Monday Jul 27, 2020

Monday, July 27, 2020

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NMEAD Chief: Emergency Plans for Major Weather Events Are Well Advanced Correa Says Island’s Disaster-Response Agency Is Ready to Face a Storm, Hurricane Amid Quakes and Pandemic

MIDA to Consumers: Shop Responsibly, Don’t Hoard

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Everything You Need to Know About This Week’s Federal Stimulus Package Negotiations P6

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

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GOOD MORNING

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July 27, 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.

Legislation to ban bullying in workplace approved by Senate

Today’s

Weather

By THE STAR STAFF

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he Puerto Rico Senate has approved House Bill 306, legislation that would ban workplace bullying.

Penned by House Rep. José Enrique Meléndez, the bill, approved in the special session last week, would declare as public policy a ban against bullying on the job and would define procedures, prohibitions and sanctions to deal with the problem.

In addition, the bill empowers the Department of Labor and Human Resources, the Office of Administration and Transformation of Human Resources, and the legislative and judicial branches to adopt and publish the necessary regulations to manage and implement the new public policy against workplace bullying.

The measure defines workplace harassment as repeated verbal, written or physical abusive conduct by the employer, its supervisors or employees, outside the legitimate interests of the employer’s company.

The bill explains that, as experts on the subject have established, workplace harassment involves a hostile and unethical communication that is systematically administered by one or several individuals, mainly against a single individual who is thrown into a situation of solitude and prolonged helplessness, based on frequent, persistent acts of harassment over a long period of time.

The measure warns that, although in Puerto Rico there

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is no specific legislation that regulates the practice of harassment in the context of the workplace, this does not prevent employers from incurring civil liability for injurious conduct under the Puerto Rico Civil Code.

The new law will apply to all employees, regardless of their job status.

The proposed legislation would make employers who commit, promote or allow workplace harassment, liable for the problem.

Every employer will be required to take the needed steps to ensure the workplace is free from workplace harassment.

For employers who have signed collective agreements with their employees under the Puerto Rico Labor Relations Act, the Labor Relations Act for Public Services, and the Federal Labor Relations Act -- all of which contain clauses that prohibit workplace harassment in their workplaces -- it will be understood that they have complied with the obligation imposed by the proposed law.

All employers will always be responsible for the actions of supervisory personnel under their charge unless they can prove that they took immediate action to correct the problem. If the employer shows that he or she has taken immediate and appropriate actions to correct the situation, he or she will enjoy immunity against claims under the provisions of the law.

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Monday, July 27, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Nino Correa: ‘We can’t let our guard down’ NMEAD commissioner says earlier tropical storm warning helped finesse contingency plans

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

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s the National Weather Service (NWS) keeps an eye on a climatic event that is approaching the Lesser Antilles, Emergency Management and Disaster Administration Bureau (NMEAD by its Spanish acronym) Commissioner Nino Correa said on Sunday that emergency plans for major weather events have been finessed since Tropical Storm Gonzalo dissipated over the weekend.

Ever since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the Atlantic hurricane season was going to have above-normal activity, NMEAD has updated contingency plans, conducted emergency drills with various first-response agencies, and met with mayors and municipal emergency directors to refine their concerns and adjust earlier plans in order to deal with a major storm during the COVID-19 pandemic and since the earthquakes that began in late December, Correa said. Meanwhile, the bureau remains aware of the most recent meteorological phenomenon that, at press time, the NWS classified as a tropical wave.

“Up until today [Sunday], the earth is still shaking, it’s a bit complicated, and, nevertheless, we have a worldwide pandemic [of COVID-19] that we are aware of and Puerto Rico is not an exception as we have seen cases go up day by day. We can’t let our guard down.” Correa said. “There

must be great concern as the tremors and the coronavirus is not a page [from a book] we can close, turn over or put down. Apart from preparing our plans, we must deliver them with our communities.”

The NMEAD commissioner told The Star that rather than preparing contingency plans and meeting with different sectors to address issues, he wants everyone to be clear on how to execute them. Likewise, he said that although the NMEAD had their set of plans available, they had to be modified in order to be tempered to the recent health crisis, such as pursuing physical distancing in shelters, having personal protective equipment for dislodged citizens and officials, and working along with the island Health Department to address any suspicious case of COVID-19 during an emergency.

“When it comes to our evacuation plan, we are aware of the communities that suffer from severe flooding; however, we acknowledge that other areas have been affected after Hurricane Maria and the earthquakes,” Correa said.

“Due to this, we felt obligated to change the places that we used as shelters.”

The official added that the bureau has identified other spaces besides schools so they can enable them by installing power generators and water tanks while maintaining all safety measures against COVID-19 and other mishaps. Some of those spaces have been community centers, hotels, motels, abandoned warehouses and inactive pharmaceutical facilities that, after swift sanitization, could be available to shelter citizens safely.

“We considered both warehouses and pharmaceuticals as these are vastly spacious; if enabling them is cost-efficient, we can use the same method as emergency tents by installing wooden panels to create divisions in case we must isolate a citizen or we have to keep them all under quarantine,” Correa said. “All of this means that all mayors must develop their own work plans and adjustments and, through our 10 regions, we have kept contact with our regional directors and have been monitoring to

Márquez: ‘Try not to hoard products’ MIDA executives call for consumers to shop responsibly as ‘supplies are limited’

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

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s Puerto Rico residents experience rising anxiety due to the likely formation of a tropical depression that could gain strength before arriving in the lesser Lesser Antilles late next week, Chamber of Food Marketing, Industry and Distribution (MIDA by its Spanish acronym) executives on Sunday called for consumers to shop responsibly as supplies have been limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the one hand, MIDA Board of Directors President Ferdysac Márquez said supermarkets have prepared emergency plans for the hurricane season, such as having reserved supplies including water and other essential products. However, Márquez added that during

the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, suppliers have received less merchandise and therefore have delivered less to supermarkets, making rationing necessary to preserve the flow of goods. For this reason, he said, consumers should not hoard products.

“I will use this interview to say something to consumers. We have merchandise available, [but] it’s not optimal for inventory, [so] try not to hoard products,” Márquez said. “As people go out unrestrained to hoard products, we definitely cannot hold a week in inventory.”

MIDAVice President Manuel Pérez said that during the COVID-19 pandemic supermarkets are going through rough times as suppliers are not buying enough products and are only handing out 30-40 percent of the merchandise the markets need to fill their shelves. However, he said the island’s supermarkets hold a variety of products that can work as alternatives for other goods.

“To keep our customers calm, supermarkets have a variety of products that can substitute for other products that we are short on,” Pérez said. “And that’s how we should see our food supply chain in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico should not be starving. There are some products that will be limited [due to COVID-19], but others that can work as replacements and other alternatives that can meet your needs.”

Nonetheless, he called for people to prepare their inventory ahead of time for hurricane season. Pérez recommends that consumers have

NMEAD Commissioner Nino Correa supply everything they need.”

Meanwhile, as The Star published a story on July 2 describing how the island Housing Department took almost three years to start rebuilding houses that were demolished by Hurricane Maria under the Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery Program, Correa was asked how NMEAD is helping residents who, after more than 1,000 days, still have their homes under tarps, Correa replied that the bureau has identified a Federal Emergency Management Agency warehouse with tarps and proposed to the previous NMEAD commissioner, Brig.

Gen. José Burgos, to hand them to all 78 municipalities and advised their mayors to visit every home and install them properly; at press time, NMEAD had handed out 22,793 tarp rolls in 53 towns.

“Everyone knows that the tarps have been installed for a year or two under our island’s scorching sun, so you must know how those tarps are doing,” Correa said. “We have told every municipality that with the 360 tarps we handed out, they should identify residences that need a replacement and to keep a tally in case they need more.

We don’t want our citizens to keep losing things.”

The Star inquired with the Puerto Rico Hospitals Association to find out how hospitals are preparing for hurricane season, but was told that association president Jaime Plá was unavailable until Aug. 3. a reserve of essential and non-perishable products that lasts for 10 days in case of any climatic event. Likewise, he said consumers should not wait until the last minute to get ready, as they might find themselves without the opportunity to do so.

“Do not wait for the first hurricane warning to go running out to supply yourselves and then not be able to find what you need, instead of filling your inventory at home with time in advance,” Pérez said.

“We’ll see how that goes and how people will react now, because, as Dr. Márquez said, when we get increased demands suddenly, we get an artificial shortage, which is very difficult for us to [resupply] swiftly.

It will take as long as it takes for the chain to get merchandise back.”

The MIDA vice president also called for Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced to stop enforcing curfew hours against supermarkets, as such limitations on operating hours are bound to cause consumers to crowd into supermarkets, increasing the chances of turning them into COVID-19 hotspots, especially with a potential storm heading for the island.

“We have to scatter people, we have to disperse those sales so people have greater opportunities to shop, and not develop hotspots in our establishments,” Pérez said. “In a situation where a storm or a hurricane would affect Puerto Rico in the midst of COVID-19, it’s something that we have never experienced. And now, we are limiting people from going into our stores and we can’t have the dynamics from before where stores got packed and lines would start at the end of the establishment.That should not happen and we need everyone’s support, and we need for the government to not limit our hours of operation.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

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PRASA cancels water rationing for Carraízo customers

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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queduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA) Executive President Doriel Pagán Crespo announced on Sunday morning the cancellation of the service interruption plan for the 140,000 clients in the municipalities of Canóvanas, Carolina, San Juan and Trujillo Alto who are supplied by the Carraízo reservoir.

The determination was made after analysis of the reservoir and after receiving rain and good runoff in the surrounding basins in recent days, PRASA said in a written statement.

“Due to recent rains and the return of a more frequent pattern of rainfall, we have determined that today (Sunday) there is sufficient water to supply all the Authority’s clients who use the Carraízo reservoir without the need for an interruption plan,” Pagán Crespo said.

“However, this is not the time to let your guard down.

We must continue to be prudent in the use of water.”

The official expressed gratitude “to Governor Wanda Vázquez Garced for her continuous support during this period in favor of fair service for the Authority’s clients, as well as the agency’s entire team, which continues to work exhaustively for our subscribers.”

“PRASA will continue the implementation of initiatives for the optimization of the management processes at the reservoir,” she said.

The municipalities of Carolina, San Juan, Trujillo Alto and parts of Canóvanas will once again have potable water service on a regular basis. The process of returning to normal operation will commence today at 9 a.m. when the valves and pump stations will be jointly opened, both for zone A and zone B. The operation will be carried out gradually to mini-

mize breakdowns and sudden changes in pipeline pressures, Pagán Crespo noted. Service recovery will take longer for higher elevations and more remote sectors.

To stay informed about everything related to other rationing plans, as well as tips for conserving water during daily use, customers can access the website www. acueductospr.com (http://www.acueductospr.com/).

Moratorium on registration of commercial gas installations in effect until Aug. 31

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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Luis D. García Fraga, president of the Bureau of Transport and Other Public Services

uis D. García Fraga, president of the Bureau of Transport and Other Public Services (NTSP by its Spanish initials), announced Sunday a moratorium until Aug. 31 on the registration of commercial installations by gas franchises using the digital platform www.renovacionesonline. com.

With the approval of the second phase of the NTSP Code of Regulations, after numerous meetings with the various gas companies in Puerto Rico, a transitional clause was established with a term of three months from the date on which the regulation will go into force, so that everything related to gas franchises begins in effect.

The term expired on May 29.

“Due to the emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the governor, Wanda Vázquez Garced, has issued

several Executive Orders with guidelines aimed at preventing the spread of the [corona]virus throughout Puerto Rico and we have complied with them, continuing our services using the new digital platform,” García Fraga said. “This has been achieved thanks to the approval of the Second Phase of the Code of Regulations, which transforms all the processes of what was the Public Service Commission into [more] flexible and efficient [processes] for the benefit of all companies, from the smallest to the largest.”

Despite the fact that all the pertinent requests by gas franchises are already programmed in the new platform, even these are not properly registered so that they can acquire the services -- such as gas technician and commercial installation services, among others -- that qualify them as having gas franchise authorization within the platform.

García Fraga also maintained that

“without a doubt, we continue to face great challenges.”

“However, we have not stopped working to achieve the registration of all entities regulated by the NTSP in the new digital platform,” he said. “Thanks to this and despite the closure caused by the pandemic, the vast majority of our services have continued without major problems.”

The moratorium approved until Aug. 31 establishes that gas franchises must register on the NTSP platform, and acquire the services of commercial facilities that they have carried out from last March 13 to Aug. 31.

Meanwhile, all gas franchises that are authorized to carry out commercial installations are ordered to register their franchises in the system at www.renovacionesonline.com on or before Aug. 14. In this way, being duly registered, they can acquire the other service authorizations required by the Code of Regulations.

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Monday, July 27, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Republicans and Democrats to discuss stimulus package today

By THE STAR STAFF

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fter failing to reach an agreement on a broad coronavirus stimulus package last week, the White House and the Republicans will start negotiations with Democrats today to avoid reaching this week’s deadline for expiring unemployment benefits without an agreement.

The federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act authorized a $600 weekly enhancement to unemployment benefits through July 31 (this Friday). However, all states and Puerto Rico stopped paying benefits this weekend due to an administrative procedure having to do with their calendars. Sensing the potential economic calamity of pulling unemployment benefits at once and to break the deadlock, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin suggested Congress should consider a smaller amount in unemployment benefits to replace them. Mnuchin told Fox News he proposed a measure that would give the unemployed 70 percent of the income they were earning before the coronavirus pandemic forced the shutdown of the economy.

The Democrats are pushing for a plan that was approved back in May that would extend the $600 a week unemployment payments until January and have an overall impact in Puerto Rico of $20 billion. The plan is part of a $3 trillion measure that would send Americans new stimulus checks and help cities and states, but the White House and Senate Republicans delayed negotiations until recent days. Republicans had hoped last week to present a unified GOP plan on July 22, but factions within the GOP couldn’t reach an agreement and now they are hoping to have a united offer to present to Democrats. Late Thursday they were still fighting over whether to include a demand by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) related to manufacturing and China, according to the Washington Post.

“I guess the only way I could characterize it is, it’s a work in progress,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican.

“I think we’ll get something done before it’s all said and done, but like everything else in this process forever, it’s gonna be loud, messy, appear to be almost doomed on many occasions,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-

Fla.) told the Post.

As differences intensified and this week’s deadline neared, the White House agreed to scrap President Trump’s demand to include a payroll tax cut in the package after the provision was met with fierce resistance by Republicans.

The news comes as thousands in Puerto Rico are still trying to receive unemployment checks. As of last Thursday, the island Labor and Human Resources Department had received 633,922 unemployment applications and more than 300,000 Pandemic Unemployment Assistance applications.

The delays on Capitol Hill occur amid an increase in the number of coronavirus infections in the U.S. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 4 million people have been infected and at press time Sunday there were nearly 146,000 deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

A labor union in Puerto Rico held a protest Saturday at Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in Carolina to stop the entrance of visitors, who are the focus of much of the blame for spreading the virus on the island.

Gym owners sue government over COVID-19 closure

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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group of gym and fitness center owners and users calling itself Gimnasios Unidos por Puerto Rico (Gymnasiums United for Puerto Rico) has filed a lawsuit requesting that Section 19 of Executive Order 2020-54 mandating the closure of gymnasiums during the COVID-19 emergency be declared unconstitutional, the group announced in a written statement Sunday.

The group made the decision after Gov. WandaVázquez Garced ordered the closure of their facilities without a scientific study or evidence of contagion in them, the group said.

“This decision [to unilaterally close the gyms] is totally incorrect since there is no evidence of outbreaks or infections originating in our establishments,” said group spokesman Abdiel Lugo. “On the contrary, our focus in the reopen-

ing had been through activities in which the precautions recommended by the experts were followed.”

The governor’s determination has deprived gym owners of their livelihood and use of their property, only days after spending large sums of money on protective equipment, the group said.

The plaintiffs are asking the San Juan Superior Court to review the constitutionality of Executive Order 202054 since, in their opinion, it intervenes and undermines contractual obligations between them and their clients and violates the freedom of assembly.

In addition, they argued that the government does not have the power to intervene with these rights through an executive order and that to proceed it would have to be done by law.

The gym industry contributes $70 million annually to the island economy.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

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Congress was already broken. The Coronavirus could make it worse.

By CARL HULSE

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conservative Republican House member profanely accosts a Democratic congresswoman as she strides up the Capitol steps to do her job during multiple national calamities.

With expanded jobless benefits supporting tens of millions of fearful Americans about to expire and a pandemic raging, Senate Republicans and the Trump White House cannot agree among themselves about how to respond, let alone begin to bargain with Democrats.

In a private party session, archconservative Republicans ambush their top female leader and demand her ouster over political and policy differences.

And that’s just the past few days.

By nearly any measure, Congress is a toxic mess seemingly incapable of rising to the occasion even at a time of existential threats. No one knows that better than those who, until recently, served there.

“Congress has largely become a dysfunctional institution unable to meet the critical needs of our country,” said a new report, “Congress at a Crossroads,” produced by the Association of Former Members of Congress. Scheduled to be issued publicly next week, it is a damning indictment of the steady deterioration of a congressional culture that today rewards power over progress and conflict over consensus.

And it warns that, while recent moves to allow Congress to function safely during the pandemic may be necessary, they could make things worse.

Based on 40 hours of interviews with 30 House members and a senator who left Congress after the 2018 elections after serving a combined 275 years, the report offers some hope, asserting that most lawmakers arrive on Washington yearning to be constructive.

