Monday Jul 6, 2020

Monday, July 6, 2020

San Juan The

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Star

SOS! A Summer Without Superheroes P20

Voter Registration Numbers Down Governor Scolds Unmasked People at Beaches

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UTIER to Citizens: Sign Online Petition Against 15-Year PREPA-Luma Deal

SEC President: Compared to 2016, Fewer People Are Registering to Vote in Island Primaries

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NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

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July 6, 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.

Fewer citizens have registered to vote this election cycle

Today’s

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

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INDEX Local 3 Mainland 7 Business 11 International 13 Viewpoint 17 Noticias en Español 19 Entertainment 20

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ess than a month before primary elections, fewer people have registered to vote compared to the 2016 election year, State Elections Commission (SEC) Chairman Juan Ernesto Dávila Rivera told The Star on Sunday.

As islanders are getting close to exercising their right to vote on Aug. 9, Dávila Rivera said that, at the moment, 86,939 citizens of Puerto Rico have added their names to the electoral registry for the first time, while 58,090 reactivated their registrations after not participating in the past two general elections. He added that these numbers are low compared with the 2016 elections, when the agency received 151,923 new registrations and 119,811 reactivations.

“At the moment [Sunday], these are the numbers of people that will be able to participate in the primary elections,” Dávila Rivera said.

Asked by The Star how the agency has handled the voter registration procedure under the COVID-19 threat, the SEC chairman said that “come hell or high water” the agency has opened most of its doors and helped everyone onsite.

“This has really been an atypical process. Let’s say that this has not been the usual procedure that we have had,” Dávila Rivera said. “First, the Permanent Registration Boards [JIPs by their Spanish acronym] started opening while abiding by COVID-19 safety standards. I must say that we are the first government agency to open its offices in almost every municipality, including VIeques and Culebra, to meet registrants’ needs on-site. With this caveat, we have catered to all people who have come to our offices.”

The SEC chairman added that although the registration date for the primaries has closed, the boards are still working to help citizens register for the general election. When The Star asked why the boards were still handling new registrations and renewals past June 30, he noted that every registration or renewal after that cut-off date will be able to participate in the general elections. The final date to register will be Sept. 14.

“It’s customary for the JIP to work on Saturdays; it’s because, at this stage, they work on Saturdays to handle all registrations,” Dávila Rivera said. “Also, as we are getting closer to the elections, we cannot lose a sense of perspective as our agency has been closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have work to catch up.”

Aponte: ‘We see hope for our party’ In spite of what the SEC chairman said, Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) Electoral Commissioner Roberto Iván Aponte told The Star that the recent registrant and reactivation numbers are not the lowest since 2016, but they

are the lowest since 2012 and 2008 elections, respectively.

According to a document from the SEC, in 2016, there were 178,032 new voters registered and 129,054 voter registry accounts reactivated; in 2012, there were 233,497 new registrations and 263,829 renewals; meanwhile, in 2008, there were 243,575 new voters and 264,121 renewals.

“Although these are some of the lowest numbers we have seen at the agency, we must take into consideration that a lot has changed in Puerto Rico,” Aponte said. “There have been a lot of emigration cases after Hurricane Maria, which leaves the island with fewer voters, a birth rate decrease, fear due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a lack of action from the agency to register new voters at universities and schools. These are some factors that we must consider as these numbers are not as high as in previous election years.”

However, although there have been only 86,939 new registrations, Aponte noticed that around 12,000 of those are young voters who registered in June.

“I consider this interesting as our party started conducting social media campaigns last month and, to see this happen, we see hope for our party,” he said.

Acknowledging the low registry figures, meanwhile, the PIP electoral commissioner called on readers to be aware that there is still a chance to register to vote in the general elections until Sept. 14.

Aponte also emphasized that absentee voter requests are available by logging in to http://ceepur.org/, downloading the absentee vote application, printing and filling out the document and mailing it postmarked on or prior to Sept. 19.

Rivera Schatz: ‘What I want is for them to be NPP’ New Progressive Party (NPP) President Thomas Rivera Schatz, meanwhile, feels confident as 58,000 voters reactivated to participate in the party’s primary elections. Likewise, during a press conference held after their directorate meeting, when a member of the press asked if there was data available on the age groups of the new voters, Rivera Schatz replied that he just wants every voter to support the NPP. “What I want is for them [voters] to be [supporters of the] NPP,” he said. “But the numbers, when we compare them with other years, it is a bit complicated because of the fiscal crisis, because the JIPs were closed; we have COVID-19, we got earthquakes and every other element that has been around -- in some way, they stop the electoral process.”

Regarding recent events, the Senate president said it is not fair to say if the numbers are better or worse. Nonetheless, he said the party is pleased with the recent data and that the NPP will take precautions in order to make voters feel safe during the elections.

“We are pleased with the numbers we have seen and we are hopeful that our primary [election] has a larger participation number than the Popular Democratic Party,” he said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

UTIER urges citizens to sign online petition rejecting PREPA-LUMA deal

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union (UTIER by its Spanish acronym) is urging the public to sign an online petition rejecting the 15-year contract between the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) and its private operator LUMA Energy LLC to manage the utility’s transmission and distribution (T&D) system.

As of Sunday, the online petition with change.org had almost 3,000 signatures of the 5,000 needed.

“We hereby declare an utmost rejection of the contract and request its cancellation,” the petition reads. “The contract, in addition to opening the door to a private monopoly, makes the country’s electricity service more expensive, does not respect or value PREPA workers and employees and perpetuates the centralized and polluting model that is vulnerable to atmospheric and seismic events.”

On June 22, PREPA entered into a 15year agreement in which LUMA Energy will manage its 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 in the first year and increases to $105 million for years four through 15, but the company will be paid additional money as incentives to achieve certain milestones that increase payments to $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. LUMA will also be in charge of certain administrative aspects such as customer service.

“LUMA would not only manage the transmission and distribution system, it would also have the power to decide on power generation, fees, and system planning,” the petition states. “This contract, which lacks cost-benefit studies, is bad business for the country since it allows LUMA to charge up to $125 million annually without having to invest even $1 in the electricity system.”

LUMA Energy was tasked with the job of administering and adjudicating $18 billion in federal reconstruction funds, in which its affiliates will play a significant role. The contract also authorizes LUMA Energy to

seek rate adjustments and budget changes.

“Any project or contract that perpetuates a centralized system, which requires the burning of fossil fuels to survive, is a project or contract that is intended to delay the path to distributed renewable energy and to fulfill the renewable energy objectives outlined in Law 17-2019, the Energy Public Policy,” the union said in its petition. “The rate increase contemplated in the contract becomes an unsustainable burden for the Puerto Rican family and a deterrent to the country’s eco-

nomic recovery.”

UTIER said the contract was awarded behind closed doors, excluding the participation of PREPA union groups and citizens, and that it only benefits companies whose sole purpose is to obtain federal funds to satisfy their own interests.

The contract will also allow LUMA Energy to decide which PREPA workers to hire, which goes against current law that ensures jobs of public workers are protected as part of a public-private partnership.

“Contrary to LUMA’s propaganda, this transaction does not guarantee the rights of PREPA workers or employees, and on the contrary, leaves them exposed to losing their jobs and acquired benefits,” the union said.

“It is these workers and employees who, without the support of PREPA’s managers, have raised the system back up after hurricanes and earthquakes.”

The union says it wants a transformation of the electrical system to a public model that integrates workers, that drives efficiency, and that promotes renewable energy on rooftops and the active integration of citizens as generators of energy and participants.

Senate hopeful: NPP hiding electricity bill increase

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

F

ormer San Juan District Sen. Ramón Luis Nieves charged Sunday that “the New Progressive Party (NPP) government has hidden from the people that they plan to impose on us several exorbitant increases in electricity beginning in 2021, after the November elections.”

Nieves, a former chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, said in a press release that “as UTIER [the main Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority union] has rightly denounced, the privatization contract for the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) indicates that, after the elections, LUMA will make a request to the Energy Bureau that the electricity be increased to cover the $100 million annually that they will charge to operate PREPA.” Meanwhile, in the dark of the night, Nieves said, the Financial Oversight and Management Board approved PREPA’s Fiscal Plan submitted by the NPP government. On page 41 of the plan, the government reveals that electricity rates will rise to 27 and 30 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) between 2021 and 2025, he said.

“Today, for example, the price per kilowatt-hour that we are paying is 17 cents and each penny of increase in the price per kilowatt-hour is equivalent to $170 million that comes out of our pockets,” said Nieves, who is seeking to become a Popular Democratic Party candidate for Senate-at-large. “A big hit to our economy of over $1.7 billion. These increases in electricity rates will prevent our economy from recovering, and represent a terrible burden

for our homes, as well as for industries and our small and midsize businesses.”

“I am also concerned that the signing of the contract with LUMA is being used as an element of pressure to force the approval of the disastrous agreement with PREPA’s bondholders,” Nieves added. “That agreement will condemn us to pay dearly for decades -- to pay old debt -- which will destroy our economy forever.”

Nieves also criticized LUMA’s contract to operate PREPA’s transmission and distribution system because, he said, it suffers from “serious defects that threaten the people of Puerto Rico.” Among those defects, the Senate hopeful noted: • Contrary to the provisions of Law 120-2018, the contract puts at risk the jobs and benefits of PREPA employees • The transaction does not contribute a single penny to the PREPA employee retirement plan, which has a multi-million dollar deficit (contrary to Law 120-2018) • The contract replaces the public monopoly with a private monopoly • The contract does not indicated what the impact will beon electricity rates, including LUMA’s charges for operating PREPA • It is anticipated that LUMA will request an increase in the electricity rate from the Energy Bureau that will apply in 2021, after the elections • LUMA will NOT contribute a single penny to rebuild the electrical system, only managing allocations of federal money ($2 billion so far) • The contract authorizes LUMA to subcontract to other companies to carry out its work

• Since PREPA will not disappear, it is unclear whether it will continue to hire consultants and lobbyists at multi-million dollar rates, as in the present • The contract does not contain prohibitions for LUMA, its executives and employees, on making donations to Puerto Rico politicians.

“Contrary to the total absence of oversight of PREPA by the Senate chaired by Thomas Rivera Schatz until December, I am prepared to inspect -- as senator at-large -- PREPA and LUMA, and thus defend the people of Puerto Rico, and our economic development,” Nieves said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

5

Governor reacts to photos, videos of maskless beachgoers at close quarters

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

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ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced called on citizens Sunday to be responsible and wear a face mask at all times to stop the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 from spreading, as infection cases and hospitalizations on the island are on the rise.

During a press conference held after a meeting of the New Progressive Party directorate, a member of the press asked about what procedures her team will consider as confirmed COVID-19 cases are increasing and Vázquez is in the midst of a primary campaign to determine the party’s candidate for governor. She replied that her campaign events are being planned in such a way as to avoid the spread of the virus but, sometimes, gatherings of people are uncontrollable.

“I have always said it: face masks are compulsory. I think that we have proven it not only in Puerto Rico, but on a national level,” the governor said.

“The activities that we have held have been from vehicles so we don’t give COVID-19 a chance to spread and infect citizens. Sometimes, it is a bit difficult because people want contact; however,

beyond that, the use of hand sanitizer and face masks is compulsory.”

Meanwhile, for the sake of making election officers and voters feel safe during elections, Vázquez told the press that the State Elections Commission will release an announcement urging islanders to wear a face mask during election day.

Meanwhile, regarding concerns as COVID-19 cases are on the rise, the governor said she always keeps up to date with the statistics to make sure the local healthcare system is not compromised.

Likewise, she stated that hospitalizations and intensive care patients due to the virus are at 1 percent, while patients on ventilators are at 0.4 percent.

The said governor said the increase is part of the reopening of various economic activities, as such an effect was expected.

“I have said it from the beginning: every individual is responsible. We have already controlled it, we shut down when we had to, we protected the lives and health of every Puerto Rican,” she said. “I saw a video this [Sunday] morning from El Poblado de Boquerón [a beachside restaurant in Cabo Rojo], where people were all around and I saw only one person using a face mask. You know what? This is something that each

of us must be responsible for. We can go out, we can spend time with loved ones, but you must wear a face mask.”

The island Health Department reported 1,846 confirmed cases and 6,070 possible cases of COVID-19 as

of press time Sunday. In addition, 118 people have been hospitalized due to the virus, an increase of 18 from Saturday, with nine patients in intensive care, one more than Saturday, and five patients on ventilators.

Lawmakers seek to ban foam coolers from beaches

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

L

awmakers asked Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced over the weekend to include in the extraordinary session a measure to prohibit foam coolers on the island’s beaches.

Carolina District Rep. Ángel Matos asked the governor to include in the upcoming special session House Bill (HB) 438, whose purpose is to prohibit foam coolers on the beaches and all other bodies of water in Puerto Rico.

“Once again in the Isla Verde area and all of Puerto Rico we wake up with large amounts of garbage, including the foam coolers that do so much damage to the environment,” Matos said. “Even the message of leaving the

beaches clean … needs tools and teeth so that the very few who think that beaches are landfills desist from the practice [of littering].”

HB 438 proposes to prohibit the use of polystyrene coolers, better known as “foam” portable coolers, on the beaches of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and for other purposes.

“I hope that the measure will be included in the extraordinary session to be convened in the coming days and we will put an end to foam coolers on our beaches and coasts,” Matos said.

Over the July 4 holiday weekend, many revelers celebrated on the local beaches, leaving behind a large amount of trash in places like Ocean Park in San Juan and Piñones in Carolina and Loíza.

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Monday, July 6, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Bill for conservation of coral reefs in line for governor’s signature

By THE STAR STAFF

S

enate Bill 1343, an amendment to the Law for the Protection, Conservation, and Management of Coral Reefs in Puerto Rico that would allow for the use of artificial coral reefs to mitigate the effects of rising sea levels on the marine-coastal zone, was one of the bills that completed the legislative process

by June 30 and was to be sent to La Fortaleza for the governor’s signature.

Penned by New Progressive Party Sen. Carlos J. Rodríguez Mateo, the bill states that one of the greatest environmental challenges in Puerto Rico is the protection of the coasts due to increasing erosion.

The 2014 National Climate Assessment report maintains that the coast in the municipality of Rincón is eroding at a rate of 3.3 feet per year, the bill notes.

Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis is blocking the processes of mitigation, adaptation and resilience to climate change, the bill adds. The measure proposes the inclusion of alternatives to marine-coastal ecosystems while considering their role in mitigating the adverse effects of climate change.

According to the measure, there are some 1,125 beaches, 140 cays, islets and islands, and thousands of wetlands that surround the coasts of Puerto Rico and provide ecological infrastructure to protect the island.

The island Department of Natural and Environmental Resources (DRNA by its Spanish initials) will be responsible for regulating the entire process related to artificial coral reefs, in compliance with the pertinent requirements of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service and with any requirements established by federal and state agencies concerned.

The DRNA should first consider coral farming and natural rehabilitation of coastal coral reefs as a long-term sustainable strategy for the rehabilitation of beaches and when there are significant problems of coastal erosion.

The Senate bill defines an artificial reef as a humanmade underwater submerged structure, typically built to promote marine life in areas with a generally bottomless spatial relief feature to control erosion, block ship passage or net dragging, or rebuild impacted habitats.

The artificial reefs can be constructed of different materials such as concrete, rock, wood or metal.

La Mina Recreation Area in El Yunque to reopen by reservation

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he U.S. Forest Service will reopen the El Yunque recreation corridor along highway PR-191, also called La Mina Recreation Area, on Wednesday.

Capacity is limited, so visitors will need to use an online reservation system to reserve a timed-entry ticket in advance of a visit, the Forest Service said in a press release.

Reservations through Recreation.gov or the Recreation. gov mobile app will be available starting today at 10 a.m.

A risk analysis was conducted to determine the visitor capacity in the corridor, prioritizing public and employee health and safety.

Based on the capacity of working restroom facilities, access in the developed recreation area will be limited to 130 vehicles per day, regulated by the timed-ticket entry system.

The reservation system will minimize contact between Forest staff and visitors, and limit crowding in the main recreation area.

The entry tickets are free, but Recreation.gov charges a $2 processing fee. Visitors must display a printed or digital ticket to enter. The tickets are issued per vehicle and the person named on the ticket must be present at the time of entry.

Reservations can be made up to 30 days in advance.

A limited number of reservations will be held for release 24 hours prior to entry to accommodate some last-minute reservations.

Reservations can be made for morning or afternoon entry tickets and are only for the PR-191 recreation corridor and are not required for visiting other areas of the Forest.

Also, reservations are only for public use and do not apply to authorized commercial operations.

Visitors are asked to follow guidelines for wearing masks, social distancing, reducing crowding, trash man-

agement and parking when visiting the Forest.

More information on the reservation system and guidelines for safe outdoor recreation can be found at the Forest website www.fs.usda.gov/elyunque, Facebook@ElYunqueNF, Recreation.gov or the Recreation.gov mobile app.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

7

239 Experts with 1 big claim: The Coronavirus is airborne

By APOORVA MANDAVILLI

T

he coronavirus is finding new victims worldwide, in bars and restaurants, offices, markets and casinos, giving rise to frightening clusters of infection that increasingly confirm what many scientists have been saying for months: The virus lingers in the air indoors, infecting those nearby.

If airborne transmission is a significant factor in the pandemic, especially in crowded spaces with poor ventilation, the consequences for containment will be significant. Masks may be needed indoors, even in socially distant settings. Health care workers may need N95 masks that filter out even the smallest respiratory droplets as they care for coronavirus patients.

Ventilation systems in schools, nursing homes, residences and businesses may need to minimize recirculating air and add powerful new filters. Ultraviolet lights may be needed to kill viral particles floating in tiny droplets indoors.

The World Health Organization has long held that the coronavirus is spread primarily by large respiratory droplets that, once expelled by infected people in coughs and sneezes, fall quickly to the floor.

But in an open letter to the WHO, 239 scientists in 32 countries have outlined the evidence showing that smaller particles can infect people and are calling for the agency to revise its recommendations.

The researchers plan to publish their letter in a scientific journal.

Even in its latest update on the coronavirus, released June 29, the WHO said airborne transmission of the virus is possible only after medical procedures that produce aerosols, or droplets smaller than 5 microns. (A micron is equal to 1 millionth of a meter.)

Proper ventilation and N95 masks are of concern only in those circumstances, according to the WHO. Instead, its infection control guidance, before and during this pandemic, has heavily promoted the importance of handwashing as a primary prevention strategy, even though there is limited evidence for transmission of the virus from surfaces. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now says surfaces are likely to play only a minor role.)

