Monday Jun 1, 2020

Monday, June 1, 2020

San Juan The

NY Protest- By Chang W . Lee / NYT

50¢

DAILY

Star

Animal Sanctuary Fights to Keep Saving Lives During Pandemic

P4

Hate and Racism Under Fire

Anger and Sorrow Over Floyd’s Death, Not Only in Minneapolis

Fiery Clashes Between Protesters and Police Spread Nationwide, States Under Curfew, NG Activated What Does It Mean for Puerto Rico?

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Change of Plans: Merger of Two Shipping Company Biggies Not Happening P5

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

UPR Students Evicted from Dorms P6

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

Caguas te quiere 25-29 de mayo de 2020 | Boletín Informativo | Edición 9 Municipio Autónomo de Caguas

Lista de cotejo para reapertura de negocios

Ante la reapertura paulatina de la actividad económica, incluimos algunos puntos importantes que debes evaluar de tu negocio: ¿Revisaste las ayudas que provee el gobierno federal? ¿Solicitaste el PPP de SBA? Haz un análisis de tu flujo de caja Identifica diversas fuentes de apoyo ¿Analizaste la viabilidad de tu modelo de negocio a corto, mediano y largo plazo en tiempos de COVID 19?

Capacítate, existen un sinnúmero de talleres en línea para aprender y reflexionar cómo puedes transformar tu negocio. ¿Revisaste los programas de apoyo del Municipio de Caguas? ¿Revisaste las distintas formas de acceso a capital?

Participa de los talleres de capacitación virtual de PromoCaguas Explora cómo digitalizar tu negocio Sigue a PromoCaguas en Facebook y You Tube

Manejo del estrés en el distanciamiento Cada persona reacciona de manera diferente ante situaciones estresantes como el COVID-19. Podrías sentirte ansioso, enojado, triste o abrumado. Encuentra formas de reducir el estrés que te ayuden a ti y a tus seres queridos.

• Infórmate sobre los signos comunes del estrés.

• Busca tiempo para relajarte y hacer actividades que disfrutes.

• Habla con familiares y amigos por teléfono, mensajes de texto o correo electrónico.

• Si tú o un ser querido se sienten abrumados, obtén apoyo a través de SANOS, llamando al 787-745-0340, extensiones. 227 y 271, o la Línea PAS al 1-800-981-0023.

Fuente: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov /prepare/ managing -stress-anxiety-sp.html

CAGUAS

Manejo de Casos Servicios psicológicos Nutrición Entrega de suministros para que no salgas de tu hogar • Referidos a Telemedicina, Pruebas COVID- 19 para otros miembros de la familia • Educación en salud con la colaboración con la Corporación SANOS • Referidos a Consejería Pastoral Requisitos • Ser ciudadano(a) de Caguas • Tener evidencia de diagnóstico clínico de COVID-19

** Ayudas de acuerdo a elegibilidad y disponibilidad.

TV

Si te perdiste algún tema de la serie de webinars Pulso Empresarial, puedes encontrarlos en el enlace: shorturl.at/lwHKO Además, suscríbete para que no te pierdas ninguno de nuestros webinars, FB Live u otro material de interés para el sector comercial de Caguas

• • • •

Para más información del proyecto “Apoyo Positivo Criollo” puedes llamar al 787-704-2020, de lunes a sábado, en horario de 8:00 a.m. a 4:00 p.m. o escribir a: apoyopositivocaguas@caguas.gov.pr.

Estamos contigo.

Encuentra más información, guías procesales, lo que debe incluir el Plan de Control de Exposición al COVID-19 y otros documentos importantes en www.caguas.gov.pr/coronavirus

PROM

Residente de Caguas, si tienes la condición del COVID-19 queremos brindarte nuestro apoyo a través de los siguientes servicios:

Orientación e información oficial sobre el manejo del coronavirus en Caguas: • caguas.gov.pr/coronavirus • Municipio Autónomo de Caguas Corporación SANOS Para participar de los talleres deberá completar registro previo al taller. Para más información y completar registro en talleres accede a: www.c3tec.org/entretenimientovirtual Calle Gautier Benítez #59 Caguas, Puerto Rico T: 787.653.6391 | info@c3tec.org

CENTRO Y CORAZÓN DE PUERTO RICO

#QuédateEnCasa

GOOD MORNING

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June 1, 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.

Today’s

A local perspective: Shades of LA in ’65, ’92 in the current civil unrest in several US cities

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By JOSÉ A. SÁNCHEZ FOURNIER Special to The Star @SanchezFournier

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Both historic riots were originally ignited by police beating African Americans, yet in those two cases the victims survived, unlike George Floyd

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INDEX Local 3 Mainland 7 Business 11 International 13 Viewpoint 17 Noticias en Español 19 Entertainment 20 22 Travel

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he civil unrest seen all over the United States during the past week, ignited by the outrage over the killing of private citizen George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, has many wondering if the rule of law can be maintained in a society where large portions of the citizenry feel that their voices are not being heard. This long-simmering sentiment has long been an undercurrent in American society, and it has previously exploded on several occasions.

The most remembered are the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the riots in the Watts section of that same city in 1965.

In both instances, there was a similar catalyst. The 1992 riots in LA ignited when three of the four officers indicted for the beating of African American taxi driver Rodney King, which was captured on videotape, were found not guilty. The Watts riots in 1965 began when a mob of civilians clashed with Los Angeles police officers who were beating motorist Marquette Fry and his mother, Rena Price.

The current demonstrations in several cities of the United States began after the dissemination of an amateur video in which white police officer Derek Chauvin can be seen forcefully putting his knee on the back of the neck of Floyd, who is already handcuffed and subdued. Chauvin does so for over eight minutes, while Floyd pleads for his life.

Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck even after he became unresponsive.

The video was recorded by several bystanders last Monday and posted on social media. The next day, the four Minneapolis officers on the scene were fired.

Civil rights attorney José Enrico Valenzuela said the recent mass protests and looting are just the beginning.

“These sentiments of despair and wrath among minorities have existed in their communities for a while, but it really started to burn when [Donald J.] Trump became president,” Valenzuela said. “His constant racist comments on social media have emboldened racists everywhere and the targets of this racism are getting to a point where there are no other options but to react the way they have been doing these last few days.”

Both Valenzuela and professor José R. Rivera believe that the fact that the demonstrations suddenly erupted in several cities in addition to Minnesota is a sign that this is not a passing fad or a topic to just be glossed over by the powers that be in government. It is proof that the mistreatment of minorities by

the state is a real thing all over the country, not only in a few major urban areas like Los Angeles or New York.

“This type of unrehearsed demonstration is like taking the temperature of a nation that is deeply divided, fragmented in cultural, racial terms, as well as in political, economic and sociological aspects,” said Rivera who teaches in the International Studies and Global Communications Program at Universidad Sagrado Corazón. “The death of George Floyd at the hands, or more appropriately at the knee, of the [Minneapolis] Police and the demonstrations that it has caused manifests the profound ire felt by huge parts of the population at the greatly disproportionate application of law in the American justice system, and the way it is immensely more burdensome against the African American population, which is an undeniable fact.”

He agreed with Valenzuela in that a large part of the responsibility for these events falls at the door of the White House and the often racially insensitive and even racist language employed by its current resident.

“That underlying sentiment kept heating up until now, and its potential explosiveness was most of all augmented by President Donald J. Trump and the divisive comments he has made through social media in the last few days,” Rivera said.

However, both Rivera and Valenzuela believe that the way American justice is unfairly applied toward minorities is systemic, not an expression of the whims of one president or another.

“This is not something new,” Valenzuela said. “Minorities, especially African Americans, have long been mistreated and abused by the police. This type of institutional racism is not new or the exception to the rule. Let us not kid ourselves. if you look from the Rodney King case until today, it hasn’t gotten any better. In fact, it has gotten worse. Back then, it was maybe only the Los Angeles Police Department that was thought of as having an institutional racism issue. Now that is the feeling about police departments all over the United States.”

Rivera said that “when we talk about a systemic evil in the system, we see how despite several police reforms around the United States and more measures [such as video recording technology becoming a mandatory component of on-duty uniformed officers’ gear] have been tried to curtail this behavior, it has gotten worse.”

In Puerto Rico, the murder of George Floyd has caused great public indignation and debate, but like in previous cases, it has not spilled into massive demonstrations or looting.

“In Puerto Rico, the victims of these types of abuses and tragedies in the United States get the sympathy and the backing of the people, but perhaps in part because it is difficult to interject this topic into the daily local political discussion, it doesn’t transcend into big demonstrations or clashes with police,” Rivera said.

Today starting at 4 p.m. at El Ancón de Loíza, there will be a public vigil in memory of George Floyd and the countless other victims of racist violence. The event is being organized by El Ancón de Loíza, Revista Étnica magazine and Colectivo Ilé.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

A sanctuary under threat The economic damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic emergency has El Santuario Lázaro animal shelter in a fight for its very existence

By JOSÉ A. SÁNCHEZ FOURNIER and ELSA VELÁZQUEZ SANTIAGO Special to The Star @SanchezFournier @elsavelazquezpr

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velyn Hernández is used to fighting against the odds. For over three decades at the helm of El Santuario Lázaro, she has firsthand knowledge of the hardships involved with running a not-for-profit animal shelter on an island with woefully inadequate animal control policies.

Yet in her long history as an animal activist and protector, Hernández believes that what El Santuario Lázaro is going through presently is as bad as it has ever been, with the shelter fighting every single day for the lives of the more than 100 cats and 100 dogs under its care. The volunteer-staffed organization also maintains several routes around the area to frequently feed and aid homeless animals.

“Times are difficult for everybody right now. With the situation how it is at the present, we are getting very few donations,” Hernández said during a recent visit by The San Juan Daily Star

to El Santuario Lázaro in Caguas.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the fullscale emergency it has caused in Puerto Rico has practically brought the island’s economy to a standstill. This means many people have zero discretionary budget because all their earnings go to cover their essential needs.

This translates to almost zero donations to organizations like El Santuario Lázaro, which take on responsibilities that the state should manage, but does not.

The coronavirus emergency has also taken from the animal shelter another of its principal means of generating income.

“One of the main ways we gather funds and supplies is by visiting schools and giving talks to student groups. The students donate food and detergent and other supplies we use,” Hernández said. “But with schools shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, that avenue is closed indefinitely for us. I understand that these times are exceedingly difficult for all, and currently we are only getting by with what our volunteer workers give out of their own pockets. We are surviving on a day-by-day basis.”

The situation gets worse. Some former donors moved to the mainland after Hurricane Maria and other local emergencies.

As expected, a shelter like El Santuario Lázaro has veterinary costs, especially when taking into account that most of its residents are there on a permanent basis. The shelter does not have an active adoption-only policy.

This also means that some of the felines and

Three decades saving lives. Santuario Lázaro is located in Caguas.

Photo by Elsa Velázquez Santiago

Before and after. Meet Brownie Blondie. His story inspired her rescuer Marjorie Andino to create the Brownie Blondie Foundation in 2015. canines in residence there are of advanced age, which means more vet care and, therefore, more expenses.

“We have our vets helping us fully, because under these difficult circumstances we have received many animals with serious health conditions, and we had no option but to keep them under veterinary care,” Hernández said. “We are using our personal funds, doing the best we can, because we are getting few donations.”

She also pointed out how PrimeVet, in Caguas, and Clínica Mi Mascota, in Las Piedras, have helped her with veterinary services by offering payment plans.

Respected among her peers Hernández’s efforts on behalf of homeless animals and her extreme sacrifices to keep El Santuario Lázaro afloat for over 30 years have garnered the respect of all those who collaborate with her.

“Evelyn has a difficult mission because she has a large number of animals and she cares for them,” said Marjorie Andino, who heads the Brownie Blondie Foundation, a non-profit organization that helps homeless animals in need of serious veterinary attention. “It leaves her and her staff with little time to do anything else. She does great work.”

Andino is also a sponsor of El Santuario Lázaro, through Brownie Blondie

Foundation’s Legacy of Love initiative.

A life’s work, under threat For Hernández, El Santuario Lázaro is more than a hobby, more than a calling. It is her life’s work. And when she speaks about the residents of her sanctuary, it becomes clear why.

“I know we are all going through a tough patch. But here all help is greatly appreciated because when you have nothing, any bit of help is a blessing,” she said. “And it all goes to help our children. Because to me, these are not pets, they are not dogs and cats. These are our kids.”

Among the main needs of the shelter are cat and dog food of both the dry and moist variety, cleaning products, trash bags and old newspapers. The money donations received are used exclusively to cover the shelter’s veterinary expenses, food and supplies.

Any help can be coordinated with El Santuario Lázaro at 787-460-4386, sent via PayPal at Santuario.Lazaro@gmail.com or via ATH Móvil at 787-502-3493. Interested parties can also buy supplies at PetSmart and gift it to Hernández at El Santuario Lázaro. Those who want to donate must indicate her full name (Evelyn Hernández) and provide her the number (code) of the order.

The Brownie Blondie Foundation receives donations through ATH Móvil at 787-949-7771, through PayPal at brownieblondiedonation@ gmail.com, or by mail at PO Box 1134, Caguas PR 00726.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

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Electricity bill will drop with fuel prices, finally

By THE STAR STAFF

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uerto Rico will experience a reduction in utility rates of about 4 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) because of the drop in oil prices that began earlier this year.

Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced announced on Saturday that the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau (NEPR by its Spanish initials) approved an adjustment in Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) rates that will be seen in the June utility bill and which takes into account the drop in fuel prices.

“After the fall in the price of oil as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, I ordered the executive director of the Electric Power Authority, José Ortiz, to take all the necessary steps so that any savings that the public corporation had on a monthly basis would translate into savings for our people.

In compliance with the foregoing, the Authority submitted to the Energy Bureau a request for adjustments to the Fuel Cost Adjustment and the Power Purchase Clause Adjustment to achieve a rate reduction, “ Vázquez said.

Ortiz, however, had anticipated during a webinar on April 14 that there would be a reduction in the utility rates for customers in June as a result of the dramatic drop in fuel prices. The utility billed customers in April the equivalent of 21.6 cents per kWh but

by June, he said, he expected the cost to be about 20 cents per kWh. “But it will not come down to 16 cents per kilowatt-hour,” he said at the time.

