phone numbers listed for the couple.

More than 50 people have been charged in the sprawling case, which was orchestrated, prosecutors said,

by William Singer, a Newport Beach, California, businessman who has been cooperating with federal investigators since September 2018.

Of the 38 parents who were charged by prosecutors more than a year ago, 10 are still fighting their ca-

ses, which could lead to federal trials beginning in October. The Blakes are scheduled to appear in court via video conference Tuesday.

Among the prominent parents who were charged was actress Felicity Huffman, who admitted in May to paying $15,000 to arrange for cheating on her daughter’s SAT exam. Huffman ultimately served 11 days at a minimum-security prison camp outside San Francisco.

In May, another prominent parent, actress Lori Loughlin, pleaded guilty to conspiring to get her daughters admitted to the University of Southern California as crew recruits.

Her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, a fashion designer, also pleaded guilty to a criminal count, prosecutors said.

Loughlin agreed to serve two months in prison. Giannulli is expected to serve five months.

For the Blakes, the fraud began, prosecutors said, on Jan. 29, 2017, after Diane Blake emailed Singer to say that her daughter was interested in at-

tending USC, which she assumed was “in the reach stretch category.”

Singer responded that “there is a way to garner a guarantee at USC if that is first choice but best to discuss without” the Blakes’ daughter present, according to a federal indictment.

Diane Blake later told Singer in an email, “We are fully committed to the USC plan,” which set in motion a scheme to get her daughter admitted to the university with fake athletic credentials, according to an FBI affidavit.

With the help of a former USC soccer coach who has pleaded guilty in the case, Singer sent a falsified volleyball profile of the Blakes’ daughter in August 2017 to Donna Heinel, a former athletic department administrator.

The profile, prosecutors said, falsely claimed that the Blakes’ daughter had received a number of honors and had played on two club volleyball teams, one of which had qualified for junior nationals three years in a row, prosecutors said.

Heinel, who was known for determining which recruited athletes gained admission to the increasingly competitive private university, presented the Blakes’ daughter to a USC subcommittee for athletic admissions as a volleyball recruit in September 2017, prosecutors said.

Heinel has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit racketeering and other charges.

The Blakes’ daughter was conditionally accepted as a student athlete, prosecutors said.

Todd Blake then wrote a $50,000 check to USC Women’s Athletics and wired $200,000 to the Key Worldwide Foundation, a charity established and run by Singer that prosecutors said he used to pay bribes.

The Blakes’ daughter, who was unaware that her parents were orchestrating her admission to the university, was formally accepted to USC in March 2018, prosecutors said. Court documents filed in March 2019 said the daughter was enrolled at the university but was not listed on the roster of the women’s volleyball team.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

11

Disney World opens its gates, with virus numbers rising

By BROOKS BARNES

T

he Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, a Magic Kingdom hair salon where little girls get styled like Disney princesses, remained closed Saturday. Buzz Lightyear was only able to wave from a distance. Parades and fireworks? Scratched.

And the coronavirus continued its rampage through Florida, with state officials reporting 10,360 new infections, the third-highest daily jump since the pandemic began.

None of which stopped Sonya Little and thousands of other theme park fans from turning out — in masks in the scorching Florida heat — for the reopening of Walt Disney World. After closing in March because of the pandemic, the mega-resort near Orlando began tossing confetti again at 9 a.m.

Two of its four major parks, the Magic Kingdom and the Animal Kingdom, welcomed back a limited number of temperature-checked visitors, with some attractions and character interactions unavailable as safety precautions. Epcot and Disney’s Hollywood Studios were set to reopen Wednesday.

Disney’s parks have always been about leaving your troubles behind, a sunny outlook some might find improbable during a pandemic. The reopening amounts to a breathtaking effort by a corporation to prove that it can safely operate — entertaining families and employing tens of thousands of people — at a highly dangerous time.

“I’m so overwhelmed with emotion,” a weeping Little said, as she stood on Main Street USA wearing Minnie Mouse ears.

“The last few months have been so hard.

We have just felt so defeated. Being here gives me the strength to go on.”

With that, Little, 45, who flew to Orlando from Birmingham, Alabama, with her friends Tammy Richardson and Kristi Peek, adjusted her face mask and set forth for Fantasyland.

Throughout the morning, the scene near Space Mountain in Tomorrowland was relaxed as most visitors took care to socially distance and Disney employees, each wearing a mask and a face shield,

Guests at the ticketing center at Walt Disney World, in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., on Saturday, July 11, 2020. kept a close eye. Disney would not say how many people it let inside, but the grounds did not feel crowded. At midday, the park — usually the busiest in the world, with about 21 million visitors last year — was a surreal sight: sparsely populated plazas, families sauntering between attractions rather than racing, rides with 5-minute wait times. There was barely a stroller to be seen near Disney’s singsong It’s a Small World boat ride, much less the usual gridlock.

“It was almost more enjoyable than usual because we got to ride everything with no wait times,” said Samantha Harris, who drove to Orlando from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with her family, including her 5-year-old niece, Addilyn. Harris said she was so eager to score tickets that she logged onto Disney’s booking website at 5 a.m. on the day it opened. To limit capacity, Disney no longer allows visitors to walk up and buy tickets, instead making blocks of “reservations” available online. Some blocks for July were gone in minutes when Disney opened the site June 24.

After months of home quarantining, the chance to have some wholesome fun and perhaps touch a childhood memory seemed to outweigh the risk of catching the virus for visitors. “A Welcome Respite” read a headline in the Orlando Sentinel

gic Kingdom had to allow some of the grimness of pandemic life to puncture the utopian fantasy. To ward off germs, Disney now leaves rows of seats empty on rides like Pirates of the Caribbean. Employees constantly disinfect ride vehicles and lap bars. Face masks are mandatory, and, for some visitors, the coverings quickly grew wet with sweat.

“It would be a lot more fun without having to wear one,” Ivan Chanchavac, 14, said as he hopped off the Jungle Cruise.

His friend, Victoria Perez, 15, shot him a stern look. “But it is best for our safety and others that we wear them,” she said.

Her mother, Dolly Perez, drove the group to Orlando from Atlanta. “We were desperate for some fun,” she said.

“Desperate.”

Disney declined to say how much it spent to retrofit the resort for the coronavirus age. The cost must have been considerable. In addition to providing employees with protective gear, the company added 4,000 hand-sanitizing stations, set up restaurants for mobile ordering and installed plexiglass partitions everywhere, including inside the queuing areas of rides.

“People trust Disney, and we have a big responsibility to deliver on that trust,” Josh D’Amaro, Disney’s theme park chairman, said as he stood near Main Street watching the company’s most avid fans pour into the park. “As hard as the world is right now, this feels like a turning point — it’s a signal that people have hope.”

about Disney’s reopening.

“We will take any amount of normalcy and any amount of joy that we can get,” Jose Villanueva said as he rested in the shade in Tomorrowland with his wife, Kacie. “I know that some people are upset about having to wear a mask or there being no fireworks. For us, we feel lucky to be here. This was the first thing that made us feel like we could leave our house and still feel safe.”

Why? “It’s Disney,” Villanueva said. The couple made the trek to Florida from their home in Laurinburg, North Carolina.

That kind of optimism is the foundation of the Disney experience. In case the wafting smell of fresh fudge and pipeorgan soundtrack don’t immediately jolt you into another dimension, there are signs at the entrances reminding visitors, “Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy.” Walt Disney’s original theme park designers spoke about the properties as selling reassurance. No matter how terrible things seem outside the gates, here is a place where everything is OK: People are nice, the windows all sparkle, there are stuffed animals to cuddle, the speedway cars ne- Social distancing markers on the ground ver run out of gas. outside the Magic Kingdom at Walt DisTo safely reopen, however, the Ma- ney World.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

Stocks

Investors await BlackRock earnings after blistering second quarter market rally

I

nvestors will watch next week’s earnings from BlackRock (BLK.N), the world’s largest asset manager, for a snapshot of how the industry performed during the second quarter’s dramatic rebound in global financial markets.

Most expect numbers from industry bellwether BlackRock and other asset managers to reflect the sharp stock market rebound. The S&P 500 .SPX rose 20% in the second quarter after falling as much in the first three months of 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic slammed the economy.

Since the performance of asset managers tends to be tied to how markets fare, investors see a range of risks ahead, including further acceleration of U.S. coronavirus cases and potential market volatility around the Nov. 3 presidential election.

Still, “just on a market level, the asset managers are inmuch better shape coming out of the second quarter than theywere coming out of the first quarter,” said Macrae Sykes, global financial services sector analyst at Gabelli Funds.

BlackRock is scheduled to report on July 17, with T. Rowe Price (TROW.O), WisdomTree Investments (WETF.O) and Invesco (IVZ.N) among asset managers reporting in the following weeks.

Analysts expect a strong recovery in the sector’s assets under management (AUM) in the second quarter, driven by rising financial markets and improving risk appetite. Higher levels of AUM mean more fees and stronger margins and earnings, analysts said.

BlackRock’s assets fell to $6.47 trillion at the end of the first-quarter, from $7.43 trillion at the end of 2019.

Improving fund flows are also likely to help secondquarter earnings for the group, analysts said. Fixed income flows reversed back into positive territory in April and stayed that way throughout the quarter while equity flows improved from March lows, according to Jefferies.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley recently raised their estimate for second-quarter earnings-per-share for traditional asset managers by 19%.

Most analysts expect BlackRock to show robust flows into its $2 trillion exchange-traded funds business, with strength in the fixed income and alternatives ETFs offsetting outflows from equities.

Investors will also look for details on BlackRock’s role in the Federal Reserve’s debt-buying efforts as the central bank sought to stabilize a corporate bond market roiled by economic fallout of the pandemic.

The firm’s own ETFs accounted for a large share of corporate bond ETFs it bought on behalf of the Fed as part of the central bank’s relief program. BlackRock waived asset management fees on ETFs purchased on behalf of the Fed. BlackRock’s shares are up about 9% year-to-date, outperforming a 3% decline in the S&P 500. The broader sector has not fared as well, with the Refinitiv U.S. Investment Management & Fund Operators Price Return Index .TRXFLDUSPINVM is down about 13% for the year.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

13

Protests rock Russian far east with calls for Putin to resign

By ANDREW HIGGINS

T

ens of thousands of people protested in Russia’s Far East on Saturday in a rare display of opposition to President Vladimir Putin in the country’s vast hinterland, chanting “Putin Resign” and demanding the release of a regional governor arrested this past week on suspicion of multiple murders.

The protests in Khabarovsk, a city bordering China, and several other towns were the largest in Russia’s usually somnolent provinces in many years, rivaling or even exceeding in size demonstrations last summer in Moscow, the main center of opposition to the Kremlin.

Unlike streets protests in Moscow, which the authorities can easily discredit as the work of a privileged metropolitan elite led astray by Russia’s enemies in the West, the outburst of anger against Putin in a hardscrabble region nearly 4,000 miles east of the capital presented an unusual and potentially more troublesome challenge.

The demonstrations in towns across Khabarovsk Krai, a sprawling region that stretches from the frontier with China to the Arctic along the Pacific Ocean, followed the arrest on Thursday of the region’s popular governor, Sergei I. Furgal. He is one of Russia’s few provincial leaders not affiliated with political forces entirely controlled by the Kremlin.

Furgal, a member of the Liberal Democratic Party of the nationalist rabble-rouser Vladimir Zhirinovsky, took office in 2018 after defeating a Kremlin-endorsed candidate. Despite his affiliation with a party scorned by Russian liberals as a collection of crackpots and crooks, he has now been embraced by many Kremlin critics as a victim of political repression by Putin.

Alexei Navalny, a Moscow-based anti-corruption campaigner and Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, cheered Saturday’s protests in the Far East, hailing the street demonstration in Khabarovsk as the “biggest in the city’s history.” Nalvalny tweeted a video of the protests and a message of support: “Far East, We Are With You!” The Ministry of Interior, which controls Russia’s regular police forces, estimated that between 10,000 and 12,000 people had joined the protest in Khabarovsk. Local news outlets put the number at more than 40,000.

State-controlled media ignored the protests while giving extensive coverage to troubles in the United States, particularly a spike in coronavirus cases. The focus on America’s problems instead of Russia’s Far East led Dmitri Alekseyev, a wealthy businessman in Vladivostok, a city east of Khabarovsk, to comment on Facebook that “it seems I am living in the USA.” City authorities in Khabarovsk, the regional capital, tried to prevent the rally by sealing off the main square, claiming that it needed to be disinfected. But municipal police officers stood aside as crowds poured peacefully into the center of the city.

Videos showed festive scenes of protesters, both young and old, waving signs in support of the arrested governor and chanting “Freedom for Furgal,” “Moscow Get Out” and “Putin Step Down.”

Protests were also reported in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, an important industrial center, Solnechny and other towns in Khabarovsk Krai.

A former timber and scrap metal trader, Furgal has long

Protesters said they were concerned that Mr. Furgal’s alleged crimes had suddenly been used to depose a governor. been trailed by accusations of criminality.

But protesters said they were less concerned about his innocence or guilt and more concerned that his alleged crimes, ignored for nearly two decades by investigators, had suddenly been used to depose a governor who, unlike Putin, had won a real and competitive election.

Appearing in court in Moscow on Friday, Furgal pleaded not guilty to charges of multiple murders and attempted murder in the early 2000s. His arrest now, so many years later, was widely seen as politically motivated, the latest heavy-handed strike in a rolling crackdown unleashed after a rigged national plebiscite on constitutional amendments effectively entrenched Putin as president for life.