Dr. Benedetta Allegranzi, the WHO’s technical lead on infection control, said the evidence for the virus spreading by air was unconvincing.

“Especially in the last couple of months, we have been stating several times that we consider airborne transmission as possible but certainly not supported by solid or even clear evidence,” she said.

“There is a strong debate on this.”

But interviews with nearly 20 scientists — including a dozen WHO consultants and several members of the committee that crafted the guidance — and internal emails paint a picture of an organization that, despite good intentions, is out of step with science.

Whether carried aloft by large droplets that zoom through the air after a sneeze, or by much smaller exhaled droplets that may glide the length of a room, these experts said, the coronavirus is borne through air and can infect people when inhaled.

Most of these experts sympathized with the WHO’s growing portfolio and shrinking budget, and noted the tricky political relationships it has to manage, especially with the United States and China. They praised WHO staff for holding daily briefings and tirelessly answering questions about the pandemic.

But the infection prevention and control committee in particular, experts said, is bound by a rigid and overly medicalized view of scientific evidence, is slow and risk-averse in updating its

guidance and allows a few conservative voices to shout down dissent.

“They’ll die defending their view,” said one long-standing WHO consultant, who did not wish to be identified because of her continuing work for the organization. Even its staunchest supporters said the committee should diversify its expertise and relax its criteria for proof, especially in a fast-moving outbreak.

“I do get frustrated about the issues of airflow and sizing of particles, absolutely,” said Mary-Louise McLaws, a committee member and epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

“If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do,” she said. “I think it’s a good idea, a very good idea, but it will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”

In early April, a group of 36 experts on air quality and aerosols urged the WHO to consider the growing evidence on airborne transmission of the coronavirus. The agency responded promptly, calling Lidia Morawska, the group’s leader and a longtime WHO consultant, to arrange a meeting.

But the discussion was dominated by a few experts who were staunch supporters of handwashing and felt it must be emphasized over aerosols, according to some participants, and the committee’s advice remained unchanged.

Morawska and others pointed to several incidents that indicate airborne transmission of the virus, particularly in poorly ventilated and crowded indoor spaces. They said the WHO was making an artificial distinction between tiny aerosols and larger droplets, even though infected people produce both.

“We’ve known since 1946 that coughing and talking generate aerosols,” said Linsey Marr, an expert in airborne transmission of viruses at Virginia Tech.

Scientists have not been able to grow the coronavirus from aerosols in the lab. But that doesn’t mean aerosols are not infective, Marr said: Most of the samples in those experiments have come from hospital rooms with good air flow that would dilute viral levels.

In most buildings, she said, “the air-exchange rate is usually much lower, allowing virus to accumulate in the air and pose a greater risk.”

The WHO also is relying on a dated definition of airborne transmission, Marr said. The agency believes an airborne pathogen, like the measles virus, has to be highly infectious and to travel long distances.

People generally “think and talk about airborne transmission profoundly stupidly,” said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“We have this notion that airborne transmission means droplets hanging in the air capable of infecting you many hours later, drifting down streets, through letter boxes and finding their way into homes everywhere,” Hanage said.

Experts all agree that the coronavirus does not behave that way.

Marr and others said the coronavirus seemed to be most infectious when people were in prolonged contact at close range, especially indoors, and even more so in superspreader events — exactly what scientists would expect from aerosol transmission.

Precautionary principle Many experts said the WHO should embrace what some called a “precautionary principle” and others called “needs and values” — the idea that even without definitive evidence, the agency should assume the worst of the virus, apply common sense and

Patrons at the Ocean Casino in Atlantic City, N.J., on July 3.

Some scientists are warning that airborne transmission of the coronavirus in indoor settings has been underappreciated. recommend the best protection possible.

“There is no incontrovertible proof that SARS-CoV-2 travels or is transmitted significantly by aerosols, but there is absolutely no evidence that it’s not,” said Dr. Trish Greenhalgh, a primary care doctor at the University of Oxford in Britain.

“So at the moment we have to make a decision in the face of uncertainty, and my goodness, it’s going to be a disastrous decision if we get it wrong,” she said. “So why not just mask up for a few weeks, just in case?”

After all, the WHO seems willing to accept without much evidence the idea that the virus may be transmitted from surfaces, she and other researchers noted, even as other health agencies have stepped back from emphasizing this route.

“I agree that fomite transmission is not directly demonstrated for this virus,” Allegranzi, the WHO’s technical lead on infection control, said, referring to objects that may be infectious. “But it is well known that other coronaviruses and respiratory viruses are transmitted, and demonstrated to be transmitted, by contact with fomite.”

The agency also must consider the needs of all its member nations, including those with limited resources, and make sure its recommendations are tempered by “availability, feasibility, compliance, resource implications,” she said.

Aerosols may play some limited role in spreading the virus, said Dr. Paul Hunter, a member of the infection prevention committee and professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia in Britain.

But if the WHO were to push for rigorous control measures in the absence of proof, hospitals in low- and middle-income countries may be forced to divert scarce resources from other crucial programs.

“That’s the balance that an organization like the WHO has to achieve,” he said. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to say, ‘We’ve got to follow the precautionary principle’ and ignore the opportunity costs of that.”

In interviews, other scientists criticized this view as paternalistic. “‘We’re not going to say what we really think, because we think you can’t deal with it?’ I don’t think that’s right,” said Don Milton, an aerosol expert at the University of Maryland.

Even cloth masks, if worn by everyone, can significantly reduce transmission, and the WHO should say so clearly, he added.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

As Coronavirus slams Houston hospitals, it’s like New York ‘all over again’

KeAra Maddox, a patient care assistant, prepares to enter the room of a COVID-19 patient at Houston Methodist Hospital.

By SHERI FINK

O

ver the past week, Dr. Aric Bakshy, an emergency physician at Houston Methodist, had to decide which coronavirus patients he should admit to the increasingly busy hospital and which he could safely send home.

To discuss questions like these, he has turned to doctors at hospitals where he trained in New York City that were overwhelmed by the coronavirus this spring. Now their situations are reversed.

Thumbing through a dog-eared notebook during a recent shift, Bakshy counted about a dozen people he had treated for coronavirus symptoms. His colleagues in Houston had attended to many more. Meanwhile, friends at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens told him that their emergency department was seeing only one or two virus patients a day.

“The surge is here,” Bakshy said.

As Houston’s hospitals face the worst outbreak of the virus in Texas, now one of the nation’s hot zones, Bakshy and others are experiencing some of the same challenges that their New York counterparts did just a few months ago and are trying to adapt some lessons from that crisis.

Like New York City in March, the Houston hospitals are experiencing a steep rise in caseloads that is filling their beds, stretching their staffing, creating a backlog in testing and limiting the availability of other medical

services. Attempts to buy more supplies — including certain protective gear, vital-sign monitors and testing components — are frustrated by weeks of delays, according to hospital leaders.

Methodist is swiftly expanding capacity and hiring more staff, including local nurses who had left their jobs to work in New York when the city’s hospitals were pummeled. “A bed’s a bed until you have a staff,” said Avery Taylor, the nurse manager of a coronavirus unit created just outside Houston in March.

But with the virus raging across the region, medical workers are falling ill. Bakshy was one of the first at Methodist to have COVID-19, getting it in early March. As of this past week, the number of nurses being hired to help open new units would only replace those out sick.

Methodist, a top-ranked system of eight hospitals, had nearly 400 coronavirus inpatients last Sunday. Nearly a week later — even as physicians tried to be conservative in admitting patients and discharged others as soon as they safely could — the figure was 575. The flagship hospital added 130 inpatient beds in recent days and rapidly filled them.

Now, administrators estimate that the number of COVID-19 patients across the system could reach 800 or 900 in coming weeks, and are planning to accommodate up to 1,000.

Other Houston hospitals are seeing similar streams of patients. Inundated public hospitals are sending some patients to private

institutions like Methodist while reportedly transferring others to Galveston, 50 miles away.

“What’s been disheartening over the past week or two has been that it feels like we’re back at square one,” Dr. Mir M. Alikhan, a pulmonary and critical care specialist, said to his medical team before rounds. “It’s really a terrible kind of sinking feeling. But we’re not truly back at square one, right? Because we have the last three months of expertise that we’ve developed.”

Houston’s hospitals have some advantages compared with New York’s in the spring. Doctors know more now about how to manage the sickest patients and are more often able to avoid breathing tubes, ventilators and critical care. But one treatment shown to shorten hospital stays, the antiviral drug remdesivir, is being allocated by the state, and hospitals here have repeatedly run out of it.

Methodist’s leaders, who were planning for a surge and had been dealing with a stream of coronavirus patients since March, pointed to the most important difference between Houston now and New York then: the patient mix. The majority of new patients in Houston are younger and healthier and are not as severely ill as many were in New York City, where officials report that over 22,000 are likely to have died from the disease.

But so far, the death toll has not climbed much in Texas and other parts of the South and West seeing a surge.

“We are having to pioneer the way of trying to understand a different curve with some very good characteristics versus the

Houston Methodist Hospital staff speak with a family member of a COVID-19 patient to get consent to perform a procedure, in Houston.

last curve,” said Dr. Marc Boom, Methodist’s president and chief executive.

But he cautioned, “What I’m watching really closely is whether we see a shift back in age — because if the young really get this way out there and then start infecting all of the older, then we may look more like the last wave.”

Dr. Sylvie de Souza, head of the emergency department at Brooklyn Hospital Center, which on Friday reported no new coronavirus admissions and no current inpatient cases, said that she was receiving distressing text messages from doctors elsewhere in the country asking for advice. “It’s disappointing,” she said. “It sort of brings me back to the end of March, and it’s like being there all over again.”

Meeting the Demand Many hospitals in New York during the earlier crisis essentially became all-COVID units and endured billions of dollars in losses.

But Methodist and some other private Houston institutions are trying to operate differently now after taking a financial beating from shutting down elective surgeries and procedures this spring.

With safety protocols and expansion plans in place, they are trying to maintain as many services as possible for as long as possible while contending with the flood of coronavirus cases. “No one’s ever done that before,” Boom said. “We were seeing all the harm from patients delaying care.”

Doctors and nurses have combed through lists of surgical patients, choosing whom to delay. The easiest surgeries to maintain are those that do not require a hospital stay, like treatment for cataracts. Some surgeons who used to keep patients overnight after knee and hip replacements are now allowing them to leave the same day.

The most agonizing decisions concern the hospital’s robust transplant program, in part because its recipients often require a stay in intensive care. Dr. A. Osama Gaber, the program’s director, spoke with a dialysis patient whose kidney transplant had been postponed from March. “She was in tears,” he said. “She almost wanted me to swear to her we’re not going to put her off again.” For now the surgeons plan to continue cautiously.

A key strategy to maintain services is increasing what hospital officials call throughput — discharging patients as quickly as is safely possible. Yet it is not always clear who is ready to leave. Alexander Nelson-Fryar, a

The San Juan Daily Star began laboring to breathe and an ambulance sped him back to Methodist. By the end of the week, he was in intensive care receiving a high dose of pressurized oxygen.

As cases began rising in New York, some overwhelmed emergency departments sent home coronavirus patients only to see them return gravely ill or die. “We realized there was no way of predicting which direction a patient would go,”said de Souza, the emergency department director in Brooklyn. As a result, she said, she came to believe that any patient aside from those with the mildest symptoms should be admitted to the hospital or otherwise monitored.

But doctors in Houston are tightening criteria for admission. Bakshy, the Methodist emergency room doctor, who trained at Bellevue and Mount Sinai in New York, said that he was conferring with his former colleagues.

“We all have questions about who truly needs to be hospitalized versus not,” he said. “If we had unlimited resources, of course we’d bring people in just to make sure they’re OK.” Better Treatments One morning this past week, Molly Tipps, a registered nurse, brought some medications to an older patient at the Methodist ward outside Houston.“I have the dexamethasone for your lungs,”she told the patient, Dee Morton. Preliminary results of a large study, released last month but not yet peer-reviewed, showed that the drug, a common steroid, saved lives among those who were critically ill with COVID-19 or required oxygen.

Morton, 79, said she was confident she would recover. “I’m going to make it to 80,” she said. A much lower proportion of patients have been dying from the virus locally and nationally than they were several months ago.

The ward where Morton is being treated is inside a long-term acute-care facility and is known as the Highly Infectious Disease Unit. Created to treat Ebola several years ago, it now serves as a safety valve for the Methodist system. It takes in coronavirus patients who are improving but for various reasons — from lacking housing to living in a nursing home that will not accommodate them — cannot go home. In Morton’s case, she was too weak, and after transferring to the unit, some signs of infection, including a fever, rebounded.

At Methodist’s flagship hospital in central Houston, Rosa V. Hernandez, 72, a patient in the intensive care unit, has pneumonia so severe that if she had fallen sick several months ago, she would probably have been put on a ventilator and made unconscious.

But doctors, based on the experiences of physicians in NewYork and elsewhere, are avoiding ventilators when possible and are maintaining Hernandez on a high flow of oxygen through a nasal tube. She is on the maximum setting, but can talk to the clinical team and exchange text messages with her daughter, who is also a Methodist inpatient with the coronavirus.

Monday, July 6, 2020

Dr. Aric Bakshy checks on a patient in the emergency department at Houston Methodist Hospital.

“I took it seriously,” Hernandez said of the virus. But she joined a small party of eight people for her granddaughter’s birthday, a decision she now described with regret. “Just a birthday cake.

What’s a birthday cake without health?”

She is getting remdesivir, an antiviral that was tested in clinical trials in NewYork and Houston, among other cities, and a new experimental drug.

Methodist was part of two remdesivir trials.

But because the research has ended, it and other hospitals now depend on allotments of the drug from the state. As virus cases increased, the supplies ran short, said Katherine Perez, an infectiousdisease specialist at the hospital. “In Houston, every hospital that’s gotten the drug, everyone’s just kind of used it up,” she said.

The hospital received 1,000 vials, its largest shipment ever, a little over a week ago. Within four days, all the patients who could be treated with it had been selected, and pharmacists were awaiting another shipment.

A new chance to test remdesivir in a clinical trial in combination with another drug may provide some relief. As cases rise, Methodist researchers are being flooded with offers to participate in studies, with about 10 to 12 new opportunities a week being vetted centrally.Without solid research,“your option is to do a bunch of unproven, potentially harmful, potentially futile, interventions to very sick people who are depending on you,” said Dr. H. Dirk Sostman, president of Methodist’s academic medicine institute.

Convincing the Public Boom, the Methodist chief executive, said if he could preserve one thing from the New York experience in March, it would be how the country came together as it had in previous disasters.

When cases began rising again in Texas, hospital officials spent close to a month trying to

educate the public about the risks of contagion.

“It didn’t work,” Boom said.

“How do you get the message out there when certain people just don’t hear it and then you’re dealing with quarantine fatigue and it’s summer and I’m done with school and I just believe I’m 20 and I’m invincible?” he asked. “We told everybody this is all about the sick, vulnerable population, which was the truth, but they heard the message of ‘Well, therefore I’m fine.’ And now we’re doing the reeducation on that.”

But even some of Methodist’s physicians, like many Texans, take issue with measures promoted by most public health experts. “A lot of the masks

9

that people are wearing in public don’t do very much,”said Dr. Beau Briese, director of international emergency medicine, contradicting studies that point to a substantial benefit with universal face coverings.

Briese, 41, believes the soundest approach is to keep opening businesses but have the population at highest risk, including older people, stay apart from the broader public. Some of Methodist’s patients find even those measures objectionable.

One patient on Bakshy’s emergency room shift, Genevieve McCall, 96, came to the hospital with a satchel full of nightgowns because her legs had swollen, a sign of worsening heart failure.

Bakshy asked about any exposure to the coronavirus. She said her caregiver had been out since the previous day with a fever and a sore throat.

Born five years after the 1918 flu, McCall, a retired nurse, said that until the coronavirus, she told people she thought she had seen everything.

“I question a lot of things,” she said of the safety restrictions. “They’ve been too tight about it. And every time that there is a little bit of a spike, then we’re restricted more.”

McCall, who tested negative for the virus, added: “This is a political year. I think that politics has a lot to do with the way this has been handled.

And I think it’s been mishandled.”

She said that it was difficult to be stuck in her apartment in an independent-living complex that was prohibiting visitors, canceling many activities and delivering meals to rooms instead of serving them in the dining room. “It’s very depressing,” she said. “Until this afternoon, when my daughter walked in the door to come and pick me up and bring me here, I had not been able to see her or touch her for three months, more.”

Molly Tipps, a registered nurse, takes the temperature of Dee Morton, who has COVID-19, at Houston Methodist Hospital

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

New Trump appointee puts global internet freedom at risk, critics say

People play video games at an internet cafe in Wenzhou, China.

By PRANSHU VERMA and EDWARD WONG

W

hen Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker and ally of Stephen Bannon, recently fired the heads of four U.S. government-funded news outlets, many became alarmed that he would turn the independently operated organizations, as well as the Voice of America, into “Trump TV.” But Pack, the new chief executive of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, also cleaned house last month at the lesser-known Open Technology Fund, an internet freedom group overseen by the agency Pack now runs.

Many worry that the move could have an even greater effect.

In less than a decade, the Open Technology Fund has quietly become integral to the world’s repressed communities. Over 2 billion people in 60 countries rely on tools developed and supported by the fund, like Signal and Tor, to connect to the internet securely and send encrypted messages in authoritarian societies.

After Pack was confirmed for his new post on June 4, following a personal campaign of support by President Donald Trump, Pack fired the technology group’s top officials and bipartisan board, an action now being fought in the courts. A federal judge Thursday ruled in Pack’s favor, a decision that plaintiffs will likely appeal.

On Friday, Pack appointed an interim chief executive, James Miles, to head the fund,

according to a letter obtained by The New York Times. Miles is little known in the internet freedom community, and his appointment needs approval from the fund’s new board, which is stacked with Trump administration officials and chaired by Pack.

The move was a victory for a lobbying effort backed by religious freedom advocates displeased with the fund’s work and who are often allied with conservative political figures.

This battle revolves around software developed by Falun Gong, the secretive spiritual movement persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party.

Some Falun Gong members have become notable players in American politics. The Epoch Times, a newspaper started by Falun Gong practitioners, has spent millions of dollars on pro-Trump ads, including conspiratorial ones, on Facebook and YouTube — and was even banned by Facebook last year from buying more ads because it had tried to evade advertising rules.

Now, allies of Falun Gong are making a big push for the Open Technology Fund and the State Department to give money to some of the group’s software, notably Ultrasurf, developed about a decade ago by a Falun Gong member.

