Friday to Sunday Jul 21-23, 2023

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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.

PRHTA invites candidates to explore thriving careers in Puerto Rico’s Tourism Industry

By The STAR STAFF

The President and CEO of Puerto Rico Hotel and Tourism Association (PRHTA), Clarisa Jimenez, called individuals interested in a tourism career in Puerto Rico to submit their resumes. PRHTA will connect aspiring talents with human resources offices among their members.

“Our vision at PRHTA is to continue to be a bridge between prospective employees and our partners, effectively expanding our talent bank and facilitating the referral process for each corresponding opportunity, leading to potential contracts,” Jiménez mentioned. “To facilitate this process, we have set up a dedicated email address, info@prhta.org, where all interested candidates can submit their credentials. Our valued members have informed us about the diverse range of positions available, each offering highly competitive salaries and abundant opportunities for personal and professional growth,” she explained.

Contributing 7% to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Puerto Rico and generating more than 80,000 direct and indirect jobs, the tourism industry remains a pivotal economic engine for the island.

“We are committed to accelerating the growth of this crucial sector, underscoring Puerto Rico as one of the most favorite destinations in the Caribbean,” she added. “I urge all individuals aspiring to be part of this captivating industry to seize this opportunity and share their resumes with us,” she concluded.

Representing an extensive network of over 400 corporate partners, PRHTA encompasses various businesses, including large, medium, and small hotels, casinos, restaurants, and allied members, such as airlines, transportation companies, attractions, villas, tour operators, as well as providers of goods

and services to the hospitality industry.

Embrace the opportunity to shape the future of Puerto Rico’s tourism industry alongside PRHTA. To explore the exciting possibilities within the sector and submit your resume, please visit www.prhta.org or email us at info@prhta.org.

HIMA•San Pablo Hospitals announce layoffs

By The STAR STAFF

HIMA•San Pablo Hospitals announced in recent days a strategic plan to address the challenging economic landscape and ensure a sustainable future for the organization, which includes employee layoffs.

“We deeply value the contribution and dedication of each member of our team,” said Armando Rodríguez, President and CEO of the HIMA•San Pablo Group in a written statement.

“This decision was not taken lightly, but it is essential to continue providing high-quality care to our patients as

we adapt to the changing healthcare industry landscape,” Rodríguez explained.

The ongoing impact of the economic recession, coupled with changes in the healthcare industry, has presented significant challenges for the hospitals. Like many healthcare organizations, HIMA•San Pablo Hospitals have experienced financial pressures that require immediate action.

The decision to reduce the workforce will affect 300 positions across various hospitals, a measure taken after thorough evaluations, ensuring that essential healthcare services and patient safety are not compromised.

Clarisa Jimenez, President and CEO of PRHTA.

Federal authorities arrest 27 persons for fraud on federal recovery funds

By THE STAR STAFF

W. Stephen Muldrow, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Puerto Rico, announced Thursday the indictment of 27 individuals for their participation in a scheme to illegally obtain federal recovery funds under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

A federal grand jury charged the defendants with multiple counts of wire fraud and money laundering. The charging documents allege that from April 2020 through July 2023, the defendants and their co-conspirators caused the submission of at least 23 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan applications seeking the illegal disbursement of at least $458,923 in federal recovery funds from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and Bank

“This is the third round of defendants charged since April 2023 relating to this fraud scheme, and the investigation remains ongoing,” said Muldrow. “The EIDL and PPP loans were supposed to benefit those whose legitimate businesses were suffering from losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Prosecution of those who illegally obtain government benefits will continue to be a priority for our office.”

The U.S. Secret Service, the Small Business Administration Office of the Inspector General, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigations conducted the investigation with the collaboration of the Puerto Rico Treasury Department, the Puerto Rico Bureau of Special Investigations,

the Puerto Rico Police Bureau, and the Guaynabo Municipal Police.

According to court documents, defendant Brian Oniel Blassini, together with Manfred A. Pentzke Lemus, a.k.a. “Man/ Contable/El Gestor”, Rodolpho R. Pagesy Roussel, a.k.a. “El Banquero”, Augusto A. Lemus Berrios, a.k.a. “Primo”, Jonatan Ben David Prieto Ruiz De Val, a.k.a. “Johnny Millones”, Ligia María Lemus De Pentzke, and others knowingly devised a scheme to defraud the SBA and Bank 1 to obtain federal money and property by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises submitted through applications for EIDL and PPP loans made available to help small businesses recover from the impact of the pandemic through the CARES Act. Pentzke Lemus, Pagesy Roussel, Lemus Berrios, Prieto Ruiz De Val, and Lemus De Pentzke were previously charged in April in a separate indictment.

The CARES Act authorized federal assistance through the issuance of SBA loans

to small businesses and non-profit entities that experienced revenue loss due to the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic. The EIDL program was one such loan assistance program for small businesses. To procure the loan, applicants had to fill out an online application detailing operational information for the 12-month period prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the number of employees in the business, the gross business revenues realized, and the cost of goods sold. Another form of assistance provided by the CARES Act was the authorization of United States taxpayer funds in forgivable loans to small businesses for job retention and certain other expenses, such as interest on mortgages, rent and utilities, through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

The indictment alleges that the defendants and their co-conspirators submitted at least 23 fraudulent EIDL and PPP loan applications containing materially false and fraudulent information and false documents, including false and fictitious tax documents, payroll records, bank records, and identification documents, to procure the disbursement of EIDL and PPP assistance loans by Bank 1. The indictment further alleges that the defendants and their co-conspirators directed the recipients of the fraudulently obtained PPP and EIDL loans to remit a portion of the proceeds of the loans to the defendants and their co-conspirators and used the loan proceeds to benefit themselves and others, and to pay for expenses prohibited under the requirements of the EIDL and PPP programs.

The court documents claim that defendant Manfred A. Pentzke Lemus was the principal organizer of the fraudulent scheme

and the efforts to launder the proceeds; defendant Rodolpho R. Pagesy Roussel worked at Bank 1 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and used his position to obtain the approval of fraudulent PPP applications; defendant Augusto A. Lemus Berríos assisted in the preparation of fraudulent PPP applications; defendant Jonatan Ben David Prieto Ruiz De Val acted as a money courier and coordinated the delivery of “kickback” payments to further the fraudulent scheme; defendant Ligia María Lemus De Pentzke received “kickback” payments from proceeds of the fraudulent scheme and forwarded them to her co-conspirators; and defendant Carlos Manfredo Pentzke Chamorro received fraudulent PPP and EIDL loans in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Defendants Brian Oniel Blassini and Homar Javier Horta Torres are facing one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, for knowingly conducting financial transactions involving the proceeds of wire fraud, together with other individuals previously indicted. The defendants, including Brian Oniel Blassini, are also alleged to have recruited other unindicted co-conspirators to not only obtain additional EIDL and PPP loans under false pretenses, but recruit others to submit fraudulent applications.

If convicted, the defendants are facing up to 30 years in prison for the wire fraud counts. Brian Oniel Blassini and Homar Javier Horta Torres are also facing up to 20 years of imprisonment for the money laundering count.

This case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Timothy R. Henwood and Daniel J. Olinghouse.

Municipal Finance Agency posts loss in net position for FY 2022, audit found

BY The STAR STAFF

The Puerto Rico Municipal Finance Agency (MFA), created to help cities finance their public investment programs, posted a net position of $76.4 million in FY22 that ended June 30, 2022, a 4.1% less than the $79.7 million net position posted at the close of FY21.

The information is contained in an audit for FY 2022 performed by Kevane Grant Thornton that was disclosed on July 19.

The commonwealth agency, however, experienced a 12.4% drop in its total assets, declining to approximately $349.4 million in FY22 compared to $398.7 million in FY21, according to the audited financial statements. The auditor signed the letter on July 5.

The statements also showed that deferred outflow of resources declined by 74.4%, falling to $21 million in FY22 from $82 million in FY21, and total liabilities dropped 14.5%, closing the FY22 at $273.0 million compared to $319.2 million in FY21, according to the report.

“These reductions are associated mostly with the bonds principal payments amounting to approximately $44.9 million and $61,000 of current year amortization of deferred loss on bond refunding,” the report said.

As of June 30, 2022, the MFA’s outstanding bonds amounted to approximately $243.3 million. “Debt repayments amounted to approximately $44.9 million during the year ended June 30, 2022,” the report explained.

There was an unrealized $4.1 million loss of the fair market value of the investments, the report said.

W. Stephen Muldrow, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Puerto Rico

“Climate change won’t halt our agriculture.”

Department of Agriculture explores its impact on Puerto Rican farming

By RICHARD GUTIÉRREZ richardsanjuanstar@gmail.com

Climate change remains a global concern, and its effects on civilizations and the environment are subject to intense discussions by governments, corporations, and non-profit organizations worldwide. Puerto Rico is no exception to this global conversation, which prompted Ramón González Beiró, the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, to convene Puerto Rican company owners, farmers, government representatives, academics, and other members of the agricultural industry to the Puerto Rico Convention Center for an open forum on climate change titled: “Adapting Our Agriculture to Climate Change.”

As the event commenced, González Beiró addressed the significance of being prepared for potential challenges brought on by climate change. “They are saying that World War 3 will probably revolve around food. I can’t predict the future in that regard, but there is evidence that we are already experiencing the effects of climate change in Puerto Rico,” he stated. “That is why we are gathered here today, to address issues directly related to agriculture, as without agriculture, there is no food production, and without food production, any country can suffer from starvation. We need to work together, the agriculture industry and the government of Puerto Rico alike,” he added.

The conference focused on the complex topic of agriculture and was divided into six distinct presentations: Agrivoltaics, Animal Genetics for Meat and Dairy Products, Desalination for Consumption and Reservoir Conservation for Crop Watering, Precision Risk Systems, Biotechnological Agriculture, and Production in a Controlled Environment.

The first conference, hosted by Andrew Kennedy, Co-founder of Phoebus Fund, highlighted their concept of Agrivoltaics and its potential implementation in Puerto Rico. Agrivoltaics involves combining solar energy and traditional farming by placing solar panels above actively cultivated land, allowing light diffusion for continued

crop growth. “This is basically the dual use of lands,” said Kennedy.

“The concept of agrivoltaics has been around since the 80s, but true research and development have occurred since 2012, mainly because modern solar panels are much more efficient now,” he explained.

Kennedy believes that Puerto Rico’s tropical climate makes it an ideal place to introduce this concept. The company’s goals for clean energy include providing electricity to the local grid using off-the-shelf solar technologies, offering low-cost, self-sufficient systems that stabilize and lower grid electricity costs, and collaborating with agricultural producers near high voltage lines or substations. Regarding farmer and rancher productivity, the Agrivoltaics system aims to provide irrigation, field drainage, and material dispersal equipment to improve agricultural efficiency and maintenance.

The Secretary of the Department of Agriculture expressed optimism about the current state of agriculture on the island. “We are at a critical juncture in our island’s history, and we have the opportunity to revitalize agriculture and restore its significance,” said Gonzalez to The Star.

“Climate change, wars, pandemics, and other global situations have drastically affected the economy. To normalize renewable energy, we want to reduce the cost of energy through systems like agrivoltaics. With projects like these, Puerto Rico can become an exemplary model in agriculture for other countries worldwide. If we continue to work hard, Puerto Rico can reach new heights on a global level,” he concluded.

Judicial employees worry about funds for salary hikes

By The STAR STAFF

The president of the Association of Judicial Employees, Amircal Gerena Román, on Thursday criticized the decision of the Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) to allocate $18,5 million for the salary increase for employees of the Judicial Branch instead of the $26.6 million allocated in the budget.

Gerena Román said that the employees of the Judiciary are “extremely concerned” in the face of the decision since it “stirs uncertainty.”

“With what has happened now, we don’t know if the needs of the employees are going to be met... For now, we are going to meet with the legislative leaders of the House and Senate to see the steps to follow,” he said.

Gerana Román made an energetic call to the Board and to Supreme Court Chief Justice Maite Oronoz to be transparent and offer details on the allocation of funds and explain the discrepancies in the budgets.

“The registration of judicial employees deserves a clear

and detailed explanation of how this decision was reached and what measures will be taken to guarantee the correct functioning of the Compensation Plan. It is essential that the remuneration be fair, adequate and consistent with the valuable work carried out by the employees of the Judiciary in the administration of justice”, he claimed.

The classification and remuneration plan for judicial employees “is a crucial tool to ensure fair remuneration and adequate recognition of their essential work in the judicial system. However, the allocation of funds significantly less than what was approved raises serious questions about the real commitment of the authorities to justice and the well-being of those who perform fundamental functions in the legal system. The plan cannot be implemented in isolation, but must be accompanied by a proportional and equitable salary increase for all judicial employees,” he said.

Similarly, the president urged Governor Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia, as well as legislative leaders, to “take action on the matter and review the allocation of funds to the aforementioned plan. It is the responsibility of the government and

political leaders to ensure that the judicial system is adequately resourced to function efficiently and fairly.”

He stressed that the Association of Judicial Employees will continue to be “vigilant” of this issue and will take the “necessary actions” to ensure that the rights and well-being of its members are protected.

The Secretary of Agriculture, in his opening statements at the forum held at the Pedro Rosselló Convention Center in San Juan, emphasized the importance of addressing the effects of climate change on Puerto Rican agriculture.

New resolution aims to include condominiums in the regulation regarding solar panel installations

By The STAR STAFF

Due to the increasing interest in potentially installing photovoltaic energy systems (solar panels) in condominiums and walk-up buildings, Representative Víctor Parés announced the filing of a resolution to direct the Department of Consumer Affairs (DACO in Spanish) to establish regulations to govern this practice.

