Thursday Jul 23, 2020

Thursday, July 23, 2020

San Juan The

50¢

DAILY

Star

Pfizer Gets $1.95 Billion to Produce Coronavirus Vaccine

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Atypical Back-to-School Students to Start from Home in August; COVID-19 Situation Will Determine When or If On-Site Classes Begin in September Plus, Education Secretary Finally Speaks on Millions in Blocked CARES Act Funds P4

Scary Number of Tourists Arriving in PR Without Negative Virus Tests

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NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

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Governor Asks PFEI to Stop Investigation Against Her

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

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July 23, 2020

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

Some 80% of travelers to Puerto Rico did not bring negative COVID-19 test results

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lthough Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced’s Executive Order 2020-052 requiring travelers who come to Puerto Rico to bring a travel declaration form and a negative COVID-19 molecular test result issued 72 hours before arrival has been in effect for nine days, around 80 percent of travelers who arrived at Luis Muñoz Marín Airport in Isla Verde through the first six days covered by the order did not submit a negative test, Puerto Rico National Guard (PRNG) Adj. Gen. José J. Reyes said Wednesday.

According to data provided by the PRNG, from July 15 to July 20, the military organization registered 24,797 travelers; while 97 percent of the travelers had at least their travel declarations scanned and 3 percent received guidance to fill out the travel declaration on travelsafe. pr.gov, only 20 percent of the travelers arrived with a negative COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test in hand. Reyes said PRNG officers have advised around 80 percent of citizens and tourists to fill out their travel declarations in order to comply with SAR Alert, a mobile phone application from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to monitor COVID-19 symptoms, and of a 14-day mandatory quarantine. “[Regarding] the 80 percent of travelers that arrived in Puerto Rico without a negative molecular test result, they were oriented to fill out their travel declaration as information from this document goes automatically to the [Puerto Rico] Department of Health and SAR Alert and to be on quarantine for 14 days unless they get tested and get a negative test result,” Reyes said. “This is important because the [Health] Department can monitor citizens and take action on those who have symptoms or are not complying with the surveillance system. If a traveler does not answer an SAR Alert survey, a Health Department representative will be notified and contact the user that is not complying. If they don’t respond a second time, they will be visited by both a Health Department and a Puerto Rico Police Bureau agent as they are violating the executive order.”

Meanwhile, the brigadier general said, PRNG officers have seen an almost 50 percent reduction in travelers arriving at the airport, as they have registered an average of 4,500 to 5,000 people in a day. He said the restrictions have brought awareness that this is not the time to travel to the island; likewise, he added that as Puerto Rico is short on both molecular and rapid kit

tests, this was the time to give priority to the elderly citizens and first responders and act intelligently.

“I trust in a resilient country with people who have done well to inform their family members and friends to not travel, as this is not the moment to come here,” Reyes said. “Both molecular and rapid kit tests are short not only in Puerto Rico, but in the United States and the rest of the world. The tests that we have available should be used intelligently on our elders, which is a susceptible community, and first responders, who are the doctors and nurses who are saving lives. Puerto Ricans have been resilient enough, and got their message across as we have seen a decrease in travelers arriving.”

However, as The Star asked why it is that we have seen citizens in the metropolitan area who are not complying with any safety measures if some 20,000 travelers are supposed to be on a 14-day quarantine and there is a shortage of PCR reagents in clinical laboratories, Reyes said he could not answer the question as the PRNG is only in charge of logistics at the airport; however, he also said it would be a great question for the Department of Health.

“Although I wouldn’t dare to give an official statement as this is a Department of Health matter, to be honest, I think it would be a great question as I have seen on the news many tourists with their face masks in their hands, instead of wearing them properly,” he said.

“I am aware that the Secretary of Public Safety [Pedro Janer] has put in a more aggressive surveillance plan at the Puerto Rico Police Bureau to handle the matter, but I think every state agency should be responsible for complying with the executive order and safeguarding the health of all Puerto Ricans.”

Meanwhile, the Socialist Workers’ Movement called for a protest convoy on Saturday at 2 p.m. to demand that the government shut down the airport for the sake of citizens’ health and livelihood. The starting point of the protest will be in front of the Hotel San Juan in Isla Verde.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Public schools open virtually Aug. 17; on-site classes expected to start Sept. 15

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

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ducation (DE) Secretary Eligio Hernández announced Wednesday that 281,577 students will start their school year virtually on Aug. 17 as a precaution amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

During a press conference held at Pedro Rosselló Convention Center, Hernández presented the “ambitious, yet flexible” 2020-2021 school year plan, which said that teachers and school staff members will start work remotely on Aug. 3, while they start working on site from Aug. 11 to Aug. 14. Meanwhile, students will start studying virtually on Aug. 17, while the DE expects to bring them back on site beginning Sept. 15, but that is an expectation as the Education secretary said he was going to wait for experts from the Department of Health to greenlight the agency’s determinations.

“This plan is ambitious, yet flexible, as the input of our team of public health experts is intertwined in the plan. We will move onto a hybrid education system when the people of Puerto Rico are ready and our students, teachers and staff members are safe enough to come back to school,” Hernández said. “I call for [educators] to show up and show off what we are made of, as our country needs us at this moment.”

The Education secretary said the public schools will be using Microsoft Teams as their main communication platform to connect with students’ parents and guardians. Meanwhile, students will have various academic options such as the aforementioned platform, online classes on Moodle, teaching modules that will be available online and in print, tele-education via public network WIPR, and other alternatives for students who are unable

to adapt to the latter learning methods. Likewise, the DE will hire 350 instructional assistants to identify students who have no contact with teachers and social workers to provide help during an atypical semester.

“Youngsters, children, parents, grandparents, we are in need of building a robust education system,” Hernández said.

“If we can all put our effort into this process, we can build the public school system we all wish for.”

Meanwhile, as members of the press questioned how the DE will help students who do not have access to the internet, as the department bought 331,030 laptops and tablets, Hernández said they are developing “different modalities” to build the bridge with the student body, and “they are working on it.”

Regarding concerns being raised about whether the DE has any services for parents who have no family members to care for their offspring while working in the midst of the pandemic, the official said he has no plan.

Education chief denies that CARES act funds have to be managed by third-party agent During the press conference, Hernández announced that the DE is investing in building a system of socioemotional aid in order to support students during the COVID-19 pandemic by recruiting 92 psychologists and 429 nurses using CARES Act education funds. However, according to an article in Tuesday’s Star, the U.S. Department of Education (USDE) has not given access to the local entity to use the released federal funds as the government still has not signed a contract with a third-party agent that will manage the money.

“We are still negotiating the contract,” Hernández said. “It’s an extremely complex contract as it affects the DE and other public entities and will go under the Financial Oversight and Management Board’s scrutiny. The main approach is about its

Secretary of Education Eligio Hernández scope with its functions and its cost for the Puerto Rican people.

That contract might fluctuate around $40 to $50 million annually.”

However, when the Star asked how the department is using the funds for recruitment, which was a $7.8 million budget for a 60-day period under a trustee’s supervision, the secretary said there is a lack of comprehension on the topic.

“It’s not that the federal [Department of] Education aids us, it’s that we indicated to them in our plan how we will use the funds for certain initiatives, and if they are permissible under the legislature, yes,” Hernández said. “We told the USDE that, for a 60-day period, we need an allocation of around $7 million … as long as we are evolving, as long as we need more.”

The Star then asked how the restrictions imposed on most of $400 million in education funds from the CARES Act affects the coming school year. Hernández did confirm that members Congress have demanded in a letter to USDE Secretary Betsy DeVos that the federal agency should not attach or assign the federal grant management to a third-party fiduciary; however, he said the island government allegedly does have access to around $349 million that will also aid other entities, such as private schools.

A total 607 police officers are in isolation; 33 have COVID-19

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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uerto Rico Police Bureau Commissioner Henry Escalera Rivera offered updated data Wednesday on COVID-19 and the island’s police force, saying a total of 607 police officers are now in isolation.

At press time Wednesday, 13 police stations and/or work units were closed as a preventive measure: Division of Special

Arrests and Extraditions -- Headquarters, Community Relations Office of San Juan -- Headquarters, Orocovis District, Cyber Crimes Division, Arecibo Drug and Narcotics Division, Drugs and Narcotics Division of Utuado, Puerto Nuevo Precinct Barracks, Boys Dormitories -- Headquarters, Legal Affairs Office -- Headquarters, Guayama Highway Patrols, Manatí Highway Patrols, Bayamón Norte Precinct Barracks, and the San Juan Motorized Unit.

In addition to the 607 agents currently isolated as a preventive measure, 2,257 officers have returned to their jobs since the emergency arose.

A total of 33 agents have reported positive results for COVID-19 currently, according to tests ordered and certified

by Dr. María del Carmen Calderón.

According to the Police Bureau, the breakdown of positive cases as of Tuesday were as follows: Ponce Aerial Area 1, Airport 1, Gouache 1, Special Arrests and Extraditions 1, North Bayamón 1, Caimito 1, CIC Aguadilla 6, CIC Carolina 1, CIC Fajardo 1, Ponce Command 1, Comerío 1, CRADIC 1, Cyber Crimes 1, Weapons Depot 1, Caguas District 1, Utuado Drug Division 1, La Fortaleza Detachment 1, FURA (includes SWAT) 2, Legal Affairs Office 1, Guayama Highway Patrol 1, San Juan Community Relations 5, Strike Force 1, San Juan Motorized Unit 1, Yauco 2.

Escalera said agents assigned to barracks adjacent to

those affected have been designated to reinforce preventive patrolling and attend to reported complaints. Decontamination and deep cleaning processes are being carried out in all barracks and closed units. The opening of the facilities will be announced shortly, in accordance with the recommendation of the medical staff.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

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SIP agents visit Justice Dept. to determine who leaked report on probe of governor

By THE STAR STAFF

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overnor Wanda Vazquez on Wednesday asked the Office of the Special Independent Prosecutor (SIP) to overturn a decision to appoint a SIP to investigate her.

In a motion, Vazquez said that the document issued by the SIP shows that Ygri Rivera, a SIP panel member, was absent from the vote, which means the decision was not made with the required three votes. She also said one of the SIP members who voted to investigate her, Ruben Velez, is a supporter of her opponent in the primary race, Pedro Pierluisi.

Velez Torres’s daughter works with the mayor of Arecibo, Carlos Molina, who also supports Pierluisi. Vazquez also noted that the referral made against her was done by former Justice Secretary Dennisse Longo, on the same day she was asked to resign

by La Fortaleza.

The governor said the accusation that she fired Family Secretary Glorimar Andujar as a reprisal for having fired the head of ADSEF and in violation of the law.

She said the allegation does not sustain itself because Andujar’s position is one of trust and the governor could remove her without providing explanations. Furthermore, the Family Secretary resigned from the position. The governor also denied she asked former Andujar to reinstate the ADSEF head but merely expressed concern that she was removed from the position based on anonymous allegations.

The ADSEF head was suspended from the job but continues to receive a salary which prompted Vazquez to express concern about the use of public funds. In that regard, she asked Andujar whether the ADSEF head could be placed in another position while the matter was investigated.

Vazquez, on the other hand, said she found out about the contents of the report against her, which was leaked to the press while under the custody of the SIP, which denied being the source of the leak.

Four agents and a prosecutor SIP went to the Puerto Rico Justice Department on Wednesday to find out who leaked a report

containing the details of the investigation being carried out against Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced and four other central government officials.

The information was provided by SIP press officer Luis de la Cruz to the San Juan Daily Star. He said Miguel Colón Ortiz, one of the prosecutors assigned to the investigation, went to the Justice Department with the agents, who also work at the SIP office.

He said everyone at the SIP office found out Tuesday night about the leak, but he did not say who gave the order to meet with Justice officials to uncover who

leaked the report.

De la Cruz did not dismiss the possibility of a hacking.

“We don’t know,” he said. “We really do not know.”

The report, prepared by former Justice Secretary Dennise Longo Quiñones, was leaked to several media outlets Tuesday.

It details that the governor may have violated the Anti-Corruption Code, after former Family Secretary Glorimar Andujar was fired for refusing to reinstate a subordinate who was suspended from the job for allowing New Progressive Party Sen. Evelyn Vázquez Nieves to involve herself with supplies destined for earthquake victims.

According to the report, for instance, Vázquez Nieves asked for some of the aid, which was originally destined for Guánica, to be sent to Ponce. The delivery of supplies was repeatedly delayed to allow the senator to be present during their disbursement, the report said.

The Special Independent Prosecutor Panel announced on Tuesday that there was cause to appoint an SIP to investigate.

The governor appointed Carlos Rodríguez as a member of the SIP, but the island House of Representatives declined to confirm him Tuesday.

The governor, meanwhile, said the legislative session on the matter was null and void because, among other alleged irregularities, the appointment had not yet been submitted for lawmakers’ consideration.

US House Natural Resources Committee to discuss PREPA-LUMA deal

By THE STAR STAFF

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he U.S. House of Natural Resources Committee will hold a public hearing today to discuss the state of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) and the recent agreement with LUMA Energy to manage the utility’s transmission and distribution system.

Testifying at the hearing are PREPA Executive Director José Ortiz, Puerto Rico Energy Bureau (PREB) Chairman Edison Aviles, and Fermín Fontanes, director of the Puerto Rico Public-Private Partnership Authority.

Also testifying is Ángel Figueroa Jaramillo, president of the Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union; Ruth Santiago, spokeswoman for the Queremos Sol Coalition; and Josen Rossi, head of the Institute for Competitiveness and Sustainable Economy.

The LUMA Energy contract has been under fire because the jobs of current PREPA workers are not guaranteed and because of concerns it may lead to rate hikes.

The hearing comes after the PREB ordered PREPA to

show cause as to why it should not be levied a fine for failing to present progress reports on its connection to renewable energy sources and on its efforts to increase the use of net metering.

In an order issued Tuesday, the PREB asked PREPA to present by Aug. 7 a progress report on interconnection to renewables, distributed generation and net metering, which is a way to encourage the use of renewable energy sources at the consumer level. Under this scheme, the renewable system supplies all or part of the client’s energy consumption and excess energy, if any, is exported to PREPA’s energy system. Customers receive a credit when their system exports power to the electricity network.

Distributed generation, meanwhile, is the term used for power generation systems that are interconnected and operate in parallel with the distribution networks of electricity companies.

The PREB also ordered PREPA to appear at a hearing on Aug. 11.

Under the law, PREPA is supposed to draw energy entirely from renewables by 2050.

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Thursday, July 23, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Borinqueneers honored in defense appropriation bill

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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he U.S. House of Representatives earlier this week passed H.R. 6395, the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2021, which includes two bipartisan amendments jointly offered by island Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González Colón (R-P.R.) and Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) to support military veterans in Puerto Rico, who are not always treated equally compared to veterans residing in the states.

The first González Colón-Murphy amendment expresses the House of Representatives’ support for designating April 13 as “National Borinqueneers Day” in honor of the 65th Infantry Regiment, a U.S. Army unit that consisted mostly of soldiers from Puerto Rico.

The regiment distinguished itself for bravery during the Korean War and other conflicts, overcame discrimination against Hispanic soldiers, and earned the Congressional Gold Medal on April 13, 2016.

The amendment also “expresses deep gratitude for the contributions to the Armed Forces that have been made by hundreds of thousands of patriotic United States citizens from Puerto Rico.” Sen. Rick Scott (RFla.), together with Sen. Robert Menéndez (D-N.J.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), led a successful effort to get a similar provision through the U.S. Senate on July 1.

“I am immensely proud of the service and sacrifice

of the Borinqueneers, who without ever voting for their Commander in Chief, as servicemembers of the Island still do now, selflessly fought and at times paid the ultimate sacrifice for our country and the values we hold dear,” González Colón said. “This is another way to continue expressing our appreciation for these great soldiers and their families.”

Murphy said “I am thrilled that Rep. González Colón and I were able to include this provision honoring the brave Borinqueneers in the annual defense bill.”

“Designating April 13th as ‘National Borinqueneers Day’ is a fitting tribute to the men of this revered unit, as well as to all men and women from Puerto Rico who have served and sacrificed in the U.S. military, defending democracy even though they do not enjoy it themselves,” she said.

González Colón and Murphy also included a second amendment in the defense bill approved Monday, requiring the U.S. Department of Defense to swiftly brief Congress on the feasibility, benefits, and costs of extending TRICARE Prime to military retirees — veterans who served on active duty for at least 20 years — residing in Puerto Rico. TRICARE is the health care program of the Department of Defense, and TRICARE Prime is a managed care option that is available to retirees in nearly every state, but not in Puerto Rico or the other territories, a source of longstanding frustration on the part of veterans in Puerto Rico.