Their thinking is that if enough Chinese citizens have this software to bypass the Great Firewall of government censorship, the citizens will see news about repression by the Communist Party.

But pieces of circumvention software

like Ultrasurf are considered old, and they are not widespread in China, according to cybersecurity experts. Just as important, Chinese patriots or nationalists who have access to reports critical of the Communist Party — including students in the United States — often do not change their views.

“Anyone who has studied China’s information control regimes and the evolution of Chinese technology knows that funding a set of circumvention tools is not going to bring down the Chinese Communist Party,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a former Beijing bureau chief for CNN who directs an internet freedom program at the New America Foundation that has received State Department funds before.

Critics also warn that if lobbyists get their way and shift the fund’s focus toward solely supporting software like Ultrasurf, it could set back the fight for internet freedom by decades.

Both Democrats and Republicans are worried. Leading Republican senators, Marco Rubio of Florida and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, wrote to Pack in a letter on Wednesday with five other senators expressing their “deep concern” about his staff cuts, saying the moves raised “serious questions about the future of the U.S. Agency for Global Media” under his leadership. Other Republican members of Congress said earlier that they were concerned about the Open Technology Fund.

The group started in 2012 as a pilot program within Radio Free Asia. It was founded

by Libby Liu, then the president of the broadcasting outlet. Seven years later, Congress allowed it to become an independent nonprofit grantee of the Agency for Global Media. Lawmakers appropriated $20 million to the group for its 2020 fiscal year.

The bulk of the money goes to incubating new technology that promotes human rights and open societies. The group supports projects such as widely popular encrypted messaging tools like Signal and technology like Pakistan’s first 24/7 hotline for confidentially reporting sexual harassment.

The Open Technology Fund also looks to create and train a community of technical experts who can fend off sophisticated cyberattacks against internet freedom.

One of the bedrock principles of the Open Technology Fund is to support opensource technology. Creating and funding tools that are open source means a worldwide collective of programmers can examine the products to ensure they are safe and secure for

people in repressed societies to use, cybersecurity experts say.

At the heart of lobbying efforts supporting the Falun Gong developers are Michael Horowitz, a Reagan administration budget official, and Katrina Lantos Swett, the daughter of former Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., a noted champion for human rights.

During the time Pack assumed his role, they have worked to advance their agenda.

On June 13, three days after Pack took office, Horowitz was a guest on a talk show hosted by Bannon, who was formerly Trump’s chief strategist. Horowitz denounced Liu, who was the chief executive of the technology fund.

Liu happened to be tendering her resignation to the board that day, effective in July. Pack fired her on June 17 and dismissed the board.

Swett has been vocal about her displeasure with leadership at the fund because they have shied away from focusing most of the group’s funding toward programs like Ultrasurf. She claims it is one of the most effective tools to fight against China’s firewall, despite criticism from experts who warn that since Ultrasurf is closed source, there is no way to independently verify its performance or assure end users that they are not being tracked.

“Open source versus closed source, we don’t get hung up on those things,” Swett said.

Many internet freedom experts disagree with this approach.

“There is no person in their right mind who should be advocating for closed-source applications,” said Nima Fatemi, the founding director of Kandoo, an internet freedom nonprofit. “When we’re talking about people inside Iran, China and Russia who are already facing so much oppression, using these tools don’t guarantee safety or security; they actually put them in more danger.”

The day after Pack assumed office, Swett sent him and officials at the State Department a letter requesting that $20 million in funding be steered toward firewall circumvention programs like Ultrasurf. The State Department declined to comment.

And one day after Pack fired Liu, officials with the White House’s National Security Council received communication from the Lantos Foundation advocating the funding of programs like Ultrasurf.

Swett denied contacting the National Security Council herself, but she said she could not rule out whether someone on her foundation’s staff reached out to the organization. The National Security Council did not return an email seeking comment.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

11

With department stores disappearing, malls could be next

By SAPNA MAHESHWARI

T

he directory map for the Northfield Square Mall in Bourbonnais, Illinois, has three glaring spaces where large department stores once stood. Soon there will be a fourth vacancy, now that J.C. Penney is liquidating stores after filing for bankruptcy.

With so much empty space and brick-andmortar retail in the midst of seismic changes even before the pandemic hit, the mall’s owners have been talking with local officials about identifying a “higher and better use for the site,” though they have declined to elaborate on what that could be.

“Filling in one anchor space, generally, is doable,” said Elliot Nassim, president of Mason Asset Management, which co-owns the Northfield Square Mall and dozens of other enclosed shopping centers. “But once you get hit by two others and you’re dealing with three anchor closures, that’s usually where we become a little more likely to put it into the bucket of a redevelopment.”

The standard American mall — with its vast parking lots, escalators and air conditioning, and an atmosphere heavy on perfume samples and the scent of Mrs. Fields cookies — was built around department stores. But the pandemic has been devastating for the retail industry, and many of those stores are disappearing at a rapid clip.

Some chains are unable to pay rent; and prominent department store chains, including Neiman Marcus, have filed for bankruptcy protection. As they close stores, it could cause other tenants to abandon malls at the same time as large specialty chains like Victoria’s Secret are shrinking.

Malls were already facing pressure from online shopping, but analysts now say that hundreds are at risk of closing in the next five years. That has the potential to reshape the suburbs, with many communities already debating whether abandoned malls can be turned into local markets, office space or even affordable housing.

“More companies have gone bankrupt than any of us have ever expected, and I do believe that will accelerate as we move through 2020, unfortunately,” said Deborah Weinswig, founder of Coresight Research, an advisory and research firm that specializes in retail and technology.

“And then those who haven’t gone bankrupt are using this as an opportunity to clean up their real estate.”

Weinswig said the malls that are able to withstand the current turmoil will be healthier — better tenants, more inviting and occupied — but she anticipated that about 25% of the country’s nearly 1,200 malls were in danger.

Most retailers that have filed for bankruptcy

Department stores are disappearing at a rapid clip amidst the coronavirus pandemic, a decline that could take down as much as a quarter of America’s malls in the next five years. are closing stores but plan to continue operating.

Department stores account for about 30% of the mall square footage in the United States, with 10% of that coming from Sears (which filed for bankruptcy in 2018) and J.C. Penney, according to Green Street Advisors, a real estate research firm. J.C. Penney, which declined to comment, has said store closings will start this summer and could eventually number as many as 250. Green Street forecast in April that more than half of all mall-based department stores would close by the end of 2021.

That will have significant effects beyond reduced customer foot traffic. Many small mall retailers have clauses in their leases — so-called co-tenancy clauses — that allow them to pay reduced rent or even break the lease if two or more anchor stores leave a location.

“At a lot of lower-quality malls — where maybe there already is a vacant anchor, where you’ve got the Sears box that closed two years ago and not yet filled it, and now your J.C. Penney box is closed — that is going to cause that mall to likely lose a lot of tenants and possibly even lose its competitive positioning very quickly,” said Vince Tibone, a retail analyst at Green Street.

Tibone said he was pessimistic about the ability of most malls to fill vacant spaces, especially during the pandemic. Entertainment options like Dave & Buster’s are off the table, for instance.

“The reality is, there are going to be dark

boxes for some time,” he said.

And then there are customers, who already shop online in huge numbers and may not be all that eager to return to enclosed emporiums where they will be surrounded by other people.

“If there’s a perception out there that people are safer outside and less safe inside, that’s not great,” said Matthew Lazenby, chief executive of Whitman Family Development, which manages the luxury open-air Bal Harbour Shops outside Miami.

As of June, 84% of the country’s 1,174 malls were considered healthy, reporting vacancy rates of 10% or less, according to the CoStar Group, a data provider for the real estate industry.

But that compares with 94% in 2006. And the percentage of healthy malls is expected to drop further as retailers carry out store closings announced this year, accounting for more than 83 million square feet of retail space. A significant percentage of that comes from apparel stores, which represent about 60% of occupied mall space.

Major mall operators have started to signal concern. The Simon Property Group, the biggest mall operator in the United States, is trying to terminate its $3.6 billion deal to acquire Taubman Centers, which owns and operates about two dozen high-end shopping centers.

In court filings last month, Simon Property said that Taubman’s malls were mostly enclosed and that indoor malls “are the last types of

retail real estate properties that most consumers will want to visit on a long-term basis after COVID-19.” (Simon Property also owns many enclosed malls.) While Taubman has promoted its wealthy, educated shoppers as an asset, Simon Property said that those consumers in particular are now “far more able and likely to use online shopping.” The sides have been ordered to enter mediation, but if an agreement isn’t reached by the end of the month, they will go to trial.

CBL & Associates Properties, which owns and operates roughly 60 malls, outlet stores and open-air shopping centers in the United States, said in filings last month that it was skipping about $30 million in interest payments due in June “to advance discussions with its lenders and explore alternative strategies,” and that there was “substantial doubt” it would continue to operate as a concern.

Jim Hull, owner and managing principal of the Hull Property Group in Augusta, Georgia, which oversees 30 enclosed malls, expressed frustration about the exit of big national chains from “smaller or tertiary markets.” The result, he said, is that “the majority of people living in the smaller markets will either have to buy from the internet or have to drive 45 miles,” he said.

Already this year, Victoria’s Secret said it would close 250 stores in North America, while the Gap brand is closing at least 170 stores globally. Financial troubles are plaguing mall chain companies like Ascena Retail, which owns Ann Taylor and Loft, and the owner of New York & Co. And bankruptcies since early 2019 have included mall staples like Forever 21, Things Remembered, Payless ShoeSource and GNC. Lucky Brand Dungarees filed for bankruptcy Friday.

Hull said that he anticipated making malls more “community-based” in smaller markets, with local and regional businesses. “It’s going to be cooking classes, boutiques, internet businesses that want a physical presence, health care, food choices,” he said.

Still, some investors have bought midtier malls in recent years and have already been working on how to repurpose and change spaces — even “de-malling” malls by flipping store entrances so that they face the street.

“We didn’t buy malls since 2014 thinking that J.C. Penney or Sears or Bon-Ton were going to be in business forever and operate department stores, and if you were, then shame on you,” said Ami Ziff, director of national retail at Time Equities, a real estate firm whose investments include eight enclosed malls. “Is there going to be more distress, vacancy and bankruptcy? Yes. Hopefully, you know what you’re doing so you can pick up the pieces to refill that space.”

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

Stocks

Oil falls below $43 a barrel on virus fears, still heads for weekly gain

O

il fell below $43 a barrel on Friday as a resurgence of coronavirus cases raised concern that fuel demand growth could stall, although crude was still headed for a weekly gain on lower supply and wider signs of economic recovery.

The United States reported more than 55,000 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, a new daily global record for the pandemic. The rise in cases suggested U.S. jobs growth, which jumped in June, could suffer a setback.

“If this trend continues, oil demand in the region is at risk,” said Louise Dickson of Rystad Energy.

Brent crude was down 38 cents, or 0.9%, at $42.76 a barrel by 12:03 p.m. EDT (1603 GMT), and U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude fell 44 cents, or 1.1%, to $40.21.

U.S. trade was thinned by the Independence Day holiday.

“The fragile U.S. economic rebound is at risk of being undone by the latest surge in new infections,” said Stephen Brennock of oil broker PVM. Both benchmarks rose more than 2% on Thursday, buoyed by strong U.S. June jobs figures and a drop in U.S. crude inventories. Brent is still on track for a weekly gain of 4%.

Signs of economic recovery, and a drop in supply after a record supply cut by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies, known as OPEC+, have helped Brent more than double from a 21-year low below $16 reached in April.

Boosting recovery hopes, a private survey showed on Friday that China’s services sector expanded at the fastest pace in over a decade in June.

OPEC oil production fell to its lowest in decades in June and Russian production has dropped to near its OPEC+ target.

The bankruptcy filing of U.S. shale pioneer Chesapeake Energy also supported prices by raising expectations production will decline, JBC Energy said in a report.

Gasoline demand will be closely watched as the United States heads into the July 4 holiday weekend.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

13

Caribbean, struggling in the pandemic, braces for hurricane season

By KIRK SEMPLE

H

ouses with no roofs. Neighborhoods lacking electricity. Residents who fled still in exile.

Ten months after Hurricane Dorian pulverized the northern Bahamas, those islands are still struggling to recover, even as this year’s hurricane season begins. But rebuilding, always a slow process, has been slowed even further this year by a disaster of another sort: the coronavirus pandemic.

“That brought rebuilding efforts to a complete halt,” said Stafford Symonette, an evangelical pastor whose house on Great Abaco Island was severely damaged during the hurricane — and remains that way.

“You still have a lot of people in tents and temporary shelters,” he said.

The Bahamas — like other hurricaneprone countries in the Caribbean and North Atlantic — find themselves at the dramatic convergence of a devastating pandemic and an Atlantic hurricane season that is expected to be more active than normal.

The pandemic has profoundly affected all aspects of hurricane preparedness and response, and left nations even more vulnerable to the impacts of storms.

It has complicated rebuilding efforts from past hurricane seasons. It has crippled national economies in the region, many of which depend heavily on tourism. It has forced the reallocation of diminished government resources — money and personnel that otherwise might have been used for hurricane-related work — to deal with the public health crisis.

And it has meant that, in the event of a major storm, evacuation centers and shelters could now turn into dangerous vectors of coronavirus contagion, driving governments and relief agencies to figure out new protocols to keep evacuees safe.

These mounting challenges have overwhelmed many of the region’s governments and relief agencies, which are scrambling to prepare for the next big storm.

“Are we prepared for this hurricane season?” said Ronald Sanders, ambassador of Antigua and Barbuda to the United States and to the Organization of American States.

“The answer is: no. And I don’t care who tells you we are. We haven’t been able to dedicate any funds toward hurricane preparedness this year.”

“These countries are struggling and have

been for some time,” he continued. “The reality is that we are in dire straits.”

Weather scientists from the American government have predicted that during this Atlantic storm season, which began on June 1 and runs through Nov. 30, there will be as many as 19 named storms, with as many as six growing to major hurricane status. An average hurricane season has 12 named storms and three major hurricanes.

The season has gotten off to a quick start, with four named storms so far.

The region started the season at a severe economic disadvantage. The pandemic crushed the tourism industry, a main economic engine for much of the Caribbean. Hotels were shuttered, cruise ships remained docked, airplanes were grounded. The Caribbean Development Bank estimated that regional economic activity may contract by as much as 20% this year.

Sanders said he worried about what would happen should the region suffer a repeat of 2017, when several major hurricanes plowed through the Caribbean.

“If that were to happen again this year,” he said, “well, I think these economies will go into complete collapse.”

The pandemic has also presented a range of public health challenges for governments and relief groups preparing for hurricanes, including the need to ensure adequate social distancing during evacuations and in shelters, and a sufficient supply of personal protective gear for emergency workers and evacuees.

Health officials are also trying to stockpile medicine and other supplies and prepare for possible coronavirus outbreaks among evacuees.

“Without a doubt, once we have a natural hazard such as a hurricane, there will be a greater rate of infection, particularly with respect to COVID-19, among other diseases that could arise,” Dr. Laura-Lee Boodram, an official with the Caribbean Public Health Agency, warned during a recent panel discussion organized by the Caribbean Tourism Organization.

The Bahamas has been at a particular disadvantage in its efforts to get out before this year’s hurricane threat.

The coronavirus pandemic swept into the region only a few months after Dorian, one of the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes on record, made landfall on Sept. 1, 2019, killing scores of people in the Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama Island, destroying thousands

Scientists predict this hurricane season will be severe, but countries in the region, with economies burdened by the pandemic and the devastation of past hurricanes, have not been able to fully prepare. of structures and causing billions of dollars in damage.

Recovery efforts were fully underway by the time the country recorded its first coronavirus case on March 16. But less than two weeks later, with the number of infections mounting, the government had closed the nation’s borders and had begun imposing a series of restrictions on movement, including curfews, 24-hour lockdowns and a ban on travel between the archipelago’s islands.

While the measures helped curb the spread of the virus — the Bahamas has only 104 confirmed cases so far — they slowed recovery, delayed preparations for the new hurricane season and, combined with the global halt of the tourism industry, further plunged the country into economic distress.

The Bahamian government said it expects to incur a $1.3 billion deficit this fiscal year, equivalent to about 11.6% of gross domestic product and the largest in the history of the Bahamas.

“Any significant storm damage this year would put us in a very serious spot in terms of our fiscal projections,” Peter Turnquest, the Bahamas’ deputy prime minister and finance minister, said in an interview this week.

Among emergency officials’ greatest concerns as the hurricane season unfolds is the insufficient number of storm shelters in parts of

the Bahamas. Many that were damaged during Dorian have yet to be repaired.

The International Organization for Migration said in a report in May that only 13 of the 25 official shelters on the Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama were “usable” and had only enough capacity for about 2% of the population.

“We certainly pray that there are no storms this year,” Turnquest said.

Adding to the uncertainty, the government is now poised to reopen the country’s borders to international visitors. The decision has sowed anxiety among many Bahamians who fear that it might spur a second wave of infections across the islands, triggering more lockdowns and border closures, and further complicating hurricane preparedness and response.

“People are nervous,” said Steve Pedican, whose house on Great Abaco Island was severely damaged in the hurricane. “People don’t know what to expect now.”

When asked what might happen should a major hurricane make landfall on Great Abaco in the coming months, Symonette, the evangelical pastor, went silent for a while, mulling the implications.

“I don’t know how we would cope with it if we get another one this year,” he finally said. “Praise God, that he be merciful to us.”

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Monday, July 6, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

In North Korea, Coronavirus hurts like no sanctions could

President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un talk after a meeting at the Freedom House next to the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea

By CHOE SANG-HUN

O

n New Year’s Day, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, called for a “frontal breakthrough to foil the enemies’ sanctions.” The strategy meant finding new sources of income, legal or illegal, and mainly from China.

Sending North Korean workers to China. Bringing more tourists from there. Smuggling banned cargo, like coal or oil, across the border at night or between ships on high seas.

But there was one thing Kim did not foresee: the coronavirus.

Barely three weeks after Kim unveiled his New Year’s resolution, North Korea shut down ​its border with China to protect itself against the emerging outbreak in the city of Wuhan. It was no ordinary border​closure.

China accounted for 95% of the North’s trade. Consumer goods, raw materials, fuel and machine parts smuggled into the North across their 870-mile border kept North Korean markets and factories sputtering along, despite United Nations sanctions designed to curb the Kim regime’s nuclear ambitions.

