Thursday Jul 9, 2020

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

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July 9, 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.

Rights group questions handling of domestic violence case against activist

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he Search for Equity Coalition (CABE by its Spanish acronym) denounced Tuesday night what it described as the irregular handling of the case of Law 54, the Domestic Violence Law, filed against activist Pedro Julio Serrano and demanded that due process of law be guaranteed for both parties.

“CABE was born in 2013 with an equality agenda that included amendments to Law 54 on Domestic Violence that today allows anyone to ask for their protection regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” said CABE spokesperson Osvaldo Burgos Pérez in a written statement. “In keeping with our history, we continue to believe that domestic violence should not be tolerated and that the State has a duty to prevent, investigate, and intervene when it occurs.”

“In this sense, CABE demands that the investigation and judicial process of the case against Pedro Julio Serrano Burgos be guided by the search for truth and justice,” Burgos Pérez said.

Carmen Milagros Vélez Vega, also a CABE spokesperson, added that “[w]e cannot, however, ignore the context of this case and how it has been handled since yesterday [Monday].”

“We are in a scenario in which Pedro Julio Serrano was arrested and held in a police station for more than 24 hours and with limited access to information and his legal representation,”VélezVega said. “Meanwhile, the Puerto Rico Police could not give information that justified why this case required more than 24 hours to interview the complainant and reach a court. Added to this is the fact that despite [Serrano] being an immuno-compromised person and the pandemic caused by COVID-19, the police at the barracks were without masks, putting the detainee’s health at risk.”

Liza Gallardo, another CABE spokesperson, noted that “[a]s human rights defenders, we have to be consistent and look at the context of the case beyond what appears to be evident.”

“There are several red flags to raise here, and they include looking at who Pedro Julio Serrano is.

Regardless of the charges and their accuracy, we have to look at the process. He is a human rights defender, critic and main promoter of the boycott of the La Comay television program and its protagonist

Kobbo Santarrosa and a constant watchdog of the actions of the police in cases related to the LGBTTIQ communities,” Gallardo said. “In this country, having these characteristics is being a tempting target of the State, which does not tolerate dissent and punishes it with the irregular handling of cases.

We have already repeatedly seen the same strategy of delaying criminal processes and mentally and physically exhausting the activists they arrest as a way of carrying a message against dissent.”

Added Vélez Vega: “We emphasize that we are not adjudicating the case and that we are firmly committed to the principle that no aggressor should go unpunished. This case will be heard in court and we will monitor this process so that it is fair for both parties.”

Meanwhile, CABE clarified that Pedro Julio Serrano has withdrawn as the group’s spokesperson for several weeks.

“Our agenda for the coming months will be committed to the electoral processes, and due to his relationship with the Municipality of San Juan, Pedro Julio Serrano himself had withdrawn from the role of spokesperson and from the discussions on the subject,” the spokespeople said in the statement. “Both he and we are clear and firm that CABE has an important job to do and that it is this equity agenda that should guide our steps.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

Governor mum on ADSEF case after acknowledging she spoke with witnesses

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

G

ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced declined to comment Wednesday on alleged obstruction of justice on her part in the supply mismanagement case from the Administration for Socioeconomic Development of the Family (ADSEF by its Spanish acronym) that was investigated by the island Justice Department (DOJ), which submitted a report to the Office of the Special Independent Prosecutor Panel (OPFEI by its Spanish initials).

As declarations by the governor in a radio interview were brought up during a press conference, Vázquez said she has no comments other than the ones she made on Tuesday. She did say she was grateful for the support she has received through phone calls, text messages and social media posts.

“The statement that I can make at this moment, in response to the question, is that I have to give enormous thanks for all the words, [phone] calls and messages on social media networks; many people approached me and expressed their support,” the governor said. “But regarding what happened yesterday [Tuesday], in relation to the investigations, as you already know, the reports have been submitted to the OPFEI. I am not going to make more comments about any investigation other than those I made yesterday.”

In a radio interview on WKAQ 580 AM, the governor acknowledged speaking to people who have been under interrogation during the ADSEF investigation that led to the dismissal of former Family Secretary Glorimar Andujar. She also said she was surprised and hoped the OPFEI would vindicate itself in the case.

“I hope that, in this matter, the OPFEI vindicates itself, if I understand that it is still possible,” she said. “That they perform a responsible investigation of the people who have been interviewed and have told me: ‘Look, governor, if the prosecutors indicated that there was nothing, there was no investigation against the governor.’ So it surprises me -- particularly in an incident that they were referring to in an ADSEF investigation, where I had absolutely no involvement, none at all -- so it sur-

prises me to see a report of this nature.”

As for allegedly ordering interim Justice Secretary Wandymar Burgos to stop an agent from handing in file reports to the OPFEI, Vázquez said she never gave such an order. Likewise, she stated that Burgos’ decision was not illegal or against the law, as she chose to do it because she was supposed to be notified of the reports. However, Vázquez said, if that was the correct decision, then it was not open to question.

“What I can say is that the secretary’s performance was neither illegal nor contrary to law. The explanations we heard were directed to her understanding that it was information that should have been reported to her before being turned in [to the OPFEI]. That was the secretary’s position,” the governor said.

“That was the determination she chose as she believed that she was supposed to be notified. What I can respond to is that her performance was not illegal or contrary to law. Whether it was the right course or not, we are not going to go into that.

As Justice secretary, I didn’t do it. In terms of that case, I do not have anything else to say.”

In response to Vázquez’s declarations, and revelations from former Justice Secretary Denisse Longo Quiñones, some citizens issued a call on social media for a rally on Resistencia Street (Calle de la Resistencia) on Wednesday evening to demand the governor’s resignation. People have used #WandaRenuncia on social media to invite others to march to hold the governor accountable for alleged acts of corruption.

PREPA asks bankruptcy judge to declare Luma transition expenses as administrative

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) has asked the judge in its bankruptcy process to declare as an administrative expense the current transition payments to be paid to LUMA Energy LLC and LUMA Energy ServCo LLC under the contract to operate the power utility’s transmission and distribution system.

Under bankruptcy law, administrative expenses have priority over other debt payments, leaving less money for payment to other creditors. The request made by PREPA would change payment priorities in its $9 billion bank-

ruptcy process.

The petition, which was filed late Monday, provided an overview of the contract payments. The motion, which states that the transition period will last 12 months, says PREPA must pay $136 million, which is an amount higher than the $125 million government officials have said the contract will cost.

PREPA’s fiscal plan says the utility may have a $132 million budget deficit next year because of the service fee it must pay under the contract.

On June 22, PREPA put $59 million in a designated account for use toward the payment. The balance of the pending front-end transition fee is $77 million, an amount that may vary depending on different factors such as whether LUMA Energy and the Public-Private Partnership Authority can commence operation and management services in less than a year.

The Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union (UTIER by its Spanish acronym) has threatened to hold a work stoppage on July 15 and engage in other actions to force the government to cancel the contract, arguing that it will result in layoffs and higher utility rates.

The motion says the government believes the contract is needed to ensure Puerto Rico’s energy system is one that is safe, reliable and affordable. The contract with LUMA was signed on June 22 after months of negotiations.

“Transitioning the operation of PREPA’s aging and

outdated transmission and distribution system to a qualified and experienced private operator is widely acknowledged as key to the success of PREPA’s transformation,” the motion states.

Under the contract, LUMA Energy will also handle customer service and be in charge of administering the $18 billion in federal reconstruction funds. The Financial Oversight and Management Board has requested a hearing on the motion for later this month.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

5

FEMA approves 500-plus hazard mitigation proposals for evaluation

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

T

he Hazard Mitigation Grant Program’s (HMGP) Section 404 approved on Wednesday 525 letters of intention (LOIs) from municipalities, agencies, and private non-profit organizations in Puerto Rico to be evaluated for risk mitigation.

Central Office of Recovery, Reconstruction and Resilience Executive Director Ottmar Chávez said the approval from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) program is moving the recovery from Hurricane Maria forward, as more than 2,200 permanent projects have been approved for evaluation.

Likewise, around 1,600 of those have been approved and funded by Section 404.

“We are glad that organizations such as the Martín Peña Channel, proposals handed in by the [island’s] mayors, healthcare entities, private hospitals and the University of Puerto Rico have critical mitigation projects,” Chávez said at a press conference. “This ensures that, in the future, what we have seen for years on the island will not happen again or, if it does,

we are able to minimize any damage.”

Section 404 manages a total of $3.999 billion in federal funds, $2.999 billion under HGMP and $1 billion under the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program. The sectors that will hold priority for the risk mitigation projects are water, training, communications, economy, public buildings, education, energy, towns, natural and cultural resources, health, social services, transportation and housing.

FEMA Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands Federal Coordinator Alex Amparo said he is satisfied with seeing more projects approved

by HGMP, after 521 letters of intention were considered in June. He added that risk mitigations are key for an effective recovery, and the approvals are an essential step toward a resilient island.

“The truth is that this country needs to see that shovel on the land, breaking ground, through different projects that are pending.”

Amparo said. “FEMA is here to invest in Puerto Rico’s future; we do nothing by replacing things with what existed before. What we want to do, especially with these funds, is something better.”

Caño Martín Peña ENLACE Project Executive Director Mario Nuñez Mercado was grateful that his proposal was one of the 525 proposals chosen for evaluation. His project, Caño Norte, consists of connecting the Israel and Bitumul neighborhoods to a sanitary system that prevents wastewater from entering potable water bodies.

“We know that we have one competitive phase left to finish until September 25,” Nuñez Mercado said. “This puts us already in a better place, as we can advance CDBG-DR funds with Joint Resolution 118 of November 19, 2019, signed by governor Wanda Vázquez, to make these accessible for the Martín Peña Channel’s reconstruction.”

One LOI approved by HMGP was a risk mitigation project for the Ariel section of Comerío. Mayor José A. Santiago said that during Hurricane Maria the urbanization was devastated as the La Plata River rose and flooded homes with more than eight feet of water.

“I must say that, since that time, until now, residents of that community do not sleep when it starts to rain,” Santiago said. “They feel like the river will devastate their home once again.

It’s important that this project is approved.

Obviously, we are at a starting point as we were recently told. We must demonstrate that, with the proposal we write to FEMA, its benefit exceeds its cost.”

Another LOI that was approved for evaluation was for the town of Aguas Buenas. Mayor Javier García noted that the community of Estancias del Río, which is part of the Jagüeyes Abajo neighborhood, could have a nearby ravine dredged, as its course changed after the 2017 hurricane and started flooding homes and local businesses.

“In addition to this, the critically needed electrical generators that we requested for public buildings in our municipality are included under this mitigation proposal,” García said. “This is good news, as it lets us become a stronger, more resilient town in times of emergency.”

For July, 188 applicants whose LOIs were approved include 65 proposals from the health sector, 18 for housing, six for training and development, three for natural and cultural resources, 27 for education, which includes all University of Puerto Rico campuses, four for the economic sector, nine for public buildings and 56 municipalities.

Mayors air budget concerns in meeting with fiscal board members

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

A

group of 10 mayors who were selected by the Financial Oversight and Management Board to work on the municipal budgets met with officials from the oversight board earlier this week to discuss the imposition of the budgets devised by the board, which the island’s mayors complain are unrealistic and would cause layoffs of municipal workers and cuts in services to citizens.

Despite the expectations of the mayors, neither the oversight board president, José Carrión III, nor its executive director, Natalie Jaresko, were present at the Tuesday afternoon meeting.

The meeting was attended by the first vice president of the Puerto Rico Mayors Association, Luis Javier Hernández, who is the mayor of Villalba and also an attorney; New Progressive Party mayors Jesús Colón Berlingeri of Orocovis, Gabriel Hernández Rodríguez of Camuy and Elliot Colón Blanco of Barranquitas; and, participating remotely, Popular Democratic Party mayors Heriberto Vélez of Quebradillas and Josean Santiago of Comerío, a former president of the Mayors Association, the mayors said Wednesday in a written statement.

“The mayors met last week in Villalba to reach an agreement and we requested this meeting from the Board. We have sug-

gested that the pilot budget plan presented by the fiscal entity is very far from what was promised last year,” Hernández said following the meeting held at the oversight board’s offices in the Seaborne building in Hato Rey. “We did not have technical assistance from them to prepare budgets, nor did we have economic development options. After we have already worked on the budgets for this fiscal year 2020-2021, which started on July 1, and three months after the elections, the board intends to impose its numbers so that the municipalities have to readjust.”

Colón Berlingeri told the media that “we let them know that there are some inconsistencies with the numbers.”

“The figures presented by the Municipal Revenue Collections Center are based on clear, documented facts,” the Orocovis mayor said. “As for the numbers presented by the Board, we do not know where they are from.

The budget has already started and this has to be worked on.”

Hernández added that “unlike the central government, we municipalities are up to date with our debts, one year in advance, and they are treating us differently.”

“Our request is that the intention of the Board be postponed, that they reconsider because this is being carried out in a hasty way,” he said. “The situation is aggravated by the elimination of Law 29, [as well as] the management of the pandemic. We are

municipalities with an operational surplus and we have achieved this with discipline and good administration.”

Meanwhile, Hernández Rodríguez, the mayor of Camuy, pointed out that Carrión has stated in the media to the effect that he would have liked to have better communication bridges with island legislative leaders, “and that is precisely what we are offering, dialogue, that this budgetary imposition be postponed.” “The sensible thing is to postpone it until after the elections and sit down [and discuss the matter] in more detail,” Hernández Rodríguez said.

The Barranquitas mayor agreed.

“What applies to us, 10 municipalities, will be imposed on the other 68 municipalities next year,” Colón Blanco said. “What we accept from the Board at this time will affect

Luis Javier Hernández, Mayor of Villaba

the entire country.”

Regarding additional details, Vélez, the mayor of Quebradillas, pointed to a particular example, which is the elimination of fringe benefits for municipal employees and even the elimination of the Christmas bonus.

“We have worked up a very detailed and responsible budget,” he said. “We are talking about employees who work for $7.25 an hour and we have arranged this bonus at the end of the year because we can afford it; we plan for that.”

One of the most dramatic cases is related to the Municipality of Comerío, where the plan imposed by the oversight board represents a cut of more than 40 percent, leaving it practically inoperative.

“A municipality where there are high rates of poverty, you cannot condemn yourself to more poverty by treating it like the others,” Hernández said. “There are some particularities that must be addressed in detail. The Board’s proposal even prohibits the transfer of items and that is something that is ordinarily done in the municipalities. For example, if we budget $50,000 for minor repairs in public schools and in a situation like the COVID-19 pandemic, where there are no classes, and we need those funds for equipment and sanitation materials, [under the oversight board’s proposal] we can’t use them. That is one of the concrete examples that we are presenting and that we cannot accept.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

Internal Revenue offices reopen. Here is how it will work

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

reasury Secretary Francisco Parés Alicea announced on Wednesday the reopening of the Internal Revenue Collections offices around the island, by appointment, and urged citizens to continue using online services through the Internal Revenue Unified System (SURI by its Spanish acronym).

“We started face-to-face services gradually, only with the opening of the 27 communities around the island. We will attend to the public by appointment, respecting the Executive Order of Governor Wanda Vázquez Garced, who maintains the requirement of distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and following internal security protocols,” the Treasury secretary said in a written statement.

Parés Alicea noted that the majority of the collection offices will operate between 8 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. from Monday to Friday and citizens should make their appointments by phone, specifically in the offices where they will carry out the transaction.

The Collections Directory, which includes physical addresses, hours and telephone numbers, is available on the website www. hacienda.pr.gov.

“We will be offering regular transfer

services, sale of stamps and vouchers, payment of fines and receipt of payment plans for traffic fines, among other things, at scheduled appointments,” the Treasury chief said. “This system will be maintained as long as the state of emergency declared for the coronavirus continues.”

In accordance with the provisions of the executive order, the use of masks will be required at all times, and as part of the precautionary measures, the visitor’s temperature will be taken with an infrared thermometer and hand sanitizer will be offered to all visitors.

Also, in this first opening phase, the entrance of a single person per appointment will be allowed. This measure will be made Francisco Parés, secretary of Treasury Dept. flexible only with those people who require the assistance of another person in order San Juan and the Filing Section of the Tax to go to the office, whether due to some Processing Bureau are offering services from physical disability or other health condition Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. that justifies it.

“The service of these two areas is very Parés Alicea urged citizens to continue important, especially during this month, using online services through SURI, which when the period for filing the Income Tax include requesting debt certifications and Return for taxable year 2019 expires on the filing of returns; making multiple payments 15th,” Parés Alicea said. such as estimated, deferred, extension and In the post office at the Intendente others; requesting an extension to file the Ramírez building, no appointment will be income tax return; filing and amending re- required, but to enter the area visitors must turns; and determining reinstatement status, wear a mask and respect physical distancing among others. while waiting for service.

