Wednesday Jul 8, 2020

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

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NPP Gov’t Under Fire, Again Unions Ready to Fight PREPA-Luma Deal Soon P3

Minority Leaders Call for Investigation of Governor

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Governor Says She’s Ready to Be Investigated: ‘I Have Nothing to Fear’ Meanwhile, Prosecutors Ask Justice Dept. for Files on Vázquez, Gov’t Officials

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

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July 8, 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.

PREPA workers, unions vow to fight LUMA deal

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tarting July 15, Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) workers will begin a series of actions to force the cancellation of the contract between PREPA and LUMA Energy, the private operator that will manage the utility’s transmission and distribution system as well as other administrative offices.

The announcement was made Tuesday at a news conference by the Alliance of Active Employees and Retirees of the Electric Power Authority, along with more than 20 labor unions, including the Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union (UTIER by its Spanish acronym).

“The contract granted to Luma Energy costs us more than $125 million annually, pays Luma executives high salaries, raises consumer energy rates, dismantles the Retirement System and creates the loss of all rights acquired through more than 78 years of negotiations for PREPA employees,” said UTIER President Ángel Figueroa Jaramillo. “We are going to the streets to defend the people against this contract that does not benefit us at all and that is another contract to continue filling the pockets of others while those of the people of Puerto Rico are emptied.”

The labor unions noted that the contract does not require LUMA Energy to hire all of PREPA’s employees.

Figueroa Jaramillo urged PREPA workers not to accept any offers from LUMA Energy because they will not have any of the benefits acquired through collective bargaining agreements. The contract will also pay “juicy salaries” to top executives that LUMA will hire at a time when the utility is in bankruptcy court to restructure some $9 billion in debt.

“It has already been publicly revealed how disastrous this contract is for the people of Puerto Rico, a contract that only benefits Luma and not Authority customers,” said Abraham García, president of the Association of Management Employees.

The spokesmen for the Alliance likewise insisted that the contract directly affects the Retirement System for PREPA employees, to which the Authority currently owes $400 million.

“Luma’s contract directly affects retirees, as [it] does not speak about the contributions to the Retirement System and the obligations that currently exist,” said Johnny Rodríguez, president of the PREPA Retirees Association. “We are talking about 12,000 people whose pensions would be affected, which, for many of them, is the only thing they have to live on.”

For his part, Evans Castro, president of PREPA’s Union of Independent Professional Employees, insisted that PREPA employees’ work is at stake, since the contract specifies that they are not required to hire existing staff at the Authority.

“What this contract has brought is uncertainty among PREPA employees, both union members and managers, since it is established that they will only interview us,” Castro stressed. “Our job stability is at stake, our family’s livelihood is faltering and we will not allow it. We are going to take to the streets and we are going to defend our work and our people who are the most affected by this contract and who we invite to participate in this and other activities against the Luma Energy contract.”

Some workers questioned the need for a private manager to perform the work that PREPA workers currently do.

PREPA’s fiscal plan says the utility faces a $132 million budget deficit next year because of the service fee that will be paid to LUMA Energy.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Another hard summer for NPP: Gov’t under fire as DOJ investigates corruption cases involving Vázquez Garced

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

T

he New Progressive Party (NPP) is under fire again as Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced and senior officials are on the horns of a dilemma due to investigations of corruption.

The Special Independent Prosecutor Panel (SIPP) issued a resolution Tuesday to have six reports from the Puerto Rico Department of Justice (DOJ) delivered to the panel by this afternoon. The reports have been the subject of a brewing controversy after DOJ Interim Secretary Wandymar Burgos ordered an agent to take them back from the SIPP. “The Resolution cites the entire tract of the incident in which Bureau of Special Investigations agent Agneris Valentín appeared before the Panel to deliver such files but received instructions from the DOJ to not proceed and [instead] return to the agency,” the SIPP said in a press release. “Members of the SIPP established that after the preliminary investigation and countersigning by the Secretary of Justice, the only legal course of action was to deliver them [the files] without further delay.”

Earlier on Tuesday, the governor defended herself against accusations that she dismissed former Justice Secretary Denisse Longo Quiñones because the governor and La Fortaleza Chief of Staff Antonio Pabón Batlle were under investigation for mismanagement of supplies from the Administration for Socioeconomic Development of the Family at a warehouse in Ponce.

Vázquez used a Tuesday press conference as a court to defend herself, stating that the reason she withdrew her trust from Longo Quiñones was because the exJustice secretary interfered in a federal investigation into a Medicaid fraud case in the Health Department (DS by its Spanish initials) that occurred from 2014 to 2019. The governor said Longo Quiñones could not interfere as she was prohibited since Sept. 17, 2019, from intervening in meetings that involved management discussions at the agency or any related matter because her mother, Concepción Quiñones de Longo, was the DS’s interim secretary.

“The [prohibition] will include excusing her from participating in meetings where discussions about said matters took place and during the official decisions.

Therefore, she cannot advise, meet, give any opinion or intervene with all matters that have to do with DS,” Vázquez said as she read from a Government Ethics Office (OGE) document. “The OGE announced on October 1, 2019, that Longo Quiñones was inhibited from every matter of the DS in order to prevent an appearance of a conflict of interest. But on June 16, a federal inspector in charge of the Medicaid fraud case conversed with the ex-secretary and [current] DS Secretary Lorenzo González Feliciano and attached a letter related to the investigation. The governor said Longo Quiñones replied a day after asking what they could do with the document and advised him not to negotiate without requiring federal prosecutors to prove their case.”

While reading an email thread, the governor said

Longo Quiñones later told the federal official to coordinate a meeting with her secretary. She then revealed to the press that the fraud case involved Manpower, a recruitment company that allegedly used Medicaid funds to hire employees who were not under the healthcare program. Later, she said the former Justice secretary held a meeting with the DS secretary, the agency’s legal division director, and other officials and intervened three times in the federal investigation.

“As she has been a federal prosecutor, they do not hand their evidence to just anybody,” Vázquez said.

“What was the intention of Denisse Longo Quiñones in knowing what the evidence was against the DS and which officials at the moment were involved as her mother was the deputy secretary?”

Nonetheless, the governor said, she felt convinced she made the right decision in asking for the Justice chief’s resignation because, she said, Longo Quiñones kept stepping into the federal investigation even when Pabón Batlle told her not to abide by the letter.

Governor claims she has nothing to fear on file reports In spite of the accusations, Vázquez told designated Justice Secretary Wandymar Burgos that she had to send all reports that she retrieved on Monday from SIPP today. She considered that the procedure was done “on the run and in the dark of the night,” as she said such reports were prepared rapidly on Friday.

“I have nothing to fear. Although everyone is aware of the SIPP’s history, and Puerto Ricans have witnessed what they are capable of doing, I have no doubt or fear that the reports are handed today to SIPP, mine and every other official involved,” she said. “If the alleged investigation has merit and goes by the law, I welcome it and will face it as I have faced similar situations. This attitude, which is clearly vengeful and rigged, in the midst of a primary contest, we will face it.”

Longo Quiñones: ‘This is a subterfuge to attack the reports’ credibility’ Meanwhile, Longo Quiñones said in a radio interview for WKAQ 580 AM that after listening to the governor’s press conference, she deemed her allegations to be “surprising.” She added that it was her first time she heard the reasons she was asked to resign.

“I am calm after listening to the allegations against me. This is a subterfuge to attack the reports’ credibility,” she said. “I always strove for integrity on every matter I had to address; I am serious with my allegations against other people. I am surprised about all these allegations against me.”

After Vázquez accused the former Justice secretary of handing over the reports on a Friday evening as an “on the run” move, Longo Quiñones said those reports come from investigations that have been resolved.

Nonetheless, she added, in order to have a smoother transition, there was one report that was left unsigned as its investigation is still ongoing.

“I did not know who was going to succeed me,” she said. “The Public Integrity division held meetings with other prosecutors for weeks to resolve investigations.

We determined that only one report from the division was not going to be signed as attorneys are wrapping up the investigation.”

“To insinuate that on Friday afternoon we created six reports -- one of which has 74 pages, which is the one that has the governor and the chief of staff involved, [and] another report has 106 pages, the other has 18 pages, the next one has 14 pages, another one has 18 pages -- is to not be truthful, is to disrespect the seriousness with which both the prosecutors and I managed these investigations, submitted their recommendations and employed their process,” Longo Quiñones said.

“The governor knows these prosecutors. They deserve respect.”

While it may be true that Vázquez was not aware that she was under investigation, Longo Quiñones replied that the DOJ does not announce anyone’s involvement until the agency holds enough proof to develop a report.

“We [the DOJ] do not notify our objects of an investigation until we submit [a report] to the SIPP,” she said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

5

Minority legislators call for investigation of governor

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

M

embers of the opposition in both houses of the island Legislature called for an investigation Tuesday into the dismissal by Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced of former Justice Secretary Denisse Longo Quiñones, which has touched off accusations that the governor is covering up wrongdoing by her administration.

Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) Sen. Juan Dalmau said the firing of Longo Quiñones, which press reports attribute to the former Justice secretary’s intention to name a special independent prosecutor to investigate the governor, calls Vázquez’s integrity into question.

“We are talking about a scandal of the highest level of governmental function that goes to the heart of duties and powers of the government and deserves to be investigated by the legislative branch,” Dalmau said.

The PIP senator said the Senate has a duty to investigate the scandal as part of its function of checks and balances.

“Given the accusations that have been made against the governor of Puerto Rico to obstruct justice and also to cover up possible crimes committed by members of her administration, I have drafted a resolution to investigate in the Senate of Puerto Rico,” Dalmau said.

The senator said the public does not trust the current government to investigate itself.

“It seems important to me to stress that I share with the country the frustration and distrust with the public government institution to carry out that kind

of investigation,” said Dalmau.

Dalmau, also a candidate for governor, added that his administration would name independent committees that would carry out their duty to investigate such scandals with autonomy.

In the House of Representative, meanwhile, Popular Democratic Party (PDP) Reps. Rafael “Tatito” Hernández Montañez and José “Conny” Varela filed a resolution to question Longo Quiñones in order to determine the true reasons for her resignation.

They also want to question interim Justice Secretary Wandymar Burgos Vargas about releasing the final report on the complaint they filed in early January against the governor for possible violations of the Penal Code and government

ethics, and that according to a newspaper, recommends the appointment of a special independent prosecutor to investigate the governor and people close to her.

“Yesterday, a local newspaper reported that before concluding her duties, former Secretary Longo Quiñones signed a report with the findings of the investigation that began after we filed a lawsuit January 27, 2020 against Gov. Vázquez Garced, for mismanagement of federal resources for politicalpartisan benefit and which placed aid for the victims (of the various disasters that have befallen Puerto Rico) at risk,” Hernández Montañez said. “Our summons to the current secretary, Burgos, is to make this document public throughout the country because this investigation has already ended.”

The PDP spokesman in the House noted that “on January 27, 2020, I filed this complaint along with Varela and made several referrals to state and federal authorities about possible violations of law by the Governor, and even her own Secretary Longo Quiñones admitted on February 5, 2020 in a public hearing that the investigation on this subject was being attended to by her department.”

Varela added that “[a]mong the indications contained in the complaint were possible violations of Articles 252 -- for illicit use of public jobs or servants -- and 261 -- for undue influence -- of the Puerto Rico Penal Code and to several subsections of Article 4.2 of the Government Code of Ethics.”

“In the same way, violations of [Title] 18 [Section] 598 of the U.S. Code … that states that any official who uses, appropriates, or is an obstacle to a correct distribution of federal reconstruction funds could face fines and even serve time in jail,” Varela said.

Acevedo Vilá campaign questions González Colón’s contributions report

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

J

uan Pablo Hernández, campaign manager for Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) candidate for Puerto Rico resident commissioner, questioned on Tuesday a recent report on campaign contributions issued by the campaign of current Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González Colón.

“Everyone in Puerto Rico knows that for years González has filled her accounts with political funds, most of them with contributions from lobbyists and big special interests,” Hernández said in a written statement. “In fact, in her own statement, the [resident] commissioner boasts that she is the candidate who has raised the most money for that position.

Let her say how many individual donations she has received and the average of these contributions.”

On Monday morning, the resident commissioner, a member of the governing New Progressive Party (NPP), issued a statement alleging that 88 percent of her collections come from donors in Puerto Rico.

By way of contrast, the campaign manager of Acevedo Vilá presented in a table the details of contributions made to

the PDP candidate, where it is evident that the vast majority of his contributions come from ordinary citizens, through donations made via different digital platforms, such as ATH Movil.

“Thanks to those 2,260 individual donations, all identified, we managed to raise $177,256.22 during the period from April to June, for an average of $78.43 per donation, which allows us to have the necessary resources to win this contest,” Hernández said.

Acevedo Vilá’s campaign manager said donors to the resident commissioner for this election cycle include Steven Kupka ($2,432.20), a lobbyist for the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority who was recently named as one of the lobbyists used by the NPP to lobby for statehood while he was paid by the government, and the American Maritime Officers ($2,500), an organization that has opposed the elimination of cabotage laws.

“These data are consistent with what has been consistently pointed out, that the origin of the campaign donations of the resident commissioner come mainly from individuals and organizations with million-dollar contracts with the NPP government, or who respond to large special interests,” Hernández said. “That the resident commissioner pounds her

chest as the candidate who collects the most money, while her donations come from people and organizations like these, far from being a source of pride, should be a source of shame. It is precisely because of this that I challenge you to open your books, and clarify how many individual donations you received in the period, and what the average donation received by your committee was.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

House hopeful calls for immediate gov’t action on rise in COVID-19 cases

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

G

iven the increase in positive cases of COVID-19 and hospitalizations due to coronavirus infections, the former head of the Public Housing Administration, Gabriel López Arrieta, called on the central government on Tuesday to acknowledge what he called “a path to lack of control” and requested preventive and immediate action in particular from the secretaries of Health, Housing and Education.

“The numbers are in front of all of us, the increase in infections. Having 204 new cases shows that the reopening of certain sectors and the lack of discipline of many citizens will cause us problems,” López Arrieta said in a written statement.

The Popular Democratic Party (PDP) candidate for the House of Representatives also suggested to Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced not to wait until July 15 to amend the executive order related to the pandemic to reassert physical distancing controls

and avoid a public health catastrophe in Puerto Rico.

“According to the president of the Medical Association, Dr. Víctor Ramos, the next few days will be critical to establish whether the increase in coronavirus cases on the island is an indication of a new rise in infections as has occurred in other jurisdictions,” López Arrieta said. “We have already seen how in public places (this past weekend in Boquerón, for example), large numbers of citizens are gathering without due precautions. Already in the state of Florida, with whom we share a number of daily flights, [authorities have] had to resume control measures in the face of the pandemic, so what are we waiting for, that cases will increase and we put the lives of thousands of people at risk?”

Regarding the airport, the PDP candidate said that “despite the alleged controls that were being carried out, everything instead was a promise that was never fulfilled and there are many cases of people arriving on the island and they don’t even

take their temperature.”

In particular, López Arrieta requested that the island Education (DE) secretary not wait any longer to present a plan for the next school semester.

“Although the governor has mentioned that she prefers face-to-face classes in the

country’s public schools, are we ready in the DE for that or are we jumping into the void and causing a dizzying increase in cases of COVID-19 in children, youth and adults who work in schools?,” he said. “In the same way, the components of Health and Housing must fulfill their obligation.”

RFQ issued for ocean tech industrial park project

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Department of Economic Development and Commerce (DDEC by its Spanish acronym) and the Puerto Rico Land Administration (PRLA) announced Tuesday the publication of requests for qualifications (RFQ) to identify potential bidders interested in developing the proposed Puerto Rico Ocean Technology Industrial Park (PROTech), a regional industrial park that would generate revenue through manufacturers working with seawater for ocean thermal energy conversion.

“PROTech is an all-encompassing and innovative project that will use water from the Yabucoa coast and the energy it produces to develop multiple eco-friendly and scientific research projects in the southeastern area of Puerto Rico,” DDEC Secretary Manuel Laboy Rivera said in a written statement. “Those interested in presenting their development plans should be highly qualified entities with experience and the ability to design, build, finance, operate and maintain this vanguard project. Since 2017, we have worked hard to build PROTech’s master plan, which will be a starting point to invest in ocean-related industry efforts and create the technologies needed for the transition of conventional energy and fuels, to more responsible and sustainable energy alternatives.”

PROTech’s proposal calls for the development of facilities for the conversion of thermal ocean energy, the development of ocean deep-sea industries, an institute of education and research, and a recreational, cultural and commercial center, as well as a hospital institution, among other components. All of the components will benefit from the energy output of the project.

PRLA Executive Director Dalcia Lebrón Nieves noted that “this innovative concept, which will be the first in the

Caribbean and the third in the world, has a master plan that respects nature and promotes eco-environmental initiatives, in accordance with the Administration guidelines.”

“The selected land area in Yabucoa is available for the development of this important project that conceptualizes PROTech,” she said. “We will continue to work as a team with DDEC and other government agencies, as well as with the private sector so that this project begins as soon as possible for the benefit of all Puerto Ricans.”

The DDEC secretary stated that the municipality of Yabucoa was selected because it has the necessary characteristics for developing a project of this scope. He added that for the development of the PROTech’s master plan, a

similar project existing in Hawaii was used as a reference.

Based on this model, Technical Consulting, Estudios Técnicos, Makai Engineering and Integra conducted a feasibility study. It is estimated that some $300 million will be needed for construction of the project in its entirety.

“Under Governor WandaVázquez Garced’s administration, we have implemented various initiatives in accordance with the Public Policy Act of Puerto Rico, which establishes the need to comply with a Renewable Energy Portfolio to reach a minimum of 40 percent renewable energy by or before 2025; 60 percent in or before 2040; 100 percent by or before 2050,” Laboy Rivera said. “This project is very important for achieving these long-term goals.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

7

U.S. will pay $1.6 Billion to Novavax for Coronavirus vaccine

By KATIE THOMAS

T

he federal government will pay vaccine maker Novavax $1.6 billion to expedite the development of 100 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine by the beginning of next year, the company said Tuesday.