With the border sealed, the North’s official exports to China, already hobbled by the sanctions, have crashed even further. In March, they were worth just $610,000, according to Chinese customs data — down 96% from a year earlier.

The North’s newly opened ski and spa resorts are empty of Chinese tourists, and its smuggling ships sit idle in their ports.

The virus has isolated the North Korean economy as no

sanctions could. It has devastated the regime’s ability to bring in money through legal and illegal trade, leaving it scrambling to protect the country’s diminishing foreign currency reserves.

“To North Korea, COVID-19 is a black swan. None of its policymakers saw it coming,” said Go Myong-Hyun, an analyst at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul, South Korea. ​North Korea claims it has had no coronavirus cases. But it was one of the first countries to shut its border, aware that its woefully underequipped public health system made it particularly vulnerable to mass infection.

The pandemic could hardly have come at a worse time for Kim, whose attempts to win sanctions relief in talks with President Donald Trump have been fruitless. North Korea’s recent acts of hostility toward South Korea, including the destruction of the inter-Korean liaison office in the North, have been seen in part as acts of economic desperation.

“If you peel North Korea’s problem like an onion, at the core is its economy, and its economic trouble comes down to whether it can lift sanctions,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul.

The North Korean economy has languished for decades, hobbled by communist mismanagement, a famine in the late 1990s and the gradually tougher sanctions imposed by the U.N. since 2006, when the North carried out its first nuclear test.

Kim has tried to boost the economy with domestic reforms aimed at creating a “socialist system of responsible

business operation.” Factories and collective farms were given more incentives to increase productivity, including the right to keep surpluses.

Kim also ramped up exports of coal, iron ore, textiles and seafood to China, achieving economic growth of 3.9% in 2016, the highest since the late 1990s, according to South Korea’s central bank.

But the North also rapidly expanded ​its weapons ​programs, testing three intercontinental ballistic missiles in 2017 as well as what it said was a hydrogen bomb. In response, the U.N. Security Council tightened the noose around the North’s economy by banning all of its major exports.​ The economy shrank by 3.5% in 2017. It contracted by 4.1% the following year, with its exports to China plummeting 86%.

Since 2017, North Korea has reported a trade deficit of more than $2 billion every year. In comparison, the North’s total exports last year were $260 million.​ “The clock is ticking, and the bomb could explode any time,” Kim Byung-yeon, a​Seoul National University​economist​, wrote in December, predicting that the North’s foreign currency reserves would shrink by $1 billion a year, leading inexorably to a crisis.

North Korea has tried to replenish its coffers with revenues from illegal smuggling and cybertheft as well as “loyalty donations” from ​what are known as donju — tradespeople with political connections who have hoarded foreign currency obtained through smuggling​and other enterprises.

Kim’s government also runs shops in Pyongyang, the capital, where the moneyed class spends foreign currency on imported goods. And it has profited by selling Chinese smartphones to an estimated 6 million cellphone subscribers in the country.

“The debate has been about how quickly or slowly the North’s foreign currency would diminish,” Go said. “But there is no doubt now that COVID-19 has accelerated the speed.” ​Recently, signs have emerged of growing stress on the North’s economy, especially its foreign currency reserves.

The government recently issued public bonds for the first time in 17 years, reported Daily NK, a Seoul-based website that uses informants inside ​the ​North. Kim tested the elites’ loyalty by asking them to buy bonds with foreign currency, it said.

Authorities have also cracked down harder on the use of foreign currency in markets in an effort to shore up the won, the local currency, said Jiro Ishimaru, a chief editor at Asia Press International in Japan, who has monitored the North Korean economy for years with the help of correspondents there.

To save on foreign currency, K ​ im has encouraged his people to produce more goods at home, like snacks, cosmetics and beverages. But COVID-19 has hit those sectors as well because they depended on Chinese raw materials to produce the goods.

“Kim Jong Un thought he could survive with tourism revenues, smuggling and Chinese help,​but his plans have crumbled because of the coronavirus,” Ishimaru​said. “If the virus has taught him anything, it is how dependent his economy is on China.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

15

As Neo-Nazis seed military ranks, Germany confronts ‘an enemy within’

By KATRIN BENHOLD

A

s Germany emerged from its coronavirus lockdown in May, police commandos pulled up outside a rural property owned by a sergeant major in the special forces, the country’s most highly trained and secretive military unit.

They brought a digger.

The sergeant major’s nickname was Little Sheep. He was suspected of being a neo-Nazi. Buried in the garden, police found 2 kilograms of PETN plastic explosives, a detonator, a fuse, an AK-47, a silencer, two knives, a crossbow and thousands of rounds of ammunition — much of it believed to have been stolen from the German military.

They also found an SS songbook, 14 editions of a magazine for former members of the Waffen SS and a host of other Nazi memorabilia.

Germany has a problem. For years, politicians and security chiefs rejected the notion of any far-right infiltration of the security services, speaking only of “individual cases.” The idea of networks was dismissed. The superiors of those exposed as extremists were protected. Guns and ammunition disappeared from military stockpiles with no real investigation.

The government is now waking up. Cases of far-right extremists in the military and police, some hoarding weapons and explosives, have multiplied alarmingly. The nation’s top intelligence officials and senior military commanders are moving to confront an issue that has become too dangerous to ignore.

The problem has deepened with the emergence of the Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which legitimized a far-right ideology that used the arrival of more than 1 million migrants in 2015 — and more recently the coronavirus pandemic — to engender a sense of impending crisis.

Most concerning to authorities is that the extremists appear to be concentrated in the military unit that is supposed to be the most elite and dedicated to the German state, the special forces, known by their German acronym, the KSK. This week, Germany’s defense minister, Annegret KrampKarrenbauer, took the drastic step of disbanding a fighting company in the KSK considered infested with extremists. Little Sheep, whom investigators have identified only as Philipp Sch., was a member.

Germany’s military counterintelligence agency is now investigating more than 600 soldiers for far-right extremism, out of 184,000 in the military. Some 20 of them are in the KSK, a proportion that is five times higher than in other units.

But German authorities are concerned that the problem may be far larger and that other security institutions have been infiltrated as well. Over the past 13 months, far-right terrorists have assassinated a politician, attacked a synagogue and shot dead nine immigrants and German descendants of immigrants.

Thomas Haldenwang, president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, has identified far-right extremism and terrorism as the “biggest danger to German democracy today.”

In interviews conducted over the course of the year with military and intelligence officials as well as avowed far-right members themselves, they described nationwide networks of current and former soldiers and police officers with ties to the far-right.

In many cases, soldiers have used the networks to prepare for when they predict Germany’s democratic order will collapse.

They call it Day X. Officials worry it is really a pretext for inciting terrorist acts, or worse, a putsch.

Ties, officials said, sometimes reach deep into old neo-Nazi

A makeshift memorial to victims of the mass shooting, outside the Linwood Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. networks and the more polished intellectual scene of the socalled New Right. Extremists are hoarding weapons, maintaining safe houses and in some cases keeping lists of political enemies.

But investigating the problem is itself fraught: Even the military counterintelligence agency, charged with monitoring extremism inside the armed forces, may be infiltrated.

A high-ranking investigator in the extremism unit was suspended in June after sharing confidential material from the May raid with a contact in the KSK, who in turn passed it on to at least eight other soldiers, tipping them off that the agency might turn its attention to them next.

“If the very people who are meant to protect our democracy are plotting against it, we have a big problem,” said Stephan Kramer, president of the domestic intelligence agency in the state of Thuringia. “How do you find them? What we are dealing with is an enemy within.”

The KSK are Germany’s answer to the Navy SEALs. But these days their commander, Gen. Markus Kreitmayr, an affable Bavarian who has done tours in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, is a man divided between his loyalty to them and recognizing that he has a serious problem on his hands.

“I can’t explain why there are allegedly so many cases of ‘far-right extremism’ in the military,” he said. The KSK is “clearly more affected than others; that appears to be a fact.”

It was never easy to be a soldier in postwar Germany.

Given its Nazi history and the destruction it foisted on Europe in World War II, the country maintains a conflicted relationship to its military.

For decades, Germany tried to forge a force that represented a democratic society and its values. But in 2011 it abolished conscription and moved to a volunteer force. As a result, the military increasingly reflects not the broad society but a narrower slice of it.

Kreitmayr said that “a big percentage” of his soldiers are eastern Germans, a region where the AfD does disproportionately well. Roughly half the men on the list of KSK members suspected of being far-right extremists are also from the east, he added.

Officials talk of a perceptible shift “in values” among new recruits. In conversations, the soldiers themselves said that if there was a tipping point in the unit, it came with the migrant crisis of 2015.

As hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers from Syria and Afghanistan were making their way to Germany, the mood

on the base was anxious, they recalled.

“We are soldiers who are charged with defending this country, and then they just opened the borders — no control,” one officer recalled. “We were at the limit.”

It was in this atmosphere that a 30-year-old KSK soldier from Halle, in eastern Germany, set up a Telegram chat network for soldiers, police officers and others united in their belief that the migrants would destroy the country.

His name was André Schmitt.

Schmitt left active service last September after stolen training grenades were found at a building belonging to his parents.

But, he said, he still has his network: “special forces, intelligence, business executives, Freemasons.”

“The forces are like a big family,” Schmitt said. “Everyone knows each other.”

When he set up his Telegram chats in 2015, he did so geographically — north, south, east, west — just like the German military. In parallel, he ran a group called Uniter, an organization for security-related professionals that provides social benefits but also paramilitary training.

Several former members of his chats are now under investigation by prosecutors for plotting terrorism. Some were ordering body bags. One faces trial.

Schmitt’s situation is more complex. He acknowledged serving as an informer on the KSK for the military counterintelligence agency in mid-2017, when he met regularly with a liaison officer.

Today the military is paying for him to get a business degree.

He himself was never named a suspect. German officials denied that they protected him. But this week the domestic intelligence agency announced that it was placing his current network, Uniter, under surveillance.

Authorities first stumbled onto his chats in 2017 while investigating a soldier in the network who was suspected of organizing a terror plot.

Investigators are now looking into whether the chats and Uniter were the early skeleton of a nationwide far-right network that has infiltrated state institutions. As yet, they cannot say.

Initially, Schmitt and other members said, the chats were about sharing information, much of it about the supposed threats posed by migrants, which Schmitt admitted to police he had inflated to “motivate” people.

Soon the chats morphed from a platform for sharing information to one dedicated to preparing for Day X. He portrayed a Europe under threat from gangs, Islamists and antifa. He called them “enemy troops on our ground.”

His network helped members get ready to respond to what he portrayed as an inevitable conflict, sometimes acting on their own.

“Day X is personal,” he said. “For one guy, it’s this day; for another guy, it’s another day. It’s the day you activate your plans.”

Chat members met in person, worked out what provisions and weapons to stockpile and where to keep safe houses. They practiced how to recognize each other, using military code, at “pickup points” where members could gather on Day X. Schmitt denies ever planning to bring about Day X, but he is still convinced that it will come, maybe sooner rather than later with the pandemic.

“We know, thanks to our sources in the banks and in the intelligence services, that at the latest, by the end of September, the big economic crash will come,” he said. “There will be insolvencies and mass unemployment. People will take to the street.”

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Monday, July 6, 2020

Macron replaces France’s prime minister in bid to reinvigorate his government

By ADAM NOSSITER and AURELIEN BREEDEN

P

resident Emmanuel Macron shuffled prime ministers on Friday, removing the most popular member of his government and a potential rival in a bid to get a fresh start in the wake of a coronavirus outbreak that has hit France hard.

Macron traded in his prime minister of three years, Édouard Philippe, for a relatively unknown technocrat, Jean Castex, who has helped guide France out of the health emergency.

But the president has taken a chance in distancing himself from Philippe: The outgoing prime minister is the only French political leader to emerge from the health crisis with sharply enhanced credibility. By pushing out Philippe, Macron is testing the adage that, in politics, it is better to keep one’s rivals close at hand.

Macron made the move in the face of an economic emergency brought on by the virus, by his own tenuous public support and by a surge in popularity for Green parties in local voting last Sunday.

But Castex is not an environmentalist nor a leftist, suggesting Macron was not cowed by the election results nor by demands that he change his pro-business stance. The contemptuous reactions of French Greens and Socialists to Friday’s news suggested as much.

By appointing Castex, the low-profile mayor of a modest town in the French Pyrenees who has shaped France’s so far successful strategy to ease lockdown restrictions, Macron is signaling that he is looking ahead.

In doing so he is butting up against public opinion, though, as a new poll revealed this week that nearly 60% of the French wanted Philippe to stay in his post.

That in itself was a problem for Philippe,

President Emmanuel Macron, center, hopes to give his government a fresh mandate in the last stretch of his term.

as was his recent appearance on the cover of Paris Match as France’s real strongman.

Macron “is very self-confident, he doesn’t want to be put in the shade by anybody,” said Gerald Grunberg, an emeritus political scientist at Sciences Po university. “He doesn’t want to be the president of Edouard Philippe’s government.”

Replacing prime ministers, like firing managers in baseball, is a well-established tradition for modern French presidents looking to create new energy. Macron, 42, has two years to go in a rocky five-year term that has been marked by social unrest, some economic progress and, now, a shaky business outlook. GDP is expected to drop 11% to 13% this year.

For weeks, speculation about the fate of Philippe — who served an unusually long spell for a French prime minister — had swirled in the news media and in political circles.

Macron had been expected to reshape his Cabinet after the coronavirus dealt a heavy blow to France, hoping to give his government a fresh mandate in the last stretch of a five-year term that ends in 2022.

“There had to be a new signal, a new conquest of the French, because we’ve lost so many,” said Patrick Vignal, a parliamentary deputy in Macron’s party from southern France. “So Emmanuel Macron was right to turn tables and name a new prime minister.”

Grunberg noted that polls suggested Philippe could be the only political figure with enough standing to take on Macron in two years. Not a single other serious potential challenger has emerged on either the right or the left.

Yet by the telling of the Élysée Palace, the seat of the French presidency, the parting was cordial, and the choice of Castex a natural one because he was seen as transcending the right-left divide, an intense focus of Macron.

Castex, 55, is a graduate of the same

elite finishing school for technocrats, the ENA, or National Management School, as both Macron and Philippe. Yet Macron’s supporters on Friday portrayed Castex as a son of the soil.

“Jean Castex represents the Old World, a rural elected official who has had to face real problems,” Vignal said. “He’s a graduate of ENA, sure, but he’s got his feet in the muck, and his head in the stars.”

Later on Friday, the Élysée announced that Philippe, who was reelected mayor of Le Havre last weekend, would be given a new role in helping shape Macron’s Republic on the Move political movement.

The reshuffle came the same day that French prosecutors announced that Philippe was one of three current or former officials under investigation for possible mishandling of the coronavirus crisis. But the process is in a very preliminary stage and might not lead to formal charges or trial.

France is still dealing with the aftermath of the initial coronavirus outbreak, which has led to nearly 30,000 deaths in the country.

France fared worse than Germany in deaths and cases, but considerably better than its northern and southern neighbors, including Britain.

The shake-up was all the more expected after a strong showing by Green parties in France’s municipal elections last week, which intensified pressure on Macron to change his governing team. Macron’s party failed to field serious candidates in any of the major cities, a sign of its grassroots weakness, and the Greens took Bordeaux, Lyon and Strasbourg.

Unlike many of its European neighbors, France has a system of government in which the president, elected directly by the French people, is the head of the executive branch and is usually the main policy driver. The prime minister and Cabinet are accountable to Parliament, but are appointed by the president and responsible for day-to-day governing.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

17

Florida, America’s pandemic playground

By MICHELLE COTTLE

B

y now, Americans have come to expect a certain level of quirkiness from Florida. All that heat and humidity does something to people — not to mention the invading hordes of Northern and Midwestern retirees in search of bountiful sunshine and friendly tax laws. In recent years, “Florida Man” has become mocking shorthand for state denizens caught in acts of flamboyant idiocy, often involving some mix of drugs, guns, cops and predatory reptiles.

But in the age of COVID-19, Florida’s free spirit, welcoming nature and dependence on tourism dollars have been putting residents at a different level of risk, in many ways beyond their control. In the pandemic’s early days, local beaches and bars were overrun by cavorting spring breakers, carelessly spreading contagion in their wake. For a brief stretch in April, social distancing restrictions were imposed to help slow the spread. But as the state has reopened, the virus has resurfaced with a vengeance. As of Wednesday, Florida had reported over 152,000 confirmed cases, 3,500 virus-related deaths and daily new infection counts in the thousands.

Even so, the state’s leaders keep sending mixed signals on prevention. People are being urged to wear masks, and the sale of alcohol at bars has been suspended statewide. But Sen. Rick Scott has repeatedly sneered at the idea of government ordering folks around, insisting that if you simply explain the risks, they will do the right thing. In an interview Monday with Greta Van Susteren, he compared educating people on the need for masks to warning them of an approaching hurricane. Scott did not address the fact that hurricanes are not contagious.

Gov. Ron DeSantis also remains loath to require mask wearing and is largely leaving it to local officials to impose safety measures.

And now, to top it all off, Florida seems poised to become a COVID-19 theme park of sorts, a place willing to host large-scale, high-profile gatherings that more skittish — or perhaps more sensible — communities have deemed too hot to handle.

Last week, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that the University of Michigan had withdrawn from hosting the Oct. 15 matchup between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, citing concerns about the pandemic. It’s hard to fault the school. Such debates typically draw not only the candidates and campaign workers but also a flood of media and supporters, as well as the local workers who staff the venues. In his letter to the commission, the university’s president, Mark Schlissel, explained that the school feared it was “not feasible for us to safely host”

Hundreds of people disregarding social distancing in Miami Beach on June 24. the event as planned.

Instead, the proceedings will take place at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami. Last summer, the center hosted the first debate of the Democratic presidential primary season, but the situation has obviously shifted a bit since.

On Sunday, the reported daily case count in MiamiDade County hit a record 2,152, accounting for more than a quarter of the state’s new cases. The area also reported that hospitalizations had risen for the previous 15 days straight. As the event nears, the center and the commission are expected to detail enhanced safety measures.

The debate announcement came not two weeks after the even bigger news that the Republican National Committee is moving part of its presidential nominating convention — at least all the fun, sparkly bits, including Trump’s acceptance speech — to Jacksonville, Florida, in late August. The multiday spectacle was originally set for Charlotte, North Carolina, where some of the boring official business, such as voting on the nominations, will still occur.