“Due to the uniqueness of photovoltaic energy systems, it was previously presumed that these could not be installed in condominiums and/or walk-up buildings. However, this is not accurate at present. Advancements in collection technology (panels), storage structures (batteries), and transfer methods have made it feasible to create co-ownership concepts of these platforms in units of horizontally owned housing,” commented Parés, representing San Juan’s District #4.

“We have observed how the industry is moving towards offering these systems in condominiums and/or walk-up buildings. There are already condominiums with systems installed in common areas. We’ve

seen solar panels on security guard booths and other areas. However, at this time, the Condominium Regulation No. 9386 of June 7, 2022, created by DACO under the auspices of Law 129-2020, does not encompass this new model of renewable

energy,” added the legislator.

As explained by the Representative, there are two co-ownership models for condominiums. The first is known as the “Project Association,” which outlines that these systems will be installed and used

to provide energy in common areas such as parking lots, hallways, and recreational zones, among others. The second alternative is the “Owners’ Gathering,” which focuses on uniting various owners to facilitate the installation of these systems for mutual benefits.

States like California, Florida, and Georgia have developed parameters that allow for the installation of these co-ownership systems in condominiums. In fact, in California, it is a requirement that all new horizontally owned housing units have these platforms. The same applies in the state of Oregon.

Over the past five years, the installation of photovoltaic energy platforms for residential properties has experienced a significant boom in Puerto Rico. According to available data, approximately 3,000 new solar panel systems are installed each month on the island. This figure is expected to increase with the influx of federal funds associated with the Department of Housing’s New Energy program, which provides assistance to low and moderate-income families for the acquisition of these platforms.

Groups united to ensure Puerto Rico’s food security

By THE STAR STAFF

The united front of Puerto Rican religious leaders, Bread for the World, and local community groups announced their collaboration Thursday to advocate for the critical importance of national food programs. This powerful alliance brings together many well-respected organizations such as ASSPEN, American Baptist Home Mission Societies, Catholic Charities USA, Casa Cristiana de Transformación Church, Puerto Rico Chaplain Corps, Knocking Down Giants Ministry, Latino Christian National Network, Puerto Rico Food Security Coalition, NutriendoPR, Hispanic Federation, and ACOMERPR. Together they intend to address the problems of hunger and food security in Puerto Rico by leveraging their collective influence and resources.

As of June, religious leaders and community groups collaborated in advocacy efforts to facilitate the integration of Puerto Rico into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

This constituency has demonstrated its commitment by hosting meetings with key stakeholders such as Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Resident Commissioner Jennifer González-Colón, and representatives from more than 200 legislative offices. Through these meetings, they have successfully highlighted the challenges Puerto Rico faces in addressing food security and the vital role that

SNAP can play in mitigating these issues.

As September 2023 approaches, the farm bill reauthorization has significant implications for Puerto Ricans and their access to vital programs and benefits. The Farm Bill, a comprehensive piece of legislation renewed every five years, covers various agricultural, nutrition assistance, and rural development policies. In the past, this legislation has directly influenced the funding and structure of programs like SNAP, which serves as a crucial lifeline for millions of Americans facing food insecurity. Consequently, the upcoming farm bill reauthorization outcome will determine how essential resources and support will be made available to Puerto Rican communities in need.

A critical issue driving coalition advocacy efforts is the stark disparity in food assistance between Puerto Rico and the continental United States. According to the data, Puerto Ricans pay up to 21% more for food than the average US household while receiving substantially lower levels of assistance. The discrepancy compounds the burden on families struggling with food insecurity in Puerto Rico, where approximately 44.9% of the population lives below the poverty line.

“Addressing this inequality in assistance is crucial to ensure that Puerto Rican residents have access to adequate nutrition and support,” shared Jayson Call, Chaplain with the Puerto Rico Chaplain Corps.

New York to pay $13 million over police actions at George Floyd protests

By COLIN MOYIHAN

On the evening of June 2, 2020, Sabrina Zurkuhlen joined a protest march on the West Side Highway that was spurred by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis eight days earlier.

When marchers were confronted by a line of police officers that stretched across the highway near Vesey Street, Zurkuhlen, 33, began walking backward while recording with her phone, according to a class-action lawsuit in which she was a plaintiff. An officer pointed at her, the lawsuit said, lunged at her, knocked the phone from her hands and began striking her with a baton as he tackled her.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, said other officers beat and kicked Zurkuhlen and that she was handcuffed and held in custody for about 8 1/2 hours before being issued a summons for a curfew violation. That summons was later dismissed, the suit said, adding that she never recovered her phone.

Demonstrators protest the killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd in police custody, near Union Square in Manhattan, on May 30, 2020. On Wednesday, July 19, 2023, the City of New York agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit which said that unlawful police tactics had violated the rights of protesters over several days in late May and early June of 2020.

On Wednesday, the City of New York agreed to pay about $13.7 million to settle the class-action suit, which said that unlawful police tactics had violated the rights of protesters over several days in late May and early June of 2020. A stipulation of settlement entered into an electronic docket just before midnight stated that the city would pay $9,950 apiece to up to about 1,380 people who “were arrested and/or subjected to force by NYPD officers” at 18 specific locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers — who are associated with the National Lawyers Guild, a left-leaning group — said the $13.7 million sum was the largest ever paid to protesters.

In 2013 the city agreed to settle hundreds of claims by people who said they were wrongly arrested during the 2004 Republican National Convention in Manhattan, paying $10.3 million to those who had been taken into custody and $7.6 million in lawyers’ fees.

“NYPD’s suppression of dissent has continued through numerous mayoral administrations,” Wylie Stecklow, one of the class-action lawyers, said in a statement.

The city Law Department and Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The settlement agreement said that the defendants denied liability and denied having had any pattern or practice that deprived anyone of their rights.

The settlement resolves one of the more significant cases among several to emerge from the protests in New York City, which saw mass arrests, the use of pepper spray, and property damage and looting.

The killing of Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis sparked a nationwide outcry over police brutality and a broader reckoning over race, power and accountability. People across the country chanted “Black Lives Matter” as they took part in marches that filled streets, highways and bridges.

Most of the marches in New York City were peaceful, but the police said that more than a dozen of their vehicles were burned. And looting took place in various neighborhoods, most prominently in SoHo, where on consecutive nights people who often seemed to have little involvement with the protests broke into and plundered luxury shops.

Mayor Bill de Blasio instituted a curfew, the city’s first in 75 years. As the looting waned, police officers dispersed or arrested people who were marching outside the prescribed hours. According to the New York state attorney general’s office, police made just over 2,000 protest-related arrests between May 28 and June 7, 2020.

New York Times journalists covering the protests saw officers repeatedly charge at protesters out after curfew with little apparent provocation, shoving people onto sidewalks and striking them with batons.

Some of the people who stand to receive payments under the class-action settlement were arrested. Others were not taken into custody but, the suit asserted, were subject to police conduct meant to impede and deter their ability to exercise First Amendment rights.

The protesters’ lawyers said that conduct included the indiscriminate use of pepper spray or batons and crowd control tactics like “kettling,” which corralled protesters between police lines and prevented them from leaving.

In March, the city settled a lawsuit over that approach, agreeing to pay at least $21,500 to each of about 320 protesters who said they were surrounded on June 4, 2020, in the Mott Haven area of the Bronx by police officers who then ran at them while swinging batons and using pepper spray.

The protesters’ lawyers attributed that type of response largely to what they described as decades of misguided police training, which they said looked upon many forms of protest

as civil disturbances, emphasizing the use of force to disperse and demoralize protesters over the protection of civil liberties.

“Since at least the 1990s,” the classaction suit said, “the NYPD has failed to appropriately train its officers on the proper handling of First Amendment assemblies.”

Lawyers for the city denied in court papers that the police had a history of unconstitutional handling of protests. While acknowledging that many of the 2020 protests had been peaceful, they portrayed the police as contending with a powerful storm of anger interspersed with serious criminal activity, all taking place against the backdrop of a pandemic.

“Some protests devolved to looting and rioting,” those lawyers wrote. “Protesters set police cars ablaze; vandalized precinct houses; threw rocks, bricks, bottles at officers; stabbed, punched, bit officers; and hurled Molotov cocktails at officers.”

Both sides used visual evidence to bolster their arguments. In one court filing, lawyers for the city included photographs of four bloodied police officers who they said had been injured by protesters.

The protesters’ lawyers, for their part, drew from what they said were thousands of police body-camera and helicopter videos to compile records of officers wielding batons, using pepper spray or shoving demonstrators.

One video from outside Barclays Center in Brooklyn on May 29, 2020, shows several police officers, including a commander, aiming overhand baton blows at a figure on the ground. Another video shows a group of officers following protesters down a sidewalk in East Flatbush on May 30 and knocking some to the pavement.

Well before the city produced that material, video from protests circulated nearly contemporaneously on social media.

One video clip, recorded in Brooklyn, showed two police SUVs ramming a crowd of people standing in a street. Another showed an officer in lower Manhattan crossing Broadway while brandishing a pistol as people screamed and fled.

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Ponzi schemer freed from prison by Trump faces new fraud charges

cial process and relying on well-connected lobbyists and lawyers to obtain relief.

After Trump commuted his sentence, Weinstein pledged to turn over a new leaf in a video message to his supporters posted online by a local publication, The Lakewood Scoop.

“My goal is to make everybody proud of me and to live my life in the proper fashion,” he said.

On Wednesday, Weinstein and his fellow defendants were charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Weinstein was ordered detained after an initial appearance in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey, as was a co-defendant, Shlomo Erez, 55, an Israeli citizen.

complaint, Tryon could not pay its investors. Weinstein agreed with its owners to pool money from both firms’ existing investors to pay other investors in a Ponzilike fashion, the complaint says.

Six months later, the complaint says, Weinstein revealed his true identity to the Tryon owners in a secretly recorded meeting. At a second meeting, the complaint says, he acknowledged that he had misappropriated Tryon investor money and had made false statements about the Optimus deals.

By ED SHANAHAN

Aconvicted Ponzi schemer, whose prison sentence former President Donald Trump commuted in one of his last official White House acts, is facing new fraud federal charges of bilking investors in a series of phony deals.

The man, Eliyahu Weinstein, a former used car salesperson from Lakewood, New Jersey, was serving a 24-year sentence in connection with two schemes, when Trump freed him from prison in January 2021. One involved defrauding members of his tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community out of more than $200 million.

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors

in New Jersey charged Weinstein, 48, along with four other men, with defrauding at least 150 people out of $35 million. They are accused of luring people into supposedly lucrative investments in scarce COVID-19 supplies and baby formula and even in first-aid kits destined for war-torn Ukraine.

“These were brazen and sophisticated crimes that involved multiple conspirators and drew right from Weinstein’s playbook of fraud,” Philip R. Sellinger, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, said at a news conference.

As The New York Times reported, Weinstein was one of many who received clemency from Trump by skipping the offi-

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A federal magistrate judge set bail at $500,000 for a third defendant, Aryeh L. Bromberg, 49, of Lakewood. Two other defendants, Joel L. Wittels, 57, of Lakewood, and Alaa M. Hattab, 34, of Ottawa, Ontario, remained at large.

A lawyer for Weinstein, Eric M. Creizman, declined to comment. Ricardo Solano Jr., a lawyer for Bromberg, declined to comment. Information about lawyers for the other defendants was not immediately available.

Weinstein, Sellinger said, had “picked up right where he left off” after leaving prison, concocting a scheme to solicit investments through a company called Optimus Investments Inc., which he had operated with Bromberg and Wittels.

Acknowledging that investors would not give him “a penny” if they knew his true identity, according to what prosecutors said was a secretly recorded conversation, Weinstein ran Optimus using the pseudonym Mike Konig when dealing with lenders, potential investors and business partners.

“I finagled and Ponzied and lied to people to cover us,” Weinstein was also recorded as saying, according to the complaint.

Much of the money that flowed into Optimus came from a second company controlled by two unidentified co-conspirators, Tryon Management Group LLC, according to a criminal complaint.

Tryon promised its investors supposedly lucrative opportunities to invest in the bogus deals, and it funneled the money they collected to Weinstein through Optimus, the complaint says.

By February 2022, according to the

The prison sentence that Trump commuted was in connection to two schemes to which Weinstein had pleaded guilty. In the first, he admitted to defrauding investors out of $200 million by luring them into fake real estate investments and land deals.

The second scheme, which he hatched while awaiting trial on the first, involved what he claimed was access to Facebook shares around the time of the company’s initial public offering.

In announcing the commutation of Weinstein’s sentence, White House officials said the move was supported by, among others, Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., and lawyer Alan Dershowitz.

A spokesperson for Van Drew did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Contacted by email, Dershowitz played down his role in winning Weinstein’s release.

“I had little or nothing to do with him personally,” Dershowitz said. “I gave legal advice to an organization that was advocating shortening sentences. If he’s found guilty a second time, he will get no mercy.”

Barry Wachsler, who had helped finance Weinstein’s court appeals and clemency push, continued to support him on Wednesday, saying in an interview that he had spoken to Weinstein and that his friend was in “total disbelief” about the new charges.

Wachsler asserted that they stemmed from prosecutors’ bitterness over the commutation of Weinstein’s sentence and that Weinstein’s activities since leaving prison were legal.

