Thursday Jul 2, 2020

Thursday, July 2, 2020

San Juan The

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DAILY

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Star

‘I Can’t Breathe’ Turned into Protest Music

The High Cost of Drought How Severely Can a Gov’t Utility’s Mistakes Impact Puerto Rican Households?

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Oversight Board Chairman Won’t Seek a 2nd Term P6

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

Complete the Census.

It’s About Time P3

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

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June 2, 2020

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

Governor urges island residents to participate in Census

Today’s

Weather

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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From E 14 mph 69% 10 of 10 5:52 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 22 Movies

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ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced urged Puerto Rico residents on Wednesday to respond to the 2020 Census in an effort to increase participation and adequate headcount of people residing on the island.

Currently, Puerto Rico has one of the lowest census response rates in the U.S. amid the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic.

“As we continue to combat COVID-19 and move forward with the reopening of our economy, it is important that we focus on responding to the 2020 Census,” Vázquez said in a press release. “While we understand the hesitation to interact with individuals outside the family nucleus and continue observing proper social distancing measures, we must not forget that Puerto Rico needs to be represented in the Census. I strongly urge the people of Puerto Rico that currently call the island home to fill out the questionnaire in order to ensure everyone is accounted for. As the governor of Puerto Rico, it is my responsibility to ensure that our people have accurate representation in the U.S. Census.”

As the island continues to follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines to reopen the economy safely, the U.S. Census Bureau has also resumed operations, and since May 22 has again been leaving questionnaire forms outside the front doors of residences. In the aftermath of the 2017 hurricanes, the U.S. Census Bureau determined to hand-deliver questionnaires instead of mailing them to residences to ensure an accurate headcount amid the island’s recovery efforts. However, after earthquakes struck the island early in the year and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic hit Puerto Rico, the island’s response rate has stalled at just 22 percent.

The U.S. Census Bureau serves as the nation’s leading provider of quality data about its people and economy, data that is used to provide community services planning for the elderly and infrastructure such as new roads and schools, among many other purposes.

The Census also distributes more than $675 billion in federal funds and informs how states and communities allocate funding for neighborhood improvements, public health, education and transportation.

It also publishes information on age-qualifying services such as social security and other retirement benefits as well as passport applications. Additionally, it estimates population size, characteristics and projections on future demographic trends, including births, life expectancy and migration patterns. The U.S. Census is vital to ensure proper community representation.

“Over the past decade, we’ve faced many challenges.

The fiscal and economic crisis, the impact of hurricanes and earthquakes, and now the coronavirus are just some examples. Responding to the 2020 Census is crucial to

ensure Puerto Rico receives the necessary federal resources to address these emergencies and continue our recovery process,” said Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González Colón. “The information gathered through the Census also helps determine how we in Congress allocate billions of dollars in federal funding each year to meet the needs of our citizens and communities. This is why I continue to urge everyone in Puerto Rico to fill out the Census as soon as possible. The future and well being of our island depend on it.”

U.S. Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham noted that “[b]y now the majority of Puerto Rico households have been invited to participate in the 2020 Census.”

“I strongly encourage everyone in Puerto Rico to respond to the 2020 Census online, by phone or mail as soon as possible,” he said. “Your response helps shape decisions about the distribution of funds for public services such as schools, emergency response and health care in your community. Responding is safe and your information is protected by law.”

Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration Executive Director Jennifer M. Storipan said “Puerto Rico has currently one of the lowest response rates of the 2020 Census in the U.S., and we need to change that.”

“If underreporting happens on the island, this will create a domino effect on the amount of federal funding the island receives,” she said. “Puerto Rico could see a reduction in eligibility for access to federal funding and allocation based on population, and we cannot have that.

We urge the people of Puerto Rico to respond to the 2020 Census in an effort to assure accurate representation of the people on the island.”

The U.S. Census consists of 10 questions and takes 10 minutes to complete, but it determines the community’s funding and representation for the next 10 years. Citizens can fill out the Census online, by phone, and in Spanish for Puerto Rico residents from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. Eastern Time: (844) 426-2020, or in the respondent’s preferred language or by mail. For more information, visit 2020Census.gov.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Drought could cost water customers on rationing $140 million

By PEDRO CORREA HENRY Twitter: @PCorreaHenry A Special for The Star

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uerto Rico Aqueducts and Sewers Authority (PRASA) clients who are affected by the Carraízo reservoir rationing plan starting today could spend as much as $140 million in a year if the drought continues, said Financial Analysts Association President Juan Villeta Trigo.

In an interview with The Star on Wednesday, Villeta Trigo said the estimate took into consideration what a three-member household would have to invest in order to survive the drought, the rationing plan, the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of the earthquakes in the southwest and Puerto Rico’s living expenses.

On a weekly basis, each PRASA client could spend from $200$300 in a work week, he said.

“These numbers are not meant to alarm readers. But considering what Puerto Rico had to spend during the 2015 drought, this is not as far-fetched as it seems,” the economist said. “However, we don’t know what might happen the next day, as we are unaware if only 140,000 [PRASA] subscribers will go through the water shortage.”

According to a 2015 study led by the ex-president of the Puerto Rico Economists Association, island residents had to spend around $1 billion in order to endure a drought that affected almost 1 million PRASA subscribers. However, Villeta Trigo pointed out, five years ago Puerto Rico didn’t go through earthquakes, the COVID-19 pandemic or the climate change crisis.

“I have no doubt that this could be more expensive,” he said. “However, we must take time to evaluate expenses for households, the local government, private businesses, agriculture and many other contributors to our economy.”

One solution that has been under observation has been the dredging of Lake Carraízo, which, according to PRASA President Doriel Pagán Crespo, could cost around $300 million. However, the agency expects emergency funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Villeta Trigo said that although the project’s estimated price seems higher, in the long run, the dredging will be less costly than the expenses incurred by all the affected households during the water crisis.

“I still don’t understand why no agency has used local emergency funds, which are around $500-$600 million,” he said. “This is the time to start the dredging. This will help us grow again. It will help businesses grow again.”

CIAPR president: ‘It’s not acceptable to be living with this water shortage’ Puerto Rico Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors Association (CIAPR by its Spanish initials) President Juan Alicea Flores said dredging -- the procedure to remove sediments and debris from lakes, rivers, harbors and other waterways -- is one of the alternatives for solving the island’s water shortage, yet it is not enough.

“Many were not surprised to know that it has been 22 years since the Carraízo Lake was dredged. Many experts have said that this [shortage] was bound to happen,” Alicea Flores said.

“Even if we end up dredging the reservoirs, we cannot rely on only one source, we must combine other resources.”

The mechanical engineer declared that Puerto Rico is too advanced a country to be living in such an underdeveloped

condition. There have been proposals to battle against these problems, he said, yet the local government has not considered them. Some of the alternatives are combining wells, connecting reservoirs, desalinization and wastewater recycling.

“This seems more like a strategic planning issue than a climate issue,” Alicea Flores said. “We dispose of around 200 million gallons of wastewater a day that could be put into industrial use. Desalinization might seem expensive, but incorporating such a system while using electric power would make this cost-effective. It’s not acceptable to be living with this water shortage. We do not have any contingency plans.”

Soderberg: ‘We cannot rely on rainfall only’ Carl Soderberg, a former director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Caribbean Environmental Protection Division said PRASA is not lacking strategic planning, the agency is lacking a plan for action. In addition, he called on the agency to work on water loss reduction due to a damaged distribution system.

“The distribution system hasn’t been updated in 70 years.

You might see a tiny leak in your hometown. However, the pipes underneath have not been checked, making us waste water without seeing it,” Soderberg said. “Puerto Rico lost 140 million trees after Hurricane Maria, making the land susceptible to erosion, and lost around 55 percent storage capacity at Lake Carraízo and even 60 percent at Lake Dos Bocas in Utuado. We cannot rely on rainfall only. We cannot work like this.”

He insisted that the government must consider projects that promote water preservation.

One of the first programs that was mentioned was the EPA’s Water Sense program, which has been applied in states like New York and Mexico and reduces in-house water usage by up to 40 percent. Soderberg said this rate is around 2.5 times what Lake Carraízo produces in a day. The Experts and Climate Change Advisers’ Committee member also suggested wastewater recycling.

“Although nay-sayers might say that such proposals would cost a lot of money, droughts cost a lot more,” Soderberg said.

“Due to climate change, experts suggest that droughts might be longer and more frequent as we expect 10 percent less rain showers.”

Droughts are century-old news for Puerto Rico For Puerto Rico, droughts are not a novel thing, notes Universidad Ana G. Méndez-Recinto de Gurabo history professor Jorge Nieves Rivera. Ever since 1847, locals have lived through periods of water scarcity and, nearly 175 years later, history has proven that this phenomena is still a challenge for the island.

“Puerto Ricans have survived water scarcities since last century, [most recently] in 2015,” Nieves Rivera said. “We survived Hurricane Maria in 2017, yet local authorities are not able to manage our natural sources proficiently. Now, in 2020, we wait for rain to fill our water reservoirs and expect federal funds to fix the problems, even though we understand how bureaucratic this process is.”

The Center for Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean graduate student also suggested that citizens try to understand the issue from a social, political and environmental perspective.

“We must take care of our natural resources,” he said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Fiscal board to lose its chairman, at least one other member, but not immediately

By THE STAR STAFF

T

wo members of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico are stepping down, but not immediately, and a third, whose name was not revealed, is also planning to leave.

After almost four years at the helm of the oversight board, its chairman, José B. Carrión, announced Wednesday that he has informed the White House that he will not be available for renomination for a second term as a member of the board. Carrión’s last day on the job will be Oct. 5 of this year, or when the president and Congress appoint a successor, whichever happens first. Board member Carlos M. García also said he will not be available to serve a second term on the entity created by Congress to implement the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act of 2016, better known as PROMESA. “Upon appointment, I committed to serve a three-year term, yet we will soon be concluding our fourth year, this coming August,” said Carrión, who used the occasion to thank his family for all their patience, understanding and wise counsel. “I am also grateful to the president and congressional leadership for the opportunity to have been of service to Puerto Rico.”

Carrión said one other oversight board

member is leaving but declined to reveal the name. He said he has proposed names of candidates but that he was not clear as to the process that will be followed.

“The president has to collaborate with Congress but the process is polarized,” he said. “I do not know how the process will be.”

García said he has notified the Office of the President that after four years on the oversight board he will not be available to serve another term.

“It has been an honor to work alongside my fellow board members, and I am proud of what has been accomplished in these past four years amidst very challenging circumstances,” he said.

García will remain on the board until Aug. 31.

“At the end of 2016, I received a call that would lead me to the most challenging, toughest, and most demanding job I have ever had in my professional career,” Carrión said. “Nonetheless and without regret, I must say that serving as chair of the oversight board has also given me the greatest opportunity to make a positive contribution to Puerto Rico.”

“I am fortunate and grateful to have worked side by side with six talented colleagues from different backgrounds, ideologies and life experiences. Together we have made literally hundreds of very difficult, yet fair decisions for the benefit of Puerto Rico,

almost all of them unanimously,” he added.

“My fellow members have been passionate, steadfast advocates for Puerto Rico, and have done so without compensation. I also take pride in the group of professionals working for the oversight board … public policy experts, people of remarkable commitment, drive and passion, most of Puerto Rican heritage, who have championed the best ideas regardless of their political preferences.”

At the conclusion of the public meeting held Wednesday by the oversight board, Carrión shared the news of his departure and gave a brief account of the board’s accomplishments during the past four years.

“Together, we have accomplished many things. I am most proud to have defended pension payments to all public employees despite the insolvency of the public pension system,” he said. “We have also certified responsible fiscal plans and budgets with appropriate controls, regardless of political considerations. Due to this fiscal discipline we have been able to assist the government to respond quickly to different crises such as the earthquakes earlier this year and the current COVID-19 emergency, with meaningful economic aid.

“I am also proud of the progress we have made in the restructuring of Puerto Rico’s public debt, saving the people of Puerto Rico billions of dollars in both prin-

cipal and interest. And last but not least, last week we preliminarily approved the public-private partnership to transfer to an independent, private-sector consortium the management, operation and maintenance of the transmission and distribution systems of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority. This agreement represents the kind of transformation of our electrical utility that is so crucially important to the people of Puerto Rico.”

Carrión said his tenure as oversight board chair had its share of disappointments along the way as well, chief among them the lack of commitment and political will to implement structural reforms necessary to propel Puerto Rico’s economy beyond its dependency on federal transfers.

“Puerto Rico doesn’t lack human capital, ideas, or plans to improve its economy,” Carrión said. “What it lacks is the determination to implement these transformative reforms for the benefit of our people.”

“PROMESA was and is an imposition upon Puerto Rico by the federal government. However, it is also a life preserver and a tool that has saved Puerto Rico from drowning in a sea of debt,” he added. “It is certainly not perfect, but if properly used, it can continue to help our government to find its way out of its crippling public debt and to lay the foundation for a more prosperous future for generations of Puerto Ricans.”

Oversight board gives Treasury Dept. an ultimatum

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) is giving Treasury Secretary Francisco Parés Alicea 30 days to devise a plan that would accelerate the release of commonwealth audited financial statements.

Puerto Rico has not released audited financials for the years 2017, 2018, 2019.

“It is a top priority of the FOMB,” said Natalie Jaresko, the oversight board’s executive director, during a board hearing Wednesday.

“It is a critical element to completing our mandate.”

Puerto Rico is supposed to issue audited financials 180 days after the end of the year, but the audited financial for 2017 is 1,097 days overdue, the 2018 audited financial is 732 days overdue and the 2019 audited financial is also overdue, Jaresko said.

Parés Alicea said he expected the 2017 audited financial to be published in August, the 2018 audited financial in April 2021 and

the 2019 audited financial in January 2022.

During his explanation for the delay, the Treasury chief mentioned personnel shortages and lack of economic resources as the main reasons for the delay, but oversight board member Carlos García pressed upon Parés Alicea the urgency of dealing with the problem expeditiously and without making excuses.

“We are still behind in audited financial statements; the biggest issue here is accountability,” García said. “Unless you make every single agency accountable and [make clear] the cost and consequences of not doing reconciliations on time, this will be a recurring situation.”

Deeming the situation unacceptable, García called for a hearing 30 days from now to discuss the problem. Parés Alicea insisted that he needed more resources to complete the audits, but García told him he had “to think outside the box.”

At the start of the hearing, Jaresko said the oversight board has been holding recur-

rent meetings with the Treasury Department and government external auditors. To help expedite the 2017 and 2018 audits, the board said it required the government to make weekly updates and provide progress reports and other documents, including the contract with external auditors to ascertain the prompt delivery of the audits.

The oversight board said it provided the Treasury Department $1.6 million to hire staff accountants for the agency’s central accounting division to reduce the reliance on external contracts. It also provided up to $15,000 for incentives to employees if the 2017 audited financials are published soon and the 2018 audited financial statement draft is provided

by November.

Parés Alicea provided a long list of reasons for the delays in releasing audited financials.

That list of factors includes the 2017 hurricanes, the implementation of new accounting standards and the insolvency of the Government Development Bank. He said the Treasury De-

partment’s central accounting division only has 27 employees, of which just one is a certified public accountant.

