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July 3-5, 2020

San Juan The

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What to Watch on Netflix, Amazon and More in July

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Obstacles for PREPA-LUMA Deal Nearly 3 Years After Hurricane Maria, Housing Dept. to Finally Start Rebuilding Project

UTIER Files Complaint Over Backdoor Contract

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$600 Weekly Recipients to File Federal Income Tax Returns in 2021 P3 NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

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July 3-5, 2020

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The San Juan Daily Star

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July 3-5, 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.

FPUC recipients to file federal income tax in 2021

Today’s

Weather

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

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t’s official. Every unemployment insurance and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) recipient who received Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) payments of $600 weekly must file for federal income taxes in 2021, Puerto Rico Labor and Human Resources (DTRH by its Spanish initials) Secretary Carlos Rivera Santiago confirmed Thursday.

Rivera Santiago told the Star that this is due to the fact that the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020, which includes both U.S states and territories, suggests that the FPUC is taxable.

Likewise, a post from the Office of Unemployment Compensation stated that the compensation will be subject to 10 percent federal withholding tax if the claimant chose to withhold from the unemployment insurance or PUA benefits.

“Both this agency and the Treasury Department are expecting guidelines from the federal government”, Rivera Santiago said. “As soon we get them, we can decide how to address and help citizens during this process.”

The news has caused some concern, as many Puerto Rico residents are not required to file federal income tax returns. Rivera Santiago said citizens should remain calm as the withholding will apply to tax filings next year. Meanwhile, in response to suggestions that the situation amounts to a fiscal trap, Rivera Santiago declared that, as the DTRH secretary, there is not much he can say.

“The law was approved by Congress for all [U.S.] states and territories. I cannot say much about this,” he said. “It is what the Congress approved and the Department must follow suit.”

Improvements in technology help shrink caseload Amid the 522,384 unemployment insurance claims, Rivera Santiago said, 362,104 applicants are getting their unemployment and PUA insurance payments.

However, as The Star inquired into the pending cases for the FPUC, the secretary suggested that, although this compensation is added automatically to both unemployment and PUA benefits, citizens should consult with the agency to solve such issues.

“The $600 is added automatically from the moment you get unemployment benefits,” Rivera Santiago said.

“It is important that every citizen should also know that you must qualify for this aid. If you qualified for partial payment, you will not get the [full] $600.”

The official also noted that in June the agency disbursed $2.3 billion for unemployment and PUA claimants, compared to $1.8 billion the previous month. Meanwhile, the DTRH still has 9,727 pending payments. Although Rivera Santiago still considers that an alarming sum, in May, around 50,000 payments were pending. He said the decrease has been possible as the entity improved its online platforms.

“For two weeks, the agency has been using Turnos PR, and we found tools within [that platform] that helped claimants address specific issues. One of them has been an antiquity list, which consists of the many unsolved unemployment cases involving debatable points,” the DTRH chief said. “We have noticed that, from more than 300 applicants that we received at the [Pedro Rosselló] Convention Center, we now get between 240 and 270 applicants a day. There’s an improvement, although we would like to see those numbers reduce.”

The aid that has provided unemployment and PUA recipients $600 will end on July 25. However, the DTRH announced Wednesday that beneficiaries will receive up to $240 a week.

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The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

UTIER files complaint to overturn PREPA-LUMA deal

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union (UTIER by its Spanish acronym) filed a complaint Thursday in the commonwealth’s Court of Appeals seeking to overturn an energy regulator’s decision granting a certificate of compliance to the contract between the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) and LUMA Energy to manage the utility’s transmission and distribution (T&D) system.

UTIER’s attorney, Rolando Emmanuelli, said the union is challenging the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau’s (PREB) decision to grant the certificate on several fronts.

One is the lack of public participation from stakeholders in the decision, while another relates to the ethical conduct of PREB chairman Edison Avilés.

Avilés was part of the government commission that selected LUMA Energy, but he also participated in the PREB process that granted the certificate of compliance, in what UTIER contends was a conflict of interest.

On June 22, PREPA entered into a 15year agreement in which LUMA Energy will manage the utility’s T&D for a service fee and incentive fees payable to the company after achieving certain performance

milestones. The fixed fee starts at $70 million for the first year and increases to $105 million for years four through 15, but with the incentives the total would end up costing $125 million per year. The contract requires the reorganization of PREPA into two operating companies. One is GridCo, which will retain ownership of the T&D system, and the other is GenCo, which will own PREPA’s generation assets.

UTIER President Ángel Figueroa Jaramillo said in a statement that prior to PREB’s decision, issued on June 17, both the contract and a report prepared by the Public Private Partnership Authority, which negotiated the agreement, had been kept secret. Although the report exceeded 600 pages, the LUMA Energy contract was approved by PREPA, the P3, the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico and island governor Wanda Vázquez Garced, without citizen participation.

“The efficiency shown by the government when it comes to depriving the people of their rights is incredible, in contrast to the ineptitude it shows in protecting them. We will carry out the battle against this contract in all forums, to protect the interests of our members and the people of Puerto Rico to prevent them from stealing

from us and increasing our rates,” Figueroa Jaramillo said. “We have no doubt that the only one who benefits from this contract is LUMA Energy. They are going to profit

from doing the same work that the Authority can do without investing a penny. There is no benefit for consumers, workers or for Puerto Rico.”

Judge Swain rules against three commonwealth insurers

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico on Thursday won three disputes with insurers of revenue bonds from the Puerto Rico Infrastructure Financing Authority (PRIFA), the Convention Center District Authority (CCDA), and the Puerto Rico Highways and Transportation Authority (PRHTA).

Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who is overseeing Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy-like process, found in three separate cases that insurers were not entitled to stay relief in bringing lawsuits related to more than $6 billion in revenue bonds.

CCDA bond insurers offered the strongest argument for lifting the stay because the revenue that backs $469 million in hotel occupancy tax debt was collected by the island Tourism Co. and never touched the commonwealth’s hands. The CCDA

bondholders said the bankruptcy stay under Title III of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act did not apply.

But Swain was not convinced. The judge said the commonwealth did not have constitutional authority to delegate its tax collection authority to the Tourism Co., so it had an ownership stake in the taxes collected.

“The CCDA movants have failed to show a reasonable likelihood that the hotel taxes are not property of the commonwealth, and, consequently, they have not satisfied their burden to show that the automatic stay does not apply to the CCDA enforcement action, which would implicate hotel taxes collected by the tourism company pursuant to the commonwealth’s delegation of authority under the hotel tax act,” Swain ruled.

She also ruled against lifting the automatic stay for PRIFA and PRHTA bonds.

The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

5

1,016 days after Hurricane Maria, Housing Dept. starts rebuilding project

BY PEDRO CORREA HENRY Twitter: @PCorreaHenry A Special to The Star

R

einaldo Gómez Rivas and Silvia Soto Ortiz, a married couple for 31 years, are to relocate today to a temporary home in Barrio Mangos in Juncos as their 69-year-old home in Barrio Ceiba Sur will be rebuilt by the island Housing Department under the Home Reparation, Reconstruction and Relocation (R3) Program due to damages after Hurricane Maria.

Although the 69-year-old owner seemed hopeful that the house he inherited from his parents was to be made over in 90 to 180 days, the couple has had to survive in subpar conditions. Their apartment, which was a storage room before the 2017 hurricane devastated the second floor of their wooden house, was refurbished by parishioners of the Rosa de Sarón Pentecostal Church in Las Piedras. However, the household lacked open space, had poor water filtration, a narrow hall and a bathroom with little room for Soto Ortiz, who has mobility issues and must carry a walking stick.

“When we got to the Housing office, we inquired if there was a chance to move into an affordable house,” Gómez Rivas said. “The only option they gave us was to try and find a house that charged no more than a $300 monthly rent. We had to move out and into another house on our own, where we paid rent for nine months with our Social Security money. It wasn’t until our church helped us build this apartment. However, I had to spend more money on strengthening walls

and building up a barrier so our apartment would not flood.”

When The Star asked the couple if they received any state or federal aid, Gómez Rivas said that although he received funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), he had to wait for five months and it was not enough to rebuild the house.

Also, they didn’t have electric power until early March.

Things changed two weeks ago when their case was approved by the island Housing Department and funded by the Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery Program.

“We don’t feel safe here,” Soto Ortiz said of their cramped apartment. “We tried to get help before from the municipality’s Housing office. But nothing happened after our efforts.”

Vázquez Garced: ‘We can’t respond for what happened in the past’ When a member of the press asked if the government would guarantee that a situation like Tu Hogar Renace, a $1.3 billion project found to be deficient in rebuilding homes after Hurricane Maria, would not be repeated, Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced said she will make sure that anyone involved in the R3 projects, which cost $3.025 billion in federal funds, will not participate if found to have harmful intentions.

“In the past, many things happened, we can agree. What we can tell Puerto Rico is that under this [Housing] secretary, and this governor, we will make sure that things run responsibly,” Vázquez said. “That contractor and that person who is a part of this program and has the intention to violate any rules or

commits any misdeed, they will not come in.”

Meanwhile, Housing Secretary Luiz Fernández Trinchet replied that the current program has different requirements from the previous FEMA-funded project. He added that the R3 project has rigorous protocols and will follow the standards of the Puerto Rico Building Code.

“I cannot speak for Tu Hogar Renace; the governor cannot speak for it either. We were not there at the time,” Fernández Trin-

chet said. “We are with a program that has completely different codes than FEMA, as this is a federal Housing [and Urban Development] department program. You all have seen the presentations of what we have to do in order to rebuild a house. Our roof sealing [system] is designed to last 10 years, and we must rebuild septic tanks. To tell you that no one is going to steal money, I can’t respond regarding the thousands who will be involved in different contracts.”

Co-defendant in fraud case against ex-lawmaker faces 7 years on probation

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Special Independent Prosecutor Panel (OPFEI by its Spanish initials) announced Thursday that San Juan Superior Court Judge Eloína Torres Cancel has imposed a sentence of seven years on probation against Soniel Torres Suárez, a co-defendant in the case against former New Progressive Party Rep. Ramón Rodríguez Ruiz.

Torres Suárez pleaded guilty to government corruption on Jan. 23. She faced 10 charges filed against her by special independent prosecutors Manuel Núñez

Corrada and Cándida Selles Ríos in connection with a scheme in which non-profit entities were created in order to obtain funds from the Legislature.

Torres Suárez faced perjury charges after declaring under oath that the former legislator did not attack her. She was also charged with embezzlement of public funds when hiring an employee who did not perform the described duties, ideological falsehood, and fraud or deception of witnesses.

She entered a guilty plea for a recommended sentence of seven years’ probation, subject to what is revealed in the pre-sentence report, which will be

submitted to Judge Gisela Alfonso of the San Juan Superior Court.

The OPFEI investigation indicated that at the request of Rodríguez Ruiz, the non-profit organizations Lazos Dorados de Amor and Futuros Deportistas were created to receive legislative donations. Torres Suárez reimbursed $5,625 to the House of Representatives through a manager’s check. The former official was represented by lawyers Mario Moczó and Lester Arroyo.

The OPFEI accused Rodríguez Ruiz of fraud and improper intervention in government operations.

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The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

NGO Espacios Abiertos joins freedom of information coalition

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

W

ith citizen participation increasingly limited in the discussion of the budget, and contracts that affect people’s lives and the privatization of natural resources largely hidden, the non-governmental group Espacios Abiertos (Open Spaces) will intensify its efforts in favor of transparency with a new alliance by joining the National Freedom of Information Coalition (NFOIC), the organization announced Thursday.

Espacios Abiertos (EA) Executive Director Cecille Blondet Passalaqua said that in recent days she was informed that the NFOIC board of directors had decided to invite EA to become a member of the organization, which has 30 years of experience advocating for the right to freedom of information in the United States, where it has members in 37 states and the District of Columbia.

“We are impressed with the work of EA and the influence it has achieved in such a short time in promoting transparency and accountability on the part of the Puerto Rico government and its local jurisdictions,” said NFOIC Executive Director Daniel Bevarly in a press release.

Bevarly noted that the relationship with EA began when the Puerto Rican entity signed a statement from the NFOIC

and the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, issued in March, which called for government transparency in handling the coronavirus/COVID-19 emergency in the United States.

The NFOIC defines itself as “a resource” to guarantee the citizen’s right to an open government. The organization and its members strive to ensure that state and local governments and public institutions have laws, policies, and protocols to facilitate press and public access to information and procedures.

“The greatest challenges that limit freedom of information in Puerto Rico are not very different from those faced by

other jurisdictions in the United States,” Blondet Passalaqua said. “This alliance will give us the opportunity to learn and collaborate with the other members of the NFOIC in order to advance transparency and access to information in both Puerto Rico and the continent.”

This year, EA has also established alliances with the Center for Law and Democracy in Canada and its counterpart in Europe, Access Info Europe, and continues to strengthen ties with other entities in Puerto Rico such as the Red Transparencia (Transparency Network) and community projects.

The EA executive director noted that the organization has focused in recent years on literacy on fiscal issues and civic engagement to navigate through an economic crisis caused by an unprecedented public debt burden.

“The lack of transparency and accountability of the government in the spending of public funds has been a great challenge,” Blondet Passalaqua said. “If it was necessary to strengthen civic capacities in Puerto Rico before the fiscal crisis, after hurricanes Irma and Maria, the earthquakes in January and now the COVID pandemic, it is more important than before to have a stronger, more committed and participatory civil society to guarantee an open, fair and equitable allocation, distribution and disbursement of public funds.”

She stressed that access to information is key to promoting citizen participation in governmental processes.

And … Action! Island film industry resumes, with health safety measures

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he film industry in Puerto Rico will resume after the monthslong closure to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, as Economic Development and Commerce (DDEC by its Spanish acronym) Secretary Manuel A. Laboy Rivera announced guidelines Thursday for the preparation of what is being called the Puerto Rico Film and Audiovisual Industry Plan to Control Exposure to COVID-19.

“To achieve an orderly and safe restart of this important economic sector through the Film Industry Development Program, in collaboration with industry representatives, guidelines were prepared that will be of great help with resuming operations in this industry, which has invested over $150 million during this fiscal year and has generated more than 10,000 direct, indirect and induced jobs. In addition to this are some 15,000 hotel nights during the filming period of about 25 film projects,” said Laboy Rivera, who noted that unlike many other jurisdictions worldwide, the island has the public health crisis under control. “The administration of Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced is committed to strengthening the creative economic sectors and we trust that despite the situations that the Island is facing, we will succeed in turning Puerto Rico into the Caribbean film mecca.”

As part of the guidelines for establishing the reopening plan of the film sector, productions are required to comply with all the requirements established by the Puerto Rico Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA-PR) and the health prevention measures outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Therefore, it is the responsibility of the highest-ranking official of the film production company based in Puerto Rico, or his/her designee, to ensure that there

is a protocol so that all employees are properly trained and understand the reopening plan developed by the company.

Film Industry Development Program Director Pedro Piquer Henn pointed out that according to OSHA criteria, film and audiovisual production should be a “low risk of infection” activity if the guidelines are followed and if the established plan is correctly executed.

“The plan that each film company must prepare must include: the monitoring and/or screening of staff prior to entering the workplace, [and] control measures for physical distancing” Piquer Henn said. “It is recommended to use outdoor settings, to the extent possible, and to control the number of people who are present throughout the production process.

For this, it is suggested to establish rotating shifts and divided work zones and to give reasonable rest times between days, since excess work affects health. They must use an adequate ventilation and/or air conditioning system, as well as continuous cleaning and disinfection measures. In addition, the use of personal protective equipment [masks] is required, among other recommendations.”

During the casting process, meanwhile, auditions and other procedures must be performed remotely through some digital platform, the official said. “Callback” sessions with the director will likewise be done virtually and will be coordinated by the casting director.

It is also suggested that once the talent has been selected, the production and/or production company is in charge of conducting a molecular test for COVID-19. The production should always have a “backup” for each role in case anyone shows a positive result prior to hiring.

The DDEC secretary reaffirmed his commitment to the process of economic recovery that many industries are going through.

“Puerto Rico is an island that is distinguished by our workforce, which always shows its readiness, talent and good attitude in the face of adversity,” Laboy Rivera said. “The world is constantly changing due to COVID-19 … and within these circumstances, we must operate under the measures recommended by health experts, so that the economic sectors can continue operations within this new reality that affects our lifestyles.”

The island film industry’s exposure control guidelines for COVID-19 are available at https://refuerzoeconomico.com/ reactivacion-de-negocios.