After seven days of voting, the electoral commission in Moscow last week announced that Putin had won what the Kremlin described as a “triumphant referendum on confidence.” More than 78% of voters endorsed amendments that allow Putin to crash through term limits previously mandated by the constitution and stay in power until at least 2036. He was supposed to step down at the end of his current term in 2024.

But Putin’s image as a can-do leader has been badly battered by his often passive response to the coronavirus pandemic and a deepening economic crisis. His approval rating has slumped in recent weeks to its lowest level since taking office more than 20 years ago.

While other countries in Europe or East Asia have slowed

the pace of new infections, Russia is seeing nearly 7,000 new cases a day. And it risks new spikes following the lifting of lockdown restrictions in Moscow and most other places ahead of Putin’s constitutional plebiscite and a huge military parade in Red Square.

Few commentators expect street protests to snowball nationwide and force Putin to step down, not least because the Kremlin controls an immense security apparatus adept at crushing demonstrations.

But events in Khabarovsk and angry grumbling across the country over growing economic hardship suggest that Putin has lost his aura as an invincible leader supported by a large majority of the public.

Putin has for years faced periodic outbursts of street protests involving mostly young people in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia’s biggest and wealthiest cities. But aided by relentless propaganda on state-controlled television and loyal security officers, Putin has swatted his critics away, sneering at them as spoiled troublemakers out of step with ordinary Russians in the provinces who have repeatedly reelected him by ever-increasing margins.

But none of those presidential elections, which have excluded would-be opposition candidates like Navlny, has come close to being free and fair, leaving the Kremlin reliant on secret opinion polls to gauge Putin’s real level of support.

Protests in places like Khabarovsk provide a rare unfiltered view of what many people, including those with no connection to Putin’s inveterate critics in Moscow, might really think.

14

Monday, May 13, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

To ‘protect young minds,’ Hong Kong moves to overhaul schools

Students participate in a demonstration in Hong Kong’s Central district, Sept. 2, 2019.

By AMY QIN and TIFFANY MAY

S

tarting this fall, schools in Hong Kong will display colorful new government-issued posters declaring that “freedom comes with responsibilities.” Administrators may now call the police if anyone insults the Chinese national anthem on campus.

Students as young as kindergartners will be taught about a new national security law that gives the authorities the power to squelch opposition to Beijing with heavy prison sentences.

After months of antigovernment protests in Hong Kong, China’s ruling Communist Party is reaching into the semiautonomous territory to overhaul an education system that it sees as having given rise to a generation of rebellious youth. The sweeping law Beijing imposed earlier this month also targets Hong Kong’s students, who have been a galvanizing force behind the protests.

Carrie Lam, the city’s Beijing-backed leader, said at a forum Saturday that the arrests of more than 3,000 children and teenagers at protests had exposed how the city’s campuses had been penetrated by forces hostile to the local and central governments.

“Faced with such a severe situation with our young people, we can’t help but ask, what is wrong with education in Hong Kong?” she said.

Lam said the schools’ textbooks, classroom teaching and students’ extracurricular activities reflected negative news media reporting about China and the “wanton discrediting of the government and police.” Educating students about the new law, she said, would help them become more law-abiding.

The party’s goal for the territory is clear: to foster a new generation of loyal and patriotic Hong Kong youth. It is a strategy of ideological control that it has wielded to great effect in the

mainland, but could rapidly erode Hong Kong’s reputation for academic freedom.

“Young kids will be brought up to understand and believe that without the Chinese Communist Party they have no future, that anything they have is because of the party,” said Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Over the last year, images of students in neatly pressed school uniforms joining hands to form human chains have become among the most evocative symbols of the protest movement.

But campuses have also been the site of some of the movement’s most violent scenes, such as at Polytechnic University, where protesters and police officers faced off in a prolonged fight with rubber bullets, firebombs and bows and arrows in November.

Now, in forcing through the security law, Beijing has signaled that it has seen enough. On Wednesday, Kevin Yeung, Hong Kong’s education secretary, barred students from singing “Glory to Hong Kong,” a popular protest song, displaying political slogans or forming human chains on campus.

Defenders of the law have argued that the city’s academic freedom would remain untouched. But, they say, students and teachers should know that freedom of speech comes with limitations.

“You can’t just allow teachers to talk, and impose their views, free-for-all,” said Regina Ip, a cabinet member who leads a pro-Beijing party in the legislature. “Critical thinking does not mean training people to criticize or attack.”

Even before the law was enacted, the transformation of Hong Kong’s education system was already underway.

The new school year had just started in September when

Law Pei-lee, a teacher at a girls’ school, learned that a parent had filed a complaint about her conduct. She was accused of discussing the case of Lam Wing-kee, a local bookstore owner who was kidnapped by Chinese security officials in 2015.

Law, a veteran teacher, said she had mentioned the incident in passing. But she said the education bureau repeatedly demanded an explanation. Though she was never officially punished, she said the monthslong investigation felt like “psychological torture.”

Worse, Law said, she feared the law would stifle young minds. “Will our kids be able to think critically when they grow up?”

Both the education bureau and an employee at Law’s school, Sacred Heart Canossian School Private Section, said they could not comment on individual cases.

Some teachers and students say the investigations have created a climate of fear on campuses. A recent survey of more than 1,100 teachers found that around a third had been told by a supervisor to avoid discussing politics.

Some parents say they are only trying to keep their children out of harm’s way.

“What are the teachers afraid of?” said Ho Chiu Fai, a father of a fifth-grader and founder of Help Our Next Generation, a group of volunteers who investigate complaints against teachers.

“We are all very worried that our kids will do something illegal, like go to illegal protests.”

Yeung, the education secretary, has vowed to “ferret out” problematic teachers. Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s former top leader, has set up a fund to help investigate teachers.

“The Government have a duty to protect young minds from radicalization,” Leung wrote in an email.

Some teachers have lost their jobs for not taking a harder line against protest-related actions in school.

The new national security law — which authorizes life imprisonment for secession, terrorism and other political offenses in the most serious cases — could make navigating classroom discussions even more difficult for teachers.

Liberal Studies, a mandatory civics course that has been blamed by some officials for radicalizing students, will likely come under much greater scrutiny. Chinese history has become a mandatory subject in middle schools, and some teachers have asked how they should discuss contentious events under the party’s rule.

Schools must review their library catalogs to remove books that “provoke any acts or activities which endanger national security,” the bureau said in a statement to The Times.

The law is already having a deterrent effect. At Ying Wa College, an elite boys’ school, a group of students who only last month chanted pro-independence slogans on the school’s sports field has now quickly disbanded and taken down its social media account.

Some administrators are striking a defiant note. Kellee Tsai, the dean of the school of humanities and social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, encouraged her department to carry on their teaching and research as usual until further instructions were issued.

“There may well be non-obvious ‘red lines’ in Hong Kong’s higher education sector that cannot be crossed without severe legal consequences,” she told them in an email seen by The Times.

“Let’s not draw those lines ourselves.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

15

In Latin America, the pandemic threatens equality like never before

By JULIE TURKEWITZ and SOFIA VILLAMIL

S

andra Abello grew up poor, left school at 11 and spent her teenage years scrubbing floors as a live-in maid. But by this year, something remarkable had happened.

Abello, now 39, finally had a home in a decent neighborhood. One of her daughters, Karol, was about to finish high school. Another, Nicol, was turning 15, and they were planning a party with a big dress and many guests. They were saving for a washing machine. Abello was proud of all she had accomplished.

Then the pandemic hit, and Abello lost her cleaning work. By May, she had been evicted, forcing her to move her children into a tin shed in an illegal settlement high above the city. At night, a bitter cold pushed its way in. A lifetime of effort had evaporated in a matter of weeks.

Abello’s oldest daughter, Karol, an aspiring nurse, called it the “great regression.”

Not long ago, Colombia — and Latin America more broadly — were in the middle of a history-making transformation: The scourge of inequality was shrinking like never before. Over the past 20 years, millions of families had marched out of poverty in one of the most unequal regions on earth. The gap between rich and poor in Latin America fell to its lowest point on record.

Now, the pandemic is threatening to reverse those gains like nothing else in recent history, economists say, potentially upending politics and entire societies for years to come.

We — two reporters and a photographer with The New York Times — wanted to understand what this meant for the region’s future, and in particular for the families that had been so central to that march toward economic equality.

So we began to drive, packing the car with masks and traveling more than 1,000 miles from Colombia’s capital to the northeastern border and back, interviewing dozens of people about the way the pandemic was changing the course of their lives.

As we went, leaving the mountainflanked high-rises of Bogotá for the tropical regions beyond, it became clear that the engines of upward mobility were failing, choked off by an economic shutdown that began in March and fell hardest on the working poor and vulnerable members of the middle class.

Small businesses had closed for good.

Universities were hemorrhaging students.

Schools that had turned the children of construction workers into engineers were near collapse, unable to pay teachers. Farmers were burning their crops, ruined by disrupted markets.

Teenage boys had turned to selling drugs to feed their siblings. Young women and girls had been pushed into prostitution to pay the bills. Mothers and fathers began rationing medicine to their children, unsure when they would have money for more.

Wealthy people retreated to countryside homes, while other families sold their cellphones to buy dinner.

“It was never my dream to go backward,” said David Aguirre, 32, who had risen from a low-level bodyguard to the boss of his own strawberry farm.

He had poured his life savings into his business, opening just a few months before the pandemic struck. Now it was unclear if the farm would survive. When we met, he’d just fired his four workers and killed off a quarter of his crop — unable to find a buyer and unable to pay his employees to pick it.

The berries lay dry and cracked around us, poisoned with Roundup, and he worried about returning to the dangerous work of protecting the wealthy.

“The sacrifice of many people, days of

Over the past two decades, inequality in Latin America had fallen to the lowest point in its recorded history, but the coronavirus pandemic threatens to reverse that.

Maria Eugenia Carvalho, who collects recycyling for a living and lost all her buyers in the economic impact of the coronavirus, with her family in Medellin, Colombia, May 16, 2020. work from 6 to 6 at night, rain, sun,” he said.

“And then — for it all to become nothing?”

Bogotá Even on the first day of our journey, we could see the distance between the rich and poor widening.

We drove into the hills above the capital, to an encampment of hastily built sheds that had long been a last resort for desperate families.

When the lockdown began, the settlement quickly swelled with people like Abello who had been moving up — bakery employees, preschool janitors — but lost their jobs and apartments. The pandemic hadn’t just stalled their progress. It suddenly made them squatters.

That day, the police arrived with a wrecking crew, saying that the settlement was illegal and too precariously built to live in, even if tearing it down exacerbated the pain of the pandemic.

Abello’s walls fell with a terrifying clatter.

For the second time in the brief life of the crisis, she and her family had nowhere to go.

Medellín Eight hours outside of Bogotá, the school appeared like a sanctuary on a hill, ringed by an expansive lawn and a gate.

The institution, Mi Segundo Hogar, had played a life-changing role for families

of modest means over the years, offering low-cost, high-quality education. It produced flight attendants and pharmacists in families where the parents had walked barefoot to class.

Now, the school sat empty, with in-person classes canceled across Latin America. Unemployed parents had stopped paying fees, sometimes apologizing profusely through text message, and the school was barely paying instructors.

On the patio, the rector, Lina Castrillón, said Mi Segundo Hogar was in danger of closing. Technically, classes had moved online, but only a fraction of the students were able to connect every day. Many didn’t have computers, or tried to log on via cellphone, and data was expensive.

It was not just that her students were going to slide backward in their learning, Castrillón said. She worried this interruption would fundamentally reshape their lives, leading to dropouts and lower pay, stunting an entire generation. At home, disconnected from school, she said, “they are losing their vision” of a better future.

For years, Colombia was a glaring example of the region’s wealth gap — and of the struggles to narrow it.

The nation’s generations-long war with rebels grew out of anger over inequality.

Class divisions are so baked into society that poorer people refer to wealthier ones

16 as “your mercy” in casual conversation, a relic of colonialism. Cities are divided into “estratos,” which signify one’s social class.

The rich live in estrato six. The poor live in estrato one. Those in informal settlements — which legally don’t exist — live in what people colloquially call “estrato zero.”

But life had been changing, considerably. Colombia, one of the most unequal countries in an extremely inequitable region, cut its poverty rate nearly in half, to 27%, from 2002 to 2018. The country signed a historic peace deal with the main rebel group, promising to help thousands on the economic and social margins join the nation’s success.

Now, the pandemic could push poverty and inequality back to what they were at the turn of the 21st century in Colombia, according to an analysis by professors at the Universidad de los Andes. “A setback of two decades,” they called it.

Economists are predicting similar regressions around the region, with the World Bank warning that more than 50 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean could fall into poverty this year alone.

In Medellín, we watched hundreds of single mothers line up outside a food bank that expanded significantly when the crisis began. One woman, María Camila Salazar, 22, said her mother, María Eugenia Carvalho, 53, had become so dangerously malnourished that her thin shoulders now jutted from her frame.

“We go to bed without eating, without giving anything to our children,” she said.

Bucaramanga Perhaps the most glaring image of Latin America’s backslide was the highway.

We had expected to find empty routes.

Instead, mile after mile, we met processions of Venezuelan migrants pulling suitcases toward home.

They had come to Colombia only a few years or even months before, part of an exodus of migrants escaping Venezuela’s political and economic collapse. Many had hoped to learn a trade or finish a degree in Colombia, or just make enough money to

Monday, July 13, 2020

A 17-year-old with her child before heading to a park where she began working as a prostitute after her father lost his job due to the economic impact of the coronavirus, Cucuta, Colombia, May 22, 2020. help their families back home.