But overall, it paints a grim portrait of an institution that has ceased to work as it should. A course correction may be more critical now than ever before, the report said, as the nation faces “outsize challenges” that place congressional shortcomings in stark relief.

“The pandemic alone is a call to our elected officials for the type of leadership and vision we expect at a moment of crisis,” said the report, which grew out of interviews conducted by Leonard Steinhorn, a professor of communication at American University, and Mark Sobol, an author and expert on organizational development and executive leadership. “But we are also facing another reckoning, one over our nation’s original sin and the racial inequities that have beset our country since its founding.”

The study ticks through familiar themes when it comes to assessing the sorry state of Congress: the lack of any real acrossthe-aisle relationships, a schedule that limits opportunities for interaction, too much power concentrated in leadership, constant fundraising demands, discouragement of bipartisanship, the negative influence of round-the-clock media, the fact that the most important election for lawmakers is often their primary, and the shutting out of minority-party voices.

It also warns that the shifts toward a more virtual Congress as a result of the pandemic, such as a new system of proxy voting in the House that allows lawmakers to cast their votes without

“Congress has largely become a dysfunctional institution unable to meet the critical needs of our country,” says a new report, “Congress at a Crossroads,” produced by the Association of Former Members of Congress. traveling to Washington, could exacerbate the existing problems.

If the idea of a remote Congress takes hold, the report suggests, it would be a serious setback to efforts to enhance bipartisan interaction.

“Because of the pandemic, Congress was forced to conduct much of its business virtually, and we certainly understand why,” the report said. “But as much as that may have been a necessity, it should not be interpreted as a virtue.”

The document said Congress needs “more and not less in-person interaction among members of Congress. They need to learn more about each other’s districts, hold civil conversations aimed at finding common ground, build relationships of trust that can lead understanding and solutions.”

In a week when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was verbally assaulted without provocation by Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla.; and fellow Republicans ganged up on Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., in a hostile confrontation, the call for civility rang especially true.

At its core, the report said that the most important thing lawmakers and leaders of both parties could do was to find ways to promote more communication and understanding across the aisle.

It is a long-standing complaint about Congress that with time spent in Washington now deemed a negative, lawmakers just do not interact socially and consequently find it much easier to dismiss the other side. The disconnect has been exacerbated in recent years as the polarization intensified and Republicans and Democrats now have little contact with one another. The authors said that situation must change if there is any chance for Congress

to become more functional.

“Those relationships are the secret sauce for getting things done, understanding each other and building bridges across geography and ideology,” said Steinhorn.

One lawmaker who took part in the study, former Rep. Michael Capuano, D-Mass., said he had been struck by the concerted effort by leaders of both parties to keep the sides separated from the start, intentionally discouraging any cross-party bonding.

“I didn’t come into Congress as a novice, and the concept of partisanship was not new to me,” said Capuano, who was first elected in 1998. “But the concept of not even talking to the other side was new to me. All day long there was an intention to split you up. There was not one iota of an attempt to bring us together.”

And with the most serious challenge to a sitting lawmaker coming chiefly from a primary these days, the incentive to find common ground is vastly reduced, inhibiting the search for compromise, which has become a dirty word, politically speaking.

Recognizing the need for more communication, the report offers multiple recommendations, including encouraging lawmakers to travel as part of congressional delegations as well as for field hearings, visits to districts of lawmakers from the other party and bipartisan retreats. It also recommended more social functions and even scheduled weekend sessions of Congress to give lawmakers more time to interact.

“There is going to be no substitute for connecting with people, building relationships and staying connected,” said Sobol. “Forging relationships in action is what we are advocating.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

‘Mugged by reality,’ Trump finds denial won’t stop the pandemic

House Speak­er Nancy Pelos­i (D-Ca­lif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) at her weekly news conference at the Capitol in Washington, on Thursday, July 23, 2020.

By PETER BAKER

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e insisted that it was safe, that people could go back to work, that schools could reopen, that he could hold packed indoor campaign rallies, that he could even hold a fullfledged, boisterous, bunting-filled nominating convention as if all were well.

Only now, it is all crashing down around President Donald Trump. The president who scoffed at masks and pressured states to reopen and promised a return to the campaign trail finds himself canceling rallies, scrapping his grand convention, urging Americans to stay away from crowded bars and at long last embracing, if only halfheartedly, wearing masks.

It may not be the death of denial, but it is a moment when denial no longer appears to be a viable strategy for Trump. For more than three years in office, he proved strikingly successful at bending much of the political world to his own vision of reality, but after six months the coronavirus pandemic is turning out to be the one stubborn, inalterable fact of life that he cannot simply force into submission through sheer will.

The president’s springtime confidence that he could cheerlead the country back to a semblance of normalcy in time to kick-start the moribund economy and power himself to a second term in November’s election has proved unequal to the grim summertime medical and autopsy reports emerging from the South and West. With

60,000 new cases and 1,000 more deaths being registered each day, Trump has been forced this week to retreat from the rose-colored assessment of the health of the nation — and his presidency.

Not that he has admitted a change. As he revived his coronavirus briefings this week, he still insisted that most of the country was doing well and offered upbeat predictions about conquering the virus. But his actions belied that view as he canceled the convention in Jacksonville, Florida, citing the same health care concerns that he had disparaged in shifting it abruptly from Charlotte, North Carolina, in the first place.

Even the decision to begin holding the briefings again was itself an admission that the crisis he wanted so desperately to be over in fact is accelerating even as he falls behind former Vice President Joe Biden by double digits in the polls. Trump would have rather been talking about almost any subject other than the virus, but there he was again at the lectern three days in a row dutifully reading the warnings that his advisers had given him to read.

“This is a case when you line it all up, it’s the last season of ‘The Apprentice,’ we’ve got 100 days left and the reality TV star just got mugged by reality,” said Rahm Emanuel, who served in Congress and as White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama before becoming mayor of Chicago.

His defenders said Trump has responded to the situation as it has changed. “With this virus

we entered a realm of unknown unknowns, making decision-making tough for anyone, including this president,” said Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax and a friend of Trump’s.

“Considering the conflicting advice he’s gotten from medical experts, I think he’s done a great job on the economic response and a good job in lowering the daily death count. The public will eventually see that.”

In speaking before the cameras this week, White House officials insisted that Trump had not changed his view of the virus at all and that he always took it seriously. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, however, senior Republican officials express exasperation that the president in their view mishandled the virus, leaving the party vulnerable to not only losing the White House but the Senate as well.

The public has grown increasingly worried as caseloads soar to twice as high as they were during the earlier peak of the pandemic in March and April. Where just 30% of Americans believed the crisis was getting worse in early June, 66% now believe it is, according to Gallup. Three-quarters of those surveyed said they expected the disruption to travel, school, work and public events to continue until the end of the year or even into next year before the situation begins to improve.

“He needed to be the pandemic president.

Instead he became a pandemic denier,” said Dr. Jonathan S. Reiner, a prominent cardiologist who treated former Vice President Dick Cheney. “Unfortunately, when a president refuses to accept scientific reality,” Reiner added, “his words and actions are emulated by large numbers of Americans who then dismiss the seriousness of the pandemic with predictable disastrous consequences.”

From the start, Trump has repeatedly underestimated the virus, likening it to the flu, frequently predicting that it will simply “disappear” on its own, denouncing media “hysteria” over the disease, insisting that cases will go down to almost zero and then prematurely declaring victory in the war against it.

He said in March that “no way am I going to cancel the convention” and contended that “we’re going to be in great shape long before then.” A month later, citing health experts, he declared that “the worst days of the pandemic are behind us.” When North Carolina’s governor insisted that the convention in Charlotte would have to be limited by public health measures, Trump angrily moved most of it to Jacksonville, where he promised a full event.

By this week, he was grudgingly bowing to the reality that the virus has spread, not ebbed,

admitting that it would “get worse before it gets better” and canceling Jacksonville, saying “it’s not the right time for that.” After his initial effort to resume arena rallies was a bust in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the second one scheduled for Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was canceled, Trump now says he will conduct “telerallies.”

The rising infections have also forcedTrump to be more supportive of masks after months of scorning them. When he first announced that public health experts wanted the public to wear masks, he immediately undercut the message by declaring that “I don’t think I’m going to be doing it,” complaining that it would not look good in the Oval Office as he greeted foreign visitors.

In the months since, he reposted a Twitter message that mocked Biden for wearing a mask, disparaged a reporter who insisted on wearing a mask to a news conference “because you want to be politically correct,” insisted that masks were a “double-edged sword” and agreed that some people might only be wearing masks to make a political statement against him.

Over the past two weeks, he wore one in public where he would be photographed for the first time and told Americans that it was an act of patriotism to wear one. “If you can, use the mask,” he said in a televised briefing. “When you can, use the mask.”

Trump and his team continued to insist that he had handled the virus decisively, always citing his decision early on to limit travel from China and the increases in the supply of ventilators and testing capacity. The president likewise continued to press schools to reopen fully and in person in the fall, even though his own son’s private school will not, but even there he gave some ground this week by acknowledging that some schools in areas hard hit by the virus might need to delay doing so.

But in much of the country, school leaders, like many governors and mayors, are paying less attention now to a president whose predictions have fallen flat and are paying more attention to the numbers on the charts. If a political convention in Jacksonville is not safe in the coronavirus age, many schools are coming to the conclusion that it may not be safe for them either, at least not on a full-scale basis.

“The virus and science, not politics, will determine spread of the virus and whether and when schools and our economy can reopen without having to slam shut again,” Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Friday.

“Facts matter. Science matters. Supporting and being guided by public health matters.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

9

Trump presses limits on transgender rights over Supreme Court ruling

By CHRIS CAMERON

T

heTrump administration Friday published its rule allowing single-sex homeless shelters to exclude transgender people from facilities that correspond with their gender identity, pressing forward with limits on transgender rights despite a Supreme Court ruling that extended civil rights protection to transgender people.

The new rule on homeless shelters will go into effect after a 60-day comment period.

Administration officials argue that it will make women’s shelters safer by preventing men from gaining access to abuse or attack women seeking protection.

Transgender rights groups say it is more likely to force some transgender women to go to men’s shelters where they could face assault.

The policy is just a small piece of a broader, governmentwide effort to diminish protections for transgender people. President Donald Trump’s 2017 ban on transgender people enlisting or serving in the military has now been in effect for more than a year. A Department of Health and Human Services rule erasing protections for transgender patients against discrimination by doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies was finalized in June.

The Education Department has rescinded Obama-era rules that allowed transgender students to use bathrooms of their choice or participate in sports corresponding with their gender identity. The Justice Department has moved to roll back protections for transgender people in federal prisons, and the Office of Personnel Management has suspended protections for transgender employees of federal contractors.

“Across the board, when you’re cut out of the federal protections you used to have, people are more likely to experience discrimination, and they’re less likely to talk about it,” said Robin Maril, an associate legal director at the

Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT rights group. “It has a significant chilling effect.”

The Department of Housing and Urban Development did not respond to questions about the new shelter rule, but Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, has previously expressed concern about “big, hairy men” entering women’s shelters.

“The current HUD rule permits any man, simply by asserting that his gender is female, to obtain access to women’s shelters and even precludes the shelter from asking for identification,” Carson said last week in a letter to Democratic lawmakers in the House obtained by The New York Times.

Transgender rights groups say transgender women are the ones at risk. In a report released in 2011 by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, more than half of the transgender people who had used a homeless shelter said they had been harassed.

The rule, first announced three weeks ago, was published in the Federal Register a month after the Supreme Court ruled that transgender people cannot be fired or otherwise discriminated against in the workforce, because federal protections against sex discrimination apply to gay, bisexual and transgender people.

The ruling in the case, Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, was a landmark moment for gay and transgender rights.

“Secretary Carson’s insistence on pressing forward with this discriminatory policy — despite the Bostock ruling and clear consensus among experts and service providers opposed to this rule change — betrays a disturbing determination to target and endanger trans Americans,” Rep. Jennifer Wexton, D-Va., said in a statement.

Transgender rights groups and others are likely to sue to try to block the homeless shelter rule, as they have on other administration regulations on transgender rights. A coalition of 23 Democratic attorneys general filed a

Protesters rallying to call attention to violence against Black transgender people in Brooklyn, June 14, 2020. lawsuit Monday seeking to block the Health and Human Services rule on transgender health care under the Affordable Care Act from going into effect next month.

Roger Severino, director of the office for civil rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, which was responsible for the rule, said the health law’s anti-discrimination provision had been “held unlawful and unenforceable by a federal court in December 2016.”

“We at HHS respect the dignity of every human being and are committed to vigorously enforcing civil rights protections in health care, especially during the pandemic,” he added.

Transgender rights groups say that such discrimination will extend to people who are not transgender. The housing department’s rule change for homeless shelters has language detailing methods of identifying transgender people based on their appearance.

“Reasonable considerations may include,

but are not limited to, a combination of factors such as height, the presence (but not the absence) of facial hair, the presence of an Adam’s apple, and other physical characteristics which, when considered together, are indicative of a person’s biological sex,” the text reads.

Promoters of transgender rights say the new rule could even deny shelter to people who are mistaken as transgender. For example, a medical condition that causes excess facial and body hair growth affects around 5% to 10% of women, according to the Indian Journal of Dermatology, and is more common in women of color.

“The idea that you can create some kind of gender surveillance checklist that some front desk staff person is forced to look through as clients come in the door, it’s deeply disturbing,” said Dylan Waguespack, director of public policy at True Colors United, which works on preventing homelessness among LGBT youth.

“It’s Orwellian.”

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

In era of sickness, doctors prescribe unusual cure: Voting

By FARAH STOCKMAN

T

he sign is easy to miss in the waiting room of the emergency department at Massachusetts General Hospital, next to the reception desk and a hand sanitizer pump. “Register to vote here,” it says, above an iPad attached to a podium.

The kiosk has stood there since November, before the pandemic began, and stayed there through the worst weeks of April, when 12 gasping patients were put on ventilators during a single grueling 12-hour shift.

Now, as the number of coronavirus patients has slowed to a trickle, Dr. Alister Martin, the 31-year-old emergency room doctor who built the kiosk, is determined to keep trying to register voters.

“There will be a time where, above the din of suffering, we ask, ‘How can we use this to make something better of our situation?’” vowed Martin, who always sports a “Ready to Vote?” badge around his neck.

Martin’s project, VotER, has taken on new urgency as the pandemic has curbed traditional in-person voter registration efforts and as the link between public policy failures and death has become especially clear.

Now, despite a global pandemic — or perhaps because of it — his project is spreading across the country. Since May, more than 3,000 health care providers have requested kits to register their own patients to vote, including at flagship hospitals across the country in Pennsylvania, Kansas and Arizona.

VotER is part of a larger movement that pushes medical professionals to address the underlying social conditions — such as hunger, drug addiction and homelessness — that make their patients sick in the first place. At its core, it amounts to nothing less than an effort to change the culture of medicine by getting doctors and nurses to view the “civic health” of their patients as part of their professional duties.

Supporters of this movement said the health care system tends to work best for communities that vote, so encouraging voting is a strategy for improving patient health in the long term. Jonathan Kusner, a fourthyear medical student who is co-chair of Med Out the Vote, a get-out-the-vote initiative started by the American Medical Student Association, said his group was encouraging primary care doctors to include “Are you re-

Dr. Alister Martin starts his work commute to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on April 10, 2020, from his apartment in Cambridge, Mass. Martin has created a kiosk at the hospital to register patients to vote.

gistered to vote?” on intake screening questionnaires, similar to questions about domestic violence.

“Just as we ask people to behaviorally modify their diet or their exercise or their health, we could ask people to modify their civics,” said Kusner, whose organization has teamed up with VotER to promote voter registration in hospitals around the country.

But some health care professionals frown on voter registration efforts, fearing that they could be viewed as partisan. After years of being dependably Republican, doctors are now more likely to be Democrats.

Others worry that registering voters is beyond the scope of what medical professionals should be asking their patients.

Few doctors have been trained to discuss voter registration in a nonpartisan way, and many emergency room doctors already feel overwhelmed by their work as it is.

“There is an enormous voice that says, ‘Not our job,’” said Dr. Harrison Alter, founding executive director of The Andrew Levitt Center for Social Emergency Medicine, which helped popularize a new medical field called “social emergency medicine” that trains doctors to tackle social conditions that make patients sick.

But newly minted doctors tend to be more outspoken about the need to get involved in enfranchising patients and trying to fix a broken health care system.

“Previously, physicians taking a political stance was seen as possibly unprofessional,” said Kelly Wong, a medical student who is the founder of Patient Voting, a Rhode Island-based effort to provide hospitalized patients with information that can help them navigate the gauntlet of voting from a hospital bed. “Civic engagement of our patients and our communities is really important to changing health outcomes.”

Last year, just a few months after Martin was hired as a full-fledged emergency room doctor and a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Social Justice and Health Equity, he asked hospital administrators for permission to put up voting kiosks. They agreed, as long as the effort was nonpartisan and did not infringe on treatment.

Martin installed TurboVote software on a few iPads and affixed them to podiums that he bought online. He also put up posters with QR codes that patients can scan with cellphones, automatically bringing up a website where they can register to vote.

The project was just getting started — with about one patient a day registering to vote and about a dozen hospitals expressing an interest in the kiosks — when the pandemic struck. Emergency rooms filled with terrified people demanding tests. The iPad touch screens became a source of possible infections. Hospitals that had ordered kiosks stopped returning his calls.