The 2017 audited financial is under review by accounting firm KPMG, but the portion of the report explaining the reason why the commonwealth remains a “going concern” has been a headache for auditors to write because of the bankruptcy process, Parés Alicea said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

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Domestic vacationers drive up July 4 weekend hotel stays

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

on the island this coming July 4.”

“Since June 8, the ‘VoyTuristeando.com’ website has received a total of 110,406 users and 859,757 visits,” she said. “These visits have generated a total of 21,378 direct sales referrals for the hotels and businesses that participate in the promotional offers on the web page.”

Campos stressed that the figure of 46.9 percent in estimated occupation for the holiday weekend “is a promising figure since it represents an increase of 42 percentage points over the occupation reported in April (4.8 percent estimated occupation) and an approximate jump of over 30 percentage points over the estimated occupation in May (10 percent) tourism.”

“Some 38,000 residents will ‘check in’ this long weekend and will enjoy healthy and safe tourism,” Campos said. “This is indicative that Puerto Rico has always been a diverse and accessible destination to enjoy a vacation without having to travel abroad. We invite all residents to take advantage of packages prepared exclusively for the local public and continue to boost the economy on the island.”

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uerto Rico Tourism Co. (CTPR by its Spanish initials) Director Carla Campos announced on Wednesday that occupancy in hotels and inns is expected to reach 46.9 percent and it is estimated that 37,884 island residents will stay in lodgings during the four days of the July 4 holiday weekend (Thursday to Sunday).

“Our tourism industry has begun its reopening with a solid step, and residents have promoted this resurgence of the sector,” Campos said. “On this holiday weekend, a direct economic impact of $3.3 million is estimated in room consumption. According to data collected by the agency, 16,604 room nights have been reserved at present and an average rate of $154.30 has been reported.”

The CTPR chief noted that through the “Check In for Your Island” initiative and the implementation of the Destination Health and Safety Program, “they have sparked the interest of our residents to vacation

COR3 has allocated $980 million for 2,283 projects in past 6 months

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

G

ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced and the executive director of the Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resilience (COR3), Ottmar Chávez Piñero, announced Wednesday that during the past six months, the agency has supported the allocation of about $980 million for 2,283 projects aimed at the reconstruction of Puerto Rico.

Of the total of these projects, 2,007 are for permanent work, with an allocation of $636 million.

Of these, 555 projects are large-scale and involve an investment of $579 million.

“We are extremely satisfied with the great work of the entire COR3 team during the management and allocation of these funds aimed at these largescale projects for the socioeconomic growth of Puerto Rico,” the governor said. “We have a long way to go, but I am convinced that dedication to this work will be the key to making the best use of these funds, which are so necessary for our island.”

Funding for permanent jobs encompasses projects such as roads, bridges, water control facilities, buildings and equipment, and public agency, park and recreation facilities, in accordance with Section

406 of the federal Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act. “All these projects, once developed, will be the best evidence of the great talent and excellent workforce that Puerto Rico has,” Chávez Piñero said. “We thank Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced, the federal government, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for their continued support in this process.”

The Public Assistance Program — financed by FEMA and administered by the Puerto Rico government through COR3 — provides grants to eligible governments and certain private non-profit organizations for debris removal, life-saving emergency protection measures, and the repair, replacement or restoration of facilities damaged by a disaster.

The program also encourages protection of these damaged facilities from future events by providing assistance for hazard mitigation measures during the recovery process.

Vázquez stressed that “COR3 guarantees that the Government of Puerto Rico implements recovery and reconstruction efforts efficiently, effectively, and transparently, while capitalizing on the opportunities to rebuild a better, stronger and more resilient Puerto Rico that meets the current and future needs of its residents.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Meet the supporters Trump has lost

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER, KEVIN QUEALY and NATE COHN

F

or some, the disenchantment started almost as soon as Donald Trump took office. For others, his handling of the coronavirus and social unrest turned them away. For all of them, it is highly unlikely they will vote for him again.

These voters, who backed Trump in 2016 but say there is “not really any chance” they will this year, represent just 2% of registered voters in the six states most likely to decide the presidency, according to New York Times/Siena College polls. But they help explain why the president faces a significant deficit nationwide and in the battleground states.

“I think if he weren’t such an appalling human being, he would make a great president, because I think what this country needs is somebody who isn’t a politician,” said Judith Goines, 53, a finance executive at a home building company in Fayetteville, North Carolina. “But obviously with the coronavirus and the social unrest we’re dealing with, that’s where you need a politician, somebody with a little bit more couth.”

“I’m ashamed to say that I’ve voted for him,” said Goines, who described herself as a staunch Republican.

These 2016 Trump voters might not all be considered part of the president’s base — many were not enthusiastic about him four years ago. As 6% of battlegroundstate Trump voters, they are just a sliver of the overall electorate. Also, 2% of battleground-state voters who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 say they will vote for Trump.

But Trump defectors play an outsize role in the president’s challenge. He won by a narrow margin in 2016, and he has made limited efforts to broaden his appeal. Even a modest erosion in his support imperils his reelection chances. Another 6% of Trump voters in these states say they no longer support Trump, while allowing “some chance” that they will vote for him again.

A majority of the defectors disapprove of his performance on every major issue, except the economy, according to the Times/Siena polls. Somewhat surprisingly, they are demographically similar to the voters who continue to support him. They are only marginally likelier to be women

or white college graduates.

In interviews, many said they initially backed Trump because he was a businessman, not a politician. In particular, he was not Clinton. But they have soured on his handling of the presidency.

Several mentioned his divisive style and his firing of officials who disagreed with him, and especially his response to the coronavirus and to the unrest in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in police custody.

Not all of them are ready to back Joe Biden, but they no longer entertain the possibility of backing the president.

Overall, 78% of respondents in battleground states who said they would not vote for Trump again disapproved of his handling of the pandemic.

John Crilly, 55, a retired commercial diver in Reeders, Pennsylvania, said he voted for Trump “because the other option was Hillary Clinton.”

“What changed my mind? 120,000 deaths,” he said. “He refused to realize, ‘Oh my god, there’s a virus coming our way. Shouldn’t we do something, guys?’

COVID was the turning point. It’s the thing that touches home with everybody.”

He plans to vote for a local write-in candidate instead of Biden, who he worries is too old.

The president also lost voters because of his handling of the growing movement against police brutality and entrenched racism. More than 80% of those who will not vote for him again say that Biden would do a better job on race relations or unifying America. Of the Trump voters who have not ruled out voting for him again, only around 10% said they trusted Biden to do a better job on race relations.

Kelvin Pittman II, 34, who is self-employed doing car detailing in Jacksonville, Florida, said he voted for Trump because “he was a great businessman.” As a Black man, he said he aligns with Democrats on many issues, but as a businessman, he favors certain Republican policies.

Then came the death of Floyd. Pittman felt the president did not take it seriously: “It was kind of the last straw. It was like, this dude is just in it for himself. I thought he was supposed to be for the people.”

Some former Trump voters said it was his personality more than any specific

policy that turned them off. They observed his behavior as a candidate, but expected him to act with more decorum in office.

Robert Kaplan, 57, a supervisor at a water utility in Racine, Wisconsin, voted for the president because he wanted to abolish Obamacare, and he did not trust Clinton.

But he was disappointed from the start.

“He’s an embarrassment,” he said.

“He’s like a little kid with a temper tantrum when he doesn’t get things to go his way.

He’s very punitive — if you disagree, he fires you. He disrespects very good people in Washington trying to do some good. And I think it’s very disrespectful of the office to be tweeting all the time.”

More than 80% of the voters who will not back Trump again agreed with the statement that he does not behave the way a president ought to act. Their view is shared by 75% of registered voters across the battleground states.

“He said he was going to, quote unquote, drain the swamp, and all he’s done is splashed around and rolled around in it,” Kaplan said.

Biden was not his first pick, but he believes he has a chance to “bring the people back together.” His choice of vice president is important, he said — he hopes it is someone younger, who can close the divide between the two parties.

John Chavez, 45, a manager at a car dealership in Queen Creek, Arizona, voted for both George W. Bush and Barack

Robert Kaplan, who says he voted for Donald Trump in 2016 but now views the president as “an embarrassment,” outside his home in Racine, Wisc.

Robert Kaplan, who says he voted for Donald Trump in 2016 but now views the president as “an embarrassment,” outside his home in Racine, Wisc.

Obama. His 2016 vote was not so much for Trump, he said, as against Clinton — he was “spooked” by things he had heard about her potential involvement in scandals.

“I thought, obviously he’s going to step it up and he’s going to have to change, he’s going to have to become more presidential,” he said. “But little did I know, he’s not. He got worse.”

There was one moment, he said, when “he lost me forever”: when Trump did not wear a mask during his recent rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He said that the president should not have made masks into a political symbol, and that if the public should wear masks, so should he.

Chavez will vote for Biden, mostly as a vote against Trump.

Though many voters similarly described Biden as the least objectionable choice, some were more enthusiastic.

Craig Smith, 64, a veteran in Big Rapids, Michigan, said he planned to vote for Biden because “he’s got integrity, he tells the truth, he’s got compassion and empathy.”

“Donald Trump represents the past,” he said, “and I believe that the Democrats and Joe Biden and the young people of the world are looking at the future.

“I will never vote for another Republican in my life because of Donald Trump,” Smith added. “What changed? Well, three years.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Mississippi governor signs law to remove flag with Confederate emblem J

By RICK ROJAS

ust a few weeks ago, as Mississippi lawmakers mobilized to take down the only state flag in the nation with the Confederate battle emblem embedded into it, Gov. Tate Reeves said the choice was not theirs to make.

“It should be the people who make that decision,” Reeves told reporters then, “not some backroom deal by a bunch of politicians in Jackson.”

But on Tuesday, Reeves signed into law a measure that removes the flag that has flown over the state for 126 years and been at the heart of a conflict Mississippi has grappled with for generations: how to view a legacy that traces to the Civil War. The legislation mandates the “prompt, dignified and respectful” removal of the flag, which features the blue bars and white stars of the Confederate battle flag, within 15 days.

Reeves, a Republican, acknowledged his own evolution from believing the flag should be changed only through a statewide referendum to allowing lawmakers to make the decision.

He said that Mississippi has been buffeted in recent months by flooding, tornadoes, and an eruption of violence and discord in state prisons before the outbreak of the coro-

navirus and the economic devastation it has unleashed. He said that dividing the state, and stirring up an internecine political fight, would only hurt it even more.

“There are people on either side of the flag debate who may never understand the other,” Reeves said in a speech Tuesday delivered from the governor’s mansion in Jackson. “We as a family must show empathy.

We must understand that all who want change are not attempting to erase history. And all who want the status quo are not meanspirited or hateful.”

Reeves had previously said he would sign the measure that state legislators approved over the weekend, in another example of Confederate symbols being re-examined following protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

When the state flag was last on the ballot, in 2001, Mississippi voters overwhelmingly decided to keep it. But over the weekend, the House voted, 91-23, in favor of removing the flag, and the Senate affirmed that decision in a 37-14 vote.

A commission will be charged with introducing a new flag design by September that could be included on the November ballot. The new flag will be forbidden from including the Confederate battle emblem and must include the phrase “In God we trust.”

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Thursday, July 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Fauci says U.S. could reach 100,000 virus cases a day

By SHERYL GAY STOLDBERG and NOAH WEILAND

ced bars to close again. In Texas, the bar closures spurred protests at the state Capitol and the governor’s mansion Tuesday. he government’s top infectious disease exIn Arizona, officials identified more than pert said Tuesday that the rate of new coro4,600 new coronavirus infections Tuesday, by navirus infections could more than double far the state’s most in a single day. California’s to 100,000 a day if current outbreaks were not case count has soared, surpassing 220,000 contained, warning that the virus’s march across known infections.

Vice President Mike Pence, the the South and the West “puts the entire country administration’s point person on the virus, insisted at risk.” that the situation was not dire, telling reporters in Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseasuburban Washington, “We’re in a much better ses, offered the grim prediction while testifying place than four months ago, even two months on Capitol Hill, telling senators that no region of ago.” Pence has said the new infections are primarily hitting younger people who get less sick. the country is safe from the virus’s resurgence.

The governors of New York, New Jersey The number of new cases in the United States and Connecticut — three former hot spots in the has shot up by 80% in the past two weeks, according to a New York Times database, with Northeast — were less sanguine, telling travelers coming into the region to quarantine for 14 new hot spots flaring far from the Sun Belt epicenters. days. New York added eight states — California, “I can’t make an accurate prediction, but Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada and Tennessee — to a quarantine list that it is going to be very disturbing, I will guarantee already included Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, you that,” Fauci said, “because when you have Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas an outbreak in one part of the country, even and Utah. New Jersey and Connecticut are adthough in other parts of the country they are vising travelers from the 16 states to quarantine. doing well, they are vulnerable.”

But in Florida, where more than 6,000 New flash points have weighed down new cases were reported Tuesday, Gov. Ron talk of a resumption of normal life and a quick DeSantis, a Republican, remained defiant. On economic rebound. The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome H. Powell, issued his own Friday, the state abruptly banned drinking in gloomy assessment, cautioning lawmakers Tuesbars, though they can still sell food and alcohol day of an “extraordinarily uncertain” moment for takeout. On Tuesday, DeSantis said at a news facing the U.S. economy. conference in Juno Beach that was enough: “A full recovery is unlikely until people are “We’re not going back, closing things.” confident that it is safe to re-engage in a broad With the virus not under control in the United States, the European Union announced Tuesday that it would open its borders to visitors from 15 countries — but not from America.

Even states that had reported improvements are starting to see the number of new cases rise, causing governors to rethink their plans to get residents back to work.

“We are now having 40-plus-thousand new cases a day. I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around,” Fauci testified, adding, “I think it is important to tell you and the American public that I’m very concerned because it could get very bad.”

As to bars, he said, in his customary clipped fashion: “Outdoor better than indoor. Bars really not good. Really not good. Congregation in a bar inside is bad news. We’ve really got to stop that right now when you have areas that are surging like we see right now.”

Fauci and Redfield were among four top government doctors involved in the coronavirus response to testify Tuesday; Adm. Brett P. Giroir, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH.) points to a chart showing COVID-19 cases in the the assistant secretary for public health, and United States compared to other countries, during a Senate Health, Education, Dr. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of food and drugs, also appeared. All four officials also Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington.

T

range of activities,” Powell told a House committee, adding that a second wave “could force people to withdraw” and “undermine public confidence, which is what we need to get back to lots of kinds of economic activity that involve crowds.”

The twin hearings on Capitol Hill mirrored concerns roiling states where hospitalizations are rising, intensive care units are filling up and business establishments are again shutting their doors. Fauci particularly implored states to shut down indoor drinking establishments, declaring, “Congregation at a bar, inside, is bad news.”

And Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, admonished American Airlines for beginning to sell flights to their capacity, which would make onboard social distancing impossible.

“When they announced that the other day, obviously there was substantial disappointment,” Redfield said, adding, “We don’t think it’s the right message.”

Around the nation, and the world, it became painfully clear that, despite President Donald Trump’s recent suggestion that the virus would “fade away,” the pandemic is getting worse.

More than 46,000 coronavirus cases were announced across the United States on Tuesday, the most of any day of the pandemic. Officials in eight states — Alaska, Arizona, California, Georgia, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas — also announced single-day highs.