Now, because of the pandemic, the people we met had lost whatever small hold they had on a life in Colombia — a job, an apartment — and were migrating in reverse, returning to a nation where they were almost certain that disaster awaited.

Most said they had family in Venezuela who could help them, while in Colombia they no longer had anything.

“Hope is over,” said one man, Rafael Decena, 50.

Since the pandemic began, more than 80,000 Venezuelans have crossed back into their country, according to Colombian authorities.

In Bucaramanga, a mid-size city in Colombia, hundreds of migrant families camped outside a park to rest. One night, a parade of buses arrived, a fleet sent by the Colombian government to take people the last 120 miles to the border.

Cúcuta In Cúcuta, a town pressed up against the Venezuelan border, a 17-year-old stood in a cranberry-colored T-shirt and jean shorts, tugging at a purse with a shiny bow, swinging one heel nervously. A few men approached. A ribbon of cars roared past.

When the lockdown began, her father lost his job in construction and the refrigerator emptied. Pushed to desperation, she made the excruciating decision to head to a local park, where men began to pay her for sex, $6 an encounter. She was not even the youngest one there to do so.

Somebody had to bring in money, she said, “and it turned to me.”

Before the crisis, she had been selling small items — cigarettes, candy — in the street. But she had always dreamed of returning to school, of becoming a criminologist like those powerful women on television.

Having sex with strangers is “horrible,” she said, and when she has to, she imagines herself in a classroom, with her friends, to distract herself.

Over the past two decades, school attendance and rising access to birth control played a crucial role in shrinking the country’s wealth gap, allowing millions of women to study and work, when so many of their mothers had been forced to stay home.

When the pandemic hit, though, the number of women forced into prostitution swelled in Cúcuta, said Alejandra Vera, the director of a local advocacy group. So did the number of unwanted pregnancies, as travel restrictions and job losses made it

difficult to get condoms and other types of birth control.

Bogotá Back in Bogotá, Abello, the mother who had been evicted twice amid the pandemic, had moved in with a friend, both families crammed together.

Karol, the aspiring nurse, was trying her best to keep up with classes, but she couldn’t log into the school website without the internet, so a friend was downloading the assignments and texting them to her. She then completed them by hand, took pictures and texted them back. But it was hard, and she worried she was falling behind.

Nicol, the younger daughter, turned 15.

They had a small celebration, just family, and she wore Karol’s old dress, black, with tulle.

As the quarantine loosened, Abello finally returned to her job cleaning a bakery.

But her housekeeping clients never asked her back, and she was earning about half as much as she did before. It wasn’t clear when they’d be able to move into their own place.

“This has been hard on my mom,” said Karol. “As soon as this is over, I hope she gets new work and we can go back to our old lives.”

“Well,” she said, “God willing.”

Venezuelan families wait for a bus to the border, Bucaramanga, Colombia, May 20, 2020.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

17

Liar, liar, nation on fire

By MAUREEN DOWN

S

leepy Joe and Creepy Joe haven’t worked. So now they’re trying Sticky-Fingered Joe. After Joe Biden gave his big economic speech in Dunmore, Pennsylvania, they pounced.

“He plagiarized from me, but he could never pull it off,” President Donald Trump told reporters as he left Friday for a Florida fundraiser. “He likes plagiarizing.”

Kellyanne Conway told Fox News that Biden’s “Buy American” pitch was “rich with irony.”

“Look, this is Joe Biden plagiarizing Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader,” Conway said of the time Biden lifted lines from the British politician, during his first presidential run. “Two days ago,” she added, “he’s plagiarizing Bernie Sanders, and yesterday he’s plagiarizing Donald Trump: Buy American.”

“Buy American” is a slogan that House DemoJoe Biden, face mask at the ready. crats have used for many years, so if anyone is swiping it, it’s Trump. And Biden and Sanders coming sentimentality and loyalty. together on proposals is not plagiarism.

Biden’s fabulist flights were an effort to make himself look As to Kinnock, Kellyanne, I know a little something about that. That was my front-page New York Times story back in better. Trump’s are more audacious — and dangerous. It’s the 1987. Biden, as he did on other occasions, got swept away with difference between fibs and whoppers, white lies and white puffing himself up and sprinted over the factual line. He overi- supremacy.

Every day, Trump wakes up and constructs an alternative dentified with aspects of Kinnock’s life in Wales — fusing their universe where his crowds are bigger, his poll results are better, backgrounds — and borrowed some Celtic lyricism.

I wrote another story at the same time about Biden lifting the virus is evaporating, the testing is fantastic, it’s totally safe chunks of Robert Kennedy speeches. But that was the fault of his for kids to go back to school, and he’s doing the greatest job of speechwriter Pat Caddell, who sprinkled in Kennedy passages any president in history.

“Toxic positivity,” the president’s niece Mary Trump calls without Biden knowing. it in her new family memoir, “Too Much and Never Enough,” Biden dropped out of the race. I ran into him on a back which exposes the gruesome underbelly of the president’s stairway in the Senate when he was getting ready for his news gilded facade. conference. We looked at each other but did not speak. I figured Mary Trump is the daughter of the president’s older he’d never speak to me again. brother, Fred Trump Jr., who died an alcoholic after a lifetime I was wrong. One of his top aides yelled at me and told of his father’s abuse. With a doctorate in clinical psychology, me I wouldn’t be allowed into Robert Bork’s Supreme Court she diagnoses her uncle as a narcissist, of course, but also quite confirmation hearings, which Biden was chairing. But Biden himself was friendly and fair to me afterward, even when I possibly having “antisocial personality disorder.”

“The country is now suffering from the same toxic positivwrote pieces that were highly critical of the way he conducted ity that my grandfather deployed specifically to drown out his the Anita Hill hearings and ripped on him for his hair plugs. He ailing wife, torment his dying son, and damage past healing the was so unvengeful that I began to doubt he was really Irish. (His psyche of his favorite child, Donald J. Trump,” she concludes. middle name is Robinette, after all.)

Biden has a talent for messes and has made some bad The inability of the “court jester from Queens,” as Mary calls him, to succeed without being heavily subsidized by his father judgment calls — including voting to authorize the Iraq War. But when David Axelrod told me that Barack Obama was created a tension where he knew he was inadequate but could leaning toward putting Biden on the ticket, I thought it was a never admit it.

“At a very deep level,” Mary wrote, “his bragging and false fine idea. I felt that Obama made a mistake nudging him aside bravado are not directed at the audience in front of him but at in 2016; I think he would have beaten Trump. his audience of one: his long-dead father.”

Biden’s gaffes, logorrhea, puffery and handsiness are part A Washington Post story a few days ago underscored her of the messy package that is Uncle Joe. So are his empathy,

point that he is the same “desperate” little boy.

The story recounted that Trump sees himself as a victim of the pandemic, and his mood is so “woe is me” that advisers tried to cheer him up with special events — “bringing 18-wheelers onto the White House South Lawn in mid-April or creating social media videos that feature throngs of his adoring fans.”

His father’s racism infected him, and the patriarch promoted a warped idea of manliness.

The president’s cracks about “ugly women” and his disrespectful behavior in business were meant to make him look tough.

Fred Trump Jr. was destroyed by it. But the president is trying to destroy us with it, with his absurd philosophy that masks are unmanly.

Biden, who assiduously stays masked, has never been a divider. Indeed, there were times, as with the Hill hearings and the Iraq War vote, that he leaned too far into comity.

But Trump divides with feral pleasure. “The atmosphere of division my grandfather created in the Trump family is the water in which Donald has always swum,” Mary Trump wrote, “and division continues to benefit him at the expense of everybody else.”

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Monday, July 13, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Why will our great-grandchildren scorn us?

A chicken farm in North Carolina.

By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

A

s we pull down controversial statues and reassess historical figures, I’ve been wondering what our greatgrandchildren will find bewilderingly immoral about our own times — and about us.

Which of today’s heroes will be discredited? Which statues toppled? What will later generations see as our own ethical blind spots?

I believe that one will be our cruelty to animals. Modern society relies on factory farming to produce protein that is inexpensive and abundant. But it causes suffering to animals on an incalculable scale.

Over the last 200 years, the world has become far more sensitive to animal rights. In feudal Europe, a game consisted of nailing a cat to a post and head-butting it to death; now growing numbers of states have passed animal protection laws, McDonald’s is moving to cage-free eggs, and there are legal debates about whether certain mammals should have standing to sue in courts.

The upshot is court cases like Cetacean Community v. Bush, in which the plaintiffs were whales, dolphins and porpoises; and Naruto, a Crested Macaque, v. Slater.

Pope Francis suggests that animals go to heaven, and

many humans would agree: Paradise would be diminished without pets.

Yet while we adore our pets and coddle them — a dog in a wealthy family may get better medical and dental care than a child in a poor family — we as a society often do not extend this empathy to unseen farm animals, especially poultry.

Some 9.3 billion chickens were slaughtered last year in the United States — 28 per American — and here’s how they are typically killed: Workers shove the chickens’ legs into metal shackles, and the birds are then carried upside down to an electrified bath that stuns them before a circular saw cuts open their necks and they are dunked in scalding water.

Even when this system works perfectly, chickens sometimes have legs or wings broken as they are shackled.

When the system fails, they are not stunned and struggle frantically as they are carried to the saw. The saw in turn misses many birds — the Agriculture Department said that 526,000 chickens were not slaughtered correctly last year — and some are boiled alive.

A child who plucks out a bird’s feathers may be punished, but corporate executives who torture birds by the billions are showered with stock options.

Factory farming also diminishes human front-line workers, from struggling farmers who raise animals to the miserably paid and poorly protected slaughterhouse employees now falling ill from the coronavirus.

In the face of all this, attitudes are changing: About 8% of young American adults said in 2018 that they were vegetarians, compared with just 2% of Americans 55 and older.

I became a vegetarian almost two years ago (not a strict one, and I do eat fish) because my daughter nagged me (“provided moral guidance” would be a nicer spin), and I suspect that ethical and environmental considerations — and the increasing availability of tasty alternatives to meat — will lead our descendants to eat less meat and be baffled at our casual acceptance of an industrial agricultural model built on large-scale cruelty.

“One day future generations will look back on our abuse of animals in factory farms with the same attitude that we have to the cruelties of the Roman ‘games’ at the Colosseum,” Peter Singer, a Princeton University philosopher, told me. “They will wonder how we could be blind to the suffering we are so needlessly inflicting on billions of animals.”

A second area I think will leave future generations baffled at our heartlessness is our indifference to suffering in impoverished countries. More than 5 million young children will die this year around the world from diarrhea, malnutrition or other ailments; we let these children perish essentially because of our own tribalism. They are not a priority to us.

While I denounced the mistreatment of broiler chickens, it’s only fair to note that about 5% of those birds die prematurely. In contrast, 7.8% of children in sub-Saharan Africa die by the age of 5, according to UNICEF. So heartless agribusiness concerns do a better job ensuring the survival of baby chicks than the international community sometimes does for human babies.

A third area where I suspect our descendants will judge us harshly is climate change. Our generation’s denialism will lead to more extreme weather, more flooded homes, more heat waves — and resentment that early-21st-century humans could have been so selfish as to refuse to take small steps to reduce carbon emissions.

I raised this issue of our moral blind spots in my email newsletter the other day, and one reader, Brad Marston, a physics professor at Brown University, put it this way: “In 100 years our generation may be as poorly regarded as 19thcentury racists are today (or worse), due to our failure to tackle climate change, leaving a damaged and possibly ruined planet to future generations.”

So I’m all for reexamining history and removing statues of Confederate generals. But just as important is our obligation to think deeply about our own moral myopia and address it while there is still time.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

19

Familia ordena investigación en hogar de ancianos en Carolina tras fallecer dos personas Por THE STAR l secretario de la Familia, Orlando López Belmonte, inEvestigación formó en la tarde de hoy domingo que ordenó una inde la División de Maltrato Institucional de la

agencia que dirige tras informarse por el Departamento de Salud de un nuevo fallecimiento de una residente en el hogar en Carolina donde se detectó un brote de Coronavirus.

“Conforme han llegado los resultados de las pruebas moleculares realizadas en ambos hogares se han confirmado nuevos casos positivos a COVID-19 y un fallecimiento, por lo que hemos tomado medidas mas agresivas para evitar el contagio de otros residentes y procurar servicios constantes a los residentes contagiados, no empece a que algunos no presentan síntomas. También he ordenado una investigación para determinar si ha habido negligencia por parte del operador del establecimiento en el manejo de los contagios,” aseguró en declaraciones escritas el Secretario de la Familia.

López Belmonte informó que se confirmaron nuevos casos positivos en el hogar. Los residentes contagiados fueron trasladados a un centro hospitalario para recibir servicios y ser monitoreados las 24 horas.

El funcionario explicó que se activó un apoyo interagencial al hogar en beneficio de sus residentes y para su protección, ningún personal esta autorizado a entrar al hogar, a menos que se permita por el Departamento de la Familia. Aseguró que se coordinó una limpieza profunda del lugar entre otras medidas cautelares.

Entre las medidas tomadas se señaló la coordinación del suplido de agua para la cisterna con la AAA, ya que el establecimiento de referencia se encuentra en la zona de racionamiento; el suplido de alimentos, coordinado a través de la ADSEF, para evitar que personal del hogar salga a realizar estas tareas; el suplido de medicamentos que a la fecha se encuentran al día y en orden. Así mismo, se confirmó la disponibilidad de suministros de seguridad y protección, para que en caso de hagan falta adicionales un proveedor pueda suplirlos.