Massachusetts General Hospital took on the look of a military camp, with a tent for the homeless who awaited their results.

In April, at the peak of surge, Martin noticed that most of the sickest people were low-income Spanish speakers — essential workers who could not shelter in place.

The virus was laying bare the disparities in the health care system that Martin was already trying to combat.

Instead of sidetracking VotER, the pandemic has only raised interest in the project.

After months of watching the mismanagement of the response and fearing for their own lives as well as their patients’, many doctors and nurses now see the connection between their work and politics more clearly.

“There are more nurses interested, more doctors interested,” said Aliza Narva, director of ethics at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, of her hospital system’s efforts to register patients to vote. “I would guess that people really saw the implication that policy can have on the actual care that we are able to deliver.”

So far this month about 500 people have registered to vote using the QR code on VotER posters and badges worn by health care providers, about twice as many as had registered during the previous three months.

And Martin has received so many orders that he isn’t sure how his small team of volunteers will fill them all.

The pandemic has put an edge in his normally cheerful demeanor that was not there before. If health care providers want a system that works, he said, they have to “step up.”

“The time for us being impartial and apolitical and standing on the sideline is over,” he said.

The virus has also given Martin another avenue to bring up the topic of voting with his patients. He advises his patients, especially the most fragile, that it is safest to vote from home in November. “Do you already have your mail-in ballot?” he asks them, pointing to the QR code on his badge. “You can get one here.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

11

Once a source of U.S.-China tension, trade emerges as an area of calm

By ANA SWANSON and KEITH BRADSHER

F

or the better part of three years, President Donald Trump’s trade war with China strained relations between the world’s largest economies. Now, the trade pact the two countries signed in January appears to be the most durable part of the U.S.-China relationship.

Tensions between the United States and China are flaring over the coronavirus, which the Trump administration accuses China of failing to control, as well as accusations of espionage, intellectual property theft and human rights violations. U.S. officials on Tuesday ordered the closure of the Chinese Consulate in Houston, saying that diplomats there had aided in economic espionage, prompting China to order the closure of the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu.

Earlier in the week, the Trump administration added another 11 Chinese companies to a government list barring them from buying American technology and other products, citing human rights abuses against predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region in China’s far west. The two countries are also clashing over China’s security crackdown in Hong Kong, its global 5G ambitions and its territorial claims in the South China Sea. But unlike previous moments of heightened tensions between the U.S. and China, Trump has not threatened to impose additional tariffs on Chinese goods or take other steps to punish companies that export their products to America. And neither side is threatening to rip up the initial trade deal they signed in January, which took years of painful negotiations to complete.

Trade, long the most contentious part of the U.S.-China relationship, has suddenly become an area of surprising stability.

The reasons have more to do with politics than diplomacy. Both the Trump administration and Chinese leaders invested time and political capital in rea-

President Donald Trump, right, and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He sign an initial trade agreement in the White House in Washington, Jan. 15, 2020. ching their initial trade deal, which removed barriers for foreign firms doing business in China and strengthened the country’s intellectual property protections. The deal also required China to purchase an additional $200 billion of American goods by the end of next year, including some agricultural goods like soybeans, pork and corn from farm states that are crucial to Trump’s reelection chances.

As tensions between the two countries rise again, both sides appear to think they have more to lose from rupturing the agreement than they would gain.

“Ironically, trade has become an area of cooperation or stability,” said Michael Pillsbury, a China expert at the Hudson Institute who advises the Trump administration.

In some ways, the signing of the sought-after trade deal in January has paved the way for the Trump administration to press China on other fronts.

In pursuit of a trade deal, the Trump administration had long shelved various actions to address other concerns about China, including its human rights abuses in Xinjiang, its crackdown in Hong Kong and security threats and sanctions violations by Chinese tech-

nology and telecommunications companies like Huawei and ZTE. Geopolitical tensions are rising, too. Clashes between Chinese and Indian troops over their disputed border in the Himalayas have resulted in fatalities. U.S. officials have increased their criticisms of China’s actions in the South China Sea, calling Beijing’s claims to the disputed waters “completely unlawful.” In April, the U.S. sent two warships into disputed waters near Malaysia as a show of force after a Chinese government vessel tailed a Malaysian state oil company ship for days.

U.S. officials say that China’s behavior has become increasingly provocative in recent months, prompting tougher action not just from the U.S. but also Australia, Britain, India and other nations. Some public figures in China have blamed increasing tensions on Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. competing to appear tougher on China before the general election in November.

Jia Qingguo, a professor at Peking University’s School of International Studies, said in an online panel hosted by the National Press Foundation on Thursday that the U.S. and China were

not yet in a new Cold War, but they were heading in that direction with “accelerating speed, thanks to the Trump administration.”

“If the current momentum continues, I think the two countries are likely to end up in a Cold War and maybe even in a hot one,” Jia said.

The Chinese government is trying to keep trade matters separate from other frictions in the bilateral relationship, though that has proved more difficult as the two countries begin closing each other’s consulates.

“Comparatively speaking, trade I think is more stable and more quiet,” said He Weiwen, a former Chinese commerce ministry official and now a senior fellow at the Center for China and Globalization, a nonprofit research group in Beijing. But he said there are reasons to be worried going forward.

“I’m quite concerned about the trade relationship ahead, because we need a calm, stable political environment,” said He, who is also an executive council member of the China Association of International Trade.

While the trade truce is holding for now, that could prove fleeting if Trump decides Beijing is not living up to its side of the deal. The agreement left tariffs in place on more than $360 billion of Chinese goods and ushered in a détente that forestalled further tariff increases by either side.

But the president views tariffs as one of his most effective and reliable tools, a powerful cudgel to wield against foreign countries that doesn’t require the approval of Congress. And China appears to be lagging far behind on the purchases of America products it pledged to make as part of the trade deal, partly as a result of the pandemic.

Analysts have long viewed those targets as unrealistic. But Trump sees those purchases as crucial to narrowing the U.S. trade deficit and boosting the fortunes of farmers and businesses, and thus his reelection prospects.

“The president has repeatedly said if they don’t make the purchases, I will terminate the deal,” Pillsbury said.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 20, 2020

Stocks

Wall Street closes lower as Intel dives, earnings and pandemic weigh

W

all Street retreated on Friday, heading into the weekend with a broad sell-off due to weak earnings, surging coronavirus cases and geopolitical uncertainties.

For the second day in a row, the tech sector weighed heaviest on all three major U.S. stock averages. Intel Corp (INTC.O) led the decline, its shares plunging 16.2% after the chipmaker reported a delay in production of a smaller, faster 7-nonometer chip.

“There’s a skittishness ahead of the weekend after yesterday’s tech and growth sell-off,” said Ryan Detrick, senior market strategist at LPL Financial in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“It’s been an unbelievable ride for the Nasdaq and tech over the last two moths,” Detrick added. “A well-deserved correction makes a lot of sense in our view.”

Each index posted a weekly loss, with the S&P 500 and the Dow snapping three-week winning streaks.

Nasdaq had its weakest week of the last four.

The retreat followed a rally that brought the S&P 500 to nearly 5% below its record high reached in February. The bellwether index is now near break-even for the year, while the Nasdaq has gained more than 15% year-to-date.

“With the rally we’ve seen so far in July, it makes sense to see anxiety ahead of a huge earnings week, the Fed decision and what’s likely to be the worst GDP in our lifetimes,” Detrick added.

Momentum stocks Apple, Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) and Amazon.com (AMZN.O) are scheduled to post results on July 30, the day the U.S. Commerce Department is due to give its first take on second-quarter GDP. Analysts project that the economy dropped by a bruising 35% during the three-month period.

More than 1,000 Americans died from COVID-19 on Thursday, the third straight day for that grim milestone as total cases surged past 4 million.

Beijing fired back at Washington shuttering China’s Houston consulate by closing the U.S. consulate in the city of Chengdu.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI fell 182.44 points, or 0.68%, to 26,469.89, the S&P 500 .SPX lost 20.03 points, or 0.62%, to 3,215.63 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC dropped 98.24 points, or 0.94%, to 10,363.18.

Of the 11 major sectors in the S&P 500, all but consumer discretionary .SPLRCD closed in the red. Tech .SPLRCT was the biggest percentage loser.

Healthcare .SPXHC lost ground, dropping 1.1% ahead of executive orders by President Donald Trump aimed at lowering drug prices.

Second-quarter earnings season charges ahead, with 128 constituents of the S&P 500 having reported.

Of those, 80.5% have cleared a very low bar of analyst expectations.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

13

As the world gets tougher on China, Japan tries to thread a needle

By MOTOKO RICH and MAKIKO INOUE

E

arlier this year, as it became clear that the coronavirus pandemic was not going to pass quickly, the Japanese government delayed plans for what would be the first state visit by a Chinese leader to Tokyo since 2008.

Now, with Chinese military aggression rising in the region and Beijing cracking down on Hong Kong, Japan is considering canceling Xi Jinping’s visit altogether — but very gingerly.

“We are not in the phase of arranging a concrete schedule now” was how Toshimitsu Motegi, the foreign minister, put it this month.

While its top allies have taken a harder line on China — especially the United States, which dramatically escalated tensions this past week by closing the Chinese Consulate in Houston — Japan has pursued a delicate balancing act, mindful of the economic might of its largest trading partner and its own limited military options.

So as Chinese ships have engaged in the longest series of incursions in or near Japanese waters in several years, Japan has offered a restrained response, vowing to be firm but “calm.” It did not join several Western nations in an initial statement criticizing the draconian security law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong.

It has abandoned plans to purchase an American missile defense system, which in part had been considered a shield against China. And the government has continued to tiptoe around the issue of the state visit by Xi, even as polls show that most Japanese believe it should be scrapped.

“Certainly Japan is in a dilemma,” said Narushige Michishita, director of the Security and International Studies Program at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo. “We understand the fact that Japan is basically competing with China while cooperating with it. We are playing those two games at the same time.”

For other world powers, this kind of middle ground on China, in the face of its growing authoritarianism and heightened bellicosity, has become less and less tenable.

The United States has approved sanctions against Chinese companies and officials and pushed back on China’s broad territorial claims in the region’s seas. Australia led the call for a global inquiry into the origins of the

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in Beijing last year. pandemic, which began in China, and announced an investment of nearly $1 billion in cyberweapons and defenses to counter Beijing. Britain and Canada, along with Australia, have suspended extradition agreements with Hong Kong because of the national security law.

China has responded by curbing Australian imports and threatening an array of retaliatory actions against any countries that move to punish it. On Friday, China responded to the closure of its Houston consulate by ordering the United States to shut its consulate in the southwestern city of Chengdu.

To some extent, Japan’s mild-mannered response to China echoes its broader approach to foreign policy, in which it tends to avoid direct conflict or public rebukes of other nations. It has also sometimes sought a mediating role, as when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met last December with Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, to try to ease tensions in the Middle East.

Not so long ago, China and Japan — the world’s second- and third-largest economies — were engaged in a diplomatic thaw as a hedge against an unpredictable Trump administration. In 2018, Abe became the first Japanese leader to visit China in seven years, and the two leaders pledged deeper economic and political cooperation. The invitation to Xi to visit Japan followed soon afterward.

Now, given China’s muscle-flexing as the world is preoccupied with the pandemic, some have expressed disappointment that Japan has not rebuffed its neighbor more vigorously, such as by definitively canceling Xi’s visit. In recent weeks, China has engaged in deadly clashes on its border with India in the Himalayas, and it has sent ships for 100 straight days — the longest period in years of such incursions — to patrol waters around the Senkakus, islands administered by Japan but contested by China.

Japan “should just say ‘We cannot have him if China continues with this sort of behavior,’” said Jeffrey Hornung, an analyst at the RAND Corp., referring to Xi. But Hornung acknowledged that Tokyo would not want to draw China’s full ire, either.

“If you look at what China is doing with India or Hong Kong, Japan doesn’t want to be at the tip of China’s spear right now,” Hornung said. “They know what they could do around the Senkakus in terms of swarming it with ships.”

Yoshihide Suga, chief cabinet secretary to Abe, told reporters that the Japanese government had “strongly requested” that Chinese ships “stop approaching Japanese fishing boats and quickly leave Japanese territory.” He added, “We would like to continue responding firmly in a calm manner.”

Parts of the Japanese government have highlighted China’s growing hostility. Earlier

this month, the defense ministry warned that China was trying to “alter the status quo in the East China Sea and the South China Sea,” and it ranked China as a more serious longterm threat than North Korea.

Yet Japan’s recent decision to abandon its plan to buy an American missile defense system, known as Aegis Ashore, led some to wonder if it would now be more exposed to potential attacks from both North Korea and China.

“While the cancellation of Aegis Ashore might put Japan in a more vulnerable position, if Japan uses this opportunity to pivot to acquisition of other capabilities, then the result could be even more worrying for China,” said Kristi Govella, an assistant professor in the department of Asian studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

One area where Japan has taken steps against China is the economy. Earlier this year, it passed a law restricting foreign investment in industries that the government designates as important to national security, a move that many viewed as targeting China. It has also offered financial incentives to companies — especially those in crucial sectors — to move operations out of China and into Japan or Southeast Asia.

“The Chinese economy is recovering while other countries are still deteriorating,” said Takahide Kiuchi, an economist at Nomura Research Institute, a think tank. “Now China is in a good position to purchase companies in other countries, so the government is cautious about critical industries related to the military and national security.”

Still, Japan does not want to push too hard.

In addition to being Japan’s largest trading partner, China sent more tourists to Japan than any other nation before the pandemic shut borders. Last year, close to 115,000 Chinese students were studying at Japanese universities. The government, which has imposed entry bans on nearly 150 countries during the pandemic, is now discussing admitting travelers from several Asian countries, including China.

“A couple of years ago, it seemed like there was space for Japan to be seen as a mediator because relations between the U.S. and China had become so bad,” Govella said.

But with China’s increasing aggression, it “really is an actor that has different values and dubious intentions in the region,” she said.

14

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

North Korea declares emergency after suspected COVID-19 case

Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, in a photo released by the official Korean Central News Agency that it said had been taken on Saturday.

By CHOE SANG-HUN

N

orth Korea said on Sunday that it had locked down a city near its border with South Korea and declared a “maximum” national emergency after finding what its leader, Kim Jong Un, said could be the country’s first case of COVID-19 there.

It issued the high alert after a North Korean who had defected to South Korea three years ago but secretly crossed back into the North’s Kaesong City last Sunday was “suspected to have been infected with the vicious virus,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency

said Sunday.

After running several tests, the health authorities put the person and contacts under quarantine, as well as those who have been in Kaesong City in the last five days, the North Korean news agency said.

While reporting the incident, the agency stopped short of calling it the country’s first case of the coronavirus, saying the test result was “uncertain.”

But it was serious enough that Kim called an emergency meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party’s Political Bureau on Saturday, where he admitted that his country may have its first out-

break of COVID-19.

“There happened a critical situation in which the vicious virus could be said to have entered the country,” Kim was quoted as saying, while declaring “a state of emergency” around Kaesong City and ordering his country to shift to “the maximum emergency system and issue a top-class alert.”

Kim “took the pre-emptive measure of ​​totally blocking Kaesong City and isolating each district and region from the other” on Friday shortly after he received a report on the situation, the North Korean news agency said.

Until now North Korea, one of the world’s most isolated countries, has repeatedly said that it has no case of COVID-19, although outside experts questioned the claim.

A COVID-19 outbreak could seriously test North Korea’s underequipped public health system and its economy, already struggling under international sanctions. International relief agencies have been providing test kits and other assistance to help the country fight any potential spread of COVID-19.

North Korea has taken some of the most drastic actions of any country against the virus and did so sooner than most other nations.

It sealed its borders in late January, shutting off business with neighboring China, which accounts for nine-tenths of its external trade. It clamped down on the smugglers who keep its thriving unofficial markets functioning. It quarantined all diplomats in Pyongyang for a month. ​The government’s ability to control the

movement of people​also bolsters its diseasecontrol efforts.

But decades of isolation and international sanctions have raised concerns that ​it lacks the medical supplies to fight an outbreak, which many fear has already occurred. ​North Korea’s senior disease-control officials attended the Political Bureau meeting that Kim called on Saturday, while other senior government and party officials from across the country watched it through video conferencing, state media reported. Kim ordered them to fight the spread of the virus “​with a sense of boundless responsibility, loyalty and devotion.” ​North Korea did not reveal the identity of the North Korean runaway who it said returned home with the possible virus infection from South Korea. The South Korean government did not immediately react to the North Korean claim.

The North said it was investigating a military unit for failing to catch the runaway when the person first slipped through the inter-Korean border to defect to the South three years ago, and said it planned to “administer a severe punishment and take necessary measures.” The defector returned home last Sunday after illegally crossing back, it said.

More than 30,000 North Koreans have fled to South Korea since the early 1990s. But some have failed to adapt to life in the capitalist South Korea and gone back to the North. Still, defections across the inter-Korean border, one of the world’s most heavily armed, are rare.

Vietnam, lauded in Coronavirus fight, has first local case in 100 days

By RICHARD C. PADDOCK

V

ietnam, which had gone 100 days without reporting a case of local transmission of the coronavirus, said Saturday that a 57-year-old grandfather in the central city of Danang had tested positive. How he got the illness remains a mystery.