“According to the report by the Congressional Task

Force on Economic Growth in Puerto Rico, having limited access to TRICARE Prime is one way in which Puerto Rico is treated differently under several federal programs,” González Colón said. “This amendment gives us an opportunity to continue working toward rectifying this discrepancy. I trust it will provide valuable and updated information, building on former reports and moving us closer to resolving this issue.”

“It is completely unacceptable that TRICARE Prime is not available to military retirees in Puerto Rico and the other territories,” Murphy said. “If you served 20 or more years in the U.S. military and then retire in Puerto Rico, you should have access to the same health services as are available to your fellow veterans living in Florida or any state. This is a moral issue, and we won’t rest until it’s fixed.”

Companies embrace remote work during pandemic

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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hybrid work model that combines office work and remote work is the predominant trend among companies in Puerto Rico during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a survey conducted this summer by Puerto Rican consulting firm Retention Strategies.

The results showed that only a third (32 percent) of the companies surveyed have managed to fully reopen their offices with staff, while 16 percent operate exclusively with remote work; the majority of companies (52 percent) now operate with a hybrid model, by combining in-office work with remote work.

Likewise, employee productivity levels seem to not be adversely affected by operational changes. A full 44 percent of participants indicated that the productivity of their workforce has increased in the pandemic, while 41 percent believed that productivity remained the same.

“The purpose of this survey was to examine the status of companies in terms of face-to-face work versus remote work, but we were also very curious to know what were the lessons learned, the challenges, and how organizations worked to overcome them,” said Sandra Román, human resources consulting expert at Retention Strategies.

The survey, conducted in June, consulted 68 representatives of companies in Puerto Rico, from 16 industries.

Román emphasized that the respondents shared concerns about various work obstacles they face due to the pandemic, which include “the difficulty of maintaining social distancing in office settings and that workers with children are very concerned about the lack of childcare centers, as well as the uncertainty of where they would leave their children if there is no reopening of schools in August.” The situation is further complicated when, in many cases, the only family members available to watch over the children are the elderly, who are among the groups at high risk of coronavirus infection.

Regarding the return of employees to offices, 63 percent of the participants answered that their companies did not have a firm date for reopening. Among those with planned dates to return, a third (33 percent) estimated it would be in August, and 13 percent said it would be in September.

“Of course, this was before new cases of COVID-19 emerged in July, which led the government of Puerto Rico to resume some of the previous measures, such as the closure of bars, cinemas and gyms and the restriction of 50 percent in restaurant capacity. This situation is likely to cause delays in returning to face-to-face work for many companies,” Román said.

Among the lessons learned, the survey participants identi-

fied the importance of having access to adequate equipment and technology to be able to bring company work to their homes. Two of the characteristics that companies identified as keys to the success of their transition during the pandemic are the creativity and flexibility of their work teams to work remotely, face-to-face or hybrid.

“A large part of the responses emphasized the importance of having a comprehensive medical plan, since the pandemic came to remind us all that the health of employees is one of the most valuable resources a company has,” Román said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

7

Pfizer gets $1.95 billion to produce Coronavirus vaccine by year’s end

By NOAH WEILAND

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he Trump administration Wednesday announced a nearly $2 billion contract with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and a smaller German biotechnology company for up to 600 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine.

If the vaccine proves to be safe and effective in clinical trials, the companies say they could manufacture the first 100 million doses by December.

Under the arrangement, the federal government would obtain the first 100 million doses for $1.95 billion, with the rights to acquire up to 500 million more. Americans would receive the vaccine for free. Before it could be distributed, it would first need at least emergency approval by the Food and Drug Administration.

Large-scale safety and efficacy trials are to begin this month, with regulatory review set for as early as October.

“Depending on success in clinical trials, today’s agreement will enable the delivery of approximately 100 million doses of vaccine being developed by Pfizer and BioNTech,” Alex Azar, the health secretary, said in a statement announcing the deal.

The news Wednesday came as something of a surprise. Unlike AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna, which have also received funding from the U.S. government, Pfizer did not earn a contract for its initial research and development efforts — only for producing and distributing the doses.

At a congressional hearing Tuesday with executives

The first patient enrolled in Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine trial receiving an injection at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore in May. from five vaccine manufacturers, including Pfizer, some lawmakers raised concerns about the company’s decision to reject federal funds, suggesting it could lead to pricegouging and a lack of transparency.

“We didn’t accept the federal government funding solely for the reason that we wanted to be able to move as quickly as possible with our vaccine candidate into the clinic,” John Young, Pfizer’s chief business officer, said at

the hearing.

Several of the executives, including Young, said that their companies would not sell a coronavirus vaccine at cost.

“We’ll price our potential vaccine consistent with the urgent global health emergency that we’re facing,” Young said, adding that “a vaccine is meaningless if people are unable to afford it.”

BioNTech is a German pharmaceutical company. The two firms are developing a vaccine candidate that uses genetic material from the virus, known as messenger RNA, to trigger the immune system without making someone sick. The technology is fast to produce but has never been used in an approved vaccine.

Moderna, a Massachusetts biotech company receiving $483 million from the U.S. government for its vaccine development, is also using mRNA technology.

The agreement, which the Department of Health and Human Services announced Wednesday morning, is the largest contract yet for “Operation Warp Speed,” the government’s crash coronavirus vaccine program. The federal government announced earlier this month that it would pay the Maryland-based company Novavax $1.6 billion to expedite the development of a coronavirus vaccine.

“We’ve been committed to making the impossible possible by working tirelessly to develop and produce in record time a safe and effective vaccine to help bring an end to this global health crisis,” Dr. Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chairman and chief executive officer, said in a news release.

Warehouses are headed for California’s Central Valley, too

By JILL COWAN

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cross the Inland Empire, inexpensive single-family homes on large lots represented a California dream for lowerincome, often immigrant families who had lived in cramped apartments in Los Angeles or other big cities.

But over the past decade or so, the region has been transformed by the development of enormous warehouses, where companies like Walmart and Amazon sort, package and ship off goods bound for consumers across Southern California and beyond.

The warehouses could be built within a relatively short drive of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, as well as the millions of consumers in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego.

Recently, I wrote about how the pandemic is accelerating that transformation by at once boosting the demand for products to be delivered directly to our doors and the demand for jobs — almost any jobs — amid historic levels of unemployment and plummeting tax revenue.

The influx of warehouse jobs has also meant that the primarily Latino and increasing numbers of Black residents of the region

must risk their lives to keep going to work in often dangerous conditions, where they’re at greater risk of getting COVID-19.

Now, some observers and community organizers have told me they’re bracing for that wave of change to reach a different part of the state: the Central Valley.

“I think what you’re seeing in the Central Valley now is to some extent what our region saw 12 or 13 years ago,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside.

The Inland Empire was the most feasible place to serve the large consumer market that is Los Angeles without building the enormous warehouses on expensive real estate close to the coast. Similarly, places like Fresno are within a relatively short drive of the wealthy and expensive Bay Area.

“The rents are there; the labor’s there,” said James Breeze, the head of industrial and logistics research for the real estate data firm CBRE. “The Central Valley is going to be the distribution hub for Northern California, Oregon and inland states for the foreseeable future.”

Fresno’s mayor, Lee Brand, said in an emailed statement that e-commerce distribution centers were a critical part of efforts

to diversify the area’s economy as it struggles to “achieve the economic success enjoyed by its wealthier neighbors along the California coast.”

Warehouses, he said, bring opportunities for residents who don’t have college educations.

“Their next step could be buying a house or using education benefits offered by Amazon, for instance, to attend college,” he said. “Maybe it improves the lives of their children, allowing them to become the first in the family to earn a degree.”

But for residents and community organizers, the warehouses are harbingers of the same problems they say have followed them in the Inland Empire: pollution and traffic that disproportionately hurt poor communities of color, promises of economic mobility without follow-through and thousands of physically demanding jobs that are at risk of being automated, even if they come with benefits.

And the pandemic has made it more difficult to push back against plans to allow that kind of development in neighborhoods that are already vulnerable.

Continues on page 8

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

‘Blue Lives Matter’ and ‘Defund the Police’ clash in the streets

By JULIANA KIM and MICHAEL WILSON

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lashes between protesters and the police were familiar sights in the days after the death of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer. But a new kind of unrest has emerged in recent days: confrontations between New Yorkers who support law enforcement and those who are pressing for an overhaul of the Police Department.

There have been raw encounters in Brooklyn, Queens and in Manhattan, as civilian groups identifying themselves as pro-police have led marches in support of the men and women in blue.

The pro-police rallies also attract counterprotesters. Violent clashes and arrests have played out this month as unsettling images of civilian-versus-civilian rage echo back to periods of racial violence in the city. New Yorkers are shouting, not at police officers, but over their shoulders, at one another.

Diane Atkins, who lives in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, attended propolice events in the borough on a Saturday and a Sunday this month. “We wanted to stand up for our police officers,” Atkins said. “These are everyday New Yorkers who could be your friends, family and neighbors.”

Most of the pro-police events have been neighborhood-based and organized by local residents, using Facebook and other social media outlets to gain traction. Others have been co-organized by local political groups, such as the Brooklyn Conservative Party, although most organizers try to refrain from discussing politics at their rallies.

The crowds, which are overwhelmingly white, have been a mix of retired officers, their friends and family and other attendees who have said they are rallying support for law and order. Many law enforcement supporters feel local officers have been wrongly vilified since Floyd’s death. The rise of pro-police rallies is

also a reaction to legislative efforts to shrink the Police Department.

But the rallies, often known as “Back the Blue” or “Blue Lives Matter” events, have been met by Black Lives Matter backers — racially diverse groups of protesters who are outraged at gatherings that they see as undermining their own cause.

“For pro-cop rallies to come down into the streets and yell ‘white lives matter’ or ‘blue lives matter,’ it almost takes away from the conversation,” said 18-year-old Abdullah Akl, who helped organize a counterprotest in Bay Ridge. “We aren’t fighting against individual police. We are fighting against the institution as a whole and all the racism practices within.”

Organizers of counterprotests have said that they intend their demonstrations to be “a peaceful, nonviolent show of opposition.”

But quelling public anger has proved to be difficult for both sides. This month in Brooklyn, in the Dyker Heights and Bay Ridge neighborhoods, hundreds turned out for propolice rallies that were interrupted by protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement, and tensions quickly escalated in confrontations largely split along racial lines.

At the rally in Bay Ridge, pro-police participants waved American and Thin Blue Line flags and campaign signs for President Donald Trump. Counterprotesters arrived with Black liberation flags and Black Lives Matter banners. Fists and insults flew even as police officers stood between the two groups.

Several people were seen being taken away by officers. The police later said two people were arrested in Bay Ridge, one for throwing a helmet into a crowd and the other for attempted assault.

Days later, a more violent clash took place on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The smartphone videos filmed at the events and shared on social media tend to focus on the loudest and most volatile voices

in attendance, but others have quietly sought to mobilize backing for law enforcement.

Mary Ziegler, 43, who lives in Burnt Hills, New York, near Schenectady, created a Facebook group to rally support for the police. In a little over a month, the group has grown to over 9,000 members from across the country.

“I would say this movement to ‘Back the Blue’ was galvanized when calls to defund and abolish the police became a very real force in this country,” Ziegler said in an email.

She recently created a Facebook event to organize a pro-police rally in Albany, New York, next month.

Some pro-police rally attendees insist that their mission is not to antagonize Black Lives Matter protesters. At a recent police rally in Staten Island, Scott LoBaido, 55, told participants the message should be kept positive.

“I emphasized if you’re going to spew anti-BLM rhetoric, that will not be tolerated at this rally,“ he said.

And not everyone in pro-police circles favors the rallies. The Brooklyn Young Republican Club turned down an invitation to the rally in Dyker Heights, according to Joel Acevedo, 25, the president of the organization.

“Good police do not need defending,” Acevedo said. “You can be pro-police and still support accountability to a police system that perpetuates inequities in Black communities.

They’re not mutually exclusive.”

The mere presence and timing of the nascent movement — and the “Blue Lives” language — has upset protesters calling for overhaul of policing.

“The logic is nonsense,” said Noah Weston, 35, an activist from Bay Ridge who attended two pro-police rallies as a counterprotester. On Saturday, he was treated at an emergency room after someone kicked him in the groin.

“Blue is their uniform, and they can take it off,” he said. “But Black people can’t stop being Black at their leisure.”

In a Bay Ridge protest earlier this month, pro-police ralliers had angry confrontations with Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

Warehouses are headed for California’s Central Valley, too From page 7

“Cities across California are fighting for these,” said Grecia Elenes, a senior policy advocate with Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, an advocacy organization based in Fresno that has opposed city plans to attract industrial development. “It’s to the point where no one’s benefiting except the company itself — all on the backs of low-income communities, and communities of color.”

Katie Taylor, 74, who lives in southwest Fresno, said she’s concerned about warehouse development around her home. She has lived there for years with her adult daughter who has Down syndrome and requires round-the-clock care.

The neighborhood, she said, is a place where people make do with little — but they thrive.

“This is our home and to bring all this industry in, all this traffic, all the extra pollution,”

she said, “It suppresses us even more.”

Local leaders say they see the Inland Empire as a kind of example and cautionary tale.

While Ashley Swearengin was mayor of Fresno from 2009 to 2016, she said, she helped get an Amazon warehouse built in the city. At the time, she said, she told her colleagues: “Having warehouse jobs is not our highest ambition as a community.”

But logistics seemed like a salve for a city

struggling with widespread poverty and a dearth of jobs that paid more than minimum wage.

Today, Swearengin said, as president and chief executive of the Central Valley Community Foundation, she recognizes that leaning too heavily on warehouses would be a mistake.

“In Fresno, as far as the eye can see, it’s agriculture,” she said. “In the Inland Empire, as far as the eye can see, it’s warehouses. We’re not looking to replicate that.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

9

Trump’s remedy for low poll numbers: Reminding people polls can be wrong

By ANNIE CARNI

“I

’m not losing,” President Donald Trump insisted in an interview on Sunday with the Fox News anchor Chris Wallace after being presented with the cable network’s latest poll, which showed former Vice President Joe Biden with an 8-point advantage nationally.

The president, who often promotes poll numbers when they are favorable to him — and even regularly advertises what he claims is a “96% Approval Rating in the Republican Party” without citing any source for that questionable statistic — said the public polls that showed him losing were “fake in 2016, and now they’re even more fake.”

There aren’t many campaign metrics out there these days to buoy a president who loves to cite a record he has shattered. He hasn’t been able to pack a stadium with supporters since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, and Biden has out-raised him for two months in a row. Unlike Hillary Clinton’s slim lead in national polls four years ago, Biden has held a nearly double-digit lead in an average of polls for more than a month.

In response, the Trump campaign has highlighted the meaningless marker of “boat parades” as a measure of voter enthusiasm. The most recent shattered record Trump has touted online is a heat index. “We may have set a record for doing such an interview in the heat,” Trump tweeted Tuesday, referring to his outdoor interview with Wallace. “It was 100 degrees, making things very interesting!”

Meanwhile, his campaign and his top advisers have echoed his attempts to discredit public polls, in an effort to treat them, dismissively, as an extension of “the media.” The Trump team sent a cease-and-desist letter to CNN after it published a June poll that showed Trump losing to Biden. (The network said it stood by its poll.) And in a recent interview with Newsweek, the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is overseeing Trump’s campaign, dismissed public polling as “all BS.” Privately, aides said, Trump knows things aren’t looking good for him — he just thinks the public polls are overstating the situation. His campaign does not conduct national polls, but aides have presented him with internal data about battleground states that show a closer race than the public polling numbers. His pollsters tell him regularly that he is in a close race and that there is more polling bias in the news media today than there was four years ago, a claim untethered to any measurable metric. They assure him that his base is still enthusiastically engaged and that the middle that might have been planning to vote for him in March has moved away through no fault of his own.

That has helped lead Trump to think that the public polls are overstating Biden’s advantage, advisers said, and that they offer only a snapshot in time. But his internal numbers still show him trailing Biden, and he is worried about his standing.

He asks his advisers with more regularity, “What do we need to do?” and grills his friends about “how is it looking?” while making public course corrections, the advisers said.

Over the past several weeks, he changed his stance on promoting masks, claiming that it was “patriotic” to wear one,

and resuscitated the daily coronavirus news conference — both an acknowledgment that he needs to be seen as taking the virus seriously again.