The Energy Bureau, in Resolution and Order NEPR MI-2020-0001, which was published Saturday, said that after evaluating the information presented by PREPA related to the expenses and savings of the corporation for the last quarter, approved an immediate

reduction of 4.1337 cents per kWh on the electricity bill for June 2020, the governor said.

“This equates to a reduction from the current rate of 21.59 cents per kilowatt-hour to 17.46 cents per kilowatt-hour effective as early as this coming Monday,” Vázquez said.

Regarding savings in dollars and cents, the governor said, as an example, an unsubsidized residential customer whose monthly consumption is 450 kWh, will see a reduction of $18.60 on the June bill, a drop to $78.58 from $97.18.

The ruling says the NEPR agreed to make the adjustments in an accelerated fashion to allow PREPA to recoup a deficiency in revenues stemming from fuel purchase for the

month of March totaling $11 million and a deficiency in revenues for the purchase of energy totaling $3.6 million. The deficiency in revenues from fuel purchase in April was $4.4 million, and from power purchase it was $7 million.

NEPR Commissioner Ángel Rivera dissented from the majority opinion, arguing that certain conditions required under the law to make the adjustments were not met.

The NEPR’s determination yields a positive economic impact for Puerto Rico estimated at over $55 million for June, the governor said.

For his part, Popular Democratic Party Sen. Anibal Jose Torres questioned the timing of the reduction in the utility bills, reminding the public via Twitter that the world is experiencing a huge drop in oil prices that could explain the cut. “Also remember that the New Progressive Party got a loan to reduce rates before the past elections,” he said. Torres was talking about the 2012 election in which it is alleged that former Gov. Luis Fortuno artificially reduced energy rates.

LAC, PRT are not merging, but will share facilities at Puerto Nuevo pier

By THE STAR STAFF

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he threat of a possible merger of two shipping companies at the Puerto Nuevo pier that could potentially create a shipping monopoly is not taking place as Luis Ayala Colón (LAC) and Puerto Rico Terminals (PRT), an affiliate of TOTE Maritime, opted instead to share infrastructure to improve the flow of maritime commerce.

The information was provided during a webinar last week by Adm. Peter J. Brown, a special representative for Puerto Rico’s disaster recovery before the federal government.

Last year, LAC and PRT announced their possible merger as Puerto Nuevo Terminals (PNT), a Puerto Rico limited liability company, raising fears that it could lead to monopolistic control of the island’s maritime transportation market.

However, the companies opted to walk back the idea of a possible merger

and in April submitted an amendment to a cooperative agreement before the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) saying Puerto Nuevo Terminals will serve as a marine joint shared terminal management entity and provide a container stevedoring agent for LAC and PRT. “The purpose of PNT is to enable LAC and PRT to cooperate and coordinate their terminal facilities and operations in the Port of San Juan, Puerto Rico, through the use of a joint shared terminal management entity, in order to provide for more efficient terminal operations, maintenance and repair, and facilitate joint investment in their infrastructure and equipment,” the companies said in the agreement.

The agreement was amended to confirm and clarify “that the parties have not agreed to, and are not authorized to, effect a merger of PRT and LAC.” “Instead, they are authorized to enter into a cooperative working agreement,

whereby LAC and PRT cooperate (through the use of PNT) to most efficiently rationalize and coordinate the shared use of LAC’s and PRT’s marine terminal facilities and equipment, so they are able to continue to invest in and provide high quality terminal facilities and services well into the future,” it said. “At the same time, LAC and PRT will continue to operate other maritime and port-related businesses independent of PNT and each other as well.”

The amendment was submitted in April and became effective on May 18 following the FMC’s green light.

Brown said last week that he had intervened in the matter because the proposed amendment was stuck between the FMC and the federal Justice Department, which insisted it had jurisdiction. The FMC took control over the proposal.

“I engaged directly with the Maritime Commission and they announced the bureaucratic issue was settled,” Brown said.

“The Federal Maritime Commission had authority to approve the project and approved the proposal of the two companies not to merge their activities but rather to share infrastructure to improve flow of maritime commerce into Puerto Rico and Jones Act commerce into Puerto Rico from the mainland.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

PDP demands debate on electoral reform amendments

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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opular Democratic Party (PDP) Reps. Luis Vega Ramos, Jesús Santa Rodríguez and Ángel Matos García have called on House Speaker Carlos “Johnny” Méndez to open debate on the more than 100 amendments that the Senate made to the electoral reform bill and that will be taken up today in the House of Representatives.

“The House is preparing to approve new amendments that are neither known nor discussed, so we announce that we are going to demand and use our parliamentary right to debate them,” Vega Ramos said over the weekend. “This Monday we are going to the session to fight against electoral fraud and for democracy.”

The PDP legislator added that “the amendments on the mixed intra-party vote are part of the civil war in the [majority New Progressive Party], those on [former resident commissioner and current gubernatorial hopeful Pedro] Pierluisi’s

side in the House want to hang [Senate President Thomas] Rivera Schatz, who is the main ‘handyman’ in the candidacy of his protégé [Gov.] Wanda Vázquez, but that is not the most important thing.”

“The bill, even with amendments, continues to be a robbery of our democratic process and dangerously invites a person who does not live in Puerto Rico to decide the fate of the island, “ Vega Ramos said.

Santa Rodríguez said “the electoral reform promoted by the New Progressive Party [NPP] is a very dangerous hoax because it violates the rights of citizens by not respecting their will when casting their vote.”

“Also, it is a robbery [committed against] the candidates who are favored by a majority, but as a result of the [legislative] manipulation, will not be elected,” he added. “It also strips the country of validating the will of the majority, making it a robbery of democracy and an invitation to autocracy and despotism.”

Matos García said meanwhile that “this electoral reform violates provisions

of the federal code of elections.”

“The early vote offered to Puerto Ricans with permanent residence in the United States violates the provisions of Volume 52 Art. 10307 (U.S. Code), which establishes as a prohibited act voting twice in a general election.”

“No Puerto Rican resident in the United States may vote for the president of the United States, [his or her] congressional commonwealth senator, [his or her] commonwealth congressional representative, and a resident commissioner in Washington representing Puerto Rico,” Matos García said. “This act carries a fine of $10,000 and jeopardizes any federal aid or benefit that a person receives in the United States when he or she is interpreted to be a double resident.”

The PDP legislators reiterated their position that “the NPP’s electoral reform is a crude attempt to cover up an organized scheme to take and maintain control in the State Elections Commission, destroying the electoral balance and consensus, which is why we will responsibly promote debate on this measure that still does not

have the participation or consensus of the other parties.”

Rep. Luis Vega Ramos

People’s Social Task Force decries evictions of UPR students

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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he People’s SocialTask Force (TFSP by its Spanish initials) on Sunday denounced the intentions of the administration of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) Río Piedras Campus, to evict students from the “ResiCampus” student residence in the middle of the COVID-19 quarantine.

As a result of Sunday’s scheduled eviction warning, today many of the affected students may be deprived of safe housing, the TFSP said in a press release.

“It is of particular concern that among this student body there are young people with limited resources who have no other options for safe housing,” the TFSP statement said. “This is alarming given the public health emergency in the country and the economic conditions in which many of our students live. In several statements these students have expressed that despite having made alternative housing arrangements, they do not have [those arrangements in place], which would result in them walking the streets and other risky situations. This is unacceptable to the Social Task Force.

Some students have stated that there has also been no dialogue about possible financial aid to student-residents that would serve to pay for temporary residence, food and other supplies necessary to survive this crisis.”

In a study by Puerto Rican Minds in Action (MPA), a TFSP member organization, it was reported that 67.3 percent of the university students participating in the study had seen a reduction in their monthly income during quarantine.

“It is distressing not to receive any kind of reply, even from the Unemployment Department,” said one of the study participants. “It is an uncertainty that one does not know when one will find the fridge empty and begin to starve.

Nerves are on edge and anxiety equally.

This stage we are experiencing is horrible. I hope it happens now.”

It is imperative that the university administration make affirmative decisions to safeguard the safety of this student body, the group said. Some of the affected students live in economic precariousness, as do more than 57 percent of the island’s children and youth, according to reports from the Institute for Youth Development.

The MPA study showed that 59.4 percent of the participating students had a monthly income below $500

before quarantine. In the midst of the quarantine, some of these students have lost their jobs and therefore their sources of income. For many of them, the eviction means great housing insecurity, food insecurity and possibly the inability to continue their studies.

“These insecurities of our youth, students of the UPR, endanger not only their physical health but also make precarious their mental health, which has already been made vulnerable by the trauma we have experienced for the past three years,” said the co-facilitator of the TFSP Childhood and Youth Committee, Eduardo A. Lugo Hernández.

“These events include hurricanes Maria and Irma, the earthquakes at the beginning of the year (and which continue in many of the towns where these students come from), the COVID-19 quarantine and the growing economic insecurity due to the increase in enrollment and cuts to the University of Puerto Rico.”

The TSFP is made up of more than 100 non-profit organizations, foundations, community leaders and people from civil society who are dedicated to working on a wide spectrum of issues and disciplines such as social work, health, law, psychology, education, childhood, the elderly, women and housing, among others.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

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Fiery clashes between police and protesters spread through U.S.

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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rotesters who took to the streets in Minneapolis for the fifth straight night Saturday met a more determined response from police officers and National Guard troops, as demonstrations escalated in dozens of cities across the country — an outpouring of national anger sparked by the death of a black man in police custody.

Soon after an 8 p.m. curfew took effect, the police in Minneapolis began arresting protesters and firing tear gas and other projectiles toward crowds, and the National Guard used a helicopter to dump water on a burning car.

The forceful response reflected the desire of authorities to halt the violent protests that have spread nationwide since George Floyd, 46, died after being pinned down by a white Minneapolis police officer. There were still reports of violence and destruction: a fire on the roof of a shopping mall, a person who shot a gun at officers, and a group of people throwing items at the police. But state officials said around 11 p.m. local time that they were encouraged by the smaller crowds and apparent decrease in damage. Much of the city was empty shortly after midnight.

But even as aerial videos from Minneapolis showed police officers largely keeping demonstrators at bay, other cities were being overwhelmed, despite hastily imposed curfews.

Mayors ordered people of the streets in many of the nation’s largest cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Miami. And governors in at least eight states, including Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio, Colorado and Tennessee, called up National Guard troops in an attempt to impose order, often with little success.

In Tennessee, the building that houses Nashville’s City Hall was set on fire. Two police vans in New York City were filmed plowing into protesters. In Washington, demonstrators set fires and smashed the windows of buildings near the White House.

The police in Indianapolis said three people had been shot during the protests — not by police officers — including one person who was killed. And in Philadelphia, the Police Department said at least 13 officers had been injured during protests.

The demonstrations continued to escalate Friday and Saturday even after Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was recorded kneeling on Floyd’s neck until he lost consciousness, was charged with third-degree murder.

President Donald Trump has harshly criticized the unrest, and Attorney General William Barr warned on Saturday that people inflicting the destruction could face federal charges. Gov.Tim Walz of Minnesota said the people defying curfews and confronting the police were no longer protesting brutality but rather were seeking to exploit Floyd’s death for their own political motives.

Protests escalated nationwide throughout Saturday, prompting many cities to impose curfews.

Tens of thousands of people were in the streets across the United States on Saturday night, as demonstrations stretched from coast to coast in a national paroxysm of rage that saw buildings set on fire, businesses looted and an aggressive response from the authorities.

Protests have taken place in at least 48 cities and have

Demonstrators block the intersection at Figueroa Street and Olympic Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles, on Friday, May 29, 2020, as they protest the death of George Floyd and police brutality. reached the gates of the White House in the days since Floyd’s death. The imposition of curfews by mayors appeared to be more widespread on Saturday than at any time since the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

— In Indianapolis, one person was killed and three others were injured when a gunman fired shots at a protest, the police said.

— In Chicago, protesters scuffled with police Saturday afternoon, burning at least one flag and marching toward the Trump International Hotel and Tower before dispersing. About 3,000 people took part in the protests, according to local news reports. Some protesters vandalized police vehicles and left spray-painted buildings in their wake.

— In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti issued a curfew, a day after the police made more than 500 arrests. Police used batons and rubber bullets to disperse crowds, and Gov. Gavin Newsom activated the National Guard.

— In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed implemented a curfew as demonstrators arrived outside her home to protest.

— In Miami-Dade County, Florida, Mayor Carlos Gimenez ordered a countywide curfew beginning at 11 p.m. after at least one police car was set ablaze near the Miami Police Department headquarters. Tear gas was used to disperse crowds Saturday evening in Jacksonville and Orlando.

— In Washington, the National Guard was deployed outside the White House, where chanting crowds clashed with the Secret Service and attacked a Fox News reporter. Fires were set in Lafayette Park, just steps from the White House.

— In Philadelphia, at least 13 police officers were injured when protesters began setting fires and became violent.

— In New York City, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets for a third day, gathering at marches in Harlem, Brooklyn,

Queens and outside Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan. In the late afternoon, protesters in Brooklyn confronted the police in a series of street melees, hurling empty bottles and pieces of debris at officers who responded with billy clubs and pepper spray. A video showed a police car driving into a crowd.

— In Richmond, Virginia, two police officers at the state Capitol were hospitalized with leg injuries after being struck by a baseball bat and a beer bottle, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. Earlier, the police fired tear gas at protesters, some of whom launched fireworks and smashed windows.

Police and protesters clashed as flames rose on the streets outside the White House.

The turmoil was on display a short distance from the White House, where Trump had called earlier in the day for his supporters to rally. Instead, hundreds of protesters mobilized on the streets of the nation’s capital as tensions ratcheted higher.

Demonstrators hurled projectiles, including water bottles, fireworks and bricks, and wrested barricades from the police, who responded by lobbing canisters of tear gas into the crowd.

Buildings up and down the streets near the White House were sprayed with graffiti, including the entrance of the Hay-Adams, a luxury hotel.

Nearby, scaffolding on a construction site behind the U.S. Chamber of Commerce could be seen on fire. The windows at the entrance of the building were smashed.

Around 11 p.m., two cars were set ablaze on an adjacent block, and a local bank was vandalized, its windows broken and the numbers “666” sprayed across the front.

As police officers moved to secure the block, a Chevy Suburban was engulfed in a plume of black smoke; trees nearby were on fire. The crowds retreated into Farragut Square to regroup as helicopters circled overhead, and some split off back toward the White House.