To prevent a wider outbreak, the Health Ministry said it was conducting “extensive screening and testing in all at-risk areas in Danang.” Officials said they had tested and quarantined people who had been in close contact with the patient and were tracing others. So far, no other positive cases have surfaced.

The case of the Danang grandfather is yet another sign of how difficult it is to contain the virus even when a country has followed the

best practices. The patient has no record of recent travel and appears to be a homebody who spends most of his time looking after his grandchildren.

Health officials, noting that mask use in Vietnam had become lax, urged members of the public to resume wearing them, especially in crowded places and on public transportation.

Vietnam, one of the world’s few remaining communist states, has been among the most successful in the world in containing the virus. Soon after the illness emerged in China, Vietnam’s northern neighbor, the government quickly closed international borders, called for widespread use of masks and established strict quarantine and aggressive contact-tracing procedures.

Most foreigners are still barred from traveling to Vietnam, and returning citizens are required to go into quarantine, which is where all of Vietnam’s other recent cases have been found.

The public has embraced the campaign and rallied around one famous case, that of Scottish pilot, Stephen Cameron, 43, who came so close to death that doctors in Ho Chi Minh City contemplated giving him a double-lung transplant. He spent more than two months on life support in a medically induced coma but recovered and flew home two weeks ago.

As of Saturday, Vietnam had reported 416 cases and no deaths. Its last known case of local transmission was in mid-April. The government has been considering resuming international flights to countries where the virus has been

contained.

The discovery of the new case in Danang was a shock. Many people reportedly canceled travel plans in central Vietnam, a popular destination for domestic and foreign travelers.

The 57-year-old man, known as Patient 416, first showed signs of a cough and fever July 17 and was admitted to a hospital three days later. He was initially diagnosed with pneumonia. An X-ray showed lung lesions and, after he suffered respiratory failure, he was put on a ventilator.

His tests for COVID-19 were positive from the outset, but it was not until Saturday, when the fourth test result came back, that the government officially declared that he had COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Continues on page 15

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

15

The Amazon, giver of life, unleashes the pandemic

By JULIE TURKEWITZ and MANUELA ANDREONI

T

he virus swept through the region like past plagues that have traveled the river with colonizers and corporations.

It spread with the dugout canoes carrying families from town to town, the fishing dinghies with rattling engines, the ferries moving goods for hundreds of miles, packed with passengers sleeping in hammocks, side by side, for days at a time.

The Amazon River is South America’s essential life source, a glittering superhighway that cuts through the continent. It is the central artery in a vast network of tributaries that sustains some 30 million people across eight countries, moving supplies, people and industry deep into forested regions often untouched by road.

But once again, in a painful echo of history, it is also bringing disease.

As the pandemic assails Brazil, overwhelming it with more than 2 million infections and more than 84,000 deaths — second only to the United States — the virus is taking an exceptionally high toll on the Amazon region and the people who have depended on its abundance for generations.

In Brazil, the six cities with the highest coronavirus exposure are all on the Amazon River, according to an expansive new study from Brazilian researchers that measured antibodies in the population.

The epidemic has spread so quickly and thoroughly along the river that in remote fishing and farming communities like Tefé, people have been as likely to get the virus as in New York City, home to one of the world’s worst outbreaks.

“It was all very fast,” said Isabel Delgado, 34, whose father, Felicindo, died of the virus shortly after falling ill in the small city of Coari.

He had been born on the river, raised his family by it and built his life crafting furniture from the timber on its banks.

In the past four months, as the epidemic traveled from the biggest city in the Brazilian

Amazon, Manaus, with its high-rises and factories, to tiny, seemingly isolated villages deep in the interior, the fragile health care system has buckled under the onslaught. Cities and towns along the river have some of the highest deaths per capita in the country — often several times the national average.

Tyler Hicks, a photographer for The New York Times, spent weeks on the river, documenting the spread of the virus. In Manaus, there were periods when every COVID ward was full and 100 people were dying a day, pushing the city to cut new burial grounds out of thick forest. Grave diggers lay rows of coffins in long trenches carved in the freshly turned earth.

Down the river, hammocks have become stretchers, carrying the sick from communities with no doctors to boat ambulances that careen through the water. In remote reaches of the river basin, medevac planes land in tiny airstrips sliced into the lush landscape only to find that their patients died while waiting for help.

The virus is exacting an especially high toll on Indigenous people, a parallel to the past. Since the 1500s, waves of explorers have traveled the river, seeking gold, land and converts — and later, rubber, a resource that helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, changing the world. But with them, these outsiders brought violence and diseases like smallpox and measles, killing millions and wiping out entire communities.

“This is a place that has generated so much wealth for others,” said Charles C. Mann, a journalist who has written extensively on the history of the Americas, “and look at what’s happening to it.”

Indigenous people have been roughly six times as likely to be infected with the coronavirus as white people, according to the Brazilian study, and are dying in far-flung river villages untouched by electricity.

Even in the best of times, the Amazon was among the most neglected parts of the country, a place where the hand of the government can feel distant, even nonexistent.

But the region’s ability to confront the virus

Relatives gather to hear a doctor’s assessment of a family elder who had the coronavirus, in Manacapuru, Amazonas state, Brazil, May 26, 2020. Along the Amazon, hammocks have become stretchers, carrying the sick from communities with no doctors to boat ambulances that careen through the water. has been further weakened under President Jair Bolsonaro, whose public dismissals of the epidemic have verged at times on mockery, even though he has tested positive himself.

The virus has surged on his government’s disorganized and lackluster watch, tearing through the nation. From his first days in office, Bolsonaro has made it clear that protecting the welfare of Indigenous communities was not his priority, cutting their funding, whittling away at their protections and encouraging illegal encroachments into their territory.

To the outsider, the thickly forested region along the Amazon River appears impenetrable, disconnected from the rest of the world.

But that isolation is deceptive, said Tatiana Schor, a Brazilian geography professor who lives off one of the river’s tributaries.

“There is no such thing as isolated communities in the Amazon,” she said, “and the virus has shown that.”

The boats that nearly everyone relies on, sometimes crowded with more than 100 passengers for many days, are behind the spread of the virus, researchers say. And even as local governments have officially limited travel, people have continued to take to the water because almost everything — food, medicine, even the trip to the capital to pick up emergency aid — depends on the river.

Scholars have long referred to life on the Amazon as an “amphibious way of being.”

The crisis in the Brazilian Amazon began in Manaus, a city of 2.2 million that has risen out of the forest in a jarring eruption of concrete and glass, tapering at its edges to clusters of wooden homes perched on stilts, high above the water.

Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, is now an industrial powerhouse, a major producer of motorcycles, with many foreign businesses. It Continues on page 16

Vietnam, lauded in Coronavirus fight, has first local case in 100 days From page 14 The country’s acting health minister, Nguyen Thanh Long, confirmed the finding at a meeting Saturday of the National Steering Committee for COVID-19.

Health investigators concluded that the patient had not traveled outside Danang, one of

Vietnam’s largest cities, and had rarely left home in the month before becoming ill.

On July 7, he took his 92-year-old mother to a medical center for treatment for her heart ailment and, on July 16, visited her at the hospital where she had been transferred.

On July 17, he began to feel tired and feverish but attended an engagement party. The

next day, he went to a family wedding.

Health officials said that more than 100 people with whom he had been in contact had tested negative for the virus. About 50 of them have been placed in isolation as a further precaution.

Specialist teams were sent from other parts of the country, including from Cho Ray

Hospital, where Cameron was treated, to help with the treatment of Patient 416, whose condition appeared to be deteriorating.

“This patient is suffering from acute pneumonia with severe symptoms and rapid progression,” according to a statement posted Friday by the Health Ministry, and doctors were pursuing “a maximum treatment regimen.”

16 From page 15 is intimately connected to the rest of the world — its international airport sees about 250,000 passengers a month — and, through the river, to much of the Amazon region.

Manaus’ first documented case, confirmed on March 13, came from England. The patient had mild symptoms and quarantined at home, in a wealthier part of town, according to city health officials.

Soon, though, the virus seemed to be everywhere.

“We didn’t have any more beds — or even armchairs,” Dr. Álvaro Queiroz, 26, said of the days when his public hospital in Manaus was completely full. “People never stopped coming.”

Gertrude Ferreira Dos Santos lived on the city’s eastern edge, in a neighborhood pressed against the water. She used to say that her favorite thing in the world was to travel the river by boat. With the breeze on her face, she said, she felt free.

Then, in May, dos Santos, 54, fell ill. Days later, she called her children to her bed, making them promise to stick together. She seemed to know that she was about to die.

Eduany, 22, her youngest daughter, stayed with her that night. In early morning, as Eduany got up to take a break, her sister Elen, 28, begged her to come back.

Their mother had stopped breathing. The sisters, in desperation, attempted mouth-tomouth resuscitation. At 6 a.m., the sun rising above the city, dos Santos died in their arms.

When men in white protective suits arrived later to carry away her body, the sisters began to wail.

Dos Santos had been a single mother.

Life had not always been easy. But she had maintained a sense of wonder, something her daughters admired. “In everything she did,” Elen said, “she was joyful.”

Her mother’s death certificate listed many underlying conditions, including long-standing breathing problems, according to the women. It also listed respiratory failure, a key indicator that a person has died of the coronavirus.

But her daughters didn’t believe she was a victim of the pandemic. She had certainly died of other causes, they said. God would not have given her such an ugly disease.

Along the river, people said similar things over and over, reluctant to admit to possible contagion, even as the health of their siblings and parents declined. Many seemed to think their families would be shunned, that a diagnosis would somehow tarnish an otherwise dignified life.

But as this stigma led people to play down symptoms of the virus out of fear, doctors said, the pandemic was spreading quickly.

After Manaus, the virus traveled east and

Monday, July 27, 2020

west, racing away from the region’s health care center.

In Manacapuru, more than an hour from the capital, Messias Nascimento Farias, 40, carried his ailing wife to their car and sped down one of the region’s few country roads to meet the ambulance that could carry her to a hospital.

His wife, Sandra Machado Dutra, 36, gasped in his truck.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” he prayed over and over until he handed her to health care workers. They were lucky.

She survived.

But for most people living along the river, hundreds of boat miles from Manaus, the fastest way to a major hospital is by plane.

Even before the virus arrived, people in far-flung communities with a life-threatening emergency could make a frantic call for an airplane ambulance that would take them to a hospital in the capital.

But the small planes turned out to be dangerous for people with COVID-19, sometimes causing blood oxygen levels to plummet as the aircraft rose. Very few of the airlift patients seemed to be surviving, doctors said.

Instead, physicians and nurses found themselves flying their patients to painful deaths far from everything and everyone they had loved.

One morning in May, a white plane touched down at the airport in Coari, about 230 miles from Manaus.

On the tarmac on a stretcher was Delgado, 68, the furniture maker, barefoot and barely breathing.

Dr. Daniel Sérgio Siqueira and a nurse, Walci Frank, exhausted after weeks of constant work, loaded him into the small cabin. As the plane rose, his oxygen levels began to dive.

Delgado’s daughter Isabel turned to the doctor in a panic. “My father is very strong,” she told him. “He is going to make it.”

When the Delgados finally reached the hospital in Manaus, Isabel was stunned by the scenes around her. Despairing relatives held up loved ones who had crumpled under the burden of disease, hurrying them in for treatment.

At the same time, patients who had managed to survive COVID-19 staggered out, into the jubilant arms of family and friends.

“I was just there,” she said, “praying that God would save my father.”

Delgado died a few days later. When Isabel found out, the doctor started crying with her.

She had no doubt that the river her father loved had also brought him the virus. Soon, she and five other family members fell ill, too.

When the coronavirus arrived in the Americas, there was widespread fear that it would take a devastating toll on Indigenous communities across the region.

In many places along the Amazon River, those fears appear to be coming true.

At least 570 Indigenous people in Brazil have died of the disease since March, according to an association that represents the country’s Indigenous people. The vast majority of those deaths were in places connected to the river.

More than 18,000 Indigenous people have been infected. Community leaders have reported entire villages confined to their hammocks, struggling to rise even to feed their children.

In many instances, the very health workers sent to help them have inadvertently spread the virus.

In the riverside hamlet of São José da Fortaleza, Chief Iakonero Apurinã’s relatives sent word, one by one, that they couldn’t eat, that they heard voices, that they were too sick to get up.

Soon, it seemed to the chief that everyone in her community was sick.

Apurinã, 54, said her group of 35 Apurinã families had survived generations of violence and forced labor. They had arrived in São José da Fortaleza decades ago, believing that they would finally be safe.

It was the river, said the chief, that had sustained them, feeding, washing and cleansing them spiritually.

Then the new disease came, and the chief was ferrying traditional teas from home to home.

Soon came her own cough and exhaustion. A test in Coari confirmed that she had caught the virus.

Apurinã didn’t blame the river. She blamed the people who traveled it.

“The river to us is purification,” she said.

“It’s the most beautiful thing there is.”

Miraculously, she said in mid-July, not a single person among the 35 families had died.

In Tefé, a city of 60,000 people nearly 400 miles along the river from Manaus, the virus had arrived with gale force.

At the small public hospital, where officials initially planned to accommodate 12 patients, nearly 50 crowded the makeshift COVID-19 unit. Dr. Laura Crivellari, 31, the hospital’s only infectious disease expert, took them in, doing what she could with two respirators, no intensive care unit, many sick colleagues — and no one to replace them.

At one of the worst moments, she was the only physician on duty for two days, overseeing dozens of critically ill patients.

The costant death pushed Crivellari to her breaking point. Some days she barely stopped to eat or drink.

At home, she shared her anguish with her partner. She was thinking of giving up medicine, she said. “I can’t carry on like this,” she told him.

The pandemic has been brutal on medical workers around the world, and it has been particularly difficult for the doctors and nurses navigating the vast distances, frequent communication cuts and deep supply scarcity along the Amazon.

Without proper training or equipment, many nurses and doctors along the river have died. Others have infected their families.

Crivellari knew her city was vulnerable.

It’s a three-day boat ride from Manaus to Tefé, with ferries often carrying 150 people at a time.

“Our fear was that an infected person would contaminate the whole boat,” she said, “and that’s what ended up happening.”

By early July, the daily deaths in Tefé were dropping, and Crivellari began to celebrate the patients she had been able to save. She no longer thinks of quitting medicine.

Tefé, as a whole, took a cautious collective breath.

The virus, at least for the moment, had moved to a new place on the river.

Relatives mourn Gertrude Ferreira dos Santos, who spent her life along the Amazon and died at home during the coronavirus pandemic, in Manaus, Brazil, May 20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

17

Donald Trump is the best ever president in the history of the cosmos

By FRANK BRUNI

I

t’s no longer interesting, or particularly newsworthy, to point out that Donald Trump lies. It stopped being interesting a long time ago. He lied en route to the presidency. He lied about the crowd at his inauguration. His speech itself was one big lie.

And the falsehoods only metastasized from there.

Why? We’ve covered that, too, most recently in all the chatter about “Too Much and Never Enough,” by Mary Trump, who is not only his niece but also a clinical psychologist. He lies because he grew up among liars. He lies because hyperbole and hooey buoy his fragile ego. He lies because he is practiced at it, is habituated to it and never seems to pay much of a price for it.

What intrigues me is that last part: the impunity. I want to understand how he has gotten away with all of the lying because I’m desperate to know whether he’ll continue to.

That’s the question at the heart of his reelection bid, because his strategy isn’t really “law and order” or racism or a demonization of liberals as monument-phobic wackadoodles or a diminution of Joe Biden as a doddering wreck. All of those gambits are there, but they spring from and burble back to a larger, overarching scheme. His strategy is fiction. His strategy is lies.

Can he sell enough Americans on the make-believe that he really cares about the quality of life in cities and is dispatching federal officers as a constructive measure rather than a provocative one in a flash of empathy versus a fit of vanity? He gave himself away a few days ago when he punctuated a mention of “the wonderful people of Chicago” with the needless notation that it’s “a city I know very well.” Everything Trump says is self-referential, and everything he does is self-reverential.

Can he feed voters the fantasy that his actions in the infancy of this pandemic saved lives and that our country’s world-leading death toll and unflattened curve are more figment than fact, or at least more fluke than indictment? Can he convincingly don the mask of a longtime evangelist for masks?

His recent interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News was a trial run of this and … wow. Up was down. Black was white.

A superficial check of his cognitive coherence was a profound spelunking of his cerebral glory.

He claimed that Biden had pledged to defund — no, abolish — the police, when Biden had done nothing of the kind. He boasted that America’s management of this pandemic made us “the envy of the world,” when in fact we’re so densely diseased that we’re barred from entering most of Europe. Oh, and he’s cruising toward four more years: All of those pollsters who predict otherwise are incompetent fabulists. (Talk about projection.)

Then there are the Trump campaign’s ads, which are “Veep”-grade caricatures of the usual fakery, not to mention paragons of incompetence in their own regard. One that appeared on Facebook in early July said, “WE WILL PROTECT THIS” — just like that, in URGENT CAPITAL LETTERS — beneath

“I want to understand how he has gotten away with all of the lying, because I’m desperate to know whether he’ll continue to,” writes Frank Bruni. a picture of a statue of Jesus. But Trump won’t be protecting that statue, because, as eagle-eyed observers noticed, it was the Christ the Redeemer monument that looms over Rio de Janeiro.

Another Facebook ad a few weeks later comprised two side-by-side pictures. Under an image of Trump were the words “Public Safety.” Under a separate image, of a police officer crumpled on the ground amid protesters, were “Chaos & Violence.”