On Tuesday evening, campaign aides circulated a news story from CNBC, in which the host Jim Cramer said that Trump’s belated endorsement of face coverings had sparked a rally in recovery stocks.

The president also unceremoniously demoted his longtime campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and his campaign has shifted the majority of its advertising resources to a message of law and order, claiming inaccurately in a new television ad spot that if Biden is elected, the country’s police departments will cease to exist.

His political opponents assume he knows he is losing, and badly, and that his blanket dismissal of public polling as “fake” is part of a strategy to sow doubt and confusion in November. “Saying the polls are fake helps in laying the predicate for claiming the election is rigged,” said William Kristol, the conservative writer and prominent “Never Trump” Republican. “Because his brand going forward depends on his being a victim of a rigged system, not accepting defeat.

He has a general interest in discrediting the truth, and this is part of an assault on the truth.”

But aides said that even in private conversations, Trump has not let the reality of his current political standing fully sink in.

“No one’s ever come back from something like this,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, referring to Biden’s polling lead over Trump. Indeed, it has been almost 25 years since Bill Clinton sustained such

a gaping advantage over his opponent, Bob Dole, in 1996.

But when donors and outside allies have been blunt with Trump and told him that he is, in fact, losing, the president has pushed back, claiming that things are getting better and there’s still plenty of time for improvement, according to Republicans familiar with these conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private exchanges.

His sources for his poll numbers, beyond cable television and newspaper articles, are his aides, some of whom willfully distort the electoral landscape to avoid his wrath — going so far as to tell him he’s winning in states like Maine, where he is losing. Aides said that even those advisers who are willing to bring him bad news no longer deliver the full picture.

One of Trump’s main pollsters, Tony Fabrizio, often had the most dire predictions and was known not to shy away from a “sky is falling” briefing with the president. But aides said that everyone has tiptoed around the president ever since June, when he threatened to sue Parscale after he presented polling data that showed Trump trailing Biden in several crucial states.

Now, aides said, even the aides with more dire predictions will explain away bad numbers by pointing to outside factors and will often blame news coverage for Trump’s slump.

The campaign disputed that there was anything terrible they even needed to brief the president about.

“We track 17 states that will decide who the next president will be and we trust the methodology,” said Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director. “In those states, our data shows that President Trump remains strong against a defined Joe Biden and is well positioned for reelection. ”

President Trump has been trailing in national polls for over a month.

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Trump’s warm words for Ghislaine Maxwell: ‘I just wish her well’ EN MENONITA ESTÁS SEGURO

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The remarks renewed attention on Trump’s ties to Epstein, who was arrested alresident Donald Trump’s return to the most exactly a year before Maxwell, Epstein’s White House podium on Tuesday to dis- longtime companion. Epstein was charged in cuss the coronavirus pandemic took an a federal indictment with sexually exploiting unusual detour when he offered warm words and abusing dozens of girls and women at his for Ghislaine Maxwell, who is facing fede- mansion in Manhattan and elsewhere, inclural charges of helping Jeffrey Epstein recruit, ding at his Palm Beach estate. groom and sexually abuse girls.

A month after his arrest, Epstein, 66, Trump’s comment about Maxwell, who hanged himself in his cell at the federal jail in was arrested in New Hampshire this month Manhattan where he was awaiting trial. Fedeand is being held without bail in a federal jail ral prosecutors said after his death that they in Brooklyn, came in response to a reporter’s would continue to investigate his associates. question about whether he expected her to go After Epstein’s arrest, Trump sought to public with the names of powerful men who distance himself from the disgraced financier, have been accused in lawsuits of taking part in who had avoided federal sex-crime charges the sex-trafficking ring that Epstein allegedly ran. under a widely criticized plea deal in 2008 “I don’t know,” Trump said. “I haven’t that allowed him to plead guilty to lesser state really been following it too much. I just wish charges of soliciting prostitution. (A furor over the plea deal ultimately caused Trump’s labor her well, frankly.”

“I’ve met her numerous times over the secretary, who negotiated it, to resign.)

Trump, speaking to reporters at the Whiyears, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach,” the te House last July, said he knew Epstein “like president continued, referring to the Florida everybody in Palm Beach knew him.” town where his Mar-a-Lago resort is and wheBut, the president added: “I had a fare Epstein had a home. “But I wish her well, lling-out with him. I haven’t spoken to him in whatever it is.”

15 years. I was not a fan of his, that I can tell Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to the you.” The circumstances of the rupture in their charges. relationship have never been made clear.

Trump’s comments last year were a reversal from the opinion he expressed in 2002, when he told New York magazine that Epstein was a “terrific guy” whom he had known for 15 years.

“He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump said at the time.

“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Epstein was never a dues-paying Mar-a-Lago member, but Trump treated him like a close friend and the two men were photographed together at the club in the 1990s and early 2000s — Trump always wearing a tie, Epstein never wearing From left, Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Jeffrey one. They also attended Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago re- many of the same dinner parties in Manhattan. sort in Florida in 2000.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

11

The pandemic isn’t bringing back factory jobs, at least not yet

By ANA SWANSON and JIM TANKERSLEY

F

or companies with supply chains that snake around the globe, the crises have just kept coming: First the prolonged and painful U.S.-China trade war, then a pandemic that snarled shipments, stalled international travel and shut factory doors.

President Donald Trump and his advisers have seized on the disruptions to make a familiar case to manufacturers: Come back home.

“The global pandemic has proven once and for all that to be a strong nation, America must be a manufacturing nation,” Trump said at a Ford factory in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on May 21. “We’re bringing it back.”

Trump has spent much of his presidency trying to cajole manufacturers to return to the United States, through both tough talk and policies like tariffs. His advisers have pointed to both the trade war and the pandemic as evidence that it is just too risky for multinational companies to rely on other countries, particularly China, to make their goods.

But those arguments have yet to result in a wave of factories returning to the United States. Foreign direct investment into the United States — which measures spending from internationally owned companies to start, expand or acquire American businesses — sank drastically last year, to its lowest recorded level since 2006.

Foreign-owned companies invested about half as much in the United States in 2019 as they did in 2016, the year before Trump took office. After increasing in the first two years of Trump’s presidency, the number of manufacturing jobs flatlined last year and fell sharply with the pandemic. As of June, there were nearly 300,000 fewer factory jobs in the United States than there were when Trump was inaugurated.

For all the president’s criticisms of global supply chains, the economic incentive to outsource still prevails. While his trade policy has made doing business abroad, particularly in China, more uncertain and costly, higher wages in the United States and the lure of foreign markets mean that most global businesses are choosing to remain global. Most firms that shifted out of China to avoid the crossfire of the trade war moved to other low-cost countries, like Vietnam and Mexico. Other companies say China is a growth market they cannot afford to lose.

President Donald Trump makes remarks after touring the Ford Rawsonville Components Plant in Ypsilanti, Mich., on May 21, 2020.

And while the pandemic has prompted a broader reassessment of the risks of global supply chains, it has also brought about the deepest economic contraction in generations, battering companies’ finances and forcing them to cut back on workers. Executives are deeply uncertain what demand for their products will look like in the coming months and years — hardly the environment to encourage big investments in new American factories.

The furniture maker La-Z-Boy is one example. The company shifted its production out of China to Vietnam last year to bypass Trump’s tariffs on $360 billion worth of Chinese goods, according to tracking by Panjiva, a research firm. But on a June 24 earnings call, Kurt Darrow, La-Z-Boy’s chief executive, announced that the economic effects of the pandemic would force the company to make steep cuts to its workforce, including in the United States.

“While we were pleased to have brought back some 6,000 furloughed workers, we made the decision to permanently close our Newton, Mississippi, La-Z-Boy branded manufacturing facility and reduce our global workforce by approximately 10%,” he said.

Under the pressure of the trade war, some multinational companies have opened new facilities in the United States, including Williams Sonoma and Stanley Black & De-

cker. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. announced in May that it would set up a facility in Arizona, pending funding. Makers of masks and protective gear, like Honeywell and 3M, are expanding domestic production during the pandemic.

Politicians in both parties are offering proposals to encourage more manufacturing in the United States, such as more funding for industries like semiconductors and pharmaceutical production.

The Trump administration’s newly created U.S. International Development Finance Corp. may offer tens of billions of dollars to help reshore manufacturing of protective equipment and generic drugs. The administration is also considering other tax incentives and “reshoring subsidies,” potentially as part of the next stimulus package, to try to lure factories home.

But there is little data to support claims by administration officials that their trade and tax policies have already encouraged significant reshoring of manufacturing or created a “blue-collar boom.”

U.S. factory output declined throughout 2019, as Trump’s trade war intensified, and it has dropped further this year, suggesting there is no boom in new American factories. Since peaking in mid-2019, corporate investment has declined for three consecutive quarters. Total foreign direct investment in

manufacturing was nearly one-third lower in the first three years of Trump’s tenure than it was in the final three years of President Barack Obama’s.

Trump ostensibly fought his trade war on behalf of American manufacturing. But economists say it has actually been a drag on most U.S. factories, by increasing prices for components and inciting foreign retaliation.

It has also coincided with a plunge in Chinese investment in the United States to $5 billion in 2019, the lowest level since 2009, according to Rhodium Group, a research firm.

Some Trump officials and their supporters blame a broader global economic malaise that has dragged down factories worldwide. They point to the fact that imports fell last year and now account for a slightly smaller share of the goods consumed by Americans, as a sign of their success.

There are good reasons for some companies to leave China. Wages are rising, whittling away at one incentive to manufacture there. And deep fissures between the United States and China have opened in areas like security and technology, which could lead to more aggressive action by either side, regardless of who wins the presidential race in November.

Still, more companies leaving China does not necessarily mean a win for U.S. workers. Like La-Z-Boy, many companies that are moving some facilities out of China — including Samsung, Hasbro, Apple, Nintendo and GoPro — are relocating to countries with even lower wages. While U.S. trade with China fell sharply last year, imports from Vietnam, Taiwan and Mexico swelled.

For many companies, making their supply chains more resilient has meant spreading out production around the world, not concentrating it in the United States, said Chris Rogers, a global trade and logistics analyst at Panjiva. “If you want to hedge your risks, you need to stay global,” he said.

Michael Upchurch, chief financial officer of Kansas City Southern, which runs railroads through Mexico and the United States, said in an earnings call this year that more companies were eyeing Mexico for new facilities because of the tariffs on China and Mexico’s relatively low wages and proximity to American customers. Building new factories would take time, he said, “but over the next few years, we would certainly expect to see benefit.”

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Slack accuses Microsoft of illegally crushing competition

Slack C.E.O. Stewart Butterfield in 2019.

By STEVE LOHR

M

icrosoft is undeniably one of the Big Tech elite, given its size, wealth and stock market value. But the software giant has stood apart from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple in one important respect: Microsoft, once the bully of the tech world, has escaped antitrust scrutiny so far.

Now Slack Technologies, whose popular chat and collaboration software has become embedded in the daily routines of millions of workers at thousands of companies, is hoping to change that.

Slack said Wednesday that it had filed a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission, accusing the tech giant of using its market power to try to crush the upstart rival.

In its filing, Slack claims that Microsoft has illegally tied its collaboration software, Microsoft Teams, to its dominant suite of productivity programs, Microsoft Office, which includes Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

“Slack threatens Microsoft’s hold on business email, the cornerstone of Office, which means Slack threatens Microsoft’s lock on enterprise software,” Jonathan Prince, vice president of communications and policy at Slack, said in a statement.

Slack’s complaint is just a first step. The European Commission must assess the complaint to see if a formal

investigation is warranted. In recent years, European regulators have more aggressively pursued antitrust actions against large tech companies than U.S. regulators.

But the complaint threatens Microsoft’s recent ability to largely avoid regulatory scrutiny. Federal and state regulators in the United States are investigating whether the other tech giants have broken antitrust laws. On Monday, the chief executives of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook will testify before Congress, which is also looking into them.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Slack-Microsoft confrontation has some echoes of the internet browser competition in the 1990s. The browser wars led to a landmark federal antitrust case against Microsoft in the United States that found the company repeatedly violated the nation’s antitrust laws. Europe also ruled against Microsoft.

The internet browser was a layer of software that could be a gateway to online computing. Developers could write software applications that ran on the browser, potentially undermining the role of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, the dominant technology of the personal computer era.

The browser was a rival computing platform. And Netscape Communications, the commercial pioneer of browser software, was Microsoft’s enemy.

Today, Slack serves as a gateway to online work

for many people. Developers can write apps that run on Slack. And it is a nascent challenge to one part of Microsoft’s business. Now, online cloud software is the major platform, and Teams is included in Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud suite.

“Online collaboration platforms and related tools have become as important to us as smartphones and computers,” said Michael Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Whether a software program like Slack could emerge as a genuine threat to Microsoft is uncertain, industry analysts say. Microsoft has positioned Teams as an all-in-one stop for online video meetings, calls, chat and collaboration, and it works seamlessly with Microsoft’s Office software.

“For Microsoft, Teams is increasingly where online work is done,” said Wayne Kurtzman, an analyst at IDC, a technology research firm. “It is becoming a platform for Microsoft.”

Slack is making its complaint as adoption of modern communication and collaboration technology is surging. Slack, Microsoft Teams and Zoom are all experiencing huge demand because of the coronavirusinduced shutdowns that have forced much of the workforce to toil from home.

In April, when the company reported its quarterly financial results, Microsoft said that Teams had 75 million daily users, more than double the number in early March. At the time, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”

Microsoft will report its results for the most recent quarter later Wednesday, after the close of stock trading. Despite the coronavirus-battered economy, Microsoft is expected to report revenue of $36.5 billion, up 8%, according to analysts’ estimates compiled by IBES Refinitiv.

Slack, which was founded in 2014, has enjoyed rapid growth this year. Last month, reporting the results for its quarter ended in April, Slack said its revenue had jumped 50% to $202 million. It has more than 122,000 paying customers, typically companies with annual licenses, which was a 28% increase from the year-earlier quarter.

David Schellhase, Slack’s general counsel, said, “Microsoft is reverting to past behavior.”

But the illegal-tying claim, which Slack makes in its complaint, was not resolved in the federal browser case. Microsoft was found to have engaged in a range of illegal tactics to thwart competition, with contract restrictions and threats. An appeals court upheld those claims but sent the tying claim back to the lower court for reconsideration. The case, which was brought by the Clinton administration, was settled early in the Bush administration.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

13 Stocks

S&P 500 beating Nasdaq for fourth day as investors shift focus

T

he S&P 500 index on Wednesday was on track to beat the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite for a fourth straight session, a feat scored only twice since Wall Street launched its massive recovery last March.

The recent outperformance of the most-followed U.S. stock market benchmark reflects a rotation away from companies viewed as benefiting from the economic lockdown caused by coronavirus, and into those crippled by the pandemic.

Data for a potential COVID-19 vaccine drove the S&P 500 0.3% higher early Wednesday afternoon, with strong gains in cruise ship lines, airlines and other companies that investors in recent months have worried might not remain solvent.

The S&P 500 financial and energy indexes, two of the weakest performers since the coronavirus ended Wall Street’s 11-year bull market in February, each rose over 1%.

“The notion of maybe getting a vaccine and getting the economy restarted has really pushed investors toward the weaker value and leveraged names on hopes that we can end this shutdown,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Cresset Wealth Advisors.

The last time the S&P 500 outperformed the Nasdaq for four consecutive sessions was June 5, and before that, March 27, according to Refinitiv data.

The S&P 500 has climbed about 2% since last Thursday, compared to the Nasdaq’s 0.7% dip. Still, the Nasdaq hit an intraday record high on Monday, while the S&P 500 remains 5% below its February record high close.

Keeping the Nasdaq down 0.2% on Wednesday was a 2.6% drop in Amazon.com Inc , as well as losses in Alphabet Inc , Nvidia Corp , Netflix Inc and other companies that have outperformed in recent months on bets they would outgrow rivals due to the coronavirus.

Netflix’s quarterly report after the bell on Thursday will show how well the leading streaming video service has fared as a result of the coronavirus, and could affect investors’ expectations for other recent market leaders ahead of their reports in the next several days.

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Thursday, July 23, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

U.S. orders China to close its Houston consulate in 72 hours

President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping of China during their bilateral meeting at the G-20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, June 29, 2019.