Case counts have climbed sharply in many of the states that were the first to reopen, including Florida and Texas, which recently for-

appeared before House lawmakers last week, when Redfield warned of a potentially crippling second wave of the virus that would coincide with flu season — a warning he reiterated Tuesday.

But beyond the spike in cases, they told lawmakers they had another pressing concern: Large swaths of the American population may refuse a coronavirus vaccine once one becomes available, which could seriously hamper efforts to control the pandemic and prevent the nation from turning the corner toward a full reopening.

Redfield told senators that his agency has spent about three months developing a plan to rebuild “vaccine confidence.” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Health Committee, sounded alarmed, telling Redfield to speed up the work.

“We need to see that plan,” she said. “We need to know what it is. The public needs to know what it is.”

Redfield said that the CDC’s plan was being developed with Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s crash vaccine program that aims to have 300 million doses of a vaccine by early next year. Officials at the Defense Department and the Department of Health and Human Services involved in that project have spent significant time discussing a public-relations campaign that will in part try to win over Americans suspicious of a coronavirus vaccine, according to a senior administration official.

The official topic of Tuesday’s hearing was how to get children safely back to school, but there seemed to be no agreement on that, and no universal plan to do so. The American Academy of Pediatrics has come out strongly in favor of bringing children back to the classroom in the fall, saying in a statement that “schools are fundamental to child and adolescent development and well-being.”

Fauci agreed, but said each school district must make decisions based on the course of the pandemic in its area.

Masks — and Trump’s refusal to wear one — were a central issue at the hearing. The Republican chairman of the Health Committee, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, prefaced his opening statement with an appeal to the president to set a better example by occasionally covering his face.

Alexander lamented that masks had “become part of the political debate,” with people’s decision about whether to wear one dependent on their views of Trump.

“The president has plenty of admirers,” Alexander said. “They would follow his lead; it would help end this political debate. The stakes are too high for this political debate about proTrump, anti-Trump to continue.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

11

Trying to correct banking’s racial imbalance

By ELLEN ROSEN

W

ole Coaxum was a managing director at JPMorgan Chase in business banking when a police officer fatally shot the unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

The killing caused Coaxum to rethink his career goals.

“Everyone needs the opportunity to effectively participate fully in the economy, and I wanted to be part of the conversation,” he said. “The issues, including the lack of access to banking and financial tools, were hiding in plain sight. But for a community to have a social justice plan without an economic plan is like one hand clapping.”

Within the year Coaxum left JPMorgan to create Mobility Capital Finance, known as MoCaFi, a startup focused on providing free or less expensive financial services to those with low-to-moderate incomes, “people like home health care workers, bus drivers and municipal employees,” he said, who frequently were underserved, discriminated against or shut out from traditional banks.

Now, the deaths of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks and Breonna Taylor, coupled with the racial disparity in COVID-19 outcomes, have magnified the deep fault lines nationwide. Additionally, Black-owned businesses have been more affected by the economic fallout from the pandemic. The confluence of these crises have laid bare another underlying issue: income inequality and a resulting loss of access to the financial system among communities of color.

At the time Coaxum left traditional banking to become an entrepreneur, close to 30% of households in the United States had no bank accounts or, even if they had them, still resorted to significantly more expensive alternative systems like check cashing centers or payday loan businesses.

While those numbers have improved incrementally since then — as of 2017, roughly 25% of U.S. households had limited or no access to the traditional financial system, a racial divide remains. Most of those who are the so-called un-or-under-

banked live either in communities of color or rural areas. Close to 17% of Black households and 14% of Hispanic families lack basic financial services, compared with 3% of white households in 2017, the last year for which statistics are available from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

The loss of access means that “Black and Hispanic people are spending 50 to 100% more per month for basic banking services, which, over a lifetime, can cost $40,000 in fees,” Coaxum said.

While the technology sector has been criticized for its lack of diversity, Coaxum and a handful of other founders are hoping that fintech — the frequently used term for financial technology — can lead to successful business models that can help correct the imbalance in the financial system.

Marla Blow had worked in startups and financial institutions after graduating from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. But it was through her experiences at the Treasury Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that she thought about focusing on those without access to banks and credit cards.

“Financial services companies have a long history of redlining and declining to serve communities of color,” she said.

While the economy recovered from the financial crisis, she said, the subprime market — often the only credit available to households with low-to-moderate income — lagged behind.

As a result, she started FS Card, a company that provided the Build credit card with a $500 spending limit, offering a lower-cost alternative to a payday loan.

To get this done, FS partnered with Republic Bank to gain access to the credit-card system. She had traction: At the time she sold the company to Continental Finance in late 2018, FS Card had issued more than 100,000 cards and extended $50 million in credit, she said.

Blow joined Mastercard as the senior vice president for social impact, North America, at the company’s Center for Inclusive Growth last October, where she focuses on closing economic disparities.

Coaxum and Blow were also aware of another problem facing people with

People wait on line to enter a check-cashing center in Queens. low-to-moderate income: the inability to get personal or small business loans. Traditionally, banks use three credit rating bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, which rely on indicators like checking-account performance and mortgage payments, among others, to compute the important FICO scores.

But that often leads to a dilemma for those who have had overdrafts or pay rent.

These people may have very low scores, or sometimes none at all. About 20% of consumers have insufficient credit history to secure loans from traditional means.

James Gutierrez, the chief executive and co-founder of Aura Financial and the grandson of immigrants, was driven by this imbalance, which, he said, left “customers with only two options — payday loans or auto title loans.” His first company, Progreso Financiero, opened in 2005 before smartphones became widespread.

It offered loans through supermarkets and storefronts. Both companies, Gutierrez said, took a risk on people who were “sometimes invisible but make the economy go round. And they paid us back.”

After he left in 2012, he began Aura, which offered loans to people often unbanked and underbanked, but this time through smartphones and in locations like supermarkets. To determine credit risk —

and the interest rate for the loans — Aura “uses proprietary data, in addition to credit bureau data, that include income and expenses, bank account information” and whether the borrower gives money to relatives in other countries, he said.

Progreso was renamed Oportun after Gutierrez left. Under the current chief executive, Raul Vazquez, Oportun has an “omnichannel approach” of mobile, branded storefronts and grocery store availability and is now publicly traded on Nasdaq.

Vazquez, the son of Mexican immigrants, said Oportun was not only providing financing, but was also trying to provide “relationship banking services” to customers who often worked multiple jobs with little time to spare.

All the founders emphasize that while they focus on low-to-moderate-income households, they are for-profit companies that can succeed as they scale.

While these companies are expanding, there is room for more, said Linda Lacewell, superintendent of New York State Department of Financial Services.

“Many are not participating in the financial system the way middle class and rich understand,” she said. “We want to help generate the opportunity to participate in a way that is efficient, but not discriminatory.”

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Stocks

S&P, Nasdaq close higher on vaccine hopes, improving data

T

he S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes closed higher on Wednesday to kick off the third quarter as increasing optimism for a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine eased concerns that another round of business lockdowns was likely.

Pfizer Inc’s shares rose more than 3% after the drugmaker said a COVID-19 vaccine being developed with German biotech firm BioNTech showed promise and was found to be well-tolerated in early-stage human trials.

The gains put Pfizer among the top boosts to both the S&P 500 and Dow Industrials while helping improve the mood on Wall Street even as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported an increase of 43,644 new cases of the coronavirus. U.S.-listed shares of BioNTech rose as much as 18.9% before fading into the close, ending down 3.9%.

“Pfizer news was certainly an impetus for the market to move even higher but in general it is this very positive momentum, looking beyond this respreading of the virus, looking beyond that to eventual treatments, eventual vaccine and eventual safe openings of the economy,” said Tim Ghriskey, chief investment strategist at Inverness Counsel in New York.

Investors were also encouraged by some upbeat economic data as coronavirus-induced lockdowns have eased. A report on Wednesday showed a slump in global manufacturing had ebbed in June, with U.S. figures hitting their highest level in more than a year.

On Thursday, all eyes will be on the Labor Department’s nonfarm payrolls report.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 77.91 points, or 0.3%, to 25,734.97, the S&P 500 gained 15.57 points, or 0.50%, to 3,115.86 and the Nasdaq Composite added 95.86 points, or 0.95%, to 10,154.63.

The Dow was held in check partly by a 1.6% fall in Boeing Co shares, which lost ground for a second straight day following a 14% surge on Monday.

Updates on the progress in various COVID-19 vaccine programs are being closely watched by investors, and have been partly responsible for Wall Street’s recent rally.

The S&P 500 closed its best quarter since 1998 on Tuesday, fueled also by unprecedented levels of fiscal and monetary stimulus. Minutes from the Federal Reserve’s June policy meeting showed policymakers broadly agreed to make full use of the tools at the central bank’s disposal to support a recovery from the recession triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

13

Harsh penalties, vaguely defined crimes: Hong Kong’s security law explained

BY JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

T

he sweeping new national security law that China imposed on Hong Kong, aimed at stamping out opposition to the ruling Communist Party in the former British colony, is as “devastating” as some critics feared, a human-rights activist said Wednesday.

Conceived in secrecy and passed Tuesday without serious input from Hong Kong authorities, the law sets up a vast security apparatus in the territory and gives Beijing broad powers to crack down on a variety of political crimes, including separatism and collusion.

In what initially appeared to be an early test of the law, a man was arrested Wednesday after he unfurled a Hong Kong flag during demonstrations and the police said on Twitter that he had been detained for “violating the #NationalSecurityLaw.” It was “the first arrest made since the law has come into force,” the police said. But a closer look at the banner appeared to show words that translated to “No to” in small letters and “Hong Kong Independence” in bigger type. It was unclear if the police were aware.

The law is likely to usher in a new era for Hong Kong, experts say, in which civil liberties are tightly constrained and loyalty to the party is paramount. “All in all, this is a takeover of Hong Kong,” said Jerome A. Cohen, a New York University law professor who specializes in the Chinese legal system.

Here’s a guide to the new rules.

— The law targets protesters with harsh penalties, including life imprisonment.

The security law, which includes 66 articles and more than 7,000 words, takes direct aim at the spirited anti-government protests that have convulsed Hong Kong over the past year, prescribing harsh penalties for the tactics commonly used by demonstrators.

As they led a monthslong campaign last year to resist what they called Beijing’s encroachment on Hong Kong’s civil liberties, protesters worked to disrupt the city’s reputation for efficiency and orderliness. Some groups attacked police stations, vandalized shops and restaurants and briefly paralyzed the airport.

Under the new law, damaging government buildings would be considered an act of subversion punishable by life imprisonment in “grave” cases. Sabotaging transport would be deemed a terrorist activity punishable by life in prison if it harms other people or causes significant damage to public or private property.

The four major offenses in the law — separatism, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign countries — are ambiguously worded and give the authorities extensive power to target activists who criticize the party, activists say.

“This law is to punish a tiny number of criminals who seriously endanger national security — a sharp sword hanging high over their heads that will serve as a deterrent against external forces meddling in Hong Kong,” Zhang Xiaoming, a deputy director of the central Chinese government office for Hong Kong, said at a news conference in Beijing on Wednesday.

Zhang said that a separate legal system under mainland laws would be used for some of the most serious and imminent

The new national security law is likely to usher in a new era for Hong Kong, experts say, in which civil liberties are tightly constrained. national security cases. But he did not specify whether this could be done by bringing mainland prosecutors, judges and prison guards to Hong Kong or by extraditing prisoners to mainland China.

“The law is devastating in that it appears to have no bounds,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch. “Hong Kong activists, accustomed to operating in mostly rights-respecting environment, now face a frightening void.”

— Beijing now has broad authority to intervene in Hong Kong’s legal system.

Hong Kong’s residents have long cherished the city’s independent judiciary, a legacy of British colonial rule that stood in stark contrast to the secretive, party-controlled courts in mainland China.

Under the security law, however, Beijing has given itself wide latitude to interfere in Hong Kong’s legal affairs, insulated from scrutiny by local courts and lawmakers. The legislation will install in Hong Kong a formidable network of security forces answering to Beijing.They include a national security committee in the Hong Kong government and a national security office made up of mainland Chinese officers stationed in Hong Kong and handling cases according to mainland Chinese law.

Under the legislation, the central government in Beijing can intervene in national security cases, especially during crises or if a case is deemed “complex.” The law opens the way for defendants in important cases to stand trial before courts in mainland China, where convictions are usually assured and penalties are often harsh. Trials involving state secrets could be closed to the news media and the public.

The law could bring to Hong Kong many harsh legal practices common in mainland China, experts said. Broadly, the law

says that the rights of suspects and defendants in national security cases should be respected. But apart from a presumption of innocence and the right to defend oneself, it does not offer much clarity on those protections, leaving open the danger that some of the harsh, unaccountable practices common on the mainland could spread to Hong Kong.

“As a national security suspect, you can be locked up for as long as six months incommunicado, subject to torture, coerced confession, no access to counsel or family or friends, before the police decide whether to process you for a crime,” said Cohen, the law professor, speaking about practices common in mainland China.

— The law sends a warning to the U.S. and other countries.

Beijing has repeatedly sought to portray the unrest in Hong Kong as the work of foreign countries, especially the United States, accusing them of taking part in a plot to sow chaos in China and topple the Communist Party. Chinese officials have spread unfounded conspiracy theories suggesting that Western countries are funding and directing the activists.

Several parts of the security legislation take aim at the perceived role of foreigners in political activism in Hong Kong.

The new rules apply even to those who are not residents of Hong Kong, with Article 38 suggesting that foreigners who support independence for Hong Kong or call for imposing sanctions on the Chinese government could be prosecuted upon entering Hong Kong or mainland China.

The law also states that national security officials in Hong Kong will “take necessary measures to strengthen the management” of foreign nongovernmental organizations and news outlets in the territory. And, the legislation does not offer specifics.

The legislation seems to be aimed at silencing criticism of the party’s policies in Hong Kong among rights activists, journalists and government officials outside China, experts said.

“The law’s broad extraterritorial scope could well have a chilling effect on overseas NGOs, limiting their ability to partner with Hong Kong groups on sensitive issues like human rights and political reform,” said Thomas E. Kellogg, executive director of the Center for Asian Law at Georgetown University.

Kellogg said that more restrictions on nongovernmental groups working on issues like human rights, the rule of law and the democratic development in Hong Kong were likely to emerge in the coming months.

The provisions targeting foreigners will most likely worsen tensions between China and the United States, with relations already at their lowest point in decades. The Trump administration has promised a series of punishments in retaliation for the national security legislation, including visa restrictions and limits on exporting defense technology.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized the passage of the legislation, tweeting: “The CCP’s draconian national security law ends free Hong Kong and exposes the Party’s greatest fear: the free will and free thinking of its own people.”

He also said in a statement, “The United States will not stand idly by while China swallows Hong Kong into its authoritarian maw.”

14

Thursday, July 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

United Nations fights donor fatigue for Syrian civilians and refugees

Syrian families in an emergency shelter for displaced families in Idlib, Syria.

BY STEVEN ERLANGER

A

s ​the long Syrian war drags into its 10th year, conditions for Syrian civilians ​are ​deteriorating​quickly, with rapid inflation and the coronavirus pandemic adding to their​travails​. ​On Tuesday, donors met virtually in Brussels at a conference hosted by the European Union and United Nations to try to find the money to keep the poorest Syrians alive.