The deal is the largest that the Trump administration has made so far with a company as part of Operation Warp Speed, the sprawling federal effort to make coronavirus vaccines and treatments available to the American public as quickly as possible. In doing so, the government has placed a significant bet on Novavax, a company based in Maryland that has never brought a product to market.

Operation Warp Speed is a multiagency effort that seeks to carry out President Donald Trump’s pledge to make a coronavirus vaccine available by the end of the year, but the full extent of the project is still unclear. Officials have declined to list which vaccines and treatments are part of Operation Warp Speed.

In an interview Sunday, Novavax’s president and chief executive, Stanley C. Erck, initially said he was not sure where in the government the $1.6 billion was coming from. A Novavax spokeswoman later said the money was coming from a “collaboration” between the Department of Health and Human Services and the Defense Department.

In May, the administration announced it was awarding up to $1.2 billion as part of Operation Warp Speed to British drugmaker AstraZeneca, which has said that its vaccine could be available by October. Four other companies — Moderna Therapeutics, Johnson & Johnson, Merck and Sanofi — have also received federal assistance for their experimental coronavirus vaccines.

“Adding Novavax’s candidate to Operation Warp Speed’s diverse portfolio of vaccines increases the odds that we will have a safe, effective vaccine as soon as the end of this year,” Alex Azar, the health and human services secretary, said in a statement.

Erck said Novavax’s coronavirus vaccine uses the same technology as its other experimental vaccines, such as one for the flu, that have been tested in late-stage clinical trials. Novavax has recently brought in senior executives from established manufacturers like AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, he said.

“The risk they’re taking is that a company like ours — which doesn’t have a pipeline of already commercialized products — can we get to the big leagues and scale up?” he said. “And I think they’re placing the bet that we can.”

The U.S. investment comes after an international group, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, awarded up to $388 million to Novavax in May to make its coronavirus vaccine available globally.

Several vaccine experts said Novavax’s vaccine would help diversify the federal portfolio by including

Scientists looking at a sample of a respiratory virus at Novavax labs in Rockville, Md. another candidate that uses a protein-based vaccine that has worked against other pathogens, like hepatitis B. The Novavax vaccine uses microscopic particles that carry fragments of the coronavirus, prompting the body’s immune system to respond. Sanofi, which has received nearly $31 million in government funding, is also developing a vaccine that is based on viral proteins.

Other leading candidates are relying on less proven technologies. For example, Moderna is using genetic material from the coronavirus called mRNA to provoke an immune response, and AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson are both testing vaccines that use a harmless virus to deliver coronavirus genes into cells.

“This is a sort of diversification from other approaches, which makes a certain amount of sense,” said John P. Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. “You don’t want all of your eggs in one basket.”

Erck said the U.S. deal would allow Novavax to begin manufacturing the vaccines before the company concludes late-stage clinical trials, expected by the end of the year. The company would ensure that 100 million doses — enough for 50 million people to receive an initial shot and a booster — are delivered by the first quarter of 2021, if its coronavirus vaccine is proved safe and effecti-

ve. In June, Novavax secured a $60 million contract from the Defense Department to guarantee the delivery of 10 million doses to vaccinate U.S. troops for the coronavirus.

Novavax began early-stage safety trials in Australia in May, and the company has said it expects to make the results available this month. It said it planned to begin so-called Phase 3 efficacy trials by the fall of this year and could release interim data by the end of 2020.

There is no vaccine for the coronavirus, and many clinical trials fail when vaccines turn out to be ineffective or to cause serious side effects. Until now, new vaccines have taken years to develop, and many experts have said the aggressive timelines set by companies and government officials for a coronavirus vaccine are overly optimistic.

Through its deal with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, Novavax is also setting up manufacturing in other sites around the world, including in Europe and Asia, to serve populations outside the United States. The company is using its own facilities to scale up manufacturing and will also contract with outside companies, Erck said.

He and others have noted that more than one vaccine will need to succeed in order to vaccinate the entire world.

“Right now, we need and want everybody’s to work,” he said.

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Wednesday, July 8, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Months into virus crisis, U.S. cities still lack testing capacity

By SARAH MERVOSH and MANNY FERNANDEZ

L

ines for coronavirus tests have stretched around city blocks and tests ran out altogether in at least one site on Monday, new evidence that the country is still struggling to create a sufficient testing system months into its battle with COVID-19.

At a testing site in New Orleans, a line formed at dawn.

But city officials ran out of tests five minutes after the doors opened at 8 a.m., and many people had to be turned away.

In Phoenix, where temperatures have topped 100 degrees, residents have waited in cars for as long as eight hours to get tested.

And in San Antonio and other large cities with mounting caseloads of the virus, officials have reluctantly announced new limits to testing: The demand has grown too great, they say, so only people showing symptoms may now be tested — a return to restrictions that were in place in many parts of the country during earlier days of the virus.

“It’s terrifying, and clearly an evidence of a failure of the system,” said Dr. Morgan Katz, an infectious-disease expert at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

In the early months of the nation’s outbreak, testing posed a significant problem, as supplies fell far short and officials raced to understand how to best handle the virus. Since then, the United States has vastly ramped up its testing capability, conducting nearly 15 million tests in June, about three times as many as it had in April. But in recent weeks, as cases have surged in many states, the demand for testing has soared, surpassing capacity and creating a new testing crisis.

In many cities, officials said a combination of factors was now fueling the problem: a shortage of certain supplies, backlogs at laboratories that process the tests, and skyrocketing growth of the virus as cases climb in almost 40 states and the nation approaches a grim new milestone of 3 million total cases.

Fast, widely available testing is crucial to controlling the virus over the long term in the United States, experts say, particularly as the country reopens. With a virus that can spread through asymptomatic people, screening large numbers of people is seen as essential to identifying those who are carrying the virus and helping stop them from spreading it to others.

But the images of long lines at testing sites and complaints from mayors about the lack of a coordinated, overarching federal testing system have placed the White House on the defensive.

President Donald Trump tweeted on Monday that “our great testing program continues to lead the World, by FAR!”Vice President Mike Pence said last week that the country had so improved its testing capacity that “we will literally test anyone who comes into a testing site or comes to their local pharmacy.”

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services said federal officials had been working closely with states to develop and meet testing goals since early April. So far, she said, the federal government has distributed about 26 million swabs nationwide, among other equipment, and was on track to “meet all the needs for July.”

But testing in the United States has not kept pace with other countries, notably in Asia, which have been more ag-

gressive. Chinese officials who were monitoring infections in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, tested 6.5 million people in a matter of days in May. In Arizona, where reported cases have grown to more than 100,000, a shortage of testing has alarmed local officials, who say they feel ill-equipped to help residents on their own.

“The United States of America needs a more robust national testing strategy,” Mayor Kate Gallego of Phoenix said in an interview.

Gallego, a Democrat, said she had been scrambling to lobby for help from anyone she could think of — the federal government, private companies like Walgreens, even a middle school friend who works at a European testing company. As the crisis has intensified in her state in recent weeks, she suggested that testing resources could be shifted from states with decreasing needs to those struggling like hers.

All along, the United States has struggled with issues tied to testing. In February, the federal government shipped a tainted testing kit to states, delaying a broader testing strategy and leaving states blind to a virus that was already beginning to circulate. Later, testing supplies became a choke point, and states called on the federal government to use the Defense Production Act to force additional production.

Many places have been able to overcome some of the supply constraints that defined the earlier days of the outbreak,

Testing for the coronavirus at a drivie-thru site at Nissan Stadium in Nashville, Tenn., on July 2, 2020.

in part with their own resources. New York City, once faced with severe shortages as an epicenter of the virus, is now testing 30,000 people a day, officials say, an expansion that included the city building its own testing kits and partnering with private labs.

But even as Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced last week that anyone in New York state who wanted a test could get one, officials in other states have been left seeking a more robust testing system, and setting new limits on who can take one.

“We are too fragmented,” said Dr. Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We don’t have a good way to loadbalance the system.”

Testing delays and shortages have increasingly become a problem in Texas, where cases are surging.

Cities like San Antonio and Austin have reverted to testing only those who are showing symptoms as a way to manage the demand and a backlog of tests.

“We’re now focused on the highest priorities,” Mayor Steve Adler of Austin said Monday.

Adler, a Democrat, said the testing crunch was the result of the demand for tests statewide, brought on by the uptick in coronavirus cases after Texas reopened in fast-moving phases starting on May 1. He attributed the problem in large part to a backlog at laboratories; in some cases, test results take four to six days, far longer than the 24 hours health experts recommend to most effectively isolate the ill and track people they have had contact with.

The problem extends far beyond Texas and Arizona, among the hot spots that have led the country in rising cases in recent weeks.

In Idaho, where cases were also climbing, the state lab was so inundated that state officials sent a memo to nursing homes and long-term care facilities, saying the state could no longer meet all their testing needs. That has left the facilities in a crisis, desperate to find other labs to process tests for a particularly vulnerable population.

“Everyone is scrambling,” said Robert Vande Merwe, the executive director of the Idaho Health Care Association.

Louisiana has also seen testing delays.

Dr. Jennifer Avegno, the director of the New Orleans Health Department, said the problem her agency was seeing now was different than the one it experienced in March, when states competed over swabs and test tubes. Now the problem is a shortage of reagents, she said, which are the chemical ingredients needed to detect whether the coronavirus is present in a sample.

The supply chain issues have led officials in New Orleans to reduce the tests they carry out: At one site on Monday, officials handed out just 150 tickets for testing, which were gone in minutes.

“We are telling everyone to do all the things you are supposed to do, and if they have any concerns about exposure or close contact or are feeling sick, there will be a test for you,” Avegno said.

“And yet we’re starting to have to turn them away,” she said. “That is not what we want to do.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

9

Colleges plan to reopen campuses, but for just some students at a time

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

W

ith the coronavirus still raging and the fall semester approaching, colleges and universities are telling large segments of their student populations to stay home. Those who are allowed on campus, they say, will be living in a world where parties are banned, where everyone is frequently tested for the coronavirus and — perhaps most draconian of all — where students attend many if not all their courses remotely, from their dorm rooms.

In order to achieve social distancing, many colleges are saying they will allow only 40-60% of their students to return to campus and live in the college residence halls at any one time, often divided by class year.

Stanford has said freshmen and sophomores will be on campus when classes start in the fall, while juniors and seniors study remotely from home. Harvard announced on Monday that it will mainly be first-year students and some students in special circumstances who will be there in the fall; in the spring, freshmen will leave and it will be seniors’ turn.

At the same time, very few colleges are offering tuition discounts, even for those students being forced to take classes from home.

Professors, students and parents all seem to be conflicted over how these plans will work out.

Pascale Bradley, a senior studying English and French literature at Yale, is just looking forward to seeing some classmates again. Yale is allowing firstyear students, juniors and seniors on campus in the fall, but nearly all classes will be taught remotely.

“It won’t be the same social life,” she said. “Not that students are upset there might not be big parties.

People are just looking forward to daily small interactions, being able to sit and study with someone and have a meal with someone.”

Her father, Kirby Bradley, is less forgiving. “This just seems to be the worst of all worlds,” said Bradley, who owns a video production company. “They are exposing the kids to increased virus risk, something that is arguably justifiable in exchange for in-person learning, which everyone agrees is better than online.

But no, the kids will do remote learning, from campus!

At full tuition!”

College administrators say they are in a bind and doing the best they can to bring students back to campus to get at least some of the social and academic benefits of being surrounded by their peers.

“This pandemic is among the worst crises ever to hit Princeton, or college education more broadly,” Christopher L. Eisgruber, president of Princeton, said in his reopening announcement. “Princeton’s preferred model of education emphasizes in-person engagement, but in-person engagement is what spreads this

An almost empty Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Mass., May 28, 2020. terrible virus.”

Many universities are requiring behavioral contracts in which students agree to wear face masks in public, to be tested regularly for the coronavirus, and to limit travel and socializing. If they break the rules, they can be disciplined.

Universities say they are keeping a tight rein on students because the trajectory of the virus is still uncertain. Several universities cited the recent surge in virus cases in some states as justification for keeping classes virtual, even for students living on campus.

Faculty members are also worried. More than 850 members of the Georgia Tech faculty have signed a letter opposing the school’s reopening plans for the fall, which say that wearing face masks on campus would not be mandatory, just “strongly encouraged.”

The Montana University System is also facing pushback from the faculty over its mask policy.

International students may have the hardest time of all. Many have returned to their home countries and will not be able to reenter the United States because of travel and visa restrictions.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement on Monday that student visas would not be issued to people enrolled in schools or programs

that are fully online for the fall semester. Students in such programs will not be permitted to enter the country, and those already in the United States “must depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction, to remain in lawful status.”

Many universities are bracing for the possibility that upperclassmen will request leaves of absence until things return to normal. The schools are warning students that if they do, there may not be dormitory housing for them in a year or two when they come back.

Cornell University is bucking the trend and allowing all its students back to campus, with a mixture of in-person and online instruction. Cornell said it based its decision on an analysis that found that conducting a semester entirely remotely could result in far more students becoming infected — up to 10 times as many — compared with reopening the campus. That is because of the likelihood that even if classes were conducted remotely, many Cornell students would return to off-campus housing in Ithaca, New York, and the university would not be able to enforce virus testing requirements or restrictions on their behavior.

10

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

A million jobs lost: A ‘heart attack’ for the NYC economy jobs, reaching a record-low unemployment rate of 3.4% in February. ew York City, hit hard by the coronavirus The setback has been quick and steep. pandemic, is mired in the worst econoOfficially, about 670,000 city residents were out of work in May. But the real number mic calamity since the financial crisis of is higher because many unemployed people, the 1970s, when it nearly went bankrupt. like workers in the country illegally, do not fit The city is staggering toward reopening the government’s official definition of unemwith some workers back at their desks or behind cash registers, and Monday it began a new ployed. phase, allowing personal-care services like nail Even with the restrictions on operating besalons and some outdoor recreation to resume. ginning to loosen, workers are still getting bad Even so, the city’s unemployment rate is hovenews from their employers.

When Veronica Carrero, 37, was invited to ring near 20%, a figure not seen since the Great a virtual staff meeting last month, she hoped to Depression. hear that the furlough that had left her collecting What was intended as a “pause” has unemployment benefits for the first time was endragged on so long that for many workers, furloughs are turning into permanent job losses. ding. Instead, she was told that it would last at The sudden shutdown of the city nearly four least three more months. months ago threw at least 1 million people out The government benefits she has been of work and threatened the survival of many of relying on do not match the salary she was eartheir employers. ning as an executive assistant for a travel and enThe layoffs continued in June as some emtertainment company in Manhattan. But she and her family have been getting by in their Bronx ployers gave up hope of a quick recovery or ran home because her husband has continued worout of the federal aid they were using to maintain their payrolls. king.

Kelvin L. Rolling, 48, was among those The uncertainty about when and if her affected. A taxi dispatcher at Kennedy Internaemployer will need her again makes Carrero anxious. If the additional $600 in weekly benetional Airport for the past five years, Rolling said he thought he was one of the lucky ones who fits she has been collecting from the federal gowould hold on to his job despite the plunge in vernment expires at the end of July as scheduled, traffic at the airport. she may have to start looking for another job.

But then in June he was laid off on short “It kind of throws you completely off cournotice. se,” Carrero said. “I don’t even want to make any With the city trying to kick-start its ecoplans for next year.’’

The losses have been particularly signinomy and in the midst of a phased reopening, Rolling said, “It seems like you would be calling ficant among people of color: About 1 in 4 of the city’s Asian, Black and Hispanic workers was unemployed last month, compared with about 1 of every 9 white workers, the city comptroller’s office said.

“New York City is experiencing deep and enduring unemployment, mostly by low-income workers of color, and the city is facing a sluggish recovery with double-digit unemployment,” said James Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policies at the Center for New York City Affairs.

Parrott estimates that the city’s total job loss since February — counting all the workers in the country illegally and gig workers — could be as high as 1.25 million.

Residents of the city have filed nearly 1.4 million new claims for unemployment benefits in the 15 weeks since the pandemic began. And the flood of claims is not abating: In the week that ended June 27, the number of new claims Alan Rosen, in New York, on June 30, 2020, is the owner of Junior’s, a family- filed rose in Brooklyn, while falling only slightly owned group of restaurants in New York City and Connecticut known for their in the city’s other boroughs. cheesecake.

The state was so ill prepared to have to

By PATRICK McGEENAN

N

people back, not laying people off.”

The pandemic set off an immediate and sweeping reversal of fortune that the city has never before endured, economists said. Most past financial crises were “like a prolonged illness,” said Frank Braconi, a former chief economist for the city comptroller’s office.

“This was like a heart attack,” he said.

Entire industries — restaurants, hotels, theaters and museums and galleries — went from operating at full throttle to being practically shuttered.

Economists said they feared that the fallout would soon spread to other sectors, like education, health care and professional services.

Wall Street, a main driver of the city’s economy, appears somewhat insulated for now because the markets have rebounded and several of the biggest banks have pledged not to lay off workers during the pandemic.

Many businesses, including restaurants and hotels, are expected to close for good. The picture has grown even grimmer since officials delayed indefinitely the reopening of indoor dining.

While the national unemployment rate fell to 11.1% in June, New York City’s rate reached 18.3% in May, the highest level in the 44 years that such data has been collected. (In the Depression, unemployment is estimated to have reached 25%.) The numbers for June will be released July 16.

The highest the city’s unemployment rate reached during the Great Recession following the financial collapse in 2008 was about 10%.

For a decade after that, the city steadily added

pay out so much so fast that it quickly exhausted its unemployment insurance trust fund and had to borrow from the federal government. That debt is $3.4 billion and rising — more than any other state has had to borrow.

Some employers, like John Fitzpatrick, who owns two hotels in Manhattan, have laid workers off twice during the pandemic.

Fitzpatrick said he put most of his staff on furlough when the city was locked down in mid-March. Then, when he received a payrollprotection loan from the federal government in April, he rehired most of them, as Congress envisioned when it approved the program’s creation.