“Se asignó un personal exclusivo para atender este esta-

blecimiento y se aseguraron los suplidos de sus necesidades para este periodo. La prioridad en este momento es la salud y seguridad de los residentes. Hemos ordenado al operador a comunicarle a todas las familias de los residentes del centro sobre las acciones tomadas y sobre el estado de salud de sus familiares. Sabemos el desasosiego que puede causar una situación como esta y queremos mantener a todos los familiares en constante comunicación con los residentes”, dijo López Belmonte.

El Secretario informó que la división de Licenciamiento inició, en conjunto con el Departamento de Salud una investigación sobre las circunstancias que llevaron al contagio de estos residentes, con el objetivo de controlarlo y fijar responsabilidades.

“Una vez finalizada esta investigación se tomarán las acciones correspondan, según dictan los protocolos y la ley.

Advertimos a todos los establecimientos a cumplir fielmente con los protocolos de salud. El fallar en cumplir con las medias de seguridad expone a los residentes a consecuencias fatales. Conscientes de la vulnerabilidad de esta población y la severidad del virus desde el mes de abril se prohibieron las visitas en los centros y se promulgó el protocolo de manejo. Todos tenemos que evitar exponer a nuestros adultos mayores a este virus mortal”, sostuvo López Belmonte.

El hogar tiene actualmente una matrícula de 59 residentes, de los cuales 27 están bajo la custodia del Estado y 32 de manera privada. El hogar tiene 38 empleados, quienes ya se habían realizado las pruebas de rigor con anterioridad y se realizaron nuevamente.

Por su parte, el Departamento de Salud informó que, durante el transcurso de la semana se continuaron recibiendo los resultados de las pruebas moleculares asociadas a los residentes y empleados del brote identificado a inicios de la semana en un hogar de cuido prolongado en Carolina. Hasta el momento, el total de casos positivos mediante prueba molecular es de 23 personas: 18 residentes y 5 empleados.

A su vez, en el mismo establecimiento se han identificado 3 casos probables mediante prueba serológica: un empleado y dos residentes. En el caso de los residentes con prueba molecular positiva a COVID, estos son 7 féminas y

11 varones entre las edades de 52 a 89 años. De estos, un varón falleció la semana pasada y una fémina falleció en el día de ayer; sus restos fueron trasladados al Negociado de Ciencias Forenses para realización de autopsia y certificación de causa de muerte.

Durante la semana se habían reportado dos pacientes con COVID-19 confirmados mediante prueba molecular que se encontraban hospitalizados. Para garantizar la salud de estos adultos mayores, se comenzó desde el sábado 11 de julio de 2020 un proceso de traslado de los residentes con resultados positivos confirmados con COVID-19 mediante prueba molecular a instituciones hospitalarias para el monitoreo de su salud.

“La investigación la estamos realizando con diligencia y responsabilidad para garantizar que tengamos toda la información necesaria para tomar acciones concretas. De manera simultánea, estamos actuando con inmediatez para atajar la situación y evitar mayores contagios. El esfuerzo con los miembros del Elderly Task Force está enfocado en reforzar todas las medidas de salud y seguridad y establecer protocolos más estrictos para evitar que nuestros hogares de cuidado prolongado se sigan convirtiendo en foco de contagio. Es importante señalar que esta situación está bajo investigación; una vez concluya la misma, se podrá dar detalles más actualizados”, dijo la epidemióloga Idania Rodríguez Ayuso.

Como parte de los esfuerzos de vigilancia epidemiológica se realizaron visitas al hogar de cuido prolongado.

Se brindaron recomendaciones para el aislamiento de los casos y se comenzó los procesos de investigación de caso.

Mañana lunes se realizarán nuevamente pruebas moleculares y serológicas a los residentes y empleados del hogar cuya prueba molecular la semana pasada fue negativa. A partir de la investigación de caso, se han identificado, hasta el momento, 59 contactos, los cuales pudieran aumentar en la medida que se continúe con las investigaciones.

Así mismo se informó que al 9 de julio se han realizado pruebas en 392 establecimientos que licencia el Departamento de la Familia entre las pruebas de gestionadas por el Task Force y las realizadas de manera privada.

Solicitan al DRNA que haga cumplir la ley contra el depósito de cenizas de carbón Por THE STAR ctivistas que luchan contra la quema de carbón para A producir energía y el depósito de cenizas tóxicas en la Isla denunciaron en la tarde de hoy domingo que

el Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales (DRNA) sigue violando la Ley 5-2020, que prohíbe el depósito y disposición de los residuos de la combustión de carbón en Puerto Rico.

La Ley 5, firmada por la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced el pasado 2 de enero, le daba 90 días al DRNA para aprobar un reglamento, límite de tiempo que se cumplió el 2 de abril. Sin embargo, la agencia ambiental aún no ha presentado el reglamento ni convocado vistas públicas para la evaluación del mismo.

Para José “Nolo” Díaz Pérez, miembro del campamento contra cenizas en Peñuelas, la falta de acción del DRNA podría poner en peligro la propia aplicabilidad de la Ley 5.

“En una reunión que sostuvimos el pasado 16 de abril con el secretario del DRNA, licenciado Rafael Ma-

chargo, y en comunicaciones posteriores, le explicamos la urgencia de tener ese reglamento aprobado, ante la amenaza de la Agencia de Protección Ambiental federal (EPA por sus siglas en inglés) de enmendar su propia reglamentación para complacer a la carbonera AES y permitirle depositar sus cenizas tóxicas en cualquier parte de Puerto Rico. Al parecer el licenciado Machargo no comprendió el peligro al que estamos expuestos”, señaló Díaz Pérez en declaraciones escritas.

Según el líder peñolano la información que tiene es que el borrador del reglamento está en manos de la división legal del DRNA desde hace más de un mes.

“Incluso, ante una consulta del propio DRNA, desde el 21 de mayo el Departamento de Justicia avaló que las vistas públicas pudieran ofrecerse utilizando métodos electrónicos y video conferencia, en estos momentos de crisis debido al coronavirus. Sin embargo, el DRNA ni presenta el reglamento ni convoca a vistas públicas”, señaló Díaz Pérez.

Por su parte, Víctor Alvarado Guzmán, portavoz del Comité Diálogo Ambiental de Salinas, exigió al secreta-

rio del DRNA a explicar su falta de acción.

“Hay muchas preguntas que Machargo debe contestar: ¿por qué se permite a AES continuar contaminando el acuífero de Guayama con sus cenizas tóxicas? ¿Por qué AES sigue sin cubrir la montaña de cenizas en su patio? ¿Por qué no ha enviado a la EPA la carta que le solicitamos informando oficialmente sobre la aprobación de la Ley 5? ¿Dónde está el reglamento y por qué no convocan a las vistas públicas? Esta falta de acción de Machargo a quien favorece es a AES. ¿Acaso esa es la intención?”, opinó Alvarado Guzmán.

Ambos portavoces expresaron que, inicialmente, le dieron espacio al secretario para demostrar que venía a tomar las acciones correctas sobre la contaminación producida por AES. “Es tiempo de que el diálogo se convierta en acciones concretas. Pero, me parece que tendremos que volver a la calle para presionar al gobierno a cumplir la ley y proteger a nuestra gente de la intención maliciosa de AES de seguir tirándonos sus cenizas tóxicas en todo el país”, finalizó Díaz Pérez.

20

Monday, July 13, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

The Chicks are done caring what people think

By AMANDA HESS

so high,” Strayer, 47, said. “This song had to be perfect; this line had to be just-so.”

When it was over, “I was tired,” Maines said. “I just wanted to raise my kids.”

In the years since, the Chicks dabbled in side projects: Maines released a solo album, “Mother,” and Strayer and Maguire wrote two albums together as the Court Yard Hounds. It was as if, by scattering their powers, they were working in a kind of stealth mode, making music under the pop radar. When I asked Strayer what was different about playing without Maines, she joked: “Probably the success of it.”

There’s just something spellbinding about these three women singing as one.

Their harmony is totemic — it is a sonic representation of sisterhood. (It helps that Strayer and Maguire are actually sisters.)

In an industry that’s never really loved them or defended them, they became a testament to female self-reliance. They move with the energy of witches who could not be burned. If you were already a fan of the Chicks, the incident made you love them harder, seeding their popfeminist anthems with real-life gravitas.

In the time that the Chicks have been gone, they have not been forgotten. They have become a touchstone for some of the biggest women in pop: When

T

he women formerly known as the Dixie Chicks have survived the good old boys of country music, a legal battle with their record label, a feud with a president and arguably the first attempted cancellation of the internet era.

As they plotted their comeback — writing their first album together in 14 years — they decided to have a little bit of fun with their reputation. So they called up restaurants across America with menu items named after the band.

The Chicks — they dropped the “Dixie” last month — huddled around the phone as their producer, Jack Antonoff, quizzed establishments about the conceptual underpinnings of their Dixie Chicken sandwiches, with their “unapologetically spicy” mayonnaises and “controversial” sauces. “They’re known for hating men,” one hostess explained.

Antonoff asked her if he would be safer ordering a lunch associated with jingoistic country star Toby Keith instead.

“The Toby Keith sandwich,” the Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines, 45, said, “had a glowing description.”

When the Chicks retell the story of the great sandwich prank, they are thousands of miles apart — Maines patched into a Zoom call from Los Angeles, Martie Maguire from Austin, Texas, and Emily Strayer from San Antonio — but they are speaking as one, piling onto one another’s sentences and leaning close into their webcams, as if they’re all drawing from some central power source. It has been 17 years since their lives blew up, and now they have sufficient distance from what they call “the incident” that they can peer down at the wreckage and laugh. By the time they get to Keith, Strayer and Maguire are softly giggling and Maines is tossing her head back, scream-laughing.

In 2003, if you’ve forgotten, U.S. troops invaded Iraq, and Maines offhandedly told a London audience, “We’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” The comment sparked a country radio boycott, album-burning rallies and a squabble

A photo illustration of, from left, Emily Strayer, Natalie Maines and Martie Maguire of the Chicks, photographed via FaceTime. with Keith, who staged concerts in front of an oversize doctored photo of Maines embracing Saddam Hussein. The Chicks appeared on the cover of Entertainment Weekly nude, with some of the names they’d been called printed on their bodies.

“The incident” also presaged the coming tide of celebrity activism, socialmedia cancellation and political harassment campaigns. But even as they were cast out of Nashville, Tennessee, the Chicks entered the pop stratosphere, and

within a few years, they were the stars of a redemptive documentary, winners of a Grammy sweep and keepers of a kind of superpower — what Maines calls “a true ability to not care.”

For 14 years, they cared so little about the music industry that America’s bestselling female band of all time did not release any albums of new songs to sell. They had made “Taking the Long Way,” the smash 2006 album that rebutted their smearing by country music, inside a pressure cooker. “The stakes were

In a photo illustration, Emily Strayer of the Chicks, photographed via FaceTime.

The San Juan Daily Star Beyoncé played her stomping “Lemonade” track “Daddy Lessons” at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards, the Chicks were right behind her, drawling “Texas.” And when Taylor Swift needed backup on her hyper-emotional “Lover” ballad “Soon You’ll Get Better,” she leaned on the voices of the Chicks.

When “Gaslighter” was released, in March, it sent fans scrambling to decode its seemingly autobiographical clues. One particularly evocative line — “Boy, you know exactly what you did on my boat” — instantly converted Chicks supporters into a squad of maritime sleuths. They noted that the Chicks had written the album, also called “Gaslighter,” as Maines weathered a stormy divorce from her estranged husband — an estranged husband who just In a photo illustration, Natalie Maines of so happened to have possessed a boat, the Chicks, photographed via FaceTime. the Nautalee, named after his wife.

Last summer, Maines’ ex peti- and Lana Del Rey. At the party, as tioned a court to hand over the songs, Barbara Walters mingled with Robert arguing that they could violate a confi- Downey Jr., Antonoff was most excited dentiality clause in the couple’s prenup- “to see a Dixie Chick in the wild,” he tial agreement. The music was saved — said in a phone interview.

Maines visited Antonoff’s studio a “Gaslighter” will be released on July 17 — but since the divorce was settled in couple of times, and in 2018, she inDecember, the Chicks have been mark- troduced him to the other Chicks over edly silent on any real-life sources of breakfast in the restaurant of the Suninspiration for the album. Their lyrics, set Tower Hotel. “He was a nerd,” Mahowever, are talking. On a salty bop guire, 50, said. “Is he fashionable becalled “Tights on My Boat,” Maines cause he’s willing to go so retro ’80s? further clarifies the ship situation: “You Or is he just really out of touch? It can tell the girl who left her tights on my was cute.” Antonoff possessed a littlebrother energy that fit easily into the boat that she can have you now.”

Before “Gaslighter,” Maines was sisterhood. With Antonoff, Maguire mired in an uninspiring songwriting said, “we felt comfortable sharing our period — “Mother” was mostly covers dirty laundry.”

Their first studio session together — but suddenly she had much to say.