Scary! But, again, foreign. The scene wasn’t Portland, Oregon, or Minneapolis or Washington or Chicago circa 2020, although that was the obvious suggestion. The picture, it turns out, was taken in Ukraine. Six years ago. For a more complete and very funny deconstruction of its infelicity, read Jonathan Last’s riff in The Bulwark.

The Trump campaign’s television commercials, meanwhile, have painted a dystopia of rampant criminality in Democraticcontrolled metropolises where the police no longer function or exist. One shows an elderly woman being attacked by a burglar as she listens to a 911 recording that tells her to “leave a message.”

If this is Trump’s tenor in July, just imagine October. By the time he’s done, Willie Horton will look like Peter Pan. It’s beyond ludicrous. But is it too much? I once would have answered an emphatic yes. Now I just don’t know.

Every president’s election illuminates the moment in which it occurs, and Trump’s told us something important — and terrifying — about our relationship with the truth. He relied like no candidate before him on a new infrastructure of misinformation and disinformation, tweeting toward Bethlehem while his allies made Mark Zuckerberg their stooge. If you’re peddling fiction, Twitter and Facebook are the right bazaars.

But they’re hardly the only ones. The web (how aptly named) has fostered the proliferation of “news” sites with par-

tisan and micropartisan agendas. They amount to flourishing ecosystems for alternate realities. Many Americans believe that Trump is an underappreciated martyr because they marinate in selective, manipulated and outright fraudulent factoids. And Trump and his minions have really figured out how to slather on the marinade.

When Robert Mueller released the conclusions of his investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, everyone focused on its second section, about Trump, when the first was at least as important. It documented the extent and ingenuity of Russia’s attempts to pervert the election. But even many of the people who paid it heed missed the point, which wasn’t Russia’s nefariousness. It was the process’s corruptibility. It was the power of lies in a world gone digital.

As for the power of a liar, well, that’s what Trump is testing.

He got away with lies in his business career because he chose professional avenues paved with deception and crowded with con men. Plus, he had — and still has — a special talent for treating drivel as gospel, as long as it’s tumbling from his lips.

That’s the great advantage of the truly amoral: They’re liberated from any tug of conscience, so there’s no suspicious hesitancy in their words, no revelatory panic in their eyes. Damn the verities, and full steam ahead.

He got away with lies in 2016 because of social media, because show business and politics had finally fused to the point where one was indistinguishable from the other, and because many Americans had grown so skeptical of traditional candidates that an utterly untraditional one seemed more trustworthy on some level. Trump was the diet that hadn’t yet failed them. They were ready to believe.

But to believe now is to ignore the receipts. About 150,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. Tens of millions have tumbled into financial ruin or are on the precipice of it. Racial tensions are at a palpable boil. And Trump keeps having to double back to correct his predictions and retrace his missteps.

Charlotte, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; Charlotte: I’ve lost track of where the Republicans are convening next month and of who’s on board, though I remain primed for Trump’s remarks. He alone can fictionalize it.

From now until Nov. 3, Trump will take the grand inventions that attend any presidential candidate’s campaign to a newly grandiose level, signaled by his insistence a few days ago that he’d “done more for Black Americans than anybody, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.” I love that “possible.”

Trump, Lincoln — it’s a jump ball, really.

So, while this election is indeed a contest between two men with two visions, it’s also something else. It’s the tallest tale Trump has ever scaled, the greatest story ever told. It’s a referendum on the reaches of his persuasion. It’s a judgment of the depths of Americans’ gullibility.

Have we cut the cord to reality? Then Trump has a chance.

And America hasn’t a prayer.

18

Monday, July 27, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

AOC and the jurassic jerks

By MAUREEN DOWD

P

resident Donald Trump is oh so proud of having mastered the ability to intone, “Person.

Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” But the more pressing issue is whether he is a person who can master talking to women through a TV camera without sounding like a caveman.

We continually debate whether Trump is a madman, but there’s no doubt he’s a Mad Man. He’s a ring-a-ding-ding guy, stuck in a time warp redolent of Vegas with the Rat Pack in 1959, talking about how “broads” and “skirts” rate. He was in his element broing out with Dave Portnoy in an interview for “Barstool Sports” that aired Friday.

Trump’s idea of wooing the women’s vote, which is decisive in this election, was to tweet out a New York Post story headlined “Joe Biden’s disastrous plans for America’s suburbs” with the directive: “The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article.”

Clearly, the 74-year-old president thinks that American women are in the kitchen; clutching their pearls à la June Cleaver; sheltered in the ’burbs in their gingham aprons; waiting for their big, brave breadwinners to come home after a hard day’s work

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in a sentence with the word Cheney in it, but it was disturbing to see a bunch of MAGA bros in Congress beat up on Liz Cheney because, among other offenses to the cult of Trump, she defended Dr. Anthony Fauci and shaded Trump on his denial regarding the virus by tweeting a picture of her father in a mask with the hashtag “realmenwearmasks.”

One Trump disciple in the House, Rep. Matt Gaetz, tweeted that “Liz Cheney has worked behind the scenes (and now in public) against @realDonald Trump and his agenda.” He added, “Liz Cheney should step down or be removed.”

Donald Trump Jr. chimed in on Twitter, “We already have one Mitt Romney, we don’t need another.”

(Of course, while it feels strange to be typing soRep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks on the House floor mething positive in a sentence with the word Trump on Thursday. in it, Donald Trump Jr. was right in his second point: “We also don’t need the endless wars she advocates for.” That point was echoed by the president on Twitmanhandling their secretaries.

Trump believes that the coveted electoral cohort ter. I would never agree with a Cheney’s mindless that used to be known as soccer moms are actually hawkishness.)

As Republicans sniped, one Democrat soared. sucker moms, naive enough to fall for his shtick that Ted Yoho, a Florida Republican, tried to slap the unleashed forces of urban America are marching down Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A reporter overtoward their manicured lawns.

How perfect that the pussy-grabbing president heard him muttering that the congresswoman was “a — whose personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, got in fucking bitch” as Yoho walked away after having an trouble over his boss’s porn-star payout — wants to argument with her about crime and policing on the steps of the Capitol. (Yoho denies he said it.) protect the desperate housewives of America.

The youngest woman to ever serve in Congress In a speech on drug prices Friday, Trump took is so full of natural political talent, burning so bright, his strange brand of feminism for a spin, pausing whithat the 2020 field seems dull next to her luster. It le he talked about middlemen profiting in the Big was a remarkable moment on Capitol Hill, where for Pharma arena to say “and women, I guess.”

On the Bulwark, a conservative website, Sarah years superachieving women have let such sexist reLongwell wrote about her three years’ worth of focus marks slide.

She went to the House floor Thursday and groups with women who voted for Trump in 2016. schooled Yoho the Yahoo and the retrograde crowd.

She found that they chose Trump over Hillary “Mr. Yoho mentioned that he has a wife and Clinton because they did not like Clinton and because two daughters,” she said. “I am two years younger they felt that Bill Clinton’s bad behavior with women than Mr. Yoho’s youngest daughter. I am someone’s canceled out Trump’s bad behavior with women. daughter, too.”

She added, “I am here because I have But the relationship with women voters has soured, not only because of his pugnacity and bullying to show my parents that I am their daughter and that but also because of his lack of compassion and com- they did not raise me to accept abuse from men.”

Showing her skill in a generational dimension petence dealing with the coronavirus and painful isforeign to Congress until now, AOC posted a video of sues about race.

“They don’t see Trump as someone who can herself on Instagram Stories strutting to the rap tune protect them from the chaos,” Longwell wrote. “They “Boss Bitch” by Doja Cat, her long hair whipping to the music, with the Capitol in the background. “I’m a think he’s the source of it.”

And his party is on board with the antediluvian bitch and a boss, I’m a-shine like gloss.” She captiovibe. R-Misogyny. Even on the 100th anniversary ned it: “Shine on, fight for others, and let the haters of women getting the vote, Republicans can’t help stay mad.”

And that’s the way you make Paleolithic men themselves. understand that they are history.

It feels strange to be typing something positive

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

19

Talan árboles en Centro Vacacional de Punta Santiago en Humacao Por THE STAR

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l secretario de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales (DRNA), Rafael Machargo Maldonado anunció en la tarde de hoy domingo que comenzaron trabajos de corte y remoción de árboles en el Centro Vacacional de Punta Santiago en Humacao.

Los trabajos se hacen a través de una asignación de fondos de asistencia pública de FEMA, que se otorgó para remover árboles que estaban enfermos y/o representan peligro para la salud y seguridad del público, esto luego del paso del huracán María el 20 de septiembre de 2017.

Los trabajos se realizan en conjunto con el DRNA, el Departamento de Recreación y Deportes (DRD) y FEMA. Los mismos cuentan con la asesoría y supervisión de un arborista certificado.

“Luego del paso del huracán María por Puerto Rico, los árboles que ubican en los predios del Centro Vacacional Punta Santiago en Humacao sufrieron graves daños, y a consecuencia de esto, muchos enfermaron y otros repre-

sentan un peligro para la ciudadanía”, señaló Machargo Maldonado en declaraciones escritas.

El DRD, quién era la agencia que tenía la titularidad del parque al momento del paso del huracán María, solicitó que se aprobara un proyecto de Categoría A para la remoción de escombros vegetativos para éste y otros parques. Esta agencia es la encargada de la ejecución del proyecto.

Con este proyecto, se continuará impactando otros Parques Nacionales que sufrieron daños por causa del paso del huracán María. Luego de que culmine este proceso, la Compañía de Parques Nacionales estará implantando un plan de reforestación con especies adecuadas para el área.

“Recalcamos que estos trabajos están siendo supervisados por personal adiestrado para dichas tareas y es nuestro compromiso que se tomen todas las medidas necesarias para que los recursos naturales sean preservados. Todos los trabajos se están realizando acorde con el reglamento para remoción de escombros de FEMA y el Reglamento 25”, concluyó Machargo Maldonado.

Demócratas en la isla eligen a Carmelo Ríos como presidente de delegación para su convención anual Por THE STAR

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l portavoz de la mayoría senatorial por el Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), Carmelo Ríos, fue seleccionado el domingo como presidente de la delegación de Puerto Rico durante la convenwción virtual del Partido Demócrata, que se llevará acabo del 17 al 20 de agosto.

En una votación de 21 a 27 y un voto abstenido, Ríos superó a su contrincante Rafael “Tatito” Hernández durante una elección a distancia donde participaron miembros del comité ejecutivo de dicho partido en la Isla y los delegados locales de todos los aspirantes presidenciales, se informó en declaraciones escritas.

“Como demócrata es un honor ser elegido por mis compañeros de partido para liderar nuestra delegación durante la convención anual. Es momento de trabajar unidos por Puerto Rico dejando a un lado las diferencias que nos pudieron separar durante la primaria.

Nuestra Isla necesita contar con aliados, en el Congreso y la Casa Blanca, que escuchen y atiendan nuestros reclamos. Hacia ese norte vamos todos los miembros de la delegación”, dijo el también senador por el distrito de Bayamón.

Entre los temas a discutirse durante la convención estará lo que será el programa de gobierno del Partido Demócrata donde se discutirán tópicos de importancia para Isla, entre ellos el estatus.

Ríos también es copresidente de la campaña de Joe Biden en Puerto Rico junto al exgobernador, Ale-

jandro García Padilla, el representante Rafael “Tatito Hernández” y Zoé Laboy.

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Monday, July 27, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s courtroom faceoff: An explainer

Johnny Depp arriving at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Wednesday.

By ALEX MARSHALL

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or the past three weeks, the attention of movie fans has been focused on one place: London’s grand, neo-Gothic Royal Courts of Justice.

Not because of a shoot.

Almost every day since July 7, Johnny Depp has walked into Court 13 here, where he is suing the owners of The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, and its executive editor, Dan Wootton, for libel over a 2018 article that called Depp a “wife beater” and said there was “overwhelming evidence” that he had assaulted actress Amber Heard during the pair’s marriage. Depp denies all the claims.

The newspaper has argued in court that it was “entirely accurate and true” to call Depp a “wife beater,” and Heard has been testifying this week on its behalf. (In English law, unlike in the United States, the burden of proof lies on the publisher in such cases.)

Depp, 57, testified at length earlier in the case, accusing Heard, 34, of violence toward him — claims she has denied in turn.

The proceedings have aired unsavory details of the marriage — from their drug and alcohol use to the moment excrement was found in a bed. And it has potential implications for both actors’ careers, with the verdict likely either to give Heard more prominence in the #MeToo movement or to leave her accused of having hijacked it, said Nick Wallis, a journalist who

has live-tweeted much of the trial proceedings and has put court documents online.

Only one party seemed to be benefiting so far, Wallis added: The Sun. The case had generated so much publicity for the paper that “even if it loses, it’s a win-win,” he said.

Here’s what’s happened so far and what’s next.

What is the background to the relationship between Depp and Heard?

Depp and Heard met while making “The Rum Diary” in 2011, a film based on a book by Hunter S. Thompson. They married in February 2015, but Heard filed for divorce just over a year later and obtained a temporary restraining order against Depp after accusing him of hitting her. She said at the time, according to The Associated Press, that she had “endured excessive emotional, verbal and physical abuse” in the relationship.

She withdrew those claims the day before a restraining order hearing was scheduled, and the divorce was finalized with a $7 million settlement. In a joint statement, the two declared: “Neither party has made false accusations for financial gain.

There was never any intent of physical or emotional harm.”

But the allegations did not go away. The Sun article appeared in April 2018. A few months later, Heard published an opinion piece in The Washington Post titled, “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.” Depp is suing Heard for defamation in the United States over that article, which he says led to him being dropped

from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie franchise.

What has Heard claimed?

On Monday, Heard told the court that Depp often put her in “life-threatening” situations. “I had been for years, for years, Johnny’s punching bag,” she added Tuesday. On Wednesday, she detailed an episode in Australia in which she said he threw bottles at her “like grenades or bombs.”

In pretrial documents, Heard listed 14 times when she said Depp assaulted her.

The first occurred in early 2013, Heard said in a pretrial statement, when the couple were sitting on a couch talking about one of Depp’s tattoos. She said it had originally read “Winona,” in reference to Winona Ryder, his former partner, but that he had changed it to read “wino.”

Heard said she had laughed during the conversation, and in response Depp hit her three times. “It felt like my eye popped out,” she added of the third strike, saying it knocked her off balance and to the floor.

In later incidents, Heard claims, Depp grabbed her by the hair, choked her, head-butted her and repeatedly punched her, on top of emotional abuse and other controlling behavior.

She said Wednesday that his behavior was “so confusing because when he was clean and sober, he was wonderful, and that part of him I loved so much.” News Group Newspapers — The Sun’s publisher — claims Depp’s memory of the couple’s time together has been impaired by heavy drug and alcohol use.

He has admitted use of both at times in the relationship but said his tolerance for substances was high.

What has Depp’s response been?

Depp denies the incidents. He told the court that whenever the couple had an argument he would retreat, sometimes hiding in bathrooms. “I would try to go to my own corner, as it were,” he said when asked about one incident. “I thought it important that we separate before things got out of hand.” Witnesses including a former estate manager for Depp and a former assistant to Heard have testified in his favor.

Depp has repeatedly portrayed Heard as an aggressor, provoking arguments. In the incident in Australia, Depp told the court, Heard threw a vodka bottle at him, severing the tip of one of his fingers.

Heard denies all claims that she was violent toward him and said that Depp must have severed the fingertip himself, potentially in the process of ripping a phone off the wall and smashing it beside her face repeatedly.

On Monday, Heard admitted she had thrown “pots and pans” at Depp but said it was “only to escape him.” She also acknowledged hitting him once but only to protect her sister, who she thought he was about to push down some stairs. “I will never forget it,” she said of that moment. “It was the first time after all these years that I actually struck him back.”

What happens next?

The case, which is being heard without a jury, continues, with final arguments not expected until Tuesday. The judge, Justice Nicol, will then take time to consider his ruling.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

21

The new ‘Kissing Booth’ star on ‘Cats,’ Selena and greased abs

By NANCY COLEMAN

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aylor Zakhar Perez usually only gets a taste of fame at Home Depot.

He’s been spotted four times, in four different Home Depot stores around Los Angeles: once at customer service, twice in various aisles and again as he was walking out. Each time, employees or shoppers have recognized him from a 2015 episode of Freeform’s “Young and Hungry.” (Why so many fans of the show frequent the hardware store is unclear. As for Zakhar Perez: “I’m a handy guy,” he said in a Zoom interview.)

His reach is likely to expand past the lighting aisle fairly soon: Zakhar Perez stars as the new love interest, Marco, in “The Kissing Booth 2,” Netflix’s sequel to the 2018 high school rom-com, released Friday. Marco is a bit of a Renaissance man in the film — athletic, musically inclined, adept in dance — or as Elle (Joey King) and perhaps a decent portion of the internet prefer to call him: a “snack.”

This is one of the first big projects for Zakhar Perez, 28, who got an early start performing in regional musicals while growing up in northwest Indiana. On Tuesday, he spoke about the film, his family and Marco’s first (greased up, clothing-optional) scene. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: What did you know about “The Kissing Booth” before you got involved? Had you seen the movie?

A: I knew nothing. Nothing. It was kind of crazy. It was my first audition of the year, in January 2019. I got this email, and I’m like, oh, a YA film, high school — and I didn’t love high school, so any time I get high school projects, I have to ask my sister for advice. I’m like, “Hey, so when you’re a cool kid, does this happen? How does this work?”