But in June, with no resumption of tourism on the horizon, he had to lay them off again, he said.

Fitzpatrick closed one of his hotels and has kept a small crew operating the other one, near Grand Central Terminal.

A second-generation hotel operator, Fitzpatrick has struggled to hold his business and his staff together. He started tearing up as he described how disappointed his late father would have been to learn that a business bearing the family name had shut down.

With Broadway theaters dark through the end of the year and spectators barred from the U.S. Open tennis tournament, he said, “We don’t see any pickup at all until September at the earliest.”

By then, he said, not all of his competitors will have survived. “Some of these hotels are not opening again,” Fitzpatrick said.

Dozens of layoff notices have been filed each week by employers unsure of what to tell their workers about the future. Junior’s, a familyowned group of restaurants in New York City and Connecticut known for its cheesecake, has warned more than 600 employees that furloughs that started in mid-March will be extended indefinitely.

Alan Rosen, the owner of Junior’s, said he was confident he would eventually reopen the company’s two restaurants near Times Square.

But for now, he said, he is moving cautiously.

In mid-June, he reopened the bakery counter at the flagship location in Brooklyn near the Barclays Center. For that, he brought back about 15 workers, with plans to rehire about 10 more, he said.

With only outdoor dining allowed in the city, he said he could not yet predict when he would call back more workers to reopen the other restaurants.

“If all things were perfect, all these people would still be working for us,” he said. “These are tough decisions we have to make.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

11

In Hong Kong, a proxy battle over internet freedom begins

By PAUL MOZUR

A

s Hong Kong grapples with a draconian new security law, the tiny territory is emerging as the front line in a global fight between the United States and China over censorship, surveillance and the future of the internet.

Long a bastion of online freedom on the digital border of China’s tightly managed internet, Hong Kong’s uneasy status changed radically in just a week. The new law mandates police censorship and covert digital surveillance, rules that can be applied to online speech across the world.

Now, the Hong Kong government is crafting web controls to appease the most prolific censor on the planet, the Chinese Communist Party. And the changes threaten to further inflame tensions between China and the United States, in which technology itself has become a means by which the two economic superpowers seek to spread influence and undercut each other.

Caught in the middle are the city’s 7 million residents, online records of rollicking political debate — some of which may now be illegal — and the world’s largest internet companies, which host, and by extension guard, that data.

A standoff is already brewing. Many Big Tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zoom and LinkedIn, have said in the past two days that they would temporarily stop complying with requests for user data from Hong Kong authorities. The Hong Kong government, in turn, has made it clear that the penalty for noncompliance with the law could include jail time for company employees.

Based on the law, Hong Kong authorities have the remit to dictate the way people around the world talk about the city’s contested politics. A Facebook employee could potentially be arrested in Hong Kong if the company failed to hand over user data on someone based in the United States who Chinese authorities deemed a threat to national security.

While it is not clear how widely Hong Kong’s government will enforce the law, the looming legal fights could determine whether the city falls behind China’s digital Iron Curtain or becomes a hybrid where online speech and communications are selectively policed.

The technological Cold War between China and the United States is playing out on various fronts around the world.

The trade war has ensnared Chinese tech giants like Huawei and ZTE, while American companies complain of industrial policies that favor Chinese businesses at home and subsidize them abroad. Beijing’s severe digital controls have kept companies like Google and Facebook from operating their services in mainland China.

Though U.S. internet companies still earn billions of dollars in Chinese ad revenue, a decision to go along with the Hong Kong rules would risk the ire of Washington, where there has been bipartisan condemnation of the security law. New blocks on American businesses could also trigger retaliation.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday that the Trump administration was considering blocking some Chi-

Supporters of a detained protester hold blank signs outside a courthouse in Hong Kong. nese apps, which he has called a threat to national security.

“I don’t want to get out in front of the president, but it’s something we are looking at,” he said in an interview on Fox News.

A Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, Zhao Lijian, defended the law at a news conference Tuesday, saying that it would make a more “stable and harmonious” Hong Kong.

“The horses will run faster, the horses will run happier, the stocks will sizzle hotter, and the dancers will dance better.

We have full confidence in Hong Kong,” he said, alluding to a quote from the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping about the city.

Google’s experience over the past year shows the fraught position that the largest U.S. internet companies are in.

As Hong Kong police struggled to contain sprawling protests across the city in 2019, they turned to internet companies for help. Overall data requests and takedown orders from police more than doubled in the second half of 2019 from the first half to over 7,000 requests, according to a pro-democracy lawmaker, Charles Mok. Police asked Google to take down a number of posts, including a confidential police manual that had leaked online, a YouTube video from the hacking group Anonymous supporting the protests, and links to a website that let the public look up personal details about police officers, according to the

company’s transparency report.

In each case, Google said no.

The new law could punish the company with fines, equipment seizures and arrests if it again declines takedown and data requests. It also would allow police to potentially seize equipment from companies that host such content.

“We see the trend. It’s not just that they’re making more requests, it’s the growing power in the hands of the authorities to do this arbitrarily,” Mok said, adding that “some of the local smaller platforms will be worried about the legal consequences and they may comply” with government requests.

Several small local apps associated with the protest movement have already shut down. Eat With You, which labeled restaurants based on their political affiliation, stopped operating the day after the security law was enacted last week.

On Sunday, another service that mapped pro-protester and pro-police businesses on Google Maps suspended its services, citing “changing social circumstances.”

Individuals, as well, have taken to self-censoring. Many have taken down posts, removed “likes” for some pro-democracy pages and even deleted accounts on platforms like Twitter, according to activists. Fears that WhatsApp would hand over data drove a spike in downloads of the encrypted chat app Signal. WhatsApp, though, had no recent data requests from Hong Kong police, according to a person familiar with the matter.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Stocks

Why the next three months are key for stocks

C

entral bank firepower helped stock market bulls finish the first half of 2020 on a high. Now the rally hinges on follow-through in the third-quarter from economic data, company earnings and the coronavirus newsflow.

With central bank and government stimulus approaching $20 trillion, world stocks’ 35% collapse between Feb. 20 and March 23 - the swiftest and deepest sell-off since 2008 - has mostly reversed.

Global shares are within 10% of their February record, while the U.S. Nasdaq and China’s Shenzen indexes are back at multi-year or record highs. (Graphic: World’s biggest stock markets since start of 2020, here) Latest numbers from jobs to manufacturing have kept momentum going. But what comes next is important - for investors as well as possibly for U.S. President Donald Trump’s re-election prospects in November.

Economic data is essentially backward-looking, so April to June figures reflected first big falls, as lockdowns drastically curtailed activity, then a bounceback from March-April troughs. Data from July onwards must confirm whether the rebound is becoming entrenched.

“For now, markets are still in a sweet spot. It’s not until the end of the quarter that we are going to get some visibility,” said Russell Silberston, co-head of developed markets FX and fixed income at asset manager Ninety One. Markets risk being sideswiped by bad news, Silbertson said, adding: “If you believe markets are forwardlooking, perhaps they are overly optimistic.”

What complicates the picture is that the figures mostly do not reflect record rises in U.S. infections and renewed lockdowns.

Extraordinary labour and business support schemes, such as furloughs in Britain or additional cheques for U.S. unemployment, may mask the real state of affairs. Unless renewed, these schemes start to roll off from end-July onwards.

Contrary to common belief, surging stocks and a shrinking economy can go together - past meltdowns attest markets can trough up to six months before crises end.

But they do need to see data improving at a steady clip.

“The rate of change (in data) matters more than the level,” said Morgan Stanley’s chief cross-asset strategist, Andrew Sheets. “Markets have got it right.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

13

Europe’s Roma already faced discrimination. The pandemic made it worse.

By PATRICK KINGSLEY and BORYANA DZHAMBAZOVA

A

t a checkpoint on the edge of a Roma neighborhood, a police officer held up his hand, stopping Angel Iliev from leaving.

Water was running low at home, so Iliev, 49, had cycled down a bumpy, dusty track that connects the district with a wealthier part of town, hoping to fill two plastic jerrycans at a spring beyond the checkpoint.

But while the rest of the city — like the rest of Bulgaria — is emerging from a lockdown put in place because of the coronavirus pandemic, the 12,000 residents of this Roma suburb are not allowed to leave their segregated settlement. Although its lockdown is scheduled to end at the start of Wednesday, municipal officials have already extended it once and could decide to prolong it again.

Last week, the police officer was in no mind to bend the rules, sending Iliev back into the ghetto with his jerrycans empty.

“It’s pure prejudice,” Iliev said before cycling home. “The discrimination was already bad, but now it’s even worse because of the pandemic.”

Authorities in Kyustendil justify the lockdown as a medical response to a spike in coronavirus cases in the Roma suburb.

But for many Roma, it is the latest example of centuries-old bigotry that has deepened in several parts of Europe since the start of the pandemic.

In Bulgaria, at least seven Roma settlements have been shut off from the rest of society at various points since March, despite low rates of confirmed infections in most of them. Officials in one town even sprayed disinfectant on a Roma settlement from a plane.

Five Roma towns were cordoned off in Slovakia, according to research by Amnesty International.

In Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, the Netherlands and North Macedonia, there have been 15 incidents of police violence against Roma since Europe’s lockdowns began, including against young children, according to research shared with The New York Times by the European Roma Rights

Bulgarian officials have cited the medical risks of COVID-19 in barring the 12,000 residents of this suburb from leaving their segregated settlement, but residents and advocates say it’s yet another form of bigotry.

Center, a Brussels-based watchdog.

In Belgium, two groups of Roma were made homeless in April after police confiscated their four caravans on accusations of violating coronavirus restrictions.

“It’s a perfect storm,” said Jonathan Lee, a spokesperson for the European Roma Rights Center. “The coronavirus measures have exacerbated the level of institutional racism that was already prevalent throughout institutions and police forces across Europe.”

A catchall term for several minorities, the Roma are descendants of people who left the Indian subcontinent about 1,500 years ago and later migrated in large numbers from Asia Minor to Europe during medieval times, just as the Ottoman Empire began expanding in that direction.

Settling across the continent, they have faced persecution and discrimination ever since. Sometimes known as Gypsies, Roma were targeted in medieval pogroms and enslaved until the 19th century. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the Holocaust.

At least 10 million Roma people now live in Europe, many of them in overcrowded, segregated communities, often with limited access to health care, education

and basic amenities like water and electricity.

In the Roma suburb in Kyustendil, most roads are unpaved and strewn with garbage. A wall separates part of the settlement from a nearby road, obscuring it from residents on the other side. With no access to computers and high-speed broadband during the pandemic, Roma children have struggled to take part in internet-based learning, falling even further behind.

Across Europe, more than 80% of

Roma are at risk of poverty, nearly half do not finish school, roughly one-third lack running water and one-third are unemployed, according to research published by the European Union in 2016.

“Roma represent one of the most disadvantaged minorities in Europe,” said Jelena Sesar, a Balkans researcher for Amnesty International.

The municipal authorities in Kyustendil, a city in western Bulgaria, locked down its Roma suburb on June 17. Residents were barred from leaving unless they could convince police that they had a job to attend or an urgent medical emergency.

In reality, that meant that most residents have remained stuck inside, since few have formal employment contracts.

There is little doubt that the lockdown has inflicted added hardship on an already neglected Roma population.

“They don’t care about us,” said Vasil Todorov, a 26-year-old resident. “They’re just afraid they’ll get sick themselves.”

In June, when one 72-year-old resident, Zafir Dimitrov, fell ill with coronavirus symptoms, his friends called for an ambulance. But the ambulance operators refused to come, telling them to contact the man’s general practitioner instead, according to a video of the telephone call seen by The Times.

Dimitrov’s doctor was unreachable, which delayed his treatment, said a community leader who was present for the call.

Within a few days, Dimitrov was dead.

A police checkpoint at the entrance of Kyustendil, a Bulgarian town with a Roma suburb, June 29, 2020.

14

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Laid off and locked up: Virus traps domestic workers in Arab states

By BEN HUBBARD and LOUISE DONOVAN

W

hen the nine African women lost their jobs as housekeepers in Saudi Arabia because of the coronavirus lockdown, the agency that had recruited them stuffed them in a bare room with a few thin mattresses and locked the door.

Some have been there since March. One is now six months pregnant but receiving no maternity care. Another tore her clothes off in a fit of distress, so the agency chained her to a wall.

The women receive food once a day, they said, but don’t know when they will get out, much less be able to return to their countries.

“Everybody is fearing,” one of the women, Apisaki, from Kenya, said via WhatsApp. “The environment here is not good.

No one will listen to our voice.”

Families in many Arab countries rely on millions of lowpaid workers from Southeast Asia and Africa to drive their cars, clean their homes and care for their children and elderly relatives under conditions that rights groups have long said allow exploitation and abuse.

Now, the pandemic and associated economic downturns have exacerbated these dangers. Many families will not let housekeepers leave the house, fearing they will bring back the virus, while requiring them more of them since entire families are staying home, workers’ advocates say.

Other workers have been laid off, deprived of wages and left stranded far from home with nowhere to turn for help.

In Lebanon, employers have deposited scores of Ethiopian women in front of their country’s consulate in Beirut because they could no longer pay them.

Persian Gulf countries alone had nearly 4 million domestic laborers in 2016, more than half of them women, according to a study for the Abu Dhabi Dialogue, which focuses on migrant labor in the region. Experts say the real number has risen since and is probably much higher.

Hundreds of thousands of foreign housekeepers and nannies work in other Arab countries, including Lebanon and Jordan, giving the Arab world the most female domestic migrant workers of any region, according to the International Labor Organization.

Most come to the Middle East through recruitment agencies and are employed under a sponsorship system that links their residency status to their jobs, giving their employers tremendous power. In many cases, they cannot quit without losing their residency, or move to new jobs or leave the country without an employer’s permission.

And in practice, many employers confiscate their workers’ passports and deprive them of time off, human rights groups say.

Some prevent them from using cellphones or the internet. Physical and sexual abuse are common.

The combination of their gender, the sponsorship system and the lack of contact with their peers makes female domestic workers especially vulnerable, said Vani Saraswathi, associate editor of Migrant-Rights.org, an advocacy group.

“Most domestic workers are very isolated,” she said.

“You have this person who controls your every movement, and you are in their house 24/7, so imagine the kind of

An Ethiopian domestic worker at the Ethiopian Consulate outside Beirut, where she and others were abandoned by their Lebanese employers last month. power that gives them.”

Alarm among such workers rose as COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, spread across the Middle East and shook the economies many migrants depend on.

“Even in cases of extreme abuse, workers are hesitant to leave their employers, as they fear being made completely homeless,” Saraswathi said.

Dozens of Kenyan women in Saudi Arabia have complained of “not enough food, no rest, violence, even being threatened, trapped and monitored,” said Ruth Khakame, chairwoman of the National Domestic Workers Council of Kudheiha, a Kenyan union. “You’re being denied from using your phone.

So you’re struggling, you’re alone and you’ve nowhere to turn.”

In recent years, a number of countries have passed regulations regarding domestic workers, granting them one day off each week, annual or biannual leave and an end-of-service benefit based on length of employment.

Qatar has capped the workday at 10 hours, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait at 12 hours and Saudi Arabia at 15 hours. Kuwait has a monthly minimum wage of about $195 for domestic workers. Kenyans in Saudi Arabia are supposed to earn at least $375 per month plus benefits, and the Philippines has set a $400 minimum wage for its citizens across countries.

As the coronavirus has spread, Bahrain, Kuwait and the Emirates have facilitated visa renewals to stranded migrants and helped them avoid fines and detention if their residency status lapses. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have announced free treatment

for migrant workers who get COVID-19.

But workers’ advocates say that enforcement of regulations is often spotty and that those who face abuse have little recourse.

“The way these countries have perfected this system of disposable labor lends itself to a high level of exploitation,” said Mustafa Qadri, the executive director of Equidem, a labor rights organization based in Britain.

Those who get the virus can be easily discarded by their employers.

Two months ago, Hanico Quinlat, a Filipino domestic worker in Saudi Arabia, came down with a severe headache and moved into her agency’s hostel to recover. When she tested positive for COVID-19, the agency supervisor locked her in a room alone, giving her only painkillers and vitamin C to treat her illness.

“When they give us food, they throw it into the room,” Quinlat said by telephone from the room where she was being held. “We are people, not animals.”

Among the most vulnerable workers are women who have fled their employers or entered countries on tourist visas, hoping to freelance on the local market.

Kelleh Njoki, 25, arrived in Dubai from Kenya as a tourist in February seeking work, but soon discovered she was pregnant. She is now sleeping in a crowded private dorm and cannot afford maternity care or a $400 ricket on a repatriation flight.

“I’m seven months pregnant; how am I going to have my baby here?” she said in a phone interview. “I’m stuck. I’m confused. I really need help.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

15

Britain, charting its own course on human rights, imposes new sanctions

The British foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said the new sanctions were part of an effort to carve out a post-Brexit role as a human-rights defender.

By MARK LANDLER

B

ritain, seeking to carve out a post-Brexit role as a human-rights defender, said Monday it had blacklisted dozens of people from Russia, Saudi Arabia and Myanmar for abuses ranging from a carefully-plotted execution to jailhouse beatings and the persecution of Rohingya refugees.

It was the first time since leaving the European Union in January that Britain imposed its own sanctions for humanrights violations. British officials cast the move as proof that the country can play an influential global role on its own, with some noting that the EU has yet to adopt similar sanctions.

Among the 47 people who face travel bans and frozen assets in Britain are 25 Russians accused of aiding and abetting in the death of Sergei L. Magnitsky and 20 Saudis accused in the assassination of dissident Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi. It also sanctioned two high-ranking generals from Myanmar and two North Korean organizations responsible for the isolated country’s brutal prison system.

Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer, died after brutal treatment while in detention on false charges in 2009, and is the namesake for the Magnitsky Act, under which the United States blacklists human rights abusers. Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, at the hands of Saudi agents.