“I was going through a lot of things per- quickly produced “Gaslighter,” and the sonally, so I had a lot to write about,” Chicks immediately decided to follow she said. The Chicks had envisioned that sound. Maines was going to fly to making the album with a kitchen-sink Hawaii for a three-week vacation, but approach, using a rotating cast of pro- she refashioned it into a work trip. The ducers, but “I was raw,” Maines said. Chicks assembled a menagerie of in“It was too hard for me to reveal myself struments and children and jetted off to to a lot of different people.” Once the Kauai, with Antonoff and recording enChicks invited Antonoff into the studio, gineer Laura Sisk in tow. On the island, he so disarmed the three of them that they wrote over the sounds of pouring they asked him to shepherd the rest of rain and screaming roosters. They had to shut off the booming air conditioner the album.

Maines first encountered Antonoff to record, so they played drenched in years earlier, at Howard Stern’s star- sweat, like marathoners. In their downbloated 60th birthday party. Antonoff, time, they shopped for ukuleles, swam a fixture of indie-guy bands like Steel in caves and ate flavored ice.

As they worked, “Laura and I were Train, fun. and Bleachers, has also become an unlikely collaborator to pop’s also sort of on a family vacation” with biggest female artists, including Lorde the Chicks and their broods, Antonoff

Monday, July 13, 2020

21

said. One minute, they’d all be eating barbecue in cowboy hats and novelty T-shirts, and the next, “we’d be combing through these heartbreaking lyrics about betrayal and grief.”

At the beginning of their career, the Chicks were doubly dismissed. They felt marginalized in music because they were a country act, and marginalized within country because they were women. “They accepted us because we made them a lot of money, but they didn’t get us or like us,” Maines said, joking of the Sony chairman: “We didn’t get invited to Tommy Mottola’s wedding.”

When “Wide Open Spaces” went platinum for Sony in 1998, “I had this dream,” Maines said. “You’d hear all these stories of, like, the cast of ‘Frasier’ all getting cars,” she explained, and when Christmas rolled around, she eagerly opened the package from her record company to find an array of scented soaps. “Our contract was so piddly,” Maines said. “I was calling our manager, like, ‘Why can’t they at least send us a TV? They make TVs.’” “Well,” Maines said, “the big TVs did arrive.”

In a photo illustration, Martie Maguire of the Chicks, photographed via FaceTime.

One of the greatest indictments of the country music industry is that after the Chicks churned out country hit after country hit, rising to become an unparalleled success story for the genre and bringing a huge new audience with them, country music did not want them.

In recent years, the status of women in

the genre has only devolved. In 2015, a radio consultant compared female country acts to “the tomatoes of our salad” — a garnish. Despite the emergence of countless powerful, gifted women in the genre, radio — still the all-important arbiter of taste in Nashville — seems to think that playing one woman an hour is more than enough.

In 2016, the Chicks had sworn off the country machine forever, “and then Beyoncé called,” Maines said, and when Beyoncé calls, you say yes. When they arrived at the CMAs, they found the scene had not evolved. “They treated us very weird backstage,” Maines said. As Strayer’s daughter played with Blue Ivy, the Chicks sensed a backlash brewing.

Alan Jackson was so affronted by the performance that he walked out, later tweeting using the hashtag “#KeepinItCountry.”

A vocal contingent of aggrieved viewers flooded the internet with messages trashing the performance. “For them to disrespect her that way,” Maines said of Beyoncé, “was disgusting.” It was a classic Dixie Chicks situation — a high point for their careers, and a new low for country music.

Country is more than a genre — it is a culture steeped in conservatism, masculinity and whiteness. When CMA viewers complained that Beyoncé was “not country,” it meant the same thing as when Billboard removed Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” from the country chart. After a 14-year wait, the Chicks have improbably returned at another flash point, and this time, they feel free to say what they mean.

When the group announced its name change last month, casting Dixie from their lives for good, supportive fans jockeyed for attention with conservative commentators on Twitter, who lashed out with an almost programmatic outrage. The Chicks staged dramatic readings of the most absurd takes over Zoom.

“I used to care way too much what people thought,” Strayer said. “I really have a don’t-give-a-[expletive] part to me now, which I didn’t have before.”

That time when it was actually risky for an artist to make a political statement — it seems so long ago. “I criticize the president,” Maines said, and here her voice lifted into her trademark Texas howl: “Every single day!”

22

Monday, July 13, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Venice tourism may never be the same. It could be better.

Visitors along a canal in Venice, June 1, 2020.

By ANNA MOMIGLIANO

L

ong before Venice became the destination of choice for millions of international holidaymakers, locals had a tradition of flânerie, an aimless stroll through the city’s calli, or walkways. They would bump into acquaintances for a chat and the occasional drink, an ombra de vin, a “shadow of wine,” as it’s called in the lagoon.

That tradition has been picked up again. The pandemic crushed the tourism industry, curtailing the hordes of annual visitors that made flânerie a near impossibility, and now many residents — particularly those furloughed or laid off — have more time and space to enjoy the city’s slow pace and faded beauty. But money is tight, for that sip of wine and everything else. Local taverns have begun accepting promises of future payments from regulars.

“People are like, I’ll pay you in September, when hopefully tourists will be back,” said Matteo Secchi, an unemployed hotel concierge. “If we don’t help each other, who will?”

Secchi, a native Venetian, started working in tourism when he was in high school 30 years ago. “My first job was to escort tourists from hotels to Murano’s glass shops,” he said. “Since I can remember, tourism has been our only economy. We thought it was a bottomless well, like oil for the Saudis.”

Venice certainly wasn’t alone. The economies of other European cities — Barcelona, Prague and others — grew to rely heavily on tourism, leaving them now particularly exposed to the side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But there’s a new feeling many residents and local travel operators share: The crisis creates an opportunity to make future travel to and within their cities and regions more sustainable. This crossroads is sparking conversations about how to make tourism less taxing on urban infrastructure and local inhabitants.

In Venice, residents and local leaders hope their city can develop an economy that doesn’t revolve entirely around tourism, one that would draw international investors, expand the footprint of the city’s two universities, and turn its empty buildings into environmental research facilities.

Yes, the pandemic has shuttered Venice’s lodging industry, said Claudio Scarpa, the president of Associazione Veneziana Albergatori, a body representing 430 hotels in Venice, but “it is also a precious occasion to rethink tourism.”

“This is the time to reclaim this city,” he said, “or in a couple of years we’ll get back to complaining about overtourism.”

Other Venetians echoed that sentiment.

“We have to act now, before mass tourism will be back at full capacity, because we won’t get a second chance,” said Paolo Costa, a former mayor of Venice and an economics professor who also served as the dean of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

A commercial hub ebbs The uniqueness of this Italian city has made it a worldwide attraction for centuries. Tellingly, Venice’s rise as a travel destination coincided with its decline as an economic powerhouse, said Ezio Micelli, an expert of urban transformation at Iuav University of Venice.

As a city-state, Venice thrived as a commercial and financial hub for much of the Middle Ages. Its location midway between Constantinople and Western Europe made it an ideal junction for the trade of spices, silk and salt. “It was the capital of capitalism,” Micelli said.

But as the center of trade moved from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, Venice lost centrality, and by the end of the 18th century, when it fell under foreign rule, its decline was unstoppable. It was then that wealthy Europeans started visiting Italy’s art-rich cities, including Venice, in a tradition known as “the Grand Tour.” Lord Byron and Stendhal were among the city’s earliest holidaymakers. By the 19th century, Venice’s Lido became the place of pilgrimage for Europe’s well-off bourgeoise (think of Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”).

But by the late 20th century, Venice became what economists describe as a “tourism monoculture,” borrowing the term from the risky agricultural practice of growing a single crop.

‘Too many of them’ Before COVID-19, hotels in and around Venice hosted 10.2 million mostly international guests a year, according to Italy’s bureau of statistics. But this figure — an estimate at best — does not account for day-trippers from cruise ships, the train station and bus tours. One estimate puts the actual number of tourists at 20 million annually — largely concentrated in an area of 2 square miles and 50,000 residents. They contribute 3 billion euros, or about $3.3 billion, a year.

“Tourists grew gradually, year by year, and before we realized it, there were too many of them, just like a boiling frog,” Micelli said.

The mass tourism of recent decades was a result of globalization, home-sharing platforms, cheap airfares and emerging economies. Ryanair, easyJet and other low-cost carriers began flying into the Marco Polo airport, cruise ships alone brought in 1.6 million visitors each year, and the growing strength of Asian economies allowed new tourists to join the crowds of Europeans and North Americans.

Especially in the high season between May and October, and during Carnival in February, Venice was impossibly crowded — particularly in its narrow calli, some just 2 meters, or 6.5 feet, wide.

When Micelli, the urban studies professor, would

The San Juan Daily Star visit a brother who lives on one of the city’s most touristy streets, he sometimes could not get out the door.

“It’s like a flood, literally. So I just have to wait,” Micelli said. Occasionally the local police would declare some calli one-way. “I guess Venice is the only place in the world where you need one-way pedestrian streets.”

Cristina Giussani, a bookshop owner, often walked home with heavy groceries because the vaporetto, the water buses that serve as public transportation, would be swarmed with tourists. She considers the famous Rialto Bridge off-limits between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. “because it’s impossible to cross it without throwing elbows.”

Tourism changed the soul of the lagoon. Grocery stores turned into souvenir shops, and rising housing costs and an increasing lack of services pushed residents out.

With more than 8,000 apartments listed on Airbnb, Venice has Italy’s highest Airbnb-to-population ratio.

The city’s historical center, consisting of two islands, had 175,000 residents at its peak in the 1950s.

In 2009, the population fell below 60,000, the conventional threshold to be considered a city in Italy. A mock funeral was organized, with a coffin wrapped in the city’s 1,500-year-old flag.

Today, the center of the city has about 50,000 residents.

“Being a resident in Venice feels like being part of the resistance,” Giussani said.

Day-trippers and cruise ships “The longer a visitor stays, the smaller his impact on the territory,” said Magda Antonioli Corigliano, a tourism industry scholar at Milan’s Bocconi University. Daytrippers tend to have a particularly harmful impact, she argues, because they are on the move, and always crowding the same spots around St. Mark’s and the Rialto.

“If you have only one day, you want to see as much as you can, so you run here and there, take a lot of vaporettos,” Antonioli Corigliano said. Overnight visitors can enjoy the lagoon at a slower pace and venture beyond its most obvious spots.

Then there are the cruise ships, docking at the Marittima port and navigating through the Giudecca Canal and St. Mark’s basin. Though responsible for a fraction of daytrippers, they unload a significant number at a time and have a significant impact on the city’s environment because of the amount of fuel used.

“A cruise is a very energy-intensive way you can take a holiday,” said Jane Da Mosto, a scientist who heads the environmentalist group We Are Here Venice, which opposes the presence of cruise ships.

Cruise ships bring money, but not all goes to Venice’s historical center.

The COVID crisis Six months ago, Venice’s overtourism came to a sudden halt.

The number of tourists in the city plummeted first in November, when a series of unusually high tides spurred cancellations. Tourism almost disappeared beginning in late February, when the COVID-19 pandemic prompted authorities to cancel the Carnival and, soon after, declare a nationwide lockdown.

Scarpa, the president of the hotel body, said the sudden drop in tourism could cost the city more than 1 bil-

Monday, July 13, 2020

Crowds of tourists swarm Riva degli Schiavoni, by St. Mark’s Square in Venice, April 22, 2019. lion euros in lost revenue. About 10,000 Venetians have been furloughed in the hotel industry alone, Scarpa said.

The recovery, he added, will be slow, as hotels expect only one-third the usual number of visitors for the high season this year.

Since Italy lifted its restriction on movement in early June, the lagoon has seen few visitors, the vast majority of them day-trippers from the surrounding Veneto region.

The role of universities Most of all, Venice’s two universities are actively working on revitalizing the city’s population.

“People tend to think that everyone in Venice is either a tourist or a resident, but in the middle there’s another group, temporary residents, who are part of the social

23

TRAVEL

fabric and breathe new life into it,” said Michele Bugliesi, the dean of Ca’ Foscari, Venice’s largest university.

The school, he said, is already a draw for temporary residents — “It’s remarkable how easy we get visiting professors,” Bugliesi said— but this year it plans to open a business incubator to attract forward-thinking entrepreneurs.

In late 2018, partnering with the Italian Institute of Technology, Ca’ Foscari launched a center for applying technologies to the preservation of cultural heritage, which is now expanding. In 2018, the university also founded, with Italy’s National Research Council, a program on climate change. It is expected to expand; beginning next semester, it will offer a new English-language degree in environmental humanities.

Iuav, a small public-arts college, is converting empty bed-and-breakfasts into dorms for its 4,000 students, most of whom were commuters.

Taken alone, these three projects aren’t enough to repopulate Venice. But Bugliesi thinks they have the potential to create “a critical mass that would set off a chain reaction.”

For the first time, Venice may have the space to dedicate to new projects.

“Very soon, Venice will end up with lots of empty buildings, because some hotels will have to close. Now it’s the time to think about what to do with them,” Costa said.

“Before the pandemic, every project, every idea had to carve out space from overtourism. But now, there’s a whole world out there.”

The Regata Storica, which celebrates Venetian rowing with historical costumes and rowing races, in Venice, Sept. 1, 2019.