After almost a decade of violence, the Syrian government of Bashar Assad has mostly won the country’s civil war, aided by Russia and Iran and their proxies. But with Turkey increasing its own forces inside northwestern Syria, with up to 10,000 troops around Idlib province, a sort of military stalemate has taken hold since March in parts of the country.

The meeting of the donors in Brussels, which included some 80 governments and nongovernmental organizations, was focused solely on humanitarian aid, not reconstruction. That will have to wait for the war to end and a political settlement. Collectively, the donors pledged $5.5 billion for this year, plus a further $2.2 billion for 2021.

The aid is meant to be targeted toward Syrians in need throughout the country, whether in government-controlled areas or rebel ones, and to Syrian refugees in neighboring countries like Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, as well as Egypt and Iraq. Donors have for years pushed the United Nations and aid groups to ensure that the aid reaches those who need it, regardless of political control.

Life in Syria is getting worse even for those under government control, and the amount pledged here will still leave many

destitute.

U.N. officials say that with raging inflation, a basket of basic food items providing 2,000 calories each for a family of five costs at least 200% more than it did a year ago. At the same time, salaries are stagnant.

The price of that basic monthly food basket is now 80,000 Syrian pounds ($155.94), while the average monthly salary is 64,000 pounds, said Corinne Fleischer, the World Food Program’s director for Syria.

After nine years of war, some 9.3 million people inside Syria are considered “food insecure,” an increase of 1.4 million in the last six months alone. Half a million children are considered to have been stunted from malnutrition.

Fleischer, based in Damascus, said her teams were helping 4.5 million people a month — fewer than half those now considered food insecure — and still have a funding shortfall of some $200 million.

“There is real desperation now, even in Damascus, with the inflation,” Fleischer said. “A lot of shops have closed, here and in Aleppo, too. It’s a downward spiral.”

Mark Lowcock, the United Nations’ undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, said, “The numbers are really unfathomable.’’

But, he added, there is also a particularly significant obstacle to getting aid to the embattled northwest, where the Syrian government is still trying to establish control.

The authorization for the U.N. to use two border crossing points for aid from Turkey into northwest Syria, including Idlib province, runs out on July 10, Lowcock said. Those crossings are

the lifeline for some 2.8 million people, 70% of the region’s population, many of whom are displaced from elsewhere in Syria.

More than half of them are children with high rates of malnutrition. “There is no other way to reach them,” Lowcock said.

But the U.N. Security Council has been dragging its feet on acting, with Russia and China slow to respond. In December Russia and China vetoed a resolution allowing aid to cross at four points, and later voted to allow only these two crossing points to operate for six months.

Assad’s government monitors aid workers and deliveries in areas it controls, and can make it difficult to do the kind of evaluations that donor countries would like, according to Fleischer, the World Food Program’s Syria director. That has sometimes led to aid agencies stopping distribution in the south, but the U.N. is clear about trying to provide aid to those who need it wherever they are.

The U.N. had asked for nearly $10 billion — $3.8 billion for aid inside Syria, including $380 million to respond to the coronavirus as it spreads there, plus another $6 billion to aid countries hosting Syrian refugees.

Lowcock said the money for the virus would go toward testing kits and supplies to distribute throughout Syria in preparation for a higher rate of infection, as has been seen in Yemen and Iran.

“A country whose health system has been destroyed in the war cannot be expected to cope with COVID,” he said.

Before this meeting Lowcock said the U.N. had about 25% of what it needed, but that is roughly on track with last year, when the total sought was lower, about $9 billion. About $7 billion of that was pledged at this conference last year.

This year, donors pledged $5.5 billion, plus a further $2.2 billion for 2021. That is “not a bad outcome,” said Lowcock, who was the co-chairman of the meeting, along with the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles.

The European Union pledged 2.3 billion euros ($2.6 billion) over the next two years, Fontelles said. Adding in additional money from member states, Europe pledged $3.6 billion for this year, plus another $2 billion for 2021 and beyond.

Since 2011, the bloc and its member states have provided 20 billion euros in aid for Syrians in need.

The United States pledged nearly $700 million, bringing the American total to more than $11.3 billion since the start of the Syria crisis, said James Jeffrey, the U.S. special representative for Syria engagement.

Germany pledged 1.6 billion euros, and Britain will contribute some 300 million pounds ($368 million).

When the Syrian war began nine years ago, Syria had about 22 million people. Currently some 6.7 million people are internally displaced, and 6.6 million are refugees. Officials have stopped trying to count the number of dead, which are estimated by some groups, like the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, to be as many as 580,000.

An estimated 80% of Syrians live in poverty.

Syria’s currency plummeted last fall in connection with a financial crisis in neighboring Lebanon, where many Syrians kept their money; this has compounded the crisis.

In about a month, the Syrian pound fell from about 1,800 to the dollar to about 3,100 on the black market, destroying the purchasing power of government employees. Prices for imported staples such as sugar, coffee, flour and rice have doubled or tripled.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

15

With Putin’s cachet tattered, Russia’s internet stars turn away

By ANTON TROIANOVSKI

K

senia Hoffman, a Russian video blogger, says another blogger passed along an offer back in March: Was she interested in putting up an Instagram post mentioning the coming referendum on President Vladimir Putin’s amendments to the constitution?

“They’ll pay well for it,” she recalls the blogger saying.

Hoffman, 22, says she turned down the offer. The appearance of carrying the Kremlin’s message, she said, increasingly risks staining an internet influencer’s image. And that has “serious consequences for ad sales.”

“The public mood has really changed,” said Hoffman, who has 800,000 followers on YouTube.

Among the constitutional amendments in the vote is one that lays a legal foundation for Putin to stay in office until 2036. The Kremlin looks assured of victory in the referendum, which ends Wednesday, but its desperatelooking scramble in recent weeks imploring Russians to vote lays bare a more fundamental challenge: For many people, Putin has lost his aura as the unshakable and irreplaceable leader of his nation.

Putin’s falling approval rating tells part of the story, but his declining standing in Russian pop culture more vividly underlines his failure to connect with regular Russians. He may still be inevitable, but he is no longer inspiring.

He gets ever-more-hagiographic coverage on state television — where a Sunday night, prime-time show is called “Moscow. Kremlin.

Putin” — but he is no longer cool.

And celebrities, many of whom long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with those in power, are feeling their fans’ wrath when they appear to toe the Kremlin line.

“Those artists who worry about their reputation in the general public,” a longtime Russian music critic, Artemy Troitsky, said, “have started to quietly duck away from the state.”

There was a time, when the annexation of Crimea brought Putin’s showdown with the West to a fever pitch, that the president held more emotional sway over his public. His carefully stage-managed, Hollywood-style stunts — riding topless on a horse, diving in a submersible — dovetailed with the assertive image he was trying to project in geopolitics and a widespread feeling among Russians that it was time for the country to stand up to the West.

“You and I, the whole country, are for

An undated self-portrait provided by the artist Elena Sheidlina, who has more than four million followers on Instagram. him,” goes a single by the hip-hop star Timati from 2015. “He’s an awesome superhero.”

But over the past two years, pollsters say that the mobilizing force of Russia’s conflict with the West has worn off, replaced by increasing anxiety over the country’s economic and political direction. The growth of an anti-Putin slant in Russian pop culture, where the internet has encroached on state TV’s erstwhile monopoly on mass entertainment, tracks that shift.

“These submersible dives aren’t so entertaining anymore,” said Tatyana Stolyar, a co-founder of Antiglyanets, a popular news source on celebrity culture on the Telegram messaging service.

When Timati recorded another proKremlin single ahead of the Moscow City

Council elections in September — “I don’t go to protests, I don’t peddle nonsense” — the music video drew 1.4 million thumbs-down votes on YouTube until the rapper took it down. News outlets called it the most disliked video in the history of the Russian internet; his co-star in it apologized.

The pandemic has accelerated the shift in public opinion, and it has coincided with Putin’s constitutional referendum, a time when he needed to mobilize the public. Yet with the nation suffering the third-highest number of cases in the world and reeling from the economic impact, Putin’s leadership is under fire.

Maxim Galkin, a mainstream comedian who is a staple on state television, has needled the Kremlin on his Instagram account, which has more than 8 million followers.

In one skit, viewed more than 6 million times, Galkin acts out a phone call between Putin and the mayor of Moscow discussing the mechanics of allowing people to go on walks during the lockdown. The president asks the mayor to be careful not to make it look like the government is trying to control when people can breathe.

“Yes, we do sometimes cut off some people’s oxygen,” Galkin’s Putin says. “But not yet for the masses — for now.”

Young people — who used to be among Putin’s most avid supporters — have swung hard the other way. In December 2017, the independent polling group Levada Center recorded an 81% approval rating for Putin, and 86% among Russians aged 18 to 24. By May of this year, Putin’s rating had dropped to 59% overall — and just 51% among 18-to24-year-olds.

“It gets amplified by the internet,” Denis Volkov, the Levada Center’s deputy director, said of the swing away from the Kremlin among young people, “against the background of overall fatigue with Putin.”

On the internet, which is mostly uncensored in Russia, the expanding industry of YouTube and Instagram stars is increasingly dabbling in politics. Yury Dud, a 33-year-old sports journalist who reaches audiences of tens of millions on his YouTube channel interviewing celebrities, has become a voice of the opposition.

“The vote on constitutional amendments is an embarrassment,” he wrote on Instagram recently, drawing 1.2 million likes. “The only point of the vote is to give Vladimir Putin the chance to stay in power until 2036.”

The government’s apparent attempt to lean on online celebrities to get out the youth vote backfired when some of those same “influencers” went public about it. Erik Kituashvili, a car blogger with nearly 4 million followers, claimed he was offered $100,000 in exchange for urging fans to vote. Katya Konasova, who reviews beauty products and online shopping sites for her 837,000 YouTube followers, claimed she was offered $14,000 for hinting “poignantly” that the amendments would be good for “motherhood and childhood.”

“I don’t fault these people, because they just don’t realize what they’re doing,” Kituashvili said in a profanity-laced rant on Instagram, referring to those celebrities who did urge their followers to vote in the referendum. “They’ll be extremely embarrassed when they figure out that they simply sold out their motherland.”

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Thursday, July 2, 2020

U.S. officials warn Russia of China’s nuclear threat

By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

W

hen negotiators from the United States and Russia met in Vienna last week to discuss renewing the last major nuclear arms control treaty that still exists between the two countries, U.S. officials surprised their counterparts with a classified briefing on new and threatening nuclear capabilities — not Russia’s, but China’s.

The intelligence had not yet been made public in the U.S., or even shared widely with Congress. But it was part of an effort to get the Russians on board with President Donald Trump’s determination to prod China to participate in New START, a treaty it has never joined. Along the way, the administration is portraying the small but increasingly potent Chinese nuclear arsenal — still only one-fifth the size of those fielded by the U.S. or Russia — as the new threat that Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia should confront together.

Marshall Billingslea, Trump’s new arms control negotiator, opened his classified briefing, officials said, by describing the Chinese program as a “crash nuclear buildup,” a “highly alarming effort” to gain parity with the far larger arsenals that Russia and the U.S. have kept for decades.

The American message was clear: Trump will not renew any major arms control treaty that China does not also join — dangling the possibility that Trump would abandon New START altogether if he did not get his way. The treaty expires in February, just weeks after the next presidential

DF-41 intercontinental nuclear missiles rolled through Tiananmen Square during a military parade in Beijing last year.

inauguration.

Many outside experts question whether China’s buildup — assessed as bringing greater capability more than greater numbers — is as fast, or as threatening, as the Trump administration insists.

The intelligence on Beijing’s efforts remains classified, a senior administration official said, noting that sharing such data is not unusual among the world’s major nuclear weapons states. But that means it was given to an adversary with whom the U.S. is conducting daily, low-level conflict — including cyberattacks, military probes by warplanes and Russian aggression in Ukraine. And that was before reports surfaced that a Russian military intelligence unit had put bounties on U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan.

The U.S. official said the administration would try to declassify and make public some of the assessment about China.

Nuclear weapons have suddenly become a new area of contention between Trump and President Xi Jinping of China, and there are many reasons to believe that even if the three superpowers are not yet in a full-scale arms race, what is taking place in negotiating rooms around the world may soon start one.

The Russians have publicly offered a straight, five-year extension of New START, which would not require congressional approval. But Trump is clearly betting that he can find common ground with Putin in confronting the Chinese.

Without question, the Chinese are improving their arsenal, and may be rethinking the idea of holding a “minimal deterrent” — just enough to assure that if they were ever attacked they could take out cities in Russia, Europe or the U.S. But they have only 300 long-range nuclear weapons deployed, compared with 1,550 each that the other two superpowers are allowed under New START. So there is the very real possibility, experts say, that in any negotiation, Beijing will insist on quintupling its nuclear force before it agrees to any constraints. So far, China has said it is not interested in discussing any limitations.

“The notion of trying to pull the Chinese into that agreement is, in theory, a good idea. In practice? Impossible,” former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said this month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The Chinese have no incentive whatsoever to participate,” said Gates, who as CIA director confronted China over its sale to Iran of missiles designed to carry nuclear

warheads. And if Trump continues on the current course, Gates said, he will end up essentially inviting “the Chinese to build dramatically more, far more, nuclear weapons than we think they have at the current time to get level with the United States.”

The roots of the revival of interest in building up nuclear arsenals go back to the passage of New START a decade ago, early in the Obama administration. As the price of getting the treaty through the Senate, President Barack Obama agreed to a multibillion-dollar upgrade of the American nuclear complex, including production facilities that had been neglected for decades. At the same time, Vice President Joe Biden, now Trump’s presumed opponent in the presidential election, said the administration would ask the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which Bill Clinton had signed but the Senate had never acted on.

Obama and Biden never sought ratification, realizing they would lose. But the past four presidents have abided by the treaty’s ban on nuclear tests. That may be coming to an end: Billingslea confirmed that the Trump administration had discussed “unsigning” the treaty and debated whether the U.S. should return to nuclear testing, which it has not engaged in since 1992. But he said there was no need to do so for now.

The U.S. conducted more nuclear tests during the Cold War than the rest of the world combined. Over decades of experimentation, and more than 1,000 tests, its bomb designers learned many tricks of extreme miniaturization as well as how to endow their creations with colossal destructive force. Compared with the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima, Japan, the nation’s first explosive test of a hydrogen bomb, in 1954, produced a blast 1,000 times as powerful.

Because of that history, many nuclear experts now argue that if Trump begins a new wave of global testing, it would aid American rivals more than the U.S. “We lose more than we gain,” Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico and now a professor at Stanford University, said in an interview. Beijing had conducted only 45 tests, he noted, and would welcome a resumption of testing to “increase the sophistication or perhaps the diversification” of its arsenal, “and that can only come back to be a national security risk for the United States.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

17

The world builds a wall to keep America out

By FARHAD MANJOO

Y

ou might call it poetic, if it weren’t so painful. Donald Trump won the White House largely on a campaign of shutting America’s borders to pretty much everyone other than people of European descent. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he once asked, about Haitians, Salvadorans and Africans. “We should have more people from places like Norway.”

So what should one conclude about America’s own proximity to Trump’s global latrine now that “places like Norway” have decided to keep their borders indefinitely closed to us?

Among the list of nations to which Norway and the rest of Europe will soon reopen for travel are three from the continent that Trump flushed down the toilet: Algeria, Morocco and Rwanda. Canada is also on the list. So is China, assuming it reciprocates.