“As we forge a dynamic new vision for a truly global Britain, this government is absolutely committed to the United Kingdom being an even stronger force for good in the world,” the British foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said in Parliament, using a phrase he and other Brexiteers coined to describe the international role that they hoped a newly independent Britain would play.

“If you’re a kleptocrat or an organized criminal,” Raab added, “you will not be able to launder your blood money in this country.”

As a practical matter, being on Britain’s blacklist will probably do little to change the lives of the people whose names were included in the announcement. The British government drew its first batch of names from individuals already blacklisted by the United States. That means they are already effectively banned from dealing with British banks, since the Treasury Department enforces its measures globally through the threat of secondary sanctions.

Still, Britain’s use of human rights sanctions gives it a weapon that it could apply more widely in the future, including against Chinese officials involved in the country’s mass internment of Uighurs or the recent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

Conservative lawmakers pressed Raab about why the list did not include any Chinese officials, and he replied that

the government would continue to add names. But analysts said they did not expect Britain to designate Chinese officials, given the complex commercial ties between the two countries.

Britain has been involved in a brewing clash with China since the Chinese government imposed a new national security law over Hong Kong in June. Prime Minister Boris Johnson criticized the move and invited nearly 3 million people in the former British colony — those who hold British overseas passports — to live and work in Britain.

A onetime human-rights lawyer, Raab has lobbied for Britain to adopt Magnitsky-style sanctions since he was on the Conservative backbench in Parliament. Britain passed the necessary legislation two years ago but held off designating anyone on the list until after it formally left the EU. Raab paid tribute to the memory of Magnitsky and afterward met at the Foreign Office with the lawyer’s widow, Natalia, and his son, Nikita, as well as with William F. Browder, an American-born British financier who employed Magnitsky and has long campaigned for British sanctions in his name.

“Britain has an outsized role in this area because most tin-pot dictators have bought mansions here, send their kids to boarding school here and kept their money here,” Browder said. “Any sanctions on those things has a very chilling effect for all these bad guys around the world.”

London has long been a preferred sanctuary for unsavory people with unlimited means. Many own apartments or houses in Chelsea or Belgravia, affluent neighborhoods in West London, and send their children to exclusive British schools, and, as Raab put it, “do their Christmas shopping in Knightsbridge.”

Among those on the blacklist are Aleksey Vasilyevich Anichin and Oleg Silchenko, who served on an Interior Ministry committee that investigated Magnitsky on trumped-up charges. Both are accused of taking part in his mistreatment and ignoring signs of his deteriorating condition while in a Moscow prison.

Among the Saudis named are Ahmed al-Asiri, a former deputy head of the Saudi intelligence service, and Saud al-Qahtani, a former adviser to the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who some have accused of ordering Khashoggi’s killing. Both men have been indicted in Istanbul and will stand trial in absentia for directing the 15-man hit squad that flew to Turkey from Saudi Arabia to carry out the killing.

Raab said he hoped the European Union would follow Britain’s lead. But there was more than a hint of satisfaction in his tone. Britain had broken free from the need for consensus, which has so far prevented the 27-member bloc from agreeing to such sanctions. Hungary has been among those who have balked at them.

“Even if they have a human rights sanctions regime in place, would they use it like the U.S. or U.K.?” said Emil Dall, an expert in sanctions at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London. “What we often see in the EU is a lowest common denominator when it comes to sanctions.”

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Wednesday, July 8, 2020

In Russia, they tore down lots of statues, but little changed

By ANDREW HIGGINS

E

lated by the defeat of a hard-line communist coup in August 1991, thousands of mostly young Muscovites gathered in front of the KGB headquarters and argued over how best to seal their victory with a bold, symbolic act.

After some discussion, recalled Sergei B. Parkhomenko, then a young journalist covering the scene, the crowd turned its passion — more euphoria than anger, he said — on the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the ruthless founder of the Soviet secret police, which stood in a traffic circle in front of the Lubyanka, the forbidding stone building that housed the KGB. The removal of the statue, accomplished with help from a crane sent by Moscow city authorities, was greeted with cries of “Down with the KGB” and sent a powerful message that change had finally come to Russia.

Or so it seemed at the time. Nearly 30 years later, Russia is ruled by a former KGB offi-

cer, President Vladimir Putin, and Dzerzhinsky is honored with a bust outside the Moscow city police headquarters.

As the United States boils with anger over police brutality and racism, the experience of Russia since the collapse of communism offers a cautionary lesson in the perils and disappointments of toppling monuments.

Russia never engaged in a deep reckoning with its Soviet past, airing injustices and holding people accountable. Instead, atrocities were glossed over and some of the old elite, particularly in the security services, has reconstituted itself in power.

Parkhomenko said he had no regrets about the removal of Dzerzhinsky — known as “Iron Felix” because of his unbending defense of Soviet communism — and certainly doesn’t want him back.

But he lamented that what had been a highly gratifying symbolic strike against the old order did not bury, or even really dent, the sys-

The statue of the founder of the KGB, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was toppled from its pedestal in front of K.G.B. headquarters in Moscow in 1991.

tem the statue represented.

“Everything has turned around,” he said.

“The putsch failed, but 30 years later it has won.

Russia’s power system today is much closer to what the putsch wanted to achieve than what those who protested against it wanted. This is our great tragedy.”

The Dzerzhinsky statue was initially dumped on the ground outside a Moscow gallery of modern art along with other “fallen heroes” — among them a pink granite statue of Stalin, his face smashed by hammer blows, and a bronze statue of Yakov Sverdlov, an early Bolshevik leader, toppled in 1991 from a square facing the Bolshoi Theater.

They are all now back on their feet as part of the Muzeon Park of Arts, a state-managed open-air exhibition that also includes artistic tributes to their victims, like a 1998 work called Victims of Totalitarian Regimes, a long wire cage containing sculpted stone heads.

Every few years, the Communist Party calls for Dzerzhinsky’s return to his pedestal in front of what is now the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the post-Soviet name of an otherwise little-changed KGB. But the symbolism of that would be too much, even for Putin.

The Kremlin has mostly focused on erecting new statues, not restoring those demolished in the 1990s. Among the new additions is a towering monument to Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47 assault rifle. The bronze statue, erected in 2017 on one of Moscow’s busiest thoroughfares, depicts Kalashnikov cradling one of his automatics, looking from a distance like an aging heavy metal guitarist.

News broadcasts on Russian state television have been filled in recent days with scornful reports about statues coming under attack in the United States. They lament that Christopher Columbus, Confederate generals and other historical figures have been targeted by what is depicted as rage-filled vandalism.

But Russia’s dismay is also felt by many

liberal-minded intellectuals who do not watch state television or share its jingoistic glee at troubles in the West, but have lived through their own country’s efforts to shake off its past.

“Waging war on bronze men doesn’t make your life any more moral or just,” said Maria Lipman, who worked in Moscow as a journalist as communism was collapsing and cheered when Dzerzhinsky was taken down.

“It does nothing really.”

Statues of Stalin, the Soviet dictator who died in 1953, quickly vanished across the empire he ruled. One prominent exception was his hometown, Gori, in Georgia, which waited until 2010 to remove him from its central square.

Today, however, the tyrant, whose body was removed in 1961 from a mausoleum in Red Square that still holds Lenin’s corpse, has never been more popular in Russia. An opinion poll last year found a record 70% thought Stalin played a positive role in Russian history.

“Deleting doesn’t work,” said Nina Khrushcheva, a Russia expert at the New School in New York City whose grandfather, former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, tried to break the grip of Stalinism only to be ousted from power in a 1964 Kremlin coup.

“Denouncing Stalin was Khrushchev’s greatest achievement, but removing him from all public spaces, trying to delete that history, was a big mistake,” she said. “Once you demolish somebody’s hero, you only incite hatred and force feelings underground.”

Mikhail Y. Schneider, a pro-democracy activist who led protesters to the KGB headquarters in August 1991, said attacking Dzerzhinsky’s statue was a “great emotional release” that “helped us believe we were living in a different country,” but “it changed nothing.”

For real change, he said, the removal of Soviet-era symbols needed to be accompanied by a program of exposing crimes, putting those responsible on trial and returning confiscated property.

“It is now too late,” he added.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

17

How America lost the war on COVID-19

By PAUL KRUGMAN

W

hen did America start losing its war against the coronavirus? How did we find ourselves international pariahs, not even allowed to travel to Europe?

I’d suggest that the turning point was way back on April 17, the day that Donald Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” followed by “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.” In so doing, he effectively declared White House support for protesters demanding an end to the lockdowns governors had instituted to bring COVID-19 under control.

As it happens, the Democratic governors Trump was targeting in those tweets stood firm. But Republican governors in Arizona, Florida, Texas and elsewhere soon lifted stay-at-home orders and ended many restrictions on business operations. They also, following Trump’s lead, refused to require that people wear masks, and Texas and Arizona denied local governments the right to impose such requirements.

They waved away warnings from health experts that premature and careless reopening could lead to a new wave of infections.

And the virus came.

The initial outbreak of COVID-19, centered on New York, should have taught us to be wary. Rising rates of infection can seem like a minor concern at first, especially if you don’t have adequate testing, until they explode with terrifying speed.

But neither Republican politicians nor the Trump administration was willing to heed that lesson. By the second week of June new COVID-19 cases were surging in Arizona and clearly on the rise in Texas. Yet the governors of both states dismissed calls for a pause in reopening, insisting that things were under control.

And on June 16, of course, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by Vice President Mike Pence declaring that there wasn’t and wouldn’t be a coronavirus second wave. Given the Trump administration’s track record, this virtually guaranteed that the wave was about to hit. And so it was.

Over the past three weeks things have quickly gotten very grim. Hospitals in Arizona and Texas are in crisis. And, yes, it was premature reopening that did it, both directly and by sending a signal to individuals that the risk was past.

But why did America bungle COVID-19 so badly?

There has been a fair bit of commentary to the effect that our failed pandemic response was deeply

rooted in American culture. We are, the argument goes, too libertarian, too distrustful of government, too unwilling to accept even slight inconveniences to protect others.

And there’s surely something to this. I don’t think any other advanced country (but are we still an advanced country?) has a comparable number of people who respond with rage when asked to wear a mask in a supermarket. There definitely isn’t any other advanced country where demonstrators against public health measures would wave guns around and invade state capitols. And the Republican Party is more or less unique among major Western political parties in its hostility to science in general.

But what strikes me, when looking at America’s extraordinary pandemic failure, is how top-down it all was.

Those anti-lockdown demonstrations weren’t spontaneous, grassroots affairs. Many were organized and coordinated by conservative political activists, some with close ties to the Trump campaign, and financed in part by right-wing billionaires.

And the rush to reopen in Sunbelt states was less a response to popular demand than a case of Republican governors following Trump’s lead.

The main driving force behind reopening, as far as I can tell, was the administration’s desire to have big job gains leading into November, so that it could do what it knew how to do — boast about economic success. Actually dealing with the pandemic just wasn’t Trump’s kind of thing.

In that case, however, why has Trump refused to wear a face mask or encourage others to do so?

After all, wider use of masks would be one way to limit infections without shutting down the economy.

Well, Trump’s vanity — his belief that wearing

a mask would make him look silly, or mess up his makeup, or something — has surely played a role.

But it’s also true that masks remind people that we haven’t controlled the coronavirus — and Trump wants people to forget that awkward fact.

The irony is that Trump’s willingness to trade deaths for jobs and political gain has backfired.

Reopening did lead to large job increases in May and June, as around a third of the workers laid off as a result of the pandemic were rehired. But Trump’s job approval and electoral prospects just kept sliding.

And even in purely economic terms the rush to reopen is probably failing. The last official employment number was a snapshot from the second week of June; a variety of short-term indicators suggest that growth slowed or even went into reverse soon afterward, especially in states where COVID-19 cases are spiking.

In any case, the point is that America’s defeat at the hands of the coronavirus didn’t happen because victory was impossible. Nor was it because we as a nation were incapable of responding. No, we lost because Trump and those around him decided that it was in their political interests to let the virus run wild.

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Wednesday, July 8, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Can we please pick the president by popular vote now?

By JESSE WEGMAN

T

he Supreme Court clearly got it right on Monday when it ruled that the Electoral College can keep working the way it has worked for the last 200

years.

The justices did not address the much bigger problem, which is the existence of the Electoral College itself.

In a unanimous opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan, the court agreed that states may replace and even punish “faithless electors,” the curious term we use for the direct electors of the president who cast their ballots for a candidate other than their party’s nominee.

According to the Constitution’s plain language, each state appoints its electors “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct.” That power, Kagan wrote, “includes power to condition his appointment — that is, to say what the elector must do for the appointment to take effect.”

This is the system cobbled together at the last minute at the 1787 constitutional convention to address the needs of a country vastly different from ours. It is rotting American democracy from the inside out.

The rot spreads in two ways. First, by potentially awarding the presidency to the candidate who earns fewer votes among the people as a whole — which violates the fundamental premise of majority rule. (Before it vaulted him into the White House, Donald Trump saw how corrosive this feature was: “The Electoral College is a disaster for a democracy,” he tweeted on election night 2012, when he believed that his candidate, Mitt Romney, would defeat President Barack Obama in the popular vote and yet lose the election.)

Second, by violating the constitutional mandate of “one person, one vote.” In the presidential election, the value of your vote depends on where you live. If you live

The Supreme Court building in Washington.

in one of the half-dozen or so “battleground” states, it matters hugely. If you happen to live in a “safe state,” as a vast majority of Americans do, it’s effectively irrelevant.

Why do we use this bizarre, anti-democratic method to choose the one leader whose job is to represent all Americans equally?

Please don’t say it’s because we’re a republic, not a democracy. We are a republic and a democracy. The terms both refer to a system of government in which the people elect leaders to act on their behalf. However we choose to elect the president, by a system of electors or through a national popular vote, we’re still electing him or her to represent us and act for us.

And don’t say it’s because the Electoral College protects us from being dominated by the big cities like New York and Los Angeles. That argument, the most popular anti-popular-vote one currently in circulation, relies on distortions of both history and statistics. There were no big cities as we think of them when the Constitution was adopted. It’s true that some framers were concerned about protecting the power of small states in the presidential election, but their solution was not the Electoral College as most of us think of it today; it was an obscure provision for a backup election that hasn’t been triggered in almost two centuries. (Specifically, it sends a deadlocked election to the House of Representatives, where each state, big or small, gets a single vote. This is a terrible idea, as the framers quickly came to see and as virtually everyone today agrees.)

Anyway, even if big-city voters cast every single one of their ballots for one candidate, presumably the Democrat (spoiler alert: they don’t), the nation’s 100 biggest cities hold just under 20% of Americans. That’s roughly the same as the number who live in rural areas, and not nearly enough to dictate who becomes president. If it were, how did George W. Bush cruise to a national popular vote win in 2004?

A more historically accurate explanation for the Electoral College is that some of the Constitution’s framers worried that most voters — who rarely ventured far from home and had no easy way of getting information quickly — couldn’t know enough about national candidates to make an informed decision.

That’s one reason the framers settled on a system of electors: men who would be, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, “most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation.”

That passage, which appears not in the Constitution but in Federalist No. 68, has long evoked for many Americans a romantic ideal — a “Mr. Smith Goes to

Washington” assertion of independent conscience and impassioned citizenship. It was the inspiration behind the formation of the “Hamilton Electors,” a group of Democratic electors in 2016 who tried desperately to keep Donald Trump out of the White House by appealing to the patriotism of their Republican counterparts, in the hope that enough would join together to cast their ballots for someone else.

The problem is that the Electoral College has never worked as Alexander Hamilton claimed it would. National political parties developed within a few years of the Constitution’s ratification, and electors quickly joined one team or the other. By the middle of the 19th century, the existence of partisan electors was so established as to be taken for granted. Justice Joseph Story wrote at the time that any elector’s effort to exercise “independent judgment would be treated as a political usurpation, dishonorable to the individual, and a fraud upon his constituents.”

That’s how the system has always functioned, for better or worse. Today, 32 states and the District of Columbia require electors to pledge to vote for a specific candidate; about half of those also penalize or replace faithless electors. But even in states without such laws, faithless electors are vanishingly rare, and for a simple reason: They were chosen precisely because of their partisan loyalty. They want to vote for their party’s candidate.

In short, Americans expect their electors to obey what the voters want. Micheal Baca, a Hamilton Elector and a plaintiff in one of the two cases the Supreme Court decided on Monday, admitted as much. “If it wasn’t me, I would feel uneasy,” he told me. “I’m not someone with the requisite knowledge to make choices of this magnitude for other people.”

He’s right, of course. In a democracy (or a republic) based on political equality, no one should have that power over other people. But if electors are supposed to follow the voters, why have electors at all? The Supreme Court’s ruling forces us to face the fact that there is no remaining rationale for the Electoral College. What remains is a system that serves no purpose other than to erase the votes of 100 million Americans every four years, making them bystanders to the most consequential election of all.

Kagan ended her opinion by invoking the Constitution’s preamble: “here, We the People rule.” Except that we don’t always.

A more accurate formulation would be, “We the People of the Battleground States rule.” And that, alas, is a problem that the Supreme Court can’t solve.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

19

Comisionada residente pide al FEI revele detalles de referidos a la gobernadora y de ser cierto, pide al directorio del PNP que actúe de inmediato Por THE STAR

L

a comisionada residente, Jenniffer González Colón solicitó el martes, al Panel sobre el Fiscal Especial Independiente (PFEI) a que revele los detalles de los referidos que incluyen a la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced y mencionó que, de ser cierto, se convoque al directorio del Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP) y se tome acción.

“Los huracanes, terremotos, pandemia y ahora la sequía son razones suficientes para mantener a nuestro pueblo preocupado ante el plano fiscal, de salud y de futuro. Las controversias en el gobierno no pueden ser la norma del día.

La fatiga emocional natural post desastre no puede ser alimentada ni promovida por la desconfianza en las estructuras e instituciones de gobierno

y mucho menos sus funcionarios.