I had no idea of the magnitude of this project and how many fans were already down for this movie. I had my first audition, and the room was just full of guys that probably could be related to me. It was like five or six auditions later that I finally got it.

Q: How old is your sister? Is she in high school?

A: No, none of my siblings are in high school anymore, but I have seven siblings. I’m number six.

My sister is actually the one who got me into acting. She did like 40 performances of “Annie” one winter — you know, that’s like the go-to play in community theater. I went with my parents, and I was watching it like, “OK, this is fun, I could do this.” So then they asked if I wanted to get involved ushering and just handing out the playbills, and I’m a 12-, 13-year-old kid, why not?

That following summer, my mom enrolled the youngest three into this theater program at the same theater that “Annie” was at, and I did all behind-the-scenes stuff: I did sound, I did lighting, I was a stagehand. My brother would be sweeping in between sets; he’s four years younger than me. After that I kind of just fell in love with it.

Q: Were you a fan of rom-coms before this?

A: I didn’t grow up being a rom-com guy, but I love Matthew McConaughey. I just thought he was so magnetic and fun and carefree.

Q: In this movie, your character has such a wide array of artistic hobbies — there’s singing in English and Spanish,

Zakhar Perez, 28, plays Marco, a new love interest in “The Kissing Booth 2,” Netflix’s sequel to the 2018 high school rom-com. there’s guitar, there’s dance. How much of that was built into Marco’s character before you came on?

A: Man, it was all prebuilt. When I got the breakdown, it was looking for guys that were on “Eurovision,” “American Idol,” Latin “America’s Got Talent” kind of stuff. I was definitely nervous.

When I got to the callback, Vince [Marcello, the director] and I had really in-depth conversations of like, “Oh, you did ‘West Side Story’ back in your musical theater days,” or, “Oh, you did ‘Music Man,’ that’s a good show,” or, “‘On the Town,’ that’s a fun one.” He was just so well versed in musical theater.

So we talked about dancing, talked about how well I took on choreography — and I was like, “Vince, I’m going to be honest with you. I’m the hardest worker out there. I may not be the best dancer. I’m not going to go audition for ‘A Chorus Line’ tomorrow and do that entire opening scene. I’m not that guy. But if you give me the time and the support, I will be freaking fantastic.” And he’s like, “OK. That’s all I needed to hear, that I can count on you.” Then we had the chemistry read, and the rest is history.

Q: Did you grow up singing in Spanish?

A: That was a newer thing. I mean growing up, Selena [Quintanilla-Pérez] was my family’s heart and soul. My mom is Mexican, and I didn’t really see women on TV that looked like

her. When I saw J-Lo bring Selena to life as a kid, we watched it as a family. Any time there was a Latin-based project that came out, my mom would usually put us in front of it. We grew up singing Selena, Gloria Estefan and Celia Cruz, but this is my first time actually being able to sing it and really get involved with it, which was awesome.

Q: I’m curious, hearing you throw out “A Chorus Line” references: Were there certain musicals growing up that were really important for you?

A: The first show I saw was “Cats,” because it was the first project that my parents brought home that was on DVD or VHS or something. My siblings and I used to reenact those scenes. My cousin was Macavity. I was, I don’t know, Rum Tum Tugger. And “West Side Story,” because Natalie Wood and Rita Moreno in that film kind of reminded me of my mom.

“Rent” and “Wicked” were also huge for me. I was into “The Wizard of Oz” growing up, and I loved “Wicked” because Elphaba; she thinks that maybe she can meet this wizard that can change her life — if she just would accept herself and know that she’s powerful. And I definitely thought that there was a huge LGBTQ undertone in that. I didn’t realize that until kind of later in life, about the representation in these musicals, but “Rent” was my first introduction to the LGBTQ community.

Q: I have to ask, mostly on behalf of everyone who is going to watch the film Friday: We’re introduced to your character in the film through this semi-viral video that’s just … mostly abs. Was that you?

A: That was me. I will take that one. When I finally did my deep dive into everything, and I was reading this introduction of me — it’s all Elle’s dialogue like, “I don’t know, was that sweat or glitter? Oh, my God, those abs should have an Instagram.”

When we were shooting it, we couldn’t find the wardrobe woman, but we had double-stick tape. So Vince and I just start double-sticking my shorts up, because he wanted to hem them just slightly so you can see a little bit more skin for the purpose of the scene. So we’re both double-sticking them and just laughing, and then we’re back to shooting, and we’re spraying me with oil and water. Vince had to be very serious because he’s seeing the cut in his head, but we would cut and then just start laughing. I’m like, I can’t even look at this. This is so embarrassing.

Q: There’s been a bit of a pattern so far with the men of Netflix’s teen rom-coms — Jacob Elordi blew up after the first “Kissing Booth,” and same with Noah Centineo after “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.” Is that something you were aware of or thinking about when you took the role? And is it something you’re prepared for?

A: I didn’t think past learning lyrics, guitar, dance and lines, and just not getting fired. But I got to experience it firsthand because I traveled internationally with Joey and Joel [Courtney, who plays Lee], and people came up to them and were like, “Oh, my God, are you guys from ‘The Kissing Booth’?

Oh, my God. Are you Joey King? Are you Joel?”

I’m definitely ready to use what’s going to become my platform for good and for advocacy, and I’m very excited about that. But I don’t know, it’s a little nerve-wracking.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

Worried about crowded planes? Know where your airline stands

An American Airlines flight from Seattle to Chicago on July 16.

By ELAINE GLUSAC

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s air travel has ticked up in the last month, airlines have divided into two camps: those blocking strategic seats to offer more space, and those willing to fill planes to capacity.

In the latter camp, United Airlines never instituted limits and continues to sell all available seats as demand allows. As of July 1, American Airlines announced it would drop its capacity restraints, in place at 85% since April.

In the other corner are Alaska Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Southwest Airlines who say they will continue to block middle or adjacent seats through Sept. 30. JetBlue Airways just extended its ban on selling middle seats through Labor Day. The rise of full flights this summer has enraged some travelers. In response to a recent New York Times story on the lack of social distancing in the air, one reader commented, “I recently flew on two different American Airlines flights. Passengers totally packed together as in the old days, zero social distancing, and frequently, the stewardess left her mask hanging off her face. NEVER again.”

Airlines that are leaving key seats open say the measure is designed to reassure the public of their safety in the air. “We’re adding tens of thousands of flights to address extra demand

while leaning in on that assurance of distancing,” wrote Brad Hawkins, a spokesman for Southwest, in an email.

“More space matters, and more space is better for you,” said Drake Castañeda, a spokesman for Delta.

The economic pressure to sell all seats is enormous. Last week, Delta announced that its revenue plunged 88% in the second quarter, losing $5.7 billion. Also last week, American said it could furlough 20,000 people beginning Oct. 1, when federal stimulus funds expire.

United said it could shed 36,000 jobs in the fall.

“Whatever airlines do to make people comfortable flying again is good for the entire industry,” said Seth Kaplan, an airline expert and host of the podcast Airlines Confidential.

“United and American are probably glad Delta and Southwest are giving the public confidence in flying, but they’re going to take the money.”

Among these four biggest airlines in the nation, he added, Delta and Southwest entered the pandemic in a stronger financial position than American and United.

As of mid-July, the average flight only carries about 60 people, flying at an average of about 50% capacity, according to the trade group Airlines for America, making it easier for the more generous airlines to guarantee open space.

Rather than blocking seats, American and United are offering rebooking for travelers on

crowded flights through preflight notifications, though some fliers have complained that changing plans at the last minute is inconvenient. Joy Gonzalez of Seattle, a recent flier on American, said the options she’d been given to change involved long trips “with two or three layovers.”

“We have multiple layers of protection in place for those who fly with us, including required face coverings, enhanced cleaning procedures and a preflight COVID-19 symptom checklist — and we’re providing additional flexibility for customers to change their travel plans, as well,” wrote Ross Feinstein, an American spokesman, in an email.

A United spokesman, Charles Hobart, wrote in an email that “the overwhelming majority of our flights continue to depart with multiple empty seats.”

On airlines that aren’t blocking seats, carriers say they allow passengers, once boarded, to move to an empty seat within their ticketed cabin, even if that seat is a premium seat, assuming there isn’t an issue with balance and weight distribution.

Just hoping for an empty seat isn’t enough for Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., who tweeted about his packed American Airlines plane from Dallas to Portland, Oregon, on July 2, concluding, “No way you aren’t facilitating spread of COVID infections.”

The next day he wrote on Twitter that he would “introduce a bill to ban the sale of middle seats through this pandemic.”

“I recognize this does not fill the 6-foot standard established by the CDC,” he said in an interview. “But it’s the minimum requirement to decrease substantially the immediate proximity of someone else’s exhaled breath.”

Even if middle seats are left open, experts point out that you’re still not going to get the desired 6 feet of safe distance from the passenger occupying the same row. Still, some medical experts say travel can be done safely.

“Shorter is better, in terms of flights, so you don’t have as much exposure to other people,” said Preeti Malani, chief health officer and a professor of medicine in the infectious diseases division at the University of Michigan.

“I tend to feel window seats are better because you’re around fewer people,” she added.

Airlines have also increased aircraft cleaning frequency and strengthened their sanitation protocols. They also point to their strong air filters — most use high-efficiency particulate air or HEPA filters that remove over 99% of airborne particles — and the constant circula-

tion of fresh air in the cabin in mitigating virus spread.

In its advice to travelers, the CDC states on its website, “Most viruses and other germs do not spread easily on flights because of how air circulates and is filtered on airplanes.”

More important than social distancing, experts say, is wearing a mask.

“A lot of people are asymptomatic with this, which is why we really want everyone wearing masks,” said Dr. Trish Perl, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in a recent news conference on behalf of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. She noted that masks reduce the risk of catching the virus by up to 70%.

Most airlines in the United States require masks except when a passenger is eating or drinking, which has sparked some dissent in the air. In June, CNN reported that one passenger had been removed from an American flight for not wearing a mask and banned from future flights while the mask mandate is in place.

“It’s been a patchwork since there is no federal mandate on masks,” said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants union, which is calling on government leadership to normalize face coverings in flight the same way the Federal Aviation Administration mandates seat belts for safety.

“Once that’s communicated, people are used to following the rules, especially in aviation,” she added. “You have to recognize, this is not a normal day. When you’re flying, your fate is tied up with others.”

Stimulating travel safely is important to the nation’s economic recovery, according to the U.S. Travel Association, which says the industry is in a depression with 51% unemployment. It forecasts that travel spending will decline $519 billion this year because of the pandemic.

But recovery, reliant on consumer confidence, might, in part, depend on the feeling of safety offered by providing extra elbow room in the air.

“We have decided as a nation that airlines are essential,” said Merkley. “In every essential setting, we’ve asked businesses to make accommodations to minimize the transmission of the virus. In stores, we have masks and sometimes one-way aisles. In restaurants, we have tables further apart. It’s reasonable to ask airlines to do the maximum they can, like not selling adjacent seats.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

23

How exercise may bolster the brain

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

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xercise may help change exercisers’ brains in surprising ways, according to a new study of physical activity and brain health. The study, which included both mice and people, found that exercise prompts the liver to pump out a little-known protein, and that chemically upping the levels of that protein in out-of-shape, elderly animals rejuvenates their brains and memories. The findings raise provocative questions about whether the brain benefits of exercise might someday be available in a capsule or syringe form — essentially “exercise in a pill.”

We already have considerable evidence, of course, that physical activity protects brains and minds from some of the declines that otherwise accompany aging. In past rodent studies, animals that ran on wheels or treadmills produced more new neurons and learned and remembered better than sedentary mice or rats. Similarly, older people who took up walking for the sake of science added tissue volume in portions of their brains associated with memory. Even among younger people, those who were more fit than their peers tended to perform better on cognitive tests.

But many questions remain unanswered about how, at a cellular level, exercise remodels the brain and alters its function.

Most researchers suspect that the process involves the release of a cascade of substances inside the brain and elsewhere in the body during and after exercise. These substances interact and ignite other biochemical reactions that ultimately change how the brain looks and works. But what the substances are, where they originate and how they meet and mingle has remained unclear.

So, for the new study, which was published this month in Science, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, decided to look inside the minds and bloodstreams of mice. In past research from the same lab, the scientists had infused blood from young mice into older ones and seen improvements in the aging animals’ thinking. It was like “transferring a memory of youth through blood,” says Saul Villeda, a professor at UCSF, who conducted the study with his colleagues Alana Horowitz, Xuelai Fan and others.

Those benefits were a result of the donor animals’ young age, though, not their exercise habits. The scientists suspected that exercise would spark additional changes in the bloodstream that might be transferable, whatever an animal’s years.

So, as a first step in the new study, they had both young and elderly mice run for six weeks, then transfused blood from both groups into elderly, sedentary animals. Afterward, those aged mice performed better on cognitive tests than equally elderly controls, whether their transfusions had come from young runners or old. They also showed spikes in the creation of new neurons in their brains’ memory centers. It was the donors’ activity that had mattered, not their age.

Intrigued, the scientists next set out to find what differed in the exercisers’ blood. Using sophisticated mass spectrometry and other techniques, they separated out and enumerated various proteins in the running animals’ blood that were not seen in similar profusion in blood from inactive mice.

Exercise prompts the liver to pump out a little-known protein that appears to rejuvenate the brain, a new study found.

They then zeroed in on one little-studied protein known as GPLD1 (its scientific name is long and unpronounceable).

The slightly mysterious protein is known to be produced mostly in the liver, an organ not usually thought to have much interplay with the brain. But levels of the protein were elevated enough after exercise to justify more investigation.

So, the researchers now employed genetic engineering to amplify the release of GPLD1 from the livers of old, inactive mice. Afterward, those animals performed almost like young mice on tests of learning and memory, and their brains teemed with far more newborn neurons than in other old mice. In effect, they gained the brain benefits of exercise without the effort of actually exercising.

To ensure that this reaction was not purely rodent-based, the scientists also checked blood drawn from elderly people.

The older men and women who habitually walked for exercise showed higher levels of GPLD1 in their bloodstreams than those who did not.

The combined upshot of these findings seems to be that exercise improves brain health in part by prompting the liver to pump out extra amounts of GPLD1, Villeda says, although it is not yet clear how the protein then changes the brain. Subsequent experiments by the scientists showed that the protein probably does not breach the blood-brain barrier and act directly on the brain, Villeda says. Instead, it is likely to incite alterations in other tissues and cells elsewhere in the body. These

tissues, in turn, produce yet more proteins that have effects on other tissues that eventually lead to direct changes to the neurotransmitters, genes and cells in the brain itself that undergird cognitive improvements.

Villeda believes that if further experiments show that GPLD1, in isolation, helps to initiate this molecular chain reaction, then it is at least conceivable that infusions of the substance might offer the brain benefits of exercise to people who are too frail or disabled for regular physical activity.

This experiment principally involved mice, though, not people, and does not tell us anything about the systemic effects of extra GPLD1, which in high amounts might be undesirable. More fundamentally, the findings highlight the pervasive, intricate, whole-body effects of exercise, with the liver, in this case, somehow changing minds and brains after workouts. At the moment, it is impossible to know if the same synchronized, interwoven processes all would occur in response to a GPLD1 exercise pill and, if not, whether it could be considered an exercise pill at all.

Villeda is quick to agree that pharmaceutical GPLD1, even if effective for brain health, “would not recapitulate the benefits of exercise.” There would be none of the usual fat burning, muscle building or cardiovascular improvements, he points out. But he hopes that, if future experiments in his lab with animals and people show consistent results, the substance might eventually help people who find moving difficult to think better.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

Scientists narrow their predictions for global warming

With Story: BC-GLOBAL-TEMPERATURES-NYT How much, exactly, will greenhouse gases heat the planet? A team of researchers has sharply narrowed the range of temperatures, tightening it to between 2.6 and 4.1 degrees Celsius.

-- 4.0 x 2.5 -- cat=i

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

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ow much, exactly, will greenhouse gases heat the planet?

For more than 40 years, scientists have expressed the answer as a range of possible temperature increases, between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit), that will result from carbon dioxide levels doubling from preindustrial times. Now, a team of researchers has sharply narrowed the range of temperatures, tightening it to between 2.6 and 4.1 degrees Celsius.

Steven Sherwood, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and an author of the new report, said that the group’s research suggested that these temperature shifts, which are referred to as “climate sensitivity” because they reflect how sensitive the planet is to rising carbon dioxide levels, are now unlikely below the low end of the range. The research also suggests that the “alarmingly high sensitivities” of 5 degrees Celsius or higher are less likely, although they are “not impossible,” Sherwood said.

What remains, however, is still an array of effects that mean worldwide disaster if emissions are not sharply reduced in coming years.

Masahiro Watanabe, a professor in the atmosphere and ocean research institute at the University of Tokyo and an author of the report, said that determining an accurate range of temperatures was critically important for international efforts to address global warming, like the Paris climate agreement, and for mitigating the effects of climate change.

“Narrowing the uncertainty is relevant not only for climate science but also for society that is responsible for solid decision making,” he said.

The new paper, published Wednesday in the journal Reviews of Geophysics, narrowed the range of temperatures considerably and shifted it toward warmer outcomes. The researchers determined that there was less than a 5% chance of a temperature shift below 2 degrees, but a 6% to 18% chance of a higher temperature change than 4.5 degrees.