But Trump’s America is not, because we are nowhere close to meeting Europe’s criteria for reducing the spread of the coronavirus. How successfully a society can fight a pandemic is as objective a measure of national capacity, not to mention “greatness,” as one is likely to find — and on this, like so much else these days, America ranks near the bottom.

I have lived in the United States for more than 30 years, and I can’t think of any national failure as naked and complete as this one. When I look at the graphs showing American infections soaring while the virus abates in nearly every other affluent country, I feel the sting of defeat, misery and embarrassment.

As an immigrant from South Africa, I find it hard to resist seeing Europe’s travel dis as the ultimate comeuppance of Trump’s xenophobia. Like a lot of Americans, I sometimes find myself assuming American exceptionalism — the idea that America’s founding ideals make us morally superior to “ordinary” nations and confer on us special credibility and insight when dealing with global crises.

But America’s pandemic failure demolishes the notion that our country is better off without people and ideas from beyond our borders. The last few months should stick a fork in the absurd proposition that the United States enjoys some kind of monopoly on brilliance. Clearly, we do not. Rather than close ourselves off from the planet, we should be inviting others to join the urgent project of rebuilding America.

I bang this drum often. As I’ve argued before, I am in favor of throwing America’s borders wide open to much of the world. My primary reasons are moral — I don’t think a country founded on the idea that everyone is equal should seal itself off to the ambitious billions who live beyond our shores.

There are also powerful economic and strategic arguments for openness; American exceptionalism is impossible without immigration. The only way that a country with less than 5% of the world’s population can maintain the long-term

ing care of Americans, but also that if they do, their families could be deported.

This is madness. More than that: If we keep shutting foreigners out, what justifies our arrogant assumption that the world’s best and brightest will keep wanting to come here?

Consider, for instance, Rwanda, one of the countries that did make Europe’s list. In 1994, it suffered a genocide in which the United States and the United Nations infamously refused to intervene. Almost a million people were killed. In the 26 years since, Rwanda has rebuilt itself, and now it boasts one of the most capable medical systems in Africa. Rwanda’s 13 million people have nearly universal health care coverage; the country uses drones to carry blood and other supplies to far-flung hospitals.

And when the coronavirus came, Rwanda set up contact tracing to quickly halt the spread of the virus, making it one of several African countries to squash it. To date, only two Rwandans are known to have died of COVID-19.

I truly hope that Rwandans and others witnessing President Trump in Arizona last week joined in a com- America’s dysfunction are not tempted to celebrate our fall. memoration of the 200th mile of new and replacement The United States’ coronavirus failure is a loss for the world, which has long depended on American leadership to combat border wall. global crises. economic and cultural superiority to which many Americans The lesson here is obvious: We are all in this together. feel entitled is to collectively produce much more than 5% It’s time to stop pretending that America, and Americans, have of the world’s best ideas. all the answers. We need all the help we can get.

The only way to do that is to invite in the other 95%. I spent much of my career covering Silicon Valley. Some of the most innovative companies in the world — from Google to Intel to Instagram to Stripe — were founded by immigrants, and many in the industry say the whole place would not work without immigration.

PO BOX 6537 Caguas PR 00726 I am not one of those lefties who believe that Trump Telephones: (787) 743-3346 • (787) 743-6537 bears all of the blame for our flawed response to the virus.

(787) 743-5606 • Fax (787) 743-5100 The breakdown here was so total that it lays bare larger and more persistent ailments: our creaking health care system, the ruthlessness of our economy, our Swiss-cheese safety net, and political polarization that poisons effective action but excels at whipping up nonsensical culture wars.

The totality of our failure is precisely why we should look Publisher to the outside for success — yet Trump has used the virus as an excuse to accelerate his restrictions on immigration.

Manuel Sierra Ray Ruiz Last week, Trump suspended the issuance of work visas General Manager Legal Notice Director for hundreds of thousands of foreigners, from tech workers to seasonal workers in the hospitality industry to au pairs and María de L. Márquez Sharon Ramírez Business Director Legal Notices Graphics Manager students.

Another group the restriction affects is doctors. About R. Mariani Elsa Velázquez 127,000 doctors, nearly a quarter of the physicians in the Circulation Director Editor / Reporter United States, are immigrants. Many of them are now caring for coronavirus patients in communities without enough health Lisette Martínez María Rivera Advertising Agency Director Graphic Artist Manager care professionals. All the while, immigrant doctors have had to worry not only that they might die of the virus while tak-

Dr. Ricardo Angulo

18

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Is Trump toast?

Some of the empty seats at President Trump’s campaign kickoff rally in Tulsa, Okla., on June 20.

By FRANK BRUNI

O too.

nly two of the past six presidents before Donald Trump lost their bids for reelection. That’s good news for him.

But their stories are bad news for him,

In their final years in office, both of those presidents, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, experienced a noticeable slide in popularity right around the time — early May through late June — that Trump hit his current ugly patch.

According to Gallup’s ongoing tracking of the percentage of Americans who approve of a president’s job performance, Carter’s and Bush’s numbers sank below 40% during this period and pretty much stayed there through Election Day. It’s as if they both met their fates on the cusp of summer.

And the cusp of summer has been a mean season for Trump, who has never flailed more pathetically or lashed out more desperately and who just experienced the Carter-Bush dip. According to Gallup, his approval rating fell to 39% in early June from 49 a month earlier. So if Carter and Bush are harbingers, Trump is toast.

He’s toast by other measures as well.

Two much-discussed polls by The New York

Times and Siena College that were published last week suggested that in key swing states, as well as nationally, he’s the limping dead, trailing Joe Biden by double digits. That assessment is mostly consistent with other modeling and projections since the economy turned on Trump.

According to some abstruse algorithm that The Economist regularly updates, he has only a 1 in 10 chance of winning the Electoral College and thus the presidency. According to a historical averaging of election-year polls by the website FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s lead over Trump right now is the biggest at this stage of the contest since Bill Clinton’s over Bob Dole in 1996, when Clinton won his second term.

Trump’s response? To set himself on fire.

His gratuitously touted instincts are nowhere to be found, supplanted by selfdefeating provocations, kamikaze tantrums and an itchy Twitter finger. There’s a culture war for him to exploit, but instead of simply pillorying monument destroyers, he created his own living monuments: a white supremacist astride a golf cart in a Florida retirement community and a pistol-toting Karen shouting at peaceful Black protesters from the stoop of her St. Louis manse. As a statement

of values, it’s grotesque. As a reelection strategy, it’s deranged.

“Trump is in a deep hole and his reaction is to keep digging,” David Axelrod told me. “What he’s doing is shrinking his vote to excite his base.” But that base is almost certainly not big enough to carry him to victory.

Of course, November is still plenty distant. “Nobody could have predicted what these last four months would bring,” Axelrod said. “We can’t predict what the next four months will bring.”

And Trump has at times seemed to live beyond the laws of political gravity, untethered by precedents and unanswerable to pundits. For instance, his approval rating since his inauguration has been consistently — and unusually — low, lingering between 35% and 45%, according to Gallup.

But his situation appears to be dire — direr than Democrats allow themselves to admit. They remember how they counted their chickens last time around and got totally plucked.

“Every Democrat rightly has 2016 PTSD,” Lis Smith, a communications strategist who has advised Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Cuomo, told me. “But right now? You can’t imagine normal suburban people voting for Trump anymore. He has really, really alienated everyone but the MAGA true believers.”

Additionally, 2016 is a possibly irrelevant point of reference, for reasons that become clearer all the time. I wouldn’t be entirely shocked if Biden stages a rout in November — or at least as much of a rout as this era of hyperpartisanship permits — and the commentary afterward casts Trump’s reign not as some profound wake-up call but as a freak accident made possible by a perfect storm of circumstances.

In fact that commentary has started.

In The Washington Post last week, Matt Bai astutely observed that even as Trump won the presidency, most Americans rejected the core tenets of his campaign and viewed him darkly. His margin of victory “came from reluctant voters who almost certainly thought they were voting for the losing candidate, and who felt confident he’d make a terrible president,” Bai wrote.

“It was mostly about the intense emotions triggered by his opponent,” he added, referring to Hillary Clinton. “In the only national referendum on Trumpism since 2016 — the midterm cycle two years later — the president’s party was resoundingly rejected.”

There are many ways in which the last

presidential election doesn’t apply to this one, when Trump faces a much tougher challenge. In 2016, an unusually high percentage of voters, especially in such pivotal states as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, told pollsters that they’d decided whom to vote for in the final week. And these late deciders favored Trump.

That could mean that many of them didn’t have an entirely fixed opinion of him.

But just about every American does now. He has dominated the media like none of his recent predecessors, with flamboyant behavior that repels ambivalence.

His luck with late deciders in 2016 could also speak to Clinton aversion. But there’s no comparable Biden aversion. If many voters can’t bring themselves to adore him, they also can’t bring themselves to abhor him.

And Trump and his minions know it.

That’s why, instead of simply portraying Biden as some lefty nightmare, they’re claiming that he’s so mentally diminished that he’ll be the puppet of progressive extremists.

“Biden is just not scary enough for Trump,” Axelrod said. “He’s culturally inconvenient.”

And because of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has less time and fewer ways to change the dynamics of the presidential race than he would have had in some other year.

The party conventions, for example, may have less impact than ever: They’re not rival shows but rival coronavirus narratives, with the Democrats planning a largely virtual event. Also, more Americans than usual are certain to vote early, by mail, possibly casting ballots even before the expected TrumpBiden debates.

“If somebody were asking me for advice on an October surprise, I’d tell them to do it in September,” Doug Sosnik, a longtime Democratic strategist, told me.

Meantime we’ve had other surprises, all cutting against Trump. There was the early June surprise of tear gas being used on peaceful protesters so that he could walk across Lafayette Square for a photo op; the mid-June surprise of John Bolton’s book; the late June surprise of The Times’ scoop that Trump was informed about Russian bounties on American soldiers but didn’t pay attention or care.

The surprises will no doubt keep coming for an administration as steeped in incompetence and corruption as Trump’s.

That’s the other thing about chickens: They come home to roost.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

19

Archivan querella contra exsecretaria de la Familia Por THE STAR un extenso análisis de la documentación recopilaTsiblesrasda enactuaciones Ia investigación preliminar realizada sobre pocontrarias a la Ley de Ia exsecretaria del Departamento de la Familia (DF), licenciada Glorimar Andújar, el Panel del FEI concurrió con la recomendación de la Fiscal Investigadora y ordenó el archivo del asunto, trascendió el miércoles.

La investigación inició con la alegación de un supuesto esquema de “venta de ancianos” y otras denuncias en el que se involucraba a funcionarios del Departamento de la Familia, incluyendo a la entonces Secretaria de dicho departamento. En la Resolución de Panel emitida por los exjueces Rubén Vélez Torres e Ygri Rivera Sánchez informó el Panel que la investigación se originó tras una comunicación de 3 de septiembre de 2019, acompañada de una declaración jurada suscrita por la señora Barbara González Nieves, quien fuera Directora de Licenciamiento de la agencia.

El Panel nombró a la licenciada Crisanta González Seda, como Fiscal Investigadora con la encomienda de que realizara una investigación preliminar sobre dichas alegaciones, de acuerdo con lo establecido en la Ley 2-1988.

Esto, ante el hecho de que en la comunicación remitida al Panel, se expuso que este asunto había sido planteado previamente ante el Departamento de Justicia, atribuyéndole también responsabilidad a Ia entonces secretaria de ese Departamento, Wanda Vázquez Garced.

Siendo así, Ia jurisdicción para dicha investigación, correspondía al PFEI. El 17 de octubre de 2019, la licenciada González Seda presentó su primer informe y concluyó que las alegaciones contra la licenciada Vázquez Garced no cumplían con las disposiciones de los artículos 4, 8 y 11 de la Ley 2, supra.

Sostuvo que no se hacía referencia a un solo hecho que permitiera siquiera inferir con razonabilidad alguna actuación ilegal por parte de la entonces Secretaria de Justicia.

Sin embargo, en cuanto a las querellas contra el Departamento de Ia Familia y su entonces Secretaria, Glorimar Andujar Matos, Ia Fiscal Investigadora concluyó que Justicia no notificó al PFEI conforme lo requiere el Articulo 4 de la Ley. Este dispone expresamente que en aquellos casos en los cuales el Secretario o Secretaria de Justicia

entienda que la información recibida contra cualquiera de los funcionarios o individuos enumerados bajo la jurisdicción del PFEI no constituye causa suficiente para investigar, así lo notificará al Panel sobre el Fiscal Especial Independiente en un término que no excederá de 15 días laborables, desde el día en que recibe la querella, informe o información que da lugar a la investigación preliminar e indicando los fundamentos que justifiquen su decisión.

Por ello, el Panel requirió de la Secretaria de Justicia, licenciada Dennise Longo Quiñones, que remitiera al Panel todo expediente o investigación relacionada con estos hechos. Según dicho expediente, Ia situación había sido presentada ante ese departamento el 11 de diciembre de 2018, y remitida a la División de Integridad Pública y Asuntos del Contralor, el 14 de enero de 2019. Sin embargo, ello nunca fue notificado al PFEI. No fue hasta que la señora González Nieves presentó la declaración jurada de referencia, que el Panel advino en conocimiento de los alegados hechos.

El 20 de febrero de 2020, la Fiscal Investigadora presentó su segundo informe que consistió en un informe de investigación preliminar. Pero debido a la pandemia provocada por ci coronavirus, los trabajos para el análisis y discusión del mismo tuvieron que ser interrumpidos hasta esta fecha.

No obstante, el informe detalla todas las alegadas incidencias en que Ia querellante alegaba intervención indebida, persecución, atropello, hostigamiento laboral y requerimiento de la compra de taquillas para actividades políticas. Ni el Departamento de Justicia, ni la investigación por parte de la Fiscal Investigadora del FEI a la Secretaria de la Familia, encontraron base en las declaraciones y la documentación provista que sustentara las alegaciones. Además de evaluar la evidencia e información remitida por el Departamento de Justicia, la Fiscal Investigadora realizó entrevistas y requirió evidencia adicional a través de requerimientos de información de diversa índole, según surge de su informe.

La Fiscal Investigadora no pudo identificar ninguna evidencia que justifique la designación de un Fiscal Especial Independiente para realizar una investigación más profunda sobre las imputaciones por parte de la señora González Nieves. Tampoco encontró certificación alguna de la Oficina de Ética Gubernamental de que la querellante estuviera cooperando con pesquisa alguna, como alegó.

Advirtió, que conforme surge de la Carta del 19 de julio de 2019 que se envió a Ia señora Migdalia Santos, Notificación de intención de Destitución, que se incluye en el informe, se determinó que el alegado esquema se llevó a cabo entre los años 2012 al 2016, antes de que Ia exsecretaria del Departamento de la Familia ocupara dicha posición.

“Ante ello, hay ausencia total de prueba de que la hoy exsecretaria del Departamento de la Familia encubriera y/o colaborara en algún acto de corrupción, ya que, conforme a la documentación recibida del Departamento de 7 la Familia, los alegados actos delictivos que se le imputan a la señora Santos, ocurrieron durante los años 2012-20 16”, cita el informe.