Trump had made a series of statements throughout the day that did little to tamp down the outrage nationwide. Speaking on the South Lawn of the White House, he criticized the authorities in Minnesota for allowing protests to turn violent and offered the help of the military to contain further demonstrations.

In a series of tweets, he called demonstrators who gathered at the White House on Friday night “professionally managed so-called ‘protesters’” and suggested that his supporters would meet them. “Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???”

Later Saturday, speaking from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida after observing the launch of a manned SpaceX rocket, Trump blamed the unrest in cities across the country on “Antifa and other radical left-wing groups,” drawing a distinction between “peaceful protesters” and other, more violent demonstrators.

“What we are now seeing on the streets of our cities has nothing to do with justice or with peace,” Trump said. “The memory of George Floyd is being dishonored by rioters, looters and anarchists.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, released a statement early Sunday appealing for calm.

Continues on page 8

8

Monday, June 1, 2020

From page 7 “We are a nation in pain, but we must not allow this pain to destroy us,” he wrote. “We are a nation enraged, but we cannot allow our rage to consume us. We are a nation exhausted, but we will not allow our exhaustion to defeat us.”

Minnesota’s governor activated all National Guard troops but declined the Army’s offer to deploy military police.

Walz of Minnesota activated thousands of additional National Guard troops to send to Minneapolis but declined the Army’s offer to deploy military police units.

Walz, a Democrat, acknowledged that officials had underestimated the demonstrations in Minneapolis, where despite a newly issued curfew, people burned buildings and turned the city’s streets into a smoldering battleground Friday night. He compared the havoc to wars that Americans have fought overseas and said he expected even more unrest Saturday night.

“What you’ve seen in previous nights, I think, will be dwarfed by what they will do tonight,” he said.

Pentagon officials said that Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke Friday with Walz to express “willingness” to deploy military police units.

Nonetheless, the U.S. Northern Command has put several military police units on four-hour status, which means they could be ready to deploy in four hours, as opposed to a day.

Commissioner John Harrington of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety said that there had been “tens of thousands” of people in the streets Friday, more than any other night since Floyd’s death Monday.

Mayor Jacob Frey, looking weary after four days of outrage in his city, pleaded with residents to go home and stop burning down the local businesses that he said were even more vital in the middle of a pandemic.

“You’re not getting back at the police officer that tragically killed George Floyd by looting a town,” Frey said. “You’re not getting back at anybody.”

Death toll since Wednesday rises to four.

One person was killed and three others were injured when a gunman fired shots at a protest in Indianapolis early Sunday, bringing to at least four the total number of people killed since Wednesday in violence possibly connected with the outcry.

The authorities were also investigating a possible connection with the shooting death of a federal officer in California.

The officer, a contract security guard for the Department of Homeland Security, was shot and killed outside a federal courthouse in Oakland on Friday night as demonstrations in the city turned violent, with protesters setting fires, destroying property and clashing with the police.

Ken Cuccinelli, the Department of Homeland Security’s acting deputy secretary, called the attack an act of “domestic terrorism,” but the state’s governor cautioned against connecting the shooting with the protests.

“No one should rush to conflate this heinous act with the protests last night,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, in a statement.

Elsewhere, people were killed when once-peaceful protests descended into violence.

The authorities in Minneapolis on Friday identified a man whose killing Wednesday was the first to be directly connected to the protests and looting there.

The victim, Calvin Horton Jr., 43, was shot to death outside

a pawnshop that was being looted.

Also on Friday in Detroit, a 21-year-old man was shot to death while sitting in his car near Cadillac Square, as hundreds of protesters swarmed the streets. The police said the gunman may have known and targeted the victim and used the chaos of the demonstrations as a cover.

Officials blame outsiders for stoking violence but have little evidence.

Officials in Minnesota and Washington are claiming that outside groups are undermining the protests in Minneapolis, using them as a cover to set fires, loot stores and destroy property.

But they disagree on whether far-left or far-right groups are to blame and have not offered evidence to substantiate their claims.

On Saturday, Walz said the “best estimate” suggested that 80% of those arrested at the protests were not from the state.

“I’m not trying to deflect in any way. I’m not trying to say there aren’t Minnesotans amongst this group,” Walz said. But “the vast majority,” he said, are from outside the state.

KARE, a Minneapolis television station, found that such claims may not be accurate. The station reviewed all of the arrests made by Minneapolis-based police agencies for rioting, unlawful assembly and burglary-related crimes from Friday to Saturday and found that 86% of those arrested listed a Minnesota address.

The mayor of St. Paul, Melvin Carter, on Saturday retracted his claim that “every single person” arrested Friday night was from out of state. A spokesman said the mayor later learned that “more than half” are from Minnesota.

Harrington said the authorities were analyzing those arrested, trying to understand what online platforms they have used and whom they were associated with.

“We have seen things like white supremacist organizers who have posted things on platforms about coming to Minnesota,” Harrington said. “Is this organized crime? Is this an organized cell of terror? Where is the linkage?”

Residents say that Minneapolis has a core group of white anarchists. A man known as the Umbrella Man, dressed in all black and carrying a black umbrella, who appears to be white, was filmed breaking windows at an AutoZone store.

Tension rose at protests in Los Angeles, where memories of Rodney King are still raw.

The protest on Los Angeles’ affluent West Side began peacefully Saturday and stayed that way for nearly three hours.

Activists handed out water and food, and a crowd marched on Beverly Boulevard, chanting slogans against police brutality and waving placards.

And then it took a violent turn.

Suddenly a police car was smashed and set on fire, black smoke billowing into the blue sky. A young man threw a skateboard at a police officer, and frightened men and women rushed away in every direction. Police helicopters hovered overhead, and convoys of police SUVs raced to the scene.

As tensions rose on the fourth day of protests, the mayor declared an 8 p.m. curfew.

“Go home,” Garcetti said. “Let us put the fires out. Let us learn the lessons. Let us re-humanize each other.”

But later in the evening, looting was reported at a Nordstrom store at The Grove, an upscale mall near the area of the protest, and a small fire was burning outside.

In San Francisco, a march drew about 1,000 people but remained peaceful, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. In Oakland, Mayor Libby Schaaf called on demonstrators to stay home after violent demonstrations Friday.

The San Juan Daily Star In Sacramento, police officers surrounded the state Capitol as protesters pelted them and their horses with oranges and water bottles.

Before the mayhem started in Los Angeles on Saturday afternoon, several hundred people reflecting the diversity of the city — white, black, Latino, Asian American — had protested peacefully.

The death of Floyd and the unrest it has provoked has tugged at painful memories in Los Angeles of the Rodney King beating in 1991 and the riots that occurred the next year after the acquittal of the four police officers involved in the case.

Reporters find themselves the targets of violence from protesters and the police.

A freelance photographer who was shot in the eye while covering the protests in Minneapolis on Saturday was one of several journalists who have been attacked, arrested or otherwise harassed while covering the protests that have erupted nationwide.

With trust in the news media lagging, journalists have found themselves the target of ire on both sides of a deeply politicized crisis.

A television reporter in Louisville, Kentucky was hit by a pepper ball on live television by an officer who appeared to be aiming at her.

Outside the White House, protesters attacked LelandVittert, a Fox News correspondent and his crew, taking the journalist’s microphone and striking him with it.

In Atlanta, masses of protesters Friday night converged on CNN headquarters, where they broke through the front door, lobbed fireworks and vandalized the building. Earlier in the day, Omar Jimenez, a reporter for the network, was detained as he reported on live television.

“I was aiming my next shot, put my camera down for a second, and then my face exploded,” said Linda Tirado, the photojournalist. “I immediately felt blood and was screaming, ‘I’m press! I’m press!’”

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press logged about 10 different incidents that ranged from assaults to menacing in Phoenix, Indianapolis, Atlanta and Minneapolis.

“With the unraveling of civil peace around the country, reporters are perceived as a target by both the police and the protesters,” said Bruce Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee, “and that is an extremely frightening place to be.”

Demonstrators stand off with police officers as they protest the death of George Floyd and police brutality, outside the Barclays Center in New York.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

9

In days of discord, a president fans the flames

By PETER BAKER

W

ith a nation on edge, ravaged by disease, hammered by economic collapse, divided over lockdowns and even face masks and now convulsed once again by race, President Donald Trump’s first instinct has been to look for someone to fight.

Over the last week, America reeled from 100,000 pandemic deaths, 40 million people out of work and cities in flames over a brutal police killing of a subdued black man. But Trump was on the attack against China, the World Health Organization, Big Tech, former President Barack Obama, a cable television host and the mayor of a riot-torn city.

While other presidents seek to cool the situation in tinderbox moments like this, Trump plays with matches. He roars into any melee he finds, encouraging street uprisings against public health measures advanced by his own government, hurling madeup murder charges against a critic, accusing his predecessor of unspecified crimes, vowing to crack down on a social media company that angered him and then seemingly threatening to meet violence with violence in Minneapolis.

As several cities erupted in street protests after the killing of George Floyd, some of them resulting in clashes with police, Trump made no appeal for calm. Instead, in a series of tweets and comments to reporters Saturday, he blamed the unrest on Democrats, called on “Liberal Governors and Mayors” to get “MUCH tougher” on the crowds, threatened to intervene with “the unlimited power of our Military” and even summoned his own supporters to mount a counterdemonstration.

The turmoil came right to Trump’s doorstep Friday night as hundreds of people protesting Floyd’s death and the president’s response gathered outside the White House. Some threw bricks and bottles at Secret Service and U.S. Park Police officers, who responded with pepper spray. The image of the White House surrounded by police in riot gear fueled the sense of a nation torn apart.

Trump praised the Secret Service for being “very cool” and “very professional” but assailed the Democratic mayor of Washington for not providing city police officers to help. While governors and mayors have urged restraint, Trump seemed more intent on taunting the protesters, bragging about the violence that would have met them had they tried to get onto White House grounds.

“Big crowd, professionally organized, but nobody came close to breaching the fence,” the president wrote on Twitter. “If they had they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen. That’s when people would have been really badly hurt, at least. Many Secret Service agents just waiting for action.”

His suggestion that his own supporters should come to the White House on Saturday foreshadowed the possibility of a clash outside his own doors. “Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???” he wrote on Twitter, using the acronym for his first campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

Asked about the tweet later, he denied encouraging violence by his supporters. “They love African American people,” he said. “They love black people. MAGA loves the black people.”

Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington responded in kind

Saturday morning, saying her police department will protect anyone in Washington, including the president, but called him a source of division. “While he hides behind his fence afraid/alone, I stand w/ people peacefully exercising their First Amendment Right after the murder of #GeorgeFloyd & hundreds of years of institutional racism,” she wrote. “There are no vicious dogs & ominous weapons. There is just a scared man. Afraid/alone ... ” Trump tried to recalibrate later in the day, devoting the opening of a speech at the Kennedy Space Center following the SpaceX rocket launch to the unrest in the streets and clearly trying to temper his bellicose tone.

“I understand the pain that people are feeling,” he said.

“We support the rights of peaceful protesters and we hear their pleas. But what we are now seeing on the streets of our cities has nothing to do with justice or peace. The memory of George Floyd is now being exploited by rioters, looters and anarchists.”

The days of discord have put the president’s leadership style on vivid display.

From the start of his ascension to power, Trump has presented himself as someone who seeks conflict, not conciliation, a fighter, not a peacemaker. That appeals to a substantial portion of the public that sees in him a president willing to take on an entrenched and entitled establishment. But the confluence of perilous health, economic and now racial crises has tested his approach and left him struggling to find his footing just months before an election in which polls currently show him behind.

“The president seems more out of touch and detached from the difficult reality the country is living than ever before,” said Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican congressman from Florida who has been critical of Trump. “At a moment when America desperately needs healing, the president is focused on petty personal battles with his perceived adversaries.”

Such a moment would challenge any president, of course.

It has been a year of national trauma that started out feeling like another 1998 with impeachment, then another 1918 with a killer pandemic combined with another 1929 given the shattering economic fallout. Now add to that another 1968, a year of deep social unrest.

It is fair to say that 2020 has turned out to be a year that has frayed the fabric of American society with an accumulation of anguish that has whipsawed the country and its people. But in some ways, Trump has become a totem for the nation’s polarization rather than a mender of it.

“I am daily thinking about why and how a society unravels and what we can do to stop the process,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University. “The calamity these days is about more than Trump. He is just the malicious con man who lives to exploit our vulnerabilities.”

Trump’s initial response to the rioting in Minneapolis, where a police officer has been charged with murder after kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes as he cried out that he could not breathe, underscored the president’s most instinctive response to national challenges. Threatening to send in troops, he wrote early Friday morning that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Only after a cascade of criticism did he try to walk it back, posting a new tweet 13 hours later, suggesting that all he had

President Donald Trump walks to the Oval Office of the White House in Washington meant was that “looting leads to shooting” by people in the street.

“I don’t want this to happen, and that’s what the expression put out last night means,” he said, a reformulation that convinced few, if any, of his critics.

But many of the president’s defenders rejected the idea that he had mishandled the crises, pressing the argument that Democrats and the news media were to blame for the turmoil in the streets, which spread from Minneapolis to New York; Atlanta; Washington; Louisville, Kentucky; Portland, Oregon; and other cities.

“Keep track of cities where hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and serious injuries and death will take place,” Rudy Giuliani, a former New York mayor who has served as Trump’s personal lawyer, wrote on Twitter on Friday night. “All Democrat dominated cities with criminal friendly policies. This is the future if you elect Democrats.”

Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who was pardoned by Trump for tax fraud earlier this year, amplified the point on Twitter. “It should be no surprise that every one of these cities that the anarchist have taken over, are the same cities run by leftist Democrats with the highest violence, murder and poverty rates,” he wrote on Twitter. “They can’t handle their cities normally, so how are they going to deal with this?”

Trump, who this past week retweeted a video of a supporter saying that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat” (though the supporter insisted he meant that in a political sense), picked up the theme Friday night and again on Saturday morning.

After crowds attacked CNN’s Atlanta headquarters with rocks, the president offered no sympathy or condemnation.

Instead, he made clear he thought it was deserved payback for a network that has aggravated him so much, retweeting a message that said, “In an ironic twist of fate, CNN HQ is being attacked by the very riots they promoted as noble & just.”

10

Monday, June 1, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

‘They’re just doing whatever they want’: Few masks are seen as beach town reopens

A server at the Fish Tales bar and grill in Ocean City, Md., wore a face shield when the business opened for in-person dining on Friday.

By ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON

D

ave Heyburn and Nevada Kaler viewed their weekend on this seaside boardwalk as an escape from the coronavirus “red zone” where they live, in Elverson, Pennsylvania. Neither wore masks, which are not required to be worn outdoors here.

The illness at home is “always in the back of your mind,” said Kaler, a part-time nursing assistant standing alongside her husband, who was enjoying the sunshine on a newly reopened public bench. “But you’ve got to live your life.”

That outlook appeared pervasive among the thousands of maskless vacationers who flocked to Ocean City for the beginning of the Greater Washington region’s emergence from coronavirus lockdown this weekend. Earlier in the week, on Memorial Day, photos of people strolling cheek-to-jowl on the teeming boardwalk appalled public health officials and prompted warnings about a potential new surge in cases.

This weekend brought little apparent change. Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland has emphasized that the state is only at Phase 1 of his “Roadmap to Recovery,” a step toward normalcy that still requires the public to abide by restrictions to keep the virus from spreading.

Yet the crowds out enjoying the spring weather in Ocean City suggested a different mentality.

“They’re just doing whatever they want,” said Aaron Gusler, a surf rescue technician — meaning lifeguard — for the

Ocean City Beach Patrol.

“People come up here with a vacation mindset,” he said.

Gusler is from Harrisonburg, Virginia, where he feels the pandemic has been impossible to ignore. But in Ocean City, “It’s weird. It’s like it’s not even happening.”

Lifeguards patrol the water, not the big clusters of sunbathers on the beach, where groups of as many as 42 people gathered on the sand early Friday.

“They told us to stay as far away from them as you can and do your job,” he said. The beach patrol gave its employees N95 masks, but Gusler did not have his on. He said he didn’t want to smear the blue-toned zinc oxide sunscreen coating his nose.

“I’m sure it’ll spike again around here,” he said of the virus.

“I’m just glad I have a job, man.”

Most of those eating, strolling and sunning on the boardwalk Friday shunned masks. “I work in a COVID hospital and I don’t care,” said Brandy Unger, who said she is a nurse at WellSpan York Hospital in Pennsylvania. “It’s the flu.”

Her husband, Hunter Unger, a mechanic, said, shrugging, “I work on all kind of random people’s cars, and eh.”

By the governor’s order, face coverings are required inside businesses, but at the Quiet Storm Surf Shop, a clerk folding Tshirts said, “We make them optional.” On the boardwalk outside, a police officer who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the news media said, “The problem is merchants have to enforce” the mask order, but many are reluc-

tant to alienate their first customers of the summer.

“They’re supposed to document violations and report them to the health department,” he said. The police — who were issuing $100 tickets to people vaping on the boardwalk Friday — do not cite mask violators.

At Flashback Old Time Photos, where patrons don vintage-looking costumes to pose for portraits against faux-historical backdrops, the only masks offered were for customers who wanted to dress like cowboy bank robbers.

“We’re doing good cleaning surfaces, keeping our masks on and staying 6 feet away,” said Sue McCrodden, the shop manager. The store’s employees try to spray the costumes with Lysol after each use and launder them at the end of each day, she said.

“If we keep telling people to keep their masks on, it’s going to stress them out, and we want them to have a good time,” said Doyinsola Adebakin, an employee.

“What are we going to do?” McCrodden asked. “We can’t lose money.”

Michael Cantine, who owns Fat Cats Airbrush, which makes personalized T-shirts and toys, said this opening week has been busier than the same time last year because children are out of school. To operate the store safely, he and his staff initially installed Plexiglas barricades, donned face masks and moved all their stock behind a counter so customers couldn’t handle it. A week later, that’s all been undone.

“People were going around” the barriers, removing their masks to pay for merchandise and leaving them on the counters, he said. “It blew me away, the lack of concern.”

Cantine said he had also given up on wearing a mask inside his shop because his airbrush easel faced the wall, not customers.

“People are spending money,” he said, maybe because the big amusement parks, restaurants and larger bars have not fully opened.

As of Friday night, restaurants were allowed to serve outdoors only, bringing a flood of patrons to tables that were supposed to be set 6 feet apart.

“In a lot of photos, the boardwalk looks very congested,” said Cantine. “But if you took an aerial view, you could see the spacing.”

Not all the tourists were nonchalant about following health restrictions. Sitting on the wall dividing the boardwalk from the beach, Kelly and Dan Goddard, who live in a Baltimore suburb, were wearing masks. Their children were sporting tie-dyed cloth ones sewn by relatives.

Dan Goddard, an accountant, said that when he and his wife packed up Cameron, 7, and Nash, 4, for a day trip to Ocean City on Friday, “we expected 50/50,” meaning that half of vacationers would wear masks. “But this is like 10%, maybe.”

Kelly Goddard said she had just quit her job as a nurse in a long-term care facility in Catonsville to protect her family after half the patients tested positive for the coronavirus and 19 died.

“This is the first time we’ve been out in a couple of months, except for the grocery store,” she said.

“There are a lot of unknowns and not a lot of real clear guidance,” Dan Goddard said. “But I don’t think people realize how serious things are, or they don’t care.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

11

Wealthy flyers worried about Coronavirus turn to private jet service

By PAUL SULLIVAN

C

ommercial air travel has plummeted in the coronavirus pandemic, but interest in private jet service is surging, particularly among people who have not paid to fly privately before.

For years, jet service providers have ferried corporate executives and wealthy leisure travelers who paid high fees for the privacy and security. Now, those companies are scrambling to meet rising demand from people worried about getting on a commercial flight.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, one of the busiest travel times in the United States in years past, traffic in the private jet industry was 58% of the volume from the same time last year, according to Argus, a company that tracks aviation data. But commercial flights fared worse over the holiday, plunging to 12% of the 2019 level.

Five weeks ago, private flights had fallen to 20% to 25% of what they were the same time last year, said Doug Gollan, founder of Privatejetcardcomparisons. com, a research site for consumers. “Now to be back to 60% of pre-COVID levels shows the people who have access to private travel are getting back out there,” he said.

NetJets, the largest private jet operator in the world, has had a rush in interest from new customers, said Patrick Gallagher, its president.

“May is on track to be the best month of new customer relationships that we’ve seen in the past 10 years,” Gallagher said.

Competitors are experiencing the same rise. Magellan Jets has had an 89% increase in new customers from midMarch to this past week, said Anthony Tivnan, its president. He added that this was coming off a strong 2019, when the company’s revenue was up 34% from 2018.

Companies that carved out a niche with private international flights are also reporting an increase. Thomas Flohr, founder and chairman of VistaJet, which has longer range jets, said the company’s refueling landings in Anchorage, Alaska, a major stop for transcontinental flights to Asia, were up 250% since the coronavirus outbreak.

Roger Federer, the tennis player, leaving a NetJets plane in Geneva last year. Jet service providers have long catered to corporate executives and wealthy leisure travelers, but are seeing more new customers.

“The number of fuel stops we had there in the last 60 days is unheard-of,” Flohr said. “It was the East moving West, and then when the pandemic shifted, it was the West moving East.”

Unlike commercial airlines, the private jet industry sells its services by the hour. Private jets are faster and can fly directly to most airports, while flying commercial may involve connecting flights.

Service providers make money by selling charter flights, jet cards with flight hours and fractional shares of jets and individually owned planes.

But as executives curtail their business travel during the pandemic, new wealthy flyers and existing customers are driving a private aviation boom. In some cases, they are actually flying and in others, they are stocking up on private flight hours. The desire is akin to hoarding toilet paper and flour at the start of the pandemic: The extra allotment provides peace of mind, even if it is never used.

“Everyone from boutique companies with five to six planes to NetJets is in a good mood,” Gollan said.

“There were a huge amount of people who had the wealth to fly private but never bought into the pitch of business

efficiency,” he said, adding that wealthy people are now thinking less about the cost of flying privately than about the safety of flying commercially.

Marco Fossati, a member of the multibillion-dollar family that owns Star, an Italian food conglomerate, said he had little need to fly privately since he became less active in the family business. But the coronavirus caused him to rethink his plans.

“At this moment, with the COVID-19, if you can afford it, fly private,” he said from Miami, where he has been since the stay-in-place orders were issued in March.

Fossati’s stance illustrates a change from just a few months ago: The wealthiest are less concerned about the perception of flying privately.

Sentient Jet, a private aviation company that offers flight hours, reported that it sold 5,000 hours in April, or the equivalent of about $30 million in flying time, significantly more than the $25 million it sells in a typical month. More than 2,500 of those hours were bought by people new to private aviation.

Worries over the environmental effect of flying privately may have taken a back seat as well.

“Concerns about opulence and

concerns about environmental issues are gone,” said Gallagher of NetJets. Many wealthy people put up with flying commercial because they had benefits like first class, TSA Precheck and a status that allowed them various perks. “But now,” he said, “there are a lot of people out there who don’t want to fly commercial if they’re part of an aging population or have underlying health concerns.”

A person on the average commercial flight has about 700 points of contact with other people and objects, according to a recent analysis by consulting firm McKinsey, but private flights have only 20 to 30.

For travelers concerned about the environment, private jet companies offer programs to offset carbon emissions. Terrapass, which has teamed with Magellan, can calculate carbon offsets based on the size and age of a plane and where its flying. Magellan includes carbon offsets in jet cards greater than 50 hours.

New flyers may be driving some of the increase in sales, but existing clients are refilling their jet cards with more hours.

“We’re seeing members purchase larger increments, so someone at 50 hours is renewing at 75 hours,” said Tivnan of Magellan Jets. These flyers want to lock in availability for themselves and family members, should they need it, he said.

The prices are not cheap. Magellan’s entry-level jet card for a Hawker 400XP, which seats six to eight people, is $130,000 for 25 hours. For the 14-passenger Gulfstream 450, it’s $313,950.

But tax breaks are available. The CARES Act, the economic stimulus package passed in late March, waived the 7.5% excise tax on all private jet flights and hours bought this year. That savings adds up.

The same 25 hours on the Gulfstream 450 would have been $25,000 more expensive before the tax break.

Owners who put their planes into chartered service can also take advantage of tax exemptions. The 2017 tax overhaul allows an owner who uses a plane at least 50% for business purposes to deduct the entire purchase price in the first year of owning the jet. But that business purpose could be putting the jet into the market for other flyers to use.

Experts caution, however, that the supply may catch up to the demand.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

Stocks

Wall Street Week ahead: Investors eye consumer discretionary stocks as U.S. reopens

I

nvestors are taking a closer look at the market’s consumer discretionary companies as a reopening U.S. economy fuels hopes of a turnaround for some of the sector’s hardest-hit names.

Many companies in the sector have been battered by the country-wide coronavirus-fueled lockdowns that have weighed on growth and damaged retail spending over the last several months, though the stocks of a few, like Amazon, have soared.

A gradual lifting of lockdowns in some states has stirred hopes for a bounce back for the retailers that make up much of the sector.

Some investors, however, say it may be months before consumers return to their previous shopping habits, making it unlikely that the companies will see a pickup in revenues in the near term.

Firms ranging from middle-income retailers such as Gap Inc and American Eagle Outfitters Inc to high-end destinations like Tiffany & Co and Vail Resorts Inc are expected to report results in the week ahead.

“This particular group is full of landmines,” said Jamie Cox, managing partner for Harris Financial Group. “There is not going to be a lot of investor follow-through until we get some certainty with what future revenue prospects are going to be.”

Shares of the Gap, for instance, are down 43% for the year to date. A recession that persists through the fourth quarter of this year would reduce the company’s revenues by 40%, according to a note by research firm Trefis.

Next Friday’s U.S. jobs report is expected to show that the unemployment rate rose to 19.8% in May, smashing April’s record 14.7%, according to a Reuters poll. Non-farm payrolls are expected to drop by 7.4 million, adding to the 20.5 million jobs lost the previous month.

Cox is focusing on dominant players such as Amazon.com Inc, Walmart Inc and Target Corp, which have a mix of essential items such as groceries as well as electronics and games that can appeal to customers who may face extended lockdowns during a potential second wave of the virus.

Overall, retail companies in the S&P 500 are up 12.9% for the year to date, a gain powered largely by Amazon’s 31% rally. Apparel companies, by comparison, are down 16.2% over the same time.

Brian Jacobsen, senior investment strategist for the Wells Fargo Asset Management Multi-Asset Solutions team, says retail companies will likely show rising expenses over the next several quarters due to items like more frequent sanitation of stores and technology purchases aimed at increasing the productivity of employees working from home.

“It’s really going to be a challenge to get a clear read of the direction for quite a while,” he said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

13

In Hong Kong, anxiety and defiance over Trump’s move to cut ties

BY VIVIAN WANG AND AMY QIN

H

ong Kong officials reacted with a mix of anxiety, resignation and defiance to President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would end its special relationship with the city, reflecting the semiautonomous territory’s deep political divide over its relationship with mainland China.

Trump’s move, which could imperil the city’s status as a global financial hub, took aim at Beijing’s new national security rules over Hong Kong, as well as fast-deteriorating relations between the United States and China. And the responses it garnered split along familiar lines.

While Chinese officials have been quiet so far on the move, pro-Beijing politicians in Hong Kong on Saturday echoed their recent criticism of the United States for intervening in what they called China’s internal affairs. They said the city would withstand the blow, in part by leaning on its stronger ties with the mainland.

Some pro-democracy supporters welcomed the announcement, saying it would punish China for national security rules that threaten to strip away some of Hong Kong’s autonomy.

Others worried that ending the special relationship with the United States would layer economic suffering on top of a protracted political crisis. Their fear is that Hong Kong has become collateral damage in a fast-escalating rivalry between two superpowers.

“This looks like a new Cold War, and Hong Kong is being made a new Berlin,” said Claudia Mo, a lawmaker in the city’s pro-democracy camp. “We are caught right in the middle of it.”

Hong Kong’s status as a financial capital has long hinged on its differences from the mainland, namely its guarantee of civil liberties and rule of law. Many global companies use Hong Kong as their gateway to Asian markets.

But the turbulent political protests of last year, followed by the coronavirus pandemic, have hobbled the city’s once-bustling economy, and any U.S. move could exacerbate the damage.

Details of Trump’s plan remain scant, but the president said Friday that the United States would subject Hong Kong to many of

the same restrictions as mainland China, especially on trade and law enforcement.

Officials in Hong Kong and China would also be sanctioned over the decision to impose national security laws. World leaders in the West and elsewhere have decried that move as a violation of the high degree of autonomy that China promised to the city in 1997, when Britain returned the former colony to its rule.