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LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUER- cución de Hipoteca. EMPLARIVERA TO RICO. ZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ES20 Gardenia Dr. TADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA A: MARITZA Kinnbrook, Monticello EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESMALDONADO RIVERA, NY, 127001; 19 Paseos TADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO por sí y en representación del Plata, Toa Alta, Puerto de la SOCIEDAD LEGAL LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERRico 00953. Teléfono: TO RICO. DE GANANCIALES (787)460-1691 A: SUHEIL MARIE compuesta por esta Por la presente se le emplaza ACEVEDO SERRANO y ROBERTO BRAVO para que presente al tribunal su E21 Calle Isla Nena, COLÓN alegación responsiva dentro de Reparto Flamingo, los 30 días de haber sido dili20 Gardenia Dr. Bayamón PR 00959 genciado este emplazamiento, Kinnbrook, Monticello 8404 (Edificio 8) Flamingo excluyéndose el día del diligenNY, 127001; 19 Paseos Apartments Bayamón PR ciamiento. Usted deberá predel Plata, Toa Alta, Puerto 00956; sentar su alegación responsiva Rico 00953. a través del Sistema Unificado teléfono 787-379-9996 y Teléfono: (787)460-1691. de Manejo y Administración de 787-521-4958 Por la presente se le emplaza

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Si usted revisión o apelación dentro del PAGARÉ HIPOTECARIO EX- parte demandante dentro del a través del Sistema Unificado término de 30 días contados a deja de presentar su alegación TRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIEN- término de sesenta (60) días de Manejo y Administración de responsiva dentro del referido partir de la publicación por edicTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS a partir de la publicación del Casos (SUMAC), al cual pueto de esta notificación, dirijo a termino, el tribunal podrá dicUNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL Edicto, apercibiendo que de no de acceder utilizando la directar sentencia en rebeldía en usted esta notificación que se PRESIDENTE DEL OS ESTA- hacerlo así dentro del término ción electrónica https://unired. considerara hecha en la fecha su contra y conceder el remeDOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LI- indicado, el Tribunal podrá anoramaiudicial.pr, salvo que se dio solicitado en la demanda, de la publicación de este edicBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO tar su Rebeldía y dictar Senrepresente por derecho propio, tencia, concediendo el remedio to. Copia de esta notificación ha o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, RICO. SS. en cuyo caso deberá presentar en el ejercicio de su sana dissido archivada en los autos del A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD así solicitado sin más citarle su alegación responsiva en la ni oírle. EXPEDlDO, bajo mi caso con fecha de 6 de JULIO creción, lo entiende procedenDOE COMO POSIBLES firma y sello de este Tribunal, de 2020. En MANATI, Puer- te. POR LA PRESENTE se le secretaría del tribunal. Si usted TENEDORES DE PAGARE en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, hoy to. Rico, el 6 de julio de 2020. emplaza y requiere para que deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido Dirección Desconocida día 6 de julio de 2020. LCDA. Vivian Y Fresse Gonzalez, Se- notifique a: Quedan ustedes notificados LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, cretaria Regional. F/Carmen LCDA. RAQUEL DESEDA BELAVAL termino, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en E-mail: que el demandante de epígra- Secretaria Regional. Amalyn J. Rosario Valentin, Secretaria rdeseda@delgadofernandez.com su contra y conceder el remefe ha radicado en este Tribunal Figueroa Nieves, Sec Auxiliar Auxiliar.

DELGADO & FERNÁNDEZ, LLC dio solicitado en la demanda, una demanda contra ustedes del Tribunal.

P.O. Box 11750, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, Fernández Juncos Station LEGAL NOTICE como codemandados, en la San Juan, Puerto Rico 00910-1750 en el ejercicio de su sana disLEGAL NOTICE que se solicita la sustitución juESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO Tel. [787] 274-1414 / creción, lo entiende procedendicial de un pagaré extraviado ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUFax [787] 764-8241 con fecha de 19 de diciembre DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA Expedido bajo mi firma y sello te. POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza y requiere para que de 2000 por la suma principal GENERAL DE JUSTICIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYA- del Tribunal, hoy 20 de febrero notifique a: de $119,939.00, con intereses Tribunal de Primera Instancia MÓN. de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I. SAN- LCDA. RAQUEL DESEDA BELAVAL al 7.5% anual y vencedero el Sala Superior de MANATI. TA SANCHEZ, Sec Regional.

E-mail: ORIENTAL BANK 1 de enero de 2031, conforme affidavit núm. 7605 ante el Notario Público Pedro J. Diaz

García según consta de la Escritura Número 833, otorgada en Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, el día 19 de diciembre de 2000, ante el Notario Público Pedro J.

Diaz García constituido sobre

la siguiente propiedad: ---URBANA: Urbanización Levittown

de Toa Baja. Solar: AV-10.

Cabida 310.5 metros cuadrados. Linderos: Norte, en 23.00

metros con el solar número 11.

Sur, en 23.00 metros con el solar número 9. Este, en 13.50 metros con el solar número 15.

Oeste, en 13.50 metros con la calle Leonor Oeste (según plano calle 428). --Enclava una

casa de cemento y bloques

para una familia. Inscrita al de

Toa Baja, Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón, sección 11F, inca 7,967, inscripción 7ma. Se

@

Manuel Rivera Ortiz y Manuel Rivera Martínez Demandante v.

Cooperativa de Ahorro y Crédito de Florida;Juan del Pueblo y Juana del Pueblo y cualesquier persona desconocida con posible interés en la obligación cuya cancelación por decreto judicial se solicita

Elibeth Torres Alicea, Sec Auxi-

Parte Demandante V.

ROBERTO BRAVO COLÓN, MARITZA MALDONADO RIVERA y la SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES compuesta por ambos

liar del Tribunal.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO

DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU-

NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYA-

Parte Demandada.

CIVIL NÚM.: TA2019CV01503.

Sobre: Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca, EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ES-

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

MÓN.

ORIENTAL BANK

Parte Demandante V.

ROBERTO BRAVO COLÓN, MARITZA MALDONADO RIVERA y la SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES compuesta por ambos

Por Ia presente se le emplaza

para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de

los 30 días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento,

excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá pre-

SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS Demandados

CIVIL NÚM.: BY2020CV01147.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO

POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA Y EJECUCIÓN DE GRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO

(REPOSESIÓN

DE VEHÍCULO). EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS

EE.UU. DE AMERICA EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: GADIEL OYOLA FEBUS, SU ESPOSA FULANA DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

sentar su alegación responsiva Quedan emplazados y notia través del Sistema Unificado ficados que en este Tribunal de Manejo y Administración de se ha radicado Demanda so-

Rico 00918; cuyo número de

teléfono es (787) 946-5268, el facsímile (787) 946-0062 y su

correo electrónico es: gerardo@bellverlaw.com. Expedido

bajo mi firma y sello de este

Tribunal, en Bayamon, Puerto Rico, hoy día 6 de julio de

2020. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretana Regional. Amalyn Figueroa Nieves, Secretaria Auxiliar del Tribunal.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO

DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior de TOA ALTA.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante v.

FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORP (FDIC) COMO SINDICI DE RG PREMIER BANK OF PUERTO RICO, ETC

Demandado(a) Casos (SUMAC), al cual pue- bre cobro de dinero por la vía Civil Núm: TA2020CV00009. de acceder utilizando Ia direc- ordinaria en la que se alega ción electrónica https://unired. que los demandados GADIEL Sobre: CANCELACION DE PAramajudicial.pr, salvo que se OYOLA FEBUS, SU ESPOSA GARE EXTRAVIADO. NOTIFIrepresente por derecho propio, FULANA DE TAL Y LA SO- CACION DE SENTENCIA POR en cuyo caso deberá presentar CIEDAD LEGAL DE GANAN- EDICTO. A: PEDRO GONZALEZ su alegación responsiva en Ia CIALES COMPUESTA POR secretaria del tribunal. Si usted AMBOS, le adeudan solidadeja de presentar su alegación riamente al Americas Leading responsiva dentro del referido Finance, LLC la suma de printermino el tribunal podrá dictar cipal de la suma de principal de sentencia en rebeldía en su $18,695.00, más los intereses contra y conceder el remedio que continúen acumulando, solicitado en Ia demanda, o las costas, gastos y honorarios

cualquier otro, si ci tribunal, en de abogado según pactados. el ejercicio de su sana discre- Además, solicitamos de este

ción, lo entiende procedente. Honorable Tribunal que autoriPOR LA PRESENTE se le ce la reposesión y/o embargo

RODRIGUEZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA CON ANA MALDONADO MARTINEZ A SUS ULTIMAS DIRECCIONES CONOCIDAS: BARRIO INGENIO A 101 CALLE CLAVEL, TOA BAJA PR 00949 Y P O BOX 827 DORADO PR 00646-0827; FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARE

emplaza y requiere para que del Vehículo. Se les advierte notifique a: que este edicto se publicará LCDA. RAQUEL DESEDA BELAVAL en un periódico de circulación E-mail: rdeseda@delgadofernandez.com general una sola vez y que, si rdeseda(dehadofernandez.com DELGADO & FERNÁNDEZ, LLC DELGADO & FERNANDEZ, LLC no comparecen a contestar diP.O. Box 11750, P.O. Box 11750, Fernández Juncos Station cha Demanda dentro del térmiFernández Juncos Station San Juan, Puerto Rico 00910-1750 San Juan, Puerto Rico 00910-1750 no de treinta (30) días a partir Tel. [787] 274-1414 / de la publicación del Edicto, a (Nombre de las partes a’ las que se Tel. [787] 274-1414 / Fax [787] 764-8241 Fax [787] 764-8241 través del Sistema Unificado le notifican la sentencia por edicto) Expedido bajo mi firma y sello Expedido bajo mi firma y sello de Manejo y Administración de EL SECRETARIO (A) que susdel Tribunal, hoy 20 de febrero del Tribunal, hoy 24 de febre- Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede cribe le. notifica a usted que de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I. SANro de 2020. LCDA. LAURA acceder utilizando la siguiente el 23 de JUNIO de 2020, este TA SANCHEZ, Sec Regional.

SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria dirección electrónica: https:// Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Elibeth Torres Alicea, Sec AuxiRegional Elibeth Torres Alicea, unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución liar del Tribunal.

Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal. salvo que se represente por en este caso, que ha sido debiderecho propio, en cuyo caso damente registrada, y archivaLEGAL NOTICE

LEGAL NOTICE deberá presentar su alegación da en autos donde podrá usted ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO responsiva en la secretaría del enterarse detalladamente de TADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL Sobre: Cancelación de Pagaré DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- tribunal, se le anotará la re- los términos de la misma. Esta LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERDE PRIMIERA INSTANCIA Extraviado.

NOTIFICACION NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA beldía y se dictará Sentencia notificación se publicará una TO RICO. SALA SUPERIOR BAYAMON. DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYA- concediendo el remedio así sola vez en un periódico de Parte Demandada.

A: ROBERTO BRAVO ORIENTAL BANK MÓN. A: Juan del Pueblo y solicitado sin más citarles ni circulación general en la Isla CIVIL NÚM.: TA2019CV01503.

Parte Demandante V. COLÓN, por sí y en oírles. La abogada de la parte de Puerto Rico dentro, de los AMERICAS LEADING Juana del Pueblo como Sobre: Cobro de Dinero y EjeSUHEIL M representación de la demandante es la Lcdo. Gerar- 10 días siguientes a su notificaFINANCE LLC posibles tenedores y cución de Hipoteca, EMPLAACEVEDO SERRANO SOCIEDAD LEGAL do M. Ortiz Torres, cuya direc- ción. Y, siendo o representando Demandante, cualesquier persona ZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESParte Demandada DE GANANCIALES ción fisica y postal es: Cond. El usted una parte en el procediGADIEL OYOLA desconocida con posible TADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA CIVIL NUM.: BY2020CV00211. compuesta por este y Centro I, Suite 801, 500 Muñoz miento sujeta a los términos FEBUS, SU ESPOSA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESinterés en la obligación MARITZA MALDONADO TADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO Sobre: Cobro de Dinero y Eje- FULANA DE TAL Y LA Rivera Ave., San Juan, Puerto de la Sentencia, Sentencia Demandado(a)

Civil Núm: MT2020CV00011.

TADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ES-

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

(787) 743-3346

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

Parcial o Resolución, de la cual Rodriguez Romanacce, José following liens: Senior Liens: and delivered only after such

puede establecerse recurso de Gabriel Rodriguez Romanacce, None. Junior Liens: Reverse confirmation. Upon confirma-

LEGAL NOTICE LEGAL NOTICE

revisión o apelación dentro del Graciela Margarita Rodriguez mortgage securing a note in tion of the sale, an order shall término de 30 días contados a Romanacce and Carlos Sergio favor of Secretary of Housing be issued cancelling all junior

partir de la publicación por edic- Rodriguez Romanacce, Jane and Urban Development, or its liens. For further particulars,

LEGAL NOT ICE LEGAL NOTICE

to de esta notificación, dirijo a Doe and John Doe to pay Live order, in the original principal reference is made to the jud-

usted esta notificación que se Well Financial, Inc., all advan- amount of $187,500.00, due gment entered by the Court in considerara hecha en la fecha ces made under the mortgage on January 31, 2087 pursuant this case, which can be exade la publicación de este edic- note including but not limited to deed number 159, issued mined in the Office of Clerk of

to. Copia de esta notificación ha to insurance premiums, taxes in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on the United States District Court, sido archivada en los autos del and inspections as well as 10% April 23, 2014, before notary District of Puerto Rico. In San

caso con fecha de 8 de JULIO (18,750.00) of the original prin- María I. García Mantilla, and Juan, Puerto Rico, this 6th day de 2020. En TOA ALTA, Puer- cipal amount to cover costs, recorded, at Karibe volume, of July of 2020.. By: Pedro A. to. Rico, el 8 de julio de 2020. expenses, and attorney’s fees property number 6007, 10th Vélez-Baerga, Special Master.