By EDWARD WONG, LARA JAKES and STEVEN LEE MYERS

T

he United States ordered China to close its diplomatic consulate in Houston within 72 hours, dealing another blow to the rapidly deteriorating relations between the two countries. China promptly vowed to retaliate, calling the move illegal.

The State Department said the closure was made in response to repeated Chinese violations of American sovereignty, including “massive illegal spying and influence operations.”

The Trump administration’s decision, an unusual and grave step, was a significant escalation of its effort to tighten the reins on Chinese diplomats, journalists, scholars and others in the United States. It comes amid rising tensions that were inflamed by the coronavirus pandemic but that now touch on virtually all aspects of the relationship.

The restrictions have included issuing Cold War-like travel rules for diplomats and requiring several Chinese state news organizations to register as diplomatic entities. The administration is also considering a travel ban for members of the Communist Party and their families. Such a move, if enacted, could affect 270 million people, and it has been widely criticized as too sweeping to be practical.

The State Department spokeswoman, Morgan Ortagus, said the order to close the consulate showed that the United States would not tolerate China’s “egregious behavior.”

“The People’s Republic of China has engaged for years in massive illegal spying and influence operations throughout the United States against U.S. government officials and American citizens,” Ortagus said in a pointed and politically tinged statement.

The move, she said, would “protect American intellectual

property and Americans’ private information.”

She did not elaborate, but the administration has repeatedly accused China of various attempts to steal commercial and military secrets, allegations that Beijing has rejected. The Justice Department said on Tuesday that an indictment had been secured against two Chinese hackers whom officials have accused of trying to steal information about coronavirus vaccine research.

Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, urged the United States to reverse the decision immediately. “Otherwise China will certainly make legitimate and necessary reactions,” he said. His remarks suggested that China would, at a minimum, close a U.S. Consulate in China.

In the hours after the Trump administration notified the Chinese of its decision on Tuesday, smoke was seen billowing from a courtyard inside the consulate in Houston as employees dumped what appeared to be documents into flaming barrels, according to a video posted by KPRC-TV, a local television station.

The police and fire departments responded to reports of a fire but did not enter the building, over which the Chinese have sovereignty.

In Beijing, Wang called the move unprecedented and illegal under international law, and described it as the latest in a series of aggressions.

“For some time, the United States government has been shifting the blame to China with stigmatization and unwarranted attacks against China’s social system, harassing Chinese diplomatic and consular staff in America, intimidating and interrogating Chinese students and confiscating their personal electrical devices, even detaining them without cause,” he said.

Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor at the School of Inter-

national Studies at Renmin University in Beijing, said the United States had never taken such a bold and divisive step since the two countries established diplomatic relations on Jan. 1, 1979.

“If the relationship between China and the United States continues to deteriorate unchecked,” he said in a telephone interview in Beijing, “the next result will be the severing of diplomatic relations.”

Closing a consulate is a serious diplomatic matter, but it is not without precedent in times of tensions.

In 2017, the Trump administration ordered Russia to close its consulate in San Francisco, along with two annexes near New York and Washington, in retaliation for Russian restrictions on the number of American diplomats in Moscow. Those moves stemmed from the furor over Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, the fallout from which is still felt, despite President Donald Trump’s attempted outreach to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

China also operates consulates in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, in addition to the embassy in Washington.

The effect of the closure on relations — and travel — would in the short term be minimal compared with the diplomatic furor it has already sparked. The consulates principally process visas for travelers visiting China; the Houston consulate handled those for the southern states, from Texas to Florida. Travel between the two countries has been severely limited in any case because of the pandemic.

Hu Xijin, an editor with The Global Times, a nationalist newspaper controlled by the Communist Party, called the American move outrageous, particularly given the short notice for Chinese diplomats to clear out within 72 hours. That would mean by Friday.

“This is a manifestation of panic,” he wrote in a note posted on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform. “It seems that Washington has no bottom line.”

The newspaper also posted a poll on Twitter — which is banned in China — asking readers to vote on which American consulate to close. On the mainland, the United States has them in Shenyang, Shanghai, Chengdu, Guangzhou and Wuhan; it also has a consulate for Hong Kong and Macao in Hong Kong.

The State Department evacuated most of its staff from the Wuhan consulate in February during the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic — a move that China at the time criticized as stoking panic. It has since significantly reduced the operations at the embassy in Beijing and the other consulates, with many diplomats returning to the United States.

Officials in China have reacted to the flurry of actions taken by the administration with growing alarm, frustration and anger.

Many accused Trump of attacking China as part of his reelection campaign, while others see a deeper, longstanding American animosity toward the country spilling out into public view. Much of China’s fury has focused on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has been one of the most outspoken critics of China’s behavior.

Wang Yi, the foreign minister, said last week that the United States had “lost its mind, morals and credibility,” unusually pointed remarks for any country’s top diplomat.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

15

‘No one’ protected British democracy from Russia, U.K. report concludes

By MARK LANDLER and STEPHEN CASTLE

R

ussia has mounted a prolonged, sophisticated campaign to undermine Britain’s democracy and corrupt its politics, while successive British governments have looked the other way, according to a long-delayed report released Tuesday by a British parliamentary committee.

From meddling in elections and spreading disinformation to funneling dirty money and employing members of the House of Lords, the Russians have tried to coopt politicians and corrode institutions, often with little resistance from law enforcement or intelligence agencies that ignored years of warning signs.

The report, in many ways harder on British officials than the Russians, did not answer the question of whether Russia swayed one of the most consequential votes in modern British history: the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union. But it was unforgiving about who is protecting British democracy.

“No one is,” said the report’s authors.

“The outrage isn’t if there is interference,” said Kevan Jones, a Labour Party member of Parliament who served on the intelligence committee that released the report. “The outrage is no one wanted to know if there was interference.”

The release of the report came more than seven months after Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party racked up an 80-seat majority in Parliament and almost 18 months after the end of the inquiry by the Intelligence and Security Committee, a parliamentary body that oversees the country’s spy agencies.

Still, it was eagerly awaited in Britain, where anxieties about Russia’s behavior range from influence-peddling with oligarchs in London to the poisoning of a former Russian intelligence agent and his daughter in Salisbury, England.

The report also landed in the heat of a U.S. presidential election, shadowed by questions about ties between President Donald Trump and Russia, as well as fears of renewed foreign tampering, not just by Russia but also by China and Iran.

The committee’s account characterized Russia as a reckless country bent on recapturing its status as a “great power,” primarily by destabilizing those in the West.

“The security threat posed by Russia is difficult for the West to manage as, in our

view and that of many others, it appears fundamentally nihilistic,” the authors said.

Experts said the report showed parallels between Britain and the United States in the failure to pick up warning signs, but also important differences. The FBI and other U.S. agencies, they said, had investigated election interference more aggressively than their British counterparts, while the British were ahead of the United States in scrutinizing how Russian money had corrupted politics.

“This is one of the pieces that is not really well understood in the U.S.,” said Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks Russian disinformation efforts in the United States.

“Whether there is dirty Russian money that has flowed into our political system.”

The report described how British politicians had welcomed oligarchs to London, allowing them to launder their illicit money through what it called the London “laundromat.” A growth industry of “enablers” — lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, and public relations consultants — sprang up to serve their needs.

These people, the report said, “played a role, wittingly or unwittingly, in the extension of Russian influence which is often linked to promoting the nefarious interests of the Russian state.”

Several members of the House of Lords, the report said, had business interests linked to Russia or worked for companies with Russian ties. It urged an investigation of them, though it did not name any names.

That information, as well as the names of politicians who received donations, was redacted from the public report, along with other sensitive intelligence.

“The most disturbing thing is the recognition of what the Russian government has gotten away, under our eyes,” said William F. Browder, a U.S.-born British financier who has worked extensively in Russia and provided evidence to the committee. “The government, and particularly law enforcement, has been toothless.”

The report painted a picture of years of Russian interference through disinformation spread by traditional media outlets, like the cable-TV channel RT, and by the use of internet bots and trolls. This activity dated to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, but it was never confronted by the country’s political establishment or by an intelligence community with other priorities.

Focused more on clandestine ope-

The Houses of Parliament in London on April 6, 2020. Britain and the European Union have made little headway in their efforts to strike a post-Brexit trade deal. rations, the spy agencies were anxious to keep their distance from political campaigns, regarding them as a “hot potato,” the report said. Nor was it clear who in the government was in charge of countering the Russian threat to destabilize Britain’s political process.

“It has been surprisingly difficult to establish who has responsibility for what,” the report said.

Despite pressing questions, the report said the government had shown little interest in investigating whether the Brexit referendum was targeted by Russia. The government responded that it had “seen no evidence of successful interference in the EU referendum” and dismissed the need for further investigation.

But the committee suggested that the reason no evidence had been uncovered was because nobody had looked for it.

“In response to our request for written evidence at the outset of the inquiry, MI5 initially provided just six lines of text,” the committee said. Had the intelligence agencies conducted a threat assessment before the vote, it added, it was “inconceivable” that they would not have concluded there was a Russian threat.

Among the report’s most politically salient conclusions might be about a Russian influence campaign during the Scottish independence referendum. Nationalist sentiment is surging again in Scotland, partly because

many voters consider the Scottish authorities to have handled the coronavirus pandemic better than the government in England. Based on its previous behavior, some experts said, Russia would try again to encourage the fracturing of the United Kingdom.

Although the report was approved by Downing Street in 2019, its release was held up before the election that gave Johnson his decisive parliamentary majority. Critics said he had been compromised by donations to his party from wealthy Russians living in Britain and they argued that the report was delayed unnecessarily.

After the election, there was a second delay while Downing Street agreed on the membership of a new Intelligence and Security Committee.

While the publicly available part of the report unearthed little new material, one expert said that it underscored the need to widen the focus and improve the coordination of Britain’s intelligence apparatus.

“We did know most of this,” said Martin Innes, director of the Crime and Security Research Institute at Cardiff University, “but people were not joining the dots and seeing that quite a serious situation was developing.”

“What Russia wants is to be able to play great power politics,” Innes said. “And one of the ways of doing that is by destabilizing the U.K. and some of its close allies to create that space to maneuver.”

16

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Angela Merkel guides the E.U. to a deal, however imperfect

Pedestrians in Naples, Italy, on June 18, 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic. Italy, the European Union’s third-largest economy, is seen as the member most affected by the pandemic.

By STEVEN ERLANGER and MATINA STEVIS-GRIDNEFF

A

fter days and nights of rancorous haggling, European Union leaders reached an $857 billion pandemic recovery plan on Tuesday that, for the first time, committed them to borrow money collectively and distribute much of it as grants that do not need to be repaid by the countries hardest hit by the virus, like Italy.

But as the dust settled after the marathon negotiations — the EU’s longest summit meeting in 20 years — the compromises that allowed Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, whose country holds the EU’s rotating presidency, to guide 27 nations toward consensus became all the more apparent, and none were too pretty.

The fissures in the bloc that Merkel needed to bridge ran up, down and sideways. There were divides between the frugal north and a needy, hard-hit south; but also west to east, between Brussels and budding autocracies like Poland and Hungary that have tested the limits of the bloc’s liberal democratic values.

But allowing the crisis stirred by the pandemic to worsen was in the end considered more dangerous than trimming some of the bloc’s larger budgetary ambitions or even allowing continued challenges to the rule of law.

The compromise that got most attention

was between President Emmanuel Macron of France, who pushed for large-scale grants to southern European countries like Italy and Spain hit hardest by the pandemic, and Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, who pressed for more loans than grants and for structural economic reforms in return.

But how Merkel mollified the prime ministers of Hungary and Poland, Viktor Orban and Mateusz Morawiecki, may prove more consequential.

Not only was their money from Brussels protected and increased, despite regular questions about the misuse of those funds and efforts to condition the aid on adherence to the rule of law, but she promised to help them conclude bloc disciplinary measures against them for their alleged anti-democratic abuses.

“Prime Minister Orban told me he wants to take the necessary steps and does not want this to hang in the air,” Merkel said early Tuesday about the disciplinary procedure that had been opened against Hungary.

“We will support Hungary,” she said, “but of course the crucial steps will need to be taken

by Hungary.”

That concession, little remarked upon, may have sealed the agreement, even if it outrages critics who think that Brussels is showing weakness in the face of abuses of bloc laws and values by some Central European member states. And that aspect of the deal may end up being the most contentious in the

European Parliament, which must approve it.

The agreement “looks like a disaster for the rule of law,” said R. Daniel Kelemen, a scholar of Europe at Rutgers University.

“Merkel and Macron were determined to reach a deal demonstrating the EU’s ability to respond to the crisis, and they proved willing to keep EU funds flowing to autocratic governments in order to close the deal.”

Still, by tying the recovery fund into the seven-year budget, the first without Britain, they managed to solve two extremely difficult and tendentious problems at once. For all its messiness, there was little doubt that what they had achieved for the bloc was groundbreaking.

Merkel understood that failure would badly undermine the new leaders of the European Union itself — Council President Charles Michel and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, a former member of Merkel’s government.

Having joined with Macron in supporting a virus recovery fund borrowed for collectively — a first — she then patiently worked for consensus, understanding the political needs of both Macron, whose expansive vision for the EU remains unfulfilled, and of Rutte, whose government hangs by a thread, depending on politicians even more tightfisted than he.

Macron and Rutte proved themselves two sometimes angry, sometimes emotional leaders of the two main contending groups, and the weekend talks were unusually acrimonious.

With Britain gone, Rutte and his Austrian counterpart, Sebastian Kurz, have stepped forward to create a bloc of smaller countries, known as “the frugals,” which are trying to restrain the big-spending, integrationist ambitions of Macron and the poorer southern countries.

But while they came to Brussels saying that they were opposed to any outright grants based on collective debt, it was obvious that there would be some once France and Germany pushed for them.

Then the only question — however difficult — was to negotiate an amount and some mechanism to monitor the spending, so that everyone could go home talking of victory.

France and Germany had proposed 500 billion euros in grants; the Commission took that and added another 250 billion in loans; in the end, after intense squabbling, the balance was 390 billion in grants and 360

billion in loans.

Still, that is a remarkable victory for Macron, who has broken a major taboo on creating collective debt and built a possible architecture for handling future crises — if Merkel’s successors agree.

For the future of the euro currency, the elephant in the room is Italy, the bloc’s thirdlargest economy by most measures, and already drowning in debt. Italy is both one of the least reformed economies in the eurozone and one of the hardest hit by the virus.

So while both groups agreed that Italy must be a major beneficiary of funds that do not increase its already sizable debt pile, Rutte and his group — including Austria, Sweden, Denmark and often Finland — also wanted tough monitoring on the use of those funds.

And they wanted member states to have a say in that monitoring, not just the Commission, the bloc’s unelected bureaucracy, which they regard as weak and often blind to abuses.

That could create significant bitterness for the future. But for now, bending to reality, the “frugals” in return got the numbers down, got some form of state monitoring and also got paid off with higher rebates in the budget.

Not least, to reach consensus, the EU ended up with a smaller post-Brexit European budget, and one that eliminates or reduces spending for some ambitious projects designed to prepare Europe for the future — like in research and climate transition, a fund to promote consensus on carbon goals for 2030 that was slashed by one-third.

Even with the virus, a proposed health fund evaporated entirely. There were also reductions from Commission proposals in other areas of investment, foreign policy and defense.

“This is not frugal. This is stupid,” said Henrik Enderlein, a German economist who heads of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, in a Twitter response. But he also applauded the larger deal and the recovery fund. “We shouldn’t be frugal in our judgment,’’ he said. “This is historic.”

As Enderlein noted, the summit must be considered a breakthrough in a time of crisis when the European Union, now without Britain, could not be seen to fail. European fights about money and budgets are never pretty.

But Merkel more than most understands that for all the talk of European solidarity, the European Union only proceeds when its varied leaders can convince their voters that they have fought the good fight for national interests.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

17

China uses WHO inquiry to tout Coronavirus response

By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ and AMY QIN

C

hinese officials are hailing a visit by a team of experts sent to Beijing by the World Health Organization to investigate the source of the coronavirus as evidence that the country is a responsible and transparent global power.

But the investigation by the WHO is likely to take many months and could face delays.

For starters, there are logistical headaches. China has placed the advance team of experts who are laying the groundwork for a broader investigation under a standard 14-day quarantine, forcing it to do some of its detective work from a distance.

“Obviously the arrival and quarantine of individuals and working remotely is not the ideal way to work, but we fully respect the risk-management procedures put in place,” Mike Ryan, the WHO’s chief of emergency response, said at a news conference Friday. He said it would take weeks before a full team would be able to visit China.