He added that the central post office in The 2019 tax returns that must be filed

on paper will be received, as determined in the Internal Revenue Information Bulletin 20-04, as well as the income tax returns for 2018 and previous years.

Parés Alicea said the Filing Section of the Tax Processing Bureau will also provide services by appointment, which may be requested by calling (787) 721-2020, extensions 2212, 2200 and 2216.

Taxpayers may make their request for copies of returns, request a copy of Relief of Inheritance and Donations, and manual correction will be made to the Income Tax Return Form Certification.

Energy Bureau lacks info on BPPR plans to build power plant

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Puerto Rico Energy Bureau (PREB) has requested additional information regarding Banco Popular’s plans to build a combined heat and power cogeneration plant for its facilities in the Cupey Center that will also provide energy to Evertec.

The bank made the original request to the PREB on June 26, but the STAR could not find the document in the case’s dossier.

The PREB issued its ruling asking for additional documents on Monday.

The cogeneration plant will serve as the Cupey Center’s “main source of energy” but the PREB’s resolution did not say whether the bank plans to sell its excess power to the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) or if there is any proposed net metering agreement.

The petition says Banco Popular’s cogeneration plant will also provide energy to

Evertec, which will reimburse the bank for the energy it uses. The main goal of the cogeneration plant is to provide resiliency and stability to the plant’s operations, the document states.

The PREB, however, told Banco Popular to provide over the next few days a copy of the contract between the bank and Evertec, information regarding the design of the cogeneration plant, information about the energy distribution system, information on the density of energy consumption per square footage, and an evaluation of the convenience of using meters to determine the amount of energy used by both the bank and Evertec.

The PREB warned that if the documents are not submitted in the required 10 days, the bank’s request will be dismissed.

The request comes at a time when PREPA customers are enduring occasional power outages because of the fragility of the system.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

7

Trump leans on schools to reopen as virus continues its spread

By PETER BAKER and ERICA L. GREEN

P

resident Donald Trump demanded on Tuesday that schools reopen physically in the fall, pressing his drive to get the country moving again even as the coronavirus pandemic surged through much of the United States and threatened to overwhelm some health care facilities.

In a daylong series of conference calls and public events at the White House, the president, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and other senior officials opened a concerted campaign to lean on governors, mayors and others to resume classes in person months after more than 50 million children were abruptly ejected from school buildings in March.

Trump and his administration argued that the social, psychological and educational costs of keeping children at home any longer would be worse than the virus itself. But they offered no concrete proposals or new financial assistance to states and localities struggling to restructure academic settings, staffs and programs that were never intended to keep children 6 feet apart or cope with the requirements of combating a virus that has killed more than 130,000 Americans.

“We’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools, to get them open,” Trump said at a forum at the White House. “It’s very important.

It’s very important for our country. It’s very important for the well-being of the student and the parents. So we’re going to be putting a lot of pressure on: Open your schools in the fall.”

Education has long been a local issue, controlled by district school boards and state superintendents. Indeed, Trump campaigned in 2016 against efforts to nationalize education through programs like the Common Core State Standards. So beyond jawboning, it was unclear what power Trump had to force policymakers’ hands. He stopped short of threatening to withhold federal funding, a potentially effective but risky lever.

Instead, the president used his bully pulpit, which has been influential in steering parts of the country where he has support. Trump heaped scorn on Harvard University for “closing for the season” this fall. In fact, Harvard said mainly first-year students and some students in special circumstances would be invited to campus in the fall, then seniors would replace them in the spring. “I think it’s ridiculous,” Trump said. “I think it’s an easy way out, and I think they ought to be ashamed of themselves, if you want to know the truth.”

During an earlier conference call with governors, DeVos laced into school administrations that have done “next to nothing” to educate students during the pandemic. She also criticized specific districts “playing both paradigms” in planning a hybrid of in-person and online classes for the fall, singling out Fairfax County, Virginia, a suburb of Washington.

“A couple of hours a week of online school is not OK, and a choice of two days per week in the classroom is not a choice at all,” DeVos said, according to a recording of the call obtained by The New York Times.

The president’s focus on schools and colleges, freighted with campaign-season politics, came as the United States topped 3 million coronavirus infections and the vast majority of states were experiencing new spikes. In Florida, more than 40 hospitals reported having no more beds in their adult intensive care units. In Ohio, the governor ordered residents in seven counties to wear masks in public, including those containing Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland.

Eager to put the virus in his rearview mirror and focus blame elsewhere, Trump’s administration announced Tuesday that it had formally notified the United Nations that the United States would withdraw from the World Health Organization next year in retaliation for its handling of the pandemic. And in a move to pressure colleges and universities that depend on full-tuition-paying international students for income, the administration moved to bar foreign students from returning to the United States if their schools stick with online classes only.

In demanding the resumption of schools, Trump waded into one of the most fraught issues confronting the country as it grapples with the deadliest pandemic in a century. Many parents, educators and doctors, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, have urged schools to reopen. But concerns remain high, especially among teachers who by virtue of age would be more vulnerable than the students.

The issue has enormous consequences for the economy as well as the upcoming election.

With children at home, many parents are unable to resume work, hindering the economic resurgence Trump hopes to propel before the Nov. 3 vote. And so, like wearing masks, the issue of reopening schools has become one more battleground in the ferocious ideological wars that divide America.

Trump brushed off the rise in virus cases, pointing instead to lower death rates, and characterized those reluctant to reopen the schools as partisans trying to hurt him politically

The playground at a closed public school in the Bronx. at the height of his reelection campaign this fall. “They think it’s going to be good for them politically, so they keep the schools closed,” he said. “No way.”

Critics said Trump was the one playing politics, willing to gamble the health of students and teachers to salvage a flagging bid for a second term.

“The reality is no one should listen to Donald Trump or Betsy DeVos when it comes to what is best for students,” said Lily Eskelsen García, the president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union. She added: “Everything is about his reelection. Our No. 1 priority is that we keep our students safe.”

Her organization joined several others, including the National Parent Teacher Association and the American Federation of Teachers, in a joint statement saying that without a comprehensive plan for safety, “we could be putting students, their families and educators in danger.”

After what amounted to a fitful and largely unsatisfying nationwide experiment in distance learning last spring, many districts are looking for ways to reopen in the fall, perhaps through a hybrid model relying on both online and in-person learning, including New York City, the nation’s largest school district. So far, Texas and Florida have announced that in-person instruction will be a mandatory option in the fall.

On a call with reporters, administration officials said they were urging schools to make

plans that anticipate cases while minimizing the risk of spread and the need for school closures.

The officials said the biggest risk with reopening schools and colleges would be infected students transmitting the virus to someone more vulnerable.

Among the vulnerable are teachers: Nearly one-third of the nation’s public school teachers are 50 or older, according to federal data analyzed by the research group Child Trends, which also found that teachers have more social contacts than typical adults because of the time they spend with students.

DeVos said education leaders needed to “examine real data and weigh risks,” which she said they did every day in normal circumstances, and went on to cite the other risks, such as widening achievement gaps, posed by long-term closures.

“Ultimately it’s not a matter of if schools need to open, it’s a matter of how,” DeVos said.

Education groups have released an array of plans for safely reopening schools, and some estimate they will need at least $200 billion in additional funding to meet public health requirements and stave off mass layoffs and programmatic cuts.

Those requests are stalled in Congress.

But during the conference call with governors, DeVos said that of the $13.5 billion that has been allocated to school districts through the federal coronavirus rescue bill, only 1.5%, or $195 million, had been used by the states.

8

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

Harvard and MIT fight proposed limit on foreign students’ Visas

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arvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said Wednesday that they had filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over a directive that would strip foreign students of their visas if their coursework was entirely online.

The White House measure, announced Monday, was seen as an effort to pressure universities into reopening their gates and abandoning the cautious approaches that many have announced they would adopt to reduce transmission of the coronavirus.

“The order came down without notice — its cruelty surpassed only by its recklessness,” Harvard’s president, Lawrence S. Bacow, said in a message to the university community.

“It appears that it was designed purposefully to place pressure on colleges and universities to open their on-campus classrooms for in-person instruction this fall, without regard to concerns for the health and safety of students, instructors, and others.”

The directive’s effect may be to dramatically reduce the number of international students enrolling in the fall. Together with delays in processing visas as a result of the pandemic, immigrant advocates say the new rules, which must still be finalized this month, might discourage many overseas students from attending U.S. universities, where they often pay full tuition.

But the concern that their campuses could become coronavirus clusters has prompted many universities to adopt measures to reduce exposure, from requiring masks in classrooms to limiting social activities to reducing the number of students invited back to campus. Many have announced a hybrid approach that would provide some in-person classes but offer a significant amount of coursework virtually.

Such changes could put foreign students’ visas, known as F-1 visas, at risk under the new rules. International students whose universities are not planning in-person classes — which is currently the case at schools including Harvard and the University of Southern California — would be required to return to their home countries if they are already in the United States. Those overseas would not be granted permission to enter the country to take online coursework here.

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in an interview on CNN that the administration was providing more flexibility for international students than in the past, when they could take only one online course to qualify for visas. Now they can take more, as long as at least some of their instruction is in person.

“If they’re not going to be a student or they’re going to be 100% online, then they don’t have a basis to be here,” Cuccinelli said, adding, “They should go home, and then they can return when the school opens.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

9

Ady Barkan endorses Joe Biden for president

The activist Ady Barkan at home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He has written about his experience with A.L.S. and how that has informed his push for universal health care.

By KATIE GLUECK

A

dy Barkan, the prominent liberal activist and advocate for “Medicare for All,” is endorsing Joe Biden for president, in a sign that some progressives who opposed Biden in the Democratic primary race are increasingly willing to actively support him against President Donald Trump.

In the primary campaign, Barkan endorsed Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and then Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. His endorsement now of Biden comes as the former vice president, keenly aware of the need to energize and turn out younger and more liberal voters who are unenthusiastic about his candidacy, works to improve his standing with them.

“Even though he wasn’t our first choice, I don’t think that progressives and democratic socialists should sit out the election, or vote third party, and I wanted to make that clear,” Barkan, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and can now speak only through a computerized voice using eye gaze technology, said in an email. He will announce his endorsement Wednesday.

Biden, who opposes Medicare for All and was one of the more centrist candidates in the primary contest, declined to sit down with Barkan then, the activist said publicly at the time. But the two recently engaged in a wide-ranging and sometimes deeply personal discussion over Zoom about issues including health care, police reform and Biden’s own extensive experience with illness and grief.

The conversation was the latest and final installment in Barkan’s series of interviews with candidates created through Be a Hero, the political action committee associated with Barkan.

“I think that the vice president and his staff understand the need to unify the party, and I think that is why they agreed to the conversation,” Barkan emailed. “The conversation reinforced my preexisting understanding of Joe Biden. He is an intelligent, compassionate man who will be a vast improvement over Donald Trump.”

In a statement announcing his endorsement, he directly appeals to those who may have felt as he did when his preferred candidates dropped out: “devastated.”

“He and I have meaningfully different perspectives on the world; not only on what ails it, but on what we must do to address those maladies,” the statement reads. “And yet despite the literal and figurative distances between us, I know that the vice president heard what I was saying. He listened, he understood, and he promised to continue doing both after he is elected.”

Asked about the most important steps Biden could take to energize young progressive voters, Barkan replied that the presumptive nominee’s biggest opportunity “to excite young progressive voters is by selecting Elizabeth Warren to be his vice president.”

According to a transcript of the conversation between Biden and Barkan, the two disagreed over Medicare for All and Biden defended the option of private

insurance. But he also outlined his own plans for health care, nodded at more ideas to come and raised proposals like “providing for the option to have home care paid for and elder care paid for, not as part of Medicare, as just a basic right.”

In an effort to demonstrate a commitment to investing in health care, Biden also said at one point, “What I’m proposing is something that costs an excess of a trillion dollars and we’re going to get it done.”

Asked for details on the proposal Biden was referring to, a campaign official said that his health care plan, when combined with “related forthcoming proposals,” would amount to more than $1 trillion over 10 years.

Biden has already called to build on the Affordable Care Act and add a public option.

“I’m eager to get to you and your folks the remainder of what I call the entire health initiative,” Biden told Barkan. “That goes beyond ‘Obamacare’ with a public option or Medicare for All, goes beyond that in terms of a whole new care network across the board, of giving people more flexibility, allowing people to not have to make choices between their job and taking care of a parent who’s dying.”

The campaign declined to comment further.

2 People charged with hate crime after Black Lives Matter mural is vandalized

By AZI PAYBARAH

T

wo white people in California were charged Tuesday with a hate crime and other offenses after video appeared to show them vandalizing a Black Lives Matter mural on July 4, officials said.

The two were identified by the Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office as Nicole Claudia Anderson, 42, and David Richard Nelson, 53, both of Martinez, California.

Diana Becton, the district attorney, said, “The mural completed last weekend was a peaceful and powerful way to communicate the importance of Black lives in Contra Costa County and the country.”

The mural was painted on July 4 in front of a courthouse in Martinez, a site that the city selected when it issued a permit to the mural’s organizer. Within an hour of its completion, it was vandalized, said the organizer, Justin Gomez.

Video of the episode showed a woman using black paint and a roller brush to cover the letters “B”

and “L.” She was joined by a man in a red cap and a red shirt that reads “Trump” and “Four More Years,” who can be heard saying: “We’re sick of this narrative” and “the narrative of police brutality, the narrative of oppression, the narrative of racism. It’s a lie. It’s a lie.”

The woman, using two expletives, tells onlookers to “keep this” in New York, adding, “This is not happening in my town.”

The mural has been restored and residents were “maintaining a presence” to prevent further damage, Gomez had said.

In addition to the hate-crime charges, the two people each face a charge of vandalism under $400 and possession of tools to commit vandalism or graffiti.

All the charges are misdemeanors and no court date has been scheduled, according to a spokesman for the district attorney’s office.

If convicted, the couple face up to a year in jail, the district attorney’s office said.

Efforts to reach Anderson and Nelson at multiple phone numbers Tuesday night were not successful.

10

Thursday, July 9, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

A Kennedy wins N.J. primary to take on Trump loyalist

By TRACEY TULLY

I

n a rebuke of a potent New Jersey political machine, Amy Kennedy, a former schoolteacher whose husband is a nephew of President John F. Kennedy, won Tuesday’s primary battle to take on Jeff Van Drew, a freshman congressman who defected from the Democrats with a pledge of loyalty to President Donald Trump.

Kennedy’s main opponent, Brigid Callahan Harrison — who was backed by both of New Jersey’s U.S. senators and two of its longtime political power brokers — conceded the race in a YouTube video soon after the polls closed at 8 p.m. An hour later, The Associated Press declared Kennedy the winner.

New Jersey’s primary election was conducted mainly using mail-in ballots, and the official results were not expected to be known for at least a week as ballots, which needed to be postmarked by Tuesday to be counted, trickled in.

It was the first broad test of voting by mail in New Jersey, making Election Day as much a referendum on the voting method as on the candidates who were running.

Kennedy, a mother of five, will now challenge Van Drew, who left the Democratic Party in December and was endorsed

by Trump.

“People here in South Jersey are ready for change,” Kennedy said in a victory speech that aired live on Facebook a little after 10 p.m. “We need leaders who will feel when we hurt, listen when we speak, provide direction, guidance and show up when

it matters.”

Kennedy, who was introduced by Gov. Philip Murphy, focused on Van Drew, saying, “We’ve had enough of you, and Donald Trump.”

In a recorded concession speech, Harrison, a professor of political science at Montclair State University, urged Democrats to unite behind Kennedy. “Each of us has the responsibility to get involved and help her any way we can,” she said.

Kennedy was backed by Murphy, and the race was seen as a proxy war between the governor and his two main Democratic rivals, George Norcross, an insurance executive who wields significant power in Trenton, and Stephen Sweeney, the Senate president.

Progressive groups that supported Kennedy said the results demonstrated that the once-invincible clout Democratic Party county leaders have wielded in New Jersey no longer offered an ironclad path to victory.

“For decades, the South Jersey Democratic machine has been a barrier to progressive change,” said Sue Altman, the leader of the left-leaning Working Families Alliance. “This is an absolutely huge win for progressives.”

Norcross released a statement praising Kennedy’s campaign.

“Congratulations to Amy Kennedy, who has won a strong victory in today’s primary,” said Norcross, a member of the Democratic National Committee whose brother, Donald Norcross, represents a neighboring district in Congress. “As I said months

Sabrina Taranto, center, the supervisor for elections of the county clerk’s office, looks up a voter who showed up in person to apply for a vote by mail ballot at Bergen County Board of Elections, in Hackensack, N.J.

ago, I look forward to supporting the Democratic nominee in the general election.”