If the effects of carbon dioxide are at the low end of the range or even below it, then climate change will be affected less by emissions and the planet will warm more slowly. If the Earth’s climate is more highly sensitive to carbon dioxide levels, then the expected results are not only more imminent but also more catastrophic.

The scientists noted that the Earth’s

temperature is already about 1.2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and that, if current emissions trends continue, the doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide could happen well before the end of this century.

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, who was not an author of the report but who was one of its earlier outside reviewers, called the paper “a real tour de force,” adding that “this is probably the most important paper I’ve read in years.”

For many years, those who wished to underplay the threat of climate change have tried to say that the sensitivity is low, and so rising greenhouse gases would have little effect. And some recent climate models have suggested warming could be frighteningly worse.

The value of the paper, Dessler said, lies in the way that it narrows the probable range of temperatures the world can expect.

“There were a number of people who were arguing the climate sensitivity was much lower, and a smaller number claiming it was much higher,” he said, “and I think the case for either of those positions is a lot weaker now that this paper has been published.”

That means that those who undercut the seriousness of climate change and the need for action have a much harder case to make now, Dessler said.

“It would be great if the skeptics were right,” he said. “But it’s pretty clear that the data don’t support that contention.”

The paper, produced under an international science organization, the World Climate Research Program, brought together three broad fields of climate evidence: temperature records since the industrial revolution, records of prehistoric temperatures preserved in things like sediment samples and tree rings, as well as satellite observations and computer models of the climate system. None alone could determine the range, but the researchers found ways mathematically to reconcile the three disciplines to reach their conclusions.

“This paper is really the first to try and include all of those disparate sources of observational evidence in a coherent package that actually makes sense,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, director of the NASA

Goddard Institute for Space Studies and an author of the paper.

Another author on the paper, Gabriele Hegerl, a professor of climate system science at the University of Edinburgh, said that the way the threads of research came together was surprising.

“We don’t expect these three lines of evidence to agree completely,” she said, but hoped they would “overlap.” And they did, she said, so “our research is more robust than I initially expected.”

Not everyone is prepared to accept the new results. Nicholas Lewis, an independent scientist who has been critical of aspects of mainstream climate research and who has found flaws in the work of others that led to the retraction last year of a major study on ocean warming, questioned the new paper’s reliance on computer models to interpret the lines of evidence, as well as the group’s definition of climate sensitivity itself. He also suggested that the paper ignored some possible complications from changes in clouds and convection.

Schmidt said that the new paper made all of the data and methodology available.

“This is a real challenge to people who think the experts are wrong to go in, change the assumptions, run the code and show us their results,” he said.

Some degree of uncertainty about planetary warming is inevitable, said Zeke Hausfather, a scientist with The Breakthrough Institute and an author of the paper. But the current range is “not a good amount of warming at all,” he said, noting that eliminating the extremes still leaves a middle range that means climate disaster.

“You don’t need 5 degrees of warming to justify climate action,” he said.

“Three degrees is plenty bad.”

William Collins, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who was not involved with the study, praised the effort to tie together so much research into a single paper but said that further advances in computing and data gathering would continue to drive the quest for answers.

He compared climate sensitivity research to climbing Mount Everest and said: “This is an extremely important base camp. We are not at the pinnacle yet.”

The San Juan Daily Star LEGAL NOTICE

RICAMONTES CIGARS INC.

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO Número de Expediente: DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU231901-99-0. Propietario: RiNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA cardo Ortiz Rivera. Dirección: SALA DE TOA ALTA. Bo. Bairoa carr. 156 km.51.9, COOPERATIVA DE Aguas Buenas, PR 00703.

AHORRO Y CRÉDITO DR. Actividad Empresarial: MANUMANUEL ZENO GANDÍA FACTURA Y VENTA DE CIGARROS. Renuncia a elementos Demandante vs. no registrables: NOTIFICAANGÉLICA CIÓN: Cualquier oposición a PADILLA ROBLES este registro deberá presentarDemandada se en el Departamento de EstaCIVIL NUM.: TA2019CV01405. do de Puerto Rico dentro de los SALA: 500. SOBRE: COBRO treinta (30) días siguientes a la DE DINERO (REGLA 60). EMpublicación de este aviso.

PLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE LEGAL NOTICE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE LOS EE.UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. SS. DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA A: SRA. ANGÉLICA SALA DE BAYAMÓN.

PADILLA ROBLES WILMINGTON SAVINGS RR 3 BOX 10446-4 FUND SOCIETY FSB TOA ALTA, PUERTO RICO d/b/a Christiana Trust, as 00953-8032 o sea, la parte demandada indenture Trustee, for the CSMC 2015-PR 1 Trust arriba mencionada .

Mortgage-Backed Notes, POR LA PRESENTE se le emSeries 2015-PR1 plaza y requiere para que notifique a la: LCDA. ANA M. CAMPOS GAVITO RUA 7710 EDIF. MANUEL ZENO GANDIA, 353 AVE. DOMENECH, SUITE 302 SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO 00918 TEL . & FAX: (787)751·5733 EMAIL: anamcampos1@yahoo.com abogada de la parte demandante cuya dirección es la que se deja indicada, con copia de su contestación a la demanda , copia de la cual le es serv ida en este acto, dentro de los Treinta (30) días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento, excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento , apercibiéndole que en caso de no hacerlo así, podrá dictarse sentencia en rebeldía en contra suya, concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda. Extendido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 20 de febrero de 2020. Lcda. Laura I Santa Sanchez, Secretaria Regional. Mircienid Gonzalez Torres, Sec Auxiliar.

Parte Demandante Vs.

LA SUCESION DE AIDA AURORA ORTIZ CHEVERES T/C/C AIDA A. ORTIZ CHEVERES Y AIDA AURORA ORTIZ CHEVRES compuesta por Adrian Edgardo Ortiz Chevres y Carlos Ortiz Chevres; John Doe y Richard Roe como miembros desconocidos; ADMINISTRACIÓN PARA EL SUSTENTO DE MENORES, Y CENTRO DE RECAUDACIÓN SOBRE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES

Parte Demandada CIVIL NUM. BY2020CV00679 (701). SOBRE: EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA POR LA VIA ORDINARIA Y COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO Y NOTIFICACION DE INTERPELACION POR EDICTO. EsLEGAL NOTICE tados Unidos de América PresiGOBIERNO DE PUERTO dente de los Estados Unidos de RICO. NOMBRE COMERCIAL América Estado Libre Asociado PARA REGISTRAR. AVISO. A de Puerto Rico.

A: John Doe y Richard QUIEN PUEDA INTERESAR: De acuerdo con las disposicioRoe como posibles nes de la Ley Núm. 75 del 23 herederos desconocidos de septiembre de 1992, según de la Sucesión de Aida enmendada, mejor conociAurora Ortiz Cheveres da como la Ley de Nombres t/c/c Aida A. Ortiz Comerciales del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico y la Cheveres y Aida Aurora Sección 24 del Reglamento Ortiz Chevres promulgado bajo la ley cita- Por la presente se le notifica da anteriormente, el siguiente que la parte demandante ha nombre comercial ha sido pre- presentado ante este Tribunal sentado en el Departamento de demanda contra usted sobre Estado de Puerto Rico para su Ejecución de Hipoteca y Cobro archivo y registro de Dinero. Representa a dicha

@

Monday, July 27, 2020 demandante el Lcda. Marjaliisa Colon Villanueva, con oficina en #481 Ave. Tito Castro, Ponce, Puerto Rico 00716 y con dirección postal Apartado 7970, Ponce, Puerto Rico 00732, número de teléfono (787) 843-4168, correo electrónico mcolon@wwclaw.com . Se le apercibe que de no comparecer usted a contestar dicha demanda dentro del término de treinta días (30) a partir de la publicación de este edicto, podrá dictarse sentencia en rebeldía en su contra, concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda sin más citarle ni oírle, además se le advierte que de no expresarse dentro de dicho término en torno a su aceptación o repudiación de herencia, se presumirá que usted ha aceptado la herencia de Aida Aurora Ortiz Cheveres t/c/c Aida A. Ortiz Cheveres y Aida Aurora Ortiz Chevres y por consiguiente, responden por las cargas de dicha herencia conforme dispone el Art. 957 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. S2785 el término de treinta (30) días antes señalado, el cual comenzará a contar a partir de la fecha de la publicación de este edicto.

En Bayamón, Puerto Rico, a 29 de abril de 2020. Lcda. Laura I. Santa Sanchez, Sec Regional.

Alba Brito Borgen, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PÜERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE MAY AGÜEZ.

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante v.

JOHN DOE & RICHARD ROE

Demandados CIVIL NÚM. MZ2020CV00517.

SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADOD E P.R. SS.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE, personas desconocidas que se designan con estos nombres ficticios, que puedan ser tenedor o tenedores, o puedan tener algún interés en el pagaré hipotecario a que se hace referencia más adelante en el presente edicto, que se publicará una sola vez.

Se les notifica que en la Demanda radicada en el caso de epígrafe se alega que el 29 de junio de 2006, se otorgó un pagaré a favor de Eurobank, o a su orden, por la

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

suma de $1,900,000.00, con intereses a 1% sob e “Prime Rate” anual, vencedero a la presentación, ante el Notario Luis Roberto Santos, mediante afidávit 17849. En garantía del pagaré antes descrito se otorgó la escritura de hipoteca número 75, en Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, el 29 de junio de 2006, ante el Notario Público Luis Roberto Santos, respondiendo la · finca número 18809 por $475,000.00, inscrita al folio 176 del tomo 864 de Cabo Rojo, inscripción 9na, Registro de la Propiedad de San German; respondiendo la finca número 18802 por $475,000.00, inscrita al folio 172 del tomo 864 de Cabo Rojo, inscripción 9na, Registro de la Propiedad de San German; respondiendo la finca número 18692 por $475,000.00, inscrita al folio 2 del tomo 864 de Cabo ‘Rojo; inscripción 9na, Registro de la Propiedad de San German; y respondiendo la finca número 18693 por $475,000.00, inscrita al folio 5 del tomo 864 de Cabo Rojo, inscripción 9na, Registro de la Propiedad de San German. Los inmuebles gravados mediante la hipoteca antes descrita son la finca número 18809 inscrita al folio 176 del tomo 864. de Cabo Rojo, Registro de la Propiedad de San German; la finca 18692 inscrita al folio 1 del tomo 864 de Cabo Rojo, Registro de la Propiedad de San German; la finca 18802 inscrita al folio 172 del tomo 864 de Cabo Rojo, Registro de la Propiedad de San German; y la finca 18693 inscrita al folio 4 del tomo 864 de Cabo Rojo , Registro de la Propiedad de San German. La obligación evidenciada por el pagaré antes descrito fue saldada en su totalidad. Dicho gravamen no ha podido ser cancelado por haberse extraviado el original del pagaré. El original del pagaré antes descrito no ha podido ser localizado, a pesar de las gestiones realizadas. Eurobank es el acreedor que consta en el Registro de la Propiedad. El último tenedor conocido del pagaré antes descrito fue Oriental Bank. POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los 30 días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento, excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación

(787) 743-3346

25 responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del . referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía eh su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción , lo entiende procedente.

LCDO. JAVIER MONTALVO CINTRÓN RUA NÚM. 17682 DELGADO & FERNÁNDEZ, LLC PO Box 11750, Femández Juncos Station San Juan, Puerto Rico 00910-1750, Tel. (787) 274-1414 / Fax (787) 764-8241 E-mail: jmontalvo@ delgadofernandez.com Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 17 de JULIO de 2020. Lcda. Norma G. Santana lrizarry, Secretaria. f/ Betsy Santiago González, SubSecretaria.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PREMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN.

AMERICAS LEADING FINANCE LLC Demandante, V.

DAVID GUERRA FEBULO, SU ESPOSA FULANA DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandados CIVIL NUM.: SJ2020CV03219.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO POR LA VA ORDINARIA Y EJECUCION DE GRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO (REPOSESION DE VEHICULO). EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. DE AMERICA EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO SS.

A: DAVID GUERRA FEBULO, 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 via ordinaria en la que se alega que los demandados DAVID GUERRA FEBULO, 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

$11,302.12, 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 secretarIa del tribunal, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia concediendo el remedio asI solicitado sin mas citarles ni oIrles. 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 nUmero 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 San Juan, Puerto Rico, hoy día 17 de julio de 2020. GRISELDA RODRIGLEZ COLLADO, Secretaria Regional. Maria M. Cruz Ramos, SubSecretaria.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE PONCE SALA SUPERIOR DE PONCE.

MARCIAL JUSINO OQUENDO; MIEMBROS DE LA SUCESIÓN DE MARGARITA RIVERA NUÑEZ y otros DEMANDANTES V.

MARCOS IVAN JUSINO RIVERA Y otros.

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM: PO2020CV00976.

SOBRE: 1 LIQUIDACION DE COMUNIDAD DE BIENES Y HEREDITARIA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO SS.

A: CARMEN IRIS JUSINO RIVERA es: 509-12 St. Apt. 3-B Brooklyn, New York 11215

POR LA PRESENTE se les em-

plaza y requiere para que conteste la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este Edicto. Usted deberá radicar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial.pr/ sumac/, salvo que se presente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá radicar el original de su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia a los abogados de la parte demandante, Ledo.

Wendell W. Colón Muñoz, al PO BOX 7970, Ponce, P.R. 00732; Teléfono: 787-843-4168. En dicha demanda se tramita un procedimiento de liquidación de comunidad de bienes y hereditaria relacionado con la propiedad que se describe a continuación: RÚSTICA: Parcela marcada con el número diez (10) en el plano de parcelación de la comunidad rural Yuca del Barrio Machuelo Arriba del término municipal de Ponce con una cabida superficial de cero cuerdas con mil ciento noventa y seis diez milésimas de otra, equivalente a cuatrocientos setenta punto veinte y cinco metros cuadrados. En lindes por el Norte con parcela número nueve de la comunicad. Por el Sur con parcela número once de la comunidad. Por el Este con la calle O de la comunidad. Por el Oeste con parcela número siete de la comunidad. La finca antes descrita tiene el siguiente número de codificación del Centro de Recaudación de Ingresos Municipales (CRIM): 341-063638-16-000. La cual se encuentra pendiente de inscripción.

SE LES APERCIBE que, de no hacer sus alegaciones responsivas a la demanda dentro del término aquí dispuesto, se les anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle.

Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal en Ponce, Puerto Rico, a 20 de julio de 2020. Luz Mayra Caraballo Garcia, Sec Regional. Loyda Torres Irizarry, Sec Auxiliar.

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

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante v.

FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION (FDIC) COMO SÍNDICO DE

RG PREMIER BANK OF PUERTO RICO, DE RG MORTGAGE CORPORATION Y DE DORAL BANK; SCOTIABANK DE PUERTO RICO, DORAL MORTGAGE CORPORATION T/C/C DORAL MORTGAGE, LLC., POR CONDUCTO DE SU AGENTE RESIDENTE CT CORPORATION SYSTEM; MARIBEL AYALA SANTOS; FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL; POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ

Demandado(a) Civil: FA2019CV01497. Sobre: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: *MARIBEL AYALA SANTOS: URB. SANTA MARÍA, E9 CALLE 1, CEIBA, PR 00735-3173. *FULANO y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ.

(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 FAJARDO , Puerto Rico , el 21 de julio de 2020. WANDA I. SEGUI REYES, Secretaria. f/JENIFFER CARRASQUILLO GONZALEZ, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

26

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

‘We will be a voice for the voiceless’: The WNBA season is dedicated to Breonna Taylor

By GILLIAN R. BRASSIL

T

he WNBA season started with 26 seconds of silence and an empty court.

“We are dedicating this season to Breonna Taylor,” Layshia Clarendon, a New York Liberty guard and member of the new WNBA Social Justice Council, said at the game’s start. “We will be a voice for the voiceless.”

The 2020 season, which is being played in a 22-week “bubble” tournament at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., is expected to be charged with social justice initiatives alongside a full championship schedule. Symbols and logos declaring “Black Lives Matter” and “Say Her Name” were prominent on the court, and players wore jerseys that bore the name of Taylor.

The opener — pitting young guns against league veterans, first times and comebacks — ended with an 87-71 Seattle Storm victory over the Liberty.

The Storm brought back Sue Bird, the all-time assist leader of the league, and Breanna Stewart, the 2018 MVP, after both were unable to play last season. The team started with the same lineup that garnered it the 2018 championship title.

Both players were comfortable on the court: Bird with 11 points and five assists; Stewart 18 points, eight rebounds, two assists and a personal-record four steals.

Sabrina Ionescu makes her Liberty debut in a game and season dedicated to the life of Breonna Taylor.

The team’s defensive strategy forced the Liberty into 20 turnovers and 35 percent shooting.

“I have no problem saying it,” Liberty head coach Walt Hopkins said in a pregame Zoom call with reporters, “they’re probably the favorite to win it this year.”

While the Storm sported a seasoned lineup, the Liberty entered the arena with a new set of players, staff and strategy.

Hopkins, a first-time head coach who

previously was an assistant coach for the Minnesota Lynx, has pushed for a faster pace and more 3-point attempts.

Sabrina Ionescu, the No. 1 2020 draft pick out of Oregon, played for nearly 34 minutes in her first league game. She made the first rebound of her career just a few minutes into the game and closed her debut with 12 points, six rebounds and four assists. But the player, known for her triple-doubles, wasn’t able to sink any

3-pointers, and ended up making 4 of 17 shots from the floor.