But North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper, a Democrat, could not guarantee that the pandemic would be under sufficient control by next month to allow for the kind of raucous, overcrowded, extended extravaganza that Trump demanded. The president slapped down the proposals for smaller crowds, social distancing and mandatory masks and instead went forum-shopping for a state willing to let him throw his dream party, public health risks be damned.

And so back to Florida we go.

It makes perfect political sense: The president recently made Florida his adopted home state, after New York hurt his feelings once too often. DeSantis is an outspoken Trumpist, unlikely to make a big fuss about

the perils of jamming thousands of celebrators into an enclosed arena. Jacksonville’s mayor, Lenny Curry, is a former chairman of the state Republican Party with his own misgivings about government mandates.

But the situation in Jacksonville, Florida’s most populous city, has taken a scary turn of late, with COVID-19 cases going up, up, up. Things have gotten so worrisome that on Monday, Curry ordered that masks be worn indoors in public spaces, which includes private businesses. The requirement applies to everyone over age 6, though certain categories of establishments are exempt, and proprietors are responsible for ensuring compliance. Curry did not attend the news conference at which his order was announced.

Trump’s big blowout is still several weeks off, but Jacksonville’s mask mandate could prove awkward if the virus has not loosened its grip by then. With many top Republican leaders coming out as pro-mask, Trump told Fox Business Network on Wednesday that he was “all for masks” and would wear one himself if he were “in a tight situation with people.” He has, in fact, spent this pandemic pointedly not wearing one, at least not in public, and advertising his disdain for such unmanly accouterments.

No matter how wild and crazy he can get at times, Florida Man surely deserves better than all this.

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18

Monday, July 6, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Seriously, just wear your mask

By JESSE WEGMAN

W

ear a mask.

Seriously, just wear one. Almost any mask will do, really. N95, surgical, spandex, homespun cotton. For people who aren’t front-line health care workers, what matters is whatever you can get your hands on that fits over your nose and mouth.

As the nation plunges for a second time into the depths of this brutal pandemic, officials worry we’ll soon have as many as 100,000 new cases every day. Summer won’t save us. Neither will bluster or bleach.

It’s easy to want to give up, but it would be wrong.

Wearing a mask is not only simple and cheap, it’s also proved to be effective in slowing the virus’ spread. It will protect the health and even save the lives of your loved ones, your neighbors and people you don’t know.

This isn’t hard. If the lower half of your face is not covered when you go out in public, stop searching for excuses and go mask up.

Or, if you like, think about it as a gesture of patriotism as we mark a stark and somber Independence Day. But please, just don’t think about it as so many Republicans do. “Mask-wearing has become a totem, a secular religious symbol,” Alex Castellanos, a longtime Republican strategist, told The Washington Post. “Christians wear crosses, Muslims wear a hijab, and members of the Church of Secular Science bow to the Gods of Data by wearing a mask as their symbol, demonstrating that they are the elite; smarter, more rational, and morally superior to everyone else.”

This is a bizarre way to talk about people who are guided by facts, science and reason. It’s not about making a political point or asserting moral superiority; it’s about saving lives and protecting one another — which should be a basic element of citizenship in any democracy.

And yet, like so many seemingly nonpolitical topics, donning a mask has become partisanized to the point that people are brawling in supermarkets over their right to infect others. “It’s a free country; I can do what I want” sounds charming when it comes from a child. It can be far worse when it is shouted from the mouth of a possibly infected adult. It’s a strange sort of freedom that includes exposing other people to a potentially deadly virus. What’s to resist about showing respect to your fellow Americans? Why turn a straightforward public health issue into a political one? The virus doesn’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. It ravaged blue states in the spring, and now it’s plowing through red ones.

All it cares about are finding open mouths and nostrils.

It’s crazy that we are having this debate after all. Dozens of countries have already mandated mask-wearing in public. It’s not a coincidence that the United States remains the world’s coronavirus hot spot.

Only recently — as the virus descends on the places where their political supporters live — have some top Repu-

(By the way, why, in the richest country on the planet, was there such a glaring shortage of masks? It’s not as though the mask-makers didn’t see what was coming. One executive at a Texas medical supply company warned the Trump administration back in January that he was getting deluged with orders from abroad. He offered to produce as many as 1.7 million N95 masks per week for the federal government. The administration declined.)

There’s also the uncertainty inherent to the scientific process. In the early stages of the pandemic, for instance, it wasn’t clear that infected people who had no symptoms could transmit the virus, so there didn’t appear to be a need for the general public to wear masks. Now, of course, it’s clear that asymptomatic transmission most likely plays a big Clockwise from top left: Vice President Mike Pence; Hou- role in the virus’ spread. This doesn’t mean we should ignore se Speaker Nancy Pelosi; President Donald Trump; Senator the scientists, or accuse them, as Fox News’ Laura Ingraham Mitch McConnell, the majority leader. did, of being part of “the medical deep state.” Scientists generate hypotheses based on what they know at the time; some turn out to be incorrect, so scientists adjust and come up with blicans come to their senses. On Thursday, Gov. Greg Ab- better hypotheses. That is how science works, and most of bott of Texas, whose state is currently being overwhelmed the time it happens out of the public view. But now, with the with new cases, issued a statewide mask mandate. (Indoor whole world watching and on edge, every error is magnified. churchgoers are exempted, but outdoor protesters aren’t.)

In any case, it’s long past time to stop blaming health There have been encouraging words from the Senate ma- officials’ messaging. The Centers for Disease Control and Prejority leader, Mitch McConnell, Vice President Mike Pence, vention updated its guidance to recommend the wearing of even Sean Hannity. Earlier this week, Steve Doocy, a host masks on April 3; three months later, countless Americans are of “Fox & Friends,” which has as direct a line to President still refusing.

Donald Trump’s brain as any top White House adviser, pleaMasks are not a cure-all for the coronavirus pandemic. ded with the president to “set an example” and wear a mask. Countries that have gotten the virus under control have done MAGA should now stand for “Masks Are Great Again,” he so through a robust public health response, including aggressaid. We’re not holding our breath. Even with records being sive testing and contact tracing. We also need to properly set daily, the White House refuses to issue a nationwide face fund research into vaccines and other treatments. Instead, the mask mandate.

Trump administration has wound down its coronavirus task Some resisters are still sore about the contradictory or force, perhaps because Trump still seems to believe that, as incorrect messages about masks that came from health offi- he put it as recently as Wednesday, the virus is “going to sort cials in early days of the pandemic. In late February, Surgeon of just disappear, I hope.” The buck stops anywhere but here.

General Jerome M. Adams tweeted: “Seriously people — The White House continues to deny that it has any resSTOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preven- ponsibility to lead in this effort. On Thursday, Kellyanne Conting general public from catching #Coronavirus.” way, one of Trump’s top aides, said: “People are not wearing Anthony Fauci said a version of this a few days later. masks. And I don’t think they’re not wearing masks becau“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” he se the president of the United States is not wearing a mask. told CBS. “When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wea- They’re not wearing a mask because nobody’s saying put the ring a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it mask on.” might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect And all this time we thought the presidency was a bully protection that people think that it is.” pulpit. Alas, the leader of the free world still refuses to coThese were missteps, without question. But remember ver his face in public, although he did claim he was “all for the context in which those pleas were made. In early March, masks” earlier this week. hospitals across the country were preparing for a massive The way to deal with an abject failure of leadership surge of patients, and masks were in perilously short supply. like this is at the ballot box in November. But the way to deal Considering the significant risks to front-line health care wor- with the pandemic’s daily assault on America today is to do kers, and the lack of sufficient protective gear, it was unders- the things regular people can do with little to no effort: Wash tandable — even if misguided in retrospect — to want to hands regularly, practice social distancing and wear a mask. ensure that masks were available to those who needed them On this July 4 weekend, consider it the least you can do for most. your country.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

19

Salud orienta sobre vacunas requeridas a estudiantes para el nuevo semestre escolar Por THE STAR poco más de un mes para que inicie el nuevo seA mestre escolar, el Departamento de Salud enfatizó en las vacunas que cada estudiante debe tener al día,

para estar protegido contra enfermedades serias, según lo dispuesto en la Ley de Inmunización.

“Las vacunas a tiempo…protegen a todos. Bajo este lema, y conforme a la Ley aprobada el 25 de septiembre de 1983, todos los estudiantes, de acuerdo con su edad, que se matriculen en cualquier institución educativa del país, pública o privada, deben tener administradas sus vacunas. Esto incluye, desde los centros de cuidado diurno hasta las universidades”, sostuvo la doctora Iris Cardona, subsecretaria de la agencia y experta en vacunación, tras resaltar la importancia de cumplir con el itinerario de vacunación, independientemente de si las clases se ofrecerán de manera presencial o no.

Cardona explicó que los estudiantes de escuela elemental, intermedia y superior deberán cumplir con los requisitos mínimos de dosis de vacuna contra la Difteria, Tétanos y Tosferina, Polio, Haemophilus Influenzae tipo B (Hib), Hepatitis B, Sarampión común, Sarampión alemán, Paperas, Varicela y Neumococo, de acuerdo a su edad.

“Todo adolescente de 11 a 18 años de edad debe cumplir con una dosis de la vacuna contra el Tétanos, Difteria y Tosferina (Tdap). Los de 11 años de edad debe tener una dosis de la vacuna conjugada contra el Meningococo (MCV4) y una segunda dosis de la misma a los 16 años de edad. Asimismo, necesitará por lo menos la primera dosis de la vacuna contra el virus de

papiloma humano, aquel adolescente de 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 y 16 años de edad y completar la serie según se recomienda en el Itinerario de Vacunación”, apuntó la también pediatra, al señalar que por la pandemia del CVID-19, las vacunas de rutina cobran mayor importancia.

Añadió que, en el caso de estudiantes universitarios de nuevo ingreso, menores de 21 años, se les requerirán refuerzos contra el Tétano, Difteria y Tosferina (Tdap) y/o contra el Tétanos y Difteria (Td) según sea el caso, Sarampión común, Sarampión alemán y Paperas, Hepatitis B y Polio.

“Las vacunas tienen que verse como un asunto bien serio. Las mismas deben estar registradas en el Formulario P-VAC-3, que todos conocen como el papel verde”, amplió Cardona.

Por otro lado, en cuanto a las exenciones para vacunar por razones religiosas y médicas, señaló que las mismas tienen que ser entregadas a la institución edu-

cativa para ser matriculado. Una declaración jurada solicitando exención religiosa deberá indicar la religión o secta y contar con las firmas del padre o tutor legal y por el ministro de la religión. Una certificación solicitando exención médica debe ser firmada por un médico autorizado a ejercer la profesión en Puerto Rico y deberá indicar la razón específica y la posible duración de las condiciones o circunstancias contraindicadas de una o más de las vacunaciones requeridas.

“Además, les recuerdo a los padres lo importante de vacunar a sus hijos contra la influenza para la temporada 2020-2021. La vacunación contra la influenza es el mejor método para prevenir esta infección y sus complicaciones. No podemos bajar la guardia”, sostuvo la funcionaria pública.

Finalmente, adelantó que debido a la situación actual que enfrenta el Registro de Vacunación -PRIR-, la cual no ha podido ser resuelta al momento, aquellos padres que necesitan el Certificado de Vacunas -P-VAC3 o papel verde- deberán comunicarse con su proveedor de servicios de vacunación.

Al momento de la solicitud se le requerirá información personal como nombre y apellidos, fecha de nacimiento, nombre y apellidos de la madre, número de teléfono, pueblo de residencia y el nombre y pueblo de su proveedor de vacunas.

“Con esta información se buscará el expediente de vacunas y, de estar completo, se procederá con la emisión del Certificado. A su vez, se le ha solicitado al Departamento de Educación que les devuelva el Certificado de Vacunas tanto a los estudiantes que terminaron su 4to año de escuela superior, como a los que se transfieran a otra institución educativa”, concluyó.

Denuncian intento de mutilar al Corredor Ecológico de San Juan con proyecto sin vistas públicas Por THE STAR na medida que quitaba varias fincas del Corredor U Ecológico de San Juan fue presentada, pero no aprobada, en la pasada sesión legislativa, denunció en

la mañana del domingo José ‘Pepe’ Ortiz, precandidato a la Cámara de Representantes por el distrito tres de San Juan en la papeleta del Partido Popular Democrático (PPD).

“El P de la C 2575, radicado el 24 de junio de este año y que pasó a la Comisión de Gobierno es otro ejemplo más de la agenda del Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP) de privatizar los activos que son del pueblo de Puerto Rico. Dicha medida expresamente buscaba enmendar varios artículos de la Ley 206-2003, conocida como “Ley para Designar el Corredor Ecológico de San Juan”, con el propósito de revertir la zonificación de ciertas fincas. Este proyecto nos recuerda vívidamente el fallido intento de atentar contra Mar Chiquita en Manatí”, aseguró Ortiz.

La medida no tuvo vistas públicas, dijo Ortiz en declaraciones escritas.

La Comisión de Gobierno presidida por Jorge ‘Georgie’ Navarro Suárez rindió un escueto informe

de solo dos páginas y sin la participación del Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales (DRNA).

Ortiz destacó que aunque fue un proyecto que no llegó a aprobarse en la pasada sesión legislativa, el representante novoprogresista por el precinto 3 de la capital, Juan Oscar Morales, propuso quitar al Corredor Ecológico de San Juan varias fincas, “con la complicidad del propio presidente de la Cámara de Representantes, Carlos ‘Johnny’ Méndez, coautor de la medida”, sostuvo Ortiz.

“Esta Ley, que ya lleva 17 años sirviéndole al País, dio vida a una zona de amortiguamiento urbano de unas 1,000 cuerdas de terreno para que fuera refugio para especies vivas y protección del recurso agua. Precisamente en momentos de sequía como los que vivimos hoy, el representante Morales pretendió reducir ese espacio, ¿con qué motivo, para venderlas a quién y para qué uso?, son las preguntas que están sobre la mesa”, dijo Ortiz.

Añadió que como candidato está alerta en la defensa de los recursos naturales del distrito y defender la política pública vigente, “ya que es mejor proteger los ecosistemas que buscar reemplazos o reproducir la naturaleza que se perdió. Las décadas que le toman a

un bosque crearse pueden hacerse sal y agua por medio del desarrollo desmedido”, aseguró el candidato popular.

Según el proyecto de ley, en las fincas a segregarse hay unas 43 parcelas de terreno que previamente fueron impactadas por actividades humanas “y las mismas tienen poco valor ecológico, con pocas especies de yerbas y donde se ha notado la escasez de árboles”.

Ortiz señaló que “el uso inadecuado del lenguaje para describir la zona lo que oculta es la intención de entregar dichos terrenos al desarrollo, cancelando el efecto natural de los bosques que necesitan muchos años para su desarrollo”.

Finalmente, Ortiz propuso que el Corredor Ecológico de San Juan se atienda debidamente mediante un plan científico de reforestación, donde se utilicen especies nativas, propias del Corredor Ecológico de San Juan.

“En todo el mundo las políticas públicas van en dirección correcta de la conservación del entorno natural, particularmente en lo relativo a los bosques y cuerpos de agua. No podemos permitir que en nuestra isla 100×35 despreciemos los valores que la naturaleza nos ofrece”, finalizó el precandidato.

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Monday, July 6, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

A summer without superheroes

By A.O. SCOTT

I

t’s hardly news that we live in an age of polarization.

For at least the past dozen years, the public has been pressed to choose between obedience to a smug, privilege-hoarding neoliberal elite or allegiance to a belligerent ideology rooted in negation, self-pity, resentment and revenge. You can worship the avatars of an imperial status quo that regards you as a data point or bow down to idols of grievance.

Do you embrace winners or root for underdogs? Do you fantasize about world government or vigilante justice?

Or do you find yourself drifting from one pole to another, hoping to find something to satisfy longings — for safety, for danger, for solidarity, for fun — that are themselves often unstable and contradictory? Satisfaction is intermittent and fleeting. Disappointment is the norm. Couldn’t there be a real alternative, an escape from the grip of Marvel/ Disney and DC/Warner Bros.?

What did you think I was talking about? I know the analogy is imperfect, but maybe it isn’t really an analogy at all. Popular culture and politics exist on the same wavelength and work together to shape our shared consciousness. The fantasies we buy into with our attention and money condition our sense of what it is possible or permissible to imagine. And the imagination of Hollywood in the franchise era — the age of IP-driven creativity and expanded-universe cinema — has been authoritarian, anti-democratic, cynical and pseudo-populist. That much of the politics of the past decade can be described with the same words is hardly an accident.

Don’t @ me. I’m not trying to insult fans of “Suicide Squad” or “Ant-Man.” I’ve done enough of that already, and anyway, the quickness of so many partisans to take offense counts as evidence in support of my argument.

Fandom can be a form of benign, nurturing tribalism, a mode of participation beyond mere consumption. But it has devolved recently into sullen passivity, which occasionally erupts into toxic rage.

I’m trying not to be partisan, and also to avoid bland evenhandedness. I’ve enjoyed movies from both the Marvel and the DC universes, loathed others and shrugged at plenty more. But I’m not here to rehash my opinions about any particular installment. We can continue to debate our ranked lists and to isolate favorites. “Joker” was so dark.

“Guardians of the Galaxy” was so much fun. “Thor: Ragnarok” was so zany. But such distinctions — and even the appreciation of particular performances or feats of filmmaking — distract attention from the oppressive, stultifying weight of the system as a whole.

There are still books to be written about the ideological trajectories of Batman and Superman, who started out as part of the worldwide anti-fascist crusade and may have ended up on the other side. But the politics of the DC uni-

verse are at once blatant and incoherent in ways that make these movies less insidious than their shiny, consensusdriven Marvel counterparts.

It’s always been possible to argue with and about “The Dark Knight,” to be troubled or thrilled by dystopian, punitive visions of righteous and recreational violence.

That you can hate those movies or feel hated by them is to some degree a sign of integrity. You can be repelled by this universe or expelled from it. With Marvel, the only option is submission.

As befits an undertaking wearing the Disney brand, the Marvel universe, a fief of the Magic Kingdom since 2009, is a friendly place. The engine that drove the franchise as it expanded was the sometimes fractious web of collegial relationships between the various heroes. There were comical squabbles and rivalries (between the Hulk and Thor) and also more consequential divisions, like the ongoing debate between Iron Man and Captain America about the ethics of having an unelected, unaccountable, secret organization of costumed fighters operating as a global — and then an intergalactic — police force.