Hong Kong’s government, which is backed by Beijing, played down the threat.

In a statement Saturday evening, an unnamed spokesperson said the government was “not unduly worried,” as it would rely on the “unique advantages brought about by the continuous opening up of the mainland economy.”

Sanctions were not justified, the statement said, and “will lead to a breakdown of the mutually beneficial Hong Kong-U.S. relationship built up over the years and only hurt local and U.S. businesses in Hong Kong and the people working for them.”

Earlier Saturday, Teresa Cheng, the secretary for justice, told reporters that it was “completely false and wrong” to claim that the city was no longer distinct from China.

Intervening in China’s right to impose security laws on its own territory amounted to “coercion,” she told reporters Saturday, echoing an argument made by top Chinese officials in recent days.

Regina Ip, a pro-Beijing member of the Hong Kong legislature, suggested that the United States was bluffing and would not drastically curtail the city’s economic standing. While revoking Hong Kong’s special status could dent the territory’s reputation, the United States also has significant commercial interests in Hong Kong, she noted.

“There are 85,000 American citizens in Hong Kong who have been living here happily,” she said in an interview. “I don’t think the U.S. would easily punish Hong Kong to rock the boat.”

The reaction among Hong Kong’s pro-democracy politicians, who have been demoralized by China’s security push, was more mixed.

Dennis Kwok, a pro-democracy lawmaker, said Trump’s decision would significantly damage the local economy. But he said it was the “natural consequence” of Beijing’s tightening grip on the city.

Hong Kong officials reacted with a mix of anxiety, resignation and defiance to President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would end its special relationship with the city, reflecting the semiautonomous territory’s deep political divide over its relationship with mainland China.

Given the Chinese authorities’ refusal to heed international warnings, Kwok said, “there’s nothing the world can do but to call them out.”

Alvin Yeung, another opposition lawmaker, said he hoped Trump’s decision would push the Chinese and Hong Kong governments to reconsider the national security laws.

“Hong Kong and Beijing still have a chance to undo the harm,” Yeung said.

“The ball is now in Beijing and Hong Kong’s court. It’s entirely up to them.”

Some protesters, especially younger or more aggressive ones, cheered the U.S. declaration, embracing it as a fulfillment of a protest philosophy, “If we burn, you burn with us” — meaning that if Hong Kong is brought down, China will be, too.

Mo said she did not believe that Beijing would relent, adding that Trump’s move could actually harden Chinese leaders’ resolve.

“Beijing must have considered such consequences and decided it could take them,” she said. She said the party would retaliate, and that it was “just a matter of how and when.”

But the Trump administration had been signaling such a move for days. A Chi-

nese Foreign Ministry spokesman said this past week that China was prepared to take “all necessary countermeasures” against countries taking actions over the Hong Kong issue.

Trump’s move will almost certainly bolster Beijing’s narrative that foreign powers are interfering in Hong Kong — a key argument behind its push for national security laws.

“This hegemonic act of attempting to interfere in Hong Kong affairs and grossly interfere in China’s internal affairs will not frighten the Chinese people and is doomed to fail,” read an editorial published Saturday

by People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper.

The editorial did not mention Trump by name.

Global Times, a state-run Chinese newspaper, said in an unsigned editorial that Trump’s moves would only strengthen China’s position and further unite its people against the United States.

“Washington is making a bigger gamble, but America’s economy is not as fat as it once was, and it still coughs from the coronavirus,” the editorial read. “Their extreme tactics amount to nothing more than the slow suicide of a superpower.”

14

Monday, June 1, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

In some nations, Coronavirus is only one of many outbreaks

A public health worker fumigates for mosquitos in a house near a registered dengue case in Villa Nueva, Honduras

By KIRK SEMPLE

A

dengue epidemic ravaged Honduras last year, sickening more than 100,000 people and leaving 180 dead.

As this year began, officials braced for another surge in cases of the mosquito-borne disease and wondered how they would manage with their frail public health system and shortage of trained personnel.

Then along came the coronavirus, pitching the nation into a grueling, two-front public health battle.

“Horrible,” said Dr. Dinorah Nolasco, a top health official in northern Honduras, a region that has been particularly hard-hit by both diseases. “These months have been tremendous.”

As the coronavirus pandemic stalks the globe, some nations, particularly in the developing world, find themselves under extraordinary strain as they simultaneously contend with other outbreaks, chronic public health problems and challenges posed by government mismanagement, poverty and armed conflict.

The all-consuming demands of the coronavirus, officials fear, could divert government focus and open the door to a possible resurgence of other illnesses.

In Latin America, where the number of coronavirus cases has been rising sharply, governments are trying to contend with new dengue outbreaks while holding onto gains in the fight against other infectious diseases. But at least nine countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have paused some of

their immunization activities, officials said, threatening efforts to control diseases such as polio, tuberculosis and measles.

Dengue is also bedeviling nations in Southeast Asia, like Indonesia, another country hard-hit by the coronavirus.

And in Africa, health officials are concerned about recent outbreaks of yellow fever, cholera, measles and Ebola, among other diseases.

In one alarming measure of the extent of the coronavirus disruption to global health strategies, vaccination programs in at least 68 countries have been “substantially hindered,” according to a statement released last week by the World Health Organization, UNICEF and Gavi, a public-private partnership that helps provide vaccines to developing countries.

The pandemic, coming on top of other immense public health challenges, “has showed the vulnerabilities of many countries in different manners,” said Richard Mihigo, coordinator in Africa for the World Health Organization’s immunization and vaccines development program.

“Countries have been almost on their knees, paralyzed,” he continued. “It becomes very clear that they need to have a much more resilient health system in place to control any outbreak or to prepare for any outbreak that may come.”

The coronavirus took hold in Latin America well after it had started pummeling most of the rest of the world. During the first few months of the year, health officials had more immediate problems to contend with, including dengue.

In 2019, the disease, transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, had ravaged Latin America, which suffered its worst

dengue epidemic on record with more than 3 million cases and more than 1,500 deaths.

The outbreak hit Honduras particularly hard, overwhelming a public health system that had already been weakened by budget cuts and pervasive corruption and was barely equipped to meet usual demands, much less an epidemic of record size. By the end of 2019, Honduras had suffered about 61% of the dengue deaths in Central America.

The highest number of dengue cases occurred in the department of Cortés, where efforts to control its transmission were further hampered by a lack of trained personnel and by the region’s ubiquitous criminal gangs, which for months blocked government health care workers from gaining access to some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods.

Dengue remains a major concern in Latin America and the Caribbean this year. According to the latest statistics from the Pan American Health Organization, about 1,426,000 cases have been recorded in the region so far, fewer than during the same period last year. But health officials fear this may be an undercount caused by the focus on the coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19.

“COVID has been able to sometimes deviate attention from other pressing problems,” said Dr. Marcos Espinal, director of the department of communicable diseases at the Pan American Health Organization, based in Washington, D.C. On Tuesday, Dr. Carissa Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization, said the Americas, with more than 2.4 million COVID-19 cases and more than 143,000 deaths, had become the epicenter of the pandemic.

In Honduras, the number of dengue cases this year is already outpacing last year’s tally — with the worst, perhaps, yet to come, officials said. The rainy season is just beginning, bringing more pooling and flooding and creating more potential breeding sites for mosquitoes.

Nolasco, regional health director in the northern province of Cortés, said she has already been provided more than 200 supplemental workers — doctors, nurses, microbiologists and others — to staff quick-response medical teams and conduct door-to-door education campaigns, cornerstones of her public health program to confront both the coronavirus and dengue.

But while she no longer has a problem with the criminal gangs as she did last year, her teams are still having difficulty accessing some areas. Residents of certain neighborhoods have banded together to block the entrance of health care workers out of fear that they might be carrying the virus.

Nolasco said she and her staff members have been driven away by mobs wielding machetes and throwing stones. In one incident, workers trying to enter a neighborhood were doused with bleach, she said.

Some people afflicted by COVID-19 have been fearful of seeking out attention because they believe the disease is shameful and are embarrassed. Others are in denial that it is even a real phenomenon, she said.

Some patients, seriously sick with COVID-19, are seeking medical attention after it is too late. “People are arriving at the emergency room to die,” she said. “The fight now is education.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

15

A mile-long line for free food in Geneva, one of world’s richest cities

By PATRICK KINGSLEY and LAETITIA VANCON

T

he first people arrived before 2 a.m.

By 4 a.m., more than 100 people stood waiting in the darkness outside the ice hockey stadium.

By 7 a.m., the line stretched for more than 1 mile, heading north to the river, then west down the riverbank, then all around a sports center parking lot, then past the squash courts, the boxing club, the theater, under the Pont de Saint-Georges, before doubling back up a riverside corniche.

By early afternoon last Saturday, nearly 3,000 residents of Geneva, one of the world’s richest cities, had filtered through the stadium to receive a food parcel worth about $25. Some carried babies. Some were in wheelchairs. Some had waited for more than six hours.

In medical terms, Geneva has not been as gripped by the coronavirus crisis as other areas of Western Europe. In the city and its surrounding suburbs, fewer than 300 residents have died in a population of half a million.

But in economic terms the crisis has been ruinous for Geneva’s underclass — the unauthorized and underpaid workers often forgotten about in a city better known for its bankers, watchmakers and U.N. officials.

Thousands of people working in the shadows of the Swiss economy lost their jobs overnight in March, as hotels, restaurants and families fired their cleaners and maids who were living in the country illegally in response to a lockdown enforced by the central Swiss government.

Unable to draw on state support, most were then forced to rely on charity to survive. Ultimately, that demand led volunteers and city officials to set up a weekly food bank at the ice hockey stadium near the river.

“If you wanted to pictogram Geneva, what would you put?” said Laura Cotton, a Swiss-British hospital decorator who volunteers at the stadium. “Money, money, money. And, OK — cheese and chocolate.”

“But COVID has showed the flip-side,” Cotton added.

The coronavirus infection rate has plummeted in Geneva in recent weeks, allowing authorities to markedly ease social distancing restrictions.

But the economic impact on the city’s poorest remains dire.

Sukhee Shinendorj, a 38-year-old from Mongolia, was already living on the cusp of poverty even before the coronavirus reached Switzerland. He earned about $1,600 a month as a restaurant cleaner — barely enough to feed his two children in expensive Geneva.

Then in March the restaurant where he worked shut, prompting his boss to fire him. Now Shinendorj fears losing his apartment and relies on the stadium handouts for food.

On Saturday, he woke up at 1 a.m. and walked 2 miles to the stadium to try and beat the line. But there were already several people waiting.

“Catastrophe,” Shinendorj said of his situation. “It’s a catastrophe.”

Behind him in the darkness, a giant Rolex logo shone from the watchmaker’s headquarters across the street.

The scenes at the stadium have been jarring for some Genevans, forced for the first time to recognize profound social inequalities they previously ignored or dismissed.

A group of seasoned activists first spotted Geneva’s need for the food aid. In late March, campaigners from Caravane De Solidarité, a group originally founded in response to the 2015 refugee crisis, began handing out food in the street.

But that led to the arrest of one of the group’s leaders, for flouting social distancing regulations.

After a public backlash, city authorities stepped in, permitting several groups to distribute food from several disused schools. But as the lines outside the schools kept lengthening, it was clear a bigger venue was needed.

So in early May, city officials allowed the volunteers to base themselves at the Patinoire des Vernets, an ice rink just outside the city center.

International aid group Doctors Without Borders has joined the effort, bringing its expertise from countless war zones to help manage the operation.

“It’s very strange,” said Dr. Roberta Petrucci, a medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, who

lives nearby.

“I never thought I’d see this a few hundred meters from where I live,” said Petrucci, who is more accustomed to working in crises in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Congo and Liberia.

The stadium handouts also tell a more hopeful story about the city, said Charlemagne Hernandez, a co-founder of Caravane De Solidarité.

The vast operation, which relies almost entirely on volunteers and donations, is the product of decades of activism in the city, which has created a more tolerant culture than in other Swiss cantons, Hernandez said.

On a Friday evening, the donors to the food bank included some of the city’s wealthiest residents, who brought their donations to the stadium in the trunks of their Porsches, Teslas and Mercedes.

“It has something to do with the humanitarian tradition in Geneva,” Hernandez said. “That’s what we do better than any other Swiss city.”

As he left the stadium, shortly after 8 a.m., Shinendorj, the Mongolian cleaner, had a bag of food but still no job.

He said he planned to spend the next 12 hours walking through the city, going door to door to ask for work.

“Before, the sun was shining,” he said. “Now the sky is black.”

The Swiss city is best known for bankers, watchmakers and U.N. officials but the virus has forced thousands from Geneva’s underclass to line up for hours for food aid.

16

Monday, June 1, 2020

Western countries leave children of ISIS in Syrian camps

By BEN HUBBARD and CONSTANT MÉHEUT

A

s about 900 children languish in fetid, disease-ridden detainment camps in northeastern Syria, the Western states their parents hail from have insisted they cannot take them back.

But last month, when a 7-year-old French girl was on the verge of dying if she did not receive urgent medical care, France sent a medical jet and flew her to Paris for treatment, leaving behind her mother, two brothers and twin sister.

The repatriation of the girl, Taymia, was the rare exception, but proof, rights advocates said, that countries can take their children back when they want to.

“We have seen incredible hardheartedness when it comes to the responses of governments such as France that talk the talk about human rights,” said Letta Tayler, a senior counterterrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch. “If France could take one child out, why couldn’t it take the entire family?”

Human rights groups say leaving the children in Syria threatens their mental and physical health and risks their indoctrination with Islamic State group ideology, which is widely followed in the camps and could create a new generation of violent jihadis.

The children lack education and adequate health care, and there are often shortages of food and clean water. Infectious diseases are rampant, killing dozens of people a month. There are increasing fears of the coronavirus, but there have been no confirmed cases because there has been no testing, according to the International Crisis Group.

Some children have lived in the camps for years, and at least nine children of European parents have died of preventable causes in recent years, according to Yasmine

Ahmed, executive director of Rights and Security International, an advocacy group.

Some countries have taken many of their children back. Russia, Kosovo, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have repatriated more than 100 women and children each.

But most Western governments have been reluctant to do so, citing obstacles like the difficulty of confirming parentage, the danger of sending diplomats into a war zone and not wanting to separate children from their mothers, whom the countries mostly do not want back.