The contest for the 2nd Congressional District, which stretches from Atlantic City west to the Pennsylvania border, now represents a race between Trump, who held a raucous rally for Van Drew in Wildwood, New Jersey, and the Kennedy political dynasty. Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points in the district, which for 24 years before Van Drew’s election was represented by a Republican.

With help from Norcross, Harrison notched the support of six of the district’s eight county chairs, but Kennedy won the coveted Democratic Party line in Atlantic County, where more than a third of the district’s voters live.

Will Cunningham, 34, a lawyer and a former investigator for the House Committee on Oversight and Reform who campaigned as a progressive, also mounted a lively primary challenge that effectively leveraged social media during a time when most traditional campaigning was halted by the coronavirus pandemic.

New Jersey voters also were deciding dozens of other primary races, including a Republican primary to take on Rep. Andy Kim, a Democrat in a swing district.

Only about half of the state’s polling sites were open for the filing of provisional ballots, and voters could also deliver ballots in person to drop boxes set up in each county.

Murphy said he would be watching to see how the voting went before determining how broadly to rely on mailed ballots for the presidential election in November, when the stakes would be much higher.

“We’re going to be watching very closely for any shenanigans that we hear about,” Murphy, a Democrat, said Monday.

In states like Washington that have long embraced voting by mail, there has been no evidence that it leads to widespread fraud. That has not dulled sharp attacks by Trump, who has made dozens of false claims about the process and had predicted that it would result in “the most corrupt election in the history of our country.”

In the midst of the pandemic, there was nothing normal about how candidates campaigned. And Election Day itself veered sharply from the typical script.

There were no perfunctory photographs of candidates casting votes with their spouses and no insider buzz around victory parties or early poll results. Get-out-the-vote efforts began weeks ago, as campaigns were able to check on who had returned ballots and who had not.

Those who had not were targeted by telephone and text.

Hector Oseguera, 32, a lawyer who lost his primary challenge in northern New Jersey against Rep. Albio Sires, said his campaign had planned to send 500,000 text messages to voters in the two weeks before Election Day, with a goal of contacting each voter four or five times.

Employees at election boards in New Jersey’s 21 counties were also in uncharted territory, having to confirm signatures on ballots while also tallying votes.

“This can serve as a test run for November,” said John Froonjian, the executive director of the William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy at Stockton University. “New Jersey has to be prepared to learn from what happens today and the next few days.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

11

Investors start to ask: What if Biden becomes president?

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, speaks in Lancaster, Pa.

By MATT PHILLIPS

A

fter months of fixating on the pandemic, Wall Street has something new to worry about: a possible Biden presidency.

With the latest polls suggesting that former Vice President Joe Biden has built a commanding lead over President Donald Trump in the 2020 race, investors have begun to take into account that the nottoo-distant future could look very different from the business-friendly thrust of the current administration. And it’s making some nervous.

Investors aren’t yet making buying and selling decisions based on the eventuality of a Biden administration, so the market’s dips and rallies don’t fully reflect their worries. But there are clues.

On June 24, when the market dropped 2.6% during a broad-based rise in coronavirus infections, some Wall Street traders and analysts attributed part of the fall to data from polls — including one produced by The New York Times and Siena College — showing Biden’s lead over Trump.

Of course, no one can ever be entirely sure what moves a market. But stocks of some military companies have also un-

derperformed, reflecting a view among some investors that a Biden victory could depress weapons sales.

And Wall Street analysts, who provide market research to hedge funds, asset managers and other big investors, say those clients are increasingly seeking their advice on the impact of a Biden presidency, especially on taxes.

Recently, inquiries from investors about Biden’s lead in the polls have focused almost exclusively on the issue of taxes, said Jonathan Golub, chief U.S. equity strategist at Credit Suisse. “That’s, right now, kind of the market’s focus,” he said.

On June 29, Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, told potential donors at a virtual fundraiser attended by Wall Street people that he would roll back most of Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut, “and a lot of you may not like that.”

Additionally, public opinion has swung in a way that indicates that Democrats, who control the House of Representatives, have a stronger chance of retaking the Senate come November. Such unified control could mean a sudden shift away from a range of policies — like corporate tax cuts, deregulation and weapons sales to foreign governments — that have helped push up stock prices in recent years.

“The market is starting to worry that Trump will not be reelected,” said Lori Calvasina, head of U.S. equity strategy at RBC Capital Markets. “Trump is consistently viewed as a positive for the stock market.”

Stock market investors have done well under Trump. The S&P 500 is up more than 45% since his election on Nov. 8, 2016, despite periods of sharp volatility, including one in recent months as the pandemic led to an enormous market sell-off, followed by a robust return on the back of giant helpings of government stimulus.

It wasn’t always this way. The shock of Trump’s election jolted investors at first. After his victory, stock market futures plunged more than 5% in overnight trading. But investors didn’t take long to adjust to the prospect of unified Republican control of the federal government, which lasted until the 2018 midterm elections and introduced a number of deregulatory and tax policies deemed favorable to the markets.

Now, stock market analysts and investors are trying to figure out which of those policies could come to an end if Biden goes to the White House. Among Biden’s policy proposals are a partial reversal of the Trump administration tax cuts signed into law in late 2017. Those cuts, for both individuals and businesses, were some of the most sweeping changes to the tax code in decades.

In particular, the Trump tax cuts were a windfall for major American corporations, helping to drive up the profitability of companies in the S&P 500 more than 20% in 2018. While the Trump administration promoted the tax cuts as a way to increase incentives for companies to invest and drive wage gains, many companies used their savings to buy back their shares — increasing the wealth of their shareholders by billions of dollars in the process.

At last month’s fundraiser, Biden detailed his plans, which include raising the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%, according to a pool report.

A recent analysis of Biden’s tax plan from Goldman Sachs suggested that if enacted, his corporate tax increase would cut the earnings per share of S&P 500

companies about 12%, a prospect that could act as a headwind for stocks.

“It’s becoming a hotter topic the more the polls come out showing that Biden is in the lead,” said Tony Dwyer, chief market strategist with the brokerage firm Canaccord Genuity in New York.

“The more that Biden is up, the more that people are going to start to think about what that means for taxes.”

The stocks of military companies, which are viewed as beneficiaries of the Trump administration’s push to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, have lagged the market as Biden’s fortunes have risen in polls.

“We see higher risk around weapons sales to the Middle East, and especially Saudi Arabia, in a Biden administration,” military stock analysts at JPMorgan Chase wrote in a recent note to clients.

Investors in the oil and gas industry have also raised questions with analysts about what a change in the White House would mean for energy companies, from access to federal lands for drilling to increased carbon regulation of refiners. In a research report issued late last month, Goldman Sachs analysts noted that many of their conversations with investors focused on the risks to oil and gas companies in the event of a Democratic victory in November.

Still, industries such as health care and technology, which were some of the biggest beneficiaries of the Trump tax cuts, don’t appear to be drastically underperforming the market.

Some analysts have noted that a Biden presidency could be a source of stability for the markets, which have been hammered at times during Trump’s tenure.

Since 2018, his on-again, off-again trade, tariff and technology war with China has generated waves of volatility for stocks.

“A Biden presidency would result in less trade tension with China, which would be a welcome relief for equity investors,” economists at BCA Research wrote. They also noted that corporate tax increases could finance government spending that would stimulate the economy, a potential plus when the post-pandemic recovery looks slow and long.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

Stocks

Wall Street climbs as hopes of economic revival overshadow jump in virus cases

W

all Street’s major indexes edged higher in choppy trading on Wednesday, supported by technology shares as early signs of an economic rebound overrode fears of another lockdown due to a jump in coronavirus cases across the country.

Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) provided the biggest boost to all three indexes. The technology index .SPLRCT rose 1.1%, the most among the 11 major S&P sectors.

“People are debating whether or not the low in the economy has actually been reached so they’re sticking with growth stocks and that’s technology,” said Robert Pavlik, senior portfolio manager at SlateStone Wealth LLC in New York.

Safe-haven gold rose nearly 1% as the number of confirmed U.S. cases surpassed 3 million, affecting nearly one of every 100 Americans.

California, Hawaii, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma and Texas broke their previous daily record highs for new infections.

The S&P 500 has been in a tight trading range since early June after it rose more than 45% from its March lows as investors weighed a string of upbeat economic data including record job additions and a rebound in the service sector in June, against a domestic surge in coronavirus cases.

Markets also appeared to be in a wait-andwatch mode before the beginning of the second-quarter earnings season, which kicks off next week with reports from the big Wall Street banks.

Quarterly earnings for S&P 500 companies are expected to decline about 44% year-onyear, the steepest drop since the 2008 financial crisis, according to IBES Refinitiv data.

“Wall Street is looking ahead to 2021 earnings and pretty much ignoring 2020,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA Research in New York.

At 12:34 p.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI was up 38.21 points, or 0.15%, at 25,928.39, the S&P 500 .SPX was up 9.53 points, or 0.30%, at 3,154.85. The Nasdaq Composite .IXIC was up 96.05 points, or 0.93%, at 10,439.94.

Biogen Inc (BIIB.O) jumped 5.2% after the company said it submitted the marketing application for its experimental Alzheimer’s disease therapy, aducanumab.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

13

Years after 43 Mexican students vanished, a victim’s remains are found

By KIRK SEMPLE, PAULINA VILLEGAS and NATALIE KITROEFF

N

early six years after 43 college students disappeared in rural Mexico, the government announced the first major breakthrough in its investigation Tuesday: Forensic scientists have identified the remains of one of the students.

Bone fragments found near where the students disappeared have been tested by Institute of Genetics at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, and identified as the remains of Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre, one of the students, said Omar Gómez Trejo, the special prosecutor assigned to the case. He added that forensic experts from Argentina had confirmed the findings.

The discovery marked a fresh sign of progress toward solving a case that traumatized Mexico and became a symbol of rampant corruption in the country’s justice system. It has long been assumed that the missing students were killed, and various people in authority have been implicated, but no one has been put on trial and the motive remains a mystery.

“We have broken the pact of impunity and silence that surrounded” the case, Gómez said at a news conference. He added, “today we tell the families and society that the right to the truth will prevail.”

The discovery was a victory for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had promised to prioritize the investigations — and who desperately needs a political boost amid a plummeting economy, soaring crime and a coronavirus pandemic that continues to worsen in Mexico.

The announcement came on the eve of López Obrador’s visit with President Donald Trump in Washington — a trip for which the Mexican president was roundly criticized at home, because of the U.S. president’s harsh language about Mexico and Mexicans.

For the missing students’ relatives, who for years have demanded a more robust government investigation into their loved ones’ whereabouts, the identification represented a long-awaited step toward closure. Rodríguez is only the second to be found, and the first since December 2014, when a bone fragment was identified as belonging to another missing student, Alexander Mora.

“For Christian’s family this is devastating news, and for the rest of the families it is the materialization of their worst fears that this might have been all of the students’ destiny,” said Santiago Aguirre, director of Centro Prodh, a human rights organization that represents the families.

They expect it to be “the beginning of a new and serious investigation that once and for all clarifies what happened to every single one of the students,” he said.

The students were undergraduates at a teachers’ college in the town of Ayotzinapa in the southern state of Guerrero. The night they disappeared — Sept. 26, 2014 — they were in the process of commandeering buses to carry their peers to a demonstration in Mexico City, a time-honored tradition among students at their college and one that was mostly tolerated by the bus companies.

But their escapade quickly devolved into a long, harrowing and chaotic night of terror and violence that involved law-enforcement and other gunmen, according to two reports released by an international panel of investigators several years ago.

By daybreak, six people were dead in the city of Iguala, doz-

Maria Telumbre, center, holding a poster with the image of her missing son, Christian Alfonso Rodriguez, in Mexico City in 2014. ens were wounded and the 43 students had vanished.

Even in a country often wracked by violence, the incident horrified people and spurred huge, nationwide protests demanding that the government solve the mystery and end corruption and impunity.

In 2015, after months of investigation, the administration of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto concluded that the students had been kidnapped by police officers working on behalf of a criminal group, which in turn killed them, burned their bodies in a trash dump and disposed of their ashes in a river.

But the panel of international investigators, experts in forensics and human rights who examined the case for a year at the invitation of the Mexican government, thoroughly discredited the government’s findings.

The panel said the authorities had tried to thwart its work, questioning the integrity of the Mexican criminal justice system and the government’s commitment to finding the truth.

They determined that suspects had given testimony under torture or under otherwise “cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.”

The experts also questioned the Mexican authorities’ handling of evidence and their failure to pursue certain promising lines of inquiry.

It later emerged that the experts, in addition to suffering a campaign of harassment and interference, had been targeted by spyware purchased by the Mexican government.

Aguirre, the lawyer representing the families, said Tuesday that an anonymous call led investigators to a specific spot in Cocula,

a town near Iguala, where the remains were found — about half a mile from the garbage dump. More remains are likely to be found in that location, he said.

The new discovery “breaks away from the narrative of a lie” by the former government that was meant to foreclose further investigation, said Gómez, the special prosecutor.

After taking office in July 2018, López Obrador quickly began to make good on his campaign promise to redress his predecessor’s mishandling of the case. His first official decree, signed two days after his inauguration, established a special presidential commission to support the families of the victims and get to the bottom of the case.

He has since invited the international panel of experts to return to assist with the investigation, and the country’s independent attorney general has created a special investigative unit dedicated to solving the case.

In the past year, investigators have combed numerous sites looking for evidence, and have sought the arrests of more than 50 people in connection with the case. Many are former government officials who were involved in the investigation during Peña Nieto’s term; some have been accused of torture, forced disappearance and obstruction of justice.

Among the suspects is Tomás Zerón, who had been the chief of criminal investigations in the attorney general’s office during Peña Nieto’s term and was investigated for his handling of witnesses and evidence. Officials say Zerón fled the country months ago prompting an Interpol notice for his arrest.

14

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

Mexico’s leader sought harmony with Trump. He got a lopsided relationship.

President Donald Trump along the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico in San Luis, Ariz.

By AZAM AHMED and MICHAEL CROWLEY

B

efore heading out for his first state visit to the United States, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the firebrand president of Mexico known for excoriating his foes in long-winded tirades, made a surprising promise to his people.

He vowed to be strong and not embarrass Mexico on his first trip abroad to meet President Donald Trump, a man seen by many Mexicans as their nation’s chief antagonist.

“I am going to represent you, and have no doubt, I will do as you all deserve, with decorum and a lot of dignity,” he said.

It was an exceptional statement for López Obrador, whose unapologetic manner has been a hallmark since he came to office in 2018 with a landslide and a sweep of both houses of Congress.

But many Mexicans have been angry at his decision to meet with Trump, especially given López Obrador’s consistent willingness to bend to the American president’s will — and the possibility Trump will gleefully remind American voters of that lopsided relationship during the meeting.

Rather than fight Trump and risk the economic fallout, López Obrador has repeatedly allowed the United States to dictate major concessions on migration and force Mexico to take on much of the burden of preventing people from crossing the border.

López Obrador’s visit is officially in-

tended to celebrate the new trade agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico, which went into effect this month. But the optics for Mexico’s president are even worse because Canada’s prime minister and Trump rival, Justin Trudeau, has decided not to come, citing scheduling conflicts.

The animosity between Mexicans and Trump runs deep. The American president practically launched his campaign with attacks against Mexico, and he has hardly stopped since then. Some Mexicans fear that he will simply use López Obrador to bolster his standing ahead of elections in November, while humiliating the nation once more under the pretext of celebrating trade.

And they have good reason to be suspicious. Trump has bullied and badgered the Mexican government with public threats — including the prospect of broad tariffs or even closing the U.S.-Mexican border. Mexico, aware of the disproportionate effect of a strained relationship on its economy, has largely acquiesced.

For Trump, the visit offers a welcome distraction from rising coronavirus infections and mass protests over police violence. With its focus on the trade pact, sometimes dubbed NAFTA 2.0, the meeting will allow Trump to talk instead about a U.S. economy whose restoration he has made a central campaign theme.

Trump is also likely to raise another defining issue for his campaign: immigration.

The president considers progress on a southern border wall and a sharp drop in immigration vital to pleasing his electoral base. López Obrador, under near-constant pressure from Trump, has been instrumental in making that drop a reality.

Trump enjoys “an incredible amount of leverage” over López Obrador, said Juan S. Gonzalez, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs in the Obama administration. “The Mexicans have been doing Trump’s bidding on immigration,” added Gonzalez, who advises the campaign of Trump’s 2020 Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Trump may also see potential benefit to his standing with Latino voters, 28% of whom supported him in 2016 despite his fierce antiimmigration stance. On Thursday, Trump is scheduled to participate in a round table with Hispanic leaders.

What is less clear is the benefit for Mexico.