“They were out to get him, and they were looking for every possibility, and they got it,” Wachsler said. “They wanted to teach him a lesson — whether it be hating the fact that Trump commuted his sentence, whatever it may be.”

The federal courthouse in Trenton, N.J., where Eliyahu Weinstein made an initial appearance on Wednesday.

Gilgo beach suspect’s house draws avid onlookers: ‘I’m so into this’

By COREY KILGANNON and NATE SCHWEBER

Scarlett Fascetti approached the dilapidated red house as if it were a shrine.

“I couldn’t wait to see it. I’m so into this thing,” said Fascetti, 51, a teacher who had traveled 30 miles from her Long Island, New York, town to a section of Massapequa Park that has become an instant tourist attraction for a dark reason: It is the home of Rex Heuermann, the architect charged last week in the Gilgo Beach serial killings.

Fascetti could already reel off details about the killings and had quickly gotten up to speed on the three murder charges against Heuermann. She knew everything from precisely how 11 bodies had been found along Ocean Parkway to the vehicle Heuermann had in his driveway.

Heuermann, who is being held without bail at a Suffolk County jail, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he met women who were working as escorts, then killed them and wrapped them in burlap to bury them along a stretch of barrier island on the South Shore.

Since his arrest July 13, hundreds of wide-eyed people from across Long Island and beyond have come each day to the home, about 5 miles from Gilgo Beach, where Heuermann lived with his wife and two grown children. They have clustered outside police tape on the edge of his block.

The site on the otherwise unremarkable corner of First and Michigan avenues in this sleepy bedroom community allows a vantage into the red house, a crime scene that for

days has been searched by investigators, while Heuermann’s family has not been seen at home. His wife, Asa Ellerup, has filed for divorce, her lawyer, Robert A. Macedonio, confirmed Wednesday.

Some bike over or walk the dog from nearby blocks; some trek from distant towns or other states. Once-near-empty streets are lined with cars from sunup to sundown, parked by true-crime addicts, serial killer aficionados and some people obsessed specifically with the Gilgo Beach murders.

“It’s part of history,” said Lidia Feldman, 26, who lives several towns away. Her 2-year-old daughter cheerfully rode her plastic toy car into the yellow crime-scene tape.

“It sends chills down your spine,” Feldman said.

Some couldn’t care less about Gilgo Beach, the red house or the arsenal of guns being carried out of it by investigators in white jumpsuits. One group of women showed up Tuesday evening to announce they were there only to meet police officers to date.

This offer was met with a mix of grins and stern stares from a phalanx of officers standing sentry.

Some parents viewed the house as an educational site. Mayra Urema of Farmingdale brought her daughter Veronica Medina, 14, because, she said, “I wanted to teach my daughter that there’s scary people in this world.”

As for herself, Urema said. “I’ve been following this story since day one.”’

She stared past the crime scene tape and murmured, “I’d love to go inside there, just to see.”

Onlookers seemed both horrified and fascinated.

“Coming here makes it real for me,” said Lori Gargiulo, who mentioned her own coincidental connections to notorious crimes. Serial killer Joel Rifkin was a classmate at East Meadow High School, she said, and Colin Ferguson, who shot 25 people, six fatally, on a Long Island Rail Road train in 1993, was a co-worker at a burglar alarm company in Syosset.

For Michael Iavarone, of Huntington, New York, visiting this neighborhood of modest, well-kept houses in neat rows drove home the idea that “this guy was living amongst the people.”

Iavarone, a co-owner of the champion racehorse Big Brown and a surpassingly flashy internet personality, looked toward the red house, absorbed in watching investigators cart out evidence.

“I feel horrible for the neighbors,” he said. “It’s become a tourist spot.”

Marianne Patino, 59, who lives in Babylon, likened the Heuermann house to the Dutch colonial 2 miles away made famous by the “Amityville Horror” films, which were based on the true story of a young man who killed six members of his family in 1974.

“This will be the next ‘Amityville Horror house,’ it will stay in history,” she said — a prospect dreaded by neighbors. Decades after the Amityville crimes, gawkers still drive by and take photos, to the consternation of the current owners.

On Tuesday, a reporter who visited the original Amityville house was met by a woman on a balcony who shouted, “private property!”

Nick Marsi and Jake Goodhart, both 18-year-olds from Hauppauge, New York, had parked in front of the house to chat about the films. They enjoy exploring serial killer points of interest, they said.

The young men said they were unaware of the Gilgo Beach slayings, but were amazed to learn that the suspect lived only 2 miles away.

“Sounds awesome,” Marsi said.

They drove off.

Back at the Massapequa Park house, Bernadette Paredes, 53, an office manager from Levittown, New York, had brought her 18-year-old daughter, Brooke, who had watched a Netflix documentary, “Lost Girls,” about the Gilgo Beach case.

“It was just weird to watch it and come here and see it in real life,” Brooke Paredes said. “It’s creepy.”

Her mother took photographs for Facebook.

“I guess now I’m cool,” she said. “I got to see Rex’s house.”

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Onlookers gather alongside media to watch the heavy police presence at the house of Rex Heuermann in Massapequa Park, N.Y., on Friday, July 14, 2023. In Massapequa Park, the curious and obsessed come to gawk at the house where Rex Heuermann lived; some bring the children.

US Virgin Islands seeks $190 million from JPMorgan in Epstein lawsuit

By MATTHEW GOLDSTEIN

The government of the U.S. Virgin Islands said in a court filing Friday that it is seeking at least $190 million in penalties from JPMorgan Chase & Co. for the bank’s failure to detect and report the sex trafficking operation run by disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein in the U.S. territory.

Lawyers for the Virgin Islands disclosed the sum in a legal filing in response to a request from the federal judge in New York overseeing the lawsuit it filed against JPMorgan last year, which claimed that the bank turned a blind eye to Epstein’s activities.

In the filing, the Virgin Islands attorney general’s office said it also wants the nation’s largest bank to put in new poli-

cies to prevent it from providing financial services to human traffickers.

“We are pursuing this enforcement action because JPMorgan Chase’s institutional failure enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking,” U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Ariel Smith said in a statement.

Patricia Wexler, a JPMorgan spokesperson, said, “This document does not reflect the nature of settlement conversations.” She also said the Virgin Islands’ legal theories were “not well founded and are being challenged by JPM in court.”

The bank, in court papers, has argued that the Virgin Islands government did little itself to deter any illegal activity carried out by Epstein on his private island residence off St. Thomas.

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JPMorgan has already agreed to pay $290 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed last year on behalf of Epstein’s many sexual abuse victims. The suit, filed by lawyers for Epstein’s victims, was joined for legal discovery purposes with the lawsuit filed by the Virgin Islands. The bank and the Virgin Islands government have not yet reached a settlement.

The lawsuit filed by the Virgin Islands is tentatively scheduled for an October trial in federal court in the New York City borough of Manhattan.

The Virgin Islands said Friday that its lawsuit is fashioned as an enforcement action against the bank and that it is entitled to the sizable relief to compensate it and deter future conduct by the bank. The $190 million includes penalties and the disgorgement of fees earned from business that the Virgin Islands claims Epstein directed to JPMorgan.

Last year, the U.S. territory reached

a $105 million settlement with the estate of Epstein, who killed himself in August 2019 while being held in federal custody on sex trafficking charges.

Lawyers for Epstein’s victims have said at least 200 women — many of them teenagers at the time — were sexually abused by the financier at his private residence in the Virgin Islands, as well as his homes in Manhattan, Florida and elsewhere. Epstein maintained a private island residence just off St. Thomas for nearly 20 years and ran his investment advisory businesses from the Virgin Islands as well.

The Virgin Islands is being assisted in all the litigation related to Epstein by lawyers from Motley Rice, a plaintiffs’ law firm based in South Carolina. Motley has a retainer agreement with the Virgin Islands government that entitles it to receive a portion of every settlement and recovery as its compensation.

Little St. James Island, once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Aug. 27, 2019. The U.S. territory’s government said in a court filing that it is seeking at least $190 million in damages from JPMorgan Chase for the bank’s failure to detect and report the sex trafficking operation run by the disgraced financier.

Tesla, Netflix Drag Nasdaq Down; Dow Eyes Ninth Day of Gains

The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell on Thursday, as Tesla and Netflix results underwhelmed investors, while a strong annual forecast by Johnson & Johnson set the blue-chip Dow on course for its ninth day of gains.

Tesla’s shares fell nearly 7% after the electric-car maker on Wednesday reported a drop in its second-quarter gross margins to a four-year low and CEO Elon Musk hinted at more price cuts.

“The price cuts have opened up the proverbial can of worms,” said Michael Matousek, head trader at U.S. Global Investors.

“You’re going to see more manufacturers become competitive with their pricing because these (EV) vehicles were very high margin before and now they’ve got room to cut.”

Other big names in the EV space such as General Motors and Ford Motor slid over 1% each.

Meanwhile, Netflix fell 9.4%, on track for its worst percentage drop in nearly 15 months, after the streaming video company’s quarterly revenue fell short of estimates, while analysts said its new money-making ventures will take time to bring in returns.

An annual profit forecast raise by Johnson & Johnson pushed up its shares 6%, lifting the Dow.

The Dow is on course for its ninth-straight day of gains, its longest winning streak in almost six years.

“The Dow was simply neglected in this recent growth rally and now people are redeploying capital in some of the more traditional non growth names,” said David Russell, vice president of market intelligence at TradeStation.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq has advanced 35.5% so far this year, supported by a scorching rally in megacap growth and technology stocks on optimism over artificial intelligence, a resilient U.S. economy and hopes that the Federal Reserve was nearing the end of its aggressive rate-hike cycle.

At 11:28 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 263.64 points, or 0.75%, at 35,324.85, the S&P 500 was down 14.31 points, or 0.31%, at 4,551.41, and the Nasdaq Composite was down 172.14 points, or 1.20%, at 14,185.88.

United Airlines advanced 3.9% after lifting its full-year profit outlook and posted the highest ever quarterly earnings on booming demand for international travel.

U.S.-listed shares of Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC fell 4.5% after warning of a 10% drop in 2023 sales.

Overall earnings across industries are expected to decline 8.2% for the second quarter, according to Refinitiv data on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, data showed the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell last week, pointing to persistent strength in the labor market.

Declining issues outnumbered advancers for a 1.93-to-1 ratio on the NYSE and a 1.86-to-1 ratio on the Nasdaq.

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The S&P index recorded 20 new 52-week highs and two new lows, while the Nasdaq recorded 46 new highs and 40 new lows.

Swedish Embassy in Baghdad is set afire amid protests over Quran

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Hundreds of protesters stormed the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad early Thursday and set fire to part of the building, Reuters reported, ahead of another planned burning of the Quran in Sweden, which has angered many in the Muslim world and drawn condemnation from the Swedish authorities.

Footage shared on social media showed part of the embassy in flames and people with pieces of the building in their hands. The images could not be immediately verified.

The Iraqi police fired water cannon to disperse the protesters, according to images shared on social media and news reports.

All embassy staff members were safe, the Swedish Foreign Ministry said, according to Reuters. The ministry also said that the Iraqi authorities had the responsibility to protect diplomatic missions and their staff.

Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Twitter that it “condemns in the strongest terms” the burning of the embassy and that the government had instructed the security authorities to conduct “an urgent investigation” and to take security measures in order to “identify the perpetrators of this act and hold them accountable according to the law.”

In June, after a man tore up and burned the Quran outside the central mosque in Stockholm on the first day of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, hundreds of people in Iraq protested outside the Baghdad embassy at the urging of Muqtada al-Sadr, a populist cleric.

He had called on the Iraqi government to break off diplomatic relations with Sweden, which he said was “hostile” to Islam.

Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, said this month that his country would refrain from sending a new ambassador to Sweden in protest, Reuters reported. And Iran’s Foreign Ministry summoned Sweden’s charge d’affaires to condemn what it said was an insult to the most sacred Islamic values.

“Although administrative procedures to appoint a new ambassador to Sweden have ended, the process of dispatching them has been held off due to the Swedish government’s issuing of a permit to desecrate the Holy Quran,” Amirabdollahian said on Twitter.

Egypt called the burning of the Quran “a disgraceful act,” and Saudi Arabia said that such “hateful and repeated acts cannot be accepted with any justification.” Malaysia’s

foreign minister said the desecration of the holy book during an important holiday was “offensive to Muslims worldwide.”

The Swedish police charged the man who burned the Quran with agitation against an ethnic or national group. In a newspaper interview, he described himself as an Iraqi refugee seeking to ban it.

The protest Thursday was also called by supporters of al-Sadr.

A series of videos posted by One Baghdad, a popular Telegram channel that supports al-Sadr, showed people gathering around the embassy around 1 a.m. local time and storming the embassy complex about an hour later, Reuters reported.

Later, the news agency said, videos showed smoke rising from a building in the embassy complex. It was not immediately clear if anyone was inside the embassy at the time, Reuters said.

In January, someone set the Quran on fire near Turkey’s embassy in Stockholm, and a far-right journalist and antiIslam provocateur, Rasmus Paludan, a dual Danish-Swedish national with links to Kremlin-backed media, later confirmed that he had paid for the permit to hold what he called a protest. But he denied paying anyone to burn the holy book.

While the Swedish police have rejected several recent applications for anti-Quran demonstrations, courts have overruled those decisions, saying they infringed on freedom of speech.

Turkey had cited the desecration of the Quran as it stalled Sweden’s bid to enter NATO, which needs the approval of all members, amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the

vile attack on our holy book,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement in January.