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The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

7

Ghislaine Maxwell, associate of Jeffrey Epstein, is arrested

By NICOLE HONG, BENJAMIN WEISER and MIHIR ZAVERI

G

hislaine Maxwell, the former girlfriend and longtime associate of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, was arrested Thursday on criminal charges linked to his alleged sex-trafficking operation, according to a law enforcement official.

Maxwell was accused in an indictment of helping Epstein “recruit, groom and ultimately abuse” multiple girls, including one as young as 14.

Maxwell also faces perjury charges.

The arrest came nearly a year after Epstein was charged in a federal indictment with sexually exploiting and abusing dozens of underage girls at his mansion in Manhattan; his estate in Palm Beach, Florida; and other locations.

Epstein hanged himself last August in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, where he was jailed pending trial on the federal sex-trafficking charges.

Maxwell, a longtime confidante and companion of Epstein’s, had for years been accused of helping to procure and groom young girls for the financier, including instructing them on how to pleasure Epstein sexually.

The daughter of British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell also helped manage Epstein’s properties and introduced him to the high-profile celebrities and business executives who would form his social circle.

“They were like partners in a business,” Epstein’s house manager, Janusz Banasiak, said in a deposition.

Lawsuits have accused Maxwell of managing a network of recruiters that Epstein relied on to entice young and often financially strapped girls and women into his scheme, promising he would help them with their education and careers.

“She orchestrated the whole thing for Jeffrey,” one of Epstein’s accusers, Sarah Ransome, who sued him in 2017, told The New York Times in an interview.

The federal indictment, unsealed Thursday in the Southern District of New

Maxwell was accused in an indictment of helping Epstein “recruit, groom and ultimately abuse” multiple girls, including one as young as 14.

York, charged Maxwell with six counts: enticing minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, transportation of a minor with intent to engage in sexual activity, two conspiracy counts related to those charges and two counts of perjury.

The indictment described three instances between 1994 and 1997 of Maxwell befriending girls, taking them shopping and to the movies. After establishing a rapport with the girls, Maxwell would “normalize sexual abuse” by undressing in front of them or talking about sexual topics, the indictment said.

When Epstein offered to pay for travel and educational opportunities for some of the girls, Maxwell encouraged them to accept his assistance, according to the indictment.

“As a result, victims were made to feel indebted and believed that Maxwell and Epstein were trying to help them,” prosecutors said.

Epstein would then abuse the girls in various residences and other locations in New York, New Mexico, Florida and London, according to the indictment.

Maxwell would also sometimes be present when Epstein sexually abused girls, which “helped put the victims at ease because an adult woman was present,” according to the indictment unsealed Thursday.

In 1996, the indictment said, Maxwell gave an underage girl, who was not named, an unsolicited massage in New Mexico while the girl was topless.

Prosecutors also accused Maxwell of lying under oath in 2016, during a

deposition in a lawsuit, about her role in Epstein’s operation.

During the depositions, when Maxwell was asked whether Epstein had a scheme to recruit underage girls for sexual massages, she responded, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Jeffrey Pagliuca, who has been a lawyer for Maxwell, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

When he was charged last year, Epstein was accused of paying girls and women to give him massages while they were nude or topless, in encounters that typically included sex acts. That activity, however, was said to have occurred between 2002 and 2005. It was unclear why Maxwell was charged with actions that prosecutors said had occurred earlier.

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The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

Arrest is made in connection with missing Fort Hood soldier

In an undated image provided by the U.S. Army, Army Pfc. Vanessa Guillen, 20, who has been missing from her unit since April 22, 2020.

By JOHNNY DIAZ

A

woman has been taken into custody in connection with the disappearance of a Fort Hood soldier who has been missing since April, the Army said Wednesday. A second suspect, identified only as a soldier, took his own life in Killeen, Texas, on Tuesday, the Army said.

The missing soldier, Pfc. Vanessa Guillen, 20, was last seen at Fort Hood on April 22, according to the Army Criminal Investigation Command.

The name of the deceased suspect, whom the Army described as a junior

soldier, was not released Wednesday pending notification of his family. Chief Charles Kimble of the Killeen Police Department said at a news conference Wednesday that the soldier shot himself as officers approached him Tuesday.

The Army described the woman who was arrested as the estranged wife of a former Fort Hood soldier. She was in custody in the Bell County Jail awaiting the filing of charges. Her name was not immediately released.

The arrest and the suicide were announced as the Texas Rangers, the Army CID and other agencies continued to process the scene near the Leon River

in Bell County, Texas, where partial human remains were found Tuesday.

The Armed Forces Medical Examiner Service was assisting the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences in Dallas with dental X-rays and DNA analysis.

As they awaited the identification of the remains, Guillen’s family members gathered with their lawyer, Natalie Khawam, in Washington on Wednesday to demand a congressional investigation into her disappearance.

“As you know, it is not confirmed yet whether it is my sister or not,” Mayra Guillen, one of Guillen’s sisters, said at a news conference in front of the U.S. Navy Memorial. “At this point, everything points to it.”

Guillen was last seen wearing a black T-shirt and purple fitness-type pants in the parking lot of the Regimental Engineer Squadron Headquarters at Fort Hood between 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. April 22.

Her car keys, barracks room key, identification and wallet were found in the armory room where she had been at work repairing small arms and artillery.

Since she disappeared, more than 500 soldiers have searched for Guillen in buildings, barracks, fields, training areas, lakes and trails at Fort Hood, according to base officials.

“We have made significant progress in this tragic situation and are doing everything possible to get to the truth and bring answers to the family of Pfc. Vanessa Guillen,” the Army CID said in

a statement Wednesday.

Khawam, the lawyer for Guillen’s family, said in Washington on Wednesday that her disappearance and presumed death “should never have happened.”

“And we will never know what happened, ever, until we get a congressional investigation,” she said, describing Guillen as “a beautiful young soldier.”

Khawam also called for legislation in Guillen’s name for better protocols, such as allowing members of the military to report sexual harassment and assault through a third party, rather than having to do so through the chain of command.

“We need legislation so this never happens again,” she said.

Officials at Fort Hood said last month that they had appointed an investigating team to look into allegations from Guillen’s family that she had been sexually harassed before she disappeared. Officials have not disclosed details of those allegations.

“She deserves respect, she deserves to be heard,” Lupe Guillen, another sister, said. “If this can happen to my sister, it can happen to anyone else.”

Christopher Grey, a spokesman for the Army CID, said Wednesday that “there is still a lot of investigative work to be done, and we ask for the public and media’s patience.”

He added, “There are obviously pieces of information and evidence that cannot be shared with the public during an active criminal investigation.”

The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

9

All eyes on bars as virus surges and Americans go drinking

By KIMIKO DE FREYTAS-TAMURA, DIONNE SEARCEY and JACK HEALY

W

hen the bars in Michigan reopened in June, Tony Hild forgot about face masks, social distancing and caution and headed out to Harper’s Restaurant and Brewpub, a popular spot in the college town of East Lansing. There was a line out the door. Inside were 200 people dancing, drinking and shouting over the music.

“It was just so crowded, and I’m like, ‘This is going against everything I’m told not to do,’” said Hild, 23, a college student. “But I didn’t think I was going to get it.”

As people eager for a night out flood back into public after months of confinement, public health experts say that college-town bars, nightclubs and corner taverns are becoming dangerous new hot spots for the coronavirus, seeding infections in thousands of mostly young adults and adding to surging cases nationwide.

Louisiana health officials tied at least 100 coronavirus cases to bars in the Tigerland nightlife district in Baton Rouge. Minnesota has traced 328 recent cases to bars across the state.

And in East Lansing, home to Michigan State University, nearly 140 cases have been linked to Harper’s, Hild included. He came down with a sore throat, chest pains and fatigue, and by then — more than a week later — he had already visited four other restaurants.

“I definitely regret doing it,” he said. The outbreak, the largest in the county and possibly the state, prompted Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan to announce Wednesday that she was closing indoor seating in bars in parts of the state, including East Lansing.

Public health experts say that the long nights, lack of inhibitions and shoulder-to-shoulder confines inside so many bars — a source of community and relaxation in normal times — now make them ideal breeding grounds for the coronavirus.

Now it is closing time — again.

Governors in California, Texas and Arizona, where coronavirus cases are soaring, have ordered hundreds of newly reopened bars to shut down. Less than two weeks after Colorado’s bars reopened at limited capacity, Gov. Jared Polis ordered them to close.

In other states, local health inspectors have fined bars and revoked their liquor licenses for allowing huge crowds and flouting other new health regulations aimed at curbing the spread of the virus.

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, this week addressed the issue of bars, which he deemed “really not good,” adding, “Congregation in a bar inside is bad news.”

The whipsawing rules have incited a backlash

from bar owners who say that bars are being singled out and scapegoated by politicians and on social media as symbols of America’s reckless reopening.

They worry that a second round of closures will destroy their businesses, and question why bars are being targeted for closure while Americans in some states can still eat inside restaurants, wheeze on fitnesscenter treadmills and shop at malls.

In Texas, a group of bar owners sued Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, over his order last week closing the state’s bars, saying that the state’s taverns had been “relegated to Gov. Abbott’s loser category and sentenced to bankruptcy.” The closures also spurred protests at the governor’s mansion and at the Texas State Capitol.

In recent weeks, as states began reopening public life in phases, some people celebrated their first post-coronavirus haircuts and got long-delayed dental cleanings. Neighborhood bars, back in business, seemed to have a special allure.

“I cringe to see people flocking back into bars, but I get it,” said novelist and journalist J.R. Moehringer, whose memoir, “The Tender Bar,” chronicles a boyhood among tavern regulars. “It’s an incredibly lonely moment in American history,” he said. “When they let us out of our houses, some of us go for a hike,

and others of us go for a beer.”

That beer can pose unique risks. Bars are often smaller and narrower than restaurants, with fewer windows, weaker ventilation systems and less space to squeeze by another person. Pounding music forces people to shout into one another’s faces, spraying more viral particles into the air.

Unlike restaurants where small groups stay at their own tables, bar patrons often linger and mix with one another for hours as drinks dull their caution, including about masks and social distancing. Even the conversations that animate so many evenings at bars — the laughs, the boasts, the stories and jokes — can release 10 times as many particles as a cough, experts say.

“The combination of all the factors — the age, alcohol, time of day, all those things come together to make it hard for even the most conscientious bar manager,” said Kris Ehresmann, director of the Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Prevention and Control Division at Minnesota’s Department of Health.

Many of the people being infected at bars and clubs are in their 20s, a group that is more likely to have milder cases of COVID-19. Health experts warn that young people with mild symptoms or none at all still pose a serious threat to older family members or other vulnerable people.

People enjoyed a night out in St. Petersburg, Fla., on Saturday after new guidance was issued. The whipsawing rules nationwide have led to a backlash from bar owners who say their businesses are being singled out.

10

The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

Trump is in trouble in Pennsylvania, but ‘he’s been way behind before’

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke with small-business owners in Yeadon, Pa., last month. He has often spoken of his ties to the state, which President Trump won by just 44,000 votes four years ago.

By TRIP GABRIEL

I

n political speeches for 40 years, Joe Biden has evoked his scrappy childhood in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He kicked off his presidential run last year in Pittsburgh, and as he takes tentative steps out of home confinement in Wilmington, Delaware, the campaign trail has often led to the state next door.

Yet surprisingly, Biden is enjoying no special boost in his native Pennsylvania.

A New York Times/Siena College poll of six battleground states released last week showed that the former vice president’s net approval in Pennsylvania was largely the same as elsewhere: 50% of registered voters viewed him positively and 48% saw him negatively.

President Donald Trump, mired in the lowest point of his presidency, was viewed favorably by just 43% of voters in the six battlegrounds. It helped explain why he trailed Biden in all six states and by 10 percentage points in Pennsylvania, a dire picture of the president’s chances of reelection.

Still, with four months to go until Election Day, Trump could well become competitive again. Leaders of his campaign in Pennsylvania, seizing on Biden’s failure to shine as a favorite son, have sketched out a comeback path for Trump.

Its steps include the Republican Party’s advantage in new voter registrations; a return to in-person organizing while

Biden’s ground game remains virtual; and a range of issues — including energy policy, reopening the economy and defunding the police — that Republicans believe will peel away swing voters in a state Trump narrowly won in 2016.

“The 10 points doesn’t bother me,” said Lawrence Tabas, chairman of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, referring to Trump’s deficit in the Times poll. “He’s an incumbent president, there’s a crisis and people get angry. It’s a snapshot. He’s been way behind before.”

A spokesperson for the Biden campaign, Emma Riley, said the former vice president considered Pennsylvania crucial to his 2020 chances.

“What’s become clear is that Pennsylvanians have outright rejected the Trump administration’s failed record of leadership, reckless trade wars and corruption that’s favored corporations and their wealthy CEOs ahead of everyday Americans,” Riley said.

Pennsylvania Democrats cautioned that the president’s base of rural and exurban voters, who delivered him the state in 2016 in a startling upset, were still largely supportive.

“Pennsylvania is a swing state. It’s not the Democratic state that a lot of people think it is, not anymore,” said Ryan Bizzarro, a Democratic state representative from Erie County.

Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania by a mere 44,000 votes, out of more than 6 million cast, was a result of sweeping

defections by white residents who once voted Democratic, largely in western and northeastern Pennsylvania.

In the 2018 midterm elections and in 2019 local races, Democrats came roaring back as a blue wave swept the Philadelphia suburbs. At the same time, Republicans seized control in blue-collar union counties outside Pittsburgh.

With both parties predicting higher turnout this year than in 2016, winning statewide depends on some delicate dial-twisting: Will the Republican surge in rural counties outweigh the rejection of Trump by suburban voters, especially independents and women?

And will turnout by Black voters in Philadelphia return to near 2012 levels and offset the inroads Trump made in the city in 2016?

“The Republican base is very strong outside southeast Pennsylvania,” said Rob Gleason, a former chairman of the state GOP, who lives in Johnstown, a city in central Pennsylvania. “It’s immovable. Whenever there’s any type of controversy about his administration, more Trump signs go up and flags get raised.”

In Cambria County, which includes Johnstown, Democrats have lost 7,000 registered voters since 2016, while Republicans have gained 3,700. Statewide, Democrats retain a historical registration advantage, but the last four years have brought bad news for the party: Republicans have closed the gap on Democrats by 121,000 since November 2016, a measure of enthusiasm that favors the GOP. Trump, unlike previous incumbents, has done little to reach beyond his core supporters. Since the killing of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis, the president has played to white voters with racist and inflammatory messages about protesters, Civil War monuments and crime.

Bernadette Comfort, the chair of Trump’s campaign in Pennsylvania, disputed that he was running a base-only strategy.

“The president in fact appeals to the single mom in suburbia, the president appeals to the working-class Republican, Democrat, whatever,” Comfort said. “We will go after independents, Democrats, after those folks who did not come out in 2016.”

Nonetheless, the Times poll showed erosion in the president’s base. Trump was favored by 86% of Pennsylvanians who said they voted for him in 2016, down from 92% in a Times poll in October.

In contrast to western Pennsylvania, the growing and racially diversifying counties outside Philadelphia have moved in the opposite direction. Four years ago, registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats by more than 18,000 in Chester County. Today, Democrats have an edge of about 1,000.

Shivani Jain, a bank analyst in Chester County, is among the 47% of Pennsylvanians with a “very unfavorable” view of Trump, leaving him a very narrow path to win the state. Jain, 25, has participated in recent protests.

“As a person of color myself, I find the last few years has been heartbreaking,” she said. “I’m hoping with what I’m seeing with the Black Lives Matter movement and how many of my generation have come out, people take that energy to the voting booth.”

The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

11

Is the five-day office week over?

By CLARE CAIN MILLER

M

ost American office workers are in no hurry to return to the office full time, even after the coronavirus is under control. But that does not mean they want to work from home forever. The future for them, a variety of new data shows, is likely to be workweeks split between office and home.

Recent surveys show that both employees and employers support this arrangement. And research suggests that a couple of days a week at each location is the magic number to cancel out the negatives of each arrangement while reaping the benefits of both.

“You should never be thinking about full time or zero time,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University whose research has identified causal links between remote work and employee performance. “I’m a firm believer in post-COVID half time in the office.”

According to a new survey by Morning Consult, 47% of those working remotely say that once it is safe to return to work, their ideal arrangement would be to continue working from home 1-4 days a week. Forty percent would work from home every day, and just 14% would return to the office every day.

The group of workers that is able to work from home is likely to have more education, with higher incomes, and so far they have escaped the most severe job losses from the pandemic.

That could change as the economy continues to suffer, which analysts said could affect workfrom-home policies in different ways: Employers might panic and revert to their old ways, or encourage remote work to cut real estate costs.