When the Islamic State group seized territory the size of Britain that spanned the Syria-Iraq border in 2014, declaring it an Islamic caliphate, tens of thousands of adherents flocked there from around the world, including many Westerners who brought children with them or gave birth after they arrived.

Those who survived the U.S.- and Kurdish-led military campaign against the group that ended more than a year ago were detained. The men were locked up in makeshift prisons and the women and children in the camps.

While repatriating the adults raises difficult questions about how guilty and dangerous they may be, a network of activists, lawyers and relatives in Europe and North America has pressed governments to bring the children home, arguing that they did not choose to go to Syria and should not suffer for their parents’ sins.

But the advocates have had limited success, often because the governments do not want to deal with the children’s parents.

“There is a line of argument that the kids are not to be blamed, but we will not help them because there will be a mother and potentially a father who will come out of the woods and insist to be joined with the kids,” said Tyge Trier, a human rights lawyer in Copenhagen, Denmark, who disagrees

with the policy and is working to bring Danish children home.

Despite the difficulties, 20 countries have brought home some children, according to Tayler of Human Rights Watch. The U.S. has brought home 15 children, a State Department official said, but did not say how many remained.

Twenty-six children of Canadians are stuck in northeastern Syria, most of them age 6 or younger, Tayler said. They include a 4-year-old orphan, Amira, who was born to Canadian parents in Syria and whose family was killed in the battle against the Islamic State group.

Her uncle has been trying to bring her to Canada, but the Canadian government has refused to allow it.

Other countries have followed a caseby-case approach that gives priority to sick children, because the governments do not want them to die in the camps, and orphans, who can be repatriated without the encumbrance of their jihadi parents.

That policy has left behind children who are healthy or whose parents are still alive.

The issue of repatriation is particularly thorny for France, where Islamic State attacks have killed more than 250 people, turning a majority of French people against the repatriation of jihadis and their families.

Of the roughly 300 children of French parents in Syria’s camps, only 18 have been repatriated.

Taymia’s journey illustrates how complicated such cases can be.

Her parents brought their four Frenchborn children, including Taymia and her twin sister, to Syria with them and had another child there.

In 2015, her father, a well-known French jihadi, appeared in an Islamic State group propaganda video with her oldest brother as the boy executed a prisoner with

a gunshot to the head. Both were killed in 2018.

The New York Times is not publishing Taymia’s last name, nor the names of her mother and father, to protect the girl’s privacy.

Her mother and the four remaining children surrendered to Kurdish forces last year, joining some 80,000 women and children in the Syrian detention camps.

Taymia’s mother asked relatives in France to help her and her children come home, but the government refused. As Taymia, who has a double heart defect, grew weak and emaciated, lawyers and human rights groups took up her cause.

“She was dying,” her mother said in a recent phone interview from the camp.

In April, by which point Taymia was struggling to breathe and had swollen hands and feet, the French government permitted her to come home.

Her mother, recognizing that her choice to join the Islamic State group meant that the French authorities did not want her back, gave up custody of her daughter so she could leave.

“I was happy and sad at the same time,” her mother said. “I knew she was finally going to get treatment, but I also knew that it would be a long time before I could hold her in my arms again.”

Last year, as the U.S. commemorated the 18th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a group of leading national security experts warned in an open letter that life in the Syria camps “fuels the Salafi-jihadi narrative of grievance and revenge that has proven so potent in recruiting followers.”

Leaving so many people there, the experts said, risked allowing history to repeat itself.

“The kids are going to be worse than their fathers,” Taymia’s mother said. “I don’t want them to grow up there.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

17

The case against riots

By ROSS THOUTHAT

I

n the origin myth of post-1960s liberalism, all the defeats that the Democratic Party suffered in the years of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were owed to the party’s heroic support for civil rights, which rectified a great injustice but opened the way for the Republicans to build majorities on racial backlash.

Like most myths, this story contains pieces of the truth. The battle over civil rights did accelerate the regional realignment of the parties; racial backlash did help the GOP make gains in the once-Democratic South. But what ultimately doomed the old liberal majority wasn’t just support for civil rights; that was on the ballot in 1964, when Barry Goldwater won the heart of the old Confederacy but Lyndon Johnson won everywhere else.

Rather, liberalism unraveled amid the subsequent nationwide wave of crime, unrest and disorder, which liberal mandarins and liberal machine politicians alike were unable to successfully manage or contain.

The riots of the ’60s, from Watts to Washington, D.C., were only part of this story; the wider surge of murder, battery and theft probably mattered as much to realignment. But there is a striking pattern of evidence, teased out in the research of the Princeton University political scientist Omar Wasow, showing how peaceful civil rights protests helped Democrats win white votes, and then violence pushed white voters toward Republicans.

Looking at data from the civil rights era, Wasow argues that “proximity to black-led nonviolent protests increased white Democratic vote-share whereas proximity to black-led violent protests caused substantively important declines” — enough to tip the 1968 election from Hubert Humphrey to Nixon. More broadly, in news coverage and public opinion from those years, nonviolent protests (especially in the face of segregationist violence) increased support for civil rights, while violent protests tipped public opinion away from the protesters, and toward a stronger desire for what Nixon called law and order, and Wasow calls “social control.”

Some of this research was published in the spring of 2015, when the protests-turned-riots in Ferguson and Baltimore attracted left-wing and radical defenders. Back then, the center-left writer Jonathan Chait cited Wasow’s findings in an essay accusing the pro-riot radicals of being politically delusional: “The physical damage inflicted upon poor urban neighborhoods by rioting,” he wrote, “does not have the compensating virtue of easing the way for more progressive policies; instead, it compounds the damage by promoting a regressive backlash.”

In response, the more left-wing columnist Ryan Cooper argued that, in effect, that was then and this is now: Maybe riots weakened liberalism in the past, but the riots of 2015 were more localized and therefore less threatening, the America of 2015 was less white and therefore less easily threatened, and the Republicans of 2015 were “talking about prison reform, not Willie Horton.”

I would submit that subsequent events vindicated Chait, and that in hindsight the riots of 2015 — as well as the late Obama-era crime spike, and a cluster of high-profile cop kill-

Invoking a symbol of distress, a protester carried a U.S. flag upside down on Thursday night in Minneapolis. ings in 2016 — helped create a late-1960s backlash moment in miniature. Republicans didn’t abandon prison reform; indeed, they eventually helped pass a criminal-justice reform bill. But they stopped talking about that issue, or talking like civil libertarians in general, and they nominated a figure for president who sounded like Nixon on a good day and George Wallace on the rest. Which meant that 18 months after the Baltimore riots, the violence’s major legacy was a still-wounded city — and the presidency of Donald Trump.

You can’t take this as proof that rioting never works, that it never succeeds in calling attention to an injustice that a more peaceful protest might incline the comfortable to downplay or ignore. But the political history of both the 1960s and the 2010s suggests a strong presumption against the political effectiveness of looting or vandalism or arson, to go along with the direct costs for the communities where riots are most likely to break out.

For radicals, this presumption doesn’t require shedding tears for the insurers of, say, a ransacked Minneapolis Target. It just requires recognizing that most spasms of robbery or arson aren’t the revolution but often a ritual reaffirmation of the status quo — a period of misrule that doesn’t try to establish an alternative order or permanently change any hierarchies, as a true revolution would, but instead leaves the lower orders poorer and the well-insured upper classes more or less restored.

For liberals, meanwhile, or anyone committed to reform without revolution, recognizing how the politics of riots usually play out imposes a special burden to forestall and contain them — and when that isn’t possible, to clearly distinguish the higher cause from the chaos trailing in its wake.

My suspicion is that this will be more easily accomplished in 2020 than it was in 2016 or 1968. Across his presidency Trump has been more a Wallace than a Nixon, less “law and order“ than “the law for thee but not for me,” and his obvious disregard for civic peace makes it hard for him to campaign as its custodian.

At the same time, the manifest injustice of George Floyd’s treatment by the Minneapolis police has imposed a limit on Trump’s demagoguery; even the president claimed to be honoring Floyd’s

memory in the same breath that he attacked the rioters. And unlike four years ago, in 2020 Trump’s waning reelection hopes probably depend on winning a higher-than-usual number of black and Latino men, which mean that the politics of racial backlash are more fraught for his strategists than one might usually expect.

Meanwhile Joe Biden, as a moderate Democrat with a law-and-order past who won his party’s nomination with strong African-American support, is arguably better positioned than some Democratic politicians to balance outrage over racial injustice with a message of peace, nonviolence, calm. Biden probably won’t go to war with the parts of his coalition that are inclined to portray riots as necessary uprisings or cathartic wealth-redistribution, but he has a primary season’s worth of experience ignoring them.

So if Minneapolis is the beginning of a season of protest, he may find it much easier to balance moral outrage with reassurance than a nominee more beholden to the left.

And in striking that balance he would carry on, rather than betray, the legacy of the most successful civil rights activists.

Martin Luther King Jr. became more politically radical in his last years, but his opposition to rioting was a constant. “Every time a riot develops,” he warned just months before his death, “it helps George Wallace.”

If we are headed for a long, hot, virus-shadowed summer, those are words that a liberalism that doesn’t want to help Donald Trump would do well to keep in mind.

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The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

The top U.S. Covid hot spots are all Indian lands

By NICHOLAS KRISTOFF

T

he Navajo Nation is a vast, awe-inspiring land of desert crags and canyons, the largest reservation in the country, but today it reverberates with grief and fear.

The Navajo have had more people infected with the coronavirus per capita than any state in the country. Decades of neglect, exploitation and discrimination mean that even before this pandemic, Navajo here had a shorter life expectancy (72) than people in Guatemala (74) — and now COVID-19 is hitting Native Americans with particular force.

If Native American tribes were counted as states, the five most-infected states in the country would all be native tribes, with New York dropping to No. 6, according to a compilation by the American Indian Studies Center at UCLA. Here in Navajo lands, among those who died of COVID-19 complications is Fred Thompson, 57, a champion of Navajo culture at Navajo Technical University and singer in a popular band called Aces Wild. Instead of gathering for a funeral, people honked their horns and set off fireworks at 9 p.m. on a Friday when his band would normally have performed.

“We went on a big hill and watched the fireworks,” Charmaine Tsosie, one of his former students, told me through tears. “Our horn doesn’t work, so we shouted: ‘We love you!

We miss you!’”

The virus is believed to have arrived when an infected person attended a Christian revival on the reservation in early March, and it then spread through basketball games, church services and community events. It also preyed upon poverty: Many Navajo live crowded in small homes where social distancing is impossible, and 40% of those on the reservation lack running water, according to Kathleen Norton of the Center for American Indian Health at Johns Hopkins University.

That makes hand-washing difficult, and it leads families to cluster in laundromats.

Shawna Gonzalez lives in a traditional one-room Navajo home, a hogan, with her seven children. Her husband, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who had lived in the United States since he was 3 years old, was deported, so she managed with the help of her mother — until her mother was hospitalized with the coronavirus.

Because there is no running water, Gonzalez must regularly drive to a distant well and fill several containers to take home 15 gallons — and then ration water closely. There is no postal delivery or package delivery here or in much of the Navajo Nation, so she also drives to the post office to pick up mail.

Gonzalez’s income comes from informal work on a food truck that sells barbecue. But the food truck has rarely ventured out during the pandemic, so Gonazalez’s income has plunged. Like many, she struggles to afford food.

“I think about it all the time,” she said.

“The Navajo have had more people infected with the coronavirus per capita than any state in the country,” writes Nicholas Kristof.

Some Navajo worry that the crisis will bolster a narrative of Native Americans as perpetually wretched and helpless.

“Don’t portray us as poor, poor Navajos,” said the Navajo president, Jonathan Nez. “We’re resilient. We’re overcomers.”

The Navajo have already been stigmatized as potential health threats in the region — which is brutally ironic given a history of Europeans bringing diseases such as smallpox to the New World. The town of Gallup, New Mexico, which borders the reservation, for a time set up roadblocks and barred anyone who was not a resident.

My sense is that the Navajo have handled the crisis reasonably well. The tribe canceled events, imposed curfews and tested a far higher rate of the population than the country has as a whole. But the Indian Health Service says that 28% of tests have come back positive, an alarmingly high rate.

Navajo lands are full of heartfelt homemade signs urging people to wear masks and be careful. “Turn around!” one sign read. “Go home!”

A local women’s organization, Chinle Planting Hope, delivers boxes of food to families, including Gonzalez’s, to ease hunger and reduce the need for exposure through shopping. And Gonzalez herself pays it forward by volunteering at a food pantry.

Doctors say that there are some encouraging signs that the crisis here may have peaked, but that it’s too early to be sure. Some hope it will be a wake-up call to address neglected needs of Native Americans.

“They are barely getting along in normal times, and the pandemic comes along and exacerbates an already overtaxed and underfunded health care system,” said Rear Adm. Michael Weahkee, the director of the Indian Health Service, who was visiting the hospital. Congress has allocated extra funding for the Indian Health Service, but Weahkee said,

“We’re hobbling along.”

The United States allocates just $3,943 per person for health care for Native Americans through the Indian Health Service, less than half the $8,602 spent by the Bureau of Prisons for health care per prisoner.

As for education on the reservations, only 53% of children attending Bureau of Indian Education schools graduate from high school. One student estimated to me that only a quarter of children have internet access at home, so remote learning during a pandemic is elusive.

The United States did not even confer citizenship on Native Americans until 1924, and virtually every U.S. institution has betrayed them in recent decades except one — the military. The armed forces have offered opportunity to many Native Americans, and veterans play important roles on tribal lands.

About 800 Navajo served in the Korean War, some as “code talkers” who transmitted messages in the Navajo language as an unbreakable code, and South Korea this month showed its gratitude by shipping 10,000 masks to the Navajo Nation. The Irish, in grateful memory of having received aid from Choctaw Indians in 1847 during the potato famine, have returned the favor by donating generously to a relief fund for the Navajo.

In contrast, the U.S. government has lagged. Washington took six weeks to transfer relief money from the CARES Act to the Navajo, and it was difficult for tribes to get protective equipment and testing kits. ProPublica reported that in April President Donald Trump’s former deputy chief of staff Zach Fuentes sold $3 million in masks to the Indian Health Service, although they had not been approved for use in health care.

“The criminal negligence shown by the federal government in the lack of access to testing and PPE and other necessary resources has cost us more lives than we could imagine,” said Janene Yazzie, a Navajo community organizer who helps run the Navajo and Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund.