LEGAL NOTICE

Maysonet,

Sec.del case and of these proceedings verify the extent of preferential

LEGAL NOTICE

may be examined by interested liens with the holders thereof. It

LEGAL NOTICE

Plaintiff v.

The Estate of Altagracia Romanacce Porratadoria a/k/a Altagracia Romanacce de Rodriguez composed of Maribel Rodriguez Romanacce, José Gabriel Rodriguez Romanacce, Graciela Margarita Rodriguez Romanacce and Carlos Sergio Rodriguez Romanacce, Jane Doe and John Doe; Centro de Recaudaciones de Ingresos Municipales; United States of America Defendants

LEGAL NOTICE

DAILY LEGAL NOTICE

LEGAL NOTICE

Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico. foreclosed upon, including but de JUANA DÍAZ. terms of the aforementioned liens, (express, tacit, implied or

LEGAL NOTICE

of the United States District bidder accepts as sufficient to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL

COURT DISTRICT OF PUER- ral Office Building, 150 Chardon ferential liens to the one being mera Instancia Sala Superior

Live Well Financial, Inc.

LEGAL NOTICE

LEGAL NOTICE El mejor lugar para publicar LEGAL NOT ICE LEGAL NOTICE LEGAL NOTICE SUS EDICTOS!

parties at the Office of the Clerk shall be understood that each Estado Libre Asociado de Puer-

UNITED STATES DISTRICT Court, Room 400 or 150 Fede- the title and that prior and pre- DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de PriTO RICO.

LEGAL NOTICE

Star

LEGAL NOTICE

LEGAL NOTICE

LEGAL NOTICE

Secretaria Regional. Gloribell obligation. The records of the Potential bidders are advised to 787-672-8269.

Trib.Conf. l.

LEGAL NOTICE

San Juan

LEGAL NOTICE The LEGAL NOTICE

Lcda. Laura I. Santa Sánchez, guaranteed under the mortgage inscription. Other Liens: None. specialmasterpr@gmail.com.

Vázquez

25

WHEREAS: Pursuant to the not limited to any property tax, Judgment, Order of Execution, legal) shall continue in effect it and the Writ of Execution the- being understood further that

reof, the undersigned Special the successful bidder accepts

VIG MORTGAGE CORP Demandante v.

JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE

Demandado(a) Master was ordered to sell at them and is subrogated in the Civil: Núm. VI2019CV00111. public auction for U.S. curren- responsibility for the same and Sobre: Cancelación de Pagaré cy in cash or certified check that the bid price shall not be Extraviado.

NOTIFICACIÓN without appraisement or right applied toward their cancella- DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. of redemption to the highest tion. THEREFORE, the FIRST bidder and at the office of the public sale shall be held on the

Clerk of the United States Dis- 18th day of August, 2020, at: trict Court for the District of 9:45 am. The minimum bid that Puerto Rico, Room 400 or 150 will be accepted is the sum of – Federal Office Building, 150 $187,500.00. In the event said

Carlos Chardón Avenue, Hato first auction does not produce

Rey, Puerto Rico, to cover the a bidder and the property is sums adjudged to be paid to the not adjudicated, a SECOND plaintiff, the following property. public auction shall be held on

“URBANA: Parcela de terreno the 25th day of August, 2020,

localizada en la Urbanización at: 9:45 am, and the minimum

A: John Doe y Richard Roe P/C Lcdo. Armando J. Martínez Vilella amartinez@amvlawpr. com para ser notificados por Edicto

Implementamos una forma nueva LEGAL NOTICE LEGAL NOTICE e innovadora de trabajar la publicación de edictos...

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cribe le notifica a usted que

LEGAL NOTICE

EL SECRETARIO(A) que sus-

CIVIL ACTION NO.: 3:16-cv- San Demetrio del término mu- bid that will be accepted is the Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, 3004-ADC. COLLECTION OF nicipal de Vega Baja, Puerto sum $125,000.00, which is two- Sentencia Parcial o Resolución MONIES AND FORECLOSU- Rico e identificada en el Plano thirds of the amount of the mini- en este caso, que ha sido debiRE OF MORTGAGE. NOTICE de Inscripción final de la Urba- mum bid for the first public sale. damente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enOF SALE. nización San Demetrio, con el If a second auction does not reterarse detalladamente de los TO: The Estate of número cuarenta (40) del Blo- sult in the adjudication and sale Altagracia Romanacce que “X” con un área superficial of the property, a THIRD public términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola de trescientos cincuenta punto auction will be held on the 1st Porratadoria a/k/a vez en un periódico de circulacero cero metros cuadrados day of September, 2020, at: Altagracia Romanacce ción general en la Isla de Puerde Rodriguez composed (350.00 m/c). Colinda por el 9:45 am, and the minimum bid to Rico, dentro de los 10 días NORTE, en veinticinco punto that will be accepted is the sum of Maribel Rodriguez siguientes a su notificación. Y, Romanacce, José Gabriel cero cero (25.00m), con el so- of $93,750.00, which is one-half siendo o representando usted lar número cuarenta y uno (41); of the minimum bid in the first Rodriguez Romanacce, por el SUR, en veinticinco pun- public sale. The Special Master una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la SenGraciela Margarita to cero cero metros (25.00m), shall not accept in payment of Rodriguez Romanacce con el solar número treinta y the property to be sold anything tencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede estaand Carlos Sergio nueve (39); por el ESTE, en ca- but United States currency Rodriguez Romanacce, torce punto cero cero (14.00), or certified checks, except in blecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de Jane Doe and John Doe; con la Calle “C”; y por el OES- case the property is sold and 30 días contados a partir de la Centro de Recaudaciones TE, en catorce punto cero cero adjudicated to the plaintiff, in publicación por edicto de esta de Ingresos Municipales; metros (14.00m), con el solar which case the amount of the notificación, dirijo a usted esta United States of America número catorce (14). Enclava bid made by said plaintiff shall notificación que se considerará una casa de concreto reforza- be credited and deducted from GENERAL PUBLIC hecha en la fecha de la publicado y bloques de concreto para its credit; said plaintiff being WHEREAS: Judgment was ención de este edicto. Copia de fines residenciales.” Property bound to pay in cash or certified tered in favor of plaintiff to recoesta notificación ha sido archiNumber 6,007 recorded at page check only any excess of its bid ver from defendants the princivada en los autos de este caso, 136 of volume 125 of Vega over the secured indebtedness pal sum of $91,149.92, plus the con fecha de 2 de julio de 2020.

Baja, Registry of the Property that remains unsatisfied. WHEannual interest rate convened En JUANA DÍAZ, Puerto Rico , of Puerto Rico, Section IV of REAS: Said sale to be made by of 5.060% per annum until the el 2 de julio de 2020. LUZ MABayamón. The mortgage is re- the Special Master subject to debt is paid in full. The defenYRA CARABALLO GARCÍA, corded at Karibe Volumen, Re- confirmation by the United Stadants, the Estate of Altagracia Secretario(a). f/DORIS A. ROgistry of the Property of Puerto tes District Court for the District Romanacce Porratadoria a/k/a DRÍGUEZ COLÓN, Secretaria Rico, Section IV of Bayamón, of Puerto Rico and the deed of Altagracia Romanacce de RoAuxiliar. inscription 9th. WHEREAS: conveyance and possession to driguez composed of Maribel This property is subject to the the property will be executed

LEGAL NOTICE

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(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto)

el 11 de junio de 2020, este

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Porque estamos conscientes de la LEGAL NOTICE importancia de estas publicaciones, LEGAL NOTICE ponemos especial LEGAL NOTICE atención en los detalles LEGAL NOTICE y cumplimos con todas las regulaciones LEGAL NOTICE NOTICE establecidas por LEGAL los Tribunales LEGAL NOTICE en PuertoLEGAL Rico.NOTICE NOTICEprecios!

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26

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

Even as COVID-19 looms, an MLB rookie is ready to play

By KURT STREETER

K

yle Lewis never thought about sitting out baseball’s return.

Major League Baseball is set to open its truncated season July 23, and 58 players are known to have tested positive for the coronavirus. San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher David Price and Washington Nationals first baseman Ryan Zimmerman are among the stars who have opted out of playing this summer, and several others, including the reigning American League most valuable player, Mike Trout, are considering it.

Lewis, a powerful and promising 24-year-old outfielder for the Seattle Mariners, knows he has an unusual vantage point amid the uncertainty.

He had a stellar 18-game major league debut late last season and is slated to become a starter for his rebuilding team.

Lewis is also one of 10 African American players who are expected to be on Seattle’s 40-man roster on opening day — an eye-popping number in an era when American-born Black players in the big leagues are rare.

With his Mariners convening in Seattle for workouts at T-Mobile Park, Lewis said he had never wavered on his commitment to play, even as he watched colleagues contract the coronavirus and helped protest racial injustice.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Kyle Lewis: I’m definitely tuned in and paying attention to the guys who are deciding not to play. I want to know about the decisions that guys are making and understand their reasoning. Me as a ballplayer going back to the game, COVID-19 is something I think about every day. And the fact that there are players that are getting sick is something I think about seriously.

I’ve never thought about sitting out.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to confuse that with me not thinking about the risks of it. I’m fully aware of the risk, and I am definitely not comfortable with everything.

But at the same time, baseball has laid out a health and safety protocol, and they are trying to do their best to keep us safe. I’m going to trust in that.

The plane situation, flying from my home in Atlanta to Seattle, was interesting, for sure. I just put the mask on and the hoodie on and tried to stay out of the way.

“The reunions with teammates were kind of tough, though,” Lewis said. “You want to give a big hug, but you stay away.

When I got to the concourse, I tried to sit where I could have distance from people, and I tried to get to the airport as close to departure time as possible so I didn’t have to hang around. My boarding pass was on my phone, so I didn’t touch anything.

I was trying to stay aware and not put myself in a compromising position. That’s sort of like how I’m approaching this whole thing. It helped to know that when I got here I was going to get tested immediately by the team. Having that test information was going to be helpful, just so I wasn’t going to be in the dark or unsure about anything.

That first day back was sort of bizarre. It had been over 100 days that we’d been apart, so to see what everybody had been doing and reconnect after that break, it was just really something. The reunions with teammates were kind of tough, though. You want to give a big hug, but you stay away.

The masks? After a while out there on the field, wearing them kind of starts to blend in with the regular routine. It doesn’t even feel like you have a mask on anymore. It’s a learning process. I’ve been toying around with wearing them more and more throughout the stretching and all of the activities.

In the clubhouse, you have to have the mask. In our lunchroom, you’ve got to wear it until you get to your table, and every table is spread out. All of the players are at their own individual tables.

There are some interesting rules that

ban things baseball players normally would do, like licking your fingers and spitting, high-fives and what not. We’re all trying to get a feel for that, because once the game starts, our competitive nature is going to kick in, and we’re going to have to really stay mindful of some of those rules.

The high-five thing is weird, but we actually have a handshake that doesn’t really require a handshake. It was kind of convenient that we’re able to still keep that.

At 24, I’m now in the position to play the game at the highest level, and that is something I can’t ever take for granted.

When I have an opportunity to play, I want to be a part of it. That’s why I’m here. My love for the game.

So much has changed in the world in these last few months. The George Floyd video, that was so hard to watch, man.

Frustrating and painful, because you know we’ve been speaking on these things for a long while now, so for this kind of injustice to keep happening comes off as a lack of care.

That video. You knew that was going to be what we considered the last straw before it really got serious.

Atlanta got really passionate about protesting for justice. I wasn’t able to make it out to the protests, but we were able to do some things. Me and a few of my friends made posters and tried to put them up around the city. They said, “LOVE ALL,” in gold lettering. We put the posters up around the city, trying to

spread the message.

In the minor leagues, my Double-A team was in the playoffs, and we were in Tulsa, Oklahoma. From the stands, the fans on the other team were kind of getting after me a little bit, but it seemed like it was just normal, in good fun, because I had been doing well. Then I came back to the locker room and there was a ball in my locker, and when I looked at it, I saw someone had written something. It said, “Learn to swim” [a reference to a racist trope that Black people have difficulty swimming because of their physiology].

That stung. I asked an African American teammate if he knew where the ball came from, and he had no idea. I asked some of my white teammates, and they said they had no idea. I threw that ball in the trash and never brought it up again.

You don’t have to necessarily like everybody, but you have to give them respect. Growing up, this is what my parents preached. I have always tried to live by that.

I try to keep on not looking at race and just see if I can make a good connection with somebody. If I can make a good connection with somebody, then we can be homies. Unless you give me a reason to think that my race is doing something negative to you or your perception of me, I am not going to just assume that it is. I am just always going to try to make good connections with people from every background and try to give everybody the benefit of the doubt.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

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NHL owners and players approve new CBA and return-to-play plan

By ANDREW KNOLL

T

he NHL’s owners and players union announced late last week that they had officially approved a new labor agreement that will last through 2026 and, more immediately, will allow them to proceed with plans to complete the 2019-20 season.

The deal was formally approved Friday after separate votes by the owners and the league’s players. The season will resume Aug. 1 with an expanded 24-team playoff at two hubs, in Edmonton and Toronto, and will end in Edmonton in early October. The draft is tentatively set to take place Oct. 9 and 10, and a full 2020-21 campaign will begin in December.

The existing collective bargaining agreement was set to expire in 2022, but the new agreement overwrote the final two years of that deal and extended it at least four more seasons. The new deal addresses safety measures to ward off the coronavirus during the upcoming playoffs, opens the door for a return to participation in the next two Winter Olympics and addresses how the economic effects of the pandemic will be dispersed between players and owners.