Sweden’s foreign minister, Tobias Billstrom, has said that Islamophobic provocations were appalling.

Turkey this month appeared to relent on Sweden’s NATO bid, although Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan later said that the final decision rested with its parliament and that Sweden needed to take more steps to win the country’s support.

The demonstrators, angry over Quran burnings in Sweden, protested throughout the night, setting part of the embassy on fire.

Iraqi riot police officers tried to disperse protesters outside the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad on Thursday, hours after the building was set ablaze.

Frustrated by Biden, China courts ‘old friends’ like Kissinger

By DAVID PIERSON, VIVIAN WANG and EDWARD WONG

The red carpet welcome in Beijing for Henry Kissinger, the 100-year-old former secretary of state, included China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, telling him that “the Chinese people will always remember you.” It featured praise from China’s top diplomat for his wisdom. And it involved a meeting with the Chinese defense minister, who has rebuffed multiple requests to engage with his American counterpart.

China’s enthusiastic reception for Kissinger this week is the latest example of how Beijing is reaching outside official diplomatic channels to broaden the reach of its message and try to influence Washington’s thinking. Beijing has turned to those it deems more aligned with its position as it has become more skeptical toward, and at times openly frustrated with, the Biden administration.

With the visit by Kissinger, whom Xi and other officials called an “old friend,” Beijing has sought to emphasize cooperation and mutual respect between the powers. With visits by business leaders like Bill Gates — also dubbed an old friend by Xi — and Elon Musk, China has tried to highlight the long-standing economic relationship and the perils of untangling global supply chains.

Such efforts may become increasingly significant as Beijing pushes back against what it sees as the Biden administration’s efforts to contain China geopolitically, militarily and technologically. China is also watching as Republicans and Democrats unite in wanting to remain tough on Beijing, and a U.S. presidential election approaches in which candidates will likely be more critical of China.

“This looks very much like a deliberate Chinese strategy” to court individuals who might help change opinions in Washington, said Dennis Wilder, former head of China analysis at the CIA. “The Chinese are energizing those with a vested interest in the Chinese economy and the overall relationship.”

After several months of a deep chill, the two countries have started reengaging on issues like trade and climate change. But progress has been limited, with President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, coming out of talks this week in China with no new agreements, and Beijing arguing that troubles in the relationship hinder its cooperation with Washington on fighting global warming.

While the meetings may have succeeded in building a “floor” in the relationship, tensions remain high. China wants the United States to lift restrictions on technology, curb its

support for Taiwan, and stop what Beijing sees as a containment strategy centered on building security ties with U.S. allies and partners around Asia. Ties could fray further if the Biden administration imposes new restrictions on American investments in Chinese companies involved in quantum computing, artificial intelligence and semiconductors.

Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Nanjing University, said Kissinger’s visit pointed to “Beijing’s anxiety about how to influence and persuade American policy elites to reduce their strategic suppression of China,” at a time when voices like his were increasingly rare in Washington.

Beijing often evokes the time when Kissinger served as secretary of state and helped pave the way for a historic visit to China in 1972 by President Richard Nixon, as an example of a golden era in bilateral relations. That trip led to the establishment of diplomatic ties between Washington and Communist-ruled China seven years later.

As relations have soured in recent years, Chinese officials have said U.S. officials should learn from Kissinger and his pro-engagement stance.

To drive that point again, China highlighted the historical significance of the venue for Xi’s meeting with Kissinger on Thursday. Chinese officials chose Villa No. 5 of the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, the same building

where half a century earlier Kissinger had met Zhou Enlai, China’s premier at the time.

“China and the United States’ relations will forever be linked to the name ‘Kissinger,’” Xi said in a video released by CCTV, the state broadcaster, as the two men sat side by side in plush cream-colored armchairs. “I express my deep respect to you.”

In an official summary of the meeting, released by Chinese state media, Xi was quoted as saying: “I hope you and people of insight in the United States will continue to play a constructive role in bringing China-U.S. relations back to the right track.”

Wang Yi, China’s top foreign affairs official, a day earlier had told Kissinger that U.S. policy needed “Kissinger-style diplomatic wisdom, and Nixon-style political bravery,” according to China’s Foreign Ministry.

China has also been courting American business leaders. Aside from Gates and Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon have visited China this year

— some given the kind of high-level meetings with Chinese officials that senior officials from foreign nations also get. The visits by business leaders are also an opportunity for China to send a message domestically about foreign confidence in the economy, which has faced an uncertain recovery.

During his trip to Beijing in March, Cook took selfies with admirers at an Apple store and attended a government development forum — then seen as an important signal as China was just emerging from three years of strict coronavirus restrictions.

Two months later, Musk traveled to China and met with senior ministers and Shanghai’s top leader. In Chinese media reports, Musk, the head of Tesla and Twitter, was hailed as a proponent of open trade between the United States and China.

“Musk’s trip to China showed U.S. businesses’ firm confidence in the Chinese market despite ‘decoupling’ noises from some Western politicians,” said the Global Times, a Communist Party tabloid.

With these meetings, Xi appears to be trying to highlight the importance of business ties between the two nations, and signal that growing tensions in the relationship could jeopardize those links.

That messaging has become even more important for Beijing to emphasize after Chinese officials raided the offices or interrogated the staff of American consulting firms such as Bain & Co., spooking many foreign businesses, said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington.

“China overall wants to retain foreign investors, and the ones they have been appealing to are large high-tech companies that may still see the appeal of the Chinese market,” Sun said.

“The Chinese do believe these business leaders enjoy more freedom to act outside the political correctness,” she said. “But another piece of it is that China wants to showcase that cooperation with China, and following Beijing’s rules, will be rewarding.”

China is turning to visits from high-profile figures like Bill Gates to try to broaden the reach of Beijing’s message.

Stranded in a strange land, and waiting for death

By VIVIAN YEE

For nearly three weeks now, more than 1,000 men, women and children from Africa have been clinging to survival in the no-man’s lands at Tunisia’s borders. A few scrubby trees offer fitful shade, videos taken by migrants show, and border guards from neighboring Libya and Tunisian aid workers occasionally drop off water and a bit of bread.

Otherwise, there is nothing.

Tunisian authorities dumped the African migrants there after rounding them up in the Mediterranean port of Sfax, hours away, where growing numbers have boarded boats to nearby Europe this year. Many were beaten by officers; a few have died in the desert, where there is little to no medical care, migrants and rights groups say.

Over and over, they sent pleas for help from the dwindling number of phones they managed to keep charged:

“Please help us. We are dying,” one wrote to The New York Times on Saturday. “We don’t have any food and water,” begged another. “We are stranded. If there’s any way you can help us …”

By Sunday, the text messages had stopped.

With migration to Europe at its highest level since 2016, the Mediterranean route from North Africa is once again posing a dilemma for Europe, where burning anti-migration sentiment has played into ugly scenes of coast guards setting some migrants adrift while leaving hundreds of others to drown.

It is in launchpad countries like Tunisia, which has overtaken Libya as the main crossing point for Africans and others dreaming of Europe, that European leaders hope to contain the problem.

But critics of the deal say they have only outsourced the ugliness.

On Sunday, Italy, the Netherlands and the European Commission signed a deal with Tunisia promising more than $1 billion in European Union aid and investment to stabilize the country’s crumbling economy and strengthen border controls.

“We all heard that the prime minister of Italy paid the Tunisian president a lot of money to keep the Blacks away from the country,” Kelvin, a 32-year-old Nigerian migrant, said on Saturday from Tunisia’s border with Libya. He declined to give his full name, fearing further harsh treatment.

Like other sub-Saharan African migrants, many of whom can enter Tunisia without visas, he had spent several months cleaning houses and working construction in Sfax, scraping together the smuggler’s fee for a boat to Europe. Then, he said, Tunisians in uniforms broke through his door, beat him until his ankle fractured and put him on a bus to the desert.

The EU-Tunisia deal went ahead over the objections of some EU lawmakers and rights groups that accuse Europe of buttressing an autocrat in the making, Tunisia’s president, Kais Saied. Saied, who has a record of vilifying migrants, has spent the last two years dismantling Tunisia’s democracy, the only one to emerge from the Arab Spring protests that consumed the region more than a decade ago.

He has jailed dozens of political opponents, cowed the once-independent judiciary, circumscribed the news media and rewritten the constitution to bestow more power on himself, all to muted reaction from Western allies.

In the face of criticism, Tunisia moved some of the migrants in the desert to shelters last week and allowed the Tunisian Red Crescent to provide some aid. But rights groups say hundreds remain without shelter or food.

The president has rejected reports about migrants being expelled from Sfax, claiming that they received only “humane treatment.” But the president’s assertion contradicted testimony, photos and videos provided by the migrants.

Rights groups have also accused the Tunisian coast guard of abuses against migrants, including deliberately damaging their boats or beating the passengers, even as European countries rush to upgrade the force’s equipment.

Yet much of Europe puts curbing migration first.

“We need to be pragmatic,” Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, said in a news conference last month.

For all its flaws, Tunisia’s nascent democracy after the Arab Spring was cheered and coached by the West. Now, with every new check written out to Saied, his critics say Europe and its partners in Washington are abandoning the experiment on which they once lavished care, attention and money, and as with other regional strongmen, sacrificing human rights and democratic values for short-term stability.

“If we were more consistent in making clear that we are going to be reluctant to support political repression in the region, leaders might act differently,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who, with other lawmakers, is pressing to slash U.S. military aid for Tunisia over Saied’s actions.

While the Biden administration has cut some funding for Tunisia, it has been reluctant to decrease it further out of concern that the country will fall under Russian and Chinese influence and that surging migration will weaken Europe.

European officials insist that they can better combat abuses against migrants by working closely with the Tunisians. And Western diplomats in Tunis argue that it does no good to withhold aid from

Tunisia’s 12.5 million people, who are already facing shortages of medicine and bread.

But to some critics, Saied is a bad bet as a border policeman, more likely to drive people toward Europe than corral them in Tunisia.

“Saied and what he’s doing to the country is the real driver of migration,” said Tarek Megerisi, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Europeans “are exacerbating the situation. They’re not really solving it,” he added.

Saied has done little to right Tunisia’s economy, which had stumbled even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spurred a global inflation crisis. He waved aside a $1.9 billion International Monetary Fund bailout over conditions he called “diktats.”

With the economic outlook grimmer than ever, more Tunisians came to Europe illegally last year than in any year in recent history, Europe’s border agency said.

“I’m hoping that I’ll close my eyes and find myself in Italy,” said Mohamed Houidi, 44, a Tunisian fisherman in Sfax saving up for the smuggler’s fee. “There’s no hope, no horizon, no future in this country.”

It is also under Saied that Tunisia has become the Mediterranean’s top springboard for migrants. EU data shows Tunisia is this year’s biggest contributor to the main migratory route to Europe, the central Mediterranean, where arrivals by boat have more than doubled since last year.

And every week brings more news of migrants drowning off Tunisian shores.

Expanding smuggling networks and the perception that Tunisia makes for safer transit than Libya have bolstered the number of boats heading for Italy. But departures spiked after Saied asserted in February that sub-Saharan African migrants were part of a secretive effort to turn Tunisia into “a purely African country with no affiliation to the Arab and Islamic nations.”

The speech echoed the racist “great replacement” theory — popular with the European and American far right — which holds that there is a conspiracy to replace white populations with others. Almost immediately, Black migrants in several cities, some studying or working legally, were evicted, fired, assaulted, robbed or forced into hiding, migrants and rights activists said.

Saied has denied his speech was racist, but he has signaled that migrants are not welcome to stay.

“Tunisia is not a furnished apartment for sale or rent,” he said this month.

And it remains unclear to what extent the Tunisian president is willing to work with Europe to curb migration. He said this month that Tunisia “does not accept guarding borders other than its own.”

Such pronouncements have exasperated some European donors. European officials and diplomats say Tunisia is capable of stopping the crossings from Sfax, but may be stalling for leverage.

Although Tunisia seems in no rush to finalize the IMF agreement, on which most of the promised EU aid is contingent, the bloc is already rushing more than $200 million to Tunis.

Others argue Saied is simply trying to rescue his sinking popularity by loudly rejecting Western influence and scapegoating migrants.

Now, migrants in Sfax are once again being evicted and assaulted, rights groups say. Many, they say, have headed for the sea.

We are all background actors

By JAMES PONIEWOZIK

In Hollywood, the cool kids have joined the picket line. I mean no offense, as a writer, to the screenwriters who have been on strike against film and TV studios for over two months. But writers know the score. We’re the words, not the faces. The cleverest picket sign joke is no match for the attention-focusing power of Margot Robbie or Matt Damon.

SAG-AFTRA, the union representing TV and film actors, joined the writers in a walkout over how Hollywood divvies up the cash in the streaming era and how humans can thrive in the artificial-intelligence era. With that star power comes an easy cheap shot: Why should anybody care about a bunch of privileged elites whining about a dream job?

But for all the focus that a few boldface names will get in this strike, I invite you to consider a term that has come up a lot in the current negotiations: “Background actors.”

You probably don’t think much about background actors. You’re not meant to, hence the name. They’re the nonspeaking figures who populate the screen’s margins, making Gotham City or King’s Landing or the beaches of Normandy feel real, full and lived-in.

And you might have more in common with them than you think.

The lower-paid actors who make up the vast bulk of the profession are facing simple dollars-and-cents

threats to their livelihoods. They’re trying to maintain their income amid the vanishing of residual payments, as streaming has shortened TV seasons and decimated the syndication model. They’re seeking guardrails against AI encroaching on their jobs.