“We did not deserve this negligence.”

Yazzie notes that rivers run through Navajo lands and end up irrigating golf courses in Phoenix, while natives lack legal rights to the water and can’t even get plumbing to wash their hands.

For the Navajo, returning to “normal” is not enough; attitudes need to change as well as policies.

“People grow up with this mindset of seeing us as different,” said Naiyahnikai Gorman, 21, who lives without running water in a remote area near Steamboat, Arizona, and is studying traditional Indian medicine. She says that she has been dismissed by white people as “Pocahontas” and added that America won’t do better for Native Americans until it revises its perceptions.

“They see us as savages or uncivilized,” she said sadly.

“They grow up playing Cowboys and Indians, and then they kill all the Indians.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

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Anuncian varios trabajos de rehabilitación de carreteras Por THE STAR

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l Departamento de Transportación y Obras Públicas (DTOP) y la Autoridad de Carreteras y Transportación (ACT) anunciaron el domingo varios trabajos de rehabilitación en diversos sectores de Guaynabo,que implican el cierre temporero de varias vías de tránsito a partir de hoy, lunes.

Desde este hoy a partir de las 7:00 de la mañana, y hasta horas de la tarde, se realizarán trabajos de rehabilitación en la salida número 5 del expreso Rafael Martínez Nadal (PR-20) hacia la PR-199, kilómetro 5.6, en dirección Caguas a San Juan, en el municipio de Guaynabo. Los trabajos consisten en la restauración de la losa de pavimento. Las obras no obstruirán los carriles del expreso PR-20, los cuales se mantendrán abiertos.

Los conductores deberán desviarse por la salida número 6 de la PR-20, en el kilómetro 7.1, ubicada

antes de la Plaza de Peaje de Guaynabo, Sector Piedras Blancas. Los usuarios que vayan hacia el centro urbano de Guaynabo podrán tomar la avenida David Urbina. Mientras, los conductores que transiten hacia la PR-199, en dirección a Los Paseos, pueden utilizar la calle Unión, y luego la calle Ingeniero Jaime Rodríguez hasta incorporarse a la PR-199.

Igualmente, se informó que se llevarán a cabo trabajos de rehabilitación en los puentes de las marginales del expreso Martínez Nadal, a la altura del área del Tren Urbano y Altamira, entre los kilómetros 2.2 al 1.9, en ambas direcciones. Estos trabajos comenzarán el martes, 2 de junio, desde las 7:00 de la mañana, y concluirán el sábado, 6 de junio, en horas de la tarde.

Estas labores conllevan el cierre temporal de un carril y el paseo en ambas direcciones de la vía.

Mediante estas obras se restaurará la losa de pavimento de dichos puentes. Las labores iniciarán con el

cierre del carril derecho y paseo sobre los puentes. Una vez concluyan, comenzarán con el carril izquierdo y paseo.

Finalmente, se anunció trabajos de rehabilitación de pavimento en la PR-837, entre los kilómetros 4.3 al 4.8 en Guaynabo, a partir de este lunes, a las 7:00 de la mañana. Estos concluirán el martes, 2 de junio, en horas de la tarde. Las labores conllevarán el cierre temporal de los carriles en ambas direcciones.

Los trabajos de rehabilitación consistirán en escarificado y depósito de asfalto de superficie. Estas obras son parte del proyecto de rehabilitación de las carreteras: PR-835, PR-837 y PR-8834 en este municipio.

Habrá un desvío en el kilómetro 2.5, donde está la gomera “As de Oro”, para los conductores que transiten de norte a sur. Se mantendrá disponible un carril en una sola dirección para el tránsito local mientras duren las labores.

FEMA: Hasta el 2 de julio para solicitar asistencia por terremotos Por THE STAR

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a Agencia Federal para el Manejo de Emergencias (FEMA por sus siglas en inglés) extendió la fecha límite de solicitud para los residentes que sufrieron daño por los terremotos. Los residentes ahora tienen hasta el 2 de julio para solicitar asistencia por desastre de FEMA para los terremotos continuos que comenzaron en diciembre.

“Debido a la reciente actividad del terremoto, incluyendo la réplica 5.4 que ocurrió el 2 de mayo, queremos asegurarnos de que todos los afectados reciban la asistencia necesaria por desastre. Por eso, hemos extendido el período de registro”, dijo el coordinador federal Alex Amparo, quien está liderando las operaciones de FEMA en la isla.

El programa de Asistencia Individual de FEMA podría proporcionar cierta asistencia financiera para necesidades relacionadas con desastres tales como vehículos, cuido de niños, gastos médicos o dentales, o gastos fúnebres, así como subvenciones para viviendas dañadas o inhabitables. FEMA también proporciona referidos a otras agencias que pueden ayudar.

“Agradecemos a FEMA por fijar nuevas fechas para solicitar la asistencia federal para las personas que sufrieron daños por los terremotos, más aún cuando a inicios de mayo los residentes de la zona sur sufrieron una nueva actividad sísmica”, dijo Ottmar Chávez, el director ejecutivo de la Oficina Central de Recuperación, Reconstrucción y Resiliencia (COR3, por sus siglas en inglés). “El Gobierno de

Puerto Rico continuará en coordinación para continuar trabajando con los esfuerzos de recuperación de los desastres activos en la Isla”.

Los sobrevivientes no deben esperar que la asistencia de FEMA restaure completamente sus hogares dañados por los terremotos. La asistencia puede incluir dinero para reparaciones esenciales del hogar, pérdida de propiedad personal, asistencia de alquiler y otras necesidades inmediatas relacionadas con desastres no cubiertas por el seguro.

Si descubrió más daños causado por los terremotos de los que creía, se le anima a solicitar.

La actividad sísmica en Puerto Rico comenzó el 28 de diciembre, seguida de un terremoto de magnitud 6.4 ocurrido el 7 de enero y una serie de réplicas que continúan sacudiendo principalmente la costa sur de la isla. Los terremotos más fuertes desde enero se sintieron el 2 de mayo, incluyendo uno de magnitud 5.4.

Treinta y tres municipios fueron aprobados para solicitar asistencia por desastre: Adjuntas, Aguada, Añasco, Arecibo, Barceloneta, Cabo Rojo, Ciales, Coamo, Corozal, Guánica, Guayanilla, Hormigueros, Jayuya, Juana Díaz, Lajas, Lares, Las Marías, Maricao, Mayagüez, Moca, Morovis, Naranjito, Orocovis, Peñuelas, Ponce, Sabana Grande, Salinas, San Germán, San Sebastián, Santa Isabel, Utuado, Villalba y Yauco.

Hay varias maneras de solicitar: Llame a la línea de ayuda de FEMA al 800-6213362 (FEMA) o (TTY) 800-462-7585. Pulse 2 para un operador que hable español. Las líneas están abier-

tas todos los días de 7 a.m. a 10 p.m.

Visite www.DisasterAssistance.gov/es Descargue la aplicación móvil de FEMA. Seleccione Recursos para desastres y haga clic en DisasterAssistance.gov/es. Si tiene un dispositivo Apple: Envíe APPLE por mensaje de texto al 43362 (4FEMA).

Para aquellos con un dispositivo Android: Envíe ANDROID por mensaje de texto al 43362 (4FEMA).

Para obtener más información, visite: www.fema. gov/es/aplicacion.

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Monday, June 1, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

What Tracee Ellis Ross worried about in ‘High Note’ (It wasn’t her mom)

By MELENA RYZIK

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racee Ellis Ross can’t dance — at least, not the kind of dancing that requires following choreography in three-inch heels while belting disco-pop into a microphone. She learned this the hard way, preparing for “The High Note,” a new comedy out Friday on video on demand.

She plays Grace Davis, a superstar singer looking for a refresh; enter her striving personal assistant (Dakota Johnson) who dreams of being a producer.

“I’ve never been more overwhelmed in my life,” Ross said of the dance numbers. She kept asking the choreographers to take it down a notch. “I was like, ‘We’ve been working on this one little move for quite some time now.

Should we perhaps vary it and come up with a different move that my body seems to want to bend in the shape of? Because what I’m doing does not look like what you’re doing.’”

In Ross’s vision, Grace is the kind of over-the-top glamster who changes her nail color for every outfit, feels most at home onstage in a feathery jumpsuit, and demands that her assistant break in her shoes — but has also overcome numerous hurdles as a female artist of color. Ross loved the part, she said, because for iconic artists, “it’s extremely hard work to make it look as effortless as it seems, and we forget that they have fears and dreams and secrets and hurts and hearts, and all of those things.”

“I feel like Grace Davis was written with all of that already intertwined there,” she said.

Ross knows what you’re thinking: Yes, Grace does bear a resemblance to her own mother, Diana Ross. And no, that didn’t weigh on her. She hardly thought about it herself, she said, except to ask the movie’s hairstylist not to make her ’do too much like her mom’s.

More nerve-racking for Ross was that she was due to make her big-screen singing debut in the film. She worked with a voice coach, studied clips of performers — just how do they wield that mic? — and still felt shaken when it came time to film a big concert scene. “This is not for the faint of heart,” she thought. “You have to put aside your own insecurities and shame and judgment, and just go for it.”

It was, she added, “so worth it.”

It’s the first leading movie role for Ross, 47, who spent eight years starring on the series “Girlfriends” before finding even greater acclaim on “black-ish,” the ABC family comedy. She’s now a producer on one of its spinoffs, “mixed-ish,” a prequel for her character (who is based, as an adult, on the wife of Kenya Barris, who created “black-ish”). Ross is the rare star whose clout has grown and diversified as she’s matured — she gave a TED Talk in 2018 and started a hair care company, specializing in curls, in 2019. “‘Black-ish’ made a very big shift in the opportunities that were accessible to me,” she said, adding that they came at a time “when my ego kind of had let go of them.”

She spoke, by Zoom and phone, from her home in Los Angeles, where she has been holed up during the coronavirus pandemic, learning to record the voice-overs for “mixedish” from her bedroom. “My discomfort is a privilege,” she said, “when people’s livelihoods are gone, and they have no sense of when and how they will find another paycheck, when the unemployment rate is so high, and it’s mostly the black and brown women who have been affected.

“Today’s heart is very heavy and broken,” Ross added.

It was two days after George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis, died, pleading, “I can’t breathe,” to the white police officer who kept a knee on his neck; across the country, protests against police brutality were beginning.

Her movie, the culmination of a lifelong dream, deals with inequality, sexism, ageism and racism — now, Ross was also grateful that it might be an escape. “The movie is bright and joyful and a feel-good movie,” she said, “that hopefully will offer people a small respite, in the midst of so much heavy stuff.”

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Was it always on the table for you to sing in the movie?

A: Yeah. It was a childhood dream of mine. I don’t know where consciously or unconsciously it kind of got put aside. And it’s also not that I haven’t sung. I sang the open-

Tracee Ellis Ross, in her home in Los Angeles, photographed via computer monitor in New York in a video call,

ing title song to the show I did on Lifetime in the ’90s [“The Dish”]. I sang in talent shows in high school. I have always wanted to sing, and I also have always really wanted the right movie to come along. Like, if I look back at old vision boards, when I was making vision boards, I had put on there that I wanted to do a musical biopic or a musical on Broadway, and also longing to find the right movie role.

I think I hoped I could sing, too, and until I got into that studio and finally heard myself for the first time, it was all a bit of a “who knows?” Sure, I’ve done some comedic singing, and I’ve done some hosting singing, and I’ve definitely sang in the car and the shower. But me with a microphone in my face — oh my God. So it was purposeful and also magical that this was a special enough role to encourage me to walk through my terror.

Q: I often hear from performers that they like to take jobs that slightly terrify them. Are you one of those kinds of actors?

A: I think I’m one of those people. I wouldn’t say I’m a skydiver, but I lean toward things that are healthy risky behavior, that allow me to stretch and grow and become more whole, and explore parts of myself that seem like we should never touch. It’s not that I get off on it. I become more from it.

This is the kind of person I am: I want to do something, and then I just run and jump off the edge, and at some point, once I land on the bottom — whether my knees are broken, my ankles are broken, or whatever it is — that’s when I get scared. I don’t usually get afraid while it’s happening, but when it’s finished, I’m like, “What did I just do?” And then I go through these cycles of shame and cold sweats.

I remember somewhere along my journey discovering that about myself, and going, “You know, Tracee, there’s elevators, stairs, bridges, ladders. There’s all of these different ways that you can actually come down from the cliff. You don’t have to just think you have wings.”

The TED Talk was another example. What was I thinking? They wanted me to be funny, and I was like, “The talk I’ve written has nothing to do with humor.” [It was about female rage.] I was supposed to be on the first day of the conference, and like three hours before it was supposed to start, they were like, “We’d love you to actually open.” I was like, “Open what?” They were like, “Be the first person.”

And I was like, “That sounds like a horrible idea. Are you insane? Sure. I’ll do it.”

Q: You’ve said that during “Girlfriends,” you were surprised that the doors of Hollywood didn’t open wider. Did that change after “black-ish”? Did the movie roles come then?

A: During “Girlfriends,” not only did the pearly gates of Hollywood not open, it was still locked. I was like, “Oh, is there a key? There’s no key? Nothing here? OK. Cool.”

I think once “black-ish” started and then particularly

The San Juan Daily Star once I won the Golden Globe, there was a shift for me.

It’s a combination, honestly, of the Golden Globe and the hair company, and realizing that some of my biggest, oldest dreams were happening. My manager said, “What do you want to be doing? Let’s be purposeful about it. I think you’ve got to dream some new dreams.” And I was like, “Holy moly.

I’ve had these dreams for so long! How do you start dreaming new dreams when you’ve had the same ones for so long?”

I went through this realization of, I’ve spent a lot of years taking what I was given and trying to make it into something that feels good, whether it was really what I wanted or just what I was offered. And realizing, if I’m going to do a movie at this point after waiting this long, what kind of movie do I want to do? What’s the right one?

And then this script came along, and it felt like it was sent from heaven. I chased this.

Q: Did you consult on the script?

A: We all did. First of all, at 47 years old and as outspoken as I am, and with as clear of a point of view as I have about life — particularly about sharing stories and narratives of black women — yes, I spoke up. And it was wonderful working with a director [Nisha Ganatra], a woman of color, who had a sensitivity, a willingness and openness to dive into areas with care that needed to be looked at.