The deck was always stacked. The modern Marvel universe was built around the charisma of Iron Man. The cult of personality around Tony Stark, who went from being the franchise’s original bad boy to becoming its most significant martyr, emerged alongside the real-world worship

of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and tech-company founders. Stark, leveraging Robert Downey Jr.’s vast reserves of charm, was a rich kid, scion of a big old-economy company, who disrupted the military-industrial complex and sold the world on all kinds of fantastic, game-changing inventions. If he occasionally stumbled into ethical gray areas or let his hubris get the better of his humanity, his charm and his unshakable good-guy identity always kept him in our good graces. He was funny, flirtatious and just enough of a jerk to keep from being a drag. A celebrity and a capitalist. The paragon of 21st-century masculinity. Or else one of those guys who ended up ruining everything.

His colleagues weren’t much better, though exceptions can always be made. Not all superheroes or whatever. But consider the nature of their common corporate enterprise, and the profiles of its most important members.

Deities, hereditary monarchs, various renegade soldiers and spies. Scientists and super-beings. The only ones an ordinary person could relate to are Paul Rudd and Groot.

I know; they’re supposed to be superheroes, not everyday people. But in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a group of warriors pledged to serve ideals of justice and fairness became a self-regarding elite, a board of directors devoted to shoring up their own power. Disney’s corporate strategy is perfectly mirrored with these films, which serve as propaganda not for any particular party or set of beliefs but for the way things are.

The role of the audience, like the role of the anonymous millions whose lives and deaths are fodder for digital action sequences, is to show up and have fun, to root for the overdogs, assured that they know what’s best for the rest of us. This has been one of the dominant modes of entertainment: to enjoy the spectacle of our own domination.

Perhaps 2020 was going to be a little different. A year after the fake Gotterdammerung of “Avengers: Endgame,” Marvel was going to scale down a bit, spinning out stories of individual superheroes, like magazine profiles of lesser CEOs. But of course a real-world catastrophe intervened, and we find ourselves facing the likely prospect of a summer with no blockbusters, no franchise episodes demanding our presence and our attention on designated weekends, no aggressive marketing flooding our home screens.

And maybe, as we use this time to rethink many of the other systems that have seemed so immutable, so natural, so much a part of the way things just are, we can reflect on why we thought we needed all those heroes in the first place, or how they were foisted on us. Eventually, we’ll go back to the movies, but maybe we’ll be less docile, less obedient, when we do. I’m not necessarily saying that we should abolish the Avengers, or defund the DC universe, but fantasies of power are connected to the actual forms that power takes. What feels like a loss in this superhero-free summer might be liberation.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

21

Newt Gingrich and the dawn of a toxic political era

By JENNIFER SZALAI

T

o hear President Donald Trump use the term, “corruption” can do double duty as a hand grenade and a safe word — a readymade epithet to yell out whenever he’s feeling the squeeze.

It’s a tried-and-true strategy in the frantic trajectory of American politics since the 1970s. As Julian Zelizer shows in his briskly entertaining (if politically dispiriting) new book, “Burning Down the House,” an ambitious and impatient Republican from Georgia by the name of Newton Leroy Gingrich long ago figured out that corruption was a useful charge for a young upstart to deploy against establishment politicians — a way of turning their vaunted experience against them. More political experience meant more connections with powerful constituents, which meant more of a chance that some of those connections smelled bad, or could be made to seem that way.

Gingrich’s lasting innovation, Zelizer says, was to turn a rhetorical gambit into an actionable weapon.

“Burning Down the House” looks at Gingrich before his lofty Contract With America and his down-anddirty government shutdown, before he became President Bill Clinton’s archnemesis as a gleefully obstructionist speaker of the House.

So much that’s associated with the Republican Party under Trump — the rowdiness, the bare-knuckle name-calling, the white-knuckle clinging to power at all cost — dates back to Gingrich’s ascent in the late ’80s. Gingrich went from being a junior member of Congress on the fringes of the minority party to the center of Republican leadership by destroying the long legislative career of Jim Wright, the Democratic speaker of the House. “We can date precisely the moment when our toxic political environment was born,” Zelizer declares. “Speaker Wright’s downfall in 1989.”

It’s a statement that sounds a lit-

tle pat (“precisely”?), but Zelizer has immersed himself in the political life of Gingrich, who realized early on the boons of spinning a tidy narrative and amping up the drama. Having tried and failed at an academic career as a historian, Gingrich liked to depict his entry into politics as the fulfillment of a higher calling that beckoned to him when he visited the World War I battlefield at Verdun as a teenager.

“This will absorb my life,” he told a biographer, solemnly reflecting on his fateful decision to devote himself to public policy. “It was the most effective thing I could do to ensure that the U.S. would remain free.”

But the demands of actual policymaking were too slow and painstaking to hold a restless Gingrich’s attention for very long. He preferred the thrill of the fight, and fashioned himself into an egghead brawler, reminding everyone that he was a trained historian at one moment and railing against the infernal intellectual elites the next. During one of his tirades, he likened Wright to Mussolini. Gingrich later compared himself to Martin Luther confronting the Diet of Worms.

But as any politician knows,

even the most grandiose words are just words. What Gingrich figured out was how to turn his animus into actual power by leveraging the institutions at hand. That might sound abstract and technical, but the results turned out to be brutal. Zelizer’s last book, “Fault Lines,” which he co-authored with Kevin Kruse, a fellow historian at Princeton, traced the origins of our current political divisions to Watergate and President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974; in “Burning Down the House,” Zelizer shows how Gingrich was able to exploit the profound developments since Watergate — a mistrustful electorate, a generation of reporters hungry for stories that carried a whiff of political malfeasance, a set of well-meaning but manipulable good-government reforms — to his lasting advantage.

Gingrich turned C-SPAN, the relentlessly bland public network that was supposed to make Americans better informed about the nuts and bolts of policymaking, into an unlikely broadcaster of hammy theater. He and his allies would deliver a coordinated set of speeches attacking Democrats before a mostly empty chamber, knowing that C-SPAN’s cameras were rolling, and that anything outrageous would get picked up and amplified by mainstream outlets. Wright, who was House majority leader at the time, was irritated enough by the antics of “silly little Newt Gingrich” that he complained about the “shrill and shameless little demagogue” in his diary.

Wright’s dismissiveness was a harbinger of how blindsided he would be when “little” Gingrich eventually came for him. Wright had entered Congress in the Eisenhower era, long before Watergate, when legislating revolved more around chummy relationships than hard-and-fast rules. The Democrats had also controlled the House since 1954, which was more than enough time for a selfsatisfied complacency to set in. After Wright became speaker in 1987, Gingrich dug up clippings about his

connections to businessmen in his home state of Texas, including figures in the savings-and-loans industry, and paraded them around to reporters.

A fishy book deal for a slender volume of Wright’s speeches and notes became a centerpiece of Gingrich’s charges when he filed a formal ethics complaint against Wright.

Never mind that Gingrich had his own fishy book-selling arrangement from a few years before, raising money from Republican donors in an attempt to “force a bestseller,” as Gingrich himself put it. Or that Wright’s behavior was decidedly gray, not the stark black and white that a fulminating Gingrich made it out to be.

Gingrich, Zelizer writes, contorted the rules and mechanisms of reform to serve his own ends. After the public learned that Wright’s top adviser was a convicted felon whose brother happened to be married to Wright’s daughter, voters were horrified, and House Democrats began to fear for their own political futures. Wright, a tough and effective arm-twisting legislator who saw the House as a counterweight to President Ronald Reagan and his “cruelly deranged” policies, decided to step down, saying that he expected his resignation to serve as a “total payment for the anger and hostility we feel toward each other.”

Zelizer writes about all of this with aplomb, teasing out the ironies and the themes, showing that what made Gingrich exceptional wasn’t so much his talent as his timing. He happened to seize power at a moment when a post-Watergate ecosystem paradoxically selected for politicians like him — legislatively useless, for the most part, but freakishly talented at political warfare and self-promotion, wielding idealism as a cudgel while never deigning to be idealistic themselves. You don’t have to be nostalgic for the old political era of smoke-filled backrooms to wonder if the public was better served by an arsonist bearing a blowtorch and a Cheshire cat grin.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

5 Caribbean destinations reopening this summer

The private beach at the Old Fort Bay Club on New Providence island of the Bahamas.

By ELAINE GLUSAC

T

he COVID-19 pandemic struck the Caribbean at the height of high season, when snowbirds, primarily from the United States, pack the beaches for winter and spring break and provide the revenue to see resorts and sometimes entire countries through the lull of summer and fall.

But in recent years, places like Puerto Rico and the Bahamas have developed a strong summer business, fueled by bargain seekers, adventure travelers and families.

Now, as the region begins to reopen to international travelers, it faces not just the challenge of the pandemic but the financial blow dealt by the absence of cruising and the onset of hurricane season.

Excluding Guyana, the Caribbean economy is expected to contract by 3% in 2020, according to the World Bank.

“We’re not fooling ourselves. We fully expect to see a slow return of travel,” said Frank Comito, chief executive and director general of the Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Association, which represents 33 national hotel associations in the region. “We expect those

that do open up in the coming months will take some time to see hotel occupancy levels even approach 50%.”

As countries reopen, most are mandating face masks indoors and social distancing.

Other restrictions vary widely.

Aruba planned to reopen to Canadians,

Europeans and most Caribbean nationals on July 1, and to visitors from the United States on July 10. St. Maarten announced its airport would reopen July 1 as long as COVID-19 cases remained at zero. The Cayman Islands, a nation much less reliant on tourism (about 30 percent of its economy) compared to many of its neighbors, will wait until September. St. Barts is among several islands requiring a negative Covid-19 test of arrivals or offering one on the spot (for 155 euros, or about $175). Bonaire and Curacao planned to reopen July 1, to some Europeans.

“The USA is not part of this reopening phase due to the fact that it is still considered high risk,” according to a letter from Bonaire tourism to its travel partners.

As governments have clarified their policies, airlines, including American, Delta, JetBlue and Southwest, plan to resume service to many Caribbean destinations in July.

When they do, they’ll be flying into a hurricane season that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted could be above normal. In May, it forecast 13 to 19 named storms, including three to six major hurricanes at Category 3 and above.

The coast along San Juan, Puerto Rico, March 20, 2015. The year 2020 will undoubtedly be an anomaly in San Juan, which normally hosts more than 500 cruise ships a year.

The region has been experiencing above-normal storm levels since 1995 because of warmer ocean temperatures, weaker trade winds and other factors.

Caribbean nations, perennially watchful, hope to salvage a summer season before the peak of storm season in September.

“We’re hoping to get going June, July and August to give the economy an injection we need and then hopefully get through hurricane season,” said Joseph Boschulte, the commissioner of tourism for the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The following are plans for five island destinations reopening now.

The Bahamas The Bahamas planned to enter Phase 2 of its reopening July 1, welcoming overseas visitors. Travelers ages 2 and older must present a negative COVID-19 test taken within 10 days of arrival. They must also submit an electronic health visa that asks questions, including where they have traveled in the last six weeks, and receive clearance to travel.

“As we look at the return of tourism, all data is showing Americans are interested in domestic travel, but because of proximity they are considering the Bahamas a domestic stop,” said Joy Jibrilu, director general of the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism, adding that 82% of visitors are from the U.S. “That’s working to our advantage.”

Some resorts, including Baha Mar, the luxury development on Nassau, will remain closed until October.

But the Bahamas’ largest resort, Atlantis Paradise Island, plans to reopen beginning July 30. By midmonth, it expects to have nearly 60% of its 3,786 rooms open. Its water park and dolphin swim facilities will be open along with its casino and 20 restaurants.

Normally, July and August are two of the resort’s busiest months, attracting families on summer vacations.

“We recognize not everyone will be comfortable initially traveling,” said Audrey Oswell, president and managing director of Atlantis. “If we get to 50% occupancy, I’d be thrilled.”

The San Juan Daily Star Jamaica Jamaica reopened its borders to international visitors June 15, with guidelines to be reviewed every two weeks.

Currently, visitors must be preapproved for entry via an online travel authorization that assesses an applicant’s health risk. Beginning July 10, travelers from areas deemed high risk — currently those areas include Arizona, Florida, New York and Texas — must show proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken within seven days of arrival.

Travelers are restricted to a newly designated “Resilient Corridor” along the north coast from Negril to Portland (a second corridor in the area of the capital of Kingston is open to business travelers).

Properties that are allowed to reopen must pass a COVID-19 compliant test, which includes protocols such as sanitizing public touch points like elevator buttons every two hours, installing automatic doors or having a person to open and close doors, and moving as many activities as possible outdoors.

Resorts are reopening gradually.

Sandals Montego Bay reopened June 16; five more Sandals siblings will roll out through October. The Tryall Club, the 2,200-acre property with 75 rental villas in Montego Bay, has announced it will reopen Aug. 1. The all-inclusive Sunset at the Palms in Negril plans to reopen July 9. The 55-room boutique Jamaica Inn in Ocho Rios has yet to name its date, although management expects it may be in late July.

“We don’t feel we have the level of demand to warrant opening,” said Kyle Mais, general manager of the Jamaica Inn. “Airlines are a big part of the formula. We’re seeing more demand in the later part of the month as more flights are being announced.”

Puerto Rico Puerto Rico has announced it will reopen for inbound tourism July 15. Arriving travelers will have to show the results of a negative COVID-19 test taken within 72 hours or be tested on site and, if positive, go into quarantine for 14 days at their own expense.

Beaches on Puerto Rico are open, although the islandwide curfew, in effect from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., has been extended to July 22. Restaurants are operating at 75% capacity, and casinos, set to reopen July 1, planned to administer temperature checks at entry.

Monday, July 6, 2020

St. Lucia, like several other Caribbean islands, is requiring the results of Covid-19 tests.

To encourage travel, several hotels are offering deals, including the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, which is offering a three-night stay for the price of two through the end of the year (from $199 a night).

This year will undoubtedly be an anomaly in San Juan, which normally hosts more than 500 cruise ships a year.

A quieter Puerto Rico might interest some visitors, but it’s a financial blow to the island that sustained devastating Hurricane Maria in 2017 and, earlier this year, a cluster of earthquakes.

“The summer tourism season has evolved and isn’t solely dependent on locals any more, but this year local tourism is going to restart tourism engines here on Puerto Rico,” said Brad Dean, chief executive of Discover Puerto Rico, which promotes tourism on the island.

Saint Lucia Saint Lucia officially reopened its borders June 4 and expected its first international flights the first week of July. Arriving passengers must provide the results of a negative COVID-19 test taken within 48 hours of arrival.

About a dozen hotels on the island have applied for a new, required COVID-19 cleaning certification that includes protocols for sanitizing luggage on arrival, maintaining a nurse’s station, updating housekeeping standards, dispensing hand sanitizer and reorganizing dining areas to meet social-distancing requirements.

The Moorings, which offers crewed and bareboat yacht charters, will reopen

its St. Lucia base Aug. 1 with disinfected boats, linens provided in sealed bags and advice to passengers to bring their own snorkel gear as it will no longer be provided.

“Saint Lucia is fortunate to have strong occupancy year-round and a number of hotels are keen to reopen because they still have business on the books,” said Karolin Troubetzkoy, president of the Saint Lucia Hospitality & Tourism Association.

U.S. Virgin Islands On June 1, the U.S. Virgin Islands entered the fourth of its five reopen-

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TRAVEL

ing phases, which include welcoming tourists who must undergo temperature checks and health screenings upon entry.

Tourism authorities are hoping that the increase in scheduled flights in July and the recent reopening of such highprofile resorts as the Ritz-Carlton, St. Thomas will encourage travelers to take a summer vacation in the islands.

“The USVI is ripe to benefit from people who want to stay under the U.S. flag,” said Boschulte, the tourism commissioner.

Until the pandemic, the islands were on track to host 1.5 million cruise passengers this year, 1.4 million of them to St. Thomas. While many of the shipdependent shops on the main street in the capital of Charlotte Amalie remain closed, other businesses are carrying on.

“Our key restaurants are open with proper precautions, and Gladys’ callaloo soup is as great as ever,” said Gerard Sperry, who guides St. Thomas Food Tours, naming a popular downtown restaurant.

On St. Croix, the Buccaneer resort remained open throughout the pandemic to essential workers and reopened to tourists June 1 with a glass shield on the front desk, restaurant capacity reduced by 50% and a closed bar, although cocktails may be delivered to your chaise longue.

“We are seeking a very specific guest who puts their safety and the staff safety as their No. 1 concern,” said Elizabeth Armstrong, the general manager and third-generation owner of the resort where occupancy may hit 35% in July.

A swimmer floats offshore in Negril, Jamaica.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

Older adults may be left out of some COVID-19 trials

By PAULA SPAN

P

icture the day — in six months, a year and a half or in 2023 — when university researchers or a pharmaceutical company announces a breakthrough against the virus that causes COVID-19.

Maybe it’s a successful vaccine or an effective treatment, a discovery that brings hope and relief — especially to the older adults most vulnerable to the disease, eager to return to their prepandemic lives.

Imagine, however, that the researchers neglected to enroll many people in their 70s or 80s in the clinical trials that established the effectiveness of this treatment.

As a result, it’s unclear how much the treatment will benefit older people, what risks it might pose, or if the dose that works for younger people is the best one for those older.

Could that really happen? Certainly there is a long history of older people being excluded from clinical trials, even when the diseases in question disproportionately affected this group. They have been underrepresented, for instance, in studies of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and osteoporosis.

“Ideally, the patients enrolled in a randomized clinical trial reflect the demographics of the disease,” said Dr. Mark Sloan, a hematologist leading a COVID-19 drug study at Boston Medical Center, in an email. “Unfortunately, this is seldom the case.”

Now, Dr. Sharon K. Inouye, a geriatrician at Harvard Medical School and Hebrew SeniorLife, is sounding an alarm. She points out that in the race to find drugs and vaccines to fight the pandemic — in which 80% of American deaths have occurred in people over age 65 — a substantial proportion of studies may be excluding older subjects, purposely or inadvertently.

“A year from now, when these trials are published, I don’t want to see that there’s no one in them over 75,” she said.

“If they create a drug that works really well in healthy 50- and 60-year-olds, they’ve missed the boat.”

She and her team have reviewed 241 interventional COVID-19 studies undertaken in the United States and listed on clinicaltrials.gov, a site maintained by a division

The coronavirus disproportionately affects seniors, but they may not be included in important clinical trials for vaccines and treatments. of the National Institutes of Health.

They found that 37 of these trials — testing drugs, vaccines and devices — set specific age limits and would not enroll participants older than 75, 80 or 85. A few even excluded those over 65.

Another group of 27 trials set no maximum age but used study designs that could nevertheless disqualify many older adults.