Ante esta realidad debe procederse inmediatamente, con los referidos al Panel del FEI. El Panel, aunque no sea requerido, debería hacer público el contenido y las identidades de las personas referidas. Deben determinar si hay causa o no y proceder inmediatamente sin distinción de persona. Nadie está por encima de la ley.

Si el FEI determinara causa para investigar algún candidato primarista, el PNP debe, inmediatamente, convocar el directorio y tomar acción inmediata.

La recién nombrada secretaria de Justicia en receso debe cesar en su cargo ante el manejo altamente irregular de pedir la devolución de referidos.

Puerto Rico necesita enfocarse en su realidad y futuro”, dijo González Colón en declaraciones escritas.

Representantes del PNP se unen a reclamo del presidente de la Cámara de Representantes Por THE STAR

R

epresentantes del Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP) respaldaron el martes, las expresiones del presidente de la Cámara, Carlos ‘Johnny’ Méndez, sobre el respeto debe tener la Gobernadora hacia dicho cuerpo legislativo y la solicitud de renuncia a la secretaria de Departamento de Justicia, Wandymar Burgo El portavoz de la mayoría, Gabriel Rodríguez Aguiló, junto a José Aponte Hernández, el vicepresidente de la Cámara, José Pichy Torres Zamora, el portavoz alterno, Urayoán Hernández Alvarado, así como los representantes María Milagros Charbonier, Eddie Charbonier Chinea, Maricarmen Mas Rodríguez, Antonio ‘Tony’ Soto Torres, José Alberto Banchs Alemán, José Luis ‘Junior’ Pérez Ortiz, Víctor Parés Otero, Víctor Torres González, Joel Franqui Atiles, Yashira Lebrón Rodríguez, Félix Lassalle Toro, Jorge ‘Georgie’ Navarro Suárez, Pedro Julio ‘Pelle’ Santiago Guzmán, José ‘Che’ Pérez Cordero, Rafael ‘June’ Rivera Ortega, Angel Bulerín Ramos, Néstor Alonso Vega, Wilson Román López y Reinado ‘Rey’ Vargas Rodríguez, entre otros.

“La Gobernadora, por querer defenderse de los alegados referidos que la involucra por parte del Departamento de Justicia, ha tratado de atacar la Legislatura sin que sepa que no tenemos injerencia

sobre dicho asunto. Debe concentrarse en los asuntos de gobierno y en defenderse de los referidos y no en atacar la Legislatura”, señaló Rodríguez Aguilo en comunicación escrita.

“Coincido con las expresiones del Presidente.

Tal y como mencionara anoche en mis cuentas en las redes sociales, la Secretaria Interina, Wandymar Burgos, se inhabilitó para ese puesto con sus acciones de ayer”, sentenció Aponte Hernández.

En declaraciones escrita esta tarde, el Presi-

dente de la Cámara indicó que “la Cámara de Representantes, cuerpo que me honro en presidir, no claudicará a sus facultades otorgadas mediante la Constitución. El menosprecio que muestra la Gobernadora a este cuerpo, cuyos miembros en su mayoría son parte del partido en el que ella aspira en la carrera a la gobernación, no hará que nos amedrentemos ni perdamos nuestro norte en lograr sólo lo que es justo y correcto. Cuando hemos tenido que actuar con firmeza lo hemos hecho”.

20

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

A pandemic first: Actors union will allow two shows, with testing

By MICHAEL PAULSON

F

or the first time since the coronavirus pandemic erupted, Actors’ Equity is agreeing to allow a few of its members to perform on stage.

The union, which represents 51,000 actors and stage managers around the country, said it had given the green light to two summer shows in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts: an outdoor production of the musical “Godspell,” and an indoor production of the solo show “Harry Clarke.”

In recent weeks, multiple theaters featuring nonunion actors have begun resuming performances — in some cases outdoors, and in almost all cases with social distancing — and a group of Equity actors collectively developed an outdoor performance piece in New York’s Hudson Valley. And, of course, many actors have been performing online.

But “Godspell” and “Harry Clarke,” both scheduled to begin in early August in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, are now likely to be the first productions in which union actors will perform in person before paying audiences in the United States since the threat of infection prompted Broadway and the nation’s regional theaters to shut down in mid-March. Citing safety concerns, Equity had barred its members from in-person auditions, rehearsals and performances.

“We’re not trying to stop people from doing theater, but we are trying to stop people from getting sick and/or dying,” said Kate Shindle, the president of Actors’ Equity. She called the decision to allow these two productions “very exciting, and also something to watch very closely.”

“The fact that there is going to be Equity-approved theater this summer is something that I really wasn’t sure was going to be able to happen,” she added.

At both productions, performers and stage managers will be regularly tested for the coronavirus, and audience members will have to wear masks. The infection rate in western Massachusetts is low, and both theaters were willing to accommodate the union’s safety requirements.

Nicholas Edwards, shown here in a production of “Unmasked,” will star as Jesus in the Berkshire Theater Group production of “Godspell.”

Mary McColl, the union’s executive director, said she is in conversation with about 70 producers around the country seeking to resume performances by fall.

But, she said, no other approvals are imminent, because “as we’ve been working through the protocols that would be necessary, everything started to go crazy in a lot of these states. We’re not in control of the virus, and neither are these producers.”

“Godspell,” a beloved and oftperformed 1971 musical by Stephen Schwartz and John-Michael Tebelak, is to be staged by the Berkshire Theater Group for a month beginning Aug. 6. The musical, adapted from the Gospel of Matthew and exploring biblical parables, will have a 10-person cast led by Nicholas Edwards

as Jesus; it will be set in 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic.

Kate Maguire, the artistic director and chief executive of the Berkshire Theater Group, said the production, directed

by Alan Filderman, would be staged in a tent erected in a parking area; she said the tent would have about 100 socially distanced seats, vastly smaller than the 700-seat capacity of her indoor main stage.

The cast will isolate together in a house, and will be regularly tested for the coronavirus, she said. And the production, although fully staged with sets and costumes, will include no physical contact between actors — there will even be a contactless crucifixion, she said.

“We’ve never done ‘Godspell,’ but it

was the one show I thought could make sense in this world,” Maguire said. “I’m kind of dying to hear ‘Save the People.’ ” McColl said the “Godspell” approval was particularly significant because singing is considered a potential source of virus transmission. She said the actors would be distant from one another and would sing past one another during the production.

“Harry Clarke,” a one-man play by David Cale, is about an ingratiating con artist, who will be played at Barrington Stage Company by Mark H. Dold. The play, scheduled to have a two-week run starting Aug. 5, will be staged inside a 520-seat theater; to enable social distancing, only 163 people will be allowed to attend each performance, and Dold will perform upstage, far from the audience.

The audience will undergo temperature checks, and will have to follow rules about how to enter and exit the theater to reduce crowding.

Barrington Stage says it will have an entirely digital experience — no physical tickets or programs. The theater has also reconfigured its air-conditioning system to increase the circulation of fresh air.

Both Maguire and the artistic director at Barrington, Julianne Boyd, said they could not make peace with a summer without live performance in the Berkshires, a region whose economy relies heavily on cultural tourism.

“I am acutely aware of the responsibility that we’re taking on — Berkshire County has been really healthy the past several weeks, and I know we need to keep it that way,” Maguire said. “Also, every mothering instinct that I have is coming out for these actors. But I felt like with ‘Godspell’ we could do this and keep everyone safe.”

Boyd, who has been working to get permission to proceed for two months, was also determined. She is also planning an outdoor cabaret in a park in August, and hoping to stage several other oneperformer indoor performances.

“People need live theater,” she said.

“Let’s face it: Art has healing powers, and I want to start that healing process safely and responsibly.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

21

How a Brooklyn artist is making black women her focus

By SANDRA E. GARCÍA

T

he faces of the women in her portraits are often partly covered by a mask tied behind their heads, tugging at braids, low buns or tufts of curls. They are dressed in uniforms that show their essential jobs, but their style and charisma shine through their everyday armor.

They are Black women who work in jobs that the coronavirus pandemic quickly revealed as essential to the functioning of New York City.

And they were all drawn by Aya Brown, 24, a Brooklyn artist. They are women who took care of Brown during a hospital or a supermarket visit. They include janitors, MTA workers, mail carriers and security guards.

The drawings — made with color pencils on brown paper — comprise Brown’s Essential Worker series, a collection drawn with an intimacy that makes the viewers feel as if they too know the subject. It’s not just their jobs that are depicted through the lines and colors, but their panache.

“My goal is to uplift Black women who look like me and inspire me — to give them a space to be seen and to bring awareness to them,” Brown said.

Women have been the heroes of the pandemic. They are in the emergency rooms, on the streets delivering packages, in nursing homes, on construction sites, and many are still teaching their students who have been attending school from home.

One in three of the jobs held by women is essential, according to a New York Times analysis of census data crossed with the federal government’s essential worker guidelines.

Most of the women who have essential jobs are women of color.

“I guess when you think about essential workers, you don’t really think of yourself,” said Aja Brown, 26, Brown’s sister and a subject of one of her portraits.

Aja Brown is a paraprofessional educator, a role similar to a teacher’s aide, and works with fifth graders in Brooklyn. She has been working from home since the city closed schools in March. She never considered herself an essential worker until she saw her sister’s portrait of her on Instagram. The portrait made her cry, she said.

“I don’t know if I needed that space,” Aja said. “I just want my kids to get where they need to be emotionally and academically. I kind of don’t really think about myself.”

Aya Brown aims to change that thinking, to help Black women see themselves as essential by putting them at the center of her artwork

and bringing the viewer into her universe.

“It’s very clear how close she is to her mainstream, how unfiltered her perspective is and how much she loves her people and her village,” said Tamara P. Carter, a writer and director of the upcoming TV show “Freshwater.”

After being furloughed by her employer, Gavin Brown Enterprises, where she organized events, Aya Brown has used her free time to delve into her art, which focuses on showing Black queer women fully: their sexuality, strength, style, bodies, joy and edge. Even the materials she uses are intentional: She draws on brown paper, she said, because “Black bodies do not need to start from white.”

Occasionally, she hosts parties that are meant to provide a safe space for Black lesbians, like herself. It is the kind of support Brown was entrenched in growing up in Brooklyn, and a foundation that was notably missing when she attended Cooper Union, a private college in Manhattan. She said her experience there was traumatic, that she did not feel as if her blackness was accepted. After three years, she dropped out in 2017.

“They made me feel like I didn’t deserve to be there,” Brown said.

She began her Essential Worker series in April, after a trip to the emergency room. There she noticed that her nurse, a Black, West Indian woman, took care of her while her doctor stopped by intermittently.

“I noticed that nurses in the ER are usually Black women,” Brown said. “I am thinking about these Black women on the front lines. It just bothered me because no one is noticing this.”

A few months later, out of work because of the pandemic and with not much to do, she began to develop her Essential Workers series.

Brittany Tabor, 29, one of Brown’s subjects, has been a store director at a Target in Brooklyn for six years.

“You never knew you were essential until COVID hit,” Tabor said, “and it’s like, I have to stand up for the community now. I didn’t realize all that we do.”

Like countless Black women around the country, Tabor had to be a counselor for her staff during the pandemic. When someone lost a family member or a neighbor, she tried to put them at ease.

“I needed them to know, ‘I am in it with you, and let’s get through this together,’” Tabor said. “But I was freaking out, too. I was human with everyone else. I was just able to put on a different hat.”

Black women are also underrepresented

in the worlds of art and media, and Black queer women are nearly nonexistent in museums, according to Chaédria LaBouvier, the curator of “Basquiat’s “Defacement”: The Untold Story,” at the Guggenheim Museum.

“It is disgusting in a really violent and indifferent way,” LaBouvier said. “There is no excuse, and even Black curators can be complicit in perpetuating that.”

LaBouvier said Brown’s work is not about being left out of the white, heterosexual, patriarchal art world, but about the Black working class saying, “I am already the center, and there is a lot of beauty here.”

Brown’s work “looks at what liberation actually could be,” LaBouvier said. “You’re in a moment where queer women are saying, ‘It is so much bigger than fitting into the system; let’s abolish the system.’”

According to Carter, when we look back on this moment in history and wonder who saved New York City from the coronavirus pandemic, Brown’s portraits will provide the answer.

“Who she’s making the art for seems to be just as important as the art itself,” Carter said.

“Art made with that kind of love and rigor is self-evident and can’t be co-opted.”

Aya Brown, left, an artist in Brooklyn, with Brittany Robles, one of the subjects of her Essential Workers series.

FASHION The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, March July 4, 2020 Wednesday, 8, 2020 20 22

The The San San Juan Juan Daily Daily Star Star

The unsung heroes of fashion, now mostly unemployed

Teddy Quinlivan on the street after walking in the Maison Margiela spring show in Paris on Sept. 26, 2019.

By VANESSA FRIEDMAN, ELIZABETH PATON, JESSICA TESTA and GUY TREBAY

I

n a pre-coronavirus world, hundreds of editors, clients, stylists and celebrities would have converged on Paris this weekend, clacking over the cobblestones in their kitten heels for the couture shows. Those singular displays of fashion art — handmade clothes custom-ordered by the very few — represent equal parts creative laboratory, artisanal expertise and visual extravaganza. For many, they are also a major employment opportunity.

You may see models in gowns on Instagram and hear of the famous names responsible for the updos and cat eyes, but making that perfect 20 minutes happen also demands an army of independent contractors, largely unknown — and, now that the shows have gone digital, largely unemployed.

Here, a scattering of these men and women describe their lives in the absence of shows.

They are but a fraction of the lighting technicians, manicurists, photographers, caterers, florists, drivers, security guards, seamstresses, dressers and musicians whose labor creates the dream.

These interviews have been edited.

Yesmin O’Brien, 53, Hairstylist “I’ve worked with the hairstylist Sam McKnight as part of his freelancer team for 13 years. Usually I’m a director for a group of hair

salons in and around London, but whenever Sam has been booked for a fashion show, then off I go to that city, be it for cruise, couture or ready-to-wear.

“There are probably around 40 stylists on Sam’s backstage team at a fashion show. We come from all over the world to work in Paris for couture. Often, for the biggest shows, you work in pairs on one model with a stylist and a ‘watcher,’ who makes sure the look is absolutely perfect and to the specifications of Sam or the brand.

“Until you reach the very top, you don’t do it to make money. You do it for career experience with Sam and out of love for the theater of fashion and being a part of it all. It is only after you establish yourself over many years that you make any cash.

“But for me it has been worth it for the experiences I’ve had. I still pinch myself. We do all the Chanel couture shows, of course, which are always very special. And last July, for the Fendi couture show in Rome that paid tribute to Karl Lagerfeld, we color-coordinated wigs to each of the clothes for the finale, which just looked spectacular. But this year, there is nothing at all.

“I’ve been trying to use the time to think creatively about possible hair pieces and ideas, but I really miss the atmosphere.”

Jacques Negrit, 56, Security Guard “Fashion weeks in Paris make up 60% of

my annual income, so not having couture this season is a big loss. Don’t forget, it is not just the shows — it is the presentations, fittings, private celebrity work and cocktail parties, too.

“I’ve been a security guard at fashion weeks in Paris for 20 years and built my business around it. I have almost 200 freelance guys working on my books during couture week. Security is hard work; you’ll be up at 5 a.m. or 6 a.m., securing the set and backstage, planning the entrance and exit strategies for huge crowds in very short spaces of time and often with a number of shows taking place all over town.

“In what would have been couture, I’ll be thinking about what might happen in terms of physical shows in September. For whatever events take place, security — and maintenance of new safety regulations — will be more important than ever before. Whatever happens, we will do what we always do: get the job done.”

Luc Deperrois, 40, Florist, Stéphane Chapelle “I have worked with Stéphane for 20 years. We are known for our large, extravagant bouquets. We usually work with around 10 to 12 people, although during show time, that usually goes up to 25 to 30. Fashion weeks together are a huge part of our year — maybe 40% to 45% of our annual business, if you put all six together.

“For us, couture week is very intense.

We could be doing the flowers in Mademoiselle Chanel’s apartment in the morning, then for the Lutetia hotel, then a dinner for a brand.

Or Chanel calls and says they want 100 bouquets of flowers delivered to clients who are coming to their show in the next 24 hours. And maybe they want only white roses one season.

Or another brand wants only pink roses. I will normally start my day at 4 a.m. at the market, buying the flowers.

“Now it’s all mostly stopped, though.

There are some orders — enough to keep our staff, but not for anyone extra. I am hoping that because so much of fashion is on Instagram now, there will be a need for flowers to animate the sets and the looks, to bring some humanity to the digital world. And that in September, life will begin again.”

Eny Whitehead, 38, Makeup Artist Q: How long have you been doing makeup?

A: I started in 2003. Then, in 2005, I got very lucky and met Pat McGrath, and she brought me along to do the makeup for a Gal-

liano show. It was so creative, such an exciting time. Then I started doing shows for Milan and Paris fashion weeks, and that led to me getting an agent.

Q: How big a part of your business are the shows?

A: I do ad campaigns and magazine shoots, but the shows are such a big thing here in Paris — because it’s not just the catwalks; it’s also all the VIPs that fly in for them. During couture, I might have three clients call me in a single day to do their makeup to go to a show or an event after a show, and then the next day I will be backstage for the couture.

I also get last-minute calls to fill in for other makeup artists, and then I just hop on my scooter, and the next thing, I am on the other side of Paris, getting Cindy Bruna, the French model, ready for an after-party, or Golshifteh Farahani, the Iranian French actress. I generally work with Peter Philips now during show time.

In January, we did Dior and Viktor & Rolf.

Q: How does this compare to your normal professional life?

A: My work is generally up and down; I don’t work every day, but during shows I do.

For some shows, I might have to arrive at 5 a.m. to get the models ready, and then that night, I might have to get a private client ready for a dinner. The only other time that’s remotely comparable, where I might have four jobs in one day, is the Cannes Film Festival.

Q: But what is it like now?

A: For three months, everything stopped.

I was lucky because, as a self-employed person, I qualified for the government assistance. They gave everyone 1,500 euros (about $1,700) if they had lost 70% of their income, and I lost 100%.