Mexican officials say the reason for the visit is simple. The signing of a new trade deal, especially when its economy is facing the greatest recession in a century, is historic and worthy of recognition, no matter the timing — and even if many analysts expect the deal to have a modest effect on economic growth.

But from nearly his first moment in office, López Obrador told his team that there would be no fighting with Trump or the U.S. government. They could not afford costly and bruising battles and could not win them anyway.

That leverage over Mexico has come to define the relationship, and it has embittered many in Mexico, including people within the government.

With little in the way of recourse, López Obrador has mostly gone along with the White House agenda, especially on immigration, even though in many cases his actions stand in sharp contrast to his image as a man of the people and a benefactor of the dispossessed.

To placate Trump’s ire, Mexico has transformed itself into one of the United States’ most powerful tools to halt migration.

The first major shift in policy was Mexico’s acceptance of the Migrant Protection Protocols, a policy that allows the United States to send migrants seeking asylum back to Mexico as they wait out their hearings.

Later, to avoid destructive tariffs threatened by Trump, Mexico deployed a new security force, the National Guard, to police its borders and prevent migrants from passing into

the country. That concession shifted the forces away from the reason they were created — to fight the spiraling violence engulfing the nation.

But although López Obrador’s concessions helped upend decades of established asylum policy, he paid little price in the polls.

His astronomic approval ratings at the time — around 70% or higher — barely budged.

“The average Mexican is only interested in putting food on the table, and so in that sense this visit is the last thing that worries Obrador’s supporters,” Iliana Rodríguez, a professor of international relations at the School of Government at Tec de Monterrey, said of the Trump meeting.

López Obrador has made clear that his primary focus is domestic. Appeasing Trump means the American president is less likely to interfere in domestic issues — or to punish Mexico with economic measures like tariffs.

Others question the upside of attempting to win favor with Trump. When Mexico’s previous president invited Trump to visit during the campaign, it won him few favors from the White House and summoned the wrath of Mexicans of all political stripes.

Similarly, even after pressuring Mexico to accept U.S. asylum-seekers within its borders, Trump still threatened to raise tariffs if the nation did not do more to curb unauthorized immigration through its territory.

“The notion you somehow hold him off or buy goodwill by becoming his political pawn — there is nothing to indicate that is true,” said Dan Restrepo, the former national security adviser for Latin America under President Barack Obama.

As his reelection bid nears, Trump has renewed his focus on cracking down on immigration, primarily across the southern border.

Last month, Trump traveled to virus-gripped Arizona to survey recent construction on the border wall that he has fought bitterly with Congress to fund, with limited results.

He is also expected to make a renewed effort to end a program that protects young immigrants known as “Dreamers” from deportation, after a June Supreme Court ruling struck down his prior attempt to kill the initiative by Obama.

A senior Trump administration official on Tuesday said the pandemic would make a traditional state dinner impractical for López Obrador, so the leaders will instead hold a kind of “state lite” dinner Wednesday night, along with 20 Mexican and American business leaders from industries including telecommunications, energy and agriculture.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

15

Britain says it will resume arms sales to Saudi Arabia

By STEPHEN CASTLE

O

ne day after sanctioning 20 Saudis for human rights violations, Britain on Tuesday sent a very different signal to the government in Riyadh, ending a moratorium on arms sales to Saudi Arabia over its involvement in the bloody conflict in Yemen.

A court ruling last year forced the British government to suspend sales of arms and military equipment to Saudi Arabia because of the risk they would be used in violation of international humanitarian law.

But after a review, Liz Truss, Britain’s international trade secretary, said Tuesday that procedures had been revised to comply with the court’s concerns and that the suspension of licenses for the export of arms to Saudi Arabia was at an end.

Her decision prompted anger from opposition politicians and campaigners, protests that were sharpened by the timing of the announcement. On Monday, the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, imposed sanctions on 47 people, including 25 Russians accused of aiding and abetting in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died after brutal treatment in detention in 2009.

The British list also included two people from Myanmar and 20 Saudis accused in the assassination of dissident Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, whose death caused outrage around the world.

Raab argued that, as it charts its new course on the international stage outside the European Union — which Britain formally quit in January — the British government was “absolutely committed to the United Kingdom being an even stronger force for good in the world.”

The Saudis named in the British sanctions list included 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. Both men will stand trial in absentia for directing the 15-man hit squad that flew to Turkey from Saudi Arabia to carry out the killing.

While the murder of Khashoggi and Saudi Arabia’s involvement in Yemen are very different issues, critics said that imposing sanctions while also ending a moratorium on arms sales sent contradictory signals over the balance between human rights and realpolitik in Britain’s evolving foreign policy.

Saudi Arabia is a big market for British arms manufacturers. Between April 2015 and March 2018, Britain’s government licensed the sale of at least 4.7 billion pounds (around $5.89

billion) of military equipment to the Saudis, and a further 860 million pounds to its coalition partners.

Emily Thornberry, who speaks for the opposition Labour Party on international trade, described the resumption of arms licenses to Saudi Arabia as “morally indefensible.” The timing, she added, suggests “at the very least a case of mixed messages, undermining the government’s claim to be human rights defenders.”

Andrew Smith, a spokesman for the Campaign Against Arms Trade, described the government’s move as a “disgraceful and morally bankrupt decision” and said that further legal steps would be explored to challenge it.

Under British law, the government should not grant an export license if there is a clear risk that weapons or equipment might be used in a serious violation of international humanitarian law. In a written statement to Parliament, Truss acknowledged that there had been some “credible incidents of concern” related to Saudi forces’ conduct but said that there was no systematic pattern.

“The incidents which have been assessed to be pos-

sible violations of International Humanitarian Law occurred at different times, in different circumstances and for different reasons,” she wrote. “The conclusion is that these are isolated incidents.”

The British government said in a statement that all existing and new applications for arms exports to Saudi Arabia “will be assessed against the revised methodology which considers whether there is a clear risk the equipment might be used in the commission of a serious violation of International Humanitarian Law.” “The Government takes its export responsibilities seriously and assesses all export licenses in accordance with strict licensing criteria,” the statement said. “We will not issue any export licenses where to do so would be inconsistent with these criteria.”

Britain is not alone in wanting to push ahead with arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Despite opposition in Congress, the U.S. State Department informally notified lawmakers in January that it intended to proceed with the sale of precision-guided missiles worth $478 million to the country.

Saudi soldiers at an airfield in the eastern province of Marib, Yemen, in 2018.

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Thursday, July 9, 2020

Erdogan talks of making Hagia Sophia a mosque again, to international dismay

By CARLOTTA GAL

S

ince it was built in the sixth century, changing hands from empire to empire, Hagia Sophia has been a Byzantine cathedral, a mosque under the Ottomans and finally a museum, making it one of the world’s most potent symbols of ChristianMuslim rivalry and of Turkey’s more recent devotion to secularism.

Now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is making moves to declare it a working mosque once more, fulfilling a dream for himself, his supporters and conservative Muslims far beyond Turkey’s shores — but threatening to set off an international furor.

The very idea of changing the monument’s status has escalated tensions with Turkey’s longtime rival, Greece; upset Christians around the world; and set off a chorus of dismay from political and religious leaders as diverse as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Erdogan’s opponents say he has raised the issue of restoring Hagia Sophia as a mosque every time he has faced a political crisis, using it to stir supporters in his nationalist and conservative religious base.

But given the severity of the challenges Erdogan faces after 18 years at the helm of Turkish politics, there may be more rea-

son than ever to take the talk seriously. Having lost Istanbul in local elections last year, the president has watched the standing of his party continue to slide in the polls as the COVID-19 pandemic has further undone a vulnerable economy.

On July 2, a Turkish administrative court ruled on whether to restore Hagia Sophia, or Ayasofya, its Turkish name, as a mosque, and revoke an 80-year old decree that declared it a museum under Turkey’s secular state. The ruling will be announced within two weeks, and then Erdogan is expected to make the final decision.

For more than 25 years since he became mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan has been working to leave his stamp on his beloved home city. He cleaned up the Golden Horn, built bridges and tunnels across the famous waters and placed new mosques at the most prominent sites.

But it is Hagia Sophia, one of the oldest and architecturally one of the most impressive cathedrals in the world, that commands pride of place on the historical peninsula.

Completed in 537 AD, Hagia Sophia stood for nearly a millennium at the heart of the Christian world, crowning the fabled city of Constantinople. It is unsurpassed for its grandeur and immense dome.

In 1453, Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, and although his troops plun-

Turkey’s president wants to convert Hagia Sophia in Istanbul back into a mosque, which threatens to set off an international furor over one of the world’s architectural treasures.

dered what they could carry, the building was saved and turned into a mosque. For 500 years it was the venerated center of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.

Turks record with pride that Ottoman rulers doted on the great building, assigning the best architects to embellish it. Minarets were added, and later the great Ottoman architect Sinan built massive buttresses to prevent the walls from buckling under the weight of the dome, which was damaged in earthquakes.

With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the status of Hagia Sophia changed again.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern secular republic of Turkey, ended the role of religion in the state and closed religious institutions. Byzantine churches, including Hagia Sophia, were made into museums, ending their religious function and opening them up for tourism, conservation and study.

But Erdogan’s supporters speak of the building as the third holiest site in Islam, after the Grand Mosque of Mecca and AlAqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and insist that once a mosque, it should never be unconsecrated.

Erdogan, who comes from a conservative Muslim tradition, has overseen a steady chipping away of the secular rules of the Ataturk republic, with a concerted effort to revive the glories of the Ottoman era.

At the end of May, he gave his strongest signal yet on Hagia Sophia, as he opened — remotely, because of the coronavirus — a ceremony and sound-and-light show to commemorate the 567th anniversary of the conquest of Constantinople by the Muslim army of Mehmed II the Conqueror.

For the first time in more than 80 years, an imam seated on a carpeted dais before a copy of the Quran recited the verse known as the Conquest surah, which celebrates the Treaty of Hudaibiyah between the people of Mecca and Medina.

The recitation upset many. The Foreign Ministry of Greece, which sees itself as the heir to the Byzantine Empire — which was Greek-speaking and Christian — denounced it as unacceptable and a breach of Hagia Sophia’s status as a world heritage site under UNESCO. The ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, who is the spiritual leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church from his seat in Istanbul, said the conversion of

Hagia Sophia into a mosque would disappoint millions of Christians around the world and would divide Muslims and Christians when it had been a place of worship for both.

“We consider it as detrimental,” he said in a sermon last week, “for Hagia Sophia, which, due to its dedication to the wisdom of God is a point of encounter and a source of fascination for the faithful of both religions, to become, in the 21st century, a cause of confrontation and conflict.”

He urged the Turks to honor what he described as their obligation to the world.

“The Turkish people have the great responsibility and the highest honor to give prominence to the universality of this exquisite monument,” he said.

Pompeo urged Turkey before the court hearing to respect the diverse traditions and faiths of Turkey’s history and keep Hagia Sophia as a museum accessible to all.

Many in Turkey see the entire debate as a political ploy by Erdogan to remain ahead of his many rivals, especially as former members of his Justice and Development Party have broken away to form their own political parties and threaten to draw away some of his conservative Muslim base.

He has made it a nationalist issue, lashing out at Greece for interfering in his country’s affairs and insisting that Turkey was proceeding according to the law.

“Is it you managing Turkey or us?” he said. “Turkey has its own institutions.”

His nationalist coalition ally Devlet Bahceli weighed in with a speech on the same day: “Hagia Sophia is the conquest Mosque of the Muslim Turkish nation. This truth will not change.”

“This shows that there is something catching fire, something burning in the dynamics of this country,” Erdogan added.

Beyond politics, art historians and conservationists worry that they will lose access for study and research if the monument becomes a working mosque, and tourist companies and city authorities fear that visitors will be deterred from coming. The monument is the most visited tourist site in Turkey, with 3.7 million visitors last year.

“I am more interested in preserving Hagia Sophia as a cultural treasure,” said Zeynep Ahunbay, a conservation architect who has worked on the scientific committee for Hagia Sophia for 25 years. “The best way to preserve and present it is by the museum function.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

17

Maybe this isn’t such a good time to prosecute a culture war

By JAMELLE BOUIE

D

onald Trump made his name in Republican Party politics as a “birther,” a true believer in — and an evangelist for — the racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was a foreign-born, illegitimate president. Having stoked a wave of white grievance and resentment, Trump rode it, first to influence — let’s not forget that Mitt Romney came to receive Trump’s endorsement in person during the 2012 presidential race — and then to the summit of power as president himself.

Now, because of a pandemic Trump refuses to address (“We need to live with it,” officials in his administration say), his power is at risk. If the election were held today, Trump would almost certainly lose in a landslide. His sole good fortune at the moment is that the election won’t be held for another four months, giving him time to close his 10-point gap with Joe Biden and turn his campaign around.

But to do that, Trump would have to take responsibility for and respond to events properly. He would have to show the voting public that he is capable of presidential leadership. And this, more than anything, is beyond both his interest and his ability. Trump does not want to govern and could not do it if he tried.

Instead, as he sees it, the path to reelection lies with the instincts that brought him to power in the first place. With enough racist demagoguery, Trump seems to think, he’ll close the gap with Biden and eke out another win in the Electoral College. But it is one thing to run a backlash campaign, as Trump did four years ago, in a growing economy in which most people aren’t acutely worried about their lives and futures. In that environment, where material needs are mostly met, voters can afford to either look past racial animus or embrace it as a kind of luxury political good. When conditions are on the decline, however, they want actual solutions, and the politics of resentment are, by themselves, a much harder sell.

Not that Trump isn’t trying. In just the last two weeks, he has retweeted a video of a supporter in Florida shouting “white power,” threatened to scrap an Obama-era fair housing rule meant to break patterns of segregation (citing its “devastating impact” on suburbs), promised to veto a defense funding bill that would also take the names of Confederate generals off military bases, and called New York City’s decision to paint “Black Lives Matter” on Fifth Avenue a “symbol of hate” that was “denigrating” to this “luxury avenue.”

Rather than use the Independence Day weekend to make a plea for national unity — the usual election-year approach for an incumbent — Trump took the holiday as an opportunity to excoriate the millions of Americans protesting for racial justice as “evil” heralds of a new “far-left fascism” who seek “the end of America.”

Speaking underneath Mount Rushmore on July 3, Trump warned that “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”

Trump continued along these lines on Monday with an attack on Bubba Wallace, the only Black full-time driver in NASCAR. “Has @BubbaWallace apologized to all of those great NASCAR drivers & officials who came to his aid, stood by his side, & were willing to sacrifice everything for him, only to find out that the whole thing

President Donald Trump takes the stage for his campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla. was just another HOAX?”, the president wrote on Twitter. “That & Flag decision has caused lowest ratings EVER!” Wallace was one of the leading voices in NASCAR arguing for removing the Confederate flag from events and banning it from the stands. When a member of his team discovered a noose in Wallace’s stall at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama, NASCAR launched an investigation, concluding that the noose had been in the stall since October of last year. Some observers, particularly those hostile to the Confederate flag ban, decided that this meant the noose was a hoax. But NASCAR officials rejected this view.

“Bubba Wallace and the 43 team had nothing to do with this,” Steve Phelps, the president of NASCAR, said. “Bubba Wallace has done nothing but represent this sport with courage, class and dignity.”

If conditions now were like those in January — if unemployment was still low and there wasn’t mass unrest and a deadly pandemic wasn’t continuing to rage out of control — then the president’s rhetoric might actually work to mobilize his supporters. Part of the story of the 2016 election was the movement, into the Republican coalition, of cross-pressured voters who opposed conservative anti-government ideology but were also repelled by immigration, Islam and racial liberalism. Trump appealed to these voters by pledging support for policies like Social Security and Medicare while also demonizing racial and religious minorities.

But just as important as his message was the overall condition of the economy. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough.

Unemployment was down, growth was steady and wages were up. The economy wasn’t on the back burner, but it also wasn’t the most salient issue of the election This gave a candidate like Trump the political space to bring other issues to the fore. And he took it.

It is possible that Trump would have succeeded under worse economic conditions; that a crashing economy would have made those cross-pressured voters even more eager to support a racist, demagogic candidate. We have something of a comparison point in the 2008 election, when Sarah Palin brought Trump-like energy to the Republican presidential ticket, nearly eclipsing John McCain, the presidential nominee. She drew huge crowds with furious denunciations of Obama that centered on a sense of him as foreign and un-American. “I am just so fearful that this is not a man who

sees America the way you and I see America,” Palin told a nearly all-white crowd of supporters a month before the election.

And yet the kinds of voters Palin tried to appeal to — the kinds of voters who would eventually back Trump — stayed, for the most part, within the Democratic fold that year. They may have been uncomfortable with the idea of a Black president, but they were outright opposed to another four years of Republican economic policy.