The WHO’s investigation comes as China faces intense global backlash, including from the United States, for initially downplaying and failing to contain the virus, which emerged in December in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.

For weeks, China had fiercely resisted demands from other nations that it allow independent investigators onto its soil to study the origin of the pathogen. Beijing has also tried to deflect blame by suggesting, without evidence, that the virus could have originated elsewhere.

Now, officials are trumpeting Beijing’s response to the outbreak as a model for the world and attacking the United States for “shirking its responsibilities” in the global fight against COVID-19.

The Trump administration, which has repeatedly attempted to distract from its ineffective response to the pandemic, has criticized the WHO’s inquiry. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently said that he expected it to be a “completely whitewashed investigation.”

With relations between China and Western countries deteriorating rapidly over military, technology, trade and human rights concerns, experts worry that Beijing will seek to limit the scope of the research so that it does not embarrass the government.

“The whole political landscape is not favorable to doing an unbiased scientific investigation,” said Wang Linfa, a virologist in Singapore who took part in a similar WHO study in China during the severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic in 2002 and 2003. “I feel sorry for the team members.”

The Chinese government initially covered up the SARS outbreak, but Wang said it was later eager to cooperate with the international experts. This time, he said, the WHO’s investigation was likely to be largely symbolic because the broader geopolitical climate could make Chinese experts unwilling to share valuable research.

Chinese officials have provided little data from samples that the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention took in December at the Huanan Seafood Market, a sprawling market in Wuhan that sold game meat and live animals, where

many of the first reported infections were traced. The market has since been closed and scrubbed down.

The WHO’s inquiry is focused on the question of how the disease jumped to humans from animals. The advance team is made up of an expert in animal health, as well as an epidemiologist. The team members, who arrived in mid-July, have not yet been identified and have not spoken publicly.

Ryan said Friday that the health organization was “very pleased with the collaboration on the ground.” He said earlier in the month that the experts would not do field investigations but would meet with Chinese officials and researchers to review the available data and outline the scope of the inquiry.

Chinese officials have sought to reframe the WHO’s visit as a sign of China’s confidence and strength, especially compared to the United States, making the dubious claim that China first requested it. (Countries such as Australia had pushed for such an inquiry.) Reports in the state-run news media have described the visit by the WHO as a reflection of China’s “open attitude.”

“It is our contribution to global public health cooperation as a responsible major country,” Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, said this month at a news conference.

Zhao called on the United States to allow a similar investigation, even though there is no evidence the virus originated in America. He criticized the United States for moving forward with plans to withdraw from the WHO over concerns that the health agency is too close to China.

“The U.S. has been shirking its own responsibilities and undermining global solidarity in combating the virus by declaring its exit from the WHO, politicizing matters related to the

pandemic and smearing others,” he said.

Chinese officials and experts have continued to call on the WHO to widen its analysis to include other countries.

Wang Guangfa, a top government health adviser, has said that the WHO should also go to Spain. Wang, speaking this month with The Global Times, a nationalistic Chinese tabloid, cited an unpublished study by researchers at the University of Barcelona that suggested the virus was present in Spain’s wastewater as early as March 2019. Independent experts have said that the study was flawed and that other lines of evidence strongly suggest the virus broke out in China late last year.

Officials from the WHO have said that Wuhan is the best starting point for scrutinizing the animal origin of the virus because it was where the first clusters of the outbreak emerged in humans. But they remained open to other lines of study as well.

“We have to keep an open mind,” Ryan said at a news briefing this month. “Science must stay open to all possibilities.”

The WHO’s research could take months, if not longer.

Scientists took several years to conclude that horseshoe bats were the most likely hosts in nature for the coronavirus that caused SARS in 2002. Before that, researchers had identified masked palm civets as one of the primary intermediate hosts after the virus was identified in several civets that were being sold in markets in Guangdong.

The inquiry also offers an opportunity for the WHO to rehabilitate its own image. While the agency has been praised for its efforts to coordinate treatment and vaccine development, it has also been assailed for being too trusting of China and for not pushing Chinese health officials on their early missteps.

Coronavirus testing in Wuhan, China, in May. The country is trying to shore up its image as it comes under attack for its early attempts to downplay the outbreak.

18

Thursday, July 23, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

How to fix America: Spend. Spend. Spend.

By FARHAD MANJOO

A

s a respite from a chaotic spring spent under quarantine, my family booked a weeklong vacation last month in a cozy, remote house in the California desert. While the kids cannonballed into the saltwater pool and my wife sped through several novels, I spent my time in the sun doing exactly the sort of thing you’d imagine an opinion columnist might do on summer vacation: I read two hot new books about macroeconomics.

Wait, don’t leave! I promise this isn’t as dry as it sounds.

The first book was “The Price of Peace,” Zachary Carter’s incisive biography of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, which illustrates the awesome power of economic theory to alter the fates of nations and the lives of millions of people.

The second was the “The Deficit Myth,” in which the economist Stephanie Kelton convincingly overturns the conventional wisdom that federal budget deficits are somehow bad for the nation.

I’m on record as a doomer, but in different ways, these tomes sparked the first real note of optimism I’ve felt about America’s future in quite a while. Together, they suggest a compelling political, moral and economic case for the federal government to begin to do, again, what it once saw as its duty — to make big, bold, and even expensive investments to improve the lives of Americans, and perhaps of people around the world.

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In the last few years, and especially in the hellish last couple of months, the United States has come to feel like a failed state. The coronavirus is spreading, the economy is crumbling, society is fragmenting, our infrastructure is falling apart, health care is inadequate and costly, child care is impossible, and life expectancy is declining.

The federal government is not only often unwilling to help, but seemingly incapable of it. To get just about anything done anymore, Uncle Sam must go hat in hand to the behemoth private companies that now rule much of our lives. Please, Google, will you create a coronavirus testing website? Please, Walmart, will you set up in-person testing sites?

And whenever anyone is brave enough to suggest that the government itself should provide useful services to Americans — whether big-ticket items like health care, child care and college education, or smaller things like an upgraded electric grid or a national broadband service — the first reaction from many on the right and the left is one of defeat and resignation. “How will you pay for it?” they ask. And, often, the whole conversation stops right there, because with a $26.5 trillion national debt, America looks hopelessly broke.

It is not. Kelton argues that our government’s inability to provide for citizens isn’t due to a lack for money; instead, our leaders lack political will.

Kelton — who has worked as an economist for Democrats in the Senate and as an adviser to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns — is one of the leading proponents of Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT. The theory argues that because the government is in charge of its own currency, it cannot “run out” of money the way a household or a business can, and it therefore does not need to raise taxes to fund government spending.

This doesn’t mean that the government’s resources are infinite, just that deficits are not a true limit on what’s possible.

Instead of being constrained by deficits, Kelton and other MMTers argue, policymakers should care about “real” measures of economic activity: unemployment and inflation.

Whatever the deficit, if unemployment is rife, it’s an in-

dication that aggregate demand is low; to boost demand, the government can freely spend, spend, spend — and should stop spending only when there is a danger that it will lead to a rise in prices — that is, inflation — not because deficits will soar. In practice, Kelton and other MMT-ers propose a federal jobs guarantee, in which the government would hire anyone who needs a job for a set wage. The policy, she argues, would promote full employment while keeping inflation stable.

MMT is controversial even among left-leaning economists — Lawrence H. Summers, who once worked as Barack Obama’s director of the National Economic Council, has called it “a recipe for disaster” — and it’s easy for non-economists to get lost in the many technical debates surrounding the idea.

But one doesn’t need to buy into everything about MMT to see Kelton’s fundamental point — that in the 40 years since Ronald Reagan won the White House, both the left and the right have been unnecessarily obsessed with deficits, to the detriment of the well-being of citizens.

The cruelest example of this mindset occurred after the Great Recession in 2008. At the time, many experts suggested that an adequate response to the downturn would require the government to spend $1 trillion or more to boost demand.

Instead, Obama and his aides, worried about sticker shock, lowballed their stimulus, and millions of people remained unemployed.

In the decade since that recession, many economists and lawmakers have grown less worried about deficits, because red ink has not led to economic calamity. That’s to the good: Deficits are rarely questioned when lawmakers are spending on the military or on tax cuts for corporations, so it’s only fair that they aren’t constrained by deficits when spending on things like health care, child care and education.

And right now, in the midst of a pandemic, the economy needs as much help as it can get. In March, Congress passed and the president signed the CARES Act, which provided more than $2 trillion in economic stimulus. Studies show that it has had a remarkable effect — despite a steep increase in unemployment due to the virus, the expansion in aid prevented a rise in poverty.

But most of that stimulus will soon come to an end. Congress is working on another relief package, but already lawmakers are fighting about its size: Democrats in the House passed a $3 trillion bill; Trump and Senate Republicans are looking at something closer to $1 trillion.

Near the end of his Keynes book, Carter writes that Keynesianism “is not so much a school of economic thought as a spirit of radical optimism, unjustified by most of human history and extremely difficult to conjure up precisely when it is most needed: during the depths of a depression or amid the fevers of war.”

We are in similarly dire straits now — and one way we might escape is to do what Keynes would suggest we do: spend our way toward a better tomorrow.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

19

Asociación de Bancos confirma la escasez de moneda en Puerto Rico Por THE STAR

L

a vicepresidenta ejecutiva de la Asociación de Bancos de Puerto Rico (ABPR), Zoimé Álvarez, confirmó el miércoles la escasez de monedas de metal en Puerto Rico, aunque no en papel.

“Nos están informando desde junio 17, pero no tan solo es en Puerto Rico, es prácticamente en toda la nación de Estados Unidos”, dijo Álvarez en entrevista radial en WKAQ 580 AM. “El US Mint es la autoridad emisora de monedas de los Estados Unidos. Esta entidad redujo el inventario de elaboración de monedas para poder implantar unas medidas de seguridad para sus empleados”, explicó la vicepresidenta de la ABPR. “Esto se complica al haber poca circulación de consumidores en monedas, como por ejem-

plo que las personas empiezan a comprar on line (por internet), empiezan a pagar con tarjetas de crédito o de débito. Y posteriormente al abrir los comercios se crea una gran demanda. Cuando piden la moneda hay un vacío, un ‘gap’. Hoy la Reserva Federal lo estima en $2.3 a $3.5 billones (mil millones) en moneda (la escasez), sostuvo Álvarez. El año pasado el US Mint emitió $47.8 mil millones en moneda. Álvarez dijo que el US Mint ya empezó a elaborar más monedas.

De igual modo, exhortó a pagar con tarjeta de crédito, débito o la aplicación móvil que prefiera al efectuar compras. También pueden aprovechar y usar las monedas acumuladas que tengan en sus residencias.

“Son efectos del COVID que afectó la producción de moneda. No son los billetes”, concluyó Álvarez.

Dalmau exige dar paso a investigación sobre imputaciones a la gobernadora Por THE STAR

E

l candidato a la gobernación por el Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP), Juan Dalmau Ramírez, indicó este martes que, ante las nuevas revelaciones contenidas en el informe sometido por el Departamento de Justicia al Panel del Fiscal Especial Independiente, la Asamblea Legislativa debe investigar las imputaciones contra la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced.

“Se hace más urgente que nunca antes que la legislatura descargue su responsabilidad ministerial y actúe cónsono a su función constitucional de servir de contrapeso fiscalizador a la rama ejecutiva. No hay excusas para que en esta sesión extraordinaria el Senado descargue la resolución investigativa que radiqué sobre los posibles actos criminales y de obstrucción a la justicia que se le imputan a la Gobernadora y a funcionarios de su administración”, puntualizó Dalmau Ramírez en comunicación escrita.

El también legislador independentista sentenció, que a la luz de los hechos, la Asamblea Legislativa tiene la autoridad y el deber constitucional para actuar, y aprobar su resolución sería la forma más eficaz y contundente de cumplir con ello.

“La aprobación de la resolución significaría iniciar de inmediato esta investigación, tomar declaraciones juradas, entrevistar testigos, poder tener un expediente completo sobre los hechos imputados y, así, contar con los elementos de juicio para decidir las acciones correspondientes, como podría ser la recomendación de iniciar un proceso de residenciamiento”, subrayó.

El líder pipiolo también hizo un llamado al país a reflexionar profundamente sobre los acontecimientos de cara a las elecciones generales en noviembre.

“Esta situación debe servir para que el pueblo de Puerto Rico reflexione sobre en manos de quién ha estado colocando el gobierno del país y en manos de quién lo pondrá en noviembre próximo.

Los hechos que se imputan deben provocar indignación en todos los puertorriqueños porque las acciones de estos funcionarios demuestran falta de escrúpulos en momento en que el país más vulnerable se

encontraba. A esos que anteponen sus apetitos personales en momentos en que la ciudadanía más necesitada estaba merecen que se les repudie y sean juzgados en las urnas”, concluyó.

20

Thursday, July 23, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

They’re used to tapping. Now they’re talking.

By BRIAN SEIBERT

A

yodele Casel is a top-shelf tap dancer, as generous of spirit as she is precise in technique. But years ago, she discovered that even appreciative audiences didn’t always grasp all that she was trying to communicate with her feet.

“They would come up to me after shows and say things like, ‘That was really good,’” she recalled in a phone conversation from her apartment in the Bronx. And while she appreciated the praise, she found it “a bit onedimensional.”

In response, she began explaining herself — with words, speaking as part of her tap performances.

“Tap dancers always talk about how the dance moves us, but I also feel that we move the dance,” she explained. “Our upbringing and life experience inform how we do what we do and why we do it. I thought that if we gave people more context, if we shared more of our humanity, then they might see themselves in us, and the dancing would be a bonus.”

“Diary of a Tap Dancer” is what she called the 2005 show that emerged from this idea and the five versions that have followed.

What’s most distinctive about the sixth, besides its being a video series, is a widening of focus. This one has many dancers, many diaries.

The past year has been a busy one for Casel: a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard, a triumphant show at the Joyce Theater, performance and teaching gigs all over. “Two weeks before the pandemic was declared, I had been in like five different cities on seven different planes,” she said. “I just wanted to sit down for a little, so when they said you have to shelter in place, I was so grateful.”

Stuck inside, she took stock. “Thinking back over the last 25 years of my life as a tap dancer, I felt so fulfilled,” she said. “I realized that what I really want to do is amplify other voices in my community.”

So a few weeks back, when New York City Center asked her if she had a project she wanted to work on, she had an answer. Each Tuesday through Aug. 25, a new installment of “Diary of a Tap Dancer, v. 6: Us” will have its debut on the City Center website. (The videos will remain up indefinitely.) And while this week’s entry features Casel — in verbal and tap conversation with the young Andre Imani-

shi in Japan — the rest make room for those other voices.

The videos, directed by Casel and her wife, Torya Beard, are short, around 5 minutes, a mix of tap and talk, photo-album montages, old footage and new. It’s all been edited, but “we’re not going to pretend we’re in a dance studio or on a movie set,” Casel said. “These are video diaries about where we are now.”

Some address COVID-19; others express how tap has been misunderstood or dip into long overdue conversations about tap and race.

In the series opener, the voluble and always swinging 60-year-old veteran Ted Levy compares the way that the pandemic has caused people to reassess their lives with

the kind of self-searching that tap dancers do while practicing, or woodshedding.

“The whole corona thing was nature’s way of stopping everybody,” he says. “The whole world gets to do what we do on a regular basis: We got to go in the shed” and figure things out.

“Tap dancers are more than just rhythms,” he said in an interview last week.

“We’re more than a smile and a song, but you have to set up a context in which the dance can be understood.”

Casel calls Levy “an encyclopedia of the art,” and he calls her “the Oprah Winfrey of tap.” Recounting Zoom calls among the project participants, Levy marveled at how

Ayodele Casel dances in the backyard of her home in New York, July 16, 2020. In Casel’s video series, “Diary of a Tap Dancer, v. 6: Us,” performers talk about what’s on their minds — and dance a little, too.

easily Casel could get everyone to open up emotionally.

“I’ve found that dancers don’t take stock of their feelings with any kind of frequency,” Casel said. Tap is a form of emotional expression and an outlet, but “you also really need to say it out loud.”

For many of the contributors, doing so in public is new, and scary. The video diary of Starinah Dixon addresses this newness directly. “All of my choreographic work has been related to happiness or paying homage to the forefathers of this art form or about social justice,” she said from her home in Chicago.

“This seems a time to let people know about myself as a person.”