In the Survey of Business Uncertainty — by the Atlanta Fed, Stanford and the University

The Box office in Los Altos, Calif., in 2015. The company designed it, complete with couches and a slide, to make people want to come to work. Now it will let them work from home part of the time permanently. of Chicago — employers predicted that postpandemic, 27% of their full-time employees would continue working from home, most for a few days a week. Other surveys of firms have shown that they expect at least 40% of employees to keep working remotely.

Across organizations, work was most effective when employees were home 1-2 days a week, found research by Humu, a tech company run by Google’s former chief of human resources.

“It creates a shift, where office time is for collaborative work, for innovative work, for having those meetings, and home time is for focused work,” said Stefanie Tignor, director of data and analytics at Humu, which makes tools to nudge people to improve their time at work.

Some past experiments in remote work in the United States, like at Best Buy and Yahoo, were ended because managers decided remote workers were not accountable enough and missed out on in-person collaboration.

But in research on remote work, it has been hard to prove that workers’ location caused certain effects, and to know if the effects would have been different had their competitors, partners and customers also been working from home. Also, only in the last few years has technology for video calls and virtual collaboration become more seamless.

Now, the pandemic has forced corporate America into a large-scale experiment on remote work. And so far, the results have largely been positive — even with the enormous stresses of

the pandemic, including shuttered schools.

In the Morning Consult survey, conducted June 16-20 with a representative sample of 1,066 Americans who said their jobs could be done remotely, nearly two-thirds said they had enjoyed working from home, and just 20% said they had not (the rest said they did not know or had no opinion). Three-quarters are happy with how their companies have handled the transition; just 9% are not. Fifty-nine percent would be more likely to apply to a job that offered remote work.

Of the 87% who want to keep working from home some number of days a week, even after it is safe to return to the office, the most favored choice across all demographic groups is working remotely 1-4 days a week. People 1844 are slightly more likely to want this arrangement, as are people with college degrees and higher incomes. Women are slightly more likely than men to say they want to work from home every day.

Some downsides of remote work persist.

Most people miss the social connections at work, the survey found. In Bloom’s study of the Chinese travel firm, half of the remote workers wanted to return to the office when the experiment ended.

Their reasons were loneliness, stigma and penalties in terms of being promoted. These and other reasons are why Box and other firms want workers to eventually return in some capacity.

An ideal work setup, several say, may be one in which everyone works from home or in the office the same few days each week, and everyone knows which days are for collaboration and which are for focused work. That may be hard to achieve while the coronavirus is still a severe risk because staggered schedules are recommended to achieve physical distancing in offices.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

Stocks

Global stocks jump on strong U.S. jobs data; COVID-19 caution lingers

A

measure of stocks across the globe rose for a fourth straight day on Thursday after June U.S. payrolls grew by a record 4.8 million, but investors also flocked to the safe-haven dollar and U.S. Treasuries on concerns about surging COVID-19 cases in many U.S. states.

Several states, along with some other parts of the world, are reversing or pausing reopenings to tackle a recent surge in infections, leaving analysts worried about another sell-off in financial markets if the damage mounts.

June’s job survey, which saw the unemployment rate fall to near 11% and average wages drop 1.2%, was taken just as the spike in COVID-19 cases started to accelerate. Over 31 million Americans were still collecting unemployment checks weekly.

“The strong rebound would normally be an unambiguously positive sign that a recovery is under way, (but) it is being accompanied by a sharp rise in new infections, which was what caused the collapse in the first place,” said Mike Bell, global market strategist at JP Morgan Asset Management in London.

“It is therefore too soon to say for certain that this recovery in employment sounds the all-clear for investors.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 92.39 points, or 0.36%, to 25,827.36, the S&P 500 gained 14.15 points, or 0.45%, to 3,130.01 and the Nasdaq Composite added 53.00 points, or 0.52%, to 10,207.63.

The pan-European STOXX 600 index rose 1.97% and MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe gained 0.92%.

Emerging market stocks rose 2.24%.

Japan’s Nikkei futures rose 0.52% and overnight, MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan closed 2.29% higher.

U.S. financial markets will be closed on Friday in observance of Saturday’s Independence Day holiday.

On Thursday, oil futures prices were lifted by the U.S. employment numbers but gains were limited as the spike in U.S. coronavirus infections fanned concerns that economic activity would weaken in coming weeks. [O/R] U.S. crude rose 1.26% to $40.32 per barrel and Brent was at $42.79, up 1.81% on the day.

Treasury yields initially rose after the strong jobs numbers, but backtracked and traded lower for most of the session.

Benchmark 10-year notes last rose 4/32 in price to yield 0.6693%, from 0.682% late on Wednesday.

The 30-year bond last rose 4/32 in price to yield 1.4292%, from 1.434%.

“The knee-jerk move in the wake of the jobs report made sense,” said Ben Jeffery, a strategist at BMO Capital Markets in New York. “But clearly people were reluctant to sort of push that sell-off just given the headline risk over the weekend and the fact that things on the virus front still seem to be worsening.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

13

Afghan contractor handed out Russian cash to kill Americans, officials say

By MUJIB MASHAL, ERIC SCHMITT, NAJIM RAHIM and RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

H

e was a lowly drug smuggler, neighbors and relatives say, then ventured into contracting, seeking a slice of the billions of dollars the U.S.-led coalition was funneling into construction projects in Afghanistan.

But he really began to show off his wealth in recent years, after establishing a base in Russia, though how he earned those riches remained mysterious. On his regular trips home to northern Afghanistan, he drove the latest model cars, protected by bodyguards, and his house was recently upgraded to a four-story villa.

Now Rahmatullah Azizi stands as a central piece of a puzzle rocking Washington, named in U.S. intelligence reports and confirmed by Afghan officials as a key middleman who for years handed out money from a Russian military intelligence unit to reward Taliban-linked fighters for targeting U.S. troops in Afghanistan, according to American and Afghan officials.

As security agencies connected the dots of the bounty scheme and narrowed in on him, they carried out sweeping raids to arrest dozens of his relatives and associates about six months ago but discovered that Azizi had sneaked out of Afghanistan and was likely back in Russia. What they did find in one of his homes, in Kabul, was about half a million dollars in cash.

American and Afghan officials for years have maintained that Russia was running clandestine operations to undermine the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and aid the Taliban.

But they only recently concluded a Russian spy agency was paying bounties for killing coalition troops, including Americans, which the Kremlin and the Taliban have denied.

According to officials briefed on the matter, U.S. intelligence officials believe the program is run by Unit 29155, an arm of the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU that has carried out assassinations and other operations overseas.

That a conduit for the payments would be someone like Azizi — tied to the U.S. reconstruction effort, enmeshed in the regional netherworld but not prominent enough to attract outside attention — speaks to the depth of Russia’s reach into the increasingly complicated Afghan battlefield, exploiting a nexus of crime and terror to strike blows with years of deniability.

The public revelation last week of that conclusion has touched off a political firestorm in Washington. White House officials said at first that President Donald Trump was never briefed on the matter, but it emerged that the intelligence assessment was included in a written briefing to the president in late February, if not earlier.

As Democratic and Republican officials have expressed alarm at the news, and the administration’s lack of action in response, the White House has insisted that the information was uncertain.

Details of Azizi’s role in the bounty scheme were confirmed through a dozen interviews that included U.S. and Afghan officials aware of the intelligence and the raids that led to it; his neighbors and friends; and business associates of the middle men arrested on suspicion of involvement. All spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.

American Special Forces after a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, was attacked on Tuesday.

U.S. intelligence reports named Azizi as a key middleman between the GRU and militants linked to the Taliban who carried out the attacks. He was among those who collected the cash in Russia, which intelligence files described as multiple payments of “hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Those files were among the materials provided to Congress this week.

Through a layered and complex Hawala system — an informal way to transfer money — he delivered it to Afghanistan for the missions, the files say. The transfers were often sliced into smaller amounts that routed through several regional countries before arriving in Afghanistan, associates of the arrested businessmen said.

Afghan officials said prizes of as much as $100,000 per killed soldier were offered for American and coalition targets.

Just how the money was dispersed to militants carrying out attacks for the Taliban, and at what level the coordination occurred, remains unclear. But officials say the network had grown increasingly ambitious and was in communication with more senior levels in Taliban military ranks to discuss potential targets.

About six months ago, Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, raided the offices of several Hawala businessmen both in Kabul, the capital, and in Kunduz, in the north, who were believed to be associated with the bounty scheme, making more than a dozen arrests.

Russia was initially seen as cooperating with U.S. efforts after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, as its interests in

defeating al-Qaida, an international Islamic terror group, aligned with those of the United States.

But in recent years, as the two powers clashed elsewhere, the Kremlin grew wary of the prolonged U.S. presence and moved closer to the Taliban, hedging its bets on who would take power in a post-American Afghanistan.

The Russians also saw an opportunity for long-awaited payback for the Soviet humiliation in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the Red Army withdrew after being unable to defeat a U.S.backed insurgency.

Russia has walked a fine balance in recent years, eager to bloody the American nose but wary of Afghanistan collapsing into a chaos that could spill over its borders. Publicly, Russia has admitted only to information-sharing with the Taliban in fighting the Islamic State in Afghanistan, a common foe.

The U.S. conclusion in 2019 that the Russians were sending bounty money to the Taliban came at a delicate time in the conflict, just as the United States was deep into negotiations with the insurgents over a deal to withdraw the remaining American troops from the country.

Some of the attacks believed to be part of the bounty scheme were carried out around the time the Trump administration was actively reaching out to Russia for cooperation on those peace talks. Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy leading the talks, repeatedly met with Russian officials to build consensus around the U.S. endgame.

14

The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

Sólo en

U.K. grants asylum to ex-consulate worker who told of torture in China A

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former employee of the British Consulate in Hong Kong who said he was tortured by the authorities in mainland China last year has been given asylum in Britain.

The disappearance last year of the consulate worker, Simon Cheng, during the height of pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong highlighted the issues that had set off months of protest. Hong Kongers took to the streets in part over fears that they could be subject to the opaque Chinese legal system as mainland officials expand their reach over people in semi-autonomous Hong Kong, a former British colony.

“I am grateful for the determination and courage shown by the U.K. government to rescue British nationals,” Cheng wrote on Facebook above a photo of the letter granting him asylum. “I also hope my case can be a precedent for other Hong Kongers to seek for protection.”

The British Home Office said it does not comment on individual cases.

The asylum for Cheng came amid scattered unrest in Hong Kong on Wednesday after China imposed a national security law on Hong Kong that seeks to stamp out displays of dissent against the Beijing government. The move has prompted recriminations from other nations against China and spurred fears that it spells the end of the “one country, two systems” framework that had distinguished the territory.

The Hong Kong police, which made several arrests under the law during protests Wednesday, said a 24-year-old man suspected of stabbing a police officer was arrested early Thursday at the city’s airport. Local news outlets said he had been preparing to depart for London.

The British government Wednesday confirmed plans to open a pathway for as many as 3 million people from Hong Kong to obtain British citizenship. The country’s foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said the decision was in response to the “grave and deeply disturbing” new security law.

Raab called the law a breach of the Joint Declaration, the 1984 treaty under which Britain agreed to return Hong Kong in 1997. He said the law violated the city’s autonomy, threatened civil rights and undermined judicial independence.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the law “outrageous and an affront to all nations,” because, under one of its articles, even nonresidents of Hong Kong could conceivably be punished for running afoul of Chinese law.

Last year, Cheng, 29, traveled from Hong Kong to the mainland city of Shenzhen for a business conference. He was stopped by the police on

his return to Hong Kong in the city’s high-speed rail station, part of which is under mainland jurisdiction.

He was held for 15 days, during which, he said, he was hooded, hung for hours in a spreadeagle position and beaten to force him to stay awake. Under such abuse, Cheng said, he gave the authorities the password to his iPhone, information about British Consulate operations and the names of some Hong Kong protesters.

Cheng also gave a videotaped admission to soliciting prostitution, which was later released by the Chinese police. After his release, Cheng denied the allegations against him, insisting his confession had been coerced. The police have often publicized confession videos in high-profile cases, which legal experts say are meant to display the state’s authority over individuals.

Cheng said that his decision to leave Hong Kong had been a result of political persecution and that he hoped to return some day.

“Leaving means not an end but a beginning,” he added. “We will continue the fight against the expanding totalitarianism and be back to our hometown with true democracy and freedom.”

The case strained diplomatic relations between China and Britain, and Beijing’s new national security law threatens to damage those ties further.

Raab said that Britain would grant the roughly 350,000 holders of British overseas passports and an additional 2.5 million who are eligible the right to stay in the country for five years and then transition to applying for citizenship.

The British national overseas passport was created for Hong Kong residents but did not give them citizenship rights.

The Chinese Embassy in London on Thursday rejected Britain’s new citizenship pathway for overseas passport holders.

“If the British side makes unilateral changes to the relevant practice, it will breach its own position and pledges as well as international law and basic norms governing international relations,” the embassy said in a statement. “We firmly oppose this and reserve the right to take corresponding measures.”

Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia, meanwhile, said on Thursday that he was “very actively” considering proposals to provide support to Hong Kong residents. “There are proposals that I asked to be brought forward several weeks ago, and the final touches will be put on those and they’ll soon be considered by Cabinet,” he added.

Morrison did not say what kind of residency terms would be offered under the proposals or how many Hong Kongers would be included.

The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

15

The theatrical method in Putin’s vote madness

By ANDREW HIGGINS

R

ussia’s seven-day national plebiscite, intended to keep President Vladimir Putin in power until at least 2036, delivered the expected verdict Wednesday: Early results showed that three-quarters of voters had given their endorsement.

Less clear, however, was why Putin even needed voters to approve a raft of constitutional amendments that, already ratified by the national Parliament in Moscow and regional legislatures across the country, entered into law months ago.

“From a juridical point of view, this whole exercise is insane,” said Greg Yudin, a sociologist and political theorist at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences.

But, he added, “it is not at all a meaningless procedure,” because Russia’s system under Putin depends on the appearance of popular support to confer legitimacy on decisions he has already made.

“It is theater, but very important and well-played theater. The system needs to stage displays of public support even when it doesn’t have it,” Yudin said. “This vote is putting Putin’s theatrical techniques to the test.”

In a final melodramatic flourish Tuesday, Putin addressed the nation against the backdrop of monuments to Soviet soldiers killed fighting Nazi Germany, assuring voters that their voices mattered, no matter that the scores of amendments they were being asked to consider had already been enacted and the amended constitution had been published and put on sale in bookstores. “The voice of each of you is the most important, the most significant,” Putin said.

Voters, in theory, could have rejected the amendments, and Putin pledged to honor their decision. But the chances of that happening always seemed minuscule, not least because of what Golos, an independent election-monitoring organization, described Tuesday as an electoral process rigged from the start.

Golos said the vote, unfairly skewed by a noisy onesided propaganda campaign by state-controlled media and blatant pressure from a sprawling galaxy of state-funded companies and organizations, did “not allow us to talk seriously about the possibility of the will of the people being expressed.”

The state’s vast reach and resources allowed it to mobilize people like Lyudmila Savinkina, editor-in-chief of Yegoryevsk Today, a small state television station in a town southeast of Moscow. In a recording obtained by Golos, she ordered her staff not only to vote but to make sure they voted in the town of Yegoryevsk, no matter where they are usually registered. (Local officials risk losing their jobs if they fail to mobilize enough voters in their own districts.)

For those who disobeyed, the editor told her staff, there would be consequences. Those, she said, “may vary, I’m just warning you. And this concerns both you and me.

I will not even explain it to you. Everyone can lose jobs, bonuses — and this amid a pandemic, when many people have already lost their jobs.” Savinkina did not respond to telephone calls seeking comment.

For weeks, a long parade of prominent Russians who

Voting on the constitutional changes in Barbino, Russia, on Tuesday. The constitutional amendments have already been enacted. depend on the state for their positions and income — from actors and musicians to the head of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church — have paraded across state television urging people to vote.

Curiously, none of them mentioned the core of the exercise: an amendment to allow Putin to crash through constitutional term limits in place since 1993 and stay in power virtually for life, rather than step down at the end of his current term in 2024. They instead focused on other changes, like enshrining the protection of pensions, family values, animals, the Russian language and the memory of Russians killed in World War II. The yes-or-no vote was a package deal, which meant that anyone who believed in the sanctity of Russia’s war dead — a huge number in a country that lost more than 20 million lives during what was known as “the Great Patriotic War” — would most likely tick yes and, in doing so, endorse the idea of letting Putin, now 67, stay in the Kremlin at least until age 83.

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, has denounced the exercise as a “shameful farce” that had been “specially designed to cheat and deceive the public.”