The final approval ended an unusually condensed negotiation process that began in earnest after the NHL halted competition on March 12. The previous three labor negotiations had not gone so swimmingly: In 1994-95 the league lost nearly half a season to a labor dispute, as it did in 2012-13, and in 200405 it lost an entire season.

“I don’t think a normal CBA situation goes this quickly, but both parties wanted it done and it got done,” Carolina Hurricanes right wing Justin Williams, a 20-year veteran who sat out the first half of the season before returning in January, said during a conference call.

The NHL is set to enter the third of four phases in its return-to-play plan, with the 24 teams who qualified for the expanded playoffs beginning training in their home markets this week. Players have until today to decide if they want to opt out of the season, as several players have already done in MLB, MLS, the NBA and WNBA. Hours after the agreement was announced, Calgary defenseman Travis

Scotiabank Arena in Toronto will be the site of the Eastern Conference’s games once the N.H.L. begins play in August.

Hamonic announced he would opt out, becoming the first NHL player to do so publicly. Hamonic cited the health of his daughter, who was hospitalized last year with a respiratory illness.

Thirty-five NHL players tested positive from June 8 to July 6, with only about half of the returning players undergoing regular testing thus far. The league has said “isolated cases” would not interfere with play, but the agreement stipulates broadly that an outbreak could interrupt or cancel the rest of the season.

Williams said he felt players were willing to make sacrifices such as living inside the contained environments in Edmonton and Toronto, isolated from social life and their families until the conference finals, when family visits will be permitted.

The NHL considered shortening the

conference quarterfinals and semifinals so families could arrive sooner, but Mathieu Schneider, a special assistant with the union, said players largely rejected that idea.

Commissioner Gary Bettman and Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly said testing would be constant. Daly said there were no “hard and fast numbers” that would lead the league to alter or shut down play, but that it would rely on the advice of medical professionals and experts.

Williams expressed concern earlier in the week about the possibility of a disruption in play and the virus’ potential impact on competition.

“What if there’s an outbreak on the Carolina Hurricanes in Game 5 and seven of us or 10 of us can’t play?” Williams said. “What happens to the team?

Is it a forfeit? Do we wait a couple

weeks?”

Eastern Conference clubs will travel to Toronto, and Western Conference teams will head to Edmonton on July 26. (The Canadian government waived the mandatory 14-day quarantine period for players and staff crossing the border from the United States.) Edmonton, which had 203 confirmed coronavirus cases as of Friday, will host both conference finals series, as well as the Stanley Cup finals.

The games will be played without fans, but the broadcasts of the games may include simulated noise and other adaptations.

“We have some very special things planned. You’ll just have to wait to see them,” Bettman said.

With the NHL facing an enormous budget shortfall because of the pandemic, the agreement keeps the salary cap at its current level, $81.5 million, through next season. Ten percent of player salaries will be deferred, and 20 percent will be placed in escrow — an increase of more than 50 percent from this season’s escrow payments.

Deferred salaries will be repaid over the course of the agreement. The salary cap and escrow figures are set to become less restrictive in ensuing seasons.

“What we tried to do was structure something that everybody could live with over time, but it’s important to understand that it’s over time. If revenue is less, revenue is less,” NHLPA Executive Director Donald Fehr said, adding that the idea was to “get back to normal as soon as possible.”

The agreement also helps clear the way for NHL players to return to the Olympics in 2022 and 2026. They had participated in five straight Olympics from 1998 to 2014, but the NHL did not allow participation in the 2018 games, much to the chagrin of the players. The remaining hurdle is an agreement between the league and the International Olympic Committee.

Williams acknowledged plenty of uncertainty in the league’s near future, but was still able to look forward to a return to the ice.

“Nobody knows how the game is going to come back next year when it does come back,” he said. “Is it going to be half fans, is it going to be no fans, is it going to be full houses? So you don’t know what the numbers are going to be like next year. All we know is that we’re going to be playing hockey and there will be labor peace.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

College football season teeters on the brink

By JOHN BRANCH

T

he idea of playing college sports this fall has felt iffy all along, like assembling a massive and unwieldy Jenga tower of good intentions and questionable hopes.

Now, it is teetering with each bit of news, with last week’s among the most seismic in imperiling having a season at all.

The Ivy League shut down sports until at least Jan. 1. Ohio State and North Carolina each had enough positive coronavirus cases among the few athletes on campus that they suspended summer workouts. And the Big Ten Conference soberly announced that most of its fall sports, including football, would play only league games — if they played at all. The Pac-12 Conference did the same Friday, later announcing that its commissioner had tested positive.

One by one the pieces are removed. The tower sways. When will the whole structure come crashing down?

“Nobody wants to be the first one, but when somebody is, then it makes it OK for somebody to be the next one,” Buddy Teevens, the longtime football coach at Dartmouth, said of the Ivy League.

The Big Ten, the NCAA’s richest conference, hedged its bets the day after the Ivy League announcement by paring its fall plans. The Atlantic Coast Conference, another one of the Power Five leagues, said Friday it would decide on its fall sports seasons by the end of the month. Teevens, previously the head coach at Stanford and Tulane, admitted that reality had been seeping in, slowly swamping hope.

“It’s been kind of like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny,” Teevens said. “You kind of knew they didn’t exist, and then finally you were told.”

It was bound to be harder to restart sports collegiately than professionally, with their unique breadth of tricky logistics and prickly issues — billions of dollars of revenues propped onto the backs of tens of thousands of amateur athletes, spread across hundreds of campuses and dozens of conferences sprinkled across every corner of the nation.

Athletics hold an outsized role in the nightmare facing American universities. Schools everywhere are staggering toward fall, unsure how to do the most basic things like have classes. It is a matter of life, death and budgets.

Most are jury-rigging plans to educate online, some entirely. Budgets are in tatters.

Students are in limbo. Faculty are torn by the

If there is a season, it is expected there will be no fans in the stands at Clemson, or anywhere else. bad options of teaching in person during a pandemic and educating through computer screens. Support workers and others linked to campuses wait, but each day seems to make the view murkier.

Colleges, and the towns that support and rely on them, are microcosms of the nation’s anxiety and uncertainty. They face a grudge match between health and economics. The safest option is to keep campuses closed.

That might mean economic devastation to colleges and their communities. Is there middle ground?

Now throw athletics into the cauldron. Unlike most professional sports leagues, several of which are already struggling to cocoon themselves in tightly monitored, self-described bubbles without getting people sick, there is no way to separate college sports from college environments or society at large.

Even small outbreaks could spread like wildfires into a forest.

So far, more than 3.1 million Americans have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, and 133,000 have died. Last Wednesday, the day that the Ivy League canceled fall sports, nearly 60,000 new cases were reported in the U.S., a new high.

Some of those were college athletes.

Through Wednesday, at least 426 had tested positive for the coronavirus among roughly

50 Division I programs, but the number of cases is likely much higher. About half of American universities either did not respond to requests for testing results from The New York Times, or declined to provide numbers, under the auspices of protecting the privacy of student-athletes.

Ohio State, in suspending its offseason workout programs this week, did not reveal how many students tested positive. It only said that the shutdown impacted seven sports, including football.

Such news accelerates as the fall sports calendar approaches. And if reasonable people at some of the world’s great universities had not seriously pondered this question before, they are now: Just why are we doing this?

The flip response, rarely said out loud: Money. Under the umbrella of the NCAA, college athletics is an $18 billion enterprise, with schools generating about $10 billion in revenue. And football is the primary moneymaker, especially at places like Ohio State, where the athletics budget surpasses $200 million a year.

Some schools have asked student-athletes to sign waivers to acknowledge the risk of participating during a pandemic. In a letter to the NCAA, a pair of senators called them “legally dubious” and “morally repugnant.”

To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum’s character in “Jurassic Park,” questioning the re-creation

of dinosaurs: College sports have been so preoccupied with whether or not they could return in the fall that they did not stop to think if they should.

Enter the Ivy League, with its high educational standards and modest athletic ambitions (and significantly lower reliance on revenue from sports compared with Power Five conferences). It was the first Division I conference to shut down in the spring. It was the first to reject returning in the fall.

“I think other conferences around the country are going to follow,” Columbia Athletic Director Peter Pilling said.

Not without a fight. The more money at stake, the more contortions that universities may perform to make sports happen.

Contingency plans for the football season are being made. It is a given, by now, that there may be no fans in the stands. Seasons might be reduced in scope or pushed to spring, Pac-12 Conference Commissioner Larry Scott conceded earlier this month. The Big Ten’s move to conference-only games is a half step toward canceling.

The hope is to salvage something. But even if seasons start, outbreaks could end them suddenly, just as they did basketball tournaments and spring sports.

The NCAA, which gave Americans a splashin-the-face wake-up call when it called off its basketball tournaments last March, may not react with such sweeping gusto this time.

“As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact college sports nationally, the NCAA supports its members as they make important decisions based on their specific circumstances and in the best interest of college athletes’ health and well-being,” it said in a statement Thursday.

But could the Pac-12 shutter while the Big Ten plays on? Or will one major conference’s decision start the domino chain?

Most expect answers by the end of July.

“I don’t like the trends out there right now, with the numbers and virus increases you see across the country,” Tom Wistrcill, commissioner of the Big Sky Conference, told the Bozeman (Montana) Daily Chronicle. He estimated the odds for fall sports at 50-50.

Such a half-empty analysis would have seemed unlikely back in March. Leagues like the NBA and Major League Baseball, along with most Americans, considered the virus a passing storm to wait out.

Sports did their part. They sheltered in place.

No one can blame the sports world for the broad outbreak or the continued surges through the summer. Not yet.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

29

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

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

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

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(Mar 21-April 20)

You’re thinking about future holidays because you want and need to have something to look forward to. Before booking you need to find out more. Research into all requirements you need to comply with to ensure you are meeting new travel regulations at your destination. Ask for more information if you need it.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

It’s important to have realistic expectations of your relationships. Accept that a friendship you had romantic hopes about was never going to be anything but platonic. You’re loyal to your friends but this isn’t always appreciated. Someone you thought you could rely on will turn tail at the first sign of trouble.

Gemini

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

(May 22-June 21)

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

A sudden turn of events will mean changing plans already in place and you aren’t happy about this. You were enjoying the creative excitement of a group project but now there are more serious matters to address. This will mean talking to an older relative who has a habit of causing problems whenever they get involved.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Someone has either been hiding information from you or they have not been fulfilling their obligations. You are reluctant to tackle this issue because you know it’s going to cause an argument. It is time to reassert your boundaries if a friend or neighbour has been leaning on you too hard. Protect your interests.

You don’t feel comfortable about going back into an environment where there are a number of people working together. Different people are taking different views and this makes it even more confusing. You will be told that all measures have been put in place to make things safe but you are starting to have your doubts. Trust your intuition.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

(June 22-July 23)

You will be praised for the work you have been doing on behalf of a volunteer organisation.

You may not have realised how much people have appreciated your efforts. You have an idea that just won’t wait and because you feel this will benefit your community, you want to discuss this with someone who can help.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

It’s always good to share your views but if your ideas are very different from normal, be sure you have your thoughts together before you put them to an audience. An online meeting will go well if you have prepared fully beforehand. Someone you live with is struggling to fix a broken appliance. Keep your distance.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Even if it’s just for an online seminar or conference, you have to feel good about what you’re wearing. If you don’t, you might get the impression other people aren’t taking you very seriously. Choose clothes that will boost your selfesteem, not lower it. Anything is possible when you are feeling positive.

You and a partner are growing away from each other. If you realise there are issues you will never agree on, back away. Arguing will be a waste of energy and time. You might know in your heart that the time will come when you will go your separate ways but for now, do your best to keep things harmonious between you.

You are holding back from giving your views until you hear what other people have to say.

An important issue needs to be resolved but this will take time. Some things can’t be settled in one day. A decision you have to make will affect other people’s lives and taking their feelings into consideration is the right thing to do.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

A fear of rejection is motivating you to keep your feelings to yourself. It is easier to not say anything than to have to defend your views especially when you are with people who have powerful personalities. You can’t avoid this situation entirely but you prefer to wait until you feel more prepared for a showdown.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Housemates will push back against your ideas to bring improvements into the home.

You’re tempted to retreat but if starting a domestic or garden project is important to you let others know you’re going to get on with it, with or without their support. Making old furniture look like new will be a rewarding occupation.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Monday, July 13, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 13, 2020

POR FAVOR, CONTRIBUYE A DETENER EL COVID-19

El Municipio Autónomo de San Lorenzo se preocupa por su gente y exhorta a cada ciudadano de nuestro País, a que contribuya con la responsabilidad de protegerse y cuidar a nuestros hermanos puertorriqueños. Con tu contribución podemos detener el aumento de casos y proteger en gran medida a los más vulnerables, ante la amenaza de la nueva ola de propagación del COVID-19.

Es fácil, sigue usando mascarilla, lávate las manos, usa desinfectante, mantén el distanciamiento de 6 pies. Sabemos que podemos contar contigo, por favor, es hora de unirnos en un esfuerzo mayor para preservar nuestro recurso más preciado, la vida. Así también, levantar la economía y asegurar la disponibilidad del sistema de salud.

MUNICIPIO AUTÓNOMO

+ Información Oficina de Manejo de Emergencias y Emergencias Médicas Municipal T: 787.736.0210 | 787.736.0220

DE SAN LORENZO

Sometido a la Comisión Estatal de Elecciones CEE-SA-2020-8914

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