Ad campaigns that were postponed during lockdown are happening, and since no one can fly in, they are asking local teams. And we are lucky, in that clients have not used the excuse of COVID to lower the rates. I had an option on a video that one of the brands was going to do instead of a couture show, but it didn’t work out.

The problem with the videos is, they involve very small teams. They really only need one artist, or maybe one and an assistant, whereas a show like Dior might use up to 40 makeup artists. So it’s a big loss for my income and also my creativity.

Q: What do you mean, creativity?

A: What I miss most, I think, is watching the creative process of a show, because that in-

The San Juan Daily Star spires me a lot, especially when it comes to trends for the next season. And I miss my colleagues.

Naki Depass, 22, Model “Normally, I should already be in Paris by now,” the impassive Naki Depass, a Jamaicaborn model discovered as a high school student in Jamaica five years ago, said from her family home in Kingston. After her breakout season in Europe, Depass appeared on the runways of Armani Privé and Valentino (she was one of 64 Black models in Pierpaolo Piccioli’s memorable spring 2019 show) and has walked for labels as unalike as Hermès, Prada and Off-White.

“Since I first started working, I’ve never experienced this downtime, and I find I’m really missing work — missing traveling for jobs, exploring the world. I think about losing the momentum. You don’t want to be away for too long; by the time you come back, your clients are looking for a new sensation.”

Jacques-André Henriquez, 64, Founder, Névé Cleaning Co. “I had a cleaning company with my wife for 20 years, but at the end of last year we split up, and I founded an eco-cleaning company.

We are responsible for cleaning the whole venue wherever a show is held: floors, windows, walls, everything. And because so many shows are in strange, industrial places or building sites under construction, it can be very dirty, very dusty and very complicated.

“With my wife, we used to do Chanel in the Grand Palais, and we would start two weeks before the show, with two people cleaning. On the day of the show, we would have up to 12.

“In January, for my first season on my own, we did Dior, YSL, where the whole set was an enormous white rug — I made about 80,000 (about $90,000) euros that season, and I was budgeting 120,000 to 150,000 euros for men’s and couture in July, assuming we would do seven or eight shows in each week.

“We are still getting a little work because some brands are doing photography or video, and also because everyone is very scared about safety, but it is much, much less. So now I am planning for only 15,000 to 20,000 euros this season. I feel lucky because I only have one person on staff. Otherwise, we would really be in trouble.”

Nicolas Ouchenir, Calligrapher Q: You help create invitations for some of the biggest shows. But this summer, there are no shows.

A: It’s a nightmare. Because it’s not even the shows — you have all the parties, and all the buyers’ presents, and all the events.

Q: Normally, how many invitations do you address in one day?

A: It depends on the material, the papers — or I can have the leather used by Rick Owens, and that’s superhard; or the glass used

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

at Margiela. So it depends, but you can have something like 2,000 in one day. I have around 60,000 by fashion week.

Q: Are you worried?

A: We are waiting for the buyers. If we do not have any buyers, fashion shows cannot be done. At the same time, all the communications directors for the maisons are superconfident. They call and tell me, “You’re part of the family.” That’s why I’m still positive.

Alexis Bourin, 30, Freelance Technical Director, Bureau Betak “Basically, my job is to oversee the technical jobs — lighting, video, audio, safety — and make sure everything is going well during the preparation so we can deliver on time.

“This was supposed to be my year. I quit school when I was 17 — I came from nothing, and now I’m producing some of the biggest shows in Paris for the best agency in the world.

My producer and I were supposed to have three shows for couture and six or seven for men’s ready-to-wear. From March to October, I’ll have lost around 100,000 euros (about $112,500).

“During lockdown, I trained myself to do 3D lighting design. You want to progress and train yourself, but at the same time, you’re losing all of your jobs. As a freelancer, the government gave me 1,000 euros. That’s not even my rent, you know?

“I think it’s never going to go back to normal. It’s great to be optimistic, but let’s be honest: The economy is going to decide. It’s not going to be us.”

Acielle Tanbetova, 41, the Photographer behind Style du Monde “Normally, I would be shooting backstage for American Vogue, and between the shows I’d shoot street style.

“Last year, I was traveling nonstop, shooting from one fashion week to another. So it’s very strange to be at home right now. I took this time for myself and to study, to improve myself, to reflect. I’m still licensing my pictures to publications, like British Vogue or Glamour Germany.

“I’ve been invited to Copenhagen Fashion Week in August, so that will be my first fashion week since the start of the COVID-19 crisis.

I think it will be an interesting test case for how these kinds of events can be organized in a safe and practical way. And I wonder what kind of outfits there will be. More simple and practical?

Will everyone be wearing masks?”

Romaine Dixon, 22, Model “I’ve been thinking a lot about where I am now,” said Romaine Dixon, one of the true breakout stars of recent years. Discovered after a friend dared him to send his photo to a modeling agency, Dixon rocketed to the front ranks of models, walking in Kim Jones’ first show for Dior Men and then a full roster of other major labels.

A billboard several stories high featuring his image now covers a facade of the Printemps department store in Paris, but Dixon has not seen it in person. That he may never do so weighs on him, as he said while driving through his hometown, Kingston.

“I haven’t done any work since the quarantine started. I haven’t done any Zoom shoots.

It’s a real blow to my social media profile. Because I have savings, I’ll be all right for some time. But I need to get back to work.”

Charly Lavado, 33, Freelance Patternmaker and Dressmaker “For the past eight years I have worked part time for Dior couture in Paris. Usually, I will work in the atelier for four to five months of the year, with two full months before the January shows and then two full months in the runup to the shows in July. This year, I am doing nothing at all.

“It has been a big shock. After lockdown was declared in March, Dior (and all the French fashion houses) canceled all temporary contracts for the foreseeable future, and there was no clarity on whether there would be a summer couture show or even a collection.

“Usually, this time of year would be so busy. I would pattern-cut at least three looks for the collection and complete at least one of those dresses myself. In January, I made a mousseline green plissé gown that looked simple, but every stitch was so technically challenging.

I am not complaining, though. I love what I do.

“I still remember walking into the Dior atelier for the very first time. It was like a dream come true. Some people dream of Chanel, others of Givenchy, but not me. It was always Dior.

Some of my friends have been working at Chanel on a very reduced couture collection and on client orders made in January. Now all those

23

FASHION

pieces are ready for fittings, but none of the clients are able to travel.

“I have some money saved, but I am taking stock now. I have always loved the flexibility of being a freelancer. I have turned down studio jobs and fixed contracts at other houses, as generally you don’t make as much money.

“But if things don’t change in another few months, I may have to reconsider — if there are even jobs.”

Philippe Cerceau, 60, Lighting Designer “After the clothes themselves, lighting is the most important thing at a fashion show.

With bad lighting, the audience can’t see any of the beautiful details or the finish of a collection.

You can also get bad photographs. I’ve been designing lighting for shows for 25 years, and nowadays fashion week work makes up about two-thirds of the income for my business, Clair Obscur.

“The first couture show I did was for Giorgio Armani; it was his first couture show. too. In January, my clients for couture were Dior, Valentino, Elie Saab and Viktor & Rolf. For July, there are none.

“The last few months have been so quiet, so I painted my house instead. We’ve started to get some inbound now for the September shows in Paris, but it is still early days.”

Sandrine Jolly, 40, Construction, Jaulin “We work in the shadow of the industry — with the fashion show production agency — to create the temporary installations. We do the furniture and layout and the decoration of the space: the backstage, the carpet, the fabric on the wall, the construction of benches.

“We should be really busy in June and July — last July, we had 20 to 25 shows — but we’re not. It’s a very bad situation because we love fashion shows.”

Saint Laurent fall winter collection during the Ready To Wear Fashion Show in Paris on Sept. 24, 2019.

24

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Seeking dark matter, they detected another mystery

By DENNIS OVERBYE

I

t could be a key to the secret of the universe. Or just background noise, another item to be calibrated in future experiments.

Scientists hunting dark matter have recorded suspicious pings coming from a vat of liquid xenon beneath a mountain in Italy. They are not claiming to have discovered dark matter. But these pings, they say, could be tapping out a new view of the universe.

If the signal is real and persists, the scientists say, it may be evidence of a species of subatomic particles called axions — long theorized to play a crucial role in keeping nature symmetrical but never seen — streaming from the sun.

“It’s not dark matter, but discovering a new particle would be phenomenal,” said Elena Aprile of Columbia University, who leads the Xenon Collaboration, the project that made the

detection.

In a statement, the collaboration said that detecting the axions would have “a large impact on our understanding of fundamental physics, but also on astrophysical phenomena.”

But there are other explanations for the finding. Instead of axions, the scientists may have detected a new, unexpected property of the ghostly particles called neutrinos. Yet another equally likely explanation is that their detector has been contaminated by vanishingly tiny amounts of tritium, a rare radioactive form of hydrogen.

The collaboration posted a paper describing the results to its website last week.

Or it could all just be a statistical fluctuation that will go away with more data. Members of Aprile’s team conceded that the best explanation they had right now — that axions were to blame — has two chances in 10,000 of being a fluke, a far cry from the “5-sig-

The laboratory is the largest underground research center in the world, buried more than 4,500 feet underground.

ma” criterion of less than one chance in 1 million needed in particle physics to certify a “discovery.”

“We want to be very clear that all we are reporting is observation of an excess (a fairly significant one) and not a discovery of any kind,” said Evan Shockley of the University of Chicago in an email.

Frank Wilczek, a Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was one of the first physicists to propose the axion, noted the collaboration’s own caveats in the paper. But he said it was “certainly intriguing, and the physics community will be eagerly awaiting further developments.”

Other scientists responded with cautious excitement, or excited caution.

“I’m trying to be calm here, but it’s hard not to be hyperbolic,” said Neal Weiner, a particle theorist at New York University. “If this is real, calling it a game changer would be an understatement.”

Michael Turner, a cosmologist with the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles, called the Xenon Collaboration “a beautiful experiment.”

“I really want to believe it, but I think it will probably break my heart,” he said. “But for now, I am excited that it could be something new and important that cheers us all up.”

Wishing on a WIMP Aprile’s Xenon experiment is currently the largest and most sensitive effort aimed at detecting and identifying dark matter, the mysterious substance that astronomers have concluded swamps the universe, outweighing ordinary atomic matter by a factor of 5 to 1.

In modern cosmology, dark matter is the secret sauce of the universe.

It collects in invisible clouds, attracting ordinary atomic matter into lumps that eventually light up as stars and galaxies.

The best guess is that this dark matter consists of clouds of exotic subatomic particles left over from the Big Bang and known generically as

WIMPs, for weakly interacting massive particles.

The Xenon Collaboration is a multinational team of 163 scientists from 28 institutions and 11 countries.

In a tunnel 1 mile under the rock at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, Aprile and her colleagues have wired a succession of vats containing liquid xenon with photomultipliers and other sensors. The hope is that her team’s device — far underground to shield it from cosmic rays and other worldly forms of interference — would spot the rare collision between a WIMP and a xenon atom. The collision should result in a flash of light and a cloud of electrical charge.

So far, it hasn’t happened.

The latest version, called Xenon1T, ran from 2016 to 2018 with 2 tons of xenon as the target.

Luca Grandi of the University of Chicago explained that in its most recent analysis of that experiment, the team had looked for electrons, rather than the heavier xenon nuclei, recoiling from collisions. Among other things, that could be the signature of particles much lighter than the putative WIMPs striking the xenon.

Simulations and calculations suggested that random events should have produced about 232 such recoils in a year’s time.

But from February 2017 to February 2018, the detector recorded 285, an excess of 53 recoils.

Grandi said, “We have seen the excess more than a year ago, and we have tried in any way to destroy it,” referring to the measurements.

The collaboration is in the final stages of preparing a bigger, more sensitive version of its experiment. It was delayed by the coronavirus lockdown in Italy but could now start up by the end of this year.

If the excess is real, it should show up within a month or two after it starts running, Grandi said.

So for now, all three possibilities — axions, neutrinos or tritium — are still alive, he said.

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

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante V.

ANGELA RONDÓN RIVERA, por sí y como miembro conocida de la sucesión Rafael PR RECOVERY AND Colón Carmona en DEVELOPMENT JV, LLC cuanto a la cuota viudal DEMANDANTE Vs. usufructuaria; LOURDES FONTANEZ CARLOS RAFAEL COLÓN RIVERA H/N/C RONDÓN, BETHZAIDA AGROCENTRO OJO DE COLÓN RONDÓN ÁGUILA Y YADIRA COLÓN DEMANDADA CIVIL NÚM.: CZ2019CV00254. RONDÓN como miembros SALA: 202. SOBRE: COBRO conocidos de la sucesión DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENRafael olón Carmona; TO POR EDICTO. JOHN DOE Y JANE A: LOURDES FONTANEZ ROE como miembros RIVERA H/N/C desconocidos de la AGROCENTRO OJO DE sucesión Rafael Colón ÁGUILA Carmona; POR LA PRESENTE se le ANGELA RONDÓN emplaza y requiere para que RIVERA, por sí y como conteste la demanda dentro de miembro conocida de la los treinta (30) días siguientes sucesión Carlos Rafael a la publicación de este Edicto.

Usted deberá presentar su aleColón Rondón; gación responsiva a través del FULANO DE TAL Y Sistema Unificado de Manejo y FULANA DE TAL como Administración de Casos (SUmiembros desconocidos MAC), la cual puede acceder de la sucesión Carlos utilizando la siguiente direcRafael Colón Rondón. ción 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.

Demandados

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Partes Con Interés CIVIL NÚM.: CY2019CV00433.

SALA: 801. SOBRE: COBRO DE EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA, E INTERPELACION. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. SS

John Doe y Richard Roe como miembros desconocidos de la Sucesión Rafael Colón Carmona; Urb. Jardines de Cayey I, D22 calle 8, Cayey, PR 00736.

Por la presente se les ordena para que se expresen si han de aceptar o rechazar formalmente la herencia en el término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de esta orden, de lo contrario la herencia se tendrá por aceptada. Se le apercibe a los herederos que si no se expresan dentro del término aquí otorgado, la herencia se tendrá por aceptada. Aclarándose LEGAL NOTICE que el heredero deberá, si así ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO lo desea, repudiar la herencia DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL mediante instrumento público GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRI- o por escrito judicial. En San BUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTAN- Juan, Puerto Rico, hoy 15 de junio de 2020. Carmen Ana PeCIA SALA DE CAGUAS.

@

staredictos1@outlook.com

reira Ortiz, Secretaria. Teresita el número 18 de Bloque “JJ” de Vega Gonzalez, SubSecretaria. la Urbanización Villa del Carmen del término municipal de LEGAL NOTICE Ponce, Puerto Rico, con una UNITED STATES DISTRICT cabida superficial de 312.500 COURT DISTRICT OF PUER- metros cuadrados, y en lindes por el NORTE, por donde mide TO RICO. 25.00 metros, con el solar núReverse Mortgage Funding, LLC Plaintiff mero 19 del mismo Bloque; por el SUR, en 25.00metros con v. el solar número 17 del mismo Enrique Pagan Vega; Bloque; por el ESTE, en 12.50 Jane Doe; Conjugal metros, con la Calle ConstanPartnership Pagan-Doe; cia; y por el OESTE, en 12.50 United States of America; metros, con el solar número 5 Richard Doe del mismo Bloque.” Property Defendants Number 40,410 filed at page CIVIL ACTION NO.: 3:15-cv- 265 of volume 1,395 of Pon02251-GAG. COLLECTION OF ce, Registry of the Property of MONIES AND FORECLOSU- Puerto Rico, Section of I of PonRE OF MORTGAGE. NOTICE ce. The mortgage is recorded OF SALE. in the Registry of Property of TO: Enrique Pagan Vega; Puerto Rico, Section I of Ponce at page 153, volume 2,115 of Jane Doe; Conjugal Partnership Pagan-Doe; Ponce. WHEREAS: This proUnited States of America; perty is subject to the following liens: Senior Liens: None . JuRichard Doe GENERAL nior Liens: Reverse mortgage PUBLIC securing a note in favor of SeWHEREAS: Judgment was en- cretary of Housing and Urban tered in favor of plaintiff to reco- Development, or its order, in ver from defendants the princi- the original principal amount of pal sum of $83,597.38, plus the $189,000.00, due on April 24, annual interest rate convened 2099 pursuant to deed number of 5.060% per annum until the 27, issued in Ponce, Puerto debt is paid in full. In addition Rico, on March 28, 2013, bethe defendant Enrique Pagan fore notary José L. Inglesias Vega; Jane Doe; Conjugal Part- Irizarry, and recorded, at page nership Pagan-Doe; Richard 153 of volume 2,115 of Ponce, Doe to pay Reverse Mortgage property number 40,410, 8th Funding, LLC., is ordered t pay inscription. Other Liens: None. all advances made under the Potential bidders are advised to mortgage note including but not verify the extent of preferential limited to insurance premiums, liens with the holders thereof. It taxes and inspections as well as shall be understood that each 10% (18,900.00) of the original bidder accepts as sufficient principal amount to cover costs, the title and that prior and preexpenses, and attorney’s fees ferential liens to the one being guaranteed under the mortgage foreclosed upon, including but obligation. The records of the not limited to any property tax, case and of these proceedings liens, (express, tacit, implied or may be examined by interested legal) shall continue in effect it parties at the Office of the Clerk being understood further that of the United States District the successful bidder accepts Court, Room 150 or 400 Fede- them and is subrogated in the ral Office Building, 150 Chardon responsibility for the same and Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico. that the bid price shall not be WHEREAS: Pursuant to the applied toward their cancellaterms of the aforementioned tion. THEREFORE, the FIRST Judgment, Order of Execution, public sale shall be held on the and the Writ of Execution the- 18th day of August, 2020, at: reof, the undersigned Special 9:40 am. The minimum bid that Master was ordered to sell at will be accepted is the sum of public auction for U.S. curren- $189,000.00. In the event said cy in cash or certified check first auction does not produce without appraisement or right a bidder and the property is of redemption to the highest not adjudicated, a SECOND bidder and at the office of the public auction shall be held on Clerk of the United States Dis- the 25th day of August, 2020, trict Court for the District of at: 9:40 am, and the minimum Puerto Rico, Room 150 or 400 bid that will be accepted is the – Federal Office Building, 150 sum $126,000.00, which is twoCarlos Chardón Avenue, Hato thirds of the amount of the miniRey, Puerto Rico, to cover the mum bid for the first public sale. sums adjudged to be paid to the If a second auction does not plaintiff, the following property result in the adjudication and “URBANA: Solar marcado con

(787) 743-3346

Wednesday, July 8, 2020 sale of the property, a THIRD public auction will be held on the 1st of September 2020, at: 9:40 am, and the minimum bid that will be accepted is the sum of $94,500.00, which is one-half of the minimum bid in the first public sale. The Special Master shall not accept in payment of the property to be sold anything but United States currency or certified checks, except in case the property is sold and adjudicated to the plaintiff, in which case the amount of the bid made by said plaintiff shall be credited and deducted from its credit; said plaintiff being bound to pay in cash or certified check only any excess of its bid over the secured indebtedness that remains unsatisfied. WHEREAS: Said sale to be made by the Special Master subject to confirmation by the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico and the deed of conveyance and possession to the property will be executed and delivered only after such confirmation. Upon confirmation of the sale, an order shall be issued cancelling all junior liens. For further particulars, reference is made to the judgment entered by the Court in this case, which can be examined in the Office of Clerk of the United States District Court, District of Puerto Rico. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, this 2nd day of July, 2020. By: Pedro A. Vélez-Baerga, Special Master. specialmasterpr@gmail.com.