Navalny fired his most vitriolic comments at the mostly over-the-hill celebrities who, reliant on state-funded gigs, had joined a feverish campaign to get out the vote. He called them “revolting, vile and disgusting people” who “are lying, cheating the public for money.”

The Central Election Commission reported Wednesday morning, at the start of the final day of voting, that 55% of Russia’s 108 million registered voters had already cast their ballots. The turnout alone validated the success of Putin’s extravagant show.

By late Wednesday, with more than half of all precincts counted, 77% of voters backed the constitutional amendments, election officials said. That nearly matched earlier exit poll results from the state-controlled Russian polling organization, VTsIOM, that showed 76% of voters backing the amendments.

The foregone nature of the outcome, in Yudin’s view, reflects Russia’s “plebiscitary democracy,” a system that revolves around a single, unchallenged leader but still requires regular cries of “public acclamation to give it legitimacy.”

The Kremlin’s primary objective, he said, was less to get public approval for amendments that had already been ratified than to give Putin a fresh jolt of legitimacy at a time when, with Russia’s economy severely damaged by the coronavirus pandemic, his approval rating has slumped to its lowest level since he came to power 20 years ago.

To ensure that happened, the Kremlin pulled out all the stops. Voters were lured to polling stations by prize lotteries, grocery vouchers, clown shows and other attractions.

There were scattered reports of outright fraud, but more significant was the forced mobilization of the large number of voters whose livelihood depends, one way or another, on staying on the Kremlin’s good side.

16

July 3-5, 2020

In Japan, the message of anti-racism protests fails to hit home

By MOKOTO RICH and HIKARI HIDA

A

s protests were spreading around the globe in response to George Floyd’s killing by police, Sierra Todd, an African American undergraduate in Japan, organized a march last month in Tokyo to show solidarity with American demonstrators.

She said she hoped it would prompt Japanese marchers to think about racism in their own country, too. “Of course, we want to talk about American issues, and Black Lives Matter is an American thing,” said Todd, 19, who is studying at Temple University’s campus in Tokyo. “But we also do live in Japan.”

A backlash quickly followed. Critics on social media accused participants of disregarding the risks of spreading the coronavirus. An interview with Todd posted on YouTube elicited comments that “This is an American issue” and “Please do this in your own country.”

With images of America’s racial strife rolling across television screens, some in Japan have insisted that institutional racism is a faraway problem. That, activists and scholars say, is keeping the public from more fully seizing the moment to reckon with entrenched discrimination against marginalized groups in Japan.

A vocal faction of Japanese conservatives endorses racist notions of blood-based purity. And the largely homogeneous population has often resisted acknowledging

Kento Suzuki, who organized two protests after a video emerged on social media of a Turkish immigrant getting roughed up by police during a traffic stop, sits at a bus stop in Tokyo.

difference or engaging in the kind of introspection about racism and inequality that is playing out in the United States.

“In essence, Japanese people don’t have a lot of experience of seeing other races,” said Yasumasa Fujinaga, an associate professor of American studies at Japan Women’s University. “So they don’t think racism exists.”

But Japan has a long-standing history of discrimination against minorities, including the descendants of Koreans brought to Japan as forced labor before and during World War II; Indigenous groups like the Ainu of the northernmost island, Hokkaido; those whose lineage traces back to a feudal class of outcasts known as buraku; and multiracial individuals.

The mistreatment of multiracial people through their school years and beyond has drawn particular attention as a growing number of biracial celebrities have spoken out.

In an emotional testimonial posted on Twitter last month, Louis Okoye, a half-Japanese, half-Nigerian professional baseball player, described how he had often been bullied as a child in Japan because of the color of his skin.

“I would look out from the balcony of our home and think, if I jumped off and was born again, maybe I can come back as a normal Japanese person,” he wrote in the post, which has been retweeted 52,000 times. Most of the comments were overwhelmingly supportive.

Still, the conversation is shifting only gradually in Japan, and the resistance can be stiff. When Bako Nguasong and V. Athena Lisane, English teachers in Fukuoka — the largest city on the southern island of Kyushu — organized a march there last month, one poster wrote on Twitter that “I won’t feel any mercy if these people are told to get deported by the local Japanese.”

Nguasong, 36, left behind a home and a career in Washington and moved to Japan two years ago because she was weary of fearing for her safety as a Black woman in America. “I knew it wasn’t going to be diverse, but I also knew I wasn’t going to be afraid for my life,” said Nguasong, who previously worked as a mental health coordinator for former inmates.

She did find physical security in Japan, where crime rates are low and police killings are rare. But she could not escape racism, even if in Japan it takes a less violent form.

Nguasong said that she had noticed looks and whispers from local Japanese people and that passengers had

avoided sitting next to her on trains. Two older women, she said, once groped her breasts in an elevator in apparent surprise over her figure.

“It’s not the same insidious nature,” Nguasong said.

“But racism still exists in Japan.”

A glaring reminder of that came last month when NHK, the public broadcaster, aired a segment about the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States.

A clip showed African Americans as overly muscled, music-playing, looting caricatures and presented the protests as the product of frustration with economic disparity and the coronavirus, without mentioning police brutality.

After pushback on Twitter, NHK apologized and took the clip down.

The country’s insularity has generated not just overt and unconscious bias against people abroad but also a distrust of foreigners who come to Japan.

As the country slowly opens its doors to outside workers to help confront a demographic crisis, improving its treatment of foreigners may be crucial to Japan’s future. But according to a 2017 Ministry of Justice survey, 30% of foreigners in Japan said they had been the target of discrimination, with many citing issues getting jobs or housing.

A candidate in the Tokyo governor’s race, Makoto Sakurai, is running on a platform that includes the slogan “Abolish welfare for foreigners.”

At the same time, though, some Japanese show a fascination with foreigners, including Black pop culture. That has led to accusations of cultural appropriation and left some African Americans chagrined that more people in Japan don’t reflect on their own racism.

Compared to Black Lives Matter marches in France or Britain, which have drawn tens of thousands of people, the rallies in Japan have been modest in size. The largest, in Tokyo, drew about 3,500 people, with many participants having some foreign roots.

Some scholars worry that the Japanese public only sees racism abroad without reflecting on it closer to home.

“If they are just saying, ‘Oh, gee, Blacks in America are facing horrible things, and we have to help them,’ that is almost like charity,” said Haeng-ja Chung, a professor of anthropology at Okayama University and an ethnic Korean born in Japan. “Before we accuse other societies, we have to stop and think: ‘How about us?’”

The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

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President Trump has tools to pressure China. Will he use them?

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

M

uch of the focus on China in recent months has been over the coronavirus that originated there late last year. But that has hardly slowed Beijing’s assault on fundamental freedoms and human rights, from the brutal repression of the Uighurs to choking off Hong Kong’s limited autonomy.

Congress has acted with admirable alacrity and unanimity to pass tough bills allowing for the imposition of sanctions against the Chinese officials and enterprises behind these outrages. It is now for President Donald Trump, who has shown little enthusiasm so far for tangling with President Xi Jinping over human rights, to use the tools that Congress has placed at his disposal to show Beijing that its transgressions have consequences.

The new national-security law for Hong Kong is the most current and most publicized example of Xi’s repressive, nationalistic policies. The measure severely erodes Hong Kong’s civil and political freedoms, undermining the “one country, two systems” model that China pledged when the British colony reverted to Beijing’s rule in 1997.

One of the first arrests under the new law was of a protester with a pro-independence flag, the display of which is now a criminal offense. As a result, a bipartisan push is now underway in Congress to grant refugee status to certain Hong Kong residents.

But while Hong Kong has garnered the most attention in the West, it is hardly the sole, or even the worst, of the Chinese government’s systemic violations of elemental human rights. These are among other recent developments: — A new report from the Jamestown Foundation has exposed chilling details of official measures to shrink the Uighur population, including sterilization and forced abortions. The report by Adrian Zenz, a leading authority on the mass detention of Uighurs in prison camps, found that while China has long sought to manage its vast population, the draconian controls in the Western region of Xinjiang were intended “to suppress minority population growth” while boosting the majority Han population through increased births and migration. Natural population growth in the region, the report found, had “declined dramatically.”

— On Wednesday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials in New York announced that they had seized a large shipment of weaves and other beauty products that officials suspect were made out of human hair from people locked inside the Xinjiang camp system. “The production of these goods constitutes a very serious human rights violation, and the detention order is intended to send a clear and direct message to all entities seeking to do business with the

A Uighur child plays alone in the courtyard of a home at the Unity New Village in Hotan, in western China’s Xinjiang region.

United States that illicit and inhumane practices will not be tolerated in U.S. supply chains,” Brenda Smith, a customs official, told The Associated Press. An American government advisory issued Wednesday warned companies that they risk “reputational, economic, and legal risks” from doing business with companies that used Xinjiang forced labor.

— More than 50 independent United Nations experts signed a statement last week charging that their repeated efforts to communicate their alarm to Chinese authorities about the suppression of democracy in Hong Kong, the collective repression of religious and ethnic minorities, excessive use of force by the police, detention of human rights defenders and other violations have been systematically rejected, and requests for investigations dismissed.

The group called for the U.N. Human Rights Council to evaluate their charges, and the establishment of an independent mechanism to monitor the human rights situation.

— Researchers at Lookout, a San Francisco mobile security firm, reported Wednesday that China’s massive surveillance efforts in Xinjiang, which have expanded to include measures like collecting blood samples, voice prints, facial scans and other personal data, began as early as 2013 with a hacking campaign that planted malware into the cellphones of Uighurs and Tibetans around the world.

Last Thursday, the Senate adopted by unanimous consent a bill that would impose sanctions on Chinese officials, businesses and banks involved in the assault on Hong Kong’s limited autonomy, and it is expected to sail

through the House of Representatives. The week before that, Trump signed the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, a bill that would potentially impose sanctions on Chinese officials over the prison camp system. The reaction from China was the usual bluster about “fabricated” or “fake news” and threats of “countermeasures.”

Trump’s commitment to using these tools of statecraft to change China’s behavior, however, is uncertain.

In a signing statement accompanying the Uighur bill, the president said he would treat it as “advisory and nonbinding.” The day he signed the act was also the day excerpts from John Bolton’s tell-all book about his stint as national security adviser appeared, with his accounts of Trump’s reluctance to let China’s human rights transgressions get in the way of the trade deal he has long sought.

Bolton recalls that at the opening dinner of the G-20 meeting in Osaka, Japan, in 2019, Xi explained to Trump why he was building camps in Xinjiang. “According to our interpreter,” Bolton wrote, “Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”

Still, the unanimous, bipartisan support for these bills, and Trump’s signature on them, even if unenthusiastic, are an appropriately direct and clear signal to China that its behavior is contemptible and will have serious consequences. What remains is to make sure it does.

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The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Refusing to wear a mask is like driving drunk me.

President Donald Trump during a meeting with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, right, at the White House in Washington

By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

A

s the coronavirus rages out of control across much of the United States, Americans are acting curiously helpless.

If we had been this passive in 1776, we would still be part of Britain. Yet even as we prepare to celebrate the Fourth of July, we don’t seem willing to assert independence from a virus that in four months has killed more Americans than the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq wars did over 70 years.

Here’s the simplest of steps we could take: Wear a face mask.

In the United States, mask-wearing lags, particularly among men, compared with some other countries. A poll finds that many American men regard the wearing of face masks as “a sign of weakness,” and President Donald Trump’s refusal to wear them has suggested that he perceives that masks are for wimps.

Trump may now be switching gears, for he told Fox Business on Wednesday that he’s “all for masks” and would wear one if he were “in a tight situation with people.” He

shouldn’t waste time: He should tweet a photo of himself in a mask and call on supporters to wear masks as well. Refusing to cover one’s face is reckless, selfish behavior that imperils the economy and can kill or endanger innocent people.

A review of 172 studies in The Lancet medical journal found that “face mask use could result in a large reduction in risk of infection.” An article in Health Affairs found that state mask mandates, which cover about half the population, may have averted more than 230,000 coronavirus infections.

For one study this year, reported in Clinical Infectious Diseases, researchers placed hamsters with the coronavirus in cages next to those without the virus, and found that when surgical masks were used as a barrier between the cages infections plunged by more than half.

Or take a lesson from East Asian countries, where mask-wearing is more common as a sign of courtesy, that have managed to contain the virus. Dr. Kwok-Yung Yuen, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Hong Kong, told me that a crucial reason for Hong Kong’s success against COVID-19 (less than one death per million inhabitants, compared with 385 per million in the United States) is that 97% of Hong Kong residents wear masks.

“Masking is a sign of responsible civility,” Yuen told

Hong Kong, like some Asian countries, distributes masks free. The United States should do the same, for the cost is negligible compared with hospitalization.

A University of Washington computer model suggests that 33,000 American lives could be saved from COVID-19 between now and Oct. 1 if more people wore masks. The implication is that inconsiderate Americans unwilling to wear them could in the next few months kill thousands of their neighbors.

“We need to do everything we can to increase mask usage,” said Kate Grabowski, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. But she added: “People shouldn’t see masks as a silver bullet. They’re not going to be 100% effective at preventing transmission.”

So even with masks, we also need distancing, handwashing, contact tracing and bans on large assemblies. I’m also a big believer in more widespread sewage testing to provide an early warning that the virus is in the neighborhood.

To be sure, we need more research, and masks vary in effectiveness. N95 respirators work very well — so much so that they make breathing difficult. Disposable surgical masks are more comfortable though less protective, and cloth masks are reusable but less effective.

Masks protect your neighbors, but a new Goldman Sachs report finds that expanding mask mandates could also help the U.S. economy.

“A national face-mask mandate could potentially substitute for renewed lockdowns that would otherwise subtract nearly 5% from GDP,” Goldman Sachs said. “The economic benefit from a face-mask mandate and increased face-mask usage could be sizable.”

Republicans seem to be coming around. Vice President Mike Pence earlier eschewed masks but now says that wearing them “is just a good idea.” Sen. Marco Rubio urged, “Just wear a damn mask.” Rep. Liz Cheney tweeted a photo of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, wearing one, with the hashtag #realmenwearmasks. Good for them!

But Trump has resisted. Republicans talk a good game about “personal responsibility,” so it’s time for Trump to display some — and to call on his supporters to wear masks as well. As we celebrate our independence, this is how they can show patriotism, protect the economy and save the lives of their neighbors.

The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, deflects questions about Trump and masks by insisting that mask-wearing is simply a “personal choice.”

No, it’s not. Refusing to wear a mask is no more a “personal choice” than is drinking all evening and then stumbling into your car and heading down the road. In a time of plague, shunning a face mask is like driving drunk, putting everyone in your path in danger.

The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

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Gobernadora dice entrega de tabletas corrobora su versión sobre propiedad que falta en Fortaleza Por CYBERNEWS a gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced dijo el L jueves, que la entrega a La Fortaleza de unas tabletas, parte de los artículos desaparecidos co-

rrobora su versión de los hechos y aseguró que continuará la investigación del asunto.

“Yo no creo que esté puesta en duda, ya esa investigación se hizo, esa investigación pasó a las autoridades pertinentes, así que, yo no voy a hacer expresiones. El que entienda que esas propiedades están en algún lugar, pues, sería bueno… Yo no tuve transición con nadie”, dijo Vázquez Garced a preguntas de la prensa.

Abordada sobre la entrega el miércoles de unas tabletas a La Fortaleza, Vázquez Garced contestó “Pues entonces, eso corrobora la versión nuestra de que al momento de estar nosotros en Fortaleza esa propiedad no estaba”.

Reiteró que sus pronunciamientos no acusa-

ban directamente a Ricardo Rosselló Nevares.

“No, no, no. Yo no he dicho que él se las llevó. Yo no sé quién se las llevó. Yo lo que puedo decir es que, esa propiedad no estaba en Fortaleza cuando yo llegué. Y, ¿quién podría explicar?

Pues las personas que estaban antes de mí. No quiero que pongan palabras en mi boca”, expuso la mandataria.

Insistió en que la propiedad tiene que ser devuelta.

“Esa propiedad, donde esté, tiene que traerla la persona que la tenga. Porque eso es, que corrobora lo que he dicho. Hay una propiedad que no está allí. No está en Fortaleza y son propiedades compradas con fondos públicos. Y si son propiedades compradas con fondos públicos, el pueblo necesita saber dónde está esa propiedad y que se devuelva”, dijo.

Explicó que “ahora lo que procede es que se haga la investigación”.

GNPR lleva a cabo ejercicio de respuesta a emergencias en San Lorenzo Por THE STAR a Guardia Nacional de Puerto L Rico hoy dijo presente en el municipio de San Lorenzo, llevando a

cabo un ejercicio de Respuesta a Emergencias, con el propósito de que el personal de Manejo de Emergencias de ese municipio pudiera identificar necesidades inmediatas, brechas de capacidades, limitaciones operacionales y coordinar requisitos de apoyo.

La gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced acudió al Ejercicio de Respuesta a Emergencias en San Lorenzo y agradeció al personal que participó del mismo.

“En medio de las emergencias que estamos viviendo, es importante que todos los municipios estén preparados para poder atender cualquier situación como huracanes, tsunamis, pandemias, terremotos, entre otros. Es por esto que la Guardia Nacional de Puerto Rico se ha dado a la tarea de ir a los 78 municipios a ofrecer adiestramiento al personal de las Oficinas Municipales de Manejo de Emergencias (OMME) porque son los alcaldes y su personal la primera respuesta en caso de una emergencia. Agradezco a la Guardia Nacional y a las OMME por su dedicación y compromiso al llevar a cabo estos ejercicios, que los ayudan en su trabajo al poder

velar y proteger a la ciudadanía en momentos difíciles”, destacó la primera ejecutiva.

El Ayudante General de Puerto Rico, General de División José J. Reyes añadió: “La calidad de la respuesta inicial durante una emergencia será cónsona con el grado de preparación que se tenga. Esto solo se logra a través de un proceso que demuestre las fortalezas y debilidades en los planes de acción y que solo se pueden apreciar en ejercicios de esta índole. El propósito de estos ejercicios no es rediseñar el plan de emergencia, sino continuar aplicando las lecciones aprendidas en emergencias pasadas. Esto es un proceso continuo”.

Los ejercicios de Respuesta a Emergencias toman en consideración los escenarios de desastres naturales a los que Puerto Rico está expuesto y buscan alcanzar tres objetivos básicos. Primero, que los funcionarios municipales, al igual que el personal de primera respuesta, puedan establecer una estructura de mando adecuada y elaborar un plan de acción de incidentes. Segundo, identificar limitaciones, brechas de capacidad y los requisitos necesarios para mejorar la respuesta. Tercero, una vez identificadas las limitaciones y los requerimientos específicos, se establecen los procesos de coordinación interagencial

con representantes estatales y federales, donde se proveen los requerimientos de apoyo inmediato identificados durante el ejercicio.

Durante los ejercicios se evalúan varios escenarios: huracán categoría 3 – 4, un terremoto magnitud 7.0 generando Tsunami y el

desarrollo de un virus con posibilidades pandémicas.

Estos escenarios se trabajan bajo el proceso situacional en donde se evalúan la respuesta y acciones basados en una serie de preguntas guías que se van discutiendo a medida que el ejercicio progresa.

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July 3-5, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

‘Jaws’ is still devouring us. SOS!

By MANOHLA DARGIS

T

he shark was right. With apologies to the skinny-dipper chomped in half, the shark was only being a shark and its teeth were so very sharp, her flesh so very tender. And given the harm we’ve inflicted on the planet, didn’t we deserve some punishment? When the great beast swam out of the unfathomable waters and onto screens in the summer of 1975, it stirred up anxiety that was doubtless tinged with guilt. “See it before you go swimming,” the trailer warned, tapping into our worries while making the case for moviegoing. We had many reasons to hide in the dark.

The wave-making Leviathan of summer blockbusters, “Jaws” changed the way Hollywood did business and how people went to movies. It also changed some people’s relationship to the ocean. “You wouldn’t go into the water,” my sister recently reminded me, when I asked about a 1970s family trip to Martha’s Vineyard, where much of the film was shot.

To be fair, I was a New York kid and could barely dog paddle. My natural habitat was a movie theater. And it remained so until the novel coronavirus closed cinemas and made me wonder if I’ll ever again sit in the dark with strangers. If the ocean now seems far safer, it’s because today the monster is the virus.

That the mayor in “Jaws” has become a pandemic meme is a testament to the film’s unnerving topicality and our habit of viewing the world through a screen. Played with a perfect mix of huckster smarm and cluelessness by Murray Hamilton, Mayor Vaughn is the blank, smiling face of Amity, the fictional beach paradise that the great white shark turns into a snack bar. After the remains of a woman wash up, Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) goes into over-

In 1975, this thriller freaked out the world, scaring us out of the water and creating the summer-blockbuster template. It was also a warning. drive as the mayor insists that everything’s fine.

“It’s a beautiful day,” he tells a reporter before the water turns red again. “The beaches are open and people are having a wonderful time.”

Like a lot of politicians, Mayor Vaughn survived repeated crises (he’s in the risible “Jaws 2”) and now he has a parody Twitter account, the source of a stream of bleakly funny and queasy commentary: “In Amity,” he tweeted on May 17, “we have germ spotters strategically placed on the beach.” That’s more reassuring than much of the advice dispensed by authorities who focus on putting out fires while ignoring the larger crisis of climate change and its relationship to the current pandemic. “We drain the world’s biological basins of the diversity that would ordinarily keep con-

tagions in check,” Ferris Jabr wrote in The New York Times Magazine. “Other animals’ diseases have not so much leapt onto us as flowed into us through channels we supplied.”

Steven Spielberg was 27 when he directed “Jaws” and already under contract at Universal. He had some qualms about turning Peter Benchley’s novel into a film, having made “Duel,” a thriller starring a big-rig stalker.

He didn’t want to become “a shark-and-truck director,” as he memorably put it. What drew him to the project was the book’s final 120 pages, as he explained back then, when the main characters “go on a hunt, a sea hunt for the great white shark.” So, working with Benchley and others, Spielberg pared down the story to focus on the drama of men battling a massive shark.

Subplots were deleted and new scenes added. With a potential actors’ strike looming, the film was rushed into production. There were lots of bumps and some publicly aired grievances. Spielberg, Benchley said, “has no knowledge of reality but movies,” a criticism that long clung to the filmmaker. Benchley shared screenwriting credit with Carl Gottlieb, who also plays the toadying publisher of the Amity newspaper. Gottlieb amusingly details the making of the movie in his essential account “The Jaws Log.” Spielberg knew what he had. Mid-production, he said, “We’ve really, I think, made a better movie than ‘Jaws’ is a book.” He was right: the film is as lean and clean as a denuded bone. Like the novel, it opens with the death of the skinny-dipper. Her name, you may recall though maybe not, is Chrissie. Women don’t factor much here; one becomes dinner, another fusses in a kitchen. A crucial exception is the mother, Mrs. Kintner (Lee Fierro), who con-

fronts Brody the day she buries her child. “You knew there was a shark out there,” she says, after slapping him. “You knew it was dangerous but you let people go swimming anyway.

You knew all those things. But still my boy is dead now.”

After Fierro died in April from complications of COVID-19, The Los Angeles Times columnist Mary McNamara wrote, “We are all Mrs. Kintner now.” These days, though, we are all more like the confused people of Amity who either recklessly rush into the water or stay away at a safe distance, watching in horror.

“Jaws” is about a lot of things, including fear, death, science, accountability and the necessity — and fragility — of social solidarity. It’s about knowledge and what people do with it.

Brody grasps that there’s a danger threatening Amity and its visitors and sets out to save them with help from a scientist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a fisherman (Robert Shaw). Movies love the romance of the white-hatted hero, but in real life we also need to save ourselves.

In the decades since the film freaked us out, Hollywood has grown increasingly dependent on blockbusters. Yet even as its movies have grown bigger and shinier, they have become less tethered to real people and our scarily imperiled world. Critics read “Jaws” different ways: as a take on “Moby-Dick” or the Vietnam War, or as a tale about the return of the repressed. Of course it is also about a shark that kills people and is killed in turn, which makes it another story about humankind’s domination of nature. If the threats on screen now are often extraterrestrial, it’s partly, I think, because we can’t bear to see what’s happening, what we’re doing, on Earth. Maybe the shark wasn’t simply hunting us — not all of us, anyway — maybe it was warning us.

The best movies and TV shows coming to Netflix, Amazon and more in July

By NOEL MURRAY

A

new streamer enters the fray this month: NBCUniversal’s Peacock, which had a soft rollout to Xfinity customers back in April but will become widely available July 15.

What sets Peacock apart from the other major subscription services? For one, NBC is offering a stripped-down, ad-supported free option for those who’d rather not take on another monthly bill.

Still, even the lowest-tier Peacock viewers will have to invest their time — which will be more valuable than ever this month, given what the new service’s rivals are debuting: It’s going to be an unusually strong July for streaming entertainment, led by Disney Plus’ surprise early release of “Hamilton,” the long-awaited filmed version of the Broadway phenomenon.

Here are our picks for the best new films and TV series premiering this month, plus a roundup of some of the other notable titles that

will be available to stream. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice.)

New to Disney Plus ‘Hamilton’ Starts streaming: Friday In 2016, shortly before the original principal cast of the Broadway musical “Hamilton” dispersed, they performed the show a few more times in front of a live audience and a camera crew. At the time, writer and composer Lin-

Manuel Miranda said he had no definite plans to release the film. But earlier this year Disney bought the rights for a 2021 theatrical release; and then the company’s executives persuaded Miranda and his partners to let Disney Plus go ahead and make the movie available for streaming this summer, while people are still stuck at home. Now everybody who couldn’t score tickets to the biggest Broadway smash of the 2010s can sit in their living rooms and enjoy Miranda’s infectiously tuneful and emotionally

The San Juan Daily Star affecting retelling of America’s early history, performed by a cast whose talent and cultural diversity reflects this country’s greatness.

Also arriving: July 31 “Muppets Now” New to Hulu ‘To the Stars’ Starts streaming: Friday Perhaps the best movie to compare with the black-and-white small-town melodrama “To the Stars” is “The Last Picture Show” — except that in “To the Stars,” teenage girls are at the center of the story instead of boys. Set in 1960 in a dinky Oklahoma farming town, the film has Kara Hayward and Liana Liberato playing high school misfits who are dealing with troubled home lives, bullying peers and their own irrepressible sexual desires. Director Martha Stephens and screenwriter Shannon BradleyColleary steer the story toward an overly heavyhanded final 20 minutes, but for most of its running time, the film is a vivid and poetic portrait of two unlikely best friends, bucking the conformity of their times.

‘Palm Springs’ Starts streaming: July 10 The world wasn’t exactly in dire need of another “Groundhog Day”-like romantic comedy in which characters are stuck in a seemingly inescapable time loop. But with “Palm Springs,” director Max Barbakow and screenwriter Andy Siara do put a few original twists on the premise.

For one thing, the story starts surprisingly deep into the action, with Andy Samberg playing Nyles, a low-ambition goofball who has been repeating the same destination wedding with his girlfriend’s family for some time when we first meet him. When Nyles accidentally drags the equally directionless Sarah (Cristin Milioti) into the loop, he tries to persuade her of the virtues of a life lived without consequences but soon finds that she has her own ideas for how to spend eternity — and that those plans may not include him.

Also arriving: Thursday “The Whistlers” July 17 “Into the Dark: The Current Occupant” July 20 “The Assistant” July 28 “Maxxx” New to Netflix ‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ Starts streaming: Friday The perennially popular “Baby-Sitters Club” book series has been adapted to the screen before, for a short-lived 1990 TV show and for an underperforming 1995 feature film.

The new Netflix version — shepherded by “GLOW” writer/producer Rachel Shukert and

July 3-5, 2020

son 2 ‘Mucho Mucho Amor’ “Broad City” writer/director/producer Lucia Aniello — may have greater staying power. Rather than aiming for anything awkwardly edgy or wildly off-model, Shukert and Aniello have instead delivered a kid-friendly show that’s true to the novels, telling episodic stories about a group of teenage girls who overcome their differences to run a small business together.

‘Mucho Mucho Amor’ Starts streaming: July 8 The flamboyant Puerto Rican astrologer Walter Mercado died in 2019, after fading from public life a few years earlier. For the documentary “Mucho Mucho Amor” — named for Mercado’s signature signoff line — the filmmaking team of Alex Fumero, Cristina Costantini and Kareem Tabsch were granted an audience with the reclusive entertainer, who shared his life story and his philosophies of life and fashion. The filmmakers may not quite get all the way to the bottom of Mercado’s image-conscious, largerthan-life personality — he does manage to retain some mystery. But “Mucho Mucho Amor” is still impressively comprehensive, covering not just the biography of a beloved cultural icon but also weighing what his presence meant to the LGBTQ community — and to anyone else who has ever yearned to live an unusual life.

‘Cursed’ Starts streaming: July 17 Based on a young adult novel by Tom Wheeler (with illustrations by comic book artist Frank Miller), “Cursed” retells some of the Arthurian legends from the perspective of the young enchantress later known as “the Lady of the Lake.” Katherine Langford plays the lady, Nimue, who suffers setbacks and tragedy as she discovers her mystical calling. Wheeler — a veteran TV writer who serves as the series’s coexecutive producer with Miller — adopts the familiar pulp fantasy style of “Game of Thrones” and “The Witcher” but with a somewhat lighter touch. The stakes are still high and the battles still bloody, but from its amusingly sleazy Merlin (played with gusto by Gustaf Skarsgard) to its feminist overtones, this show is primarily meant to entertain and inspire.

Also arriving: Wednesday “Unsolved Mysteries”

21

Friday “Cable Girls” Final Season: Part 2 “Desperados” “Ju-On: Origins” July 8 “Stateless” July 10 “The Old Guard” July 21 “How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)” Sea-

July 24 “The Kissing Booth 2” July 28 “Last Chance U: Laney” July 31 “The Umbrella Academy” Season 2 New to Amazon ‘Hanna’ Season 2 Starts streaming: Friday Toward the end of the first season of the thriller “Hanna,” the plot began moving beyond the 2011 movie that inspired the series. Season 2 continues on that path, with a narrative arc about a secret training program that spawns young assassins like the title heroine (Esme Creed-Miles).

Similar to the film, the root appeal of this show — beyond the strong performances and some supercool action sequences — is its nuanced take on a highly trained young killer who’s still learning to process ordinary human feelings. In this new run of episodes, the adults keeping an eye on Hanna (including friendly rivals played by the excellent Mireille Enos and Dermot Mulroney) try to exploit her talents, while she takes new steps toward independence.

Also arriving: July 17 “Absentia” July 24 “Jim Gaffigan: The Pale Tourist” “Radioactive” New to HBO ‘Close Enough’ Starts streaming: July 9 TV producer and animator J.G. Quintel is best known for his weird and whimsical Cartoon Network series “Regular Show,” in which he took the mundanities of life as an underemployed young adult and turned them into a kooky talking-animal sitcom. Not long after “Regular Show” ended in 2017, Quintel announced a new show, “Close Enough,” made for a sincescrapped TBS adult animation block but is now arriving via HBO Max. It represents a natural progression from “Regular Show,” shifting from documenting the lives of 20-somethings to looking at life after 30. Quintel and Gabrielle Walsh voice the characters of Josh and Emily, a married couple in Los Angeles trying to hang on to their millennial mojo while raising a daughter. There are fantastical elements, but primarily this is a funny and honest cartoon about young parents

struggling with “adulting.”

Also arriving: July 9 “Expecting Amy” July 14 “Showbiz Kids” July 16 “The House of Ho” July 23 “Tig n’ Seek” July 24 “Room 104” Season 4 July 30 “Frayed” New to Apple TV Plus ‘Little Voice’ Starts streaming: July 10 Songwriter Sara Bareilles and writerdirector Jessie Nelson — who collaborated on the hit Broadway musical “Waitress” — re-team for “Little Voice,” a slice-of-life drama about a young musician named Bess (Brittany O’Grady), tentatively trying to launch her career in New York. Though uncommonly talented, Bess doubts herself, in part because she worries that by pursuing her dreams she’s hurting her family, who’ve come to rely on her support. Bareilles’ soft, yearning songs provide a fine soundtrack for this muted, emotional story, all about someone wrestling with whether it’s possible to be a good and caring person while hustling to become a pop star.

Also arriving: July 10 “Greatness Code” “Greyhound” New to Peacock ‘Brave New World’ Starts streaming: July 15 NBCUniversal’s new streaming service debuts with a show that could never play on its parent network. This adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s influential 1932 dystopian novel “Brave New World” is very TV-MA, explicitly depicting the drug-fueled sexual decadence of a futuristic upper class, all while telling the story of an unusually clever “savage” (well-played by Alden Ehrenreich) who openly questions how the elites live. Long in development — and originally slated to run on Syfy — Peacock’s version of Huxley’s stinging social critique is fascinating in how it both reflects and diverges from the world of today. The show’s illustration of how revolutions quickly take hold may actually be more relevant in 2020 than it would have been had “Brave New World” been made years ago, as intended.