Surge además que la señora González Nieves fue relevada de la posición de confianza y reinstalada a la posición de carrera que ocupaba, por colocar a la agencia en una situación difícil, luego del Huracán María, al no realizar la labor de visitar y evaluar los hogares de ancianos, según se le encomendó al momento de su designación. La señora González Nieves se negaba por entender que tenía derecho a la posición de confianza y dijo haber hecho gestiones con legisladores y otros funcionarios para que Convencieran a la exsecretaria del Departamento de Ia Familia a reinstalarla en el puesto de confianza. Ello, a pesar de que su sueldo no se afectó y que ella se quejaba de que le asignaban mucho trabajo y no podía realizarlo.

Tras recibir y analizar el Informe, el Panel a través de los exjueces Vélez Torres y Rivera Sánchez concluyo: “Hemos realizado un escrutinio severo y cuidadoso del informe presentado por la Fiscal Investigadora, licenciada Crisanta González Seda, el cual es sumamente minucioso y abarcador. También, examinamos Ia evidencia que acompaña el mismo, a la luz de las disposiciones legales aplicables. Luego de nuestro análisis, concurrimos con Ia recomendación de Ia Fiscal Investigadora. A tenor de lo anterior, decretamos el archivo de este asunto sin que para ello sea necesario ningún trámite ulterior”.

Departamento de Salud ordena retiro de pruebas Clarity e Instant View Por THE STAR l secretario del Departamento de Salud, Emiércoles, Lorenzo González Feliciano, informó el que, a raíz de la notificación de la Administración de Drogas y Alimentos, -FDA, por sus siglas en inglés- se ordenó el recogido de las pruebas serológicas Clarity e Instant View.

“El Departamento de Salud tiene en su inventario pruebas Clarity, por lo que tras la determinación de la FDA de remover estas pruebas serológicas, se ordenó inmediatamente el recogido de las mismas,

por parte del departamento, ya que queda prohibido su uso y distribución. Estamos evaluando cuántas pruebas distribuimos y quedan en la periferia para cumplir con la orden de la FDA”, dijo González Feliciano en declaraciones escritas.

La División de Laboratorios, adscrita a la Secretaría Auxiliar para Reglamentación y Acreditación de Facilidades de Salud (SARAFS) explicó que puede haber pruebas no distribuidas por el Departamento de Salud, por lo que las entidades privadas deben coordinar el recogido de las mismas. Del mismo modo, cualquier labo-

ratorio que haya procesado dichas pruebas, deberá comunicarse con el paciente o médico autorizado, e informarle sobre la posibilidad de resultados erróneos. Los laboratorios deben hacer disponible al paciente la repetición de las pruebas, utilizando un sistema de pruebas distinto La desautorización de las pruebas por parte de la FDA, puede estar fundamentada por distintas razones, entre las cuales está no haber corregido algún problema con el sistema de pruebas o no haber sometido a tiempo la documentación necesaria para otorgar un Permi-

so de Uso de Emergencias (EUA), entre otras razones.

El listado de las pruebas serológicas que tienen la autorización de la FDA es revisado constantemente; por lo que, el Departamento de Salud se mantiene atento a las guías establecidas para tomar decisiones respecto a la administración de las pruebas adquiridas.

Las entidades que hayan recibido pruebas Clarity por parte del Departamento de Salud, pueden notificarlo a través del buzón electrónico rapidrecall@ salud.pr.gov

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Thursday, July 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Bob Dylan makes chart history with ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’

By BEN SISARIO

M

ost weeks, the top of the Billboard album chart is a story of hip-hop, more hip-hop and maybe a pop star. This week it also features Bob Dylan, the 79-year-old songwriter and cultural chameleon who four years ago won the Nobel Prize in literature.

While the chart’s No. 1 spot is held this week by rapper Lil Baby’s “My Turn” for a third time in a row — and a fourth overall — Dylan opens at No. 2 with “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” his 39th studio album, which is his 23rd time in the Top 10.

“Rough and Rowdy Ways,” Dylan’s first album of

new songs in eight years — his last three have been collections of traditional pop standards — sold 51,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen Music.

Factoring in its 3 million streams, the LP was credited with the equivalent of 53,000 sales, according to the formula that Nielsen and Billboard now use to reconcile the different ways that fans consume music.

Dylan’s album has been hailed by critics as one of his best, and most beguiling, in years. “Murder Most Foul,” the 17-minute final track, is a rhapsodic evocation of American history in the wake of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963; by one count, it alludes to at least 74 other songs.

According to Billboard, Dylan is the first artist to

reach the Top 40 with a new album in each decade from the 1960s to the 2020s. (He may face competition from Barbra Streisand, who has logged a No. 1 in each decade from the ’60s through the 2010s, and has not released an album in two years.)

Lil Baby’s “My Turn” held the top spot this week with the equivalent of 70,000 sales, including 107 million streams. Also this week, New York rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie jumped 77 spots to No. 3, after releasing an expanded version of his album “Hoodie 2.0,” which had arrived on the chart in February, at No. 2.

DaBaby’s “Blame It on Baby” is in fourth place, and Post Malone’s “Hollywood’s Bleeding” is No. 5. R&B singer Teyana Taylor opened at No. 8 with “The Album.”

He turned ‘I Can’t Breathe’ into protest music

By GEULIA HEWARD

W

hen Joel Thompson composed “The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” he didn’t intend for anyone to hear the piece.

It was 2014. That summer, Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner died in a chokehold during a botched arrest on Staten Island. For weeks, Thompson — then 25, with a degree in choral conducting — watched footage of Garner’s death on loop.

Reeling, he tried to find a way to channel his sadness and anger. He eventually took the final words of Brown, Garner and five other unarmed Black men who had been killed during encounters with the police, and set them to music for choir. But when he was finished, he put the piece away.

“I didn’t think of myself as a composer back then,” Thompson said in a recent phone interview. “I didn’t think anyone would hear it. I didn’t think anyone would listen to it, or even want to listen to it.”

The work may well have stayed on his computer’s hard drive had Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man, not died of a severe spinal cord injury the following year while in police custody in Baltimore. Gray’s death inspired Thompson to post on social media, asking if there was anyone interested in helping him bring his piece to life.

A friend suggested that he reach out to Eugene Rogers. As the director of choirs at the University of Michigan, Rogers was known for leading works that involved history and activism, on subjects like Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student who was murdered in 1998, and Harriet Tubman. “The Seven

The composer Joel Thompson at Yale University in New Haven, Conn Last Words of the Unarmed” was a bit riskier: The Black Lives Matter movement was still fairly new then, and still widely perceived as extreme. But in October 2015, Rog-

ers led the university’s Men’s Glee Club in the premiere.

Thompson’s 15-minute piece echoes the liturgical structure of Haydn’s “The Seven Last Words of Christ.”

The first movement is a moody setting of “Why do you have your guns out?” — the final words of Kenneth Chamberlain Sr., who was shot and killed by a bullet from an officer’s .40-caliber pistol in White Plains, New York, in 2011. After moving through the words of Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, Brown, Oscar Grant and John Crawford, the final section is a stirring rendering of Garner’s words, now a rallying cry: “I can’t breathe.”

The audience response to early performances was mixed, at best. When Rogers and the glee club toured cities including Washington and Johannesburg, the reaction was sometimes aggressive.

“I took a lot of heat,” Rogers said in an interview.

“I went against many people who asked me not to do the piece. We had people in the audience rip up their programs and throw them in the trash, right in front of the choir, and walk out. I had letters written to my dean about it.”

But now, in the wake of the death of George Floyd, the protests about police violence that have engulfed the nation and the sudden, broad realignment of opinion on racial issues, the work is finding new, and newly enthusiastic, listeners. On June 4, Carnegie Hall streamed a recording on its website and social media channels.

“People wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole five years ago,” Thompson said. “I’m grateful that people are willing to engage with it now, but I’m also simultaneously frustrated. I’m hoping that the people who are sharing this piece come to realize how white supremacy itself has been embedded into this genre. We need to make substantive structural change to how things are run in

The San Juan Daily Star classical music.”

Had the coronavirus pandemic not hit, Thompson said, he would currently be lost in the archives of the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra; the ensemble received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to commission a piece from him about the 1956 Tallahassee bus boycott. Instead, he spoke from his apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, occasionally setting the phone down to play riffs from his keyboard as he explained his work. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: You’re a Black Jamaican American in a predominantly white space. How did you get involved in classical composition?

A: I started playing piano in church services. I was pretty much self-taught up until that point, so I had horrible technique. Classical music moved to the foreground when I was an undergraduate at Emory.

I didn’t think it was really possible for me to do classical music. But I remember, I went to my first Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert. They played Alvin Singleton’s “PraiseMaker,” and it was the first time I heard classical music from a Black composer. That’s when I sort of figured it was possible.

Q: Do you think it was easier to trust another Black man to be the conductor of “The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed” because of your shared experience?

A: When Dr. Rogers told me he was interested in the piece, he came down to Atlanta and met with me

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Thompson’s “The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” written in 2014, is finding new listeners in a summer of unrest.

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over tea. We went through the score together. He shared how moved he was, as a Black male, studying the score, and seeing what I was saying, and what I was feeling. I saw the emotional effect that the piece had on him. We had frank conversations about our experiences as Black people in classical music.

Q: While you’re both Black, the Men’s Glee Club, which originally performed the piece, is largely not.

Was this something you all talked about?

A: Oh, it was hard. There were people in the chorus who didn’t want to perform it. We had alums of the club who had a problem with it. But Dr. Rogers’ pedagogy was crucial, and needs to be adopted by other predominantly white choirs. He made sure all the men did their research about these deaths, that they were educated. Everyone’s cultural competency went up like five notches.

Q: The piece itself is just so emotional and raw.

A: There was everything about me in there; there was no need to censor myself. It was as honest as possible. Now that I’m aware of an audience, it’s hard to return to that same state of vulnerability, but it’s always something that I’m aiming for.

Q: What’s next for you?

A: I’m supporting myself through composition commissions right now, but I’m also a full-time student at Yale. I start the doctorate in musical arts program in September. I’ll be either the fourth or fifth Black person to be in the program.

After #OscarsSoWhite, the Academy meets goal to diversify membership

By KYLE BUCHANAN

I

n 2015, the Oscars handed all 20 of its acting nominations to white actors. The ensuing controversy, coined #OscarsSoWhite by activist April Reign, was a blow to the reputation of Hollywood’s biggest awards ceremony — and in 2016, it happened again.

After those back-to-back blunders cast a renewed spotlight on an Oscar-voting membership mostly made up of white men, the academy set inclusion goals to double the number of women and voters of color in its membership by 2020. On Tuesday, as it unveiled a new class of 819 artists and executives invited to become members this year, the academy announced it had met both goals.

The number of active female members has doubled, from 1,446 to 3,179, and the number of active members from underrepresented ethnic and racial communities had tripled, from 554 to 1,787.

“We take great pride in the strides we have made in exceeding our initial inclusion goals set back in 2016, but acknowledge the road ahead is a long one,” the academy chief executive, Dawn Hudson, said in a statement. “We are committed to staying the course.”

Some 45% of this year’s new members are women,

while 36% are racial minorities. The list of actors invited to join includes famous faces like the “Crazy Rich Asians” stars Constance Wu and Awkwafina, as well as Yalitza Aparicio, the Oscar-nominated lead of “Roma,” and five performers from this year’s best-picture winner, “Parasite.” Several recent Oscar winners were added to the membership roll, including Matthew A. Cherry, who nabbed the animatedshort Oscar this year for “Hair Love.”

The list of new members invited to join the directors branch includes two women who were overlooked by the Oscars last year, Alma Har’el (“Honey Boy”) and Lulu Wang (“The Farewell”), in addition to acclaimed indie filmmakers like Ari Aster (“Midsommar”) and Robert Eggers (“The Lighthouse”). Only two of the 29 people invited to join the directors branch, Matthew Vaughn (“X-Men: First Class”) and Matt Reeves (“War for the Planet of the Apes”), are considered big-budget studio filmmakers; the rest of the list skews indie and international.

Overall, the 2020 class of new members is 49% international, hailing from 68 countries. That may be a boon for foreign-language Oscar contenders hoping to emulate the success of Bong Joon Ho’s South Korean sensation “Parasite,” the first film not in the English language to win best picture.

Still, despite all those gains, only 19% of the current

members are people of color while just 33% of Oscar voters are female. To that end, the academy has announced a new program, called Academy Aperture 2025, that will implement new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars eligibility. More details on those guidelines are expected to be released in the next year.

Among the academy’s invitees is Matthew Cherry, director of “Hair Love,” which won the Oscar for best animated short film earlier this year.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

‘Hamilton’ review: You say you want a revolution

By A.O. SCOTT

T

he opening scenes of the filmed version of the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” which starts streaming on Disney+ on Independence Day weekend, pull you back in time to two distinct periods. The people onstage, in their breeches and brassbuttoned coats, belong to the New York of 1776. That is when a 19-year-old freshly arrived from the Caribbean — the “bastard, immigrant, son of a whore” who shares his name with the show — makes his move and takes his shot, joining up with a squad of anti-British revolutionaries and eventually finding his way to George Washington’s right hand and the front of the $10 bill.

But this Hamilton, played with relentless energy and sly charm by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the music, book and lyrics, also belongs to the New York of 2016.

Filmed (by the show’s director, Thomas Kail, and cinematographer Declan Quinn) in front of a live audience at the Richard Rodgers Theater in June of that year, the movie, while not strictly speaking a documentary, is nonetheless a document of its moment.

It evokes a swirl of ideas, debates, dreams and assumptions that can feel, in the present moment, as elusive as the intrigue and ideological sparring of the late 1700s.

“Hamilton,” which premiered at the Public Theater in early 2015 before moving to Broadway and then into every precinct of American popular culture, may be the supreme artistic expression of an Obama-era ideal of progressive, multicultural patriotism.

Casting Black and Latino actors as the Founding Fathers and their allies — Daveed Diggs as Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette, Christopher Jackson as George Washington, and Leslie Odom Jr. as Hamilton’s mortal frenemy Aaron Burr — was much more than a gesture of inclusiveness.

(Jonathan Groff channels the essential, irreducible whiteness of King George III.) The show’s argument, woven through songs that brilliantly synthesized hip-hop, show tunes and every flavor of pop, was that American history is an open book. Any of us should be able to write ourselves into it.

Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury and an architect of the

Lin-Manuel Miranda, left, as Alexander Hamilton and Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr in the filmed version of the show.

U.S. banking system, was Miranda’s chosen embodiment of this belief: an outsider with no money and scant connections who propelled himself into the center of the national narrative through sheer brains, talent and drive. Miranda shares some of his hero’s ambition and intelligence, and turns Hamilton into an avatar of modern American aspiration. Just like his country, he sings, he’s “young, scrappy and hungry.”

The tale of his rise fuses individual striving and collective struggle. For all his sometimes comical self-regard (he has a pickup line about “my top-notch brain”), Hamilton doesn’t measure success just in personal terms. That is Burr’s great shortcoming: He scrambles after power and prestige without taking a risk or committing himself to a principle. But Hamilton wants to make his mark by making a difference.

Self-making and nation-building are aspects of a single project.