Growing up amid “turmoil and chaos in one of the worst neighborhoods of Chicago,” she said, she took after her mother, a “remain calm through the storm type of person.” Now she wants to be more honest about her doubts and pain. “During quarantine, I’ve had a lot of time to think,” she said. “For so much of my life, I’ve done what everybody else wanted me to do. But I’m about to be 33, and it’s time for me to speak my truth.”

That truth doesn’t exclude the political.

“For so much of the world, the face of tap is still white,” she said. “For a long time, when I told people I was a tap dancer, they would say ‘I didn’t know that Black people did that.’

Well, tap is for everybody, but it is also Black.”

Other diarist-dancers take the political angle more directly. “My entry is about identity, about history, about racism,” Ryan Johnson said. “It’s not an attack on whiteness. It’s about me finally being in a space where I can say what I’ve been feeling.”

Actually, Johnson has been speaking his mind for years. His Washington D.C. company Sole Defined presents “percussicals,” shows that use African American percussive dance to address social injustice in Black communities, and its extensive arts education program is centered in using art for change.

Still, “Diary of a Tap Dancer” seems different to him in its potential reach. “You mean I can actually talk about something real on the City Center platform, and it can’t be censored?” he recalled asking Casel.

A lot of the something real has to do with race. “It’s important to say that tap dance was created by Black people,” he said, “but we don’t like to have that conversation because it’s connected to slavery.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

21

Opera Foundation removes trustee for racially charged comments

By SARAH BAHR

T

he Richard Tucker Music Foundation, which grants prestigious awards to young singers, removed David N. Tucker from its board of directors on Monday evening. Tucker, a son of the distinguished tenor for whom the foundation is named, was removed after an uproar over racially charged comments that he made on a Black singer’s Facebook page.

“The Richard Tucker Music Foundation condemns the hurtful and offensive comments made by one of our board members, David Tucker,” Jeffrey Manocherian, the foundation’s chairman, and Barry Tucker, its president and another of Richard Tucker’s sons, said in a statement.

On Saturday, Julia Bullock, a Black soprano, shared a Washington Post story on her Facebook page that quoted protesters in Portland, Oregon, who said they had been detained by federal officers in unmarked vans.

In response, David Tucker commented, “Good. Get rid of these thugs and I don’t care where you send them.

They are a Pox on our society.”

In another comment, he wrote, “About time someone tough will try to crush the mob before they destroy and kill more innocent people. Bravo to Trump to send in Federal troops.”

When Russell Thomas, a Black tenor, replied in a comment that the Tucker Foundation had given its top prize, the Richard Tucker Award, to only one Black artist since it was first granted in 1978, David Tucker wrote that “pulling the race card is another convenient excuse to modify excellent standards of vocal artistry.”

A spokeswoman for the foundation said Monday that while there had been a single Black winner of the Tucker Award — Lawrence Brownlee, in 2006 — the foundation had awarded a dozen smaller career and study grants to Black artists over the past decade.

Brownlee called David Tucker’s comments “racist” and “deeply disappointing” in a Facebook post on Monday. He said that while he was

The tenor Lawrence Brownlee has been the only Black winner of the Richard Tucker Award since it was first given in 1978. the only Black artist to have received the prize, there were many other Black singers whose talent would have made them worthy recipients.

The Black Opera Alliance, an organization founded last month that aims to expose racial inequity in opera, wrote an open letter to the foundation’s board on Sunday calling for Tucker’s removal.

“We are deeply disturbed,” Derrell Acon, the founder of the group and the director of engagement and equity at Long Beach Opera in California, wrote in the letter, to which other members of the group also contributed. “It is impossible for someone who holds these views to contribute productively to any organization that seeks to cultivate a culture of respect, equity and justice.”

The group called for the foundation to publicly condemn Tucker’s comments, to do more to combat potential racial bias in its leadership and to embrace Black performers.

Since the letter was published,

several past winners of the foundation’s top prize also condemned Tucker’s comments and called for his removal.

Last year’s winner, soprano Lisette Oropesa, tweeted on Sunday evening that Tucker’s comments were “disappointing” and “racist.” Mezzosoprano Joyce DiDonato, who won the 2002 prize and currently serves on the foundation’s board, tweeted on Monday that she had told the foundation that she could not continue to serve unless it removed Tucker.

Mezzo Stephanie Blythe, who won the award in 1999, wrote on Facebook on Monday that she was “horrified” by Tucker’s comments, and also called for his removal.

“These statements were not some spur of the moment, off the cuff comments,” she wrote. “They were full of indoctrinated hate.”

Acon said in an interview that his goal in forming the Black Opera Alliance was to empower Black singers and administrators to speak out

against injustice in the industry. “We don’t want to allow the system to just absorb injustice and for it to become yesterday’s news,” he said. “We want to put companies and institutions to task and make sure they respond in an equitable way.”

Tucker’s removal comes amid a broader reckoning in the opera world over the lack of diversity in classical music. A New York Times story published last week revealed that the Metropolitan Opera has only three Black managing directors on its 45-member board, and just two Black members of its 90-person orchestra.

The Met has not presented an opera by a Black composer in its 137-year history.

Peter Carwell, the Tucker Foundation’s executive director, said in an interview Monday evening that the foundation is assembling a diversity task force. “We’ve discussed these issues in the past,” Carwell said. “And now we feel the need to not only discuss, but prioritize them.”

22

Thursday, July 23, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Family-friendly movies made by diverse filmmakers

By STACY BRICK

F

or parents trying to figure out how to talk to their children about racism, film can be a useful tool for generating empathy. But many family-friendly movies with diverse casts are told from a white perspective, for a white audience. That can rob people of color of their turn as the hero, nullifying their voices. And the stories are usually about racism, presenting the issue as a problem to be solved, wrapping up in a neat resolution.

The following eight movies, suitable for children 7 and older, are written by, directed by and star people of color. They depict stories of struggle, perseverance and joy.

Most don’t end tied up in a bow, which is more realistic and great for opening a dialogue, even just to say, “What do you think happens next?” The beauty of that contemplation is that it gets families thinking and talking about the future, viewed through the lens of the past.

Ages 7+ Hair Love (2019) 7 minutes; available on YouTube.

This Oscar-winning animated short, written and directed by Matthew Cherry, tells the story of a Black father learning to style his daughter Zuri’s hair while her mother (voiced by Issa Rae) is in the hospital. Minimal dialogue helps put the focus on the beautiful animation. HBO announced this month that the characters from the short will appear in a new series called “Young Love.”

The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (2000) 48 minutes (subtitled); available on YouTube and Kanopy.

Sili is a young disabled girl living in Dakar, Senegal.

She begs for money in the same spot daily, but after being bullied, she decides to sell newspapers instead. She soon runs into opposition from the other sellers, who are all boys. The film tells an authentic story with a cast of nonprofessional actors and street children.

Pachamama (2018) 72 minutes, available on Netflix.

Ten-year-old Tepulpai dreams of becoming a shaman in his small Andean village during the 16th century in this animated movie. He sets out on a journey to retrieve a stolen relic and must battle enemies, who include the Inca and Spanish conquistadores intent on destroying his people and all they have built. Each tribe is animated in a slightly different style, making for a unique patchwork effect. The writer-director, Juan Antín, labored on the film for 14 years.

Ages 12+ Crooklyn (1994) 115 minutes; available on Apple, Amazon and Google Play.

It’s 1973, the summer of Troy’s 10th birthday. She jumps rope with friends, steals snacks from the local deli and argues with her four brothers in their Brooklyn brownstone. After visiting her cousin in suburban Virginia, she returns home and is forced to grow up in a hurry. “Crooklyn” is the rare coming-of-age film told from a girl’s point of view. The two-volume ’70s soundtrack, with songs from the Chi-Lites and Smokey Robinson, is killer. The screenplay was written by Spike Lee, his sister Joie Susannah Lee and his brother Cinqué Lee. There is some strong language and mild drug use (glue huffing by two peripheral characters).

The Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) 101 minutes; available on Hulu, Kanopy and Amazon.

Ricky is a 13-year-old foster kid sent to live with a couple in the New Zealand bush. Bella is a loving caregiver, but her husband, Hec, is reluctant to bond with Ricky. After Bella dies suddenly, Ricky and Hec are forced to work together to survive. Writer-director Taika Waititi is expert at writing witty dialogue and fully formed characters, which make the film funny and sincere without being sappy — essential if you’re trying to persuade a skeptical tween to watch with you. There are two rather graphic hunting scenes involving a knife.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2019) 113 minutes (subtitled); available on Netflix.

William is an eager student forced to leave school when his parents can no longer afford the tuition. Determined to help his family survive a drought-induced famine in his small Malawian village, he builds a wind turbine for electricity and irrigation. The film focuses on community and political dynamics in the village, which (along with the drought) necessitate William’s invention.

Chiwetel Ejiofor adapted the screenplay, based on a true story, and stars in and directed the film. The political controversy can be confusing for younger children to follow at times; there is also some violence.

See You Yesterday (2019) 84 minutes; available on Netflix.

This debut feature from director Stefon Bristol, who also co-wrote the script, is a sci-fi tale about two Black friends, C.J. and Sebastian, who try to build a time machine. During their experiments, C.J.’s life takes a tragic turn and she decides to jump back in time to right wrongs, realizing in the process that it isn’t as easy as she thinks to change the past. Strong language and police brutality feature in the narrative.

Wadjda (2012) 98 minutes (subtitled); available on Netflix and Amazon.

Wadjda is an independent 10-year-old girl determined to acquire a bike in order to race her best friend, Abdullah. The only problem is virtuous girls aren’t supposed to ride bikes or have boys as best friends. The film was the first feature-length movie shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, and also the country’s first to be directed by a woman.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

23

During Coronavirus lockdowns, some doctors wondered: Where are the preemies?

A premature newborn at Burnley General Teaching Hospital in east Lancashire, England, in May. Doctors have noted a drop in preterm births during the lockdowns.

By ELIZABETH PRESTON

T

his spring, as countries around the world told people to stay home to slow the spread of the coronavirus, doctors in neonatal intensive care units were noticing something strange: Premature births were falling, in some cases drastically.

It started with doctors in Ireland and Denmark. Each team, unaware of the other’s work, crunched the numbers from its own region or country and found that during the lockdowns, premature births — especially the earliest, most dangerous cases — had plummeted. When they shared their findings, they heard similar anecdotal reports from other countries.

They don’t know what caused the drop in premature births and can only speculate as to the factors in lockdown that might have contributed. But further research might help doctors, scientists and parents-to-be understand the causes of premature birth and ways to prevent it, which have been elusive until now. Their studies are not yet peer-reviewed and have been posted only on preprint servers. In some cases the changes amounted to only a few missing babies per hospital. But they

represented significant reductions from the norm, and some experts in premature birth think the research is worthy of additional investigation.

“These results are compelling,” said Dr. Denise Jamieson, an obstetrician at Emory University’s School of Medicine in Atlanta.

About 1 in 10 U.S. babies is born early. Pregnancy usually lasts about 40 weeks, and any delivery before 37 weeks is considered preterm. The costs to children and their families — financially, emotionally and in long-term health effects — can be great. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, babies born premature, especially before 32 weeks, are at higher risk of vision and hearing problems, cerebral palsy and death.

The best way to avoid these costs would be to prevent early births in the first place, said Dr. Roy Philip, a neonatologist at University Maternity Hospital Limerick in Ireland.

Philip had been vacationing abroad when his country entered lockdown March 12, and he noticed something unusual when he returned to work in late March. He asked why there had been no orders while he was gone for the breast

milk-based fortifier that doctors feed to the hospital’s tiniest preemies. The hospital’s staff said that there had been no need because none of these babies had been born all month.

Intrigued, Philip and his colleagues compared the hospital’s births so far in 2020 with births between January and April in every year since 2001 — more than 30,000 in all. They looked at birth weights, a useful proxy for very premature birth.

“Initially, I thought, ‘There is some mistake in the numbers,’” Philip said.

Over the past two decades, babies under 3.3 pounds, classified as very low birth weight, accounted for about 8 out of every 1,000 live births in the hospital, which serves a region of 473,000 people.

In 2020, the rate was about one-quarter of that. The very tiniest infants, those under 2.2 pounds and considered extremely low birth weight, usually make up 3 per 1,000 births. There should have been at least a few born that spring — but there had been none.

The study period went through the end of April. By the end of June, with the national lockdown easing, Philip said there had still been very few early preemies born in his hospital. In two decades, he said, he had never seen anything like these numbers.

While the Irish team was digging into its data, researchers in Denmark were doing the same thing, driven by curiosity over a “nearly empty” NICU. Dr. Michael Christiansen of the Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen and his colleagues used newborn screening data to compare births nationwide during the strictest lockdown period, March 12 to April 14, with births during the same period in the previous five years. The data set included more than 31,000 infants.

The researchers found that during the lockdown, the rate of babies born before 28 weeks had dropped by a startling 90%.

Anecdotes from doctors at other hospitals around the world suggest the phenomenon may have been widespread, though not universal.

In the United States, Dr. Stephen Patrick, a neonatologist at Vanderbilt Chil-

dren’s Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, estimated there were about 20% fewer NICU babies at his hospital than usual in March. Although some sick full-term babies would stay in the NICU, Patrick said preterm babies usually made up most of the patients, and the drop-off seemed to have been driven by missing preemies.

When Patrick shared his observation on Twitter, some U.S. doctors shared similar stories. Others said their NICUs were as busy as ever. Some groups in other countries have said they didn’t see a change, either.

If lockdowns prevented early births in certain places but not others, that information could help reveal causes of premature birth. The researchers speculated about potential factors.

One could be rest. By staying home, some pregnant women may have experienced less stress from work and commuting, gotten more sleep and received more support from their families, the researchers said.

Women staying at home also could have avoided infections in general, not just the new coronavirus. Some viruses, such as influenza, can raise the odds of premature birth.

Air pollution, which has been linked to some early births, has also dropped during lockdowns as cars stayed off the roads.

Jamieson said the observations were surprising because she would have expected to see more preterm births during the stress of the pandemic, not less.

“It seems like we have experienced tremendous stress in the U.S. due to COVID,” she said.

But all pregnant women may not have experienced the lockdowns in the same way, she said, as different countries have different social safety nets in general, and the stress of unemployment and financial insecurity may have affected communities unevenly.

Some later premature births also might have been avoided during lockdowns simply because doctors weren’t inducing mothers for reasons like high blood pressure, Jamieson said. But that wouldn’t explain a change in very early preterm births, as the Danish and Irish authors found.

24 LEGAL NOTICE IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO.

ROOSEVELT CAYMAN ASSET COMPANY Plaintiff, v.

LILA RITA HERNANDEZ CALDERON

Defendant CIVIL NO. 16-03085-GAG. COLLECTION OF MONEIS - FORECLOSURE OF MORTGAGE. NOTICE OF SALE.

TO: LILA RITA HERNANDEZ CALDERON, General Public, and all parties that may have an interest in the property

WHEREAS, Judgment in favor of Plaintiff was entered for the principal sum of $181,419.48 plus accrued interest annual commencing in 3.00%, and monthly late charges from the 1st day of November, 2016, until the debt is paid in full. Such interests continue to accrue until the debt is paid in full. The Defendants was also ordered to pay Plaintiff late charges in the amount of $33.77 of each and any monthly installment not received by the note holder within 15 days after the installment was due until the debt is paid in full. Such late charges continue to accrue until the debt is paid in full. The defendant was also ordered to pay Plaintiff all advances made under the mortgage note including but not limited to insurance premiums, taxes and inspections as well as 10% of the original principal amount ($18,863.83) to cover costs, expenses, and attorney’s fees guaranteed under the mortgage obligation. WHEREAS, pursuant to said judgment, the undersigned SPECIAL MASTER, Joel Ronda Feliciano, was ordered to sell at public auction for US currency in cash or certified check, without appraisal or right to redemption to the highest bidder and at the office E Street, Lot 3, Section 4, Los Frailes Industrial Park, Guaynabo, Puerto Rico 00969 (18,3699028-66.1126971) the following property: “URBANA: Solar radicado en la Urbanización Ciudad Universitaria, situada en el barrio Cuevas de Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, que se describe en el piano de inscripción de la urbanización con el número cinco de la manzana U, con un área de trescientos veinticinco metros cuadrados.