Also arriving: July 15 “The Capture” “In Deep with Ryan Lochte” “Intelligence” “Psych 2: Lassie Come Home”

22

The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

Black wine professionals demand to be seen

TJ Douglas, a wine retailer, in Boston.

It’s an old story, of being ignored, patronized or dismissed. But for Black retailers, sommeliers, writers and winemakers, the days of invisibility are over.

to wine professionals who are Black in this overwhelmingly white industry, and you will hear similar stories of invisibility over and over, no matter how different their jobs, backgrounds or places of work.

These are stories about feeling dismissed by white people who cannot associate them with the expertise, knowledge or authority they have earned through their work.

Whether writers, sommeliers, retailers, farmers or winemakers, Black people in the wine world face a barrage of slights, whether small, possibly unconscious hostilities or overt racism. As a result, getting ahead requires a constant effort to pull against the friction of discrimination that slows what for whites would be a natural career progression.

I spoke with Black wine professionals, to listen, with the hope that their shared experiences might result in a deeper conversation and understanding among their peers in the wine world.

Julia Coney is a wine writer and educator based in Houston and Washington, D.C., who regularly leads tastings and teaches wine classes. Yet as a consumer, she

By ERIC ASIMOV

T

J Douglas and his wife, Hadley, own Urban Grape, a thriving wine shop in the South End neighborhood of Boston. Before the pandemic, a regular internet customer with whom Douglas had had many discussions online about wine, walked into the shop for the first time.

The customer, who was white, had come specifically to meet Douglas, whom he did not know was Black.

“He looked at me and walked right past me to an older white man who worked for me, and thanked him for all he had done,” Douglas recalled. “The employee pointed toward me, and the gentleman turned around and looked shocked. He had never thought of buying wine from a Black person before. He also looked extremely embarrassed.

“I had to go above and beyond to make him feel comfortable for the way he was perceiving me,” Douglas said.

Douglas’ experience is typical. Talk

Tammie Teclemariam, a food and drinks writer who is used to having her opinions about wine questioned, at her home in New York, June 24, 2020.

Carlton McCoy Jr., a wine executive, in St. Helena, Calif. said, white servers or merchants are always ready to instruct her, to show her how to hold a glass and to explain to her why she ought to swirl it.

In restaurants, they steer her to cheaper wines or sweeter choices that fit their stereotype of what she might enjoy.

“They dumb things down for me,” she said. “I’ve seen both innate prejudice and innate assumptions about who has the power and the discernment. I’ve been told I look like the help.”

She has grown tired of the tokenism, of being the only Black person invited to a tasting or on a sponsored trip to a wine region. She is sick of seeing the wine industry toss money only to white social-media influencers. So she has created a database, Black Wine Professionals, in hopes that white gatekeepers who say they want to diversify will use this tool. And if they won’t take action, she said, she will.

“They keep regurgitating the same person, and new people never get a chance,” Coney said. “People might ask me on a trip, and I’m going to look at the racial breakdown. And I’ll offer my spot to someone else.”

Stephen Satterfield calls himself a “recovering sommelier.” He says wine is still one of his great loves, but he has left the business twice because of what he termed “a sense of cultural isolation.” Satterfield,

who is based in Atlanta, now publishes a quarterly food magazine, Whetstone, and is host of a podcast, “Point of Origin,” that explores the intersection of culture, food, politics and diversity.

“I found people had the range to talk about nothing but wine,” he said of life as a sommelier. “I found that especially problematic as a Black person, because I felt I could never be fully seen or understood in the industry beyond my ability to adapt to standards of decorum, language and posture.”

This feeling, he said, was especially apparent in trade tastings, essential events in which producers, wine buyers and other gatekeepers socialize, taste wine and form essential business relationships.

“Imagine if you were the only white person in that same environment full of Black people,” Satterfield said. “Trying to taste wine in that kind of head space, it was an exhausting sort of emotional labor that white people wouldn’t even notice. In trade tastings, you see the invisibility.”

Madeline Maldonado is the beverage director at Da Toscano, an Italian restaurant that opened in Greenwich Village, New York, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic. She, too, has had difficult experiences in trade tastings.

“They would treat me like a novice, and you internalize that,” she said. “We

The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

23

WINE

While the white-dominated wine industry in spend so much of our time in those interactions, you South Africa sticks with the standard language, virend up feeling less-than. It’s not good for your mental health. It feels lonely.” tually ignoring a huge group of potential customers, Once, at a restaurant where she worked, she Biyela has worked to find references that are more stopped next to a white couple to make a passing commonplace. Instead of saying a wine smells like comment about an excellent bottle on the table. truffles, she said, she might say it smells like amasi, “The man responded, ‘What do you know about a sort of fermented milk. wine?’” she recalled.

“When discussing with Black people, I would “When you see other people of color, there’s explain that since I got into the industry I have managed to associate the flavors of the wine to what that look of relief,” Maldonado said. “We don’t always talk about it, but through our body language, I know,” she said. “You don’t have to go by what there’s that sense of, ‘I see you, you see me.’” the back of the label says. You can create your own As a wine server, André Hueston Mack reached things.” the peak of his profession as head sommelier at Per As a young man, Carlton McCoy Jr. received Se in Manhattan, New York, in 2004. He is now a scholarship to culinary school. His grandmother told him he would need to change the way he an author and entrepreneur, with his own Oregon spoke, cut his hair and wear new clothes, he rewine label, Maison Noir, and, with his wife, Phoebe Andre Heuston Mack, an author and entrepreneur with his own counted in a recent Facebook post.

Damrosch, a small empire of shops in Brooklyn unOregon wine label, in New York. der the umbrella name & Sons Hospitality Group.

“It crushed her to say it,” said McCoy, who As a young sommelier, he said, he met people grew up in Fairfax Village in southeastern Washing“In order to trust a wine person, you have to respect ton, D.C. “She told me that ‘they’ would never acwho assumed he knew nothing about wine. He detheir humanity as someone who can physically enjoy and cept me that way.” cided to use their feelings for his own purposes.

“I get to choose how I feel about things,” he said. “I understand an experience as well, or even in a more nuYears later, McCoy is a master sommelier and the preschoose to use that energy to keep pushing forward, to be anced way than you. That’s the whole humility of wine ap- ident and chief executive of Heitz Cellar, a historic Napa preciation, and I think it’s hard for some people to relate to Valley wine producer. But he still knows he is an outsider, relentless.” with life experiences unlike those of most of the people he He has endured many slights: A retailer in Texas asked me equally even on a sensual level.”

Rampant class and generational issues play a part as encounters professionally. him whether Maison Noir came in 40-ounce bottles. Another, in Colorado, followed him around his store, apparently well in what she sees as wine’s old-boy network and bro “They don’t know what it means to walk into a restauculture.

Adding racism to the mix creates an impregnable rant and be asked if you’re in the right place,” he said. “You fearing he might steal something. Some diners at Per Se told wall, she said. are the only one in the room. You have to be comfortable him to send over the real sommelier.

“The fact is in order to really be a trusted voice in being uncomfortable.

“I chose to make those moments empowering,” he “The fact that I’m in that room, that I’m at the head of said. “I’m constantly helping people pick their jaws up off wine, most Black people have to be co-signed by a white person or celebrity alliance, or else be in constant recitation the table, I’m proud of that. We should wear it like a badge the floor and their feet out of their mouths.” of honor, being the only one, and create another seat for Zwann Grays, the wine director at Olmsted in Brook- of their work history,” she said.

Invisibility is not just a problem for Black wine pro- somebody else.” lyn, was lucky enough to meet a number of Black women who served as mentors and role models — people like Lee fessionals in the United States. Winemaking stretches back Campbell, who has excelled in all parts of the wine busi- four centuries in South Africa, a nation in which discriminaness, Marquita Levy, the sommelier at Chef’s Club New tion and racial violence were long sanctioned by apartheid.

After that system was swept away at the end of the York, and Beth Baye, a buyer at 67 Wine in Manhattan.

20th century, Ntsiki Biyela became South Africa’s first Black “It has 100% made all the difference,” Grays said.

Her issues have come not so much in restaurants as in female winemaker. In 2016, she established her own label, Aslina Wines. areas where the wine industry congregates.

When she arrived in 1998 at Stellenbosch University “Trade tastings are the worst — I’ve felt the cold, the not-seen space,” she said. Repeatedly, she said, she has re- in the Western Cape to study wine, she did not speak Africeived the bare minimum of consideration while all around kaans, a major language of the region. Her fellow students her, white wine professionals are treated with courtesy and asked why she had even bothered coming there.

“It wasn’t the question, it was how it was asked, with given full attention.

“It’s so dismissive,” she said. “There’s a natural respect that underlying part of saying, ‘You’re not welcome here,’” for white wine culture and a natural disrespect for Black she recalled by email.

As she moved into her career, it was difficult at first to people in the wine industry space.”

Tammie Teclemariam, a freelance food and drinks interact with growers from whom she wanted to buy grapes. writer in Brooklyn (who has contributed to Wirecutter, “They didn’t want to deal with you: ‘You’re Black. What do which is owned by The New York Times), calls herself a you know about wine?’” she said.

One of Biyela’s biggest challenges has been to build “wine unprofessional” to set herself apart from what she an audience for wine among Black South Africans, who sees as an exclusionary industry.

“Just the nature of what wine is makes it really hard have not traditionally consumed wines. A major problem to separate it from racism,” said Teclemariam, whose recent she has identified is the language used to describe wine, tweet of a photo of Bon Appétit’s editor-in-chief helped spur which is full of obscure flavor references that are not alhis resignation and a reckoning over institutional racism at ways familiar to many Black South Africans who are not Ntsiki Biyela, a winemaker, in Stellenbosch, South well versed in European winespeak. the magazine.

Africa.

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

IN RE: LA MERCED LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, S.E.

Debtor CASE NO.: 18-06858 (ESL).

CHAPTER 11. NOTICE OF BID DEADLINE, AUCTION, AND SALE HEARING IN CONNECTION WITH THE SALE OF THE ASSET FOR SALE. NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN, as follows:. 1. On June 23, 2020, the Court entered and order for the approval of, and authorization for, among other things (i) the bidding procedures (the “Bidding Procedures”) to be used in connection with the sale (the “Sale”) of the property herein described; (ii) the dates of the Bid Deadline, Auction (if needed) and Sale Hearing (all as defined below), and (iii) related relief (the “Bidding Procedures Motion”), on the docket of the Debtor’s chapter 11 case, currently pending in United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Puerto Rico (the “Bankruptcy Court”). By said order dated, the Bankruptcy Court approved the Bidding Procedures and the Bidding Procedures Motion (the “Bidding Procedures Order”).

A copy of the Bidding Procedures Order, together with the Bidding Procedures, is enclosed herewith. In the event of any inconsistency between the Bidding Procedures Order (or the Bidding Procedures) and this Notice, the Bidding Procedures Order (or the Bidding Procedures) shall control. As set forth in the Bidding Procedures, the Sale of the Debtor’s asset described herein remains subject to competing offers from any prospective qualified bidder. The Asset for Sale proposed to be sold is the following: ---URBANA: Predio de terreno radicado en la URBANIZACION ELEONOR ROOSEVELT, radicada en el Barrio Hato Rey del término municipal de Rio Piedras, hoy San Juan, Puerto Rico, con una cabida de TRES MIL TRESCIENTOS CATORCE PUNTO VEINTICINCO (3,314.25) metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, en ciento veintinueve (129) pies nueve (9) pulgadas con la Avenida A; por el SUR, en igual medida con terrenos de la Asociación de Miembros de la Policía Insular; por el ESTE, en doscientos setenta y cinco (275) pies ocho y tres cuartos (8 ¾) pulgadas, con la Calle “T”; y por el OESTE, en igual medida con la Calle “H”.--Enclava en dicho terreno un edificio todo de concreto, de

@

dos (2) plantas, dedicado a una escuela privada.---Finca número trece mil cuatrocientos cincuenta y tres (13,453), inscrita al folio cuatro (4) del tomo mil cuatrocientos sesenta y seis (1466) de Rio Piedras Norte, en el Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Segunda Sección de San Juan. 2. The Proposed Sale Price is: $4,071,744.35 in cash or other, equally valued equity like instrument or Credit Bids. 3. All interested parties are invited to become a Qualified Bidder (as defined in the Bidding Procedures Order) and to make offers to purchase the Debtor’s assets in accordance with the terms of the Bidding Procedures and the Bidding Procedures Order. The deadline to submit competing bids is July 9, 2020 at 5:00 p.m. (prevailing Atlantic time). 4. Interested bidders requesting information about the qualification process, including a description or information on the asset, the forms of asset purchase agreement, confidentiality agreement and/or information in connection with due diligence and sale of the property should contact via email communication: Nelson Robles Diaz, Esq., Nelson-Diaz Law Offices, Esq., nroblesdiaz@gmail.com, with a copy to Francisco Fernández Chiqués, Fernández Chiqués, LLC, ffc@ffclaw.com. 5. Pursuant to the Bidding Procedures Order, the auction for the Sale of the Asset for Sale will be held at the offices of Fernández Chiqués LLC, 653 Ponce de León, Second Floor, San Juan, PR 00907, Tel. (787) 7223040; commencing on July 10, 2020 at 10:00 a.m., (prevailing Atlantic Time), or at such other place and time as OSP Consortium, LLC (“OSP”) shall notify all Qualified Bidders. Only the authorized representatives of each of the Qualified Bidders shall be eligible to participate in the Auction. 6. At a hearing on July 14, 2020 at 10:00a.m. (prevailing Atlantic time) or such other time as the Bankruptcy Court shall determine (the “Sale Hearing”), OSP intends to seek the Bankruptcy Court’s approval of the Sale to the Proposed Buyer, for authority to sell the Asset for Sale to any bidder submitting the highest, or otherwise best, offer (the “Successful Bidder”). The Sale Hearing will be held before the Honorable Enrique S. Lamoutte in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Puerto Rico, at Jose V. Toledo Federal Building & US Courthouse, 300 Recinto Sur, Second Floor Courtroom 2, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00901, to be held via Skype for business. 7. At the Sale Hearing, the Bankruptcy Court

staredictos1@outlook.com

may enter such orders as it deems appropriate under applicable law and as required by the circumstances and equities of this chapter 11 case. 8. Objections, if any, to the transactions contemplated by the Sale (a “Sale Objection”) pursuant to the terms of the agreements reached with the Proposed Buyer or any other Successful Bidder, shall be in writing, shall conform to the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure and the Local Rules of the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Puerto Rico, shall set forth the name of the objecting party, the nature and amount of any claims or interests held or asserted against the Debtor’s estate or properties, the basis for the objection and the specific grounds therefor, and shall be filed with the Bankruptcy Court and be duly noticed, so as to be actually received on or before July 13, 2020 at 5:00 p.m.

(Prevailing Atlantic Time) (the “Objection Deadline”). 9. This notice is qualified in its entirety by the Bidding Procedures Motion, Bidding Procedures Order and the Bidding Procedures, and all persons and entities are urged to read the those filing and the provisions thereof carefully. PLEASE TAKE NOTICE THAT THE FAILURE TO ABIDE

BY THE PROCEDURES AND DEADLINES SET FORTH IN THE BIDDING PROCEDURES MOTION AND BIDDING PROCEDURES ORDER MAY RESULT IN THE DISQUALIFICATION OF A BID AND THE FAILURE OF THE BANKRUPTCY COURT TO CONSIDER A SALE OBJECTION. *****

LEGAL NOTICE

rior de Carolina, una demanda de la cual usted podrá enterarse en la Secretaria del Tribunal.

Por la presente se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva a la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento, excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento, notificando copia de la misma al abogado de la parte demandante o a ésta, de no tener representación legal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar Sentencia en rebeldía en 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.

La parte demandanda dispondrá de 30 días a partir de la publicación del edicto para 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/sumac/ , salvo que se represente por derecho propio, con copia de dicha contestación al abogado de la parte demandante cuyo nombre y dirección se indica a continuación: LCDO. HECTOR ROMAN-MALDONADO PO BOX 10118 CAROLINA, PR 00988 correo electronico: licenciadohroman@gmail.com , bajo apercibimiento que de no hacerlo, le podrá ser anotada la rebeldía y se dictará sentencia sin más citarle ni oírle. En Carolina, Puerto Rico, a 4 de junio de 2020. Lcda. Marilyn Aponte Rodríguez, Secretaria Regional, Lourdes Torres, Secretaria Auxiliar.

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO LEGAL NOTICE DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUDE CAROLINA NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SIBIA BERMUDEZ SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN. QUIÑONES, Demandante vs.

ELGIN MORALES QUIÑONES,

Demandados.