There’s also a particular, chilling question on the table: Who owns a performer’s face? Background actors are seeking protections and better compensation in the practice of scanning their images for digital reuse.

In a news conference about the strike, a union negotiator said that the studios were seeking the rights to scan and use an actor’s image “for the rest of eternity” in exchange for one day’s pay. The studios argue that they are offering “groundbreaking” protections against the misuse of actors’ images, and counter that their proposal would only allow a company to use the “digital replica” on the specific project a background actor was hired for.

Still, the long-term “Black Mirror” implications — the practice was the actual premise of a recent episode — are unignorable. If a digital replica of you — without your bothersome need for money and the time to lead a life — can do the job, who needs you?

You could, I guess, make the argument that if someone is insignificant enough to be replaced by software, then they’re in the wrong business. But background work and small roles are precisely the routes to someday promoting your blockbuster on the red carpet. And many talented artists build entire careers around a series of small jobs.

(Pamela Adlon’s series “Better Things” is a great portrait of the life of ordinary working actors.)

In the end, Hollywood’s fight isn’t far removed from the threats to many of us in today’s economy. “We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,” Fran Drescher, the actors’ guild president, said in announcing the strike.

You and I may be the protagonists of our own narratives, but in the grand scheme most of us are background players. We face the same risk — that every time a technological or cultural shift happens, companies will rewrite the terms of employment to their advantage, citing financial pressures while paying their top executives tens and hundreds of millions.

Maybe it’s unfair that exploitation gets more attention when it involves a union that Meryl Streep belongs to. (If the looming UPS strike materializes, it might grab the spotlight for blue-collar labor.) And there’s certainly a legitimate critique of white-collar workers who were blasé about automation until AI threatened their own jobs.

But work is work, and some dynamics are universal. As entertainment reporter and critic Maureen Ryan writes in “Burn It Down,” her investigation of workplace abuses throughout Hollywood, “It is not the inclination nor the habit of the most important entities in the commercial entertainment industry to value the people who make their products.”

If you don’t believe Ryan, listen to the anonymous studio executive, speaking of the writers’ strike, who told the trade publication Deadline, “The endgame is to allow things to drag out until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”

You may think of Hollywood creatives as a privileged class, but if their employers think about them like this, are you sure yours thinks any differently of you? Most of us, in Hollywood or outside it, are facing a common question: Can we have a working world in which you can survive without being a star?

You may never notice background actors if they’re doing their jobs well. Yet they’re the difference between a sterile scene and a living one. They create the impression that, beyond the close focus on the beautiful leads, there is a full, complete universe, whether it’s the galaxy of the “Star Wars” franchise or the mundane reality that you and I live in.

They are there to say that we, too, are out here, that we make the world a world, that we at least deserve our tiny places in the corner of the screen.

Members of the Writers Guild of America and supporters picket outside of Netflix’s offices in Los Angeles, July 14, 2023.

SUBARU de Puerto Rico, distribuidor exclusivo, anuncia el lanzamiento del totalmente nuevo CROSSTREK 2024, que presenta mejoras en seguridad y diseño. Este crossover SUV versátil combina un diseño compacto con el rendimiento de un SUV, gracias a la legendaria tracción simétrica en todas las ruedas, único de SUBARU.

El diseño exterior del nuevo CROSSTREK ha experimentado una refinación en su estilo, resaltando su apariencia deportiva y robusta. El espacio interior del nuevo CROSSTREK ha sido optimizado para proporcionar una gran comodidad tanto para el conductor como para los pasajeros. Ahora los usuarios podrán beneficiarse de nuevos asientos ergonómicos.

Una de las principales novedades del nuevo CROSSTREK es la incorporación de la última generación del sistema EYESIGHT. Esta vez, SUBARU introdujo una tercera cámara monocular, de ángulo-ancho, siendo la primera vez que se utiliza en el mercado puertorriqueno. Esta innovación contribuye a un reconocimiento más preciso de los objetos en su entorno y ampliando las capacidades de prevención de colisiones. El modelo Premium está convenientemente equipado con el motor BOXER 2.0 con 152hp y hasta 36 MPG. Los modelos Sport, con emblemas deportivos color amarillo en exterior e interior, y el Limited, ahora con sistema de sonido premium Harman-Kardon, cuentan con motores BOXER 2.5 de 182hp y hasta 34 MPG.

Mayagüez- El alcalde en funciones de Mayagüez, ingeniero Jorge L. Ramos Ruiz, junto a funcionarios municipales y de la empresa privada colocaron la primera piedra que marca el inicio de un nuevo y moderno estadio de soccer, desde donde se espera que en el futuro jóvenes de esta ciudad y la región oeste desarrollen sus habilidades en ese importante deporte a nivel mundial.

El nuevo proyecto se construirá en el barrio Colombia, contiguo a la Secretaría del Departamento de Re-

Todos los modelos están equipados con el sistema de manejo de rendimiento SI-Drive, transmisión automática Lineartronic de 8-velocidades con cambios manuales en el guia, Active Torque Vectoring y la tracción integral Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive con X-MODE, tecnologías exclusivas de SUBARU.

En cuanto a la presencia de SUBARU de Puerto Rico, anunció el desarrollo de su “Dealer Network” con un nuevo concesionario boutique en Mayagüez. Este movimiento estratégico tiene como objetivo capturar la creciente demanda del mercado de vehículos nuevos en la zona oeste. El concesionario abrirá sus puertas en la avenida Méndez Vigo, marcando el regreso de la marca a la Sultana del Oeste.

creación y Deportes Municipal y donde hace varios meses fue inaugurado un Centro de Usos Múltiples para el uso de la comunidad ubicada en el casco urbano de la llamada Ciudad del Deporte y la Cultura.

“Lo que queremos es desarrollar como una academia, donde podamos ir sembrando la semilla en el deporte del soccer y desde ese nuevo campo nuestros niños y jóvenes se motiven, para que en un futuro no muy lejano podamos tener campeones de Puerto Rico, Centro América y del Caribe y hasta del mundo en esa importante disciplina”, expresó el alcalde Ramos Ruiz.

El Ejecutivo Municipal sostuvo que se trata de que desde temprana edad tanto los niños y jóvenes, al igual que sus padres, se motiven para que se desarrollen el este deporte que a nivel mundial mueve billones de fanáticos. En Puerto Rico, en la última década, esta disciplina ha cogido un auge contagioso que será atendido desde esa moderna facilidad.

El proyecto consiste en la construcción de un parque de soccer en césped natural, banco para jugadores y oficiales, torres de iluminación para llevar a cabo juegos

Lilliam Portalatin, directora de Ventas, Flotas Corporativas y Mercadeo de SUBARU en la Isla, destaca que Mayagüez representa una oportunidad para la marca, ya que atrae a clientes locales e inversionistas que llegan a Puerto Rico seducidos por los beneficios del codigo de incentivos contributivos. Según la señora Portalatin, estos inversionistas ya conocen la marca desde Estados Unidos. Estos inversionistas valoran las características de los vehículos SUBARU, como su rendimiento en diversos terrenos y condiciones climáticas, que se adaptan bien a la Isla.

La inversión en el nuevo concesionario ascenderá a $300,000 USD y generarán doce empleos directos. Las proyecciones de ventas en esta ubicación son de 150 a 180 unidades anuales, lo cual se explica por el enfoque de SUBARU en atender a un nicho específico de consumidores. Cabe destacar que el concesionario boutique será exclusivamente un punto de ventas para vehículos nuevos y usados, ya que el área de servicio automotriz estará a cargo de una empresa local especializada en este tipo de labores.

Con la apertura de este nuevo concesionario en Mayagüez, SUBARU busca fortalecer su presencia. Los clientes podrán disfrutar de la calidad, el rendimiento y la confiabilidad de los vehículos SUBARU, respaldados por el servicio profesional de la empresa encargada del área de servicio. Para más información llame al tel. 787641-1546 o entre a: trebolmotors.com/subaru. Tambien puede encontrarlos en los medios sociales Facebook, Instagram y Twitter como: #SubaruPuertoRico

nocturnos, pizarra electrónica y gradas con una capacidad de 250 personas.

“Sabemos del entusiasmo de muchos niños y jóvenes que han estado interesados por desarrollarse en el deporte del soccer en esta ciudad. Ahora con la construcción de este moderno estadio será una realidad que se formen en esa disciplina deportiva”. Subrayó el alcalde Ramos Ruiz en declaraciones escritas.

El proyecto fue diseñado por la firma de ingeniería, ENCO Group LLC y será construido por Del Mar Constractors, LLC. El costo de diseño fue de $94,000 y la construcción asciende a $2,485,424 para una inversión en el deporte mayagüezano de $2,579,424, fondos provenientes del Plan de Rescate Americano conocido por sus siglas en inglés como Fondos ARPA.

Es conocimiento de todos que la ciudad de Mayagüez cuenta con el más importante estadio de soccer en las mismas instalaciones del Estadio Centroamericano, José A. Figueroa Freyre, donde se han realizado competencias a nivel de múltiples países de Centroamérica y el Caribe.

Dan inicio a construcción de parque de soccer en casco urbano de Mayagüez

¡Llega a Puerto Rico EL TOTALMENTE NUEVO SUBARU CROSSTREK 2024, junto con el Desarrollo de un Nuevo Concesionario en Mayagüez!

How the Hollywood strikes could affect fall festivals and Oscar season

By KYLE BUCHANAN

With summer movie season at its midpoint, Hollywood typically begins to turn its gaze toward the fall, when a trio of major film festivals acts as the unofficial kickoff to Oscar season. Seven of the last 10 bestpicture winners had their debuts at a fall festival, coming out of the gate with standing ovations and critical acclaim that helped propel them through the monthslong awards-show gantlet.

But now that SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America are both on strike, could a protracted battle between the unions and the studios cause those fall launchpads to fizzle?

Though the writers’ strike, which began May 2, didn’t have much of an effect on the Cannes Film Festival that month, the actors’ strike that started Friday may significantly reshape coming fests in Venice, Italy; Telluride, Colorado; and Toronto. That’s because SAG-AFTRA is prohibiting members from promoting any film while the strike is on, an across-the-board ban that includes interviews, photo calls and red-carpet duties. Without those appearances, festivals will be sapped of the star power that is invaluable to raising a film’s profile.

The first event that will probably be affected is the Venice Film Festival, which begins its 80th edition on Aug. 30 with the premiere of the sexy tennis comedy “Challengers,” starring Zendaya. Venice has lately rivaled Cannes for glamour and headlines, so the loss of famous actors would be a big blow. Nearly all the major moments at Venice last year were star-driven, from the viral clip of Brendan Fraser crying after the premiere of “The Whale” to the social-media scrutiny of Harry Styles and Chris Pine as they appeared to clash while promoting

“Don’t Worry Darling.” (Though if there had been a strike, Florence Pugh, the star, would have had a better excuse for infamously skipping that film’s news conference.)

The festival will announce its full lineup on July 25, and buzz suggests it could include highly anticipated films like Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro”; Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” about the relationship between Elvis Presley and his wife, Priscilla; and “The Killer,” a David Fincher thriller starring Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton. Those auteurs are at least famous enough to pick up some of the promotional slack, though Cooper might be in a bind as both the director and star of “Maestro,” since any press he does could be seen as flouting SAG’s prohibition.

The Telluride Film Festival, which runs Sept. 1-4 and shot to the spotlight the likes of “Lady Bird” and “Moonlight,” should be less

stricken by the absence of stars: That intimate Colorado gathering is a favorite of famous attendees because they’re not required to do photo ops or media blitzes and can instead mill around like regular people.

But the Toronto International Film Festival, beginning Sept. 7, is a heady 10-day affair filled with red carpets, portrait studios and press junkets that will all shrink significantly if actors are forbidden to attend. Canadian businesses are already bracing for a hit to their bottom line if the festival contracts. Organizers issued a statement of concern last week: “The impact of this strike on the industry and events like ours cannot be denied. We will continue planning for this year’s festival with the hope of a swift resolution in the coming weeks.”

There is a workaround for actors to attend festivals, but it’s a slim one: Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the SAG-AFTRA negotiator, has

said that “truly independent” films able to secure interim agreements with the guild could have their stars do media duties. Still, that’s a proviso more likely to spare the indie-focused Sundance Film Festival in January rather than fall festivals, where the biggest titles tend to hail from major studios. And if the SAG strike continues into January, it will be more than just festivals that feel the pinch.

A monthslong strike would hit the awards-season ecosystem with its toughest test since COVID-19: If stars can’t attend ceremonies, could the events be held at all? (At least when these things were on Zoom, the nominated stars showed up.) Post-pandemic, prestige films need all the help they can get at the box office. If they can’t be sustained by awards chatter and media-happy movie stars, studios could opt to move some more vulnerable yearend titles to 2024.

That could provide an awards-season advantage to streamers like Netflix, which don’t have to factor the box office into decisions on what to debut or delay. And movies that have already had a big cultural moment — like A24’s “Past Lives,” an art-house hit from June, or Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which will be released by Apple in October but received a major premiere at Cannes in May — will be better positioned to thrive this awards season than films that may not have full-fledged press tours.

Will an agreement in this bitter battle be reached in time to save awards season? Even if both sides can compromise before the televised ceremonies begin, one change is likely to still be felt: Don’t expect the usual list of studio executives to be quite so effusively thanked in acceptance speeches.