En lindes por el NORTE, con el solar cuatro, distancia de veinticinco metros; por el SUR, con el solar seis, distancia de vein-

@

ticinco metros; por el ESTE, con el solar ocho, distancia de trece metros; y por el OESTE, con la calle cinco, distancia de trece metros. El inmueble antes descrito contiene una casa de concreto, diseñada para una familia. Recorded at page 242 of volume 481 of Trujillo Alto, Property Registry of San Juan, Fourth Section of San Juan, property number 6,820. The mortgage foreclosed as part of the instant proceeding is recorded at page number 242 of volume number 481 of Trujillo Alto, in the Registry of Property of San Juan, Fourth Section, property number 6,820. Potential bidders are advised to verify the extent of preferential liens with the holders thereof. It is understood that the potential bidders acquire the property subject to any and all the senior liens that encumber the property. It shall be understood that each bidder accepts as sufficient the title that prior and preferential liens to the one being foreclosed upon, including but not limited to any property tax liens (express, tacit, implied or legal) shall continue in effect it being understood further that the successful bidder accepts then and is subrogated in the responsibility for the same and the bid price shall not be applied toward the cancellation of the senior liens. WHEREFORE, the first public sale will be held on September 4th, 2020 at 9:30 am and the minimum bidding amount that will be accepted is the sum of $188,638.34. In the event said first auction does not produce a bidder and the property is not adjudicated, a SECOND public auction shall be held on September 11th, 2020 at 9:30 am and the minimum bidding amount that will be accepted is the sum of $125,758.89. If said second auction does not result in the adjudication and sale of the property, a THIRD public auction shall be held on September 18th, 2020 at 9:40 am and the minimum bidding amount that will be accepted is the sum of $94,319.17. Upon confirmation of the sale, an order shall be issued canceling all junior liens. For further particulars, reference is made to the judgment entered by the Court in this case, which can be examined in the aforementioned office of the Clerk of the United States District Court. San Juan, Puerto Rico, this 9th day of July, 2020. Joel Ronda Feliciano, Special Master. E-mail: rondajoel@me.com. Tel: 787565-0415.

LEGAL NOTICE IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO.

ROOSEVELT CAYMAN ASSET COMPANY IV Plaintiff v.

CARMEN HERNIDHIA COLOMBANI LATORRE

Defendant CIVIL NO. 18-cv-01499 (ADC).

FORECLOSURE OF MORTGAGE AND COLLECTION MONIES. NOTICE OF SALE.

TO: CARMEN HERNIDHIA COLOMBANI LATORRE, General Public, and all parties that may have an interest in the property

WHEREAS, Judgment in favor of Plaintiff was entered for the principal sum of $116,611.16, accrued variable interests starting at 6.95%, and deferred balance of $9,373.33 for a total of $125,984.49 from February 1, 2016 until the debt is paid in full. Such interests continue to accrue until the debt is paid in full. The Defendants was also ordered to pay Plaintiff late charges in the amount of $39.04 of each and any monthly installment not received by the note holder within 15 days after the installment was due until the debt is paid in full.

Such late charges continue to accrue until the debt is paid in full. The defendant was also ordered to pay Plaintiff all advances made under the mortgage note including but not limited to insurance premiums, taxes and inspections as well as 10% of the original principal amount ($12,800.00) to cover costs, expenses, and attorney’s fees guaranteed under the mortgage obligation. WHEREAS, pursuant to said judgment, the undersigned SPECIAL MASTER, Joel Ronda Feliciano, was ordered to sell at public auction for US currency in cash or certified check, without appraisal or right to redemption to the highest bidder and at the office E Street, Lot 3, Section 4, Los Frailes Industrial Park, Guaynabo, Puerto Rico 00969 (18,3699028-66.1126971), the following property: “URBANA: Solar marcado con el número Seiscientos Siete (607) en el bloque LC-35 (607 LC-35) en el plano de inscripción de la Urbanización La Cumbre, radicado en el Barrio Monacillos de Rio Piedras, termino municipal de la Capital de Puerto Rico, con un área superficial de trescientos cuarenta y ocho metros cuadrados con cuatro centímetros cuadrados

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

(348.04). Y colinda por el NORTE: en veinticuatro metros con ochenta centímetros con el Solar número Seiscientos Seis del bloque LC-Treinta y Cinco del mencionado plano; SUR; en veintitrés metros con cuarenta centímetros con el Solar número Seiscientos Ocho del bloque LC-Treinta y Cinco del mencionado plano; ESTE; en dieciséis metros con cincuenta centímetros con la calle denominada “Madison Street” del mencionado piano; OESTE; en doce metros con veinticinco centímetros con terrenos propiedad de la Corporación de Renovación Urbana y Vivienda de Puerto Rico. Enclava en dicho solar una edificación para usos residenciales. The mortgage foreclosed as part of the instant proceeding is recorded at page number 161 of volume number 112 of Monacillos Este y el Cinco, property number 3,541 in the Registry of Property of Puerto Rico, Fifth Section of San Juan. The aforementioned mortgage has one senior lien: i. MORTGAGE: In favor of Doral Mortgage Corporation, in the original principal amount of $20,000.00, with 9.95% annual interests, due on February 1, 2012 constituted by deed #53, executed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on January 28, 2002, before Notary Eric Hernandez Batalla, recorded at mobile volume 267 of Monacillos Este y el Cinco, property #3,541. and one junior lien: i. AL ASIENTO 151 DEL DIARIO 893, se presentó el día 1 de julio de 2010, mandamiento de fecha 21 de junio de 2010, expedida en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de San Juan, en el Caso Civil número KCD2010-2223, para que se anote embargo a favor de Doral Bank, por la suma de $122,109.63. Potential bidders are advised to verify the extent of preferential liens with the holders thereof. It is understood that the potential bidders acquire the property subject to any and all the senior liens that encumber the property. It shall be understood that each bidder accepts as sufficient the title that prior and preferential liens to the one being foreclosed upon, including but not limited to any property tax liens (express, tacit, implied or legal) shall continue in effect it being understood further that the successful bidder accepts then and is subrogated in the responsibility for the same and the bid price shall not be applied toward the cancellation of the senior liens. WHEREFORE, the first public sale will be held on Sept-

(787) 743-3346

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020 ember 4th, 2020 at 9:45 am and the minimum bidding amount that will be accepted is the sum of $128,000.00. In the event said first auction does not produce a bidder and the property is not adjudicated, a SECOND public auction shall be held on September 11th, 2020 at 9:45 am and the minimum bidding amount that will be accepted is the sum of $85,333.33. If said second auction does not result in the adjudication and sale of the property, a THIRD public auction shall be held on September 18th, at 9:45 am and the minimum bidding amount that will be accepted is the sum of $64,000.00. Upon confirmation of the sale, an order shall be issued canceling all liens. For further particulars, reference is made to the judgment entered by the Court in this case, which can be examined in the aforementioned office of the Clerk of the United States District Court.

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, this 14th day of July, 2020. JOEL RONDA FELICIANO, Special Master. Email: rondajoel@ me.com. Phone number: 787565-0415. ****

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 representado 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 21 de julio de 2020.

En FAJARDO, Puerto Rico, el 21 de julio de 2020. WANDA I SEGUI REYES, Secretario(a) Regional. f/ROSE M RODRIGUEZ NEGRON, Secretaria(a) Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL LEGAL NOTICE DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de PriEstado Libre Asociado de Puermera Instancia Sala ( Superior to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL Municipal de) BAYAMON. DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de PriORIENTAL BANK mera Instancia Demandante v.

Sala Superior de FAJARDO.

CRISPULO GERARDO DIAZ VENEGAS t/c/c CRISPULO DIAZ VENEGAS, ELSA IRIS HERNÁNDEZ LÓPEZ t/c/c ELSA DIAZ HERNÁNDEZ, AICITEL DIAZ VENEGAS Y AWILDA LORENZA DIAZ VENEGAS DEMANDANTE Vs

R&G MORTGAGE CORPORATION, EMC MORTGAGE CORPORATION, JOHN DOE

DEMANDADO CIVIL NÚM.: FA2019CV01426.

SALÓN: 604. SOBRE: CANCELACION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A. R&G MORTGAGE CORPORATION; EMC MORTGAGE CORPORATION; JOHN DOE

(Nombre de las partes a las que se les notifica la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que 21 de julio de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este

BANCO SANTANDER PUERTO RICO H/N/C SANTANDER MORTGAGE CORP. JOHN DOE & RICHARD DOE

solución, 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 17 de julio de 2020 . En BAYAMON , Puerto Rico , el 20 de julio de 2020.

LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretario(a). F/ MARIA E. COLLAZO, Secretario(a) Auxiliar

pia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 21 de julio de 2020. En BAYAMON , Puerto Rico , el 21 de julio de 2020.

LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretario(a). F/ MARIA E. COLLAZO, Secretario(a) Auxiliar

LEGAL NOTICE

DEMANDANTE Vs

LEGAL NOTICE Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior de BAYAMON.

FIRST AMERICAN TITLE INSURANCE COMPANY

BANCO CENTRAL Y Estado Libre Asociado de PuerECONOMIAS T/C/C to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL BANCO CENTRAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de PriCORPORATION T/C/C mera Instancia Sala Superior BANCO CENTRAL de BAYAMON. HISPANO-PUERTO NELSON TORRES RICO, HOY BANCO TAVAREZ, CARMEN IRIS SANTANDER SANTIAGO AVILÉS Y LA PUERTO RICO; SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BANCO SANTANDER BIENES GANANCIALES POR ESTOS COMPUESTA PUERTO RICO; EL SR. Demandante v.

ANDRES GONZALEZ BANCO POPULAR DE CUPERES, T/C/C PUERTO RICO como ANDRES GONZALEZ custodio de los archivos CIPRESES, SU ESPOSA de DORAL BANK; JOHN LA SRA. ADELINA DOE & RICHARD ROE COLON CASTILLO, Demandado(a) T/C/C COMO ADELINA Civil: BY2020CV00862. SALA C. COLON, ADILIA C. 502. Sobre: CANCELACION COLONY COMO ADILIA DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. COLON CASTILLO, Y NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENLA SOCIEDAD LEGAL CIA POR EDICTO. DE GANANCIALES A: JOHN DOE Y COMPUESTA POR RICHARD ROE (Nombre de las partes a las que se ELLOS; FULANO DE le notifican la sentencia por edicto) TAL Y MEGANO DE MAS EL SECRETARIO(A) que susCUAL cribe le notifica a usted que el

Demandado(a) Civil: BY2020CV00160. SALA 703. Sobre: CANCELACION 17 de julio de 2020, este TriDE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. bunal ha dictado Sentencia, NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENSentencia Parcial o Resolución CIA POR EDICTO. en este caso, que ha sido debiA: JOHN DOE Y damente registrada y archivada RICHARD ROE en autos donde podrá usted en(Nombre de las partes a las que se terarse detalladamente de los le notifican la sentencia por edicto) términos de la misma. Esta noEL SECRETARIO(A) que sustificación se publicará una sola cribe le notifica a usted que el vez en un periódico de circula17 de julio de 2020, este Trición general en la Isla de Puerbunal ha dictado Sentencia, to Rico, dentro de los 10 días Sentencia Parcial o Resolución siguientes a su notificación. Y, en este caso, que ha sido debisiendo o representando usted damente registrada y archivada una parte en el procedimiento en autos donde podrá usted ensujeta a los términos de la Senterarse detalladamente de los tencia, Sentencia Parcial o Retérminos de la misma. Esta nosolución, de la cual puede estificación se publicará una sola tablecerse recurso de revisión vez en un periódico de circulao apelación dentro del término ción general en la Isla de Puerde 30 días contados a partir to Rico, dentro de los 10 días de la publicación por edicto de siguientes a su notificación. Y, esta notificación, dirijo a usted siendo o representando usted esta notificación que se consiuna parte en el procedimiento derará hecha en la fecha de la sujeta a los términos de la Senpublicación de este edicto. Cotencia, Sentencia Parcial o Re-

DEMANDADO CIVIL NÚM.: CT2020CV00001.

SALÓN: 503. SOBRE: CANCELACION DE HIPOTECA REPRESENTADA POR PAGARE HIPOTECARIO EXTRAVIADO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

FULANO DE TAL,Y MENGANO MAS CUAL; EL SR. ANDRES GONZALEZ CUPERES, T/ C/C ANDRES GONZALEZ CIPRESES, POR SI Y EN REP. DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR EL Y SU ESPOSA, ADELINA COLON CASTILLO Y; LA SRA. ADELINA COLON CASTILLO, T/C/C ADELINA C. COLON, ADILIA C.

The San Juan Daily Star

COLON Y COMO ADILIA COLON CASTILLO, POR SI Y EN REP. DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR ELLA Y SU ESPOSO, ANDRES GONZALEZ CUPERES

(Nombre de las partes a las que se les notifica la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que 21 de julio de 2020, 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 representado 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 21 de julio de 2020.

En BAYAMON, Puerto Rico, el 21 de julio de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretario(a) Regional. IVETTE M. MARRERO BRACERO, Secretaria(a) Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

Thursday, July 23, 2020

VÉLEZ– P.O. BOX 71418 SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO 00936-8518; LCDO. JOSE F. AGUILAR VÉLEZ– P.O. BOX 71418 SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO 00936-8518

(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 21 de julio de 2020, 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 21 de julio de 2020. En PONCE , Puerto Rico, el 21 de julio de 2020. LUZ MAYRA CARABALLO GARCIA, Secretario(a). F/ GISELLE GUTIERES LEON D, Secretario(a) Auxiliar

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO Estado Libre Asociado de Puer- DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUto Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Pri- SALA SUPERIOR DE PONCE. mera Instancia Sala Superior AMERICAS LEADING de PONCE. FINANCE LLC

PR RECOVERY AND DEVELOPMENT JV, LLC Demandante v.

LUIS F. SALCEDO RUIZ, MARISOL RENTAS CRESPO & LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandado(a) Civil: PO2019CV02990. SALA 604. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO (ORDINARIO). NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

LUIS F. SALCEDO RUIZ POR SI Y EN REPRESENTACION DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES A SER NOTIFICADO POR EDICTO P/C DEL LCDO. JOSE F. AGUILAR

Demandante, v.

MIGUEL A. . VEGA COSTA, SU ESPOSA FULANA DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandados CIVIL NÚM.: PO2020CV00351.

Sala: 602. SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA Y EJECUCIÓN DE GRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO (REPOSESIÓN DE VEHÍCULO).

EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. DE AMERICA EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: MIGUEL A. VEGA COSTA, SU ESPOSA FULANA DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL

DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS.

Quedan emplazados y notificados que en este Tribunal se ha radicado Demanda sobre cobro de dinero por la vía ordinaria en la que se alega que los demandados, MIGUEL A. VEGA COSTA, SU ESPOSA FULANA DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS, le adeudan solidariamente al Americas Leading Finance, LLC la suma de principal de la suma de principal de $27,752.55 , más los intereses que continúen acumulando, las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado según pactados.

Además, solicitamos de este Honorable Tribunal que autorice la reposesión y/ o embargo del Vehículo. Se les advierte que este edicto se publicará en un periódico de circulación general una sola vez y que, si no comparecen a contestar dicha Demanda dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación del Edicto, a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https:// unired .ramajudicial. pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia concediendo el remedio así solicitado sin más citarles ni oírles. La abogada de la parte demandante es la Lcdo. Gerardo M. Ortiz Torres, cuya dirección física y postal es: Cond . El Centro I, Suite 801, 500 Muñoz Rivera Ave., San Juan, Puerto Rico 00918; cuyo número de teléfono es (787) 946-5268, el facsímile (787) 946-0062 y su correo electrónico es: gerardo@bellverlaw .com. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal, en Ponce , Puerto Rico, hoy día 10 de julio de 2020. Luz Mayra Caraballo Garicia, Sec Regional. Brenda L Santaiago Lopez, SubSecretaria

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE HUMACAO.

AMERICAS LEADING FINANCE LLC Demandante,

JOSÉ ROJAS RAMOS, SU ESPOSA NATALIE DE LEÓN CAMACHO Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandados CIVIL NÚM.: HU2020CV00535.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO POR LA VIA ORDINARIA Y EJECUCIÓN DE GRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO (REPOSESIÓN DE VEHÍCULO). EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. DE AMERICA EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: NATALIE DE LEÓN CAMACHO POR SÍ Y EN REPRESENTACIÓN DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR ÉLLA Y JOSÉ ROJAS RAMOS.

Quedan emplazados y notificados que en este Tribunal se ha radicado Demanda sobre cobro de dinero por la vía ordinaria en la que se alega que la parte codemandada, NATALIE DE LEÓN CAMACHO POR SÍ Y EN REPRESENTACIÓN DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR ELLA Y JOSÉ ROJAS RAMOS, le adeuda solidariamente a Americas Leading Finance, LLC, la suma de principal de $9,968.22, más los intereses que continúen acumulando, las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado según pactados.