CIVIL: TJ2019CV00671 (404) SOBRE: DIVISIÓN DE COMUNIDAD HEREDITARIA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO SS,

A: ELGIN MORALES QUIÑONES (SE DESCONOCE LA DIRECCIÓN).

POR LA PRESENTE se le notifica que la demandante ha presentado ante el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Supe-

THE MONEY HOUSE, INC. Demandantes Vs .

FULANO DE TAL Y MENGANO DE TAL

Demandados CIVIL NUM.: SJ2020CV01578.

SALA: 802. SOBRE : CANCELACION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDE NTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOClADO DE PUERTO RICO. S.S.

A: FULANO DE TAL Y MENGANO DE TAL

Quedan ustedes notificados que los demandantes de epígrafe han presentado en este Tribunal una Demanda contra

(787) 743-3346

The San Juan Daily Star

Friday, July 3, 2020 ustedes como codemandados, en la que se solicita la cancelación judicial de un Pagan extraviado a favor de THE MONEY HOUSE, INC., o a su orden, por la suma principal de $150,000.00, con intereses al 3.41%, anual y con fecha de vencimiento el día 29 de agosto de 2076, suscrito el día 31 de octubre de 2008; affidavit numero 5251 . Para gar ant izar el referido Pagaré cl mismo dia y ante la Abogada Notario Namyr I. Hernandez, se otorgo la Escrilura Numero 174, otorgada en San Juan, mediante la cual se constituyó Hipoteca sobre la siguiente propiedad: “URBANA: Solar marcado con cl numero Diez (10) del Bloque “M” en el plano de la Urbanización Villa Andalucía del Barrio Honduras de Sabana Llana del termino municipal de Rio Piedras; San ,Juan, Puerto Rico, con un area de CUATROCIENTOS SESENTA Y CINCO PONTO CINCO MlL SEISCIENTOS OCHENTA Y CUATRO METROS CUADRADOS. En lindes, por el NORTE, en siete punto .cincuenta y tres (7.53) metros con el solar Veinte guión “M” (20-M) ; por el SUR, en veintitrés punto cuarenta y siete (23.47) metros con la Calle Catorce; por el NORESTE, en treinta punto cero siete (30.07) metros con el solar Nueve guión “M” (9-M); y por el NOROESTE , en treinta punto cero siete (30.07) metros con el solar Once guión “M” (11-M). Consta inscrita al folio ciento ochenta y seis (186) de! tomo doscientos e1 cincuenta y seis ( 256 ) de sabana Llana, finca numero once mil cuatrocientos diez (11,410), Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección Quinta (V) de San Juan. Se le emplaza y se le notifica que debe contestar la demanda dentro del terminó de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación del presente edicto. Deberá presentar la contestación a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), a1 cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://united.ramajudicial.pr/sumac, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentarla ante el Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior de San Juan con copia a la abogada de la parte demandante a la siguiente dirección: Lcda. Magaly Rodriguez Batista PO Box 9024082 San Juan, PR 00902-4082 TEI,. (787) 504 -480!

FAX: 1(888) 224-3201 mrodrbatista@gmail.com Se le apercibe que, de no contestar la demanda dcntro del termino aquí establecido, se le anotara la rebeldía y se dictara

sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado sin mas citarle ni oírle. Expido es te edicto bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal, hoy 15 de junio de 2020.

GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, Sec Regional. Maira M Cruz Ramos, Sec de Serv a Sala.

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

THE TITLE SECURITY GROUP, LLC DEMANDANTE

AUTORIDAD DE ENERGIA ELECTRICA DE PR Y OTROS

DEMANDADO CASO NUM. BY2019CV03829.

SALA: 504. SOBRE: CANCELACION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: JUAN DEL PUEBLO Y JUANA DEL PUEBLO COMO POSIBLES TENEDORES Y

CUALQUIER PERSONA DESCONOCIDA CON POSIBLE INTERES EN LA OBLIGACION CUYA CANCELACION POR DECRETO JUDICIAL SE SOLICITA

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 1 de abril de 2020. En BAYAMON, Puerto Rico, 1 de abril de 2020.

LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria. F/VIVIAN J EL SECRETARIO(A) que susSANABRIA, Secretaria Auxiliar. cribe le notifica a usted que el 17 de marzo de 2020 este LEGAL NOTICE Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Estado Libre Asociado de PuerSentencia Parcial o Resolución to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL en este caso, que ha sido debiDE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Pridamente registrada y archivada mera Instancia Sala Superior en autos donde podrá usted de CAROLINA. enterarse detalladamente de ARACELIS los términos de la misma. Esta PASTRANA RAMOS notificación se publicará una DEMANDANTE sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la isla SCOTIABANK DE de Puerto Rico, dentro de los PUERTO RICO, como lo días siguientes a su notificasucesor en derecho ción. Y, siendo o representando de R & G MORTGAGE usted una parte en el procediCORPORATION; ; miento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia JUAN DEL PUEBLO Y Parcial o Resolución, de la cual JUANA DEL PUEBLO puede establecerse recurso de y cualesquier persona revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a desconocida con posible interés en la obligación partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a cuya cancelación por usted esta notificación que se

decreto judicial se solicita

LEGAL NOTICE OF AVAILABILITY The United States Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Wildlife Services (WS) program has issued a Decision and Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) for an Environmental Assessment (EA) that evaluated potential impacts to the quality of the human environment from the implementation of a management program to address damage caused by several bird species in Puerto Rico. The EA was prepared to facilitate coordination between agencies, streamline program management, and clearly communicate with the public the analysis of individual and cumulative impacts of the proposed program. Based on the analyses contained in the EA, it was concluded that the proposed action would not have a significant impact upon the quality of the human environment.

Interested parties may obtain the Decision/ FONSI and the final EA by contacting USDA/ APHIS/WS, 6155 Heath Road, Auburn, Alabama 36830 or by visiting the website at https://www. regulations.gov/docket?D=APHIS-2020-0028.

The San Juan Daily Star

Friday, July 3, 2020

DEMANDADO LA OBLIGACIÓN CUYA CASO NUM. TJ2019CV00363.

CANCELACIÓN POR SALA: 408. SOBRE: CANCELACION DE PAGARÉ EXTRA- DECRETO JUDICIAL SE SOLICITA VIADO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE EL SECRETARIO(A) que susSENTENCIA POR EDICTO. A: JUAN DEL PUEBLO cribe le notifica a usted que 8 de MAYO de 2020 este Y JUANA DEL PUEBLO el Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, y cualesquier persona Sentencia Parcial o Resolución desconocida con posible en este caso, que ha sido debiinterés en la obligación damente registrada y archivada cuya cancelación por en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de decreto judicial se los términos de la misma. Esta solicita. notificación se publicará una EL SECRETARIO(A) que sus- sola vez en un periódico de cribe le notifica a usted que el 1 circulación general en la isla de abril de 2020 este Tribunal de Puerto Rico, dentro de los ha dictado Sentencia, Senten- lo días siguientes a su notificacia Parcial o Resolución en este ción. Y, siendo o representando caso, que ha sido debidamente usted una parte en el procediregistrada y archivada en autos miento sujeta a los términos donde podrá usted enterarse de la Sentencia, Sentencia detalladamente de los términos Parcial o Resolución, de la cual de la misma. Esta notificación puede establecerse recurso de se publicará una sola vez en revisión o apelación dentro del un periódico de circulación ge- término de 30 días contados a neral en la isla de Puerto Rico, partir de la publicación por edicdentro de los lo días siguientes to de esta notificación, dirijo a a su notificación. Y, siendo o usted esta notificación que se representando usted una parte considerará hecha en la fecha en el procedimiento sujeta a los de la publicación de este edictérminos de la Sentencia, Sen- to. Copia de esta notificación ha tencia Parcial o Resolución, sido archivada en los autos de de la cual puede establecerse este caso, con fecha de 14 de recurso de revisión o apelación MAYO de 2020. En SAN JUAN, dentro del término de 30 días Puerto Rico, 14 de mayo de contados a partir de la publica- 2020. GRISELDAA RODRIción por edicto de esta notifica- GUEZ COLLADO, Secretaria ción, dirijo a usted esta notifica- Regional. Mildred Martinez ción que se considerará hecha Acostoa, Secretaria del Tribuen la fecha de la publicación nal Conf I. de este edicto. Copia de esta LEGAL NOTICE notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con Estado Libre Asociado de Puerfecha de 1 de abril de 2020. En to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL CAROLINA, Puerto Rico, 1 de DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Priabril de 2020. LCDA. MARILYN mera Instancia Sala Superior APONTE RODRIGUEZ, Se- de Caquas. cretaria. JENELISSE ALEMAN MIGUEL ANTONIO MARTINEZ, Secretaria Auxiliar.

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

ALVARADO LÓPEZ Y CARMEN MORALES FELICIANO DEMANDANTE

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 lo 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 4 de mayo de 2020. En Caquas, Puerto Rico, 4 de mayo de 2020. CARMEN ANA PEREIRA ORTIZ, Secretaria Regional. F/ CARMEN R DIAZ CACEREZ, Secretaria Servicios a Sala.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO UBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE FAJARDO.

IRMA IRIS RIVERA SANCHEZ Demandante v.

POPULAR MORTGAGE, INC.; JUAN DE PUEBLO Y JUANA DEL PUEBLO cualesquier persona desconocida co posible interés en la obligación cuya cancelación por decreto judicial se solicita.

Demandados CIVIL NUM. VQ2019CV00045.

SOBRE: CANCELACION E PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. EsTAOOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

FIRST BANK PUERTO RICO; BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO; JOSÉ MANUEL JUAN DEL PUEBLO Y MACHADO URRUTIA JUANA DEL PUEBLO, DEMANDANTE y cualesquier persona FIRSTBANK PUERTO RICO; JUAN DEL PUEBLO desconocida con posible Y JUANA DEL PUEBLO Y interés en la obligación A: JUAN DEL PUEBLO cuya cancelación por CUALQUIER PERSONA Y JUANA DEL PUEBLO decreto judicial se solicita DESCONOCIDA CON DEMANDADO COMO POSIBLES POSIBLE INTERÉS EN CASO NUM. CG2019CV01245.

TENEDORES Y LA OBLIGACIÓN CUYA SALA: 802. SOBRE: CANCECUALESQUIER PERSONA CANCELACIÓN POR LACION DE PAGARÉ EXTRADESCONOCIDA CON VIADO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE DECRETO JUDICIAL SE POSIBLE INTERES EN SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. SOLICITA LA OBLIGACION CUVA A: JUAN DEL PUEBLO DEMANDADO CASO NUM. SJ2019CV05597 CANCELACION POR Y JUANA DEL PUEBLO (503). SOBRE: CANCELA- como posibles tenedores DECRETO JUDICIAL SE CION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIASOLICITA. y cualesquier persona DO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENPor la presente se le notifica desconocida con posible TENCIA POR EDICTO. que ha sido presentada en A: JUAN DEL PUEBLO Y interés en la obligación este Tribunal una Demanda cuya cancelación por en su contra en el pleito de JUANA DEL PUEBLO Y CUALQUIER PERSONA decreto judicial se solicita epígrafe. En este caso la parte SECRETARIO(A) que sus- demandante ha radicado una DESCONOCIDA CON EL cribe le notifica a usted que Demanda para que se decrete POSIBLE INTERÉS EN el 29 de abril de 2020 este judicialmente el saldo de un ( 1)

pagare hipotecario a favor de POPULAR MORTGAGE INC., por la suma de $61,600.00.

Dicho pagare fue suscrito el día veintiuno (21) de febrero de dos mil seis (2006), ante el notario Ismael Luis Purcell Soler, garantizado por hipoteca constituida mediante la Escritura numero veintiséis (26), sobre la siguiente propiedad : RUSTICA: -Parcela marcada con el numero ciento veintitrés en el piano de parcelación de la comunidad rural Brisas de Santa Maria del barrio Florida del-termino municipal de Vieques, con una cabida superficial de trescientos cincuenta y uno punto cero cero--metros cuadrados. En lindes por el norte con la parcela numero ciento diez y ocho de la comunidad. Por el Sur con la calle numero cinco de la comunidad.

Por el Este con la parcela numero ciento veinticuatro de la comunidad. Par el Oeste con la parcela numero ciento veintidós de la comunidad. Sobre este solar se ha construido una casa de 2 plantas cada planta mide aproximadamente 38 pies de largo por 24 pies de ancho.

La primera planta esta construida de cementa y bloques y consta de 2 dormitorios, salacocina, comedor, un baño y un balcón. La segunda planta esta construida de madera y consta de 3 dormitorios, salacocina, comedor, un baño y un balcón. Consta inscrita al folio ciento ochenta y seis (186) del tomo sesenta y siete (67) de Vieques Registro de la Propiedad de Fajardo. Finca numero dos mil novecientos cuarenta y tres ( 2943). La parte demandante alega que dicho pagan~ ha sido saldado según mas detalladamente consta en la Demanda radicada que puede examinarse en la Secretaria de este Tribunal. Por tratarse de una obligación hipotecaria y pudiendo usted tener interés en estecaso o quedar afectado por el remedio solicitado, se le emplaza por este edicto que sepublican\ una vez en un periódico de circulación diaria general de Puerto Rico y se lerequiere para que radique en este Tribunal su contestación y notifique con copia de ellaal abogado de la parte demandante la Lcda. Saideth Cristobal Martinez, PO Box9022173, San Juan, PR 00902-2173; Tel. (787) 367-0412, dentro de los treinta(30) días siguientes a la publicación de este Edicto, apercibiéndole que de no hacerloasí dentro del termino indicado, el Tribunal podrá anotar su rebeldía y dictar sentenciaconcediendo el remedio solicitado en la Demanda sin más citarle ni oírle.EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal, en Fajardo, Puerto Rico, hoy día 22 de abril de 2020.

Wanda I Segui, Secretaria.

Olga Moralez Torres, Sec del Tribunal.

25

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The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

The Yankees’ 2 goals: Avoid the Coronavirus, and win the World Series

By JAMES WAGNER

N

early 60 New York Yankees players and their coaches will gather Saturday at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx for full-squad workouts. It will be the first time everyone is together again in one place since March 12, the day Major League Baseball shut down spring training because of the coronavirus outbreak.

After four months of upheaval, contentious negotiations between the players’ union and team owners, and a lot of home workouts, Yankees manager Aaron Boone insisted earlier this week that the club’s original mission remained the same.

“Because circumstances and certainly this season have changed, that goal doesn’t change: We want to be champions,” he said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters.

They were on a short list of favorites to win the title when they first convened in February, after having fallen two wins short of reaching the World Series last fall. They figured they had added the missing piece they needed — top-flight pitcher Gerrit Cole, whom they signed for a record $324 million contract over the winter — to claim their first title since 2009. Now they just have to find a way to do it over a 60-game regular season, instead of the normal 162.

“I do think one of the separators this year is going to be the teams that are able to find that energy, to find that focus, to find that edge on a daily basis in what is going to be unique and challenging circumstances,” Boone said.

Across MLB, Wednesday was report day for summer workouts. A handful of players arrived at Yankee Stadium around noon, all donning masks. Players underwent another round of physicals, but there was a new MLB-prescribed intake screening: temperatures were taken, and coronavirus and antibody tests were administered.

Most MLB organizations have already dealt with cases of the virus among their players and staff, including the Yankees — two of their minor league players tested positive in March and a handful of staff members did so in Tampa, Fla., last month.

General manager Brian Cashman said in a Tuesday conference call that everyone had recovered, and that in most cases the symptoms had been “extremely mild.”

But in the coming days, more cases

The Yankees will hold their second round of spring training at their stadium in the Bronx, rather than in Florida. could emerge as MLB begins testing players and on-field staff every other day, and essential staff multiple times a week, as stipulated by MLB’s 113-page manual of health and safety protocols for the 2020 season.

While praising the breadth of the protocols, Cashman and Boone acknowledged a level of unpredictability in the season.

“If this year has taught you anything, it’s to understand that anything is possible with this,” Boone said, referring to the virus. “All I know is that in my world, my job and my focus is to comply as best I can and comply as best as a team that we can.”

In recent days, Yankees officials have rushed to adapt their workouts, and Yankee Stadium itself, to the new health and safety requirements. The Yankees’ first choice for a second camp was their sprawling spring training facilities in Tampa, but as the virus surged in Florida they decided to return to their home stadium.

It will be unlike any preseason camp they have experienced. To follow social distancing rules, Cashman said players

and staff at Yankee Stadium will spread out between the home, visiting and auxiliary clubhouses. Both the home and visiting bullpens and batting cages will be used.

Pitchers may even use the stadium’s concourses to play catch, and training tables might be set up in open areas for better ventilation.

“We will utilize every aspect” of Yankee Stadium, Cashman said.