Harry Styles, a star of “Don’t Worry Darling,” at last year’s Venice Film Festival.

en el mismo lugar en la que regirá como tipo mínimo, la mitad (1/2) del precio pactado para la primera subasta, o sea, $68,749.50. El Alguacil que suscribe hizo constar que toda licitación deberá hacerse para pagar su importe en moneda legal de los Estados Unidos de América, de acuerdo con la Ley y de acuerdo con lo anunciado en este Aviso de Subasta. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado estarán de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal durante horas laborables.

Se entiende que todo licitador que comparezca a la subasta señalada en este caso acepta como bastante la titulación que da base a la misma. Se entiende que cualquier carga y/o gravamen anterior y/o preferente, si la hubiere al crédito que da base a esta ejecución continuará subsistente, entendiéndose, además, que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de estos, sin destinarse a su extinción cualquier parte del remanente del precio de licitación. La propiedad para ejecutar será adquirida libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores. Por la presente se notifica a los acreedores que tengan inscritos o anotados sus derechos sobre los bienes hipotecados con posterioridad a la inscripción del crédito del ejecutante o acreedores de cargas o derechos reales que los hubiesen pospuesto a la hipoteca ejecutada y las personas interesadas en, o con derecho a exigir el cumplimiento de instrumentos negociables garantizados hipotecariamente con posterioridad al crédito ejecutado, para que puedan concurrir a la subasta si les convenga o satisfacer antes del remate el importe del crédito, de sus intereses, costas y honorarios de abogados asegurados, quedando subrogados en los derechos del acreedor ejecutante. Vendida o adjudicada la finca o derecho hipotecado y consignado el precio correspondiente, en esa misma fecha o fecha posterior, el alguacil que celebró la subasta procederá a otorgar la correspondiente escritura pública de traspaso en representación del dueño o titular de los bienes hipotecados, ante el notario que elija el adjudicatario o comprador, quien deberá abonar el importe de tal escritura. El alguacil pondrá en posesión judicial al nuevo dueño, si así se lo solicita dentro del término de veinte (20) días a partir de la confirmación de la venta o adjudicación. Si transcurren los referidos veinte (20) días, el tribunal podrá ordenar, sin necesidad de ulterior procedimiento, que se lleve a efecto el desalojo o lanzamiento del ocupante u ocupantes de la finca o de todos los que por orden o tolerancia del deudor la ocupen. Y PARA CONOCIMIENTO DE LOS LICITADORES Y DEL PUBLICO EN GENERAL y

para su publicación de acuerdo con la Ley, expido el presente Edicto bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal. En CAGUAS, Puerto Rico hoy 22 de junio de 2023. ALEJANDRO URBINA ROQUE, ALGUACIL AUXILIAR PLACA #997, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA DE CAGUAS. ***

LEGAL NOTICE

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

ALEJANDRINA

BONILLA CANDELARIA

Parte Peticionaria EX - PARTE

Civil Núm.: SJ2023CV04527.

Sala: 606. Sobre: EXPEDIENTE DE DOMINIO BAJO EL ART. 13 DE LA LEY 118, PROCEDIMIENTO EXPEDITO Y/O USUCAPIÓN. EDICTO ENMENDADO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS E.E.U.U., EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PR, SS.

A: INMEDIATOS ANTERIORES DUEÑOS, HEREDEROS, DENOMINADOS FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANO DE TAL., Y LAS

PERSONAS IGNORADAS

Y DESCONOCIDAS A QUIENES PUDIERA PERJUDICAR LA INSCRIPCIÓN DEL DOMINIO A FAVOR DE LA PARTE PETICIONARIA EN EL REGISTRO DE LA PROPIEDAD DE LA FINCA

QUE MÁS ADELANTE SE DESCRIBIRÁ Y A TODA PERSONA EN GENERAL

QUE CON DERECHO PARA ELLO DESEE OPONERSE A ESTE EXPEDIENTE.

POR LA PRESENTE se les notifica para que comparezcan, si lo creyeren pertinente, ante este Honorable Tribunal dentro de los veinte (20) días contados a partir de la última publicación de este edicto a exponer lo que a sus derechos convenga en el expediente promovido por la parte peticionaria para adquirir su dominio sobre la finca que se describe más adelante. Usted deberá presentar su posición a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https:// unired.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación en la secretaría del Tribunal. Si usted deja de expresarse dentro del referido término, el Tribunal podrá dictar sentencia, previo a escuchar la prueba de valor

de la parte peticionaria en su contra, sin más citarle ni oírle, y conceder el remedio solicitado en la petición, o cualquier otro, si el Tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. “Solar con residencia construida en madera en la Comunidad Buen Consejo del término municipal de San Juan, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de 243.884 metros cuadrados equivalentes a 0.0621 Cuerdas. En lindes por el Norte en varias alineaciones de 15.292 y 4.540 con acceso público; por el Sur en varias alineaciones de 16.413 y 5.137 metros con Julia Márquez; por el Este en una alineación de 11.920 con acceso público y por el Oeste en una alineación de 11.297 con solar de la comunidad Buen Consejo.” El abogado de la parte peticionaria es la Lcdo. Ernesto Rovira Gándara, PMB 767, 1353 Ave. Luis Vigoreaux, Guaynabo, PR 00966; Tel. (787)-758-3277;

Email: erovira@partnerslegalservicespr.com. Se le informa, además, que el Tribunal ha señalado vista en este caso para el 30 DE AGOSTO DEL 2023 A

LAS 2:30 DE LA TARDE, mediante videoconferencia, a la cual usted puede comparecer asistido por abogado y presentar oposición a la petición. Este edicto deberá ser publicado en tres (3) ocasiones dentro del término de veinte (20) días, en un periódico de circulación general diaria, para que comparezcan si quieren alegar su derecho. Toda primera mención de persona natural y/o jurídica que se mencione en el mismo, se identificará en letra tamaño 10 puntos y negrillas, conforme a lo dispuesto en las Reglas de Procedimiento Civil, 2009. Se le apercibe que de no comparecer los interesados y/o partes citadas, o en su defecto los organismos públicos afectados en el término improrrogable de veinte (20) días a contar de la fecha de la última publicación del edicto, el Tribunal podrá conceder el remedio solicitado por la parte peticionaria, sin más citarle ni oírle. En SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, a 29 de junio de 2023. GRISELDA RODRÍGUEZ COLLADO, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. ORTIZ SILVA, MELBA, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR DEL TRIBUNAL.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU-

NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA

SALA SUPERIOR DE AGUADILLA

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

Demandante V.

SUCESIÓN DE CARLOS

ANTONIO RODRÍGUEZ

SALAS, COMPUESTA

POR: ANGEL MIGUEL

RODRÍGUEZ SALAS, NANCY MINERVA RODRÍGUEZ SALAS,

MARITZA RODRÍGUEZ SALAS, DAVID RODRÍGUEZ SALAS, GLADYS RODRÍGUEZ SALAS Y NOEL RODRÍGUEZ SALAS; DEPARTAMENTO DE HACIENDA DE PUERTO RICO

Demandado

Civil Núm.: IS2023CV00111.

Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE GARANTÍAS. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS.

A: ANGEL MIGUEL RODRÍGUEZ SALAS, COMO MIEMBRO DE LA SUCESIÓN DE CARLOS ANTONIO RODRIGUEZ SALAS. HC

3 PO BOX 8757, MOCA, PUERTO RICO 00676; 810 WOODFIELD CT, KISSIMMEE, FL 347444649.

De: BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO.

Se le emplaza y requiere que conteste la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramaiudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Este caso trata sobre Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Garantías en que la parte demandante solicita que se condene a la parte demandada a pagar: la suma principal de $107,168.76, más intereses acumulados a razón 4.5% anual, desde el 1 de agosto de 2015, que se acumulan diariamente hasta su total y completo pago, más la suma de $126.00 por cargos por mora, más la suma de $89.75 en conexión con la cuenta de reserva, más la suma de $12,046.00 por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado hipotecariamente asegurados. Se le apercibe que, si dejare de hacerlo, se dictará contra usted sentencia en rebeldía, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle.

Lcdo. José Antonio Lamas Burgos Número del Tribunal Supremo 15693 PO Box 194089, San Juan, PR 00917 Teléfono: (787) 296-9500 Correo Electrónico: jlamas@lvprlaw.com

EXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y Sello del Tribunal, hoy 13 de julio de 2023. SARAHÍ REYES PÉREZ, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. NATHALIE I. ACEVEDO

QUIÑONES, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR DEL TRIBUNAL I. LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA SALA SUPERIOR DE ARECIBO LUNA

PERFORMANCE II, LLC

Demandante V. CARMEN ANA HERNÁNDEZ MARRERO

Demandado(a)

Civil Núm.: AR2022CV01621. Sala: 402. Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA - IN REM. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: CARMEN ANA HERNÁNDEZ MARRERO. (Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 13 de julio de 2023, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 13 de julio de 2023. En ARECIBO, Puerto Rico, el 13 de julio de 2023. VIVIAN Y. FRESSE GONZÁLEZ, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. ALEXANDRA ÁLVAREZ NATAL, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN DELIA ESTHER REVERON JOSÉ ANGEL REVERÓN KUILAN; SUCESIÓN DE HIPÓLITO REVERÓN KUILAN COMPUESTA

POR: CARLOS JAVIER REVERON RODRÍGUEZ, VÍCTOR LUIS REVERÓN RODRÍGUEZ Y MARÍA LUISA RODRÍGUEZ CORREA

Demandante V. SUCESIÓN DE WILFREDO REVERÓN

KUILAN, COMPUESTA

POR: EULALIA REVERÓN GARCÍA, WANDA

MICHELLE REVERÓN, MAYRA REVERÓN, WILFREDO REVERÓ, ANN ETTE REVERÓN; SUCESIÓN DE LINO REVERÓN SALGADO, COMPUESTA POR: LINO REVERÓN MARRERO, IVETTE REVERÓN MARRERO, MIGUEL REVERÓN MARRERO, RICHARD REVERÓN MARRERO, ROBERTO REVERÓN MARRERO, IVELISSE REVERÓN MARRERO, WANDA REVERÓN MARRERO, MARGARITA REVERÓN MARRERO, ANA MERCEDEZ REVERÓN MARRERO, EDDIE REVERÓN MARRERO, EDWIN REVERÓN MARRERO, JOSÉ ANGEL REVERÓN MARRERO, PROVIDENCIA REVERÓN MARRERO, LILLIAN REVERÓN MARRERO, ALFREDO REVERÓN MARRERO; SUCESIÓN DE RAFAEL REVERÓN

SALGADO, COMPUESTA

POR: RAFAEL REVERÓN

GARCIA, SAMUEL REVERÓN, ANA GARCÍA; ISABEL REVERÓN SALGADO; FULANO DE TAL Y MENGANO DE TAL Demandado(a)

Civil: BY2023CV01107. Salón: 703. Sobre: LIQUIDACIÓN DE CAUDAL HEREDITARIO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: LA PARTE DEMANDADA, COMPUESTA POR TODOS

LOS HEREDEROS, CONOCIDOS Y DESCONOCIDOS DE, SUCESIÓN DE WILFREDO REVERÓN

KUILAN, COMPUESTA

POR: EULALIA REVERÓN

GARCÍA, WANDA MICHELLE REVERÓN, MAYRA REVERÓN, WILFREDO REVERÓ, ANNETTE REVERÓN; SUCESIÓN DE LINO REVERÓN SALGADO, COMPUESTA POR: LINO REVERÓN MARRERO, IVETTE REVERON MARRERO, MIGUEL REVERÓN MARRERO, RICHARD REVERON MARRERO, ROBERTO REVERÓN MARRERO, IVELISSE REVERÓN

MARRERO, WANDA REVERÓN MARRERO, MARGARITA REVERÓN MARRERO, ANA MERCEDEZ REVERÓN MARRERO, EDDIE REVERÓN MARRERO, EDWIN REVERÓN MARRERO, JOSÉ ANGEL REVERÓN MARRERO, PROVIDENCIA REVERÓN MARRERO, LILLIAN REVERÓN MARRERO, ALFREDO REVERÓN MARRERO; SUCESIÓN DE RAFAEL REVERÓN

SALGADO, COMPUESTA

POR: RAFAEL REVERÓN GARCÍA, SAMUEL REVERON, ANA GARCIA; ISABEL REVERON

SALGADO; FULANO DE TAL Y MENGANO DE TAL.

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

EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 10 de julio de 2023, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 11 de julio de 2023. En BAYAMON, Puerto Rico, el 11 de julio de 2023. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA. LUREIMY ALICEA GONZÁLEZ, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA

SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN

FIRSTBANK

PUERTO RICO

Demandante Vs. SUCESIÓN DE JAHAIRA RAYGINA

MARTÍNEZ HERNÁNDEZ COMPUESTA POR

MARCOS GABRIEL

MARRERO MARTINEZ; FULANO Y SUTANO DE TAL COMO

POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; RAFAEL MARRERO FLORES, POR SÍ Y COMO CONYUGE SUPERSTITE; CRIM

Demandados Civil Núm.: BY2023CV03109. Salón Núm.: 501. Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA Y COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU., EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS.