Además, solicitamos de este Honorable Tribunal que autorice la reposesión y/o embargo del Vehículo. Se les advierte que este edicto se publicará en un periódico de circulación general una sola vez y que, si no comparecen a contestar dicha Demanda dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación del Edicto, a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https:// unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia concediendo el remedio así solicitado sin más citarles ni oírles. La abogada de la parte demandante es la Lcdo. Gerardo M. Ortiz Torres, cuya dirección fisica y postal es: Cond. El Centro I, Suite 801, 500 Muñoz Rivera Ave., San Juan, Puerto Rico 00918; cuyo número de teléfono es (787) 946-5268, el facsímile (787) 946-0062 y su correo electrónico es: gerardo@bellverlaw.com. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal, en Humacao, Puerto Rico, hoy día 10 de julio de 2020. Dominga Gomez Fuster, Sec Regional. Dalias Reyes de Leon, SubSecretaria.

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26

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

(Finally) Talkin’ about practice

By MARC STEIN

T

he two happiest NBA players these days just may be Brook and Robin Lopez. Milwaukee’s 7-foot twin brothers double as unabashed Disney lovers.

“There is nothing false about that statement,” Brook Lopez told me when we crossed paths earlier this week at Walt Disney World, which is hosting the rest of the NBA season.

You could see the glee on Lopez’s face even though more than half of it, in accordance with NBA regulations, was covered by a mask. His smile was that big.

The Bucks are a title contender and will be here through mid-October if they can reach the NBA Finals.

It turns out my Monday, if not quite Lopez-level, was pretty good, too. It was my first full day out of quarantine after seven days of being restricted to a 314-square-foot room. I signed up to go to six practices in this new NBA world that suddenly requires no air travel and, despite one cancellation and a couple of timing conflicts, managed to make three of them.

I got to be in a gym again for the first time since March 6 and watched happily as Luka Doncic, at a basket on the far end of the facility, went through his array of jabstep moves against the defense of Dallas assistant coach Jamahl Mosley — just like they do before every game.

As a Dallas resident who typically sees the Mavericks often, it was my first dose of basketball normalcy in a long, long time — apart from the inelegant elbow bump greetings that I tried to exchange with the likes of Doncic, Boban Marjanovic and Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle.

“I’m having a blast,” Carlisle said.

Carlisle’s team plays the Los Angeles Lakers in a scrimmage tonight, and he was too excited by the looming prospect of an actual game to manage to fret over the aesthetics of awkward greetings in the name of public health guidelines. Carlisle said he sensed that the Mavericks were “energized” by the fast-approaching resumption of the 2019-20 season and speculated that many other teams felt the same.

I certainly got a jolt Sunday afternoon from my first exposure to sunlight in a week and the chance to get my daily steps in on actual concrete, but the real lift came Monday when I got to go see a few teams.

As stated in last week’s newsletter, I don’t like to discuss work conditions because this really is a dream job — and complaining out loud is dumb. This trip, though, is different. For the first time in league history, 22 teams are living, practicing and playing in the same place. And I’m one of only 10 independent reporters approved to cover the NBA restart at the league’s centralized location. So I share what I share here and tweet what I tweet from the experience because I don’t think there has ever been a time, in my 27 seasons covering #thisleague, that the audience wanted to know more about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.

There’s a perception, at the so-called NBA bubble, that we’re bunking with LeBron James this summer. In reality, because all face-to-face contact with players, coaches and team staff members is forbidden outside of official interviews and news conferences arranged by the league, we are not supposed to get close to James or anyone else. The way things are set up for the news media at Disney World, chance encounters like the one I had with Lopez can realistically only happen during practice times at the convention center at the Coronado Springs Resort. Three of the league’s seven practice courts are at the convention center, adjacent to a hallway that representatives from the eight teams staying at the Gran Destino are prone to populate.

I found that out Monday afternoon while waiting to get inside the San Antonio Spurs’ practice. Lopez, along with Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer and the Los Angeles Clippers’ Joakim Noah, soon passed by in the short time I was there.

Most of these encounters will generate little more than a hello, because the aforementioned 10 reporters, and a like number from the league’s official media partners at ESPN and Turner, were required to sign unprecedented waivers

Bulls’ Robin Lopez guards his twin brother, the Nets’ Brook Lopez, during the first half of of game on April 8, 2017. pledging that we would not approach any team personnel when we saw them outside of official access periods for the news media.

The rules were conceived by the league for safety reasons. To minimize the risk of a coronavirus outbreak, it wants no one getting close to the principals who does not need to be close. But let’s be clear: There are likely other motivations for league and team officials to have limited our accessible slice of the Coronado Springs property to less than 1 square mile, as measured on a walk by my colleague Ben Golliver of The Washington Post.

They don’t want us to see and document violations — players not wearing masks or failing to maintain a proper distance. They don’t want us to see the inter-team mingling that, in the NBA’s social media era, will inevitably (and instantly) be construed as tampering, like last week when Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka and Andre Iguodala of the Miami Heat, who have a long-standing relationship as former player agent (Pelinka) and client (Iguodala), were spotted walking together.

They don’t want us encroaching on team privacy, and especially player privacy, when those players have already been asked to give up so many of their usual freedoms to play on a campus they are

not allowed to leave without permission for as long as their teams are here.

Interactions like the one I had with Lopez are likely to be even rarer than we expected going in because the league Sunday closed off a common area shared by residents of the media wing and the Gran Destino tower that houses the eight teams with the best records when play was suspended March 11. Two reporters from ESPN and Turner who were invited to campus early kept running into players on their trips to grab food or a coffee, so those zones have been blocked off.

We’ll adjust. We’ll find our opportunities. In the 15-minute blocks of practice that reporters are actually allowed to watch, I saw little more Monday than individual shooting drills and, in the Spurs’ case, players in very spread out folding chairs putting on their sneakers before practice. Yet we will learn to maximize what the new normal affords us, just like the participants.

“Everyone keeps asking, ‘How is the bubble?’ or, ‘How is it going?’” James said Monday after the Lakers’ practice session.

“And I just say, ‘It’s 2020.’ Nothing is normal in 2020. Nothing seems as is, and who knows if it will ever go back to the way it was. But you make the adjustments and you figure it out along the way. That’s what life is all about.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

27

New women’s soccer team, founded by women, will press equal pay cause

By GILLIAN R. BRASSIL

K

ara Nortman’s path to owning a professional women’s soccer team began in Vancouver, British Columbia, when she went looking for a women’s soccer jersey during the 2015 Women’s World Cup. Nortman found some, eventually, without players’ names on the backs.

“I just didn’t understand why it was so hard,” Nortman said. “I was trying to get people to take my money. Why could nobody take it?”

A Southern California native from a sports-driven family, Nortman, a venture capitalist, soon became devoted to women’s soccer, following the top division in the United States, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), and talking about the game with anyone who would listen — including actress Natalie Portman, whom she met at a fundraiser.

Both soon became active supporters of the U.S. women’s team’s fight for equal pay, and after last summer’s Women’s World Cup, they decided it was time to involve themselves more personally in the game.

“Natalie texted me three times, just one line: ‘Let’s bring a team to LA,’” Nortman said.

On Tuesday, their dream became a reality when the NWSL announced that it would expand to Los Angeles in 2022, with a team bankrolled by an ownership group that includes not only Nortman and Portman, but also tennis star Serena Williams and her husband, tech entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian; media consultant Julie Uhrman; and more than a dozen former members of the U.S. women’s team.

The Los Angeles team, which said it would release its name and stadium plans before the end of the year, will be the only team in the NWSL to be owned almost entirely by women. The ownership group of 33 people also includes several women of color, including actresses Uzo Aduba, Eva Longoria and America Ferrera, and talk-show host Lilly Singh.

Perhaps befitting such a diverse ownership group — which also includes World Cup winners Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy and Abby Wambach — the team came into being in a nontraditional way.

The owners decided on a mission before

The N.W.S.L. will add a team in Louisville next year and another in Los Angeles in 2022. approaching the league, then consulted members of the U.S. women’s national team and their players association to better understand the needs of women’s pros. The mission was clear from the start, said Uhrman, the club’s president: “Champions on and off the field.”

Part of that motto, she said, would be embracing the fight for pay equity for women by bolstering media coverage of the league, securing new sponsorships and, ultimately, creating stronger revenue streams through increased viewership.

“It’s our goal to have women’s professional soccer players make a living only playing women’s professional soccer,” Uhrman said.

Becca Roux, executive director of the U.S. Women’s National Team Players Association, said the combination of female investors, former women’s pros and people of color on the new team’s board of directors had the potential to

be game-changing steps for not only the NWSL, but for other major leagues. Williams and Ohanian’s 2-year-old daughter, Olympia, is also listed as an investor.

“We’ve seen other athletes — mostly men — join ownership of sports teams in recent years, but not so much women because they often didn’t make enough money in their careers to buy into a sports franchise,” Roux said.

Many challenges remain for the NWSL. The league’s new commissioner, Lisa Baird, has helped stabilize the league since taking over earlier this year and helped attract several deeppocketed sponsors to help underwrite its summer tournament. But the NWSL also requested and received a loan from the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program this spring to cover the salaries of its players, who despite a recent raise still earn as little as $20,000 a year.

There are nine teams in the NWSL,

and a 10th, in Louisville, Ky., is set to join in 2021. The NWSL kicked off its eighth season late last month amid the coronavirus pandemic with a so-called bubble tournament in Utah. The semifinals of the event, the Challenge Cup, were to be played Wednesday. The league will crown a champion with a nationally televised game Sunday afternoon.

Plans for a coaching staff and players of the new Los Angeles team, which for now is called Angel City, will become more concrete in 2021, league officials said. But the work for change off the field will start sooner, through a partnership with the LA84 Foundation’s Play Equity Fund, which promotes access to sport for young athletes, particularly those of color.

“You just need a ball, some dirt and some grass, which makes it the most played sport in the world,” Nortman said. “Getting access to soccer and other sports into those communities is critical.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Michael Bennett, a protest pioneer, retires from the NFL

By KEN BELSON

M

ichael Bennett, the standout NFL defensive end who spoke out forcefully against racial injustice during his career, said he was retiring after an 11-year career, primarily with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Seattle Seahawks.

“Retiring feels a little like death of self, but I’m looking forward to the rebirth — the opportunity to reimagine my purpose,” Bennett, 34, wrote on Instagram. “I have never been more at peace in my life.”

Bennett, like his younger brother, Martellus, a tight end who last played in the NFL in the 2017 season, never shied away from sharing his opinions. In 2017, after the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Bennett was part of a group of players who began protesting during the playing of the national anthem to raise awareness of police brutality and other forms of injustice. But while most players knelt or raised a fist during the anthem, Bennett drew extra attention because he chose to sit on the bench.

He was later joined by a white teammate, offensive lineman Justin Britt, who put his hand on Bennett’s shoulder in solidarity.

Doug Baldwin, a Seahawks wide receiver who retired after the 2018 season, said Bennett was never afraid to share his opinions, often backed by data, in and out of the locker room. But he was also willing to listen to others who did not agree with him. At the same time, he followed unconventional paths, as when he chose to sit during the national anthem.

“Obviously, he cared deeply about the same issues as we did, but he had his own way of fighting and speaking out,” Baldwin said. “He was never afraid to express himself. Whether it was trying to bring people together or being divisive, his intention was to get people to look outside themselves.”

Bennett’s protests were informed by his personal experience. In August 2017, Bennett was outside a Las Vegas nightclub when police were investigating a report of shots fired. Two officers approached Bennett and eventually handcuffed him at gunpoint. Bennett later said the officers had racially profiled him and used excessive force, including an officer kneeling on his back. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department denied that its force was unwarranted.

In 2018, Bennett was indicted on a felony charge, accused of assaulting an elderly security guard when he rushed the field after the 2017 Super Bowl, which Martellus won as a member of the New England Patriots.

The charge was dismissed in 2019 because of a lack of evidence.

He shared his views about racial inequality, police violence and athletes’ roles in protest movements in “Things That Make White People Uncomfortable,” a book he co-wrote that was published in 2018.

In college, he said he was astonished at how white coaches tried to mold Black players in their image.

Bennett said about his experience at Texas A&M:

In 2017, after the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Michael Bennett was among the players who protested during the national anthem to raise awareness of police brutality and other forms of injustice.

“We had white coaches, and they wanted the Black players to be the embodiment of who they were. They would tell us to wear our pants and shoes a certain way; this is what it meant to ‘be a man.’”

He called out the NFL for effectively banning Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who began kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 but who has gone unsigned since becoming a free agent after that season.

“The NFL holds up as leaders players who have been accused of rape, violence against women, and even manslaughter,” Bennett wrote. “They’re right in front of us, playing quarterback and winning Super Bowl MVP awards. I’d much rather call a leader someone who helps his community.”

Bennett was signed by the Seahawks as an undrafted free agent in 2009. He was waived early that season and picked up by the Buccaneers, who moved him to defensive tackle.

After four seasons at Tampa Bay, the Seahawks signed him again, this time to a one-year contract in 2013. He joined what was already the league’s most dominant defense, helping the Seahawks win their only Super Bowl championship that season in large part because of a

strong pass rush and defensive backfield.

Bennett was chosen to play in the Pro Bowl three times in his career. In 2018, he was traded to the Philadelphia Eagles, where he played one season. In 2019, he played with the Patriots and the Dallas Cowboys. In October, the Patriots suspended him for one week, citing conduct detrimental to the team; Bennett said it was after a philosophical disagreement with his position coach.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

29

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

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

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

(Mar 21-April 20)

You don’t have to sing your own praises. There are plenty of people who admire your skills.

Let your work speak for itself. If you’re just setting yourself up in business, your talent will be obvious to anyone who takes an interest.

Word of mouth will soon spread as each happy customer steers new ones in your direction.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Problems at work will need tactful handling.

Talking about people behind their backs could come back to haunt you. Compromise with colleagues who you feel are being unreasonable. Be the one to suggest a middle ground. If you have to adjust your methods to accommodate a colleague’s needs, this is not a sign of weakness. It will prove you are a team player.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

If a youngster has asked for your advice, make this a top priority. You can help younger members of your family by supporting them to accomplish their goals. Encouraging them to save up for something they want to buy will help them manage their money. Don’t be tempted to make big financial sacrifices for the ones you love.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

You have been trying to fulfil everyone else’s needs and expectations and you’ve forgotten about your own. Take time to think about what you would like and what would make you most content then take steps to find that happiness. Anyone who makes you feel guilty should be kept at a distance. You don’t need such negativity.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Signing up for an advanced course will make you feel you are doing something to improve your life. Apply for a grant or scholarship if this will ease your financial situation. Prepare to fill out some long applications and your diligence will pay off. Before voicing your opinions, find facts and reliable information to confirm your views.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

A neighbour or friend is still relying on you to help them out when they no longer need you. You were happy to do them a few favours when they were at their most vulnerable but this was never meant to be a permanent arrangement. It is time to encourage them to be more independent. Serving others is robbing you of time and energy.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

ou’re troubled about keeping on top of work, family matters and finances. It sometimes feels as if life will never get back to any kind of normality. A change of surroundings can change your outlook. Making a gratitude list can help remind you of what you have to be grateful for.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Performing thankless jobs gets you down and you’re tired of the monotony. Try a different approach to tasks to make them more interesting. You need a job that stimulates you and fills you with excitement. Such a change may not be possible at this time and all you can do is make the most of the situation.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Make time for your friends and family even if you’re in a new romantic relationship.

People who have been with you through the good times and the bad need to know they can rely on you when they need you. Instead of acting like you and your amour are attached at the hip, venture out alone.

You are pouring too much energy into your work and outside responsibilities. Community commitments are making a lot of demands on your time. If you feel like your life isn’t your own anymore it is time to make a change.

Starting a business from home will improve family relationships. Slow down and smell the flowers.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

You’ve been spending too much time on social media as your online network has expanded rapidly. It’s time to put your social life on hold and to concentrate on your work or studies. Give yourself the time to complete course work and study for tests or exams. Showing respect to a mentor by listening attentively will help you achieve success.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

People are looking to you for guidance. Role modelling plays an important part in the lives of younger relatives and workmates. Be consistent in your words and behaviour. A family heirloom will be offered to you and it will mean a lot to know someone thinks so well of you. This will inspire you to learn more about your background.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Thursday, July 23, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 23, 2020

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