Or consider George Wallace, whose politics of cultural rage and racial resentment resonated with voters at a moment, the late 1960s, of relative security and prosperity, not decline and desperation. It’s not that demagogues never triumph in bad economic conditions, but that good times may bring some voters to feel that they can afford to vote their resentments.

If this is true — if it takes a decent economy to make voters conducive to the campaign Trump wants to run — then he is, at this moment, speeding down an electoral dead-end. As long as COVID-19 is out of control, as long as there is mass suffering, sickness and economic distress, then nothing short of actually doing his job will help him get ahead. There simply is no substitute for good governance.

Trump can spend the next four months raging against protesters, defending Confederate monuments and attacking Black celebrities. He can play the hits for his supporters and whip his most devoted followers into a frenzy of MAGA enthusiasm. He can turn up the racism dial as much as he wants and as far as it will go.

But if he’s looking for approval, he won’t get it.

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Thursday, July 9, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Biden should not debate Trump unless ...

President Trump at a 2016 debate and Joe Biden at a debate in March.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I

worry about Joe Biden debating Donald Trump. He should do it only under two conditions. Otherwise, he’s giving Trump unfair advantages.

First, Biden should declare that he will take part in a debate only if Trump releases his tax returns for 2016 through 2018. Biden has already done so, and they are on his website. Trump must, too. No more gifting Trump something he can attack while hiding his own questionable finances.

And second, Biden should insist that a real-time factchecking team approved by both candidates be hired by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates — and that 10 minutes before the scheduled conclusion of the debate this team report on any misleading statements, phony numbers or outright lies either candidate had uttered. That way no one in that massive television audience can go away easily misled.

Debates always have ground rules. Why can’t telling the truth and equal transparency on taxes be conditions for this one?

Yes, the fact that we have to make truth-telling an explicit condition is an incredibly sad statement about our time; normally such things are unspoken and understood.

But if the past teaches us anything, Trump might very well lie and mislead for the entire debate, forcing Biden to have to spend a majority of his time correcting Trump before making his own points.

That is not a good way for Biden to reintroduce himself to the American people. And, let’s not kid ourselves, these debates will be his reintroduction to most Americans, who have neither seen nor heard from him for months, if not years.

Because of COVID-19, Biden has been sticking close to home, wearing a mask and social distancing. And with

the coronavirus now spreading further, and Biden being a responsible individual and role model, it’s likely that he won’t be able to engage with any large groups of voters before Election Day. Therefore, the three scheduled televised debates, which will garner huge audiences, will carry more weight for him than ever.

He should not go into such a high-stakes moment ceding any advantages to Trump. Trump is badly trailing in the polls, and he needs these debates much more than Biden does to win over undecided voters. So Biden needs to make Trump pay for them in the currency of transparency and fact-checking — universal principles that will level the playing field for him and illuminate and enrich the debates for all citizens.

Of course, Trump will stomp and protest and say, “No way.” Fine. Let Trump cancel. Let Trump look American voters in the eye and say: “There will be no debate, because I should be able to continue hiding my tax returns from you all, even though I promised that I wouldn’t and even though Biden has shown you his. And there will be no debate, because I should be able to make any statement I want without any independent fact-checking.”

If Trump says that, Biden can retort: “Well, that’s not a debate then; that’s a circus. If that’s what you want, why don’t we just arm wrestle or flip a coin to see who wins?”

I get why Republican senators and Fox News don’t press Trump on his taxes or call out his lies. They’re afraid of him and his base and unconcerned about the truth. But why should Biden, or the rest of us, play along?

After all, these issues around taxes and truth are more vital than ever for voters to make an informed choice.

Trump, you will recall, never sold his Trump Organization holdings or put them into a blind trust — as past presidents did with their investments — to avoid any conflicts of interest. Rather, his assets are in a revocable trust, whose trustees are his eldest son, Donald Jr., and Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer. Which is a joke.

Trump promised during the last campaign to release his tax returns after an IRS “audit” was finished. Which turned out to have been another joke.

Once elected, Trump claimed that the American people were not interested in seeing his tax returns. Actually, we are now more interested than ever — and not just because it’s utterly unfair that Biden go into the debate with all his income exposed (He and his wife, Jill, earned more than $15 million in the two years after they left the Obama administration, largely from speaking engagements and books) while Trump doesn’t have to do the same.

There must be something in those tax returns that Trump really does not want the American public to see. It may be just silly — that he’s actually not all that rich. It may have to do with the fact that foreign delegations and do-

mestic lobbyists, who want to curry favor with him, stay at his hotel in Washington or use it for corporate entertaining.

Or, more ominously, it may be related to Trump’s incomprehensible willingness to give Russian President Vladimir Putin the benefit of every doubt for the last three-plus years. Virtually every time there has been a major public dispute between Putin and U.S. intelligence agencies alleging Russian misdeeds — including, of late, that the Kremlin offered bounties for the killing of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan — Trump has sided with Putin.

The notion that Putin may have leverage over him is not crazy, given previous hints by his sons.

As Michael Hirsh recalled in a 2018 article in Foreign Policy about how Russian money helped to save the Trump empire from bankruptcy: “In September 2008, at the ‘Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate’ conference in New York, the president’s eldest son, Donald Jr., said: ‘In terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. Say, in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo, and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.’”

The American people need to know if Trump is in debt in any way to Russian banks and financiers who might be close to Putin. Because if Trump is re-elected, and unconstrained from needing to run again, he will most likely act even more slavishly toward Putin, and that is a national security threat.

At the same time, debating Trump is unlike debating any other human being. Trump literally lies as he breathes, and because he has absolutely no shame, there are no guardrails. According to the Fact Checker team at The Washington Post, between Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017, and May 29, 2020, he made 19,127 false or misleading claims.

Biden has been dogged by boneheaded issues of plagiarism in his career, but nothing compared to Trump’s daily fire hose of dishonesty, which has no rival in U.S. presidential history. That’s why it’s so important to insist that the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates hire independent fact-checkers who, after the two candidates give their closing arguments — but before the debate goes off the air — present a rundown of any statements that were false or only partly true.

Only if leading into the debate American voters have a clear picture of Trump’s tax returns alongside Biden’s, and only if coming out of the debate they have a clear picture of who was telling the truth and who was not, will they be able to make a fair judgment between the two candidates.

That kind of debate and only that kind of debate would be worthy of voters’ consideration and Biden’s participation.

Otherwise, Joe, stay in your basement.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

19

Denis Márquez radica segundo informe sobre compra de pruebas COVID-19 Por THE STAR

T

ras la radicación del Segundo Informe de la investigación de la Comisión de Salud de la Cámara de Representantes, el representante del Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP), Denis Márquez Lebrón, anunció el miércoles, la radicación de su segundo informe sobre el proceso de compra de pruebas Covid19 en el que señala y reitera al clientelismo político como el germen de la corrupción en la fallida transacción.

“En nuestro primer informe detallamos el esquema de fraude en el Gobierno y los funcionarios que conspiraron para defraudar al pueblo de Puerto Rico. En este informe hacemos lo propio con el sector privado en el que reiteramos y señalamos al clientelismo político como el germen de la corrupción que provocó toda la podredumbre gubernamental que ya conocemos”, expresó Márquez Lebrón en declaraciones escritas.

El líder independentista precisó que su segundo informe gira alrededor de personas del sector privado con influencia sobre los servidores públicos y la conexión con el PNP y el gobierno para poder llevar a cabo acciones que se alejaron por completo de un plan para atender la crisis sanitaria que mantuvo al país paralizado y encerrado en sus hogares por más de dos meses.

“El Gobierno, el PNP y el sector privado – Apex, 313LLC- actuaron de forma organizada para poder lograr acceso a una cifra millonaria sin importar las consecuencias de sus actos.

Consecuencias que más allá de afectarles personalmente, afectaron al país, porque hoy el Go-

bierno no ha realizado la compra de un millón de pruebas. Es el desprecio absoluto por la salud pública y el bien común en general’, agregó el Portavoz del PIP. Agregó que en los informes de la Comisión de Salud “no se ha querido referir ni reconocer la existencia de un esquema de corrupción y conspiración para defraudar al erario y quedó demostrado en las vistas públicas que fue mucho más que meras negligencias administrativas

e incumplimiento del deber”.

El segundo informe de Márquez Lebrón amplía los referidos contra los dueños de Apex y 313 por los delitos de conspiración y perjurio.

En el caso de Juan Maldonado se le añaden los delitos de fraude por medio informático, Impostura conspiración y perjurio. Además, se amplía su referido al Tribunal Supremo por violaciones a otras disposiciones de la Ley Notarial y Cánones de Ética Profesional.

Secretario DDEC: “Viento en popa desarrollo de producciones cinematográficas en la isla” Por THE STAR omance, comedia y acción, son R algunos de los géneros de las veinticinco producciones que respalda el

Programa de Desarrollo de la Industria Cinematográfica (PDIC) del Departamento de Desarrollo Económico y Comercio (DDEC), y cuyas inversiones en la isla serán aproximadamente 148 millones de dólares, así lo anunció el miércoles, el secretario del DDEC, Manuel Laboy Rivera.

“Este segundo semestre del año cuenta con una robusta lista de producciones que filmarán bajo las estrictas medidas de distanciamiento y protección ante la propagación del Coivd-19. Esta veintena de proyectos

generarán unos 2,951 empleos, totalizan unos 1,465 días de grabación y 1,643 noches de hotel. A diferencia de otros años, nueve de estas producciones se aprobaron bajo el Código de Incentivos y el resto bajo los parámetros que establece la Ley 27 Ley de Incentivos Económicos para la Industria Fílmica de Puerto Rico. Durante los pasados tres años trabajamos como equipo para crear las mejores condiciones que incrementen la filmación de producciones, ya sean largometrajes, cortometrajes, series o programas, entre otros”, indicó Laboy Rivera en comunicación escrita.

Entre los proyectos apoyados por el PDIC se destacan películas, series y programas de televisión como: En

Agua, Dama de Las Camelias, Soltice, Spicy, Midnight at Switchgrass, Hombres de Cuello Blanco, Sin Escape, Todo por Amor, Road to Bella, Sonido Bestial, Gina Yei, YSUG Live, Leo From Toledo e Historias del Rey, entre otros.

El secretario del DDEC, señaló que bajo el nuevo Código de Incentivos se permitirá que proyectos fílmicos tengan acceso de crédito contributivo de hasta 40 por ciento de gasto para residentes y se añade un 15 por ciento adicional sujeto al cumplimiento de varios parámetros, para un total de 55 por ciento de gastos a residentes, más un 20 por ciento adicional por concepto de pagos a no-residentes.

Por su parte, el director del Pro-

grama de Desarrollo de la Industria Cinematográfica (PDIC), Pedro Piquer Henn, resaltó “la pandemia del COVID-19 atrasó entre 7-10 proyectos que iban a comenzar su rodaje durante el período de marzo a junio y esto ocasionó un fuerte impacto económico. Entendemos que, con los proyectos ya endosados y listos para rodar, además de la nueva inversión estimada para este año fiscal que acaba de comenzar, el futuro inmediato de la industria cinematográfica de Puerto Rico se proyecta muy positivo”.

Para más información sobre el Programa de Desarrollo de la Industria Cinematográfica, puede acceder a www.ddec.pr.gov/programa-de-desarrollo-de-la-industria-cinematografica/

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Thursday, July 9, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

New list of unproduced plays tallies those disrupted by pandemic

Roslyn Ruff and fellow actors play a scene from Claudia Rankine’s “Help” at the Shed, in New York.

By SARAH BAHR

T

rying to salvage a spring and summer of shelved and scrapped scripts, the Kilroys, a group of Los Angelesbased female-identified playwrights and producers, is spotlighting new plays and musicals by female, transgender and nonbinary writers that have had their runs disrupted by the pandemic.

More than 140 planned productions by writers ranging from the Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok to the comedian Sarah Silverman appear on the group’s sixth annual list, released on Tuesday.

The tally typically counts a few dozen unproduced and underproduced new plays that are nominated by approximately 300 theater professionals.

But this year the list isn’t curated. Any writer who’s had a first or second professional production of their work canceled, postponed or shortened by COVID-19 can submit their information to be included, said Obehi Janice, a playwright and member of the collective.

“It’s a rejection of status, which this list has unintentionally been a part of,” she said. “We wanted to take a true survey of our community.”

The list, which takes its name from the subversive World War II graffiti tag “Kilroy Was Here,” will be updated each month through the end of the year, she said. (The

Dramatists Guild, Theater Communications Group and National New Play Network provided information for the first round.)

Several included productions will be familiar to New York audiences: Both Hilary Bettis’ “72 Miles to Go…” and Claudia Rankine’s “Help” had begun performances at the Roundabout Theater Company and the Shed, respectively.

Silverman’s highly anticipated musical “The Bedwetter” (co-written with Joshua Harmon and Adam Schlesinger) had its April 25 opening date at the Atlantic Theater Company postponed indefinitely.

Other plays were aimed for spring at smaller, regional theaters, including Audrey Cefaly’s “Alabaster” at Know Theater of Cincinnati and Elaine Jarvik’s “Four Women Talking About the Man Under the Sheet” at Salt Lake Acting Company in Utah.

Majok, whose “Cost of Living” was on an earlier Kilroys list, went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for the play. Her “Sanctuary City” is on the new list after a New York Theater Workshop production was postponed indefinitely.

In an interview Tuesday, Majok said she believes that advocacy by the Kilroys has nudged industry gatekeepers to more strongly consider plays by female and nonbinary writers. And she hopes such progress won’t be lost to the pandemic.

“The cost and, therefore, the exclusivity makes it so

difficult for lower income artists to break into theater — or to keep going within it,” she said. “And I worry that further exclusivity could kill vital stories and perspectives in our cultural conversation.”

Inda Craig-Galván, a Los Angeles-based playwright, had two works on this year’s list, “A Hit Dog Will Holler” and “Black Super Hero Magic Mama.” She said it’s disheartening that productions have been scuttled in a cultural moment perfect for plays that tackle racism and oppression.

“It’s a great time in our country for these plays to be produced,” she said. “But now I’m wondering if they’ll ever be produced.”

She said that, as a writer of color, it’s frustrating when spaces are interested in developing her plays or showering them with prizes, but not in actually producing them. “‘Black Super Hero Magic Mama’ has won, like, every award,” she said. “And it’s had one full production.”

Approximately 49% of the plays and musicals on this year’s list are by writers of color, Janice said.

While a majority of plays produced in American theaters are written by white men, there has been progress: In 2016-17, approximately 70% of plays produced in regional theaters were written by men, compared with 2011 to 2014, when that figure was almost 80%, according to the results of a national survey financed by the Lilly Awards and the Dramatists Guild. The percentage of produced plays by writers of color also increased from 10.2% to 15.1% over that period.

But female playwrights still face a steep climb to Broadway. The pandemic-shortened 2019-20 season featured only a handful of shows written by women: Bess Wohl’s “Grand Horizons,” Rona Munro’s “My Name is Lucy Barton” and Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive,” plus the books for the musicals “Six,” “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” and “Jagged Little Pill.”

“Yes, there have been amazing gains,” Janice said.

“But at the end of the day, American theater still struggles with taking the breadth of voices in our country into account.”

Triney Sandoval, left, and Bobby Moreno rehearse a scene in Hilary Bettis’s “72 Miles to Go…,” at the Roundabout Theater Company in New York

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

21

Prominent artists and writers warn of an ‘Intolerant Climate’

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER and ELIZABETH A. HARRIS

T

he killing of George Floyd has brought an intense moment of racial reckoning in the United States. As protests spread across the country, they have been accompanied by open letters calling for — and promising — change at white-dominated institutions across the arts and academia.

But Tuesday, a different type of letter appeared online. Titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” and signed by 153 prominent artists and intellectuals, it began with an acknowledgment of “powerful protests for racial and social justice” before pivoting to a warning against an “intolerant climate” engulfing the culture.

“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter declared, citing “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”

“We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other,” it continues. “As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.”

The letter, which was published by Harper’s Magazine, will also appear in several leading international publications, surfaces a debate that has been going on privately in newsrooms, universities and publishing houses that have been navigating demands for diversity and inclusion, while also asking which demands — and the social media dynamics that propel them — go too far.

And on social media, the reaction was swift, with some heaping ridicule on the letter’s signatories — who include cultural luminaries like Margaret Atwood, Bill T. Jones and Wynton Marsalis, along with journalists and academics — for thin-skinnedness, privilege and, as one person put it, fear of loss of “relevance.”

“Okay, I did not sign THE LETTER when I was asked 9 days ago,” Richard Kim, enterprise director of HuffPost, said on Twitter, “because I could see in 90 seconds that it was fatuous, self-important drivel that would only troll the people it allegedly was trying to reach — and I said as much.”