A: FULANO Y SUTANO DE TAL COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESIÓN DE JAHAIRA RAYGINA MARTÍNEZ HERNÁNDEZ. POR LA PRESENTE se les emplaza y requiere para que conteste la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este Edicto. Usted deberá radicar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se presente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá radicar el original de su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia a los abogados de la parte demandante, Lcdo. Roberto C. Latimer Valentín, al PO BOX 9022512, San Juan, P.R. 00902-2512; Teléfono: (787) 724-0230. En dicha demanda se tramita un procedimiento de cobro de dinero y ejecución de hipoteca bajo el número mencionado en el epígrafe. Se alega en dicho procedimiento que la parte Demandada incurrió en el incumplimiento del Contrato de Hipoteca, al no poder pagar las mensualidades vencidas correspondientes a los meses de enero de 2023, hasta el presente, más los cargos por demora correspondientes. Además adeuda a la parte demandante las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado en que incurra el tenedor del pagaré en este litigio. De acuerdo con dicho Contrato de Garantía Hipotecaria la parte Demandante declaró vencida la totalidad de la deuda ascendente a la suma principal de $65,009.16, más intereses a razón del 4.50% anual desde el 1 de diciembre de 2022 y los que se continúen acumulando hasta su total y completo pago, más los cargos por demora que corresponden a los plazos atrasados desde la fecha anteriormente indicada a razón de la tasa pactada de 4% de cualquier pago que éste en mora por más de quince (15) días desde la fecha de su vencimiento, más adelantos para el

ORTIZ POR SI Y COMO HEREDERA DE LUZ JUDITH ORTIZ VEGA.

POR LA PRESENTE se les emplaza y requiere para que conteste la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este Edicto.

Usted deberá radicar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se presente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá radicar el original de su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia a los abogados de la parte demandante, Lcda. Marjaliisa Colon Villanueva, al PO BOX 7970, Ponce P.R. 00732; Teléfono: 787-843-4168, correo electrónico mcolon@wwclaw.com.

En dicha demanda se tramita un procedimiento de cobro de dinero y ejecución de hipoteca bajo el número mencionado en el epígrafe. Se alega en dicho procedimiento que la parte Demandada incurrió en el incumplimiento del Contrato de Hipoteca, al no poder pagar las mensualidades vencidas correspondientes a los meses de diciembre de 2020, hasta el presente, más los cargos por demora correspondientes. Además, adeuda a la parte demandante las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado en que incurra el tenedor del pagaré en este litigio. De acuerdo con dicho Contrato de Garantía Hipotecaria la parte Demandante declaró vencida la totalidad de la deuda ascendente a la suma de $40,667.61 de principal, más los intereses sobre dicha suma al 14.55% anual desde el 28 de noviembre de 2020, así como todos aquellos créditos y sumas que surjan de la faz de la obligación hipotecaria y de la hipoteca que la garantiza, incluyendo la suma estipulada para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado. La parte Demandante presentó para su inscripción en el Registro de la Propiedad correspondiente, un AVISO DE PLEITO PENDIENTE (“Lis Pendens”) sobre la propiedad objeto de esta acción cuya propiedad es la siguiente: RÚSTICA: Parcela número seis (6). Porción de terreno radicado en el barrio Santana del Término Municipal de Sabana Grande, compuesto de cuatro mil novecientos diecinueve punto ciento ochenta y dos (4,919,182) metros cuadrados, o sea una cuerda y dos mil quinientos dieciséis diezmilésimas de otra, colindante por Norte, con la parcela identificada en el plano de inscripción con el número cinco (5); por el Sur: con la parcela marcada en el plano de inscripción con el número once (11); por el Este, con la Faja de evangelista Alicea Santana; y por el Oeste,

con la faja de terreno para uso público identificada en dicho plano con el número dos (2). La propiedad consta inscrita en el Folio ciento veinticuatro (124) del Tomo ciento trece (113) de Sabana Grande, Registro de la Propiedad de San Germán, Finca número seis mil doscientos ochenta y uno (6,281). SE LES APERCIBE que de no hacer sus alegaciones responsivas a la demanda dentro del término aquí dispuesto, se les anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle. Además, como miembro de la Sucesión de Luz Judith Ortiz Vega se ha presentado una solicitud de interpelación judicial para que sirva en el término de treinta (30) días aceptar o repudiar la herencia. Se le apercibe que si no compareciera usted a expresarse dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de este edicto en torno a la aceptación o repudiación de la herencia, se presumirá que han aceptado la herencia de la causante Luz Judith Ortiz Vega y por consiguiente, responderán por las cargas de dicha herencia conforme dispone el 1578 del Código Civil de Puerto Rico, 31 L.P.R.A. sec. 11021. En Ponce para Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, a 10 de julio de 2023. Lic. Norma G. Santana Irizarry, Secretaria Regional. Alexandra Marie López, Secretaria De Servicios A Sala.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA

SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN HECTOR LUIS

HERNANDEZ PRINCIPE Y

ELIZABETH HERNANDEZ ALMODOVAR

Demandante Vs. FIRST BANK OF PUERTO RICO, COMO SUCESOR EN INTERES DE BANCO

SANTANDER PUERTO RICO; JOHN DOE & RICHARD ROE

Demandados

Civil No.: BY2023CV03733.

Sobre: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADOS DE PUERTO RICO, SS.

A: JOHN DOE & RICHARD ROE.

Por la presente se emplaza y se les notifica que se ha presentado en la Secretaría de este Tribunal la demanda del caso de epígrafe solicitando la cancelación del Pagaré suscrito a favor de Banco Santander Puerto Rico, o a su orden, por la suma principal de $296,250.00, con vencimiento el 01 de diciembre de 2046, y habiéndose constituido por la escritura número

381 otorgada en Bayamón, el 30 de noviembre de 2016, ante el Notario Público Mario E Vazquez Vega, inscrita al sistema Karibe de Bayamón IV, finca número 12816 de Dorado, inscripción 4ta. Representa a la parte demandante la abogada cuyo nombre, dirección y teléfono se consigna de inmediato:

ENEL M. PEREZ MONTE

RUA 9019

Reina Isabel 175, La Villa de Torrimar Guaynabo, PR 00969 Tel.: (787) 646-9168 Lcdaenelperez@gmail.com

Se le apercibe que si no comparecieran ustedes a contestar dicha demanda dentro del término de 30 días a partir de la publicación de este edicto se le anotará la rebeldía y se le dictará sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle. La parte demandada deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Administración y Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal, advirtiéndosele que de no hacerlo se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle. Dado en Bayamón, a 17 de julio de 2023. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. SANDRA BÁEZ HERNÁNDEZ, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR DEL TRIBUNAL I.

LEGAL NOTICE

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

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

Parte Demandante Vs. SUCESIÓN DE NICOLÁS

ENCARNACIÓN ULLOA

COMPUESTA POR EVA

ENCARNACIÓN, FULANO

(A) DE TAL Y SUTANO

(A) DE TAL COMO

POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS;

SUCESIÓN DE ROSALINA

CEPEDA SEGURA T/C/C

ROSELIA CEPEDA

SEGURA COMPUESTA

POR JULIO PAREDES CEPEDA, JOSÉ AGUSTÍN PAREDES

CEPEDA T/C/C MOISÉS

PAREDES CEPEDA, ANA

C. PAREDES CEPEDA, GERMANIA PAREDES

CEPEDA, ELSA C.

PAREDES CEPEDA, ELCIDO C. PAREDES CEPEDA, OSCAR LORENZO DE JESÚS

PAREDES CEPEDA, MOISÉS PAREDES

CEPEDA, CENTRO DE RECAUDACIÓN DE INGRESOS

MUNICIPALES; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA

Parte Demandada

Civil Núm.: SJ2022CV05385. (604). Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: SUCESIÓN DE NICOLÁS ENCARNACIÓN

ULLOA COMPUESTA

POR FULANO(A) DE TAL Y SUTANO(A) DE TAL COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; SUCESIÓN DE ROSALINA

CEPEDA SEGURA T/C/C ROSELIA CEPEDA

SEGURA COMPUESTA

POR JULIO PAREDES CEPEDA, JOSÉ AGUSTÍN PAREDES

CEPEDA T/C/C MOISÉS PAREDES CEPEDA, ANA C. PAREDES CEPEDA, GERMANIA PAREDES CEPEDA, ELSA C. PAREDES CEPEDA, ELCIDO C. PAREDES CEPEDA, OSCAR LORENZO DE JESÚS PAREDES CEPEDA, MOISÉS PAREDES CEPEDA.

LA SECRETARIA que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 10 de julio de 2023, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 60 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 13 de julio de 2023. En San Juan, Puerto Rico, el 13 de julio de 2023. GRISELDA RODRÍGUEZ COLLADO, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. ELSA MAGALY CANDELARIO

CABRERA, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR DEL TRIBUNAL I.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO

DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE HUMACAO BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

Demandante V. SUCESION DE SALVADOR ROLDAN RIVERA, COMPUESTA POR FULANO DE TAL Y ZUTANO DE TAL, COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS CON POSIBLE INTERES; CENTRO DE RECAUDACION DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (CRIM)

Demandados(a)

Civil: HU2023CV00475. Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA “IN REM”. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: FULANO DE TAL Y ZUTANO DE TAL, COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESION DE SALVADOR ROLDAN RIVERA; DIRECCIONES: PRADERAS DEL OESTE

K-5 CALLE 4, NAGUABO PR 00718; PO BOX 781, NAGUABO, PR 00718. (Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 12 de julio de 2023, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha 13 de julio de 2023. En Humacao, Puerto Rico, el 13 de julio de 2023. Ivelisse C. Fonseca Rodríguez, Secretaria. Dalissa Reyes De León, Secretaria Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE

BAYAMÓN ISLAND PORTFOLIO SERVICES, LLC

COMO AGENTE DE FAIRWAY ACQUISITIONS

FUND, LLC

Demandante V.

OWEN A. HERNANDEZ MALDONADO

Demandado(a)

Civil: CZ2022CV00161. Sala: 501. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: OWEN A. HERNANDEZ MALDONADO.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 10 de julio de 2023, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha 12 de julio de 2023.

En Bayamón, Puerto Rico, el 12 de julio de 2023. Laura I. Santa Sánchez, Secretaria Regional. Nereida Quiles Santana, Secretaria Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA

TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE ARECIBO

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO , INC.

Demandante V. SUCESION DE VILMA

ROSA TORRES

TORRES COMPUESTA

POR WILLANIES

MUÑOZ TORRES, VILMA ZAMBRANA

TORRES Y NATIVETTE ZAMBRANA TORRES, MASTER MORTGAGE CORPORATION, JOHN DOE

Demandado(a)

Civil Núm.: AR2022CV02104.

Sobre: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO EXTRAVIADO POR LA VÍA JUDICIAL.

NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: NATIVETTE ZAMBRANA TORRES COMO TENEDOR DESCONOCIDO DEL PAGARE A FAVOR DE MASTER MORTGAGE CORPORATION, MASTER MORTGAGE CORPORATION Y JOHN DOE COMO TENEDORES DESCONOCIOS DEL PAGARE.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 12 de julio de 2023, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 13 de julio de 2023. En ARECIBO, Puerto Rico, el 13 de julio de 2023. Vivian Y. Fresse González, Secretaria. Anabel Pérez Ríos, Secretaria Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE CAGUAS

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

Demandante V. LA SUCESIÓN DE MARÍA

REYES GARCÍA T/C/C

MARÍA AMALIA REYES

GARCÍA COMPUESTA

POR FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES HEREDEROS

DESCONOCIDOS, NELIDA

ROSA REYES GARCIA

T/C/C NELLY REYES

PERRY T/C/C NELLY

ROSA REYES GARCÍA Y MILDRED HARRIS REYES

GARCÍA T/C/C MILDRED

R. ARCHE POR SÍ Y COMO HEREDERAS DE LA CAUSANTE, FRANK ILLICH JR.

Demandado(a)

Civil: CG2023CV01208. (705).

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO, EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS E.E.U.U., EL PUEBLO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: NÉLIDA ROSA REYES

GARCÍA T/C/C NELLY REYES PERRY T/C/C NELLY ROSA REYES

GARCÍA Y MILDRED HARRIS REYES GARCÍA T/C/C MILDRED R. ARCHE POR SÍ Y COMO HEREDERAS DE LA CAUSANTE Y A FRANK ILLICH JR A LAS SIGUIENTES DIRECCIONES: URB. CONDADO MODERNO, D3 CALLE 3, CAGUAS, PR 00725-2478, PO BOX 254, CAGUAS, PR 00726-0254, COND DOS MARINAS II, 200 AVE MARINA VW APT 1607, FAJARDO, PR 00738-4215, PO BOX 634, CAGUAS, PR 007260634, 1299 AMADOR AVE NW, PALM BAY, FL 32907-8121, 9 CAROL ST., MAHWAH, NJ 07430-1506. FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE MARÍA REYES GARCÍA

T/C/C MARÍA AMALIA REYES GARCÍA. (Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 12 de julio de 2023, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha 13 de julio de 2023. En Caguas, Puerto Rico, el 13 de julio de 2023. LISILDA MARTÍNEZ AGOSTO, SECRETARIA REGIONAL INTERINA. MARTA E. DONATE RESTO, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

Women’s World Cup begins with wins for New Zealand and Australia

By ANDREW DAS and TARIQ PANJA

Shaken by a mass shooting and set against record crowds, the Women’s World Cup opened Thursday with matches featuring co-hosts New Zealand and Australia that showcased the growth and promise of women’s soccer but also some of the sport’s persistent challenges.

New Zealand went first, beating Norway, 1-0, on a bitter cold night at Eden Park, home of the country’s famed All Blacks men’s rugby team, and in front of the biggest crowd ever to see a women’s soccer game in the country. Australia followed with a 1-0 victory over Ireland despite the untimely absence of its biggest star, Sam Kerr.