Some excluded people with illnesses common among the old, like hypertension or diabetes, even if participants controlled the disease through medication. “Surrogates for age exclusion,” Inouye said.

In other cases, broad exclusion criteria gave the investigator inordinate discretion.

Inouye pointed to one trial barring subjects with “any physical examination findings, and/or history of any illness, concomitant medications or recent live vaccines that, in the opinion of the study investigator, might confound the results of the study or pose an additional risk to the participant.”

That allows investigators to exclude people for reasons ranging from legitimate safety issues to the researchers’ own convenience. One scenario that worried Inouye: “If you have an older adult who appears hard of hearing, and it takes twice as long to explain the study and obtain consent, the investigator just won’t do it.”

Other studies, relying on digital technology, might rule out people who lack smartphones or the ability to use email.

Overall, when Inouye compiled preliminary results, which have not yet been published, she found that about one-quarter of interventional trials in the United States could exclude or underrepresent older adults. “To have them be this gravely impacted and not include them is immoral,” said Dr. Louise Aronson, author of the bestselling book “Elderhood” and a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco. “It seems crazy.”

In response to similar concerns, the NIH began last year to require the studies it funds to include “individuals across the life span,” unless investigators provide an “acceptable justification” for exclusion. If they cannot, NIH won’t award the grants.

“It’s a pretty visible guidepost, reflecting national standards,” Aronson said. But most clinical trials are privately funded and need not follow NIH policy.

Some investigators might make accommodations. A study at the University of California, San Francisco, for example, examining the use of the antibiotic azithromycin, drew Inouye’s attention because participants had to submit questionnaires online.

But Catherine Oldenburg, a co-principal

investigator, explained in an email that researchers would also allow participants to complete interviews by phone or have a proxy submit the online forms.

Still, the rush to learn more about the deadly coronavirus could exacerbate the problem, because including older people can make research slower, more complicated and more expensive.

In clinical trials, “you want to control as many factors as possible,” Aronson said.

Most older adults have other illnesses and take multiple medications, so-called confounding variables that make it difficult to distinguish the effects of the drug or vaccine being studied. Older people also suffer more side effects. “Nearly all drugs are less toxic when given to younger, healthier people,” Sloan said in an email. Focusing on them produces fewer adverse effects that must be reported, “and thereby improves chances for FDA approval.”

Physical disabilities, which make it harder for seniors to reach study sites, or hearing and vision impairments requiring large-print forms or audio amplification, can further decrease participation. Investigators may need to take the extra step of obtaining family consent if a patient is incapacitated.

But that shouldn’t prevent researchers from incorporating the population most at risk from the coronavirus. “If that’s the realworld scenario, you’ve got to deal with it,” said Susan Peschin, president of the nonprofit Alliance for Aging Research.

The Alliance wants the FDA, which is now preparing guidance for including older adults in cancer research, to issue guidelines covering all medical products for conditions that primarily affect the elderly.

The FDA has issued this kind of guidance as far back as 1993, and it released additional guidelines in 2012 and again last year, said Dr. Harpreet Singh, a division director at the agency’s Oncology Center of Excellence — although such guidance is not legally binding or enforceable.

Singh, a geriatrician and oncologist, acknowledged in an interview that the agency could do more to promote the inclusion of seniors. And when there is reason to suspect that trials are overlooking them, “it should be called out and examined.”

The San Juan Daily Star a usted por correo certificado con acuse de recibo, una copia ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO del emplazamiento y de la deDE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- manda presentada al lugar de NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA su última dirección conocida: SALA DE TOA ALTA. Paseo Los Corales I. ES Golfo de México, Dorado, PR 00646.

ORIENTAL BANK, EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y el Demandante, V., sello del Tribunal en Toa Alta, MYRTA I. MORALES Puerto Rico, hoy día 28 de feSAEZ, Fulano de tal y brero de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I la Sociedad Legal de SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria Gananciales compuesta Regional. NELIDA JIMENEZ por ambos SANCHEZ, Secretaria Auxiliar Demandados del Tribunal I. CIVIL NUM.: BY2019CV06510.

LEGAL NOTICE SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. EM- ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO PLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUESTADOS UNIDOS DE AME- NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA RICA EL PRESIDENTE DE SALA SUPERIOR DE GUAYLOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LI- NABO. BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO NOEL EDGARDO RICO. SS.

LEGAL NOTICE

A: MYRTA I. MORALES SAEZ, FULANO DE TAL y la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales compuesta por ambos

POR MEDIO del presente edicto se le notifica de la radicación de una demanda en cobro de dinero por la vía ordinaria en la que se alega que usted adeuda a la parte demandante, Oriental Bank, ciertas sumas de dinero, y las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado de este litigio.

El demandante, Oriental Bank, ha solicitado que se dicte sentencia en contra suya y que se le ordene pagar las cantidades reclamadas en la demanda.

POR EL PRESENTE EDICTO 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. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía 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.

Se le advierte que dentro de los diez (10) días siguientes a la publicación del presente edicto, se le estará enviando

@

RODRÍGUEZ RODRÍGUEZ t/c/c NOEL E. RODRÍGUEZ RODRÍGUEZ DEMANDANTE Vs.

JOHN DOE y RICHARD ROE como posibles tenedores desconocidos

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM. GB2020CV00314.

SOBRE: CANCELACION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE como posibles tenedores desconocidos

POR LA PRESENTE se les emplaza y requiere para que conteste la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este Edicto. Usted deberá radicar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial.pr/ sumac/, salvo que se presente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá radicar el original de su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia a los abogados de la parte demandante, LCDA. MARJALIISA COLÓN VILLANUEVA A su dirección: PO. Box 7970 Ponce, PR. 00732. Tel: 787-843-4168.

En dicha demanda se tramita un procedimiento de cancelación de pagare extraviado. Se alega en dicho procedimiento que se extravió un pagaré hipotecario por la suma de $125,000.00, con intereses fluctuante al “prime rate” y vencedero a su presentación., a favor del portador o a su orden,

staredictos1@outlook.com

Monday, July 6, 2020 según consta de la escritura número 392 otorgada en Sabana Grande, Puerto Rico, el día 17 de mayo de 2001 ante el notario Francisco J. Biaggi Landrón.

Inscrita al folio cincuenta y seis (56) del tomo mil trescientos cuarenta y uno (1341) de Guaynabo, finca número treinta y cuatro mil ciento cuarenta y nueve (34,149). Que grava la propiedad que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Propiedad Horizontal: Apartamento A guion seis (A-6). Apartamento residencial de forma irregular localizado en la tercera planta del edificio “A” del Condominio Portales de San Patricio situado en la Avenida San Patricio en el Barrio Pueblo Viejo del término municipal de Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. El área aproximada es de mil setenta y siete punto, trece (1077.13) pies cuadrados, equivalente a cien punto once noventa y dos (100.1192) metros cuadrados. Son sus linderos los siguientes: por el NORTE, veintiocho pies once pulgadas (28’ 11”) con área exterior común; por el SUR, en veintiocho pies once pulgadas (28’ 11”) con área exterior común y área de pasillo del edificio; por el ESTE, en cuarenta y seis pies once pulgadas (46’ 11”), con área exterior común, área de pasillo del edificio y pared medianera que lo separa del apartamento A guion cinco (A5; por el OESTE, en cuarenta y seis pies once pulgadas (46’ 11”),con área exterior común.

Consta de balcón, sala-comedor, cocina, laundry, dos baños y tres dormitorios. La puerta de entrada de este apartamento está situada en su lindero este.

Le corresponde dos 92) estacionamientos identificados con el mismo número y letra del apartamento. Este apartamento tiene una participación de dos punto ochenta y cinco por ciento (2.85%) en los elementos comunes del condominio.

Inscrito al folio doscientos (200) del tomo novecientos cuarenta y cuatro (944) de Guaynabo.

Finca número treinta y cuatro mil ciento cuarenta y nueve (34,149). Registro de la Propiedad de Guaynabo. SE LES APERCIBE que, de no hacer sus alegaciones responsivas a la demanda dentro del término aquí dispuesto, se les anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal en Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, a día 26 de junio de 2020.

LDCD. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Sec Regional. Diamar T.

25

Gonzalez Barreto, Sec del Tri- 2026, sobre la siguiente propiebunal Conf II. dad: URBANA: Solar marcado con el número 3 de la manzana LEGAL NOTICE GG de la Urbanización Puerto ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO Nuevo, propiedad de EverlasDE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- ting Development Corporation, NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA radicada en el Barrio MonaciSALA SUPERIOR DE SAN llos del término municipal de San Juan, Puerto Rico, con una JUAN. BANCO POPULAR DE cabida de 358.84 metros. En lindes por el: NORTE, SUR, PUERTO RICO ESTE y OESTE, con terrenos PARTE DEMANDANTE VS. PREFERRED MORTGAGE de propiedad de Everlasting Development Corporation y BANKERS; SCOTIABANK dando frente al Sur, con la calle DE PUERTO RICO como denominada número 52, hoy adquirente y sucesor calle Antillas de la Urbanización.

Enclava en este solar en derecho de PAN AMERICAN FINANCIAL una casa de concreto para fines residenciales. La propieCORPORATION; TIM ALAN LANE GALVAN; dad consta inscrita al Folio 100 del Tomo 202 de Monacillos, MILEDY CÁCERES Registro de la Propiedad de BRETON; JOHANNIE San Juan, Sección III, finca ROQUE T/C/C número 17,655. La escritura de hipoteca consta inscrita al JOHANNIE ROQUE Folio 36 vuelto del tomo 814 CÁCERES; FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, de Monacillos, Registro de la POSIBLES TENEDORES Propiedad de San Juan, Sección III, finca número 17,655, DESCONOCIDOS DEL inscripción 14ta. La parte dePAGARÉ mandada deberá presentar su PARTE DEMANDADA alegación responsiva a través CIVIL NÚM. SJ2019CV12513. del Sistema Unificado de AdmiSOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE nistración y Manejo de Casos PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO POR (SUMAC), al cual puede acceLA VÍA JUDICIAL. EDICTO. der utilizando la siguiente direcESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉ- ción electrónica: https://unired.

RICA EL PRESIDENTE DE ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se LOS E.E.U.U. EL ESTADO LI- represente por derecho propio, BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO en cuyo caso deberá presentar RICO. su alegación responsiva en la A: TIM ALAN LANE secretaría del Tribunal. Se le GALVAN y JOHANNIE advierte que, si no contesta la ROQUE T/C/C JOHANNIE demanda, radicando el original de la contestación en este TriROQUE CÁCERES a bunal y enviando copia de la su última dirección contestación a la abogada de la conocida: URB PUERTO Parte Demandante, Lcda. BelNUEVO, 443 CALLE ma Alonso García, cuya direcANTILLAS, SAN JUAN, ción es: PO Box 3922, Guaynabo, PR 00970-3922, Teléfono PR 00920-4110.

FULANO y MENGANO y Fax: (787) 789-1826, correo electrónico: oficinabelmaaDE TAL, POSIBLES lonso@gmail.com, dentro del TENEDORES término de treinta (30) días de DESCONOCIDOS DEL la publicación de este edicto, PAGARÉ excluyéndose el día de la publiQueda usted notificado que en cación, se le anotará la rebeldía este Tribunal se ha radicado y se le dictará Sentencia en su demanda sobre cancelación contra, concediendo el remede pagaré extraviado por la vía dio solicitado sin más citarle ni judicial. El 29 de noviembre de oírle. EXPEDIDO bajo mi fir1996, Miledy Cáceres Brenton ma y el sello del Tribunal, hoy y Johannie Roque, también co- 19 de junio de 2020, en San nocida como Johannie Roque Juan, Puerto Rico. GRISELDA Cáceres, constituyeron una RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, SEhipoteca en San Juan, Puerto CRETARIA REGIONAL. CARRico, conforme a la Escritura MEN E. GARCIA FIGUEROA, número 500 autorizada ante la SECRETARIA DE SERVICIOS notario Lesbia Hernández Mi- A SALA. randa en garantía de un pagaré LEGAL NOTICE por la suma de $82,566.00 a favor de Preferred Mortgage ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO Corporation, o a su orden, con DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUintereses al 8% anual y ven- NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA cedero el 1ro de diciembre de SALA SUPERIOR DE CA-

(787) 743-3346

GUAS.

demandante es la Lcdo. Gerardo M. Ortiz Torres, cuya dirección física y postal es: Cond. El Centro I, Suite 801, 500 Muñoz Demandante, V. Rivera Ave., San Juan, Puerto DIANA SERRANO Rico 00918; cuyo número de FUENTES, SU ESPOSO teléfono es (787) 946-5268, el FULANO DE TAL Y LA facsímile (787) 946-0062 y su SOCIEDAD LEGAL correo electrónico es: gflardo@ bellverlaw.com. Expedido bajo DE GANANCIALES mi firma y sello de este TribuCOMPUESTA POR nal, Puerto Rico, hoy día 26 AMBOS de junio de 2020. Carmen Ana Demandados CIVIL NÚM.: CG2020CV00733. Pereira Ortiz, Secretaria. Ana SALA: 702. SOBRE: COBRO H. Lugo Muñoz, SubSecretaria.

DE DINERO POR LA VÍA ORLEGAL NOTICE DINARIA Y EJECUCIÓN DE Estado Ubre Asociado de PuerGRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO (REPOSESIÓN DE VEHÍCULO). to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDIC- DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de PriTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE mera Instancia Sala Superior AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE de JUANA DIAZ.

AMERICAS LEADING FINANCE LLC

DE LOS EE.UU. DE AMERICA EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: DIANA SERRANO FUENTES, SU ESPOSO FULANO DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS.

Quedan emplazados y notificados que en este Tribunal se ha radicado Demanda sobre cobro de dinero por la vía ordinaria en la que se alega que los demandados, DIANA SERRANO FUENTES, SU ESPOSO FULANO DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS, le adeudan solidariamente al Americas Leading Finance, LLC la suma de principal de la suma de principal de $9,615.87, más los intereses que continúen acumulando, las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado según pactados.

Además, solicitamos de este Honorable Tribunal que autorice la reposesión y/o embargo del Vehículo. Se les advierte que este edicto se publicará en un periódico de circulación general una sola vez y que, si no comparecen a contestar dicha Demanda dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación del Edicto, a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC1, al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https:/// unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia concediendo el remedio así solicitado sin más citarles ni oírles. La abogada de la parte

Julio Ángel Rodríguez López t/c/c Julio A. Rodríguez López; lvelisse Rivera Santiago y la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales por ellos compuesta Demandante v.

Banco Santander Puerto Rico; John Doe y Richard Roe como posibles tenedores desconocidos

Demandado(a) Civil: JD2019CV00642. Sobre: Cancelacion de Pagare Extraviado. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE P/C LCDA. MARJALIISA COLON VILLANUEVA mcolon@wwclaw.com para ser notificados mediante Edicto

EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 2 de abril de 2020 este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 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 no-

tificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 2 de JULIO de 2020. En JUANA DIAZ, Puerto Rico,2 de JULIO de 2020. LUZ MAYRA CARABALLO GARCIA, Secretaria. F/DORIS A. RODRIGUEZ COLON, Secretaria Auxiliar.

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

PR RECOVERY AND DEVELOPMENT JV, LLC DEMANDANTE Vs.

LOURDES FONTANEZ RIVERA H/N/C AGROCENTRO OJO DE ÁGUILA

DEMANDADA CIVIL NÚM.: CZ20190V00254.

SALA: 202. SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO.

A: LOURDES FONTANEZ RIVERA H/N/C AGROCENTRO OJO DE ÁGUILA

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

Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), la cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramajudiciaLpr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda o cualquier otro sin más citarle ni oírle, si el tribunal en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. El sistema SUMAC notificará copia al abogado de la parte demandante, el Lcdo. José F. Aguilar Vélez cuya dirección es: P.O. Box 71418 San Juan, Puerto Rico 00936-8518, teléfono (787) 993-3731 ala dirección jose. aguilar@orf-law.com ya la dirección notificaciones@orf-law. com. EXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y el sello del Tribunal, en COROZAL , Puerto Rico, hoy día 26 de junio de 2020. En Corozal, Puerto Rico, el 26 de junio de 2020. LCDA LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, SECRETARIO (A). Gloribell Vázquez Maysonet, Sec del Tribunal Conf. I.

26

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

The Anthem debate is back. But now it’s standing that’s polarizing.

By JOHN BRANCH

A

strange thing happened while most professional sports were away, shuttered by the coronavirus.

The stand-or-kneel debate, sparked by Colin Kaepernick’s posture during the national anthem in 2016 and smoldering since, has reignited — bigger than before, and this time with an unexpected twist.

Today, athletes may have to explain why they chose to stand, not kneel, during “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“I would have found it hard to believe a year ago,” said Charles Ross, a history professor and director of African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. “I would have said something has really happened in America to cause that. Clearly what’s happened in America and in Minneapolis on May 25 fundamentally changed people’s perspectives as it relates to racism in this country.”

The protest movement that grew after George Floyd’s death while in police custody has a deep connection to Kaepernick. People are protesting racial inequality and police brutality, just as Kaepernick had done. And many, including some police chiefs and officers, are kneeling in gestures of unity and respect.

Now the issues, and the gesture, have volleyed back to the sports world. The past couple years, most athletes avoided getting caught up in it. They could blend into the background behind league protocols for standing or amid the quiet comfort of others.

Even most of those considered leaders and allies to Kaepernick, in places like the NFL and the NBA, found reasons not to kneel.

The difference in 2020, as sports begin to emerge from their pandemic suspensions, is that nearly every professional athlete will be forced to choose a posture.

“You cannot sit around now in this postGeorge Floyd period we’re in and say, ‘We’re going to continue to take this safe position,’” Ross said. “No. Either you have an issue with racism, or you do not.”

Rachel Hill, a soccer player, found out first. When the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) started its season on June 27, Hill’s Chicago Red Stars and their opponents lined up for the pregame national anthem. Most players took a knee.

Hill, a 25-year-old attacker, remained standing. She bowed her head and put her hand on the shoulder of a Black teammate, Casey Short.

Just a year or four ago, Hill might have been hailed for her understated support in fighting racial inequality.

Julie Ertz and Casey Short both kneeled during the national anthem last week, but their teammate Rachel Hill, right, chose to stand.

Not in 2020. Days later, after a barrage of online criticism and debate, Hill felt compelled to defend her body position in a lengthy statement, foreshadowing what awaits most athletes as the games resume.

“In one way, it attests to the genius of Kaepernick’s protest tactic, which is kneeling silently during the anthem,” said Eric Burin, a history professor at the University of North Dakota and editor of a collection of essays titled “Protesting on Bended Knee: Race, Dissent and Patriotism in 21st Century America.”