“Hamilton” is a brilliant feat of historical imagination, which isn’t the same as a history lesson. Miranda used Ron Chernow’s dad-lit doorstop the way Shakespeare drew on Holinshed’s Chronicles — as a treasure trove of character, anecdote and dramatic raw material. One of the marvels of the show is the way it brings long-dead, legendshrouded people to vivid and sympathetic life. The close-ups and camera movements in this version enhance the charisma of the performers, adding a dimension of intimacy

that compensates for the lost electricity of the live theatrical experience.

The glib, dandyish Jefferson is a perfect foil for Hamilton: his rival, his intellectual equal and his sometimes reluctant partner in the construction of a new political order.

Though Hamilton hates it when Washington calls him son, the father of the country is also a warm, sometimes stern paternal presence in his protégé’s life. The duplicitous Burr may be the most Shakespearean figure in the pageant, a gifted man tormented and ultimately undone by his failure to make himself matter.

Not that public affairs are the only forces that move “Hamilton.” I haven’t forgotten the Schuyler sisters, who have some of the best numbers and who somewhat undermine the patriarchal, great-man tendencies inherent in this kind of undertaking. Miranda weaves the story of revolutionary ferment and the subsequent partisan battles of the early national era into a chronicle of courtship, marriage, friendship and adultery that has its own political implications. Angelica Schuyler (the magnificent Renée Elise Goldsberry), the oldest of the three sisters, is a freethinker and a feminist constrained by the narrowness of the options available to women of her time and class. Her sister Eliza (Phillipa Soo), who marries Alexander, is saved from being reduced to a passive, suffering figure by the emotional richness of her songs.

Still, the personal and the political

don’t entirely balance. “Can we get back to politics?” Jefferson demands after an especially somber episode in Hamilton’s family life, and it is hard to keep from sharing his impatience. The biographical details are necessary to the structure and texture of the show, but it is fueled by Cabinet debates and pamphlet wars, by high rhetoric and backroom dealing, by the glory and complexity of self-government.

Again: This isn’t a textbook. Liberties have been taken. Faults can be found. The problem of slavery isn’t ignored, but it has a way of slipping to the margins. Jefferson’s ownership of slaves is cited by Hamilton as a sign of bad faith (“your debts are paid because you don’t pay for labor”), but Washington’s doesn’t come up.

“Hamilton” is motivated, above all, by a faith in the self-correcting potential of the American experiment, by the old and noble idea that a usable past — and therefore a more perfect future — can be fashioned from a record that bristles with violence, injustice and contradiction. The optimism of this vision, filtered through a sensibility as generous as Miranda’s, is inspiring.

It is also heartbreaking. One lesson that the past few years should have taught — or reconfirmed — is that there aren’t any good old days. We can’t go back to 1789 or 2016 or any other year to escape from the failures that plague us now. This 4-year-old performance of “Hamilton,” viewed without nostalgia, feels more vital, more challenging then ever.

Its central questions — “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” — are staring us in the face. Its lyrics are an archive of encouragement and rebuke. Over the years, various verses have stuck in my head, but at the moment I can’t get past the parts of “One Last Time” that are taken, word for word, from Washington’s farewell address, ghostwritten by Hamilton. And I can’t escape tears when the outgoing president hymns “the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government.”

‘Hamilton’ Rated PG-13. Bare-knuckle politics.

Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes. Watch on Disney+.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

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Does your local doctor have a Coronavirus test for you?

By KATHERINE J. WUE

I

n recent months, Dr. Denise Hooks-Anderson has grown accustomed to saying “no.”

That’s the answer she always gives when her patients in Richmond Heights, Missouri, ask whether she can test them for the coronavirus.

“At our practice, we’ve never been able to do testing,” said Hooks-Anderson, a family medicine doctor whose patients are largely African American, a group disproportionately burdened by the coronavirus. In her office and many others, there simply is not enough protective equipment, like masks and gloves, to keep staff members safe while they collect potentially infectious samples.

Hooks-Anderson worries about her patients, whom she encourages to look elsewhere for a test if they suspect an infection. Still, the dangers are too great for her practice to become directly involved, she said: “Are we willing to take that risk? To essentially take out the entire staff if someone were to get infected? In the midst of a pandemic, that becomes a big issue.”

Back in March, after President Donald Trump declared the coronavirus a national emergency, doctors felt illequipped to diagnose their patients or counsel them on treatment and prevention. Three months later, testing numbers are up. But primary care physicians — the doctors whom many turn to first when their health declines — are not always equipped to check their patients for the pathogen. And community testing sites have not been evenly distributed, snubbing some populations most vulnerable to the ill effects of the virus. Many Americans hoping to get tested are not even sure where to start looking.

Physicians like Hooks-Anderson are concerned that these issues will not be any closer to being resolved in the coming weeks and months, even while demand increases as states reopen, employees resume in-person work, and parents seek care and schooling for their children. The situation may grow especially dire by autumn, when health officials expect to see a rise in infections, above and beyond the ongoing outbreaks that will likely last through the summer.

“Things are going to get ugly in the fall,” said Dr. Gabriela Maradiaga Panayotti, a pediatrician at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. “I don’t know if anybody knows how that’s going to be handled.”

Since the virus made landfall in the United States, more than 30 million diagnostic tests have been administered to patients across the country, according to the COVID Tracking Project. These tests, which hunt for bits of coronavirus genetic material, can help a person figure out if they are currently infected, even in the absence of symptoms. (Antibody tests, on the other hand, indicate whether someone had the virus in the past.)

But testing rates still fall short of where experts say they should be. And because the coronavirus can infect and spread from individuals who don’t show signs of illness, the strength of its grip on the nation remains unknown.

Concerns surrounding the nation’s stock of coronavirus

Primary care physicians can’t always provide coronavirus tests, or answers about where to get them. tests aren’t new. Sputtering supply chains have been an ongoing problem, caused by delays in Food and Drug Administration approvals and flaws in an early Centers for Disease Control and Prevention test. The result was a lost month during which the virus spread undetected. Even after independent manufacturers were finally allowed into the fray, they struggled to keep pace.

In the months since, the government has granted emergency use authorization to dozens of diagnostic tests, which are now widely available in many locations, including community health centers, urgent care centers and pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens. But “we’re still catching up,” said Dr. Alexander McAdam, director of the Infectious Diseases Diagnostic Laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital. That means a significant proportion of Americans who want a test still cannot get one.

Eligibility and convenience vary widely between sites, even within neighborhoods. Some sites have only enough capacity to swab people with symptoms and who are at highest risk of falling ill; others won’t swab patients before they have been screened by a doctor. Logistical hiccups at the laboratories that process the samples can also keep test results out of patients’ hands for days.

Even health networks that have developed their own coronavirus tests, like Nebraska Medicine, cannot offer assessments to all of their own patients, said Dr. Nada Fadul, who directs the network’s HIV clinic in Omaha.

“Many researchers are advocating for testing contacts” of people with confirmed infections, Fadul said. “We’re still at the point where we’re just barely able to test the symptom-

atic patients.”

Tests are also especially scarce among primary care physicians. Many smaller doctors’ offices are not set up to grapple with the logistics of collecting samples of a highly contagious and dangerous pathogen.

“We don’t have the luxury of space to do separate sick areas or swabbing areas,” said Dr. Hai Cao, a pediatrician at South Slope Pediatrics in Brooklyn, New York. “It would be nice if we did. But in our limited space, I don’t see that as being a prudent move.”

To complicate matters further, not all Americans have a doctor to consult, said Dr. Utibe Essien, a physician and health services researcher at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine. Coronavirus testing is covered under insurance in the United States, but about 28 million people in the country remain uninsured. The federal government has set aside money to foot the bill for these patients, but some could still be saddled with unanticipated costs. Fear of an enormous medical bill can be enough to drive someone away from a testing site altogether, Dr. Maradiaga Panayotti said.

Existing disparities may only be exacerbated by the approach of the fall season, when other respiratory illnesses that share symptoms with COVID-19, such as the flu, reappear, and schools invite students back to campus.

While coronavirus case numbers continue to balloon, many U.S. cities are reopening — among them, St. Louis, where Hooks-Anderson is dreading what’s to come.

“I think it’s only going to get worse,” she said. “I would love to be wrong.”

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Thursday, July 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Ancient Rome was teetering. Then a volcano erupted 6,000 miles away.

An image provided by the California Institute of Technology shows an artist’s concept of a supermassive black hole and its surrounding disk of gas, and two smaller black holes embedded in that disk and orbiting each other.

By DENNIS OVERBYE

I

n an announcement last week, astronomers described the detection of an epistemological marvel: an invisible collision of invisible objects — black holes — had become briefly visible. The story goes like this: Long, long ago, about 4 billion years before now and in a faraway galaxy, a pair of black holes collided. Typically such an event would leave no visible trace, just a shuddering of space-time — gravitational waves — and a bigger black hole. (Black holes emit no light.)

But these black holes were part of a swirl of star parts, gas and dust surrounding a third, gigantic black hole, a supermassive black hole 100 million times more massive than the sun. As a result, the merging pair generated a shock wave of heat and light that allowed the collision to be seen as well as heard.

That is the explanation being offered by a group of astronomers, led by Matthew Graham of the California Institute of Technology, for a curious flash of light they recorded last year. Their conclusion, announced Thursday, was laid out in a paper in Physical Review Letters.

If the result holds up, it would mark the first time that colliding black holes have produced light as well as gravitational waves. “We have seen a visible signal from a previously invisible part of the universe,” Graham said.

K.E. Saavik Ford, of the American Museum of Natural History and the City University of New York and an author of the new study, said about the black holes, “It means we

can see them and hear them at the same time.” She called the whole event “super exciting.”

The work, the researchers say, could lead to new insights into how, when and where black holes merge into ever bigger monsters that weigh millions or billions of suns and dominate the centers of galaxies. It could also elucidate the conditions inside the crackling turnstile of fire and fury through which matter passes on its way to black-hole doom.

Two black holes colliding while in the whirling grip of another? “Astrophysics probably doesn’t get more exciting than that,” Graham said.

Black holes are objects predicted by Albert Einstein to be so dense that not even light can escape them. Most of the black holes that astronomers know about are the corpses of massive stars that have died and collapsed catastrophically into nothing; the dark remnants are a few times as massive as the sun. But galaxies harbor black holes millions or billions of more massive than that. How black holes can grow so big is an abiding mystery of astronomy.

In 2016, scientists for the first time detected the collision of two distant black holes, using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, a pair of L-shape antennas in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. Since then LIGO and a third antenna, Virgo, in Italy, together have charted dozens of similar catastrophic marriages out there in the dark. But astronomers have yet to see any trace of light from them. (One exception was a collision of neutron stars, the remnants of supernova explosions, that lit up the universe and was detected in August 2017.)

On May 21, 2019, an alert went out to the world’s astronomers that the LIGO and Virgo antennas had recorded what looked like two black holes colliding. Among the telescopes on duty that night was the Zwicky Transient Facility, a robotic instrument on Palomar Mountain in California, which monitors the deep sky for anything that flares, blinks, explodes or moves. It is named after Fritz Zwicky, an innovative and eccentric Swiss astronomer who worked at Caltech.

Graham, the project scientist for the Zwicky telescope, and his colleagues had been mulling the possibility that black hole mergers might be happening in the dense, sparky accretion disks of supermassive black holes, which are the central engines for quasars. The team began monitoring quasars in the those regions for unusual activity.

The trail from the May gravitational wave event led to a quasar known as J124942.3+344929, located about 4 billion light-years from Earth. Examining records from the Zwicky telescope, Graham discovered that the quasar had flared, doubling in brightness for about a month — an uncharacteristically large fluctuation. That marked it as a possible black hole collision, he said.

Bolstering that hypothesis was the fact that the flare did not become visible until 34 days after the gravitational waves had been detected. It would take about that long for any light from a black hole collision to emerge from such a thick disk of gas, according to a model that Ford and Barry McKernan, her colleague at the American Museum of Natural History, described in a paper last year.

Ford described the accretion disk as “ a swarm of stars and dead stars, including black holes,” in a Caltech news release.

She added: “These objects swarm like angry bees around the monstrous queen bee at the center. They can briefly find gravitational partners and pair up but usually lose their partners quickly to the mad dance. But in a supermassive black hole’s disk, the flowing gas converts the mosh pit of the swarm to a classical minuet, organizing the black holes so they can pair up.”

The result, she said, can be a frenzy of black holes combining and recombining into bigger and bigger cosmic graves. This, she said, is what might have caused the signal that was detected in May 2019.

That could explain how the black holes in this collision grew so big, she said. The black hole that emerged from this collision and left a fiery trail through the accretion disk was at least 100 times as massive as the sun. But 50 solar masses is the weight limit for black holes formed directly from dead stars, meaning that the two holes that collided in May 2019 were right at the limit and probably even bigger. So they didn’t result directly from a stellar collapse, she said. Rather, they probably formed through a series of ever-larger mergers.

The collision heard by LIGO and Virgo might have been only the end of a chain reaction of black holes mating. “This is the tip of the iceberg,” Ford said.

26

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Do empty stadiums affect outcomes? The data says yes

By RORY SMITH

G

ermany’s privilege was also its risk.

On May 16, the Bundesliga became the first major league in any sport in the world to tread gingerly into the light of the post-coronavirus world and attempt to play on. To some, it was a purely financial decision, evidence of soccer’s lost soul. To others, it was existential pragmatism, the only way to ensure survival.

Either way, the Bundesliga became a trailblazer, a reference point for all of the other leagues trying to find their way out of lockdown. England’s Premier League has credited its German rival with accelerating its own return, and Bundesliga executives reported fielding calls from their counterparts in major North American sports who were eager to pick their brains.

But more than that, the Bundesliga’s comeback turned into a grand experiment, one that could answer some of soccer’s, and to some extent sports’, biggest questions.

For decades, studies have examined the role fans play in the world’s most popular game: How much do they contribute to home advantage? Does their presence affect the way teams play? Would their absence materially alter the nature of the game?

The Bundesliga’s data offers the first glimmer of an answer to some of those questions, and an unwelcome glimpse into some of the game’s mechanics.

Fans are the home-field advantage If the past six weeks proved anything, it was that players thanking fans for their support after a game is more than a platitude. Home-field advantage has long been far more significant in soccer than in most other sports. The great, unwelcome experiment running in Germany since May has demonstrated that what constitutes that advantage is not mere familiarity but, largely, the fans.

The performances of home teams in the Bundesliga have, for all intents and purposes, collapsed in front of empty stands. The number of home victories slipped by 10 percentage points, to 33 percent of matches in empty stadiums from 43 percent in full ones.

The change has been so extreme, in fact, that Lukas Keppler, a managing director of the data and analytics firm Impect, noted a sort of “negative home advantage.” For the first time in soccer history, he said, it has appeared, at times, to be easier to be playing on the road.

According to data provided by another

Home teams were less likely to win without fans in the stands, an analysis of Bundesliga matches showed. analysis firm, Gracenote, home teams scored fewer goals than they had in full stadiums (1.74 to 1.43 a game), leading to a decline in goal scoring overall.

They also took fewer shots (a decrease of 10 percent), and those that they did take were worse. (The probability of any given shot ending up as a goal dropped more than a point, to 11.11 percent.) Home teams, the research found, also attempted fewer crosses, won fewer corners and tried fewer dribbles.

By almost every attacking metric, Bundesliga teams were worse while playing in an empty home stadium. Most curiously, goalkeepers performed better away from home than they did on their own turf: The percentage of shots saved dropped noticeably for goalkeepers on familiar territory, but increased for those on visiting teams.