787-672-8269.

LEGAL NOTICE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT. DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO

Finance of America Reverse, LLC. Plaintiff v.

The Estate of Zoe Longoria Quiñones a/k/a Zoe Longoria Quiñonez a/k/a Soe Longoria Quiñones a/k/a Soe Longoria Quiñonez a/k/a Zoe Longoria a/k/a Soe Longoria a/k/a Zoe Longoria Viuda de Bey a/k/a Zoe L. de Bey a/k/a Zoe L. Bey a/k/a Zoe Longovia Quiñones composed of Maritza Bey, Manuel Bey Longoria and Edaliz Bey Longoria; Centro de Recaudaciones de Ingresos Municipales; United States of America

Defendants CIVIL ACTION NO.: 3:16-cv3065-SEC. COLLECTION OF

The San Juan Daily Star

MONIES AND FORECLOSU- or 400 – Federal Office BuilRE OF MORTGAGE. NOTICE ding, 150 Carlos Chardón AveOF SALE. nue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, to TO: The Estate of Zoe cover the sums adjudged to be Longoria Quiñones a/k/a paid to the plaintiff, the following Zoe Longoria Quiñonez property “URBANA: Solar marcado con el número mil ciento a/k/a Soe Longoria sesenta y nueve (1169) en el Quiñones a/k/a Soe bloque M guión treinta y siete Longoria Quiñonez (M-37) del plano de inscripción a/k/a Zoe Longoria a/k/a de la Urbanización Luis Muñoz Soe Longoria a/k/a Zoe Rivera radicado en el Barrio Longoria Viuda de Bey Frailes del término municipal a/k/a Zoe L. de Bey a/k/a de Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, con un área superficial de tresZoe L. Bey a/k/a Zoe cientos sesenta punto sesenta Longovia Quiñones y tres (360.63) metros cuadracomposed of Maritza Bey, dos. En lindes por el NORTE, Manuel Bey Longoria en veinticuatro punto noventa and Edaliz Bey Longoria; y ocho (24.98) metros, con el Centro de Recaudaciones solar número mil ciento setenta de Ingresos Municipales; (1170) del bloque M guión treinUnited States of America ta y siete (M-37); por el SUR, en veinticuatro punto noventa GENERAL PUBLIC WHEREAS: Judgment was y ocho (24.98) metros, con el entered in favor of plaintiff to solar número mil ciento sesenrecover from defendants the ta y ocho (1168) del bloque M principal sum of $164,065.82, guion treinta y siete (M-37); plus the annual interest rate por el ESTE, en catorce punto convened of 5.060% per an- ochenta y cinco (14.85) metros, num until the debt is paid in full. con la calle denominada Street The defendants, the Estate of G; y por el OESTE, en trece Zoe Longoria Quiñones a/k/a punto noventa y dos (13.92) Zoe Longoria Quiñonez a/k/a metros, con el solar número mil Soe Longoria Quiñones a/k/a ciento sesenta y cuatro (1164) Soe Longoria Quiñonez a/k/a del bloque M guion treinta y Zoe Longoria a/k/a Soe Longo- siete (M-37) del mencionado ria a/k/a Zoe Longoria Viuda de plano. Según inscripción seBey a/k/a Zoe L. de Bey a/k/a gunda (2da) se expresa que Zoe L. Bey a/k/a Zoe Longovia se ha edificado una residencia Quiñones composed of Maritza de hormigón reforzado de una Bey, Manuel Bey Longoria and sola planta que consta princiEdaliz Bey Longoria, also owes palmente de tres (3) cuartos and is ORDERED to pay Finan- dormitorios, sala, comedor, coce of America Reverse, LLC cina, cuarto de baño y balcón.” all advances made under the Property Number 12,174 filed mortgage note including but not at page 168 of volume 172 of limited to insurance premiums, Guaynabo, Registry of the Protaxes and inspections as well perty of Puerto Rico, Section as 10% ($26,250.00) of the ori- of Guaynabo. The mortgage is ginal principal amount to cover recorded in the Registry of Procosts, expenses, and attorney’s perty of Puerto Rico, Section of fees guaranteed under the Guaynabo at page 31, volume mortgage obligation. The re- 1,248 of Guaynabo. WHEcords of the case and of these REAS: This property is subject proceedings may be examined to the following liens: Senior by interested parties at the Offi- Liens: None. Junior Liens: Rece of the Clerk of the United verse mortgage securing a note States District Court, Room 150 in favor of Secretary of Housing or 400 Federal Office Building, and Urban Development, or its 150 Chardon Avenue, Hato order, in the original principal Rey, Puerto Rico. WHEREAS: amount of $262,500.00, due Pursuant to the terms of the on October 1st, 2078 pursuant aforementioned Judgment, Or- to deed number 2, issued in der of Execution, and the Writ Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, on of Execution thereof, the un- January 15, 2013, before nodersigned Special Master was tary Saideth Cristóbal Martíordered to sell at public auction nez, and recorded, at page 31 for U.S. currency in cash or of volume 1,248 of Guaynabo, certified check without apprai- property number 12,174, 13th sement or right of redemption inscription. Other Liens: None. to the highest bidder and at the Potential bidders are advised to office of the Clerk of the United verify the extent of preferential States District Court for the Dis- liens with the holders thereof. It trict of Puerto Rico, Room 150 shall be understood that each bidder accepts as sufficient

the title and that prior and preferential liens to the one being foreclosed upon, including but not limited to any property tax, liens, (express, tacit, implied or legal) shall continue in effect it being understood further that the successful bidder accepts them and is subrogated in the responsibility for the same and that the bid price shall not be applied toward their cancellation. THEREFORE, the FIRST public sale shall be held on the 18th day of August, 2020 at 9:30am. The minimum bid that will be accepted is the sum of $262,500.00. In the event said first auction does not produce a bidder and the property is not adjudicated, a SECOND public auction shall be held on the 25th day of August, 2020, 9:30am, and the minimum bid that will be accepted is the sum $175,000.00, 9:30am, which is two-thirds of the amount of the minimum bid for the first public sale. If a second auction does not result in the adjudication and sale of the property, a THIRD public auction will be held on the 1st day of September, 2020, 9:30am., and the minimum bid that will be accepted is the sum of $131,250.00, which is one-half of the minimum bid in the first public sale. The Special Master shall not accept in payment of the property to be sold anything but United States currency or certified checks, except in case the property is sold and adjudicated to the plaintiff, in which case the amount of the bid made by said plaintiff shall be credited and deducted from its credit; said plaintiff being bound to pay in cash or certified check only any excess of its bid over the secured indebtedness that remains unsatisfied.

WHEREAS: Said sale to be made by the Special Master subject to confirmation by the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico and the deed of conveyance and possession to the property will be executed and delivered only after such confirmation. Upon confirmation of the sale, an order shall be issued cancelling all junior liens. For further particulars, reference is made to the judgment entered by the Court in this case, which can be examined in the Office of Clerk of the United States District Court, District of Puerto Rico. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, this 2nd day of July, 2020. By: Pedro A. Vélez-Baerga, Special Master. specialmasterpr@gmail.com.

787-672-8269.

The San Juan Daily Star LEGAL NOTICE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT. DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO.

Finance of America Reverse, LLC Plaintiff v.

Grecia Yolanda Gutierrez Martinez a/k/a Grecia Y. Gutierrez; United States of America

Defendants.

CIVIL ACTION NO.: 17-cv1869. NOTICE OF SALE.

TO: Grecia Yolanda Gutierrez Martinez a/k/a Grecia Y. Gutierrez; United States of America GENERAL PUBLIC

WHEREAS: Judgment was entered in favor of plaintiff to recover from defendants the principal sum of $150,654.79, plus the annual interest rate convened of 5.300% per annum until the debt is paid in full. The defendant Grecia Yolanda Gutierrez Martinez a/k/a Grecia Y. Gutierrez was also ordered to pay Finance of America Reverse, LLC, all advances made under the mortgage note including but not limited to insurance premiums, taxes and inspections as well as 10% (20,850.00) of the original principal amount to cover costs, expenses, and attorney’s fees guaranteed under the mortgage obligation.

The records of the case and of these proceedings may be examined by interested parties at the Office of the Clerk of the United States District Court, Room 150 or 400 Federal Office Building, 150 Chardon Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico. WHEREAS: Pursuant to the terms of the aforementioned Judgment, Order of Execution, and the Writ of Execution thereof, the undersigned Special Master was ordered to sell at public auction for U.S. currency in cash or certified check without appraisement or right of redemption to the highest bidder and at the office of the Clerk of the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, Room 150 – Federal Office Building, 150 or 400 Carlos Chardón Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, to cover the sums adjudged to be paid to the plaintiff, the following property: “URBANA: Solar veintidós A del Bloque 2C de la Urbanización Metrópolis, localizado en el Barrio Martín González del municipio de Carolina, Puerto Rico, con un área superficial de trescientos treinta y seis metros cuadrados.

En lindes por el NORTE, con el solar dieciocho A, en una longitud de catorce metros; por el SUR, con la Avenida C, en una longitud de catorce metros; por el ESTE, con el solar veintidós,

en una longitud de veinticuatro metros; y por el OESTE, con el solar veintitrés, en una longitud de veinticuatro metros. Enclava una casa de concreto para vivienda.” Property Number 41,225, recorded at page 49 of volume 983 of Carolina, Registry of the Property of Puerto Rico, Section II of Carolina. The mortgage is recorded in the Registry of Property of Puerto Rico, Section of Carolina II at page 42, volume 1,479 of Carolina. WHEREAS: This property is subject to the following liens: Senior Liens: None. Junior Liens: Reverse mortgage securing a note in favor of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, or its order, in the original principal amount of $208,500.00, due on July 28, 2084 pursuant to deed number 970, issued in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, on November 14, 2011, before notary María G. Chevere Mauriño, and recorded, at page 42 of volume 1,479 of Carolina, property number 41,225, 5th inscription. Other Liens: None.

Potential bidders are advised to verify the extent of preferential liens with the holders thereof. It shall be understood that each bidder accepts as sufficient the title and that prior and preferential liens to the one being foreclosed upon, including but not limited to any property tax, liens, (express, tacit, implied or legal) shall continue in effect it being understood further that the successful bidder accepts them and is subrogated in the responsibility for the same and that the bid price shall not be applied toward their cancellation. THEREFORE, the FIRST public sale shall be held on the 18th of August of 2020, at 9:30 AM. The minimum bid that will be accepted is the sum of $208,500.00.

In the event said first auction does not produce a bidder and the property is not adjudicated, a SECOND public auction shall be held on the 25th of August of 2020, at 9:30 AM, and the minimum bid that will be accepted is the sum $139,000.00, which is two-thirds of the amount of the minimum bid for the first public sale. If a second auction does not result in the adjudication and sale of the property, a THIRD public auction will be held on the 1st of September of 2020, at 9:30 AM, and the minimum bid that will be accepted is the sum of $104,250.00, which is one-half of the minimum bid in the first public sale. The Special Master shall not accept in payment of the property to be sold anything but United States currency or certified checks, except in case the property is sold and adjudicated to the plaintiff, in which case the amount of the bid made by said plaintiff shall

Wednesday, July 8, 2020 be credited and deducted from its credit; said plaintiff being bound to pay in cash or certified check only any excess of its bid over the secured indebtedness that remains unsatisfied. WHEREAS: Said sale to be made by the Special Master subject to confirmation by the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico and the deed of conveyance and possession to the property will be executed and delivered only after such confirmation. Upon confirmation of the sale, an order shall be issued cancelling all junior liens. For further particulars, reference is made to the judgment entered by the Court in this case, which can be examined in the Office of Clerk of the United States District Court, District of Puerto Rico. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, this 2nd day of July, 2020. By: Pedro A. Vélez-Baerga, Special Master. specialmasterpr@gmail.com.

787-672-8269.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE SAN JUAN SALA SUPERIOR 807.

RICHARD STEWART DEL GORDO t/c/c RICHARD J. STEWART Demandante Vs.

MARTHA L. RUEDA STEWART; MARJORIE STEWART SCHUTIMANN; FULANO DE TAL; MENGANA MAS CUAL

Demandados CIVIL NÚM: SJ2018CV04693.

SOBRE: LIQUIDACIÓN Y ADJUDICACIÓN DE HERENCIA; Y SOBRE REMOCIÓN DE ALBACEA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO Y MANDAMINETO DE INTERPELACIÓN POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: MARJORIE STEWART SHUTTMANN como miembro de la Sucesión James D. Stewart t/c/p/ James Donald Stewart Schuttmann; y a FULANO DE TAL Y MENGANA MAS CUAL, como posibles herederos desconocidos de James D. Stewart t/c/p/ James Donald Stewart Schuttmann.

Por la presente se les notifica que ha sido presentada a este Tribunal una Segunda Demanda Enmendada en su contra en el pleito de epígrafe. El abogado de la parte demandante es el Ledo. Rafaél .A. García López; PO Box 9022864 San

Juan, PR 00902-2864, Tel.: (787) 620-0042 y Fax: (787) 620- 0039. Se les advierte que este edicto se publicará en un (1) periódico de circulación general una (1) sola vez y que si no comparece a contestár dicha Demanda Enmendada radicando el original de la misma 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 represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal Superior, Sala Superior de San Juan, con copia al abogado de la parte demandante, dentro del término de treinta (30) días contados a partir de la publicación de este edicto, se les anotará Rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia en su contra concediendo el remedio solicitado ‘en la Segunda Demanda Enmendada sin más citarles ni oírles. En un término de diez (10) días a partir de la publicación de este edicto, la parte demandante notificará por correo certificado con acuse de recibo, copia de la Segunda Demanda Enmendada y del Emplazamiento por Edicto, a las ultimas direcciones postales conocidas de los codemandados MARJORIE STEWART SHUTTMANN como miembro de la Sucesión James D. Stewart t/ c/ p/ James Donald Stewart Schuttmann; y a FULANO DE TAL Y MENGANA MAS CUAL, como posibles herederos desconocidos de James D. Stewart t/c/p/ James Donald Stewart Schuttmann a: Cond. Porto, APT. 101, Bo. Miramar, San Juan, PR 00907; 612 Calle Hoare, Apt 101, San Juan, PR 00907-3604; Calle 71 # 38-09, Hogar Madre Marcelina, Barranquilla, Colombia.

Además, se le interpela judicialmente, a tenor con el Artículo 959 del Código Civil de Puerto Rico, 31 LPRA § 2787, para que en un término de treinta (30) días de haber sido publicado el edicto, excluyendo e día de la publicación, acepte o repudie, mediante instrumento público o comparecencia judicial especial, la herencia del causante, James D. Stewart t/c/c James Donald Stewart Schuttmann, apercibíendole que de no expresarse dentro de dicho término, se tendrá por aceptada la herencia. BBVA v.

Latinoamericana, 164 DPR 689 (2005), por lo que responderán por las cargas de dicha herencia. EXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y el Sello del Tribunal, hoy día 25 de junio de 2020.

GRlSERLDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, Secretaria. ENID DIAZ RIOS, Sub-Secretaria.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE JUANA DIAZ.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante Vs.

MIGDALIA ALICEA NEGRÓN, RAFAEL RUIZ TORRES Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

25

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

A) RAFAEL RUIZ TORRES POR . SÍ Y EN REPRENTACIÓN DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR ÉSTE Y MIGDALIA ALICEA NEGR.ÓN

POR LA PRESENTE: Se le notifica que contra usted se ha presentado la Demanda sobre Cobro de Dinero de la cual se Demandados CIVIL NÚM.: JD2019CV00550. acompaña copia. Por la preSALÓN: SOBRE: COBRO DE sente se le emplaza a usted y

se le requiere para que dentro del término de TREINTA (30) días desde la fecha de la Publicación por Edicto de este Emplazamiento presente su contestación a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https: //unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Juana Diaz, P.O. Box 1419, Juana Diaz, Puerto Rico 00796 y notifique a la LCDA. GINA H. FERRER MEDINA, personalmente al Condominio

San Juan The

Las Nereidas, Local 1-B, Calle Méndez Vigo esquina Amador Ramírez Silva, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico 00680; o por correo al Apartado 2342, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico 00681-2342, Teléfonos: (787) 832-9620 y (845) 345-3985, Abogada de la parte demandante, apercibiéndose que en caso de no hacerlo así podrá dictarse Sentencia en Rebeldía en contra suya, concediendo el remedio solicitado en la Demanda sin más citarle ni oírle. EXPEDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y el Sello del Tribunal hoy 20 de febrero de 2020.