“When you read Hill’s statement, it was gut-wrenching — tears were shed, forthright conversations were held — and as much as protest tactics are designed to cause discomfort, Kaepernick’s tactic still works.”

The debate has become so polarizing, though, that even inaction can become political. An entire professional softball team quit last month when its general manager bragged to President Donald Trump on Twitter that her players had stood for the anthem. And when New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees told an interviewer in June that he believed kneeling protests were “disrespecting the flag” — a stance that has been unchanged for him since 2016 — he was quickly forced to backtrack amid a hailstorm of criticism from fans and teammates.

The discussion is sure to spread as more leagues plan to restart and more players kneel, and it is destined to resume its outsize place in political discourse as the fall elections ap-

proach. It may even end, at least in some leagues, the long American tradition of playing the national anthem before sporting events.

The dramatic shift toward focusing on those choosing to stand, rather than kneel, could hardly be imagined when Kaepernick took a silent stand by not rising for the anthem — sitting at first, then kneeling, after consultation with a retired Army Green Beret, Nate Boyer.

Only a few other top athletes followed, but it was all enough to divide and inflame Americans, including a gas-throwing president and an administration that saw political advantage in rejecting the anthem protests.

Leagues and organizations tiptoed through the furor, mostly without grace, until the issue faded. They will not be able to avoid it now.

A majority of Americans, 52 percent, now approve of NFL players kneeling for the anthem to protest police killings of African Americans, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll in June. Only 37 percent objected. It is a significant shift from the group’s poll in 2016, when only 28 percent found Kaepernick’s gesture “appropriate.” That support nudged to 35 percent in 2018.

Some leagues tweaked their anthem policies in recent years and then tweaked them again more recently as public opinion shifted. The U.S. Soccer Federation, for example, created a policy requiring all players to stand for the anthem in 2017 — after women’s star Megan Rapinoe became one of the first star athletes to follow Kaepernick’s lead — only to

rescind it last month.

Others appear to be bracing for the issue to return, but without a firm stance.

The NFL, which found itself at the center of the controversy, banned kneeling in 2018, opting instead for a stand-or-hide (in the locker room) choice, though it has not enforced that position after a grievance filed by the NFL Players Association. Commissioner Roger Goodell recently showed support for the Black Lives Matter movement and, in his own pivot, for player protests.

“We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest,” he said.

It all promises to make the anthem mustwatch television again this fall.

And with bleachers and bar stools still mostly off-limits, the patter will ricochet mostly through social media. That is what happened with the NWSL, where the anthem threatened to overshadow the league’s season openers last weekend.

“It’s so interesting, the importance that kneeling has assumed,” Burin said. “Why this particular gesture? Why is that so important, as opposed to putting your hand on someone’s shoulder or bowing your head?”

On Tuesday, Short and her Red Stars teammate Julie Ertz, who had consoled a sobbing Short during the anthem last Saturday, each tweeted a long statement, a sort of essay titled “Our Narrative.”

“Currently, every time the national anthem is played, our country continues to become more and more divided on what the visual symbol of unity looks like,” they wrote. “Through our continuous conversations we wanted to make sure that whatever we decided to do, it would not be an empty gesture.”

Among those conversations, they said, were emotional ones with Hill, who had stood next to them, literally.

In her statement, Hill admitted to being torn about how to approach the anthem.

“I chose to stand because of what the flag inherently means for my military family members and to me, but I 100 percent support my peers,” she wrote. “I support the Black Lives Matter movement wholeheartedly. I also support and will do my part in fighting against the current inequality. As a white athlete, it is way past due for me to be diligently anti-racist.”

Hill tried to have it both ways. But if there is anything certain about the anthem debate, renewed and turned inside-out in these nuance-free times, it is this: There is little room for such posturing.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

27

Masahiro Tanaka struck by ball as Yankees take health hit

By JAMES WAGNER

S

aturday was the New York Yankees’ first official summer workout, a routine bit of preparation to start their coronavirus-shortened 2020 season. Instead of an ordinary practice at Yankee Stadium, the team witnessed a frightening incident in which a key pitcher was hit on the head with a line drive. And later in the day, it announced that two other players were absent from practice because they had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Masahiro Tanaka, a two-time AllStar, lay motionless on the ground after being struck with a ball off the bat of his teammate, slugger Giancarlo Stanton.

Tanaka eventually sat up and walked off the field with two athletic trainers by his side. He was released from NewYorkPresbyterian Hospital on Saturday night after being evaluated for concussion-like symptoms.

The Yankees also announced positive tests for star infielder D.J. LeMahieu and pitcher Luis Cessa with their permission, as league rules prevent teams from

naming players without consent.

LeMahieu and Cessa remain isolated at their homes and will need to test negative before traveling to New York to join the team, Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. LeMahieu has been asymptomatic, while Cessa has shown “very

mild” symptoms of the virus.

“We’ll see how that continues to unfold the next several days,” Boone said.

Tanaka, who returned to his native Japan soon after the season had been suspended in mid-March because of the coronavirus pandemic, was facing a pair of Yankees power hitters, Aaron Judge and Stanton, at Yankee Stadium on Saturday afternoon as he threw in front of coaches for the first time in months.

But Tanaka had little time to react when Stanton, who hits the ball as hard as anyone in baseball, drilled a line drive toward the mound. The ball struck the right-handed Tanaka on the right side of the head, knocking him to the ground, where he lay for at least five minutes while cradling his head.

“It sucks to see something like that, especially during something as simple as a sim game,” outfielder Aaron Hicks said in a video news conference with reporters.

After the ball hit Tanaka, Stanton immediately crouched down and put his hand on his helmet, seemingly upset that he had hurt his teammate. With the Miami Marlins in 2014, Stanton sustained

facial fractures and needed multiple dental procedures when he was hit in the left cheek by a pitch from Mike Fiers, then with the Milwaukee Brewers.

“It’s incredibly unfortunate what happened today,” Boone said. “In a lot of ways, we’re hopeful we avoided something really bad happening.”

Tanaka, 31, is in his final season of a seven-year, $155 million contract he signed with the Yankees before the 2014 season, in which he was selected as an All-Star. He was also an All-Star in 2019, a season in which he posted a 4.45 ERA over 182 innings.

Tanaka had been pitching without a so-called L screen, a protective barrier often used during practice sessions. But after seeing Tanaka get hurt, pitcher Jordan Montgomery said he was so shaken up that he requested one, which he had not originally planned on using.

“It’s horrible,” Montgomery said, adding later: “I hope he’s OK. I’m thinking and praying for him right now.”

Last year, the Yankees set a major league record with 30 players spending time on the injured list.

Cleveland Indians say they will ‘determine best path forward’ on nickname

By DAVID WALDSTEIN

A

fter decades of resisting calls to change their team name, the Cleveland Indians announced Friday that they were willing to engage in discussions about whether the name is appropriate in the wake of national calls for social justice and reform.

“We are committed to engaging our community and appropriate stakeholders to determine the best path forward with regard to our team name,” the team said in a statement released Friday night.

The announcement came hours after the NFL’s Washington Redskins made a similar announcement, vowing to undertake a “thorough review” of their team name, which many consider to be a racial slur against Native Americans.

Both team names are considered offensive by many Native Americans, who oppose their heritage being used as an identity for sports teams and their mascots.

The news that Cleveland is willing to discuss changing the name was greeted with surprise and enthusiasm from Philip Yenyo, the executive director of the American Indian Movement of Ohio. Yenyo has been protesting the name since 1991, often in the face of withering abuse from fans as they enter the gates of the team’s stadium on game days.

“Wow,” Yenyo said Friday in a telephone interview. “This is a good step.”

Cleveland has used the same name since 1915, often accompanied by a caricature of a Native American, known as Chief Wahoo. The team phased out the Chief Wahoo logo last year, removing it from their uniforms and from walls and banners in the stadium.

The logo was still used on items for sale at the team store last year, however, and Yenyo called on the club to cease manufacturing such items and selling them in perpetuity.

“We’ve been out there on the street chanting, ‘Change the name, change the logo,’ for years,” he said. “They didn’t seem to hear the first part of that chant, but maybe now they are listening. There are a lot of issues we are fighting, but the name is the main one.”

The Indians have said that the name was originally intended to honor a former Native American player, Louis Sockalexis, who played for the Cleveland Spiders, a major league club, in the 19th century. Some have suggested that Cleveland adopt Spiders as a replacement.

In their statement Friday, the team cited the “recent social unrest in our community and in our country” — a reference to the nationwide protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis — as spurring its revisiting of the name.

“Our organization fully recognizes our team name is among the most vis-

ible ways in which we connect with the community,” the statement said. “We have had ongoing discussions organizationally on these issues.”

The team did not name any specific individuals or groups as the “appropriate stakeholders” it planned to engage, but it could include sponsors and financial partners of the team.

The Washington Redskins’ announcement came a day after FedEx, the company that holds the naming rights to their stadium, asked team owner Daniel Snyder to change the name.

Many Cleveland fans are emotionally attached to the name, and some will most likely be consulted in the process.

A name change is not definite.

Yenyo said he had been calling team offices for weeks hoping for a meeting, and would like to be included in any discussions.

“We want to be there,” he said. “We have to strike while the iron is hot.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

Interpreting more than words for a baseball star

By ANDREW KEH

B

ryan Lee struggled recently to remember when exactly he had first arrived in Dunedin, Fla. After some prodding, he placed it: Feb. 4, an eon ago in the brain-bending timeline of the pandemic.

For the past three years, Lee has worked as the interpreter for South Korean left-hander Hyun-jin Ryu, who this winter signed a four-year, $80 million contract with the Toronto Blue Jays after seven years with the Los Angeles Dodgers. The two were eager to get to spring training. They had work to do.

What Lee could not have anticipated upon arriving in Florida in February was that he would still be there in early July, living in a hotel room, subsisting off delivery and drive-through meals, awaiting any hint that the baseball season might one day begin.

Lee, 28, moves easily between American and Korean culture. Born in Iowa, he attended elementary school in Virginia, middle and high school in Seoul and college at NYU, where he studied sports management. His first job after graduation was as a translator in the New York Yankees’ minor-league system. Months later, the Dodgers asked him to work with Ryu. There was some whiplash, and anxiety, as Lee traded bumpy bus rides in the anonymity of Class A for a job in the majors as the right-hand man of one of the world’s best left-handers.

But Lee now describes Ryu, 33, as “an older brother” and sees it as his job to help him attain success, in ways obvious and subtle. Beyond interpreting for coaches and the news media, Lee also translates written data, analytics and scouting reports into Korean for Ryu, who continues to improve his English.

The two remain in Dunedin with other Blue Jays staff members and players, working, awaiting updates from the team and wondering, like everyone else, what baseball will look and feel like this year.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and condensed.

Bryan Lee, the interpreter for Toronto Blue Jays ace Hyun-jin Ryu, strives for as much perfection as the pitcher.

Q: What’s a normal day for you like these days?

A: Ryu’s been throwing like two times per week, but whether he’s throwing or not, I’ll be [at the stadium]. Right now I’m just trying to be a good buddy, being with him as he’s working out, helping him with anything. There will be updates from the organization and players, and I try to make sure he understands everything.

I’ve found some silver lining, which was getting a chance to reconnect with some of my friends from college and high school, spending time on Zoom calls and whatnot, as well as a bunch of bingewatching and other things I’d never have a chance to do.

I think I’m on a first-name basis with all the Uber Eats drivers here.

Q: What is your relationship with Ryu away from the field?

A: I tell Ryu we spend too much time together, especially on the road. I got some

heat when I was with the Dodgers about my lack of dating game. My excuse always was, “I have to spend time with Ryu.” I’ve been hanging out at his place. His wife is a really good cook, and she invites me over to eat. Ryu also has a personal trainer he works with, and we go over to his house and watch Korean TV shows — variety shows, singing competitions, “The Voice of Korea.”

Q: How difficult has it been to learn all the intricacies of the game?

A: Your biggest fear is screwing something up in terms of not relaying the game plan properly. One example I can give is, like, Ryu would say, “I want to throw a fastball up,” and then I’d say that to the catcher. But if you dig deeper, that can mean anywhere from up in the zone or letter high to get a swing and a miss or almost at a shoulder level, as a show pitch. When I started, I didn’t realize how detail-oriented you had to be, even if you’re delivering

something as little as that.

I remember an at-bat with Christian Yelich, when he was with the Marlins.

[The former Dodgers pitching coach Rick Honeycutt] said: “Let’s be up and away in the zone, fastball. He might get to it, but he won’t hit it out of the park.” And I said it to Ryu, but it actually had to be more up than how I made it sound. So Ryu went out and executed, and then Yelich hit it out the other way. They say these things expecting me to know what the underlying meaning is, and sometimes I couldn’t catch that cue.

It can mean wins and losses, differences in ERA. Q: Do you really feel stuff like that is your fault? It sounds like you’re being hard on yourself.

A: Being in a major league clubhouse, you see how all these talented people work their butt off on a daily basis. You realize if you want to be that good, or great, you have to have that mentality. You have to be nit-picky because the devil’s in the details.

You look at a guy like [Clayton] Kershaw.

He’s one of the best in the history of baseball, and then you always see him trying to see how he can get better. So if a guy like that is working that hard, it’s not that hard for a guy like me to at least to try to get better.

Q: What are some memorable moments from the past few years?

A: I remember a mound visit in the 2018 World Series against the Red Sox in Fenway Park, just the noise and the crowd.

There were runners on, and we had to go over the game plan so his pitch sequencing was optimized. I remember thinking, This is crazy. Most of the time you don’t feel it. But the World Series one, it was just so loud. But Ryu was so calm, doing his usual digging the mound with his left foot, and I was like, OK, this is just another mound visit.

I remember a game Ryu was pitching, and Kershaw sat down right next to me in the dugout. Ryu was facing David Peralta, and Kersh was telling me what he would do in that situation, how he would attack the hitter, and how he thinks Ryu should attack the hitter. It’s a conversation Clayton probably doesn’t even remember. But I thought to myself, If I was a little kid, I would love to be in this situation.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 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

Monday, July 6, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

You’ve reached an exciting turning point in your fitness level. Now you’re more energetic and flexible, you can produce more creative work. Don’t be surprised when you start working on your many and varied pet projects at a faster rate than ever before. Turn a deaf ear to people who accuse you of being extravagant. They’re just jealous of your success, which is the direct result of your hard work. Treat yourself. You should have something to show for your extraordinary output.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

You’re ready to overhaul your domestic life. Changing your schedule, rearranging the rooms or clearing the clutter are all things that can deepen your appreciation of home.

If you live with others, don’t hesitate to delegate jobs to them. This should be a group effort. Are you on your own?

It’s time to do something kind for yourself. Order some clothes or luxury items that appeal to your appreciation of fine craftsmanship. You’ll cherish this purchase for years to come.

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)

Getting recognised for your expertise will be most pleasing. At long last, you will be praised for your contributions to a community organisation or creative project. Don’t be surprised if you’re offered a job giving online instruction to others. You’re unlike anyone else in the field. Instead of trying to get people to copy your example, you encourage them to develop their unique interests. As a result, you have a loyal following. Students, readers, or fans feel valued when they are in your company.

The profits from a romantic or business partnership will arrive. You’ve always fared well when teaming up with someone who is practical, accomplished, and hard working.

While your other half focuses on the big picture, you can concentrate on day to day online operations. Use this financial windfall to buy some quality equipment. Being able to work with hi-tech gadgets will make it easy to produce accurate and attractive work that makes you one of the most respected people in the entire field.

A contract is ending, causing you to breathe a sigh of relief.

You should be proud of everything you have accomplished.

Now you have this work under your belt, you’ll attract even bigger and better online assignments. Feel free to raise your rates. In times to come joining another company or creative group is strongly advised. You’ll enjoy working with people who encourage your bold ideas. With their help, you can get a wild dream off the ground.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

You’re finally finishing a project you started ages ago. Having a free schedule fills you with excitement. If you’ve been thinking about starting a fitness regime, go for it.

You’ll especially enjoy exercise involving building muscle. Weight training will be more enjoyable than expected. An online career opportunity is on the way. Working in a rapidly growing industry will be a welcome challenge. Be open to taking a crash course to keep current with all the changes that constantly occur in this field.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Making plans for the future will fill you with excitement.

You’ve been blessed with a sharp brain. The more you learn about a subject, the greater your confidence becomes. Soon, you’ll be able to share your wisdom with other people via an online chatroom. Sharing tips and strategies will be more than interesting. You’ll gain a deep affection for someone whose sense of humour is very similar. Plan to meet in real life whenever the opportunity arises. This could be the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Finishing an online course will fill you with pride. It has taken a great deal of hard work and sacrifice to reach this point. Before embarking on the next adventure, take a well-deserved break. Devote some time to a creative pursuit that brings you happiness. An unusual partnership will serve you well, both financially and emotionally. It feels good to have the unconditional support of a stable person. Whenever you feel insecure, give them a call and ask for a pep talk.

An intense job will end, giving you more time to do the things you love. Don’t waste valuable time worrying about money. The abundance you desire will come when you devote as much energy as possible to exercising your imagination. Health news is excellent. Your decision to increase your physical activity has served you well. You’re always happiest when moving your body. An online exercise class is especially stimulating. Sitting behind a desk for hours isn’t really your cup of tea.

Your life has undergone a tremendous change. You should congratulate yourself for exchanging what is familiar for the great unknown. Now you’ve taken a personal risk, you’re reaping big rewards. A personal best, happy home or creative project has finally been realised. As a result, you’re more open about your feelings. If you love someone deeply, you should tell object of your affection. An email or text message will make a deep impression. You love expressing your feelings on paper.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

You’re ready to walk away for a situation that is no longer working for you. After making this break, you’ll feel years younger. Turn a deaf ear to anyone who tries to make you feel guilty about this decision. You can’t sacrifice happiness for propriety. A family chat will be much more fun than expected. Arrange for everyone to dial into a conference call. You’ll hear about an old tradition you’d like to revive. Integrating this practice into your life will be grounding.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Ending a toxic friendship gives you mixed feelings.

You’ve always been good at accepting people, warts and all. Unfortunately, this relationship was intolerable. You may be tolerant, but you won’t put up with abuse. Protect yourself from someone who drains you financially and emotionally. Working with tactile art supplies will revive your spirits. Obey your impulse to make things that are useful and beautiful. This instinct will help you attract more money.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Monday, July 6, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, July 6, 2020

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