New Zealand fans roared with delight when Hannah Wilkinson scored the tournament’s opening goal by turning in a cross minutes into the second half. Her goal delivered New Zealand’s first-ever World Cup victory in its sixth visit to women’s soccer’s showcase event.

“We put so much pressure on ourselves because it wasn’t just about winning a game, it was about inspiring our entire country,” New Zealand captain Ali Riley said, adding, “I think we did it.”

Across the Tasman Sea, Australia then beat Ireland in front of more than 75,000 fans in Sydney. But it did so without Kerr, its star striker, who sustained a calf injury the night before the game. Kerr will miss at least two games, Australia’s team announced, becoming the latest elite player ruled out of a tournament already marred by knee injuries that have sideline almost a dozen other top players.

Without Kerr, whose face adorns tournament posters across the continent-sized country, Australia created few openings against a stubborn Irish team and required a penalty from defender Steph Catley, its stand-in captain in place of Kerr, to ensure that like New Zealand it would open the tournament with a victory.

Two years in the planning, the World Cup opened only 3 miles and 12 hours removed from the site of a mass shooting in an office building under construction near the city’s waterfront and down the block from Norway’s team hotel. Three people died, including the gunman, and five were injured. The opening game began with a moment of silence to honor the victims.

The tournament also began with testy

pretournament talk about rainbow armbands, unequal prize money and lagging ticket sales, and a first glimpse of the talent spread across its expanded 32-team field. That expansion, fueled by investments in dozens of countries and efforts by FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, to grow the women’s game, has helped create perhaps the most wide-open tournament in its 32year history. But it has also the prospect of competitive imbalance: Australia’s opponent, Ireland, was one of eight newcomers in the field, each of them soon to face a daunting challenge against an established power like the United States, the two-time reigning champion, and European teams like Sweden, Spain, France and Germany.

Contradictions like that were already among the World Cup’s storylines. Organizers have sold almost 1.4 million tickets, for example, but last week offered more than 20,000 others for free to fans in New Zealand, where sales have been disappointing. The teams were playing for a record pool of prize money — $110 million, more than triple the amount of four years ago — but dozens of players have complained that their

federations have refused to offer them a fair share of the payouts.

Those disputes surely will continue as the tournament rolls out toward its final on Aug. 20 in Sydney. But on Thursday, at least, the focus was on the field, on the opportunities for new teams, on the rich rewards available to the players, and on a famous first for New Zealand, the star, for one night, of the biggest party in women’s soccer.

Organizers will surely hope that Kerr can get healthy enough to join the party, too. The forward is the one undisputed superstar in the Australian ranks, with a celebrity in her home country that in many ways eclipses the sport itself.

It was her name that was by far the one most commonly emblazoned on the backs of fans sporting the golden Australian jersey as they made their way to what was by far the highest attended women’s soccer game ever staged in Australia.

Kerr cut a forlorn figure in the moments before the game, walking out among the substitutes. Australian officials said Kerr would undergo an evaluation before the third and final group game. Kerr told her 1.2 million followers on Instagram that she wanted to share the news to avoid any distraction for her team. “I would have loved to have been out there tonight but I can’t wait to be a part of this amazing journey which starts now,” she wrote.

Without Kerr, and despite the narrow victory, that journey will almost certainly be a lot bumpier for the co-hosts.

The 32-team festival of soccer is more wide open than usual. And the two host nations started with victory, though Australia was without its injured top player, Sam Kerr.

Japan’s Hall of Fame goes global with induction of foreign-born stars

By BRAD LEFTON

In a move without precedent in Japan’s long baseball history, players from Oklahoma and Venezuela were inducted into the country’s Baseball Hall of Fame on Wednesday. For the inductees, Randy Bass and Alex Ramirez, the event was yet another in a long line of opportunities to exceed all expectations for players from the Americas in Nippon Professional Baseball.

Bass, famous in Japan for his blondish beard and back-to-back triple crowns, led the Hanshin Tigers to the franchise’s only championship in 1985. Ramirez, who struggled to get playing time in Major League Baseball, is the only foreigner to attain 2,000 hits in an NPB career, reaching the coveted milestone in 2013 with the Yokohama DeNA BayStars.

“The Japanese hall of fame was never on my radar growing up in that little town of Lawton, Oklahoma,” said Bass, who played only six seasons in NPB but made an indelible mark on the game there. “I’m just grateful to the Hanshin organization that despite the way it ended, all these years later, they still consider me like family, and I’m sure this honor wouldn’t be possible without them supporting it.”

The road to election for Bass and Ramirez was complicated by a system of baseball in Japan that has, at times, been unkind to players born outside the country, particularly to those with no Japanese heritage.

The sport was brought to Japan in the late 1800s, flourishing at the amateur level until a pro league was formed in 1936. And the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame opened in 1959. Since then, more than 200 people have been elected to the hall, including the people most responsible for developing the sport there and those who excelled at it in NPB.

But until now, the only player inducted who had no Japanese heritage was Victor Starffin, who was the first pitcher to win 300 games in Japan. Starffin’s family fled the Russian Revolution through Siberia, finding refuge in rural Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. Matsutaro Shoriki signed him as a teenager to pitch as an original member of his team, now known as the Yomiuri Giants, when a pro league formed in 1936.

Starffin was Japan’s first inductee in

the player category, in 1960.

Lefty O’Doul, a Californian, was enshrined in 2002 for his help with the early development of Japan’s pro game and a year later, Mainer Horace Wilson went in as Japan’s “father of baseball,” credited with being the first to teach the game in 1872.

O’Doul and Wilson, though, were elected as builders, which had left Starffin as the only foreign-born player to gain induction with no Japanese heritage. That is a key distinction because early on most foreign players were second- or thirdgeneration Japanese from Hawaii. Two such players, Tadashi Wakabayashi and Wally Yonamine, are hall of famers.

Over the years, more than 1,000 foreign players with no Japanese heritage have played professionally in that country, but until this week Starffin stood alone in the hall of fame.

“It’s nice to see Japan is opening up and perhaps they’re being a little fair now,” Marty Kuehnert, a longtime baseball and sports executive, said by phone from his home in Japan. “I think the way Ichiro was treated when he came to America in 2001 and was pitched to when prestigious records were on the line — that had an influence on people here about fairness and the way foreign guys should be treated.”

Bass’ plight is foremost in Kuehnert’s comment. Drafted by the Minnesota Twins, Bass, a journeyman first baseman, played for five MLB teams from 1977 to

1982, but he immediately broke out as a star after signing with Hanshin for the 1983 season. He led the Central League in 10 offensive categories over his first four seasons, including the triple crown categories — batting average, home runs and RBIs — in both 1985 and 1986. He was named the MVP in the regular season and the Japan Series in 1985.

For all his accomplishments, though, Bass is often remembered for the one he did not attain: Sadaharu Oh’s record of 55 home runs in a single season. Bass had 54 with two games left in 1985. But the Giants, managed by Oh, refused to challenge him, walking him six times in his final eight at-bats of the season.

The record was eventually toppled by another foreigner, Wladimir Balentien of Curaçao, who did it for the Yakult Swallows in 2013. Balentien reached 55 with 22 games left in the regular season, leaving opposing pitchers no choice but to challenge him. His total of 60 home runs stands as the record.

Bass’ ascendant career, however, was cut short when he left Hanshin during the 1988 season to care for his 8-year-old son upon the discovery of a brain tumor (his son ultimately survived the tumor and now has a family of his own). Attitudes in Japan at the time prioritized work above all else and the Tigers eventually released Bass. He was hitting .321 at the time, but even so, no other team would defy Hanshin to sign him and his career in Japan ended abruptly at the age of 34.

Despite such adversity from management and opponents, Bass won fans over with his perseverance and lack of condescension. He has remained highly respected and wildly popular 35 years later. His reaction to the news of his induction, in which he shared credit with the team that cut him, showed humility. But Kuehnert was more than happy to make the case that Bass earned everything he received.

“Yes, he played only six seasons in Japan,” Kuehnert said. “But his career is kind of like Sandy Koufax — short but spectacular. He’s the fastest to hit 200 home runs in Japan history, he still holds the highest single-season average of .389 in 1986, and he’s one of only three players to have back-to-back triple crowns and the other two are already in.”

Alex Ramirez had a far different story. Originally signed by Cleveland as a 16-year-old amateur free agent in 1991, he was regarded as a talented hitter who did not have a defensive position. He played parts of three MLB seasons before signing with Yakult for the 2001 season, beginning what would become a 13-year career in Japan.

Ramirez said it was his great fortune to have a baseball lifer, Charlie Manuel, as his hitting coach and manager in the Cleveland organization. Manuel himself starred in Japan for six seasons, outhomering Oh from 1977 to 1980 — 166152 — despite playing 53 fewer games.

“One day Charlie told me, ‘Alex, you’re a million-dollar player,’” Ramirez recalled. “‘But not in the States. Go to Japan.’” I said, ‘Japan? I thought that was for the players who are about to retire.’ He said, ‘No, no, with your ability to hit, you’ll get to play every day there and you’ll stay a long time.’ He was right, and I’m so thankful to Charlie for encouraging me to go.”

“Rami chan,” as he is affectionately known in Japan, retired in 2013 with 2,017 hits. With roughly 20 fewer games in a season than in MLB, Japan embraces 2,000 hits with similar reverence to 3,000 in America. As the only foreigner to reach the mark, Ramirez was voted in by writers in his fourth year of eligibility; Bass had his eligibility with writers expire and was elected by a special committee.

Randy Bass’s career in Japan was short, but it was incredible. He hit 54 home runs in 1985 and won Nippon Professional Baseball’s triple crown twice.

Sudoku

How to Play:

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

Sudoku Rules:

Every row must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Every column must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Every 3x3 square must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

Aries (Mar 21-April 20)

You may need some time alone today to bring yourself back to center, Aries. Independence is the key idea to keep in your back pocket. Make sure you’re not becoming a victim to a commitment you made long ago. As the landscape changes, you must also change. Stubborn actions will be detrimental on a day like this. Be honest and grateful for the things you have.

Taurus (April 21-May 21)

Don’t automatically think that beauty has to be defined by old-fashioned standards, Taurus. It’s time to change the definition. There is no need to squeeze yourself into a socially constructed mold that doesn’t resonate with who you truly are. Your job isn’t to try and make sure everyone loves you. There’s only one person you need to satisfy and that is you.

Gemini (May 22-June 21)

Issues may get a little heavier than you’d like today, Gemini. Your job is to infuse some levity and humor into the situation. Your adaptability will be put to the test as other people remain steadfast in their opinions. Be conscious of how you use your words. Other people, especially superiors or elders, may be offended by careless, offhand remarks.

Cancer (June 22-July 23)

If the doorknob doesn’t turn today, Cancer, don’t force it. You will only break it. Perhaps you need to try another door. If things don’t flow smoothly into place, then they probably weren’t meant to be. Life shouldn’t always be a struggle. Your job is to enjoy it. Remember that the next time you’re in a long line. View the situation as a period of rest.

Leo (July 24-Aug 23)

Your new approach to things might get some flack from superiors today, Leo, but don’t let that stop you. Realize that your independent and somewhat rebellious nature helps to keep the world in balance. Don’t give up the fight when authorities insist that their way of doing things is best when in fact it’s simply old. Use your will and determination to combat the forces from above.

Virgo (Aug 24-Sep 23)

You might be called upon to choose between two ways of handling a situation, Virgo. The old way suddenly conflicts with the new. Which way are you going to proceed? Don’t be thrown off course by fast talk and neon lights just because they grab attention. On the other hand, don’t assume that the way that has worked forever is still the best. Use your intuition to choose the best route for you.

Libra (Sep 24-Oct 23)

Unexpected events could shuffle the cards when you least expect it, Libra. If you haven’t kept a close eye on the deck, you might get thrown for a loop. Don’t be discouraged. Everyone else is playing under the same rules as you. If the dealer seems crooked, go to another table. Don’t fall victim to the same trick twice.

Scorpio (Oct 24-Nov 22)

Your sense of self may be challenged today, Scorpio, and you might have trouble keeping your seat during the joust. Keep in mind that the way others see you isn’t necessarily the way you are. Don’t feel like you have to change direction to please anyone. Your only responsibility is to you. Bizarre events may occur, urging you to change your thinking.

Sagittarius (Nov 23-Dec 21)

As you follow the path toward acquiring the latest, greatest, fastest, and best, you may have left behind some fundamental values, Sagittarius. Don’t lose sight of the principles that make up your foundation. You could be shaken today when your ego goes on trial for pig-headed behavior. Stay in check and be conscious of the way you project yourself to others.

Capricorn (Dec 22-Jan 20)

As you follow the path toward acquiring the latest, greatest, fastest, and best, you may have left behind some fundamental values, Sagittarius. Don’t lose sight of the principles that make up your foundation. You could be shaken today when your ego goes on trial for pig-headed behavior. Stay in check and be conscious of the way you project yourself to others.

Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19)

As you follow the path toward acquiring the latest, greatest, fastest, and best, you may have left behind some fundamental values, Sagittarius. Don’t lose sight of the principles that make up your foundation. You could be shaken today when your ego goes on trial for pig-headed behavior. Stay in check and be conscious of the way you project yourself to others.

Pisces (Feb 20-Mar 20)

A good tip to remember is to be careful about what you say about other people, Pisces. If you’re speaking about someone who isn’t present, act like he or she is. What’s your motivation for saying the things you say? Is it necessary to speak in such a way? A negative comment about someone is going to resonate through the cosmos. People could lose trust in you..

Speed Bump