“I definitely think we did have some letdowns,” she said in a postgame Zoom call. Ionescu is the only NCAA basketball player to record 2,000 points, 1,000 assists and 1,000 rebounds. “But we have to play in a few days and I have to learn from those mistakes.”

She’s one of seven rookies on the Liberty’s roster, which started down Asia Durr, who is battling the coronavirus, and rookie Megan Walker, who will join the team Monday following quarantine protocols after testing positive for the coronavirus just over two weeks ago.

Jazmine Jones, another new face to the WNBA, was also absent after sustaining an ankle sprain in training last week.

And the Liberty lost Kia Nurse, their second-leading scorer, with eight minutes left in the second quarter, to an apparent ankle sprain, although a final diagnosis has yet to be announced.

The New York Liberty will play the Dallas Wings on Wednesday; the Storm go against Minnesota on Tuesday.

The games will continue to be marked by social justice initiatives; the league dedicates its 22-week season to Taylor.

“We’re not just slapping her name on a shirt and saying, ‘Here we go,’” Clarendon said. “We’re being intentional about this and working with her mother.”

Tom Thibodeau nearing agreement to become Knicks coach

By SOPAN DEB

T

om Thibodeau, a defensive-minded coach who most recently led the Minnesota Timberwolves, is nearing an agreement to take the reins of the New York Knicks, a source with knowledge of the negotiations said Saturday. Thibodeau, who had been an assistant coach for the Knicks from 1996-2003, will become the team’s eighth coach since 2012.

The story was first reported by ESPN. Thibodeau, 62, had been considered a front-runner for the job since the spring, especially once William Wesley, more commonly known around the NBA as World Wide Wes, was added to the Knicks front office. Thibodeau was once

Wesley’s client at the sports and entertainment giant Creative Artists Agency, and Leon Rose, the Knicks president, was also an agent at CAA, where he worked alongside Thibodeau.

Thibodeau, a New Britain, Conn. native, has cultivated a reputation for having a single-minded obsession for basketball in his decades-long coaching career. His first coaching job was as an assistant at his alma mater, Salem State College in Salem, Mass. In the NBA, he was a highly regarded assistant from 1989-2010, best known for being the architect of the staunch Boston Celtics defense that led the team to a championship in 2008.

In 2010, Thibodeau became head coach of the Chicago Bulls and was an

immediate success. He would become the fastest head coach to accumulate 100 regular season victories. In his first year with the Bulls, the team won 62 games and went to the Eastern Conference Finals. It would be his high-water mark as a coach.

The Bulls would not get out of the second round again for the rest of Thibodeau’s Bulls tenure, which lasted four more years. He was fired in 2015, after developing a reputation for clashing with players and the front office, as well as for overworking star players.

In 2016, Thibodeau was hired as coach and president of basketball operations for the Timberwolves. But in three seasons, the Timberwolves were largely un-

successful, making the playoffs once and losing in the first round. The tenure was most defined by Jimmy Butler’s public trade demand that spilled into a dramatic practice. Thibodeau was abruptly fired midseason last year.

Thibodeau went 255-139 with the Bulls and 97-107 with the Timberwolves.

But even with recent missteps, Thibodeau will bring decades worth of experience to a young roster in flux, as Rose attempts to rebuild the franchise’s credibility for star free-agent recruits. And very few available coaches are as aware of the fan base’s craving for success: Thibodeau was a coach for the Knicks in the late 1990s, the last time the team was considered a powerhouse.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

27

Breanna Stewart is ready for her old normal: Winning championships

By KURT STREETER

A

t long last, Breanna Stewart’s WNBA comeback was Saturday, when her Seattle Storm faced the Liberty and vaunted No. 1 draft pick Sabrina Ionescu in the league’s nationally televised season opener (a game won by Stewart and the Storm, 87-71, in Bradenton, Fla.). Big-buzz, showcase games like that one are nothing new to Stewart, of course. After winning an Olympic gold medal and four national titles at Connecticut, she led the Storm to the WNBA title in 2018 and was named the league’s most valuable player. Then came the biggest test of her career: a devastating Achilles rupture that caused her to miss all of last season.

Stewart spent months cooped up in Seattle, rehabbing and taking part in Black Lives Matter protests before trekking to Florida at the start of July for the new season. She joined the rest of the WNBA’s players at the IMG Academy, a 600-acre sports training campus 45 miles from Tampa Bay where all 12 teams are living, training, and sequestering together as they play a shortened 22-game regular season.

Stewart’s wait to return to the court has been long and unsettling, with the tedium of recovery stretched out by uncertainty over the league’s return. Having endured all of that, Stewart will finally try to get back to her old normal — winning championships.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Breanna Stewart: Honestly, in a way I’m still shocked to be back and about to get back out on court in our league.

It’s surreal. I was just thinking about it today, in fact. About how I’m going to put my Seattle uniform on and this time, finally, it’s not going to be for a photo shoot. How I’m actually going to go and play a game that counts in this league again. I’ve missed that so much. Missed being around my teammates and the kind of atmosphere we have and just fighting with them for 40 minutes. Now I don’t have to miss it anymore.

There’s a lot of change in the league, with some players opting out and others moving to different teams, and also some really exciting new players. We’re fortunate in Seattle because we have our entire roster here and we’re healthy and experienced. We’re going after a

Breanna Stewart, left, posed for a selfie with her Seattle Storm teammates.

“We’re going after a championship, no doubt about it. We’re just as hungry as we were in 2018, if not hungrier,” she said. championship, no doubt about it. We’re just as hungry as we were in 2018, if not hungrier. This season has a different look to it, of course, different from any other season. We know some people want to put an asterisk on it, but we’re here and we want to do what we’ve come here to do.

I was the league MVP in 2018, and then missed last year. [Washington Mystics forward] Elena Delle Donne was the MVP in 2019, and is out now because of her concerns about COVID-19 and a pre-existing condition.

It’s definitely weird when I think about that. I have so much respect for Elena, who she is on and off the court, and, you know, the fact she wants to be able to play in an environment where she’s feeling comfortable. She’s one of the best and I always want to play against the best, but her situation is one of those things where there’s more to life than basketball and we get that in this league.

Me and a lot of my teammates basically have a bike gang at this point.

We’re living on this campus in our bubble, and other than the games which will be about a 20-minute drive away,

everything we’ll be doing will be on the campus. Since it’s so huge and sprawling, most players have been given a bike. I go to practice and the weight room on a bike. In the beginning, you should have seen all of us as players trying to ride around, because for a lot of us, we haven’t done it in forever. I can’t tell you the last time I rode a bike. I was probably about 10 years old.

We’re having fun with it. Seems like every time you turn a corner you see someone, some great player. Coming back from practice on my bike and I look around and there’s Candace Parker, just passing me by. I’m like, “Hi, Candace!”

Outside of practice with our team, I don’t think we feel we’re 100 percent comfortable hanging out as a group in the same room.

So really, we just don’t. No meetings in small conference rooms or indoors in small spaces like that. And we don’t find ourselves really socializing with other teams.

Got a shiner, a big black eye the other day.

Just under the right eye, I took an elbow from a teammate. That shows

how nobody is backing off when we’re on the court. We’re wearing the masks outside, but then we play we’re banging up against each other. We recently had a scrimmage with Dallas and it had all the normal physical play, but I’ve got to say, it’s weird to be so close to somebody else without a mask who is not on our team.

I mean, in the end, it’s like we’re contradicting ourselves with some of this. We’re told to be six feet apart, but when we’re on the court it’s impossible. We’re battling there on the court up close, but, then in the arena, you see that our seats are spread out for distancing.

So, the co-owner of the Atlanta Dream, coming out against Black Lives?

[In mid-July, Atlanta Dream coowner Kelly Loeffler was widely denounced by players for criticizing the league’s decision to honor the Black Lives Matter movement at games this season.] Well, I’m not going to say her name, so I don’t give her any type of power, but I think that from a political standpoint, what she did was just try to ruffle the feathers in the league and create more attention for herself because her Senate seat is up for grabs.

There’s so much going on outside the bubble at this time in history, and we’re still absolutely connected to it even though we’re here. As a league we know what we stand for, and what we stand by, and the Black Lives Matter movement is something that is very important to us.

I think as the co-owner of the Dream, to make those comments when you’re in that position in a league that is 80 percent women of color? We don’t appreciate that, we don’t appreciate that at all. Personally, I don’t think she should be an owner, but it is not my job to decide who should not be an owner.

This league is in good hands with all of the new, young talent coming in.

Everyone has their eyes out for Sabrina. She’s just a natural hooper, and her pick-and-roll game is like no other. I know from experience that when you’re the No. 1 pick and coming out of college after a great career you don’t fly under the radar, and she definitely hasn’t. People are super excited about seeing her at the next level, and I’m one of them.

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

As NFL fights racism and sexism, team owners undercut the message

By KEN BELSON

T

he NFL has taken strides to repair its image as being insensitive to issues facing women and people of color.

But the league continues to be confronted by an uncomfortable reality: Its efforts can be undercut by reports of toxic behavior at the tops of its franchises.

Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets and the U.S. ambassador to Britain, was accused of making comments to embassy colleagues that they found racist or sexist, complaints that State Department investigators included in a report filed in February. The report has not been released publicly, but according to interviews with half a dozen current and former embassy employees, Johnson regularly made his female and Black staff members uncomfortable, or worse, with comments about their appearance or race.

One Black female diplomat, for example, told colleagues that Johnson disparaged her efforts to schedule events for Black History Month, accusations that were first reported by CNN. The diplomat said Johnson once asked if he had to speak to an audience that “was just a bunch of Black people,” and told her she was “marginalizing” herself.

Female employees also complained that Johnson held business lunches in London at an exclusive men’s club, which meant that only male employees could attend.

The accusations against Johnson have surfaced as the NFL grapples with two other crises of racism and sexism that reached recent turning points. Its team in the Washington, D.C., area has abandoned its longtime name and logo, which many consider a racist slur against Native Americans, after team owner Daniel Snyder resisted any change for decades. Recently, the Washington Football Team, as it is now known, also hired lawyers to investigate charges in the team’s front office of widespread harassment of women, who said male executives repeatedly commented on their looks, sent inappropriate text messages and pursued unwanted relationships.

The re-emergence of issues of discrimination involving two of the league’s most prominent team owners comes as the nation confronts systemic racism in many of its institutions, including sports teams and leagues.

Johnson has been the primary owner of the Jets since 2000, but he ceded daily con-

New York Jets owner Woody Johnson was reportedly accused of making racist comments at a Black History Month event at the United Kingdom embassy. trol of the team to his brother, Christopher, when he was appointed ambassador in 2017 by President Donald Trump. Johnson’s arms-length distance from the team makes this different from other cases the NFL has faced.

Still, the new allegations of racism and sexism threaten to undercut the league’s efforts to promote itself as having learned from past failings. The NFL’s personal conduct policy says that “everyone” who is part of the league must refrain from “conduct detrimental to the integrity of and public confidence in” the NFL. The word “everyone” is emphasized with a bold font.

Yet the league has policed its owners inconsistently, in part because the circumstances around allegations that have surfaced have widely varied. The episodes surrounding Johnson and others raise fresh questions about how much the NFL can change its culture without scrutinizing those with the most power in its franchises.

“They have the same story and it keeps repeating itself,” said Upton Bell, a longtime football executive and the son of Bert Bell, a former commissioner and onetime owner of the Philadelphia Eagles. “It isn’t possible for the NFL to be progressive.”

Johnson denied the allegations on the ambassador’s official Twitter account.

“I have followed the ethical rules and requirements of my office at all times,” he wrote. “These false claims of insensitive remarks about race and gender are totally inconsistent with my long-standing record and values.”

In a statement, the NFL said it was

aware of accusations of problematic comments made by Johnson, but referred questions to the State Department. The league did not specify what action, if any, it is taking.

The Jets said in a statement that since the Johnson family bought the team 20 years ago, the team has supported “many different social justice, diversity, women’s, and inclusion initiatives.”

At least one Jets player, star safety Jamal Adams, called out Johnson.

“Right is right. Wrong is wrong!” Adams wrote on Twitter. “If u don’t think this is wrong you’re part of the problem not the solution.”

The Fritz Pollard Alliance, which promotes diversity among NFL coaches, said it was “deeply troubled by allegations of insensitive remarks” by Johnson. The group, which is named after the league’s first African American head coach, called on the league “to take appropriate action” if warranted.

The NFL has wrestled with the issues of race and sexism more prominently than most North American sports leagues.

About three-quarters of its players are Black and roughly half of its fans are women, but most majority owners are white men and the league has struggled to hire nonwhite head coaches and general managers.

The league had also struggled to respond to protests against racial injustice led by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other players who knelt during the playing of the national anthem beginning in 2016.

After the NFL neither defended nor stopped the protests immediately, Trump turned the league into a political punching bag, calling on owners, some of whom heavily supported him politically, to fire players who demonstrated during the playing of the national anthem in 2017. Trump reiterated his stance that players should stand during “The Star Spangled Banner” last month, giving new fuel to a divisive debate that has pitted fans against players — and players against team owners.

Kaepernick last played in the 2016 season, and when he went unsigned in 2017, he accused the owners of colluding to keep him out of the league because of his political beliefs. After numerous entertainers said they would not perform at NFL events in solidarity with Kaepernick, the league paid the quarterback and his former teammate, Eric Reid, several millions of dollars to settle their case.

Before the 2018 season, team owners also threatened to discipline players for demonstrating during the anthem, but the plan was quickly scuttled after the players union objected.

Renewed protests that grew after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in police custody in May led the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, to side more firmly with players who wanted to speak out about systemic racism. After a number of star players released a video in June that called for the commissioner to explicitly say “Black Lives Matter,” Goodell apologized for not having listened to the concerns of African American players earlier.

It was a hard pivot for the league’s top executive, who works at the behest of the team owners who form what is effectively a trade association. But the statement also did not acknowledge the status of Kaepernick, who has still not received an offer from an NFL team.

Goodell’s efforts on racism have mostly centered on trainings for players and football staff, hiring practices, and on supporting community groups. The league pledged tens of millions of dollars in 2017 to organizations fighting social injustice. Last August, he hired Roc Nation, the company owned by music impresario Jay-Z to help the league with a social justice initiative.

The NFL also pledged support to the Players Coalition, a player-led group that focuses on legislative measures and other steps to fight systemic racism, and planned other cosmetic changes during games.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 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)

Spending a few moments with your head in the clouds helps you keep your feet on the ground. Lively online conversations with people who share a variety of interests will excite your imagination. Don’t be surprised if you feel inspired to write a story, compose some music or begin a creative project as a result.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

A financial or creative offer will help turn your dreams into reality. An agent or manager will help with the business side of things while you enjoy the craft side. You have been blessed with lots of artistic talent and an impressive imagination. It is time to turn ideas into reality and to put your artwork on display.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Working as a team will benefit the whole organisation. Advancing your own interests is not as important to you as finding ways to benefit the group as a whole. Your reputation for fairness will take you places. Taking up a position in a cultural institution or charitable organisation will be both financially and emotionally rewarding.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

You long for a change of scenery. You don’t have to travel far to appease these restless feelings. Taking a short trip for pleasure will be refreshing. Booking a trip you’ve always dreamed of may now be possible even if you still have to wait a while before you set off on this journey.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Set aside time in your schedule for friendship pursuits. Don’t hold back from introducing yourself to someone who has caught your eye. Their vibrant personality will add fun and excitement to your life. Assuming a more prominent role in your community will feel rewarding. This is a great time to promote a fundraiser or charitable initiative.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 27, 2020

If you’re looking for love, post a profile on a dating site. Your charm and charisma will attract a lot of interest. You will have good instincts about who would make an ideal partner for you. Already in love? A heartfelt text message will pave the way for a romantic evening.

It will be easier to cultivate contentment with the right person by your side.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Making plans for the future fills you with excitement. You feel more able to consider longterm possibilities now rather than just taking each day as it comes. If you’re looking for work, explore opportunities that will allow you to exercise your creativity. Getting paid to use your imagination will be a welcome change from dull routine.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Losing yourself in a creative project will feel wonderful. You’re tired of predictable routines and carrying out the same old chores. By pushing everyday chores aside and throwing yourself into an exciting new challenge, your spirits will rise again. Indulge in some armchair travel if you are longing for a change of scenery.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Work requires your attention but home is where your heart is. There are plans being made within the family that you don’t want to miss out on. It doesn’t matter if you’re unable to get everyone together as you had hoped. A meet up in an online meeting room gives you all a chance to discuss future arrangements.

A neighbour has been struggling and they will now openly admit it. Take this opportunity to offer to help. Preparing comfort food, running errands and picking up prescriptions on their behalf will help make their life easier. A kind gesture will go a long way towards cementing a friendship.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

A friend or loved one will appreciate your company. If you can’t get together in person, an online chat will mean a lot to them. Your amour or a close friend has given you so much support recently that you feel you can’t thank them enough. You might show your appreciation through giving them a beautiful gift.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Being creative is a good way for you to connect with your higher self. If you feel confused, uncertain or adrift, pick up a sketch pad and get your creative juices flowing. Developing an idea will take your mind off your worries. If you’re in a relationship, lean on your partner for support.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Monday, July 27, 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

Monday, July 27, 2020

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