Luz Mayra Caraballo Garcia, Secretaria Regional. Waleska E. Rivera Torres, Sec Aux del Tribunal.

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26

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

As MLB stumbles out of the gate, player pushback gets louder

By TYLER KEPNER

M

ajor League Baseball triumphantly declared Monday that it would announce a 60-game schedule on its cable network that evening. Around the same time, the two teams from last year’s World Series, the Washington Nationals and the Houston Astros, were canceling their Monday workouts for safety reasons — and blaming MLB. The reason for the holdup was a delay in receiving the results of the coronavirus tests both teams took Friday. The Oakland Athletics’ tests, too, had not even been delivered to the MLB laboratory in Utah as of Sunday night. The St. Louis Cardinals, too, canceled their workout Monday because of the testing delay.

The first few days of “2020 Summer Camp presented by Camping World” have been a disaster, the official sponsor all but inviting you to head for the wilderness, pitch a tent, curl up in a sleeping bag and sleep off the storm.

“The season, it’s not on my radar, really,” Brewers manager Craig Counsell told reporters in Milwaukee. “This is on my radar: It’s keeping everybody healthy and The Boston Red Sox were practicing at Fenway Park on Monday, but several other safe and doing the best we can at that job.” teams had to postpone training because of a delay in receiving virus testing results.

Like other industries in the United States, MLB is trying to find its way in the grim new reality of pandemic life. The coaches safe for us to continue with summer camp.

Freeman’s wife, Chelsea, wrote on and some players wear masks, news me- Major League Baseball needs to work quic- Instagram Sunday that her husband had dia access is severely limited and everyo- kly to resolve issues with their process and experienced body aches, headaches, high ne practices social distancing as much as their lab. Otherwise, summer camp and fever and chills for several days, despite the possible. There is no recent blueprint to fo- the 2020 season are at risk.” family’s strict adherence to social distanllow, no foolproof protocol for administeIn a statement Monday afternoon, cing. Freeman’s experience was sobering ring nearly 4,000 tests last week. Mistakes MLB defended its testing process by saying for his teammate, outfielder Nick Markakis, were inevitable. that more than 95 percent of its planned who announced Monday that he would But failing to properly plan around tests had been conducted and analyzed. opt out of playing this season. holiday weekend delivery issues is hard “I talked to Freddie Freeman the other “We have addressed the delays caused to excuse, and it has given the players by the holiday weekend and do not expect day, and just hearing the way he sounded yet another reason to distrust Commis- a recurrence,” it said. over the phone kind of opened my eyes,” sioner Rob Manfred. We saw this dynaThe players will be tested, as planned, Markakis, 36, told reporters Monday. mic highlighted across three exasperating every other day through the end of the “Freddie didn’t sound good. I hope he’s months of failed negotiations on restarting World Series, and bad news has already doing good, I hope he’s healthy, I know the season. Now, even team executives are been pouring in. Atlanta’s Freddie Free- these guys need him more than anybody. livid with the league. man, Colorado’s Charlie Blackmon, Kansas Just to hear him, the way he sounded, it “We will not sacrifice the health and City’s Salvador Pérez, San Diego’s Tommy was tough.” safety of our players, staff and their fami- Pham, Texas’ Joey Gallo and the New York Markakis added that he has three chillies,” Nationals general manager Mike Riz- Yankees’ D.J. LeMahieu are among the dren and has already missed much of their zo said in a statement Monday. “Without many players who have tested positive for youth. Given his teammate’s ordeal, and accurate and timely testing, it is simply not the coronavirus. the prospect of playing in empty stadiums,

Markakis said goodbye.

“We play for the fans, and to take them out of the equation, it’s tough, and I think that was kind of the blow for me,” Markakis said. “I knew coming into it, but until you actually get into the situation and you go there and experience it, it changes things. I love the game. I hate to see it the way it’s going right now, but that’s the way things have to be.”

In opting out, Markakis joined a list of players that includes two former Cy Young Award winners — David Price of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Félix Hernández of the Braves — plus veteran mainstays like Ian Desmond of the Colorado Rockies, Mike Leake of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Ryan Zimmerman of the Nationals. All of them, like Markakis, have earned more than $90 million in their careers. The risk, for a two-month season, was simply not worth it.

Of course, the virus threatens everyone, regardless of salary. Nationals pitcher Joe Ross, who has earned less than $4 million in his career, also opted out. His teammate, cerebral reliever Sean Doolittle, framed the issue eloquently in a Zoom conversation with Washington reporters Sunday.

“We’re trying to bring baseball back during a pandemic that’s killed 130,000 people,” Doolittle said, as reported by The Washington Post. “We’re way worse off as a country than we were in March when we shut this thing down. And, like, look where the other developed countries are in their response to this. We haven’t done any of the things that other countries have done to bring sports back.

“Sports are like the reward of a functioning society. And we’re trying to just bring it back, even though we’ve taken none of the steps to flatten the curve.”

The Chicago Cubs’ Kris Bryant said he would play, but was dismayed by the lag time in testing results.

“I wanted to play this year because I felt that it would be safe and I would be comfortable — honestly, I don’t really feel that way,” Bryant told Chicago reporters Monday, adding later, “If we can’t nail the easy part, which is right now and just our players, we’ve got a big hill to climb.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

27

NHL and players agree to start postseason tourney on Aug. 1

By ANDREW KNOLL

T

he National Hockey League and its players union announced earlier this week that the two groups agreed on a four-year extension to the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA), a pivotal decision that paves the way for hockey to resume play amid the coronavirus pandemic.

As part of the deal, the sides set dates for the so-called Phase 3 and 4 of a return to play protocol. The start of formal training camps is slated for July 13, with teams traveling to two hub cities starting July 26. The existing CBA carries the league through the next Olympics — NHL players will participate after not playing in 2018 — and also beyond a period of uncertainty into one where salary cap numbers and escrow percentages can be more clearly planned.

The league reportedly selected Edmonton and Toronto as the two so-called hub cities that will host its proposed return to play, but is awaiting approval from the players union. An expanded 24-team playoff would unfold with the Western Conference teams vying in Edmonton and the Eastern Conference side of the bracket contested in Toronto, starting Aug. 1.

The selection of the two Canadian cities was made over the course of a month, after the NHL whittled down a list that initially included 10 potential hub cities. The pool was reduced to five — Las Vegas, Chicago and Los Angeles were the other candidates — after considering public health statistics and other data.

In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters last week that Canada had likely surmounted the worst of the outbreak. He also said that conditions in the United States — which has seen upticks in cases since reopening significant portions of its economy — were causes for concern and could help guide Canada as they incrementally reopen following the quarantine period.

Selecting a hub city in the United States would have required work with not only local and provincial officials but authorities on the national level in Canada in order to permit movement across the border between the two countries, which has been restricted heavily during the outbreak. The current restrictions prohibiting nonessential travel between the two countries expire July 21, before the tournament begins.

The NHL said Monday that public health concerns trumped location in

choosing the sites. It ultimately placed the Eastern teams, including the Maple Leafs, in Toronto, and the Western ones, including the Oilers, in Edmonton.

Toronto, the largest and most diverse city in Canada, is a market critical to the future of hockey. Hosting the Eastern Conference there gives the eighth-seeded Maple Leafs an advantage in these recast playoffs, where they will play the ninth-ranked Columbus Blue Jackets in a best of five play-in series. Toronto had reported fewer than 15,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and around 1,000 deaths as of July 1.

Thanks largely to its favorable public health conditions, Edmonton surged past early favorites Las Vegas, where the league usually holds its annual awards in the summer, and Vancouver, whose health officials reportedly had conflicted with the league over protocols if a player tested positive for the virus. There were just over 8,000 confirmed cases and about 150 deaths in Edmonton as of July 1.

Edmonton offered both a connection to hockey’s future — its Rogers Place arena opened in 2016 with a nearby entertainment district — and the game’s past, having been nicknamed “the city of champions” during the Oilers’ run to five Stanley Cups in the 1980s. The fifth-seeded Oilers will host the No. 12 seed Chicago Blackhawks in their playoff matchup.

The playoffs will open with a fivegame play-in series followed by a conference-based first round with a threegame round robin format to determine the top four seedings. Teams qualified for the postseason based on their points percentages at the time the season was suspended, and will be reseeded after each round of the playoffs. The location of the Stanley Cup Final has not been determined.

Patrick Mahomes gets 10-year deal with Kansas City Chiefs

By KEN BELSON

Q

uarterback Patrick Mahomes, one of the NFL’s biggest stars, has signed a 10-year contract extension with the Kansas City Chiefs, according to a person familiar with the terms of the deal who was not authorized to speak for the team.

The big payday, worth up to half a billion dollars, for Mahomes, who at 24 has already been voted as the league’s most valuable player and won a Super Bowl, is likely to set a new benchmark for the league’s young quarterbacks who are also playing on rookie contracts.

The extension of his current deal, which had two years left on it, will keep him in Kansas City through 2031, when he will be 35 on opening day that season.

After the deal had been reported, Mahomes posted a one-minute video on his Twitter feed with the title, “Here to stay…!”

The video includes clips of acrobatic throws

and touchdown scores, and ends with the words, “We’re chasing a dynasty.”

The contract extension, which was first reported by ESPN, is the largest in NFL history and one of the biggest in U.S. sports.

Leigh Steinberg, Mahomes’ agent, said the extension was worth $503 million. Steinberg said $477 million of that money was in “guarantee mechanisms” and that Mahomes could opt out if those mechanisms were not triggered. Mahomes also will have a no-trade clause.

A spokesman for the Chiefs declined to comment. Mahomes and the Chiefs began negotiations in May. Ten-year contract extensions are unusual in the NFL, where the injury rates are high and teams operate under a strict salary cap that limits how much they can spend on their rosters. Most star quarterbacks have received three- and four-year contracts in recent years. Russell Wilson, for instance, signed a four-year, $140 million extension with the Seattle Seahawks last year, which

at the time made him the league’s highestpaid player, with the biggest signing bonus — reportedly $65 million — in history.

The last time an NFL player signed a 10-year contract was in 2004, when quarterback Michael Vick, then 24 and with the Atlanta Falcons, agreed to a deal worth as much as $130 million. That made him the highest-paid player at the time.

But the Chiefs no doubt recognize that Mahomes is a once-in-a-generation player with a combination of athletic ability and star power that is nearly impossible to replicate. Agents for other young, talented quarterbacks, most notably Dak Prescott of the Dallas Cowboys, are likely to use Mahomes’ contract to justify seeking similar deals for their clients.

Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens and Deshaun Watson of the Houston Texans, two other cornerstone quarterbacks, are also still playing on rookie deals.

Mahomes’ rise has been swifter and borne greater results. In 2017, the Chiefs

traded up to the No. 10 pick in that year’s draft to select Mahomes, who played college football at Texas Tech. After serving as a backup to Alex Smith in his rookie season, Mahomes took over the starting quarterback spot in 2018 and instantly became a star. He threw for 5,097 yards and 50 touchdowns, helping lead the Chiefs to a division title with a 12-4 record. The Chiefs lost in the AFC championship game that season.

But this past season, Mahomes helped lead the team to a division title and, after two dramatic comeback playoff victories, took the Chiefs to their second Super Bowl title, beating the San Francisco 49ers, 31-20, in February.

Including signing bonuses, Mahomes has earned $13.7 million in his first three seasons, according to Spotrac, a website that tracks pro sports contracts. He had two years remaining on that deal worth $2.8 million this season and $24.8 million next year.

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Kaepernick’s deal with Disney includes a Jemele Hill project at ESPN

By KEVIN DRAPER

C

olin Kaepernick and The Walt Disney Co. announced a production deal earlier this week that will see the activist quarterback produce “scripted and unscripted stories that explore race, social injustice and the quest for equity” for the media giant’s various platforms, including ESPN. Work has already begun on a documentary series that will explore the past five years of Kaepernick’s life, as he began kneeling during the playing of the national anthem before NFL games to protest racism and police brutality, and later accused team owners of colluding to keep him out of the league.

It is a first-look deal, meaning Disney has the right of first refusal over projects that Ra Vision Media, Kaepernick’s company, comes up with.

The deal announced Monday is just one of many Kaepernick has signed in the past year to produce media about himself and the topics he cares about, even as he has remained silent publicly.

He has started a publishing company and plans to release a memoir. He partnered with writer-director Ava DuVernay for a Netflix series about his teenage years. He has a shoe with Nike. He plans to write pieces and conduct interviews for Medium, a blogging platform, and joined its board of directors.

Since the killing of George Floyd in police custody in May and the renewed national conversation about racism and police brutality that followed, Kaepernick’s kneeling protest has taken on new life. Joined by only a few dozen athletes across all sports in kneeling in 2016 and 2017, the last month has seen hundreds of European soccer players, Formula One drivers, tennis players and many other professional athletes take a knee.

In some sports now, it is choosing not to kneel during “The Star-Spangled Banner” that stands out.

Still, even during a cultural sea change in how Americans view police behavior and the Black Lives Matter movement, Kaepernick’s partnership with ESPN signals a shift for the network.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the

Colin Kaepernick signed a deal with the Walt Disney Company to give them the right of first refusal on film and television projects that his production company comes up with. announcement was the identity of a producer on the documentary series: Jemele Hill, who left ESPN in 2018.

Hill’s career has become very much entwined with Kaeperick’s. She was employed by ESPN for 12 years, and in 2017 she began hosting the 6 p.m. Eastern edition of ESPN’s highest profile show, “SportsCenter.” Alongside co-host Michael Smith, their version of “SportsCenter” unapologetically celebrated Black culture in a way that was rarely seen on ESPN previously.

The show immediately encountered both internal and external pushback, with ESPN being accused of being “too political.”

In September 2017, days before President Donald Trump demanded that NFL owners fire those who protested during the national anthem, using an expletive to describe the players, Hill tweeted

that the president was a white supremacist. Hill was rebuked by the White House, which set off a firestorm both within ESPN and across sports media.

Six months later, she was off the air, and ESPN later bought her out of her contract despite still owing millions.

“There’s been a big debate about whether ESPN should be focused more on what happens on the field of sport than what happens in terms of where sports is societally or politically,” said Bob Iger, who was Disney’s chief executive, in 2018. Iger said that Jimmy Pitaro, ESPN’s president, “felt that the pendulum may have swung a little bit too far away from the field. And I happen to believe he was right.”

Since the death of Floyd — and no doubt influenced by the limited number of live sporting events taking place because of the coronavirus pandemic

— ESPN has covered stories of race and police brutality with a vigor that would have been hard to imagine when Iger made his comments. It also would have been hard to imagine Hill working with her former employer so soon.

After the deal was announced, Hill alluded to her history with ESPN. She wrote on Twitter that Kaepernick “was adamant that his work be surrounded

by Black and brown voices. It also was important for me to use my influence to elevate these voices, particularly inside of ESPN.” As for Iger, who two years ago thought ESPN’s coverage had strayed too far from games? On Monday, he said that Kaepernick’s “experience gives him a unique perspective on the intersection of sports, culture and race, which will undoubtedly create compelling stories that will educate, enlighten and entertain.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, July 8, 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

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

You’re restless and in need of a change of scenery. If you can’t get away at least start planning a future journey. This will give you something exciting to anticipate and look forward to. You might think about travelling overseas to visit friends and relatives once restrictions are lifted.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

People will be inspired by your enthusiasm for a worthwhile cause. Raising money for a charity effort will be rewarding. Every accomplishment made will inspire another. Thanks to your hard work and dedication, a volunteer organisation will get the support, money and resources it needs to thrive. Keep up the good work.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

If you’re wanting to break a bad habit or improve your health, now is a good time to do so. Joining a support group will give you a safe place to talk with people who understand. Don’t be surprised to find you actually enjoy cycling and walking to places instead of using public transport.

It will take a lot of effort on your part to keep a partnership harmonious. You’re going out of your way to try to understand why someone is being so stubborn. People interfere with your routines and you’re finding a housemate’s carelessness annoying. Even so, the least said, the soonest mended. Keep thoughts to yourself.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

You are starting to wonder whether you have made the right choices and decisions. Could you have done things differently? Had you taken different action, you may have missed out on meeting someone who is now an important part of your life. The situation has been difficult but you have learned a lot about yourself through recent challenges.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Unresolved issues between you and a partner dominate your thoughts. You can’t seem to think of anything else. It isn’t good to keep emotions bottled up inside. Talk to a friend you can trust. They will help you see the matter from a different perspective. It’s not a good idea to keep secrets from your partner.

You sense that an in-law you have never got on well with is trying to turn your partner against you. Either you will stick it out because your relationship means a lot to you or you will give in and let other people get their own way. If you decide on the former, someone is going to be surprised by how determined you can be.

Matters related to romance, study and fresh opportunities will have far reaching consequences. Decisions made in any or all these areas could pave the way for a whole new chapter in your life. It will take courage to set off down untried paths but you are in need of both change and challenge. This is your chance to move forward.

Leo

Aquarius

(July 24-Aug 23)

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

It’s taking too much effort to keep a friendship harmonious. Whenever there is a disagreement you are the one who always backs down. You’re starting to lose touch with your own needs and feelings because you’re always putting other people first. Don’t make any hasty moves but it might be time to call it a day.

Break up gracefully.

A youngster in the family thinks they can get around you by playing one adult against another. You know perfectly well what they are up to. At times you will let them get their own way because of the amusement you get out of their antics. Even so, there will come a point when you will need to put your foot down.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

There’s a need to adapt to changes you aren’t happy about but must endure. It would be better to accept that some things in your life aren’t ever going to be the same again. Emotionally, this is quite a challenge but a one you will get through. Good things will eventually come out of the twist and turns your life is currently making.

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

You’ve put so much effort into making a relationship work, you’re growing weary of it. If a partner met you halfway it would make a difference. Since they don’t seem to care about whether or not you continue together, now could be a good moment to let them know you’re ready to move on. Instead of waiting for them to make a decision, take control.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Wednesday, July 8, 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

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

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