As soon as workouts begin, Boone said he expected pitchers, who have been throwing bullpen sessions over the past few months, to face their teammates.

Intrasquad games are expected later in camp.

Cashman said four key injured Yankees — pitcher James Paxton (back surgery), and outfielders Aaron Judge (fractured rib), Aaron Hicks (Tommy John surgery) and Giancarlo Stanton (calf strain) — had been able to continue rehabilitating during the hiatus, and he was optimistic they would all be ready for opening day on July 23.

But Cashman was aware that his team’s status as favorites might have been dented by this season’s untraditional circumstances. Games will be, at least to

start, in front of empty stands. Players and support staff will have to adjust their routines in several ways, at and away from the stadium. On the field, there are many new rules, including a runner on second base to start extra innings. And the Yankees will have just more than a third of the usual runway to separate themselves from the rest of baseball.

“In a shortened season, it heightens the ability for anybody to take a shot at the title,” Cashman said.

Before Saturday’s workout, Boone said, he planned to deliver a message of collective responsibility to the team. Some new regulations may be challenging or feel like a nuisance, he said, but everyone’s health, most importantly, and the viability of the season depended on it.

“I believe one of my biggest jobs will be to make sure that there is a message that guys are constantly enforcing with one another,” Boone said, “and that we’re constantly holding each other accountable.”

Of course, when he makes those comments, Boone said, he will likely do so outside and to three or four smaller groups. Just another adjustment in what will be a season full of them.

The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

27

Reality seeps in: Basketball is starting, and the virus is still here

By MARC STEIN

J

uly is supposed to be a magical month in the NBA. The mere mention of it evokes images of the feast known as free agency that, as we all understand by now, means as much (or more) to some fans as the games themselves.

The calendar flipped Wednesday, but this is 2020, which immediately tells you that the coming month will be unlike any previous July in league history — and presumably no great source of anticipation.

The mood of the moment was perhaps best capsulized by Fred VanVleet, whose Toronto Raptors have already convened in Florida to prepare for the 22-team restart of the NBA season at Walt Disney World at the end of July.

“It sounded good a month or two ago,” VanVleet said on a Monday conference call, referring to the NBA’s plans to reboot the 2019-20 season in a contained environment on the Disney campus.

“Not so much right before we got ready to leave,” he added.

The Raptors came together last week at Florida Gulf Coast University because Canada’s mandatory 14-day quarantine rule for anyone who enters the country made it impossible for the NBA’s reigning champions to begin their Disney World preparations in their own practice gym.

The rest of the 22 teams are scheduled to arrive next week.

Raptors coach Nick Nurse and Masai Ujiri, Toronto’s team president, have repeatedly insisted that their team has been greeted by a safe environment at the hotel in Fort Myers, Fla., where they — and no one else — are staying until they can relocate to the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex near Orlando next week.

But the vibe is far different in Brooklyn, where two prominent Nets players — Spencer Dinwiddie and DeAndre Jordan — revealed late Monday that they had tested positive for the coronavirus.

The disclosures from Dinwiddie and Jordan came one day after a Nets veteran, Wilson Chandler, said he was opting out of the restart for family reasons and over coronavirus concerns. The Nets have thus emerged as the NBA’s first known test case of a reunited team that must deal with the psychological effects, on top of all the health implications, of an outbreak in their camp.

How will teammates, coaches and team staffers react to the news that multiple players have to be quarantined after testing positive? As we’ve been discussing for months now, I’ve long believed that the answer to that question could only be ascertained in real time, when the situation

The Washington Wizards’ Davis Bertans, left, who averaged 15.4 points per game this season, will not play in the restart. actually materialized.

The surprise: The NBA didn’t even make it to the bubble before a team had to face it.

General manager Sean Marks told reporters Wednesday that the team was still committed to participating in the restart.

Yet you can safely presume that the Nets never imagined marking the anniversary of the free-agent commitments they officially received from Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving on June 30, 2019 — maybe the greatest day in franchise history — in such downbeat fashion.

As recently as Friday, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and Michele Roberts, executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, expressed relief on a call with reporters after the league announced that only 16 of the 302 players tested by their teams June 23 had positive results. Just a few days later, given the Nets’ plight and the Denver Nuggets’ decision to close their practice facility after multiple positive coronavirus tests among unnamed members of their planned Florida traveling party, anxiety is on the rebound. Big time.

Positive tests were not a surprise. The two-week stay for teams in their home markets before reporting to Florida, after all, was designed in hopes of isolating as many of those positive cases as possible

before anyone arrived at the Disney complex. Yet it is only now, as the possibility of multiple positive tests for any given team has become a reality, that players and other restart participants can gauge how comfortable they are with the enormity of the challenge.

Roberts insisted last Friday that the NBA and the players’ union have done “the best we can do to mitigate the risk of an infection on our players and our teams and our staffs.”

“If I didn’t feel that, I would be recommending to Chris and to the players to stay home,” Roberts said, mentioning the union president, Oklahoma City Thunder guard Chris Paul. “I feel that, and so I can sleep at night.”

The resolve of an entire league is nonetheless being tested daily. July may typically be a magical time in the NBA, and Disney World is certainly supposed to be a magical place, but as VanVleet so aptly put it during Monday’s conference call: “That’s been 2020 for us.”

T.O. Souryal, a former president of the NBA Physicians Association who spent 22 years as the Dallas Mavericks’ team doctor, offered a sobering reminder in a chat we had Sunday.

“Never forget that we are in the midst of a global pandemic where nearly

125,000 Americans have lost their lives so far,” Souryal said. The death toll has now eclipsed 126,000 in the U.S. “Until we have a functioning vaccine or treatment, there are no good options for a return to normal — sports or otherwise.

“On the surface, the concept of an ‘isolation bubble’ seems to be a good option for the NBA,” Souryal continued.

“Frankly, it’s probably the only option.

But as the numbers of coronavirus cases in Florida rise, so does the risk of infections penetrating that bubble. Then the questions come up: How many positive cases can one team tolerate before being uncompetitive? How many infections can the league tolerate before they are forced to stop play again? Can the league accept just one hospitalization or, God forbid, a death?

“For this population of NBA athletes, the medical risk is very low, but they can infect others who may be much more vulnerable. This is a dangerous virus that can kill. And as long as death is on the table, then the stakes are very high — almost unacceptable, in my opinion.

“Adam Silver and those surrounding him are well aware of the stakes. Based on my experience with NBA administrators, I have confidence that they will do the right thing.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

Let’s race two: Behind the Indy-NASCAR doubleheader

By JERRY GARRET

A

n event few motor sports fans ever thought would occur, longtime rivals from IndyCar racing and NASCAR stock cars competing on the same weekend and at the same facility, finally arrives this weekend at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The Grand Prix at Indianapolis, an IndyCar race that was postponed from its original May date because of the coronavirus pandemic, will go off Saturday on the speedway’s road course. A NASCAR Xfinity Series race will follow on the same track. On Sunday, the Brickyard 400, a jewel of the NASCAR Cup Series, will be raced on Indy’s 2.5-mile oval.

“This concept has been talked about for years,” said Scott Dixon, the Indianapolis 500 winner in 2008 and a five-time IndyCar Series champion. “But it took strange times — really strange times — to make the impossible finally happen.”

NASCAR and IndyCars have not shared the same facility since 1959, when Daytona International Speedway opened with its banked design. In February 1959, less than two weeks before the Daytona 500, Marshall Teague was killed while attempting a closed course speed record in excess of 170 mph in a modified Indianapolis roadster. Two months later, George Amick was killed in an Indy-type car event, also at Daytona.

The deaths convinced Bill France Sr., who had founded NASCAR and built the Daytona International Speedway, that the two types of cars did not belong on the same track.

“The Indianapolis-type cars just aren’t suited for our types of tracks,” France said in a 1977 interview. “I don’t see us ever running an event with them.”

“Never? Not unless hell freezes over?” I asked him.

“That pretty much sums it up,” he replied.

Through the years, the two types of racing seemed to be in existential competition with each other for fans, broadcast contracts, sponsors, race dates and venues. Knockout scheduling, with races at conflicting dates and times, has helped make drivers from one series feel unwelcome or unable to compete in the other.

Yet this once-unthinkable marriage is about to happen after a series of steps, each one presenting a seemingly insurmountable hurdle.

“The biggest obstacle was scheduling,” said Mark Miles, chief executive of the com-

pany that runs the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and IndyCar racing. “NASCAR sets its schedules years in advance, while IndyCar’s schedule usually comes together much later.

There were also other promoters whose input had to be taken into consideration, and, of course, there were sponsor conflicts to resolve. And we had to consider the broadcast contracts.”

Before those considerations could be addressed, said Steve O’Donnell, NASCAR’s executive vice president, his sanctioning body had to change its rules package for its premier Cup series cars, to make them more competitive on the Indianapolis speedway’s flat oval. Since a splashy inaugural race in 1994, the Brickyard 400 had become stale, and its crowds, which were once estimated at 250,000, rivaling those for the Indianapolis 500, had dwindled disconcertingly.

Then, last year, NASCAR tore up its traditional schedule and moved the Brickyard 400 from later in the summer to the Fourth of July weekend. An event at Daytona that usually fell on that weekend was moved to August.

Next, in an attempt to provide more bang for spectators’ bucks, a support race for NASCAR’s Xfinity feeder series was added to the schedule a day earlier, for the first time on Indy’s twisty road course.

When the pandemic forced the speedway to close in the spring, and dates on both the IndyCar Series and the NASCAR Cup Series’ schedules were scrubbed, officials in both organizations decided some bold thinking could reinvigorate interest in racing as a whole. The 2020 schedule was ripped up again, and new races that promoters were willing to run without spectators were added.

In March, Roger Penske, who had purchased the Indianapolis track and the IndyCar series months earlier, persuaded NASCAR’s chief executive, Jim France, and president, Steve Phelps, to add the previously postponed Indy Grand Prix to the NASCAR slate.

“That was something we were very much in favor of, from a broadcast standpoint,” said Sam Flood, executive producer of NBC Sports’ telecasts of IndyCar, NASCAR and International Motor Sports Association (IMSA) sports car racing. “It was something we had been pushing for, for almost three years. It suddenly made sense for this year, especially with Roger Penske coming on board, and pushing for it. That’s when the whole idea hit hyperdrive.”

He added: “I guess that’s one positive coming out of this whole COVID thing.

It made it possible” to consider what once

Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indy 500, will host this weekend’s crossover events. seemed impossible.

NBC, he said, had been looking for ways to “cross-pollinate” its motor sports properties. Drivers racing in IndyCar and NASCAR events on the same day — as Kurt Busch did in 2014, albeit at venues hundreds of miles apart — would help integrate normally disparate sets of fans.

Although no drivers in this weekend’s races will attempt to compete in both types of cars, Flood sees it as an opportunity next year and beyond.

“One of our regular IndyCar announcers, Townsend Bell, however, will be on the broadcast team for the Grand Prix Saturday, after which he will fly to Daytona, to compete in the IMSA sports car race we will be televising Saturday night,” Flood said. “We hope to see more of that kind of participation that draws different kinds of racing closer together.”

After the races at Indianapolis this weekend, Jimmie Johnson, a seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, plans to test Dixon’s IndyCar on the speedway’s road course. Johnson, who is retiring from full-time NASCAR racing after this season, said he hoped to have an opportunity to try some IndyCar races in 2021.

“I don’t see a reason, from a physical standpoint, where a driver couldn’t compete in an IndyCar race and a NASCAR Cup race on the same weekend, or even the same day,”

Busch said. “Physically, mentally, yeah, no problem, but the difference-maker is the experience. It’s very difficult to just jump into an IndyCar from a stock car, or vice versa, without having the experience of driving both types of cars regularly.”

He added, “But I would like to see more opportunities like that develop.”

That’s a sentiment with which Dixon agreed. “While I like to focus on what I know I’m good at,” he said, “this does open drivers’ minds to new possibilities. Could I do it? Absolutely. Would I do it? We’ll see.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 2020

Sudoku

29

How to Play:

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

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

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

The San Juan Daily Star

July 3-5, 20200

(Mar 21-April 20)

A new involvement fills you with enthusiastic happiness.

It’s rare for you to discover something that engages your boundless energy. When you do, it’s a sign you should spend as much time on it as possible. That’s the case with your romantic partner. Focussing on developing a new creative project will put a spring in your step and a sparkle in your eyes. Don’t show your work to anyone until it’s finished. Listening to your instinct without interruption will be one of the most liberating experiences you’ll ever enjoy.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Money is coming in at a pleasing pace. It feels good to treat yourself to creature comforts. Take this opportunity to splash out on clothes, accessories and toiletries. You’ll have fun buying things online that satisfy your needs and reflect your tastes. If you’re looking for a job, you should look for work in a creative field. Contrary to popular belief, you can make a very good living as an artist. Selling handcrafted items online can both pay the bills and satisfy your caprices.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Scorpio

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

A personal breakthrough could cause you to undergo a dramatic transformation. At long last, you’re ready to break a bad habit. Letting go of a behaviour, relationship or addiction may be easier than expected. That’s because your willpower is incredibly strong. Getting involved with a humanitarian organisation will change your outlook.

Instead of lamenting your shortcomings, you’ll count your blessings. Happiness is relative. When you look at the big picture, it’s impossible to ignore how lucky you really are.

A strict health regime is working out quite well for you.

It feels good to feel your natural vitality flooding back.

Now you have more energy, you’ll be able to produce some impressive creative work. Devote time each day to a project that engages your interest. Expressing your creativity will boost your confidence. In the past, you were intimidated by other talented people in your field. Now you realise you’re just as gifted. Prepare for your productivity to soar.

If you’re in a relationship, your partner will have difficulty keeping their hands off you. Let them lavish you with affection. Are you single? Post an intriguing dating profile on social media. You’ll get several humorous enquiries that merit responses. A flirtatious online courtship will be more exciting than expected. An intelligent person will recommend a great documentary. Watch this movie as soon as possible.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Domestic pursuits are surprisingly satisfying. Take this opportunity to make an elaborate meal, redecorate a room or plan a garden. Such activities are ideal creative outlets.

If you’ve always wanted to learn how to refinish furniture or make curtains, now is the time. Learn as much as you can about an artist whose work fills you with excitement.

You’ll be gratified to learn you have many things in common. Let this discovery inspire you to write music or stories of your own.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

A deep conversation with someone you respect will change your outlook. Adopting a more forgiving attitude towards others will make you more joyous and appreciative. Instead of continually taking people to task, you’ll laugh off their mistakes and social gaffes. Your best friend or romantic partner is urging you to confront someone who hurt your feelings. It would be wise to take their advice. Use your communication skills to explain how their behaviour has affected your outlook about work, home and family.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Working in the shadows suits you perfectly. Normally, you enjoy mixing and mingling with large groups, but now, you’ve developed a fresh appreciation for solitude. Being on your own makes your creative juices flow freely. Listen to your inner voice; it will inspire you. Tracking down information about your family will be a labour of love. You’ll enjoy accessing online archives for documents. Prepare for some surprises about your background; your outlook will undergo a big change because of these revelations.

Working in the shadows suits you perfectly. Normally, you enjoy mixing and mingling with large groups, but now, you’ve developed a fresh appreciation for solitude. Being on your own makes your creative juices flow freely. Listen to your inner voice; it will inspire you. Tracking down information about your family will be a labour of love. You’ll enjoy accessing online archives for documents. Prepare for some surprises about your background; your outlook will undergo a big change because of these revelations.

Pursuing a childhood dream gives life a sense of shape and purpose. Although the odds may be against you, that won’t be a problem. Someone with your ambition and drive can clear obstacles without difficulty. Get ready to surpass everyone’s expectations of you. Learn as much as you can about how to operate some hi-tech equipment. If this means pestering an expert, go ahead. At first, they’ll try waving you away. Eventually, they’ll agree to give you a crash course down the line.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Being in the spotlight will be enjoyable. People are captivated by your intensity. Whether you’re singing a song online or making a professional presentation, you’ll be happy with the results. After rendering a perfect performance, give yourself a reward. Order some hi-tech equipment that fills you with excitement. Once this machinery arrives, you might be able to use it to earn money from home. This is one of those times when you must spend money to make it.

Treat all expenditures as investments.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Venturing into unfamiliar territory will be stimulating. This is a great time to take an online course. You’ll benefit from the teacher’s uncompromising standards. Working harder than ever before will pay off; you’re about to realise your potential. Don’t be afraid to be more aggressive than usual.

It’s fine to be assertive when something is important is on the line. If you don’t promote your interests, nobody else will. Be vocal and insistent about your demands. People will find it impossible to refuse you.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

July 3-5, 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

July 3-5, 2020

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