“It’s a particularly odd finding,” said Simon Gleave, Gracenote’s head of sports analysis, “because it’s the same goalkeepers, playing home and away.”

The referee is no longer a homer Another aspect of home-field advantage that has been exposed in Germany is the effect a crowd can have on a referee. A considerable body of academic research, in fact, has long suggested that “all or part of home advantage” is down to “refereeing decisions being subconsciously in favor of the home team,” Gleave said.

That idea now can step out off the page and into real life. In the 83 matches Gracenote analyzed, home teams were penalized more for fouls in empty stadiums than they generally were when the stands were full.

They also had seen, perhaps not surprisingly, an increase in the number of yellow cards they were awarded.

Both teams committed more fouls in empty stadiums than they had in full ones — perhaps a sign that referees, without a crowd to consider, have felt empowered to enforce the rules more rigidly. But there has been a significant shift in culpability: After the restart, hosts committed more fouls than their guests.

(Lack of) intensity is in the mind That first weekend, the players felt it.

There was no wall of sound to greet them as they entered the field, no roar to urge them on after a setback, no delirium to greet a goal.

Empty stands seemed to sap games of their urgency and intimidating stadiums of their hostility. At least one player noted motivation — to strain that final sinew, to make that last burst — was more elusive in the silence. Many fans, watching on, seemed to detect the same lack of intensity.

The data, though, does not bear that out.

According to the Bundesliga — which tracks and records its own analytics, and then feeds the numbers back to its clubs — players sprinted a little more, and teams made marginally more high-intensity runs, in games held in empty stadiums than they had previously this season.

“The game does not appear to be any less intense at all without fans,” Keppler said.

Though most teams’ performance varied only a little, he noted that “Bayern Munich, the team that had the most sprints before the coronavirus break, could even increase their rate afterward.”

Bayern — on its way to recording an eighth consecutive championship — was not as impressive as Hertha Berlin, though.

Inspired by a new coach, Bruno Labbadia, Hertha went from producing 211 sprints in a game to 238 (bettered only by Bayern and Augsburg), and managed almost 100 more high-intensity runs a game.

Dortmund, however, slumped, enduring the largest drop in those two metrics of any team in Germany. The lesson, perhaps, is that the presence of fans is not as significant to a team’s intensity as having something to play for. Where Hertha’s players had a new coach to impress and a season to save, Dortmund was drifting to yet another year in Bayern’s shadow. That, rather than the empty stands, drew its sting.

The end of entertainment While industry and effort might have remained unchanged, Gleave saw in his figures — fewer shots, fewer dribbles, fewer home wins — proof that something was missing.

His conclusion, one that many fans watching might instinctively uphold, is that the urge to entertain diminishes if there is nobody to respond. Games since the restart have featured, on average, 16 more passes than normal, a signal to Gleave that players, subconsciously or not, are “choosing to pass the ball rather than attempt plays which would normally get fans on their feet.”

And yet similar data sets can give rise to different conclusions. Impect’s signature statistic is a metric called packing: a way of measuring how many opponents are bypassed by each and every action — whether a pass or a dribble — a player makes.

“It measures the effectiveness of a team’s buildup,” Keppler said, and it has been, essentially, unchanged since the restart. “The overall quality of the game remained the same.”

That finding is not necessarily contrary to Gleave’s data, and it is not a riposte to Arsène Wenger’s assertion that soccer would lose some of its magic if it endured a prolonged period without fans. Teams run just as much as they did. They are no less talented than they were in March.

But the absence of fans — the cavernous stadiums, the oppressive silence, the sense of unreality — changed, somehow, the way the players expressed that talent, the way they approached the game. It created a more cautious, more mechanical approach, focused on the end result more than the process.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

27

Well, it was a nice try: Some sports aren’t going so well

By VICTOR MATHER

I

t sounded like a good idea. Bring sports back, carefully, slowly, with adequate precautions. So why does it seem to be going wrong in so many places?

As major North American sports are preparing to return, a close look around the world finds a slew of problems that even the NBA’s 113 pages of protocols might not be ready for.

Some Schools Cancel All Fall Sports College football is eternal, right?

Well, maybe not. Williams and Bowdoin, small New England colleges that play in Division III, canceled fall sports.

With fewer or perhaps no opponents available, rivals like Amherst, Wesleyan and Tufts may soon have to follow suit.

“Teams will be able to practice outside in small groups if they adhere to social distancing guidelines, and may progress to more gamelike practice activities if conditions improve,” Maud S. Mandel, the Williams president, said in a statement. But teams will not travel or compete against other schools. The statement continued, “Our decision has been guided by the utmost attention to safety protocols to ensure the health and safety of our athletes, coaches, staff and community.”

Big universities with their massive, profitable programs may not do the same. Still, there are worrying signs.

Michigan, home of a 100,000-seat football stadium and a host of storied traditions and rivalries, is projecting a budget deficit. The university is expecting attendance to fall by 50 percent for the coming school year, said Warde Manuel, the director of athletics.

As a result, salaries will be cut on a sliding scale. Those making less than $50,000 a year will not be cut, but others will face cuts of 5 percent to 10 percent, with top earners like the football coach, Jim Harbaugh, and the men’s basketball coach, Juwan Howard, at 10 percent.

Traveling Teams Face Roadblocks The sports-mad country of Australia was one that eagerly got its games going again. But it has had more than its share of pitfalls, with some athletes being fined for violating social distancing, others coming down with flu-like symptoms and still others told to stay away

Can the fall season of college sports survive the continuing pandemic? Some colleges are calling off all fall sports now. from some states.

In the latest development, a game in the phenomenally popular Australian rules football league has been canceled after the state of Queensland denied a team entry into its state.

Richmond, from a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, had been scheduled to travel to play West Coast in Queensland today. But Queensland has adopted strict rules for travelers from Victoria, requiring a 14-day quarantine, which would throw the entire league schedule into disarray.

Instead, Sydney, based in New South Wales, will now play West Coast this weekend, while Melbourne will take on Richmond. There are still more than 100 games to go in the resumed regular season, and conflicting state regulations

may continue to tangle the schedule.

In England, where the Premier League has come back to life, there is an early snag. The Leicester area is under lockdown after an increase in coronavirus cases, with schools and shops being shuttered again. Leicester City is supposed to play Crystal Palace there on Saturday.

The game is on for now, but neutral sites are being scouted just in case, and postponement is also a possibility.

Given that some states in the United States are also telling visitors to selfquarantine, it is an issue that may have an effect on the North American major leagues as well.

New Zealand Wins (Kind Of) In other Antipodean developments, there was some good news for New Zealand … sort of. The rest of the 2019-20

rugby sevens series, the shorter, faster version of the game played in the Olympics, was canceled. The New Zealand men’s and women’s teams were in the lead, so they earn the trophies.

In the end, six of a possible 10 events for the men and five of eight for the women were staged before the pandemic.

Events in Canada, England, France and Singapore and the most prestigious, the Hong Kong Sevens, will not be held this season.

Will things get back to normal in 2021 at least? Well, the men’s Africa Cup of Nations, the most important international soccer tournament on the continent, scheduled for January 2021, was pushed back to 2022 on Tuesday. And the women’s tournament was canceled entirely.

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 2, 2020

A month before the NBA’s restart, the Nets keep losing players

Jacque Vaughn, right, the Nets’ interim head coach, will not have DeAndre Jordan with the team when the N.B.A. season restarts at the end of July.

By SOPAN DEB

T

he Brooklyn Nets began this NBA season ushering in a new era — and while this year was always expected to be a transition period, the franchise hoped to at least build the foundation of a potential dynasty.

Eight months later, little has gone according to plan.

With about a month to go before the NBA is expected to restart its season at Walt Disney World, the Nets have little more than a skeleton crew to send to play in Florida. Because of injuries, coronavirus infections or concerns over the outbreak, several of the team’s top players have been ruled out of the restart, raising questions about how competitive the team can be when the league returns.

The team declined to comment earlier this week as to whether it would reconsider its plans to participate in the restart. General manager Sean Marks and the Nets’ interim coach, Jacque Vaughn, were scheduled to speak to reporters Wednesday.

On Monday night, center DeAndre Jordan posted on Twitter that he had tested positive for the coronavirus and would not play in Florida, and guard Spencer Dinwiddie told The Athletic that he had also tested positive — though Dinwiddie said it was “unclear” whether he would be able to go to Disney World. Wilson Chandler, a reserve forward, told the team he was opting to skip the

rest of the season because of virus concerns.

Without Chandler, Jordan and Dinwiddie, who helped provide a spark after the Nets lost Kyrie Irving to a shoulder injury, the club will be left with a roster that includes talented but developing players like Caris LeVert, Jarrett Allen and Joe Harris, and some minimally established players.

Irving and Kevin Durant, the Nets’ two marquee freeagent signings from last summer, are not expected to play, either. In February, the Nets announced that Irving would miss the rest of the season because of an ailing right shoulder that needed surgery. Durant, who tore his Achilles tendon a little more than a year ago, told The Undefeated in June that his comeback would wait until next season.

Nicolas Claxton, a rookie power forward who played sparingly, will not be in Florida, either, after having arthroscopic labrum repair surgery, the Nets announced last week. And, finally, the team announced last week that it had waived reserve guard Theo Pinson.

The team has moved swiftly to fill some of the holes in the roster, including adding guard Tyler Johnson, who gave the Miami Heat some scoring punch off the bench in his first four seasons but struggled to fit with the Suns since being traded to Phoenix.

The Nets also re-signed Justin Anderson, another reserve forward, who had a 10-day contract with the team in January. The team had until 11:59 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday to sign any more replacement players, but it had

a full roster, including players with two-way contracts whom the team was not expecting to have to rely on this late in the season.

Even before the pandemic upended the NBA in midMarch, the Nets’ season was a tumultuous one. On opening night, Irving dazzled by scoring 50 points in an overtime loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves.

But after the team started 4-7, the injury bug hit: Irving’s shoulder caused him to miss 26 games, and then after a short-lived return, he was ruled out for the season.

LeVert, the 25-year-old guard thought to be a key piece of the Nets’ future, missed several weeks with a right thumb injury. And when he played, he didn’t show the growth many expected from him.

There was Irving-related drama as well. After a January loss to the Philadelphia 76ers, Irving told reporters that the talent deficiency on the roster was “glaring” and that the team needed more pieces.

The most shocking story of the season came in March, when coach Kenny Atkinson and the team “mutually agreed to part ways” and Vaughn was named interim coach.

Atkinson had been in his fourth year as coach and had a strong reputation for getting the most out of his players.

In the first three years of his tenure, the Nets’ win total rose each season.

Four days after Atkinson stepped down, the NBA season was postponed.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Sudoku

29

How to Play:

Fill in the empty fields with the numbers from 1 through 9.

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

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

It might be necessary to resume some duties you performed in the past. Although you’re not thrilled about moving backwards, you recognise it is critical to keeping the ship afloat.

Covering for an ailing colleague or absent executive won’t be too difficult, especially if you can do so from home. Deep understanding from a relative makes it easier to undergo a change. Whether you’re recovering from an addiction, walking away from a stressful lifestyle or breaking off a toxic relationship, a loved one will have your back.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Creating a comfortable and orderly home is your main priority now. It gives you great pleasure to rid your place of clutter and organise furniture in pleasing, attractive ways. Once you finish streamlining your living space, your creativity will soar. Get to work on a story or song. Your intelligence, wit and dignity are valued on social media. People look forward to your witty observations. You’re about to become a virtual superstar. It’s even possible you can run a subscription-based podcast.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Scorpio

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

In the past, you were afraid you’d never be recognised for your expertise. That will change now, when you get an opportunity to teach some eager students in a virtual classroom. Your patience and persistence will make it easy for even the most insecure pupils to thrive. Give yourself permission to express your feelings. Whether this means confronting someone who has been giving you grief or writing a beautiful love song is immaterial.

The key is to open your heart without reservation.

Stop being afraid of asking for money. Whether you need to apply for a government grant or want a loan from a relative, you should make your needs known. You’ve always been so kind and giving toward others; it’s time for you to receive some generosity. You’ve always had a balanced attitude toward finances. When you yearn for more wealth, you don’t feel guilty about it. Instead, you sensibly realise your needs have expanded, prompting you to find more sources of income.

Stabilising a close relationship can be as simple as spending more quality time together. Scale back your home-based work routines for the sake of a friendship or romance. Check in with your favourite person at the same time each day. Having a rewarding personal life will allow you to take more risks, which is critical to your growth. Your charisma is powerful.

Use it to land a job where you can work from home. A lively telephone interview will turn the tide in your favour.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Is your energy flagging? Rearrange your schedule to include more rest. If you have difficulty falling asleep, establish a peaceful bedtime routine. At first, it will seem strange to stay off screens for an hour, or even longer before retiring. Eventually, this soothing ritual will become a habit.

Devoting more time to spiritual pursuits will inspire an art project. Don’t be surprised when you get the great idea for a song, painting or story while carrying out a sacred ritual or comforting habit.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Join forces with someone who can ease any work burdens. It will be such a relief to share responsibilities with a conscientious individual who understands your priorities.

If you’re in an established partnership, delegate more duties to your other half. Joining a virtual study group will give you an opportunity to show off your sharp intellect.

Whether you meet online or contribute to a message board is unimportant. The key is to seek out people who can have similar interests.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Strong, responsible work habits will cause you to move to the head of a virtual class. If you’ve recently enrolled in a course or want to master a technique, rearrange your day accordingly. It may be necessary to steer clear of a chatty friend while you focus on your studies. Come to the defence of a friend who is interested in an unusual subject. There’s no reason your loved one should feel bad about marching to the beat of their own drum. Odd ducks are often the smartest ones.

If you don’t feel like you’re successful with money, adopt the financial habits of someone you’ve always admired.

Some people attract affluence by treating wealth like a game. Others earn it through careful study and hard work. Choose the method that resonates with your spirit.

Attending to the needs of a business or romantic partner could be a little difficult at first. You’d rather make jokes than let down your defences. Take this opportunity to say what’s in your heart.

You’re ready to embrace your destiny as a potential packed person. It doesn’t matter in which area you would like to excel. Your drive and determination will allow you to eventually reach the top of any game. Stop feeling guilty for your ability to spin straw into gold. Deep feelings for a friend or romantic partner will cause you to break a bad habit. Forging a healthier lifestyle will bring you closer. You’re tired of having an obsession undermine your relationship. Turn over a new leaf.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Facing your fears isn’t as difficult as you imagine. One you take the first step, you’ll realise that much of what was scary is a figment of your imagination. At that point, you can move ahead with confidence. Stop doubting yourself.

Doing work that serves others gives you a strong sense of purpose. Preparing meals, nursing invalids or caring for children are all good possibilities. Attending to basic needs will change your perspective and lead to some important personal breakthroughs.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

You’d rather have a few close friends than a big group of acquaintances. If you’ve been spending a lot of time with people who don’t inspire you, call someone you’ve known for years. A heart to heart talk will remind you of what you value in others. Doing what you love brings a new enthusiasm and enterprise that’s hard to resist. It doesn’t matter if you’re expressing your creative side or learning a craft; your happiness will make you feel like you’re on top of the world.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Thursday, July 2, 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

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 2, 2020

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