Our writer, Flora [Greeson] — she has become one of my closest friends — had a real willingness to say, “If that snags you, then we really need to take a look at it — like, I’m not a black woman. Let’s get a little crew of us together where we have enough diverse voices here so we can sort this out.”

That’s something I always think when I work, even if it makes people uncomfortable.

Q: What is your relationship with Kenya Barris like, now that you are co-producers on “mixed-ish” and you’re portraying something based on his family?

A: It started as portraying his life, but we’re so far from his experiences. We’re telling the stories coming out of the writers’ room. So although my character’s name is his wife’s name, I don’t think of it that way anymore.

And then there’s his [Netflix] show, “#BlackAF”; that is also his story. Everyone keeps asking me if Rashida [Jones, who plays his wife on that show] is actually married to Kenya. I’m like, “Oh my God, people, you don’t get it.”

And then, by the way, there’s all this stuff out there that I’m dating Kenya. I’m like, “Guys, what is going on? This is crazy.” Kenya was on “Girlfriends,” and so we have this longstanding friendship. We worked very similarly on “blackish,” even though I was not a producer. We’ve always done that kind of producer-ial partner thing together, like running work things by each other.

Executive producing for me is very similar to running my hair company. Very different from acting. I feel like I act from my gut and my heart, and I produce and run a company from my mind.

Q: A theme in the film is the difficulty of being in the shadow of an iconic artist, and the pressures on a star who is also a parent. Is that something you related to?

A: I think that was the one place where the idea of being someone’s child — the world doesn’t realize the intricacy of just what that is. I know in the case of my mom, everything

Monday, June 1, 2020

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Ross plays Grace Davis in “The High Note,” a superstar singer looking for a refresh; enter her striving personal assistant (Dakota Johnson) who dreams of being a producer. in her life is about making it good for her children. Everything she does is just about, how can she love us more, better and more fully? Diana Ross is one thing, but my mom is an exceptional love. So to think that anything of her job, life, career, gift, any of that would have made it difficult in any way for her children, I think would devastate her.

Perhaps because I was walking through the singing part of it, it just did not dawn on me that people were going to be like, “Is this a story of your mother?” No. It has nothing to do with it. I didn’t even think about it, guys.

Q: What was the most egregious thing you’ve witnessed someone asking of their assistant? Your character is not a monster, but she does ask her assistant to give her an enema.

A: When I first got the script, I was like, “Guys, we have to take this out. Nobody does this.” It got down to the moment we were shooting the scene, and again I was like, “Guys, nobody would do this.” And Dakota goes [low voice], “People do it.”

I’m like, “Are you [expletive] kidding me? This is not the way I operate. My assistants don’t do anything like that.”

This is one of the places where, because of whose child I am, I felt very protective of not creating a caricature. I don’t even remember my mom having an assistant, and she doesn’t have one now. That’s not what I was raised with.

I do know that some larger-than-life people are ridiculous in how they behave and treat people around them. I’ve witnessed it. But I have great compassion for the amount of care and vulnerability that has to exist underneath that artistry, and that the closest people to you are sometimes your

assistants or your publicist or your manager, and they do get the hard stuff because it’s got to go somewhere. I’ve had moments where my assistant is the person that gets the tears of, “I can’t do it. Literally don’t put another thing on my schedule, like there’s no food in the schedule. I’m starving, and I’m tired.” [Miming ugly crying.]

Q: So, wait. Nothing in the character reminded you of your mom?

A: I mean, of course it did. I was playing a superstar music lady. But I wasn’t like: “Yes, this is a moment that reminds me of when my mother did…” — no, not at all; or let me do my “this is me being my mom.” Literally, it just didn’t come up for me. The only way it came up for me was, I was very convinced that Grace Davis wore fake eyelashes.

Tracee hates them. That she always wore really high heels.

I wear Birkenstocks. That she had stage hair and home hair, and life hair. These were things — which again have nothing to do with my mother — these were just things I wanted to do character-wise. But when Tracee puts on eyelashes and a whole bunch of hair, it’s inevitable. I look like my mom’s child. She spit me out.

[But] I get it. I really do. I’ve been my mom’s child for 47 years. I am very aware of the magnitude of her impact in the world, the bigness of her planet, the fact that her career absolutely is part of the reason that I can do what I do in my career. From a professional standpoint, I absolutely get it, and it wasn’t the case.

I was busy living my life. I was busy trying to do something that scared me.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

Thinking about flying? Here’s what you need to know now

By TARIRO MZEZEWA

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n Friday, the Transportation Security Administration screened 348,673 people at American airports, the most since travel went into a free-fall in mid-March, likely driven by people traveling ahead of Memorial Day weekend. Still, a year ago, more than 2.7 million people were screened, showing just how far the industry has to come back.

For people who are thinking of flying this summer, or in the months after, air travel will be a far different experience than it was before the coronavirus. The days of casually hopping in a cab or Uber to the airport, then jostling for space in the overhead, are over, at least for the moment. From the curb to the plane, each portion of the journey has new rules and new things to think about.

Here’s what we know about navigating air travel safely now.

What’s the best way to get to the airport?

If someone you have been isolating with can drop you in their own car, that raises the least possible risk. If you need to take a car service like Uber or Lyft, you should remember that those companies are not allowing ride shares (so you can expect to pay more for your ride) and it’s courteous to drivers and passengers who come after you to wipe down the seat and door handle before exiting the car. Uber and Lyft are requiring that all passengers and drivers wear masks.

The companies said they were also providing cleaning supplies to as many drivers as possible.

Many airports around the country have changed their drop-off, pickup and parking procedures to encourage people to keep moving. Make sure you know what your airport’s current policies on drop-off and parking are. Most airports have created pages with COVID-19 updates. Many airports have closed their long-term parking lots but are keeping daily and hourly garages open.

Most airports have adjusted their rules to allow only ticketed passengers and people helping them check in to enter terminals, so take that into account when planning who will accompany you.

Before going to the airport, how should I prepare?

Flying has always been a high-touch exercise so think about all those points and how you can minimize them. Wrapping your-

An airline employee at Washington National Airport in early May. The number of people flying has been down by 90 percent in recent weeks. self head to toe in plastic wrap is not really necessary, but you should carry — and use — a mask, wipes and hand sanitizer. Some experts suggest wearing gloves, although the Centers for Disease Control’s guidance suggests they are not necessary.

Most airlines suggest that travelers download their app for touchless boarding, which will minimize the number of times you have to hand over documents or touch screens. Think about whether you want to check a bag or if you can make the trip with a carry-on (experts don’t necessarily think one is better than the other). Some airlines have shut down self-service kiosks, and others, like United, have begun rolling out touchless kiosks that allow customers to print bag tags using their own devices to scan a QR code.

What should I expect at the airport?

Lots of cleaning. Airports have been cleaning everything from the floors and surfaces to the air more rigorously. Long Island MacArthur Airport, for example, is using something called Continuous Air and Surface Pathogen Reduction, a system that continuously sanitizes air and surfaces. CASPR attacks pathogens by converting oxygen and moisture into hydrogen peroxide and releasing that into the air. Pittsburgh International recently became the first American airport to use robots with UV-C rays to clean and disinfect the floors in high-traffic areas.

Other airports have increased hand sanitizer stations throughout the airport as well as the regularity with which they are cleaning; in some cases it’s hourly. Many are

also requiring all passengers to wear masks.

JetBlue said last week that it had increased the frequency with which it was cleaning surfaces in its airport terminals with a hospital-grade disinfectant. United also said last week that it was working with Cleveland Clinic experts and Clorox to ensure it was using the best cleaning practices.

Many airport shops may be closed, and not all airlines are serving food on flights, so you may want to bring your own food for the plane. Most airports are discouraging the use of cash. You may want to make sure you have a tap-to-pay card or have set up contactless payments like Apple Pay on your phone.

How can I be safe during check in and security?

That’s where your at-home prep comes in. Do as much of the process on your airline’s app as you can. Bring hand sanitizer in case you need to hand over documents or your phone, or if you need to key anything in at a kiosk. Pay attention to the floor markers indicating the proper social distancing. Even though crowds have been thin, maintaining social distancing may be difficult, so wear your mask. Expect TSA agents to be wearing them as well.

TSA has tweaked its security procedures to reduce how much travelers have to handle security bins and to keep agents from touching travelers’ belongings. At the podium, you no longer have to hand your boarding pass to a TSA agent. Instead, you will place your electronic or paper boarding pass on the boarding pass reader yourself. Af-

ter scanning, you should hold your boarding pass up for an agent to inspect it.

How can I make it through the boarding scrum?

Ask your airline what its current procedure for boarding is. Southwest, for example, has been having people board in groups of 10, with people lining up on only one side of its boarding poles. United is boarding people by row, with people sitting in the back of the plane boarding after preboarding groups.

JetBlue is also implementing back-to-front boarding. Most airlines are boarding fewer people at a time to keep crowds from forming at the gate, on the jet bridge and as people get on the plane. Airlines are also asking people to scan their own boarding passes.

Policies differ by airline, but most airlines are asking passengers to wear masks to board and on flights.

Do I need to keep my mask on?

Yes, most airlines are asking people to keep them on for the duration of their flight.

You should know that the air on the plane is pretty clean: Commercial planes recycle cabin air using High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filters, so the air might not be fresh, but it is scrubbed. HEPA filters catch 99% of airborne microbes, according to the International Air Transportation Association, an industry group.

Masks can be taken off to eat and drink (on airlines that are serving meals). You can bring your own food onto the plane, although Southwest is asking people to eat before traveling. United recently introduced an “all in one” economy snack bag that includes a sanitizer wipe, an 8.5 oz. bottled water, a Stroopwafel and a package of pretzels. It is being passed out during the flight.

Will someone be in the seat next to me?

Possibly. Pictures of flights in which every seat seems full have been making the rounds on social media. They are not the norm. On average, flights are carrying about 39 passengers, down from the first two months of the year, when flights were carrying about 85 to 100 passengers.

Airlines for America, an industry lobbying group, says that most flights — about 73% — are less than 50% full.

“Airlines are attempting to leave some seats open for distancing between travelers when feasible, but not all circumstances allow for that,” the organization said in a statement this week.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

23

You’re getting used to masks. Will you wear a face shield?

By KNVUL SHEIKH

T

he debate over whether Americans should wear face masks to control coronavirus transmission has been settled. Governments and businesses now require or at least recommend them in many public settings. But as parts of the country reopen, some doctors want you to consider another layer of personal protective equipment in your daily life: clear plastic face shields.

“I wear a face shield every time I enter a store or other building,” Dr. Eli Perencevich said. “Sometimes I also wear a cloth mask if required by the store’s policy.”

Perencevich is an infectious disease physician at the University of Iowa and the Iowa City Veterans Affairs Health Care System. In an opinion article published last month in JAMA, he and two colleagues argued that simple, clear plastic face shields could help reduce the transmission of infections when added to public health measures like increased testing, contact tracing, social distancing and hand hygiene.

The idea is not just a thought experiment. In Singapore, preschool students and their teachers will receive face shields when they return to school next month. Local health experts recommended that teachers in Philadelphia wear shields when schools reopen, and a teachers union in Palo Alto, California, requested them as well.

But it can be difficult to imagine Americans being willing to put on another form of protective equipment. President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have shirked wearing masks in settings that would seem to call for them, and simple face-covering requirements have provoked conflicts at grocery stores and restaurants.

Face shields have long been required equipment for many procedures in hospitals. Doctors and nurses wear them when intubating COVID-19 patients and during surgeries that may cause blood and bone fragments to fly out.

As debate arose over whether tiny coronavirus droplets could float on air currents, protecting the eyes and the entire face became a bigger issue in health care settings, said Dr. Sherry Yu, a dermatology resident affiliated with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. People needed them to do nasal swabs for the coronavirus test or for triage in the emergency room. As shortages loomed, Yu was among the many people and groups around the country who began fabricating face shields for front-line health care workers.

“The nice thing about face shields is that they can be resterilized and cleaned by the user, so they’re reusable indefinitely until some component breaks or cracks,” Yu said.

A simple alcohol wipe or rinse with soap and hot water is all it takes for the shields to be contaminant-free again.

Surgical masks and N95s, on the other hand, are meant to be disposed after each use, although some studies have shown masks can be reused two or three times after being sterilized before they lose integrity.

Perencevich believes that face shields should be the preferred personal protective equipment of everyone for the same reason that health care workers use them: They protect the entire face, including the eyes, and prevent people from

The clear plastic guards may be easier to wear, disinfect and reuse than cloth or surgical face coverings, although they don’t entirely replace the need for masks. touching their faces or inadvertently exposing themselves to the coronavirus.

Face shields may be easier to wear than masks, he said, comparing them with wearing glasses or a hat. They wrap around a small portion of a person’s forehead rather than covering more than half their face with material that can create the urge to itch.

Many people also wear masks incorrectly, letting them dangle off the tips of their noses or concealing just their mouths. People also tend to readjust face masks frequently or remove them to communicate with others, which increases their risk of being exposed or infecting others, he said. And while cloth masks can prevent people from spreading germs to others, they don’t usually protect the wearer from infection.

Face shields can also aid people who depend on lipreading, Perencevich said. They may be slightly dorky-looking, but the shields allow facial expressions and lip movements to remain visible while serving as an obvious reminder to maintain social distancing.

Still, he and other experts acknowledge that face shields have their limits.

Just like masks, they must be removed when eating in

cafeterias or restaurants. And studies on how effectively they can reduce a person’s viral exposure are scarce.

One cough simulation study in 2014 suggested that a shield could reduce a user’s viral exposure by 96% when worn within 18 inches of someone who was coughing. But most people in the general public are much farther away from others they are interacting with, said William Lindsley, a bioengineer at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health who led the study. Large droplets that may contain virus will fall to the ground quickly, reducing the need for a face shield worn when standing farther away.

Even in close range, there can be scenarios where face shields are not as effective as masks like N95s that create a seal around one’s face.

“If you’re facing sideways, or I’m behind you — maybe you’re sitting at a desk, and I’m standing — there’s other scenarios you can imagine where droplets can come around a face shield,” Lindsley said.

There is also no research on how well one person’s face shield protects other people from viral transmission, the concept called source control that is a primary benefit of surgical and cloth masks.

24

Monday, June 1, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

These large carnivorous lizards are right where they belong demonstrating that the monitor lizards of Palau, the Western Caroline Islands and the Mariana