The debate over diversity, free expression and the limits of acceptable opinion is a longburning one. But the letter, which was spearheaded by writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, began taking shape about a month ago, as part

Wynton Marsalis in the Appel Room performance hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. of a long-running conversation about these issues with a small group of writers, including historian David Greenberg, writer Mark Lilla and journalists Robert Worth and George Packer.

Williams, a columnist for Harper’s and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, said that initially, there was concern over timing.

“We didn’t want to be seen as reacting to the protests we believe are in response to egregious abuses by the police,” he said. “But for some time, there’s been a mood all of us have been quite concerned with.”

He said there wasn’t one particular incident that provoked the letter. But he did cite several recent ones, including the resignation of more than half the board of the National Book Critics Circle over its statement supporting Black Lives Matter, a similar blowup at the Poetry Foundation, and the case of David Shor, a data analyst at a consulting firm who was fired after he tweeted about academic research linking looting and vandalism by protesters to Richard Nixon’s 1968 electoral victory.

Such incidents, Williams said, both fueled and echoed what he called the far greater and more dangerous “illiberalism” of President Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump is the Canceler in Chief,” he said. “But the correction of Trump’s abuses cannot become an overcorrection that stifles the principles we believe in.”

Williams said the letter was very much a crowdsourced effort, with about 20 people contributing language. Then it was circulated more broadly for signatures, in what he describes as

a process that was both “organic” and aimed at getting a group that was maximally diverse politically, racially and otherwise.

“We’re not just a bunch of old white guys sitting around writing this letter,” Williams, who is African American, said. “It includes plenty of Black thinkers, Muslim thinkers, Jewish thinkers, people who are trans and gay, old and young, right wing and left wing.

“We believe these are values that are widespread and shared, and we wanted the list to reflect that,” he said.

Signatories include leftist Noam Chomsky and neoconservative Francis Fukuyama.

There are also figures associated with the traditional defense of free speech, including Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as some outspoken critics of political correctness on campuses, including linguist Steven Pinker and psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

The signers also include some figures who have lost positions amid controversies, including Ian Buruma, former editor of the New York Review of Books, and Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard Law School professor who left his position as faculty dean of an undergraduate residence amid protests over his legal defense of Harvey Weinstein.

There are also some leading Black intellectuals, including historian Nell Irvin Painter, poets Reginald Dwayne Betts and Gregory Pardlo, and linguist John McWhorter. And there are a number of journalists, including several opinion columnists for The New York Times.

Pardlo said that as somebody who has felt the “chilling effect” of being the only person of color in predominantly white institu-

The author Margaret Atwood in Toronto.

tions, he hoped the letter would spark conversation about those “chilling forces, no matter where they come from.”

He said he was surprised by some of the blowback to the letter “from the left, or what I assume is the left.”

“It seems some of the conversation has turned to who the signatories are more than the content of the letter,” he said.

There was particularly strong blowback over the inclusion of J.K. Rowling, who has come under fierce criticism over a series of comments widely seen as anti-transgender.

Amid the intense criticism, some signatories appeared to back away from the letter. On Tuesday evening, historian Kerri K. Greenidge tweeted “I do not endorse this @Harpers letter” and said she was in touch with the magazine about a retraction. (Giulia Melucci, a spokeswoman for Harper’s, said the magazine had fact-checked all signatures and that Greenidge had signed off. But she said the magazine is “respectfully removing her name.”)

Another person who signed, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in an effort to stay out of the growing storm, said she did not know who the other signatories were when she agreed to participate, and if she had, she may not have signed. She also said that the letter, which was about internet shaming, among other things, was now being used to shame people on the internet.

But Betts, director of the Million Books Project, a new effort aimed at getting book collections to more than 1,000 prisons, was unfazed by the variety of signers.

“I’m rolling with people I wouldn’t normally be in a room with,” he said. “But you need to concede that what’s in the letter is worthy of some thought.”

He said that as someone who had spent more than eight years in prison for a carjacking committed when he was a teenager, he was given pause by what he called the unforgiving nature of the current moment. “It’s antithetical to my notion of how we need to deal with problems in society,” he said.

He cited in particular the case of James Bennet, who resigned as the editorial page editor of The New York Times following an outcry over an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and cases of authors of young adult literature withdrawing books in the face of criticism over cultural appropriation.

“You can criticize what people say; you can argue about platforms,” Betts said. “But it seems like some of the excesses of the moment are leading people to be silenced in a new way.”

22

Thursday, July 9, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Review: In ‘Stateless’ on Netflix, Cate Blanchett (and immigration)

By MIKE HALE

C

ate Blanchett was an executive producer as well as the star of Hulu’s “Mrs. America,” but the multi-Oscared actor actually made her debut as a television producer when the miniseries “Stateless” premiered in Australia in March. She also created the six-part drama, with Australian writers Elise McCredie (a longtime friend) and Tony Ayres, and appears in a supporting role as a torch-singing hustler who runs a cultlike self-help racket out of her dance school.

All of this Blanchettness is a good thing, of course — she’s predictably excellent as Pat, who gets to exercise her small-time song-and-dance talents in service of the scam, and warbles a creditable “Let’s Get Away From It All.” But it’s also a case of misdirection, because “Stateless” isn’t about charismatic fraudsters, at least not directly. It’s about the troubled history of Australia’s mandatory-detention system for immigrants without visas, specifically the centers where asylum-seekers are warehoused while their cases are processed.

And while the series, available in the United States on Netflix beginning Wednesday, is well made,

well acted and well intentioned, it’s probably less interesting as a social-problem drama than as an example of what even the Cate Blanchetts of the world have to do to get a social-problem drama made.

The solution, in this case, is a four-pronged narrative, each strand involving a lost soul who washes up at a detention center in a desolate stretch of South Australia. One is an immigrant, Ameer (Fayssal Bazzi), an Afghan seeking asylum. The other three are white Australians: Clare (Asher Keddie), the center’s new immigration director, essentially the warden of what’s a prison in all but name; Cam (Jai Courtney), a local who takes a relatively well-paying job as a guard; and Sofie (Yvonne Strahovski of “The Handmaid’s Tale”), a troubled woman whose involvement with the cult leads, through a series of lies and mishaps, to her being detained at the center under a false name.

The disappearance of Sofie, an Australian citizen, into the detention system — her family has no idea what has happened to her — is the most equal among these equal threads, and given current cultural trends it’s impossible not to notice that a critique of immigration policy is being delivered largely through the story of a white woman’s dilemma. But before leaping to

Yvonne Strahovski in “Stateless,” which tells parallel stories within an Australian immigration detention center.

judgment, consider that Sofie is based on an actual person, Cornelia Rau, and that it was the public shock over Rau’s imprisonment that finally spurred an investigation of wrongful detentions. So in this case, form follows government folly.

There’s another solid argument for focusing on Sofie: Her story is where we get to see not just Blanchett but also Dominic West, as Pat’s predatory husband and business partner, Gordon, and Australian all-star Marta Dusseldorp (“A Place to Call Home”) as Sofie’s frantic sister. The show’s most interesting moments come in the first few episodes as Sofie is drawn in and then cast out by Pat and Gordon. West and Blanchett are particularly good in a scene when Gordon, suddenly realizing that Sofie has turned against him, leaps to his feet to publicly denounce her and Pat seamlessly goes along with his improvisation.

The other converging story lines of “Stateless” are credible and sometimes moving, but rarely surprising. The writers, McCredie and Belinda Chayko, lean into the tropes of the prison movie. (Emma Freeman and Jocelyn Moorhouse directed.) Cam is the idealistic newbie, matched against a sadistic veteran guard (Rachel House). Clare is compassionate but takes a hard line to make up for the perceived disadvantage of being a woman; her opposite number is the cynical director of the center’s private security guards, played with engaging weariness by Darren Gilshenan (“No Activity”). The population includes a silent lifer, staring into the distance with his suitcase by his side, and a garrulous nut job, among other familiar prison-yard types.

Running in parallel are the fates of Sofie and Ameer — her fleeing her family, him trying to hold his together; her giving in to her delusions, him fighting to hold onto his sanity. Bazzi and Soraya Heidari are fine as Ameer and his young daughter, but they’re saddled with stiff dialogue and prefab nobility. As in so many immigrant stories told by Westerners, the third-world characters tend to talk as if they’re diagraming each sentence in their heads.

There’s a tinge of that sort of high-minded obviousness throughout “Stateless,” in the way it strategically deploys the Australian legal designation “unlawful noncitizens” and satirically frames statements about “duty of care” and handling prisoners in culturally appropriate ways. And its finale, unsurprisingly, offers bittersweet catharses for the Australian authority figures and sentimental irresolution for the detainees.

But there’s also a current of humor in the depictions of bureaucratic and disciplinary madness, especially in the early episodes. And from start to finish there’s the pleasure of the top-notch cast — surely another aspect of the Blanchett effect.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

23

Scrutinizing SpaceX, NASA overlooked some Boeing software problems

By KENNETH CHANG

A

fter a couple of rounds of investigation and some soul-searching, NASA and Boeing believe that they have identified what went wrong during a troubled test flight of an uncrewed Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts.

In addition to the software errors that slipped through undetected and were not fixed before the spacecraft was launched in December, NASA officials admitted that decades of working with Boeing gave them a level of trust. As a result, the agency might not have been paying attention to the company as closely as it should have while it was also placing more scrutiny on SpaceX, which also built a capsule for carrying people to the space station.

“We were, I would say, a little more used to the Boeing process,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said during a news conference Tuesday. “It’s one that we have used in the past on successful NASA programs like space shuttle and the International Space Station.”

Instead of building and operating its own spacecraft to take astronauts to space as it has in the past, NASA has hired two companies — Boeing and SpaceX,

the aerospace newcomer started by Elon Musk — to provide transportation to and from the space station.

“We may have been focused a little more on SpaceX because they use a bit of a nontraditional approach to their software development,” Stich said.

“And so we may have had a few more people looking at that.”

Last month, SpaceX successfully launched two NASA astronauts, Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, to the space station in its Crew Dragon capsule.

The two astronauts are in orbit working on experiments and maintenance of the space station and will attempt a return trip in the SpaceX vessel later this year.

If Boeing’s December test flight of its spacecraft, called Starliner, had gone as planned, a demonstration flight with two astronauts aboard similar to Behnken and Hurley’s voyage would most likely have occurred by now.

Instead, Boeing will now repeat the uncrewed test, perhaps late this year, with a crewed flight delayed until next year.

In addition to an investigation of what went wrong technically, NASA officials also declared what is known as “high visibility close call” to examine whether there were any blind spots within NASA that

In a photo by provided by NASA, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft shortly after it landed in White Sands, N.M.

led to its overlooking Boeing’s issues.

Kathy Lueders, who was recently appointed associate administrator of the agency’s human exploration and operations directorate, said that NASA, as part of efforts to reduce costly bureaucratic overhead, had not asked Boeing or SpaceX for a high-level management plan for how complex pieces of engineering would be put together and tested.

But that lack of knowledge meant that NASA did not fully understand how Boeing was designing the Starliner’s software and the testing process for verifying that it would work as intended. “We thought we understood it, but we ended up finding out that over time, that kind of changed,” Lueders said.

She also said that for the December test flight, NASA had focused on the highest priorities, in particular ensuring that Starliner did not pose any danger to the space station as it approached, and that might have caused software engineering to receive less attention.

“Where do you apply the resources to make sure that you’re getting kind of the biggest bang for your buck, to be able to really flesh out where you have problems in your systems?” she said.

NASA is now overseeing software development more closely at both SpaceX and Boeing.

The Starliner spacecraft, launched on top of an Atlas 5 rocket Dec. 20, encountered two major software problems during its flight. The first occurred minutes after the spacecraft had separated from the rocket, because the capsule’s clock had been set wrong. That caused the spacecraft to squander its propellant, and a planned docking at the International Space Station was called off.

Starliner also experienced a communications problem that prevented mission controllers from quickly regaining control. An investigation revealed that the spacecraft’s radio receiver had been listening to too wide a swath of frequencies, which led to interference from other transmissions from Earth. Boeing engineers have added a filter to limit the frequencies.

The second software flaw would have fired the wrong thrusters as Starliner was preparing for reentry. As Boeing engineers hastily combed through the Starliner software in the aftermath of the clock problem, they found that problem and fixed it. If it had not been fixed, two pieces of Starliner — the capsule that returns to Earth and the service module, which is discarded — might have collided. The capsule might have tumbled and burned up in the atmosphere instead of landing safely in White Sands, New Mexico.

A review panel made 80 recommendations that Boeing is working to implement before the next uncrewed test flight.

24 LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA SALA DE GUAYNABO.

DO.

MIDFIRST BANK Demandante v.

PAN AMERICAN FlNANCIAL CONSEJO DE TITULARES CORPORATION , INC., NEREIDA QUIÑONES DEL CONDOMINIO FIGUEROA , MARIA BOULEVARD DEL RIO I, ELENA MALDONADO Demandante v.

FIGUEROA , JOHN DOE Y YOLANDA BEATRIZ RICHARD DOE SÁNCHEZ LÓPEZ, JANE Demandada Y JOHN DOE,

Demandados Civil Núm.: GB2020CV00029.

SALA: 201. Sobre: Cobro de Dinero Procedimiento Ordinario.

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

A: YOLANDA BEATRIZ SÁNCHEZ LÓPEZ.

POR LA PRESENTE, se le notifica que se ha presentado una Demanda en cobro de dinero por la vía ordinaria, en la cual la parte demandante alega se le adeuda la cantidad de $3,184.44. Por consecuencia, se le emplaza y requiere para que conteste dicha Demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este Edicto, radicando su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal Superior de Puerto Rico, Sala de Guaynabo y enviando copia a la parte demandante: Lcdo.

Israel O. Alicea Luciano, Número RUA: 16,267, Capital Center Building, South Tower, 239 Arterial Hostos Ave., Suite 305, San Juan, Puerto Rico 009181476, teléfono (787) 250-1420, correo electrónico: israel_alicea@yahoo.com. Se le apercibe que si dejare de comparecer se podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra de acuerdo con la súplica de la demanda, conforme a lo establecido en la Regla 45 de Procedimiento Civil de 2009. EXPEDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y el sello del Tribunal, en Guaynabo, Puerto Rico hoy día 26 de junio de 2020.

Lcda. Laura I Santa Sanchez, Sec Regional. Diamar T. Gonzalez Barroto, Sec del Tribunal Confidencial II..

CIVIL NUM: FA2020CV00256.

SOBRE : CANCELACION DE PAGARÉ HIPOTECARIO EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASóCIAOO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: NEREIDA QUIÑONES FIGUEROA Urbanización Sagrado Corazón, Casa Juan Ruiz Veléz 1711, Apartamento 409, San Juan Puerto Rico 00926 .

tribunal y notifique copia de la Contestación a la Demanda a las oficinas del Lcdo. Juan B. Soto Balbás, RUA Número: 7340 , JUAN B. SOTO LAW OFFICES, P.S.C., 1353 Ave. Luis Vigoreaux, PMB 270 , Guaynabo, PR 00966 , TEL: (787) 273-0611 , FAX: (787) 273-1540 , E-mail: jsoto@lbsblaw.com, abogado de la parte demandante dentro del término de sesenta (60) días a partir de la publicación del Edicto, apercibiendo que de no hacerlo as! dentro del término indicado, el Tribunal podrá anotar su Rebeldía y dictar Sentencia, concediendo el remedio así solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle.

EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal, en Fajardo, Puerto Rico, hoy día 30 de junio de 2020. Wanda I Segui Reyes, Secretaria. Jeniffere Carrasquillo, Secretaria Auxiliar I.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE FAJARQueda usted notificad que el DO. MIDFIRST BANK demandante de epígrafe ha Demandante v. radicado en este Tribunal una demanda contra usted como PAN AMERICAN codemandada, en la que se soFlNANCIAL licita la sustitución judicial de un CORPORATION, INC., pagaré extraviado con fecha de NEREIDA QUIÑONES 9 de enero de 2004 por la suma FIGUEROA, MARIA principal de $58,870.00, con intereses al 7% anual y venceELENA MALDONADO dero el 1 de febrero de 2034, FIGUEROA, JOHN DOE Y conforme affidavit núm. 4097 RICHARD DOE ante el Notarlo Público Alfredo Demandada Ortiz Almedina según consta de CIVIL NÚM.: FA2020CV00256. la Escritura Número 5, otorgada SOBRE: CANCELACION DE en Rio Grande, Puerto Rico, el PAGARÉ HIPOTECARIO EXdía 9 de enero de 2004, ante el TRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENNotario Público Alfredo Ortiz AlTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS medina constituido sobre la siUNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL guiente propiedad: ···URBANA: PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTAUrbanización Santiago Veve DOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LICalzada de Fajardo. Solar: 70.

BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO Cabida 359.53 metros cuadraRICO. SS. dos . Linderos: Norte con soA: JOHN DOE Y lar es números 69 y 684. Sur, RICHARD DOE c on solar 683 y calle número 14 . Este, con el solar número Dirección Desconocida 69 y calle número 14. Oeste , Quedan ustedes notificados con sola res números 683 y que el demandante de epígra684. Sobre este solar enclava fe ha radicado en este Tribunal una casa. Inscrito al folio 166 una demanda contra ustedes vuelto del tomo 436 de Fajardo, como codemandados, en la finca número 2,683, Registro que se solicita la sustitución de la Propiedad, Fajardo. Se judicial de un pagaré extraviales advierte que este edicto se do con fecha de 9 de enero publicará en un (1) periódico de 2004 por la suma principal de circulación general una (1) de $58,870 .00, con intereses sola vez. Usted deberá presen- al 7% anual y vencedero el 1 tar su alegación responsiva a de febrero de 2034, conforme través del Sistema Unificado affidavit núm. 4097 ante el de Manejo y Administración Notario Público Alfredo Ortiz de Casos (SUMAC), al cual Almedina según consta de la puede acceder utilizando la Escrítura Número 5, otorgada ·Siguiente dirección electróni- en Rio Grande, Puerto Rico, el LEGAL NOTICE ca: https://unired.ramajudícial. día 9 de enero de 2004, ante ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO pr, salvo que se represente por el Notario Público Alfredo Ortiz DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUderecho propio, en cuyo caso Almedina constituido sobre la NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA deberá presentar su alegación siguiente propiedad: URBANA: SALA SUPERIOR DE FAJARresponsiva en la secretaría del Urbanización Santiago Veve

@

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

Calzada de Fajardo. Solar: 70.

Cabida 359.63 metros cuadrados. Linderos: Norte con solares números 69 y 684. Sur, con solar 683 y calle número14.

Este, con el solar número 69 y calle número 14. Oeste, con solares números 683 y 684.

Sobre este solar enclava una casa. Inscrito al folio H36 vuelto del tomo 436 de Fajardo , finca número 2,683, Registro de la Propiedad, Fajardo. Se les advierte que este edicto se publicará en un (1) periódico de circulación general una (1) sola vez. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramajudicial.pr , salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretarla del tribunal y notifique copia de la Contestación a la Demanda a las oficinas del Lcdo. Juan B. Soto Balbás, RUA Número: 7340, JUAN B. SOTO LAW OFFICES, P.S.C., 1353 Ave. Luis Vigoreaux, PMB 270, Guaynabo, PR 00966, TEL: (787) 273-0611 , FAX: 787) 273”1540, E-mail: jsoto@ jbsblaw .com, abogado de la parte demandante. Dentro del término de sesenta (60) días a partir de la publicación del Edicto, apercibiendo que de no hacerlo así dentro del término indicado, el Tribunal podrá anotar su Rebeldía y dictar Sentencia, concediendo el remedio asi solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal, en Fajardo, Puerto Rico, hoy dia 30 de junio de 2020. Wanda I Segui Reyes, Secretaria. Jeniffer Carrasquillo, Secretaria Auxiliar I.

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

BANCO POPULAR DE P.R. Demandante v.

COOPERATIVA DE AHORRO Y CREDITO DE ARECIBO (COOPACA) Y OTROS

Demandado(a) Civil Núm. AR2020CV00242.

Sobre: CANCELACION O RESTITUCION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: AMERICAN MORTGAGE CORPORATION A SUS ULTIMAS DIRECCIONES CONOCIDAS MARGINAL

(787) 743-3346

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

HERMANAS DAVILAS to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL Gananciales Compuesta JUSTICIA Tribunal de PriCARR. #2 BAYAMON PR DE por ambos, mera Instancia Sala Superior Demandantes Vs. 00959, de Ponce.

COOPERATIVA DE COND. LAS TORRES FIRSTBANK AHORRO Y CRÉDITO NORTE APT. 2 A PUERTO RICO DE CIALES (HOY), antes BAYAMON PR 00959, DEMANDANTE VS. COOPERATIVA DE URB. COLLEGE PARK RAYMOND BARRAL AHORRO Y CRÉDITO 1820 CALLE ALCALA, RIO ALMODOVAR T/C/C HOGAR CRISTIANO, PIEDRAS PR 00921-4343, RAYMOND RUBEN JOHN DOE, RICHARD URB. PASEO MAYOR BARRAL ALMODOVAR ROE, DEMANDADO D1 CALLE 1, SAN JUAN Demandados CIVIL NUM. PO2019CV03965.

PR 00926-4699, URB. NÚMERO: SALA 601. SOBRE INCUM- CIVIL APOLO 2056 CALLE SOBRE: PLIMIENTO DE CONTRATO, CI2020CV00047.

SATURNO, GUAYNABO COBRO DE DINERO Y REPO- CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ PR 00969-5027.

SESIÓN. NOTIFICACIÓN DE HIPOTECARIO EXTRAVIADO EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICMASTER MORTGAGE A SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. A: RAYMOND BARRAL TO. SU ULTIMA DIRECCION A: JOHN DOE, ALMODOVAR T/C/C CONOCIDA, URB. RICHARD ROE RAYMOND RUBEN HERMANAS DAVILA, Por la presente se les notifica BARRAL ALMODOVAR, que la parte demandante en AVE. BETANCES #24, PARA SER NOTIFICADO este caso, ha presentado ante BAYAMON PR 00959.

POR EDICTO este Tribunal una Demanda soAURELIA MONSERRATE licitando la cancelación de un P/C: LCDO: JAVIER VALES MENDEZ A SU RIVERA LONGCHAMPS pagaré extraviado e hipoteca ULTIMA DIRECCION en garantía del mismo. Dicho PO BOX 194089 CONOCIDA, URB. pagaré hipotecario fue constiSAN JUAN, PUERTO REPARTO MARQUEZ tuído por Pedro Antonio Rivera RICO, 00919 Rodríguez y Bienvenida Pagán (MARQUES) F31 CALLE 5 (Nombre de las partes a las que se Rodríguez, dueños anteriores ARECIBOPR 00612les notifica la sentencia por edicto) de dicha propiedad, a favor de 3912. FULANO Y EL SECRETARIO(A) que sus- Cooperativa de Ahorro y CrédiMENGANO DE TAL COMO cribe le notifica a usted que 28 to Hogar Cristiano, (antes), hoy, POSIBLES TENEDORES de mayo de 2020, este Tribunal Cooperativa de Ahorro y CrédiDESCONOCIDOS DEL ha dictado Sentencia, Senten- to de Ciales, o a su orden, por cia Parcial o Resolución en este la suma principal de SESENPAGARE caso, que ha sido debidamente

TA Y CINCO MIL DÓLARES ($6500000), vencedera el uno (1) de mayo del año dos mil nueve (2009), intereses al ocho y un cuarto por ciento (8 1/4%) anual, autenticado mediante el affidávit número trece mil quinientos veintisiete (13,527) garantizada mediante escritura de hipoteca número ciento seis (106) otorgada en Ciales, Puerto Rico, el día trece (13) de abril del año mil novecientos noventa y cuatro (1994) ante el notario José Oscar San Miguel, según surge de la inscripción sexta (6ta) del Registro de la Propiedad, Sección de Manatí, sobre la propiedad inmueble que se describe a continuación: RUSTICA: Solar marcado con la letra H del Plano de lnscripción y Segregación, localizado en el Barrio Jaguas de Ciales, con una cabida superficial de mil cero noventa punto doscientos treinta y seis metros cuadrados (1,090.236 mc), o sea, cero punto doscientos setenta y siete cuerdas(0.277 cdas), en lindes, por el Norte, en veinte metros (20.00) con LEGAL NOTICE camino municipal, por el Sur, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO en una alineación de veintidós DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- metros (22.00) con el remaNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA nente de la finca principal, por SALA DE CIALES. el Este, en cincuenta y cuatro MARISOL RIVERA punto cero noventa y nueve metros (54.099) con el solar PAGÁN, JESÚS FERNANDO SINGH, y G, propiedad de Antonio CoLEGAL NOTICE lón Fernández y por el Oeste, la Sociedad Legal de Estado Libre Asociado de Pueren cincuenta punto doscientos (Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 29 de junio de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 30 de junio de 2020. En ARECIBO, Puerto Rico , el 30 de junio de 2020.

VIVIAN Y. FRESSE GONZALEZ, Secretario(a). f/BRUNILDA HERNANDEZ MENDEZ, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representado usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 2 de julio de 2020. En Ponce, Puerto Rico, el 2 de Julio de 2020. LUZ MAYRA CARABALLO GARCIA, Secretario(a) Regional. f/ MARICELL ORTIZ MUÑIZ, Secretaria(a) Auxiliar.

sesenta y siete metros (50.267) con el solar marcado con la letra 1. ---Dicha propiedad consta inscrita al folio número ciento veinticinco (125) del tomo número ciento treinta y nueve (139) de Ciales, finca número seis mil seiscientos ochenta y tres (6,683) del Registro de la Propiedad, Sección de Manatí.

---Sin que se tome razón en el Registro de la Propiedad, se hace constar qúe sobre dicho predio de terreno enclava una estructura para fines residenciales. Se le apercibe y advierte a usted que deberá presentar su alegación responsiva dentro de los próximos treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de este emplazamiento por edicto que será publicado una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico. Dicha alegación responsiva deberá hacerla a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo de Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicialpr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal y notificando copia de la misma a la parte demandante por conducto del Lcdo.

Luis G. Estades, Jr., PO Box 368048, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00936-8048, Tel. (787) 7242300, Fax (787) 725-1691, Email: luisestades©hotmail.com.

Se le apercibe que, si no comparece usted a contestar dicha demanda dentro del término de 30 días de la publicación de este Edicto, podrá dictarse Sentencia en Rebeldía en su contra concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda.

EXTENDIDO BAJO Ml FIRMA y el sello del Tribunal, hoy día 12 de marzo de 2020/ Vivian Y Fresse Gonzalez, Sec Regional. Carmen M. Burgos Ortiz, Sec Auxiliar.

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

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Parte Demandante vs.

SUCESION DE FRANCISCA GUTIERREZ RIVERA COMPUESTA POR SUS HIJOS JUAN RIVERA GUTIERREZ Y MARIA RIVERA GUTIERREZ, y X, Y, Z, COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS Parte Demandada

RIVERA GUTIERREZ Y

The San Juan Daily Star

MARIA

CIVIL NUM.: BY2019CV06568.

SALA: 702. SOBRE : COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO EMITIDO POR EL TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANC IA DE PUERTO RICO, SALA DE BAYAMON

A : X, Y, Z, (HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS), por sí y como miembro s de la Sucesión de Francisca Gutiérrez Rivera, parte demandada en el caso de: Banco Popular de Puerto Rico vs. Francisca Gutiérrez Rivera, Civil Núm.: BY2019CV06568 (702), sobre Cobro de Dinero.

Se les notifica a ustedes, X, Y, Z, (HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS), por sí y como miembros de la Sucesión de Francisca Gutiérrez Rivera, que en la Demanda Enmendada que originó este caso se alega que ustedes le adeudan solidariamente a la parte demandante, BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO, las siguientes cantidades: a. $13,586 .92 de principal, $1,024.89 de intereses devengados hasta el 8 de noviembre de 2019, más los intereses que se devenguen a partir de la fecha de radicación de la Demanda al tipo legal, hasta el total y completo pago de la obligación, $49 .20 de cargos por mora y la cuantía de $1,466.11 pactada para las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado. La deuda es por concepto de un préstamo que les fue desembolsado por la demandante y cuyos últimos cuatro dígitos son 0104. b. $14, 142.43 de principal e intereses devengados hasta el 8 de noviembre de 2019, más los intereses que se devenguen a partir de la fecha de radicación de la Demanda al tipo legal, hasta el total y completo pago de la obligación, y una suma razonable para las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado, por concepto de las sumas desembolsadas por el uso de una tarjeta de crédito VISA Novel cuyos últimos 4 dígitos son 8545. Que conforme al Artículo 959 del Código Civil de Puerto Rico (31 LPRA, Secc. 2787) se le apercibe a los demandados, X, Y, y Z, (Herederos Desconocidos) miembros de la Sucesión de Francisca Gutiérrez Rivera, que tienen un término de 30 días para informarle al Tribunal si aceptan o repudian la herencia de la causante. En caso de que ustedes no manifestasen su declaración sobre la aceptación de la herencia dentro del plazo correspondiente, se tendrá la herencia por aceptada. Se les emplaza y requiere que presenten al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto,

Thursday, July 9, 2020

a través del Sistema Unificado de Administración y Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al cual pueden acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica : https://unired.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se representen por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberán presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Deberán notificar a la licenciada: María S. Jiménez Meléndez al PO Box 9023632, San Juan, Puerto Rico 009023632 ; teléfono : (787) 7232455; abogada de la parte demandante, con copia de la contestación a la demanda enmendada. Si ustedes dejan 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 enmendada, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

Expedido en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, a 25 de febrero de 2020.

Lcda. Laura I Santa Sanchez, Sec Regional. Yolanda Cruz Vargas, Sec Auxiliar del Trib I.

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

TRESAMICI PROPERTIES, INC. DEMANDANTE

FULANO DE TAL Y MANGANO DEL CUAL

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM: SJ2019CV12888.

SALA 807. SOBRE: CANCELACION DE PAGARE HIPOTECARIO EXTRAVIADO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: FULANO DE TAL Y MENGANO DEL CUAL

EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 30 de junio de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso con fecha 2 de julio

de 2020. En San Juan, Puerto Rico, el 2 de julio de 2020. Griselda Rodríguez Collado, Secretaria Regional. F/ Maribeth Luna Nogueras, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

Sarahi Reyes Perez, Secretaria Regional. Ariene Guzman Pabon, Sec Aux del Tribunal I.

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ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL LEGAL NOT ICE GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO BUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANDE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL CIA SALA DE AGUADILLA. GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBANCO POPULAR DE BUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANPUERTO RICO CIA SALA DE AGUADILLA. Demandante Vs.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante Vs.

WILMA VEGA RIVERA, ROBERTO ARCE Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandados CIVIL NÚM.: AG2019CV01451.

SALÓN: 604. SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A) ROBERTO ARCE POR SÍ Y EN REPRESENTACIÓN DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR ÉSTE Y WILMA VEGA RIVERA

POR LA PRESENTE: Se le notifica que contra usted se ha presentado la Demanda sobre Cobro de Dinero de la cual se acompaña copia. Por la presente 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 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 19 de febrero de 2020.

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DEBORAH BARRETO NIEVES, FULANO DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandados CIVIL NÚM.: AG2019CV01533.

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

A) DEBORAH BARRETO NIEVES, FULANO DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

POR LA PRESENTE: Se le notifica que contra usted se ha presentado la Demanda sobre Cobro de Dinero de la cual se acompaña copia Por la presente 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 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 21 de febrero de 2020. Sarahi Reyes Perez, Secretaria Regional. Arlene Guzman Pagon, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal I.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

As NBA teams arrive at Disney, focus turns to keeping the virus out

By MARC STEIN

A

s the first NBA teams arrived at Walt Disney World for the resumption of their season, Commissioner Adam Silver reiterated his conviction that the restricted environment in Florida will be safer for the league’s personnel during the coronavirus pandemic than being anywhere “off this campus.”

The ultimate test of that belief had begun just a few hours before Silver’s comments, when the Orlando Magic — courtesy of a 30-minute bus ride from their home arena — were the first of the 22 teams to arrive Tuesday morning at Walt Disney World to begin life in the NBA’s restricted-access village.

Denver, Phoenix, Utah, Washington and the Brooklyn Nets were also scheduled to arrive Tuesday, with eight teams to follow on Wednesday and eight more today. After weeks of planning and the creation of a 113-page guidebook of health and safety regulations to govern the NBA’s return to play July 30 after a more than four-month hiatus, Tuesday’s checkins were the beginning of a critical process: assimilating teams into the campus while trying to keep the coronavirus out.

“It’s a very protected environment, but, again, this virus has humbled many,” Silver said Tuesday on Fortune’s Brainstorm Health virtual panel. “So I’m not going to express any higher level of confidence than: We are following the protocols and we hope it works as we designed it.”

Jeff Weltman, Orlando’s president of basketball operations, spoke with reporters via Zoom as members of the Magic’s traveling party settled into their quarantine at the Grand Floridian, regarded as the second-tier choice of the three Disney hotel properties to which teams were assigned based on playoff seeding.

“This has never been done before,” Weltman said. “All you can do is prepare yourself as best as possible given the very restricted modes of operation that have been placed upon us. Our guys have done that and now it’s time to come together.”

Those who arrived Tuesday were almost immediately taken to a testing room. While on campus, they will be tested for the coronavirus daily, and masks will be mandatory in public when teams

N.B.A. teams began arriving at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Disney World on Tuesday. The rest of the 22-team field will arrive Wednesday and Thursday. are away from basketball activities. After arrival, players and staff must quarantine for up to two days and register two negative tests before they can move freely around the premises.

A significant fear is that players or staff members who initially register negative tests are actually carrying the coronavirus, which medical experts say can incubate for up to two weeks. To help mitigate that threat, players also received two optional devices in their rooms: A beeping sensor to remind campus residents to maintain at least 6 feet of distance between themselves whenever possible, and an Oura ring, which may help provide early warnings of COVID-19 symptoms.

“I have been very optimistic for quite a while now, only because I know the lengths to which and the extent that the NBA has relied upon experts and tried to leave no stone unturned,” Weltman said.

Yet even as the first teams arrived, two more high-profile players were ruled out for the rest of the season Tuesday: Washington’s Bradley Beal and the Nets’ Spencer Dinwiddie.

Beal’s decision was not a surprise, as he had voiced numerous concerns about

safety and the restrictions on players once inside the NBA bubble. He was officially ruled out because of the lingering effects of a shoulder injury, leaving Washington without its three best players: Beal, injured former All-Star John Wall and Davis Bertans, Washington’s sharpshooting forward who recently announced that he would not play to guard against injury as he enters a potentially lucrative offseason as a free agent.

Dinwiddie, who tested positive for the coronavirus last week and again Monday, has experienced headaches and dizziness. He announced on Twitter that he and the Nets made a joint decision to end his breakout season while he remains symptomatic. Averaging 20.6 points and 6.8 assists per game, Dinwiddie is one of at least five Nets veterans who will be unavailable for the restart, joining Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, DeAndre Jordan and Wilson Chandler.

The Nets were in talks Tuesday to sign veteran center Amir Johnson to replace Jordan, according to two people who were not authorized to discuss the team’s plans publicly. Jordan also tested positive for the coronavirus last week and immediately ruled himself out of the

restart. Chandler cited family reasons for not playing; Durant (Achilles’ tendon) and Irving (shoulder) are recovering from injuries.

The uncomfortable reality for the league, at the start of such a pivotal week, is that an increasing number of players have voiced apprehension about the restart, raising concerns that go beyond the coronavirus and injury risk — though the fact that at least seven of the 22 Disney-bound teams over the past two weeks closed their practice facilities at some point because of positive tests surely stoked concerns.

The Nets’ Garrett Temple, a vice president for the National Basketball Players Association, acknowledged in an interview Sunday that there’s considerable player anxiety about the challenges of living and playing on the Disney campus for at least six weeks, and potentially up to three months for the teams that reach the finals.

“I would imagine more than half of the league, of the players that are going, have had second thoughts,” Temple said Sunday, describing his own state as a “nervous anxiousness.”

Weltman, the Magic’s president, also acknowledged that the weight of “leaving your families and leaving your loved ones behind for such a long period of time” had been felt more acutely throughout his organization over “the last few days.”

Said Tilman Fertitta, the owner of the Houston Rockets, in an interview with CNBC: “If it ever becomes unhealthy, I promise you — the players, the owners and the NBA office together will decide this isn’t the right thing. As soon as it becomes dangerous, I can promise you, we won’t do it.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

27

Here’s what you need to know about MLS’ return

By VICTOR MATHER

M

ajor League Soccer is the first of North America’s major men’s professional sports leagues to return, with a makeshift mini-tournament that was to begin Wednesday night.

Here are the hows, whys and wheres for the event, which is taking place in Florida, one of the country’s coronavirus hot spots. The caveat is that the league’s plans could easily change: In the past few days, a game has been postponed and a team has dropped out of the field.

When do the games start?

The opener was a match between Orlando City SC and Inter Miami CF on Wednesday at 8 p.m. Eastern. Games will continue daily until the end of the group stage on July 23, and, to combat the summer heat, some will be played at the eye-opening hour of 9 a.m.

Where did things stand when we left off?

Each team in MLS managed to play two games before the pandemic halted the season.

Atlanta, Kansas City, Minnesota and Colorado were 2-0 in the early action.

Cincinnati, New York City FC and the two expansion teams, Nashville and David Beckham’s Inter Miami, were pointless.

What’s the format of the new tournament?

The NHL will head straight to the playoffs, the NBA will briefly resume its regular season, and the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) is holding a short cup. MLS plans to use a mix of these elements.

Initially, teams will play in a newly created event, the suitably named “MLS Is Back Tournament.” Teams are divided into groups and will play three games each. The top two or three teams from each group, plus some of the best runners-up, will advance to the Sweet 16.

The group stage lasts until July 23, followed by a single-elimination playoff, with the final Aug. 11.

What comes after that?

The MLS has not announced a firm schedule, but the plan is to resume the regular season, preferably with teams back playing in their home stadiums.

While there will be no fans at the Florida tournament games, the league hopes to begin reintroducing fans at some point

this season.

Where are the games being played?

All games in the MLS Is Back event will be held at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Walt Disney World.

Players are staying in the Swan and Dolphin hotels there.

What’s being done for safety?

Players were tested for the virus before arriving, and testing, both exhaustive and expensive, will continue during the tournament. Players and staff on the bench for games must wear masks. Exchanging of jerseys and kissing the ball will be forbidden. And “players, coaches and officials are asked to exercise care when spitting or clearing their nose,” the league’s protocols say.

Will teams be motivated for the new event?

There are several incentives for teams to do well in the new tournament.

The three group stage games will count toward the regular season once it resumes. There will be prize money. And the winner of the tournament will earn a berth in next year’s CONCACAF Champions League.

What happened to FC Dallas?

About a dozen MLS players have tested positive for the COVID-19 virus.

Unfortunately, 10 of them are on the same team, FC Dallas. Because of this, the league decided to remove Dallas from the tournament, although the team will presumably return when the regular season resumes.

On Tuesday afternoon, the second scheduled game of opening day, Nashville-Chicago, was postponed because five Nashville players had tested positive after arriving in Florida.

Are all the players coming?

The vast majority are, but a few have opted out. Like the NWSL, which will resume without Megan Rapinoe, MLS will be down one of its marquee players: Carlos Vela of LAFC, the reigning Most Valuable Player. “It is in the best interest of the health of my family to stay home and be with my wife during what is a risky pregnancy,” he said in a statement.

At least a few other players and coaches have gone to Disney World but expressed trepidation.

Matt Lampson, a goalkeeper for the Columbus Crew who is a cancer survivor, tweeted last week: “For everyone

Fans watching the Los Angeles F.C. team bus depart from the training facility.

The team will not have Carlos Vela, the reigning M.L.S. most valuable player. in the ‘These are pro athletes. There is no risk. Nothing happens to them if they get the virus’ camp — I am high risk.

And I know for a fact there are multiple others at #MLSisBack that are as well — including other players on their way here. This is serious.”

Brian Schmetzer, coach of the reigning champion Seattle Sounders, told a group of fans holding signs urging players not to go to Florida: “I understand it. It wouldn’t be my choice to leave, either. But we’re going to go play a game and do what Sounders do, which is win a soccer game.”

Given the withdrawals, how concerned is the league?

Commissioner Don Garber remained upbeat even after the news of FC Dallas’ withdrawal. “We have 550 players that have already been tested, and 13 of them have tested positive,” he told ESPN, before news of the further positive tests on Nashville’s squad.

“Right now it’s an extremely low percentage. The players that are there are safe, they’re comfortable, they’re training, they’re eating, they’re recreating.”

He did also say, “We’re going to have to keep a close eye on it.”

What else will be different?

MLS will not play the national anthem before games. The stated reason is that there would be no point without fans, but the anthem has also become a flashpoint for controversy amid the Black Lives Matter protests. Many athletes have said they plan to kneel rather than stand for the anthem, and others, including President Donald Trump, have criticized those plans.

Garber reiterated last month that “If a player is looking to express their right to kneel during the national anthem, they should have the right to do so.”

Are there financial concerns?

At least four MLS teams applied to receive money from the Paycheck Protection Program, a federal loan program designed to help small businesses. The four teams, D.C. United, Inter Miami, Orlando and Seattle, asked for loans of between $1 million and $5 million.

What about the lower leagues?

The USL Championship, which includes a number of MLS farm teams, is to begin play Saturday, with games at home stadiums. The next lower division, League One, is to begin a week later.

League Two has been canceled this year.

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

With pandemic keeping them apart, runners embrace virtual races

By KELLEN BROWNING

O

n a Friday evening in late June, three women in matching blue-and-white Hoka running shoes leaned over a starting line at Buffalo Park in Flagstaff, Ariz., each with one hand on their watches.

After a countdown and a yell of “go!” they bolted across the line. It was just like any other cross-country race — except their competition was invisible: A trio of rival runners raced them in a nearby state as thousands of fans watched on a split-screen live Instagram video feed.

Virtual races weren’t supposed to be the most exciting competition for runners in the summer of 2020. But with the coronavirus pandemic making large-scale gatherings impossible, runners are turning to technology as they search for ways to train, stay connected with teammates and compete.

Some have kept it simple, logging workouts and training plans in shareable Google documents or spreadsheets to stay in touch with their coaches. Other runners are using popular social fitness apps like MapMyRun and Strava, which saw a record 3.4 million downloads in May. And some coaches and race organizers have innovated after being forced to scrap plans for prestigious track meets, massive marathons and the Tokyo Olympics, which was delayed from this summer to 2021. They’re making the best of a time without in-person competition by hosting virtual races and pitting runners in different states — or even continents — against each other.

“Everything’s pretty much been wiped off the table and we’ve had to regroup and reassess and find things to look forward to that aren’t traditional,” said Ben Rosario, the head coach of the Hoka Northern Arizona Elite professional distance running team.

While Arizona was under a stay-at-home order in April and May, Rosario’s small team of pro runners in Flagstaff went more than a month without training together, and he used an online training log called FinalSurge to send workout plans and stay connected with his athletes.

But that didn’t replace the thrill of racing. So when the team’s runners were able to train together again, Rosario hatched a plan.

He partnered with another professional team in Boulder, Colo., to host a time trial. The two teams would both run a 2-mile course, starting at the exact same time, and compare results. As an added twist, both squads would livestream the race on Instagram on a split screen so fans could watch from home.

When Stephanie Bruce arrived at Buffalo Park, an expanse of meadow and grassland on top of a mesa, she felt pre-race nerves that she hadn’t experienced in months.

“I kind of got those butterflies, which was really nice to have,” said Bruce, a pro runner for Hoka Northern Arizona. “When we haven’t had the opportunity to race, it’s really hard. You’re in this cage where you just want

Long-distance runner Stephanie Bruce training in Flagstaff, Ariz. to let out all the fitness and all the workouts that you’ve been pouring all of your heart into.”

Bruce, the first woman to finish for either team, said it was difficult to imagine racing the Boulder runners while running the course. But fans enjoyed the competition — more than 15,000 people watched the videos after they were posted to Instagram Even for athletes who don’t rely on the sport to make a living, running with friends and competing in races was a steady, familiar part of life that was ripped away — and they’re looking for ways to reconnect.

Many of them are using Strava, an app that allows runners to interact with each other by giving “kudos” on a friend’s workout. They can also compare times on specific segments of a running route and join clubs and challenges.

“It’s the Instagram for runners,” said Kalea Chu, a sophomore runner at the University of Kansas. “It’s keeping up with your teammates, so you can get back together and be on the same page.”

Facing the possibility of no in-person races this fall, race organizers are also using technology to motivate runners. In June, the New York Road Runners (NYRR), the organization that hosts the annual New York City

Marathon, canceled this fall’s marathon — and moved a version of it online.

In October, marathon entrants will have a two-week window to run the 26.2 miles on their own and log the result on Strava as tracked by their phone or GPS watch.

Times will be compiled on a NYRR leaderboard.

Christine Burke, senior vice president for NYRR, acknowledged that the virtual races can’t recreate the strategy and tactics that come with an in-person competition. Nor can they adjust for different elevations, weather conditions or even GPS malfunctions around the world.

Still, she said, runners have embraced the concept.

Some have even arranged to have family members meet them at the finish line of their personal marathon with a medal.

“The community that’s created through that and the sort of fun competition is really inspiring to watch,” Burke said.

J&A Racing, which hosts marathons in Virginia Beach, Va., is challenging runners to hit 75.7 miles in August — a reference to the area’s 757 telephone area code — and track their progress on an online leaderboard. Other groups are creating music playlists online and digital racing bibs that runners can print and wear during their virtual races, according to Haku, an event management platform that partners with J&A and other race organizers.

“We’re creating a new kind of bucket of runners, because you have this whole group of people who are into wellness and into fitness, but they can’t go to their gyms, they can’t go to their group fitness class,” said Haku’s cofounder, Jackie Levi.

NYRR has seen an increase in the number of participants in its virtual races for 2020. The group had about 22,000 finishers in its two virtual race events this year, up from about 15,000 in 2019. The organization also added two new virtual competitions this spring, each of which had more than 10,000 finishers.

And today, at least 30 athletes at seven different tracks on three continents, including star U.S. sprinters like Allyson Felix and Noah Lyles, will compete in the Inspiration Games, which includes five virtual shortdistance running races and three field events. Felix will run alone at a track in California while two competitors race against her simultaneously thousands of miles away, synced up and timed using satellite technology.

But virtual racing can tide the pros over only for so long.

Emma Coburn, the 3,000-meter steeplechase world champion, Olympic bronze medalist and American record-holder, was able to let out some of her pent-up energy with a real race in June, when she ran a 4 minute, 32 second mile, breaking the Colorado state record in a miniature track meet limited to members of her professional track club.

“We can’t replace our competitive needs by just a virtual run,” Coburn said, adding that she does think virtual racing has “opened the world up” as runners from different countries race each other.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 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

(Mar 21-April 20)

After all you have recently been through, you would never take your health for granted. If you’re recovering from an illness, feeling better means taking good care of yourself. Resist the temptation to resume your normal workload.

Include fresh produce in your diet, drink lots of water and take it one step at a time.

Taurus

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

(April 21-May 21)

After all you have recently been through, you would never take your health for granted.

If you’re recovering from an illness, feeling better means taking good care of yourself.

Resist the temptation to resume your normal workload. Include fresh produce in your diet, drink lots of water and take it one step at a time.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Plans you had at the start of the year now seem like aspirations that will never be achieved. Don’t give up hope completely. There’s every chance once your life gets back into some kind of new normal, you will go ahead with your dreams. It might take longer than expected, but you will find a way to reach your goals.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Someone you care for is feeling lonely. Go out of your way to include them in your plans.

Meet up regularly online and be sure to ask them how they are coping. You might feel worried about the safety of a dedicated member of your family. They will reassure you all necessary safety precautions are being followed.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

A friend will mention something someone said and you could find this could upsetting. You might wish they hadn’t confided in you. This will undoubtedly result in some tension when you are suddenly suspicious of a partner’s recent activities. To avoid undue upset and uncertainty, beware of engaging in gossip.

You’re ready to make a big decision. The one you choose will seem like the best option out of the few that are available. There will be no regrets even if someone is suggesting differently because you will know you made the right decision for this particular moment in time. You long to get outside and enjoy the outdoors.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Someone you thought you could trust will let you down at the last minute. You’re tired of putting your all into a relationship and getting nothing in return. A problem you’re faced with will look impossible to resolve. Like a mind reader, an old friend will come to the rescue.

This reminds you of just how loved you really are.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

A recent large expenditure has left you short of cash. You know a cautious partner is itching to say, I told you so’. You have learned your lesson and you know you’ve been foolish. You really don’t need anyone to tell you to be more mindful about future purchases as you’ve already decided this is what you are going to do.

You’re growing tired of listening to a friend or loved one’s constant complaints. Life is hard for everyone and it’s easier to just get on with it than to grieve about what might have been.

Encourage them to take a fresh approach and to find a way to make the most of what they have in the here and now.

Plans for a cautious return to some semblance of normality should be based on medical and professional advice. New systems that are being put into place should allow you to get into new routines. You will be asked to keep a secret but if this puts you in a difficult position, be honest about your feelings.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Volunteering to take part in a trial or study will make you feel you are doing your bit for community. This is your chance to move forward with a daring project. Finding creative ways to leap over obstacles will put you on the path to success. News that you receive later in the day will give you food for thought.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

It isn’t sensible to continue in a situation that is making you feel miserable. You may have had to stick it out due to recent restrictions but now there are no more excuses. It is time to move on and there are several ways you can do this. You won’t feel happy unless and until you break away from the past.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Thursday, July 9, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, July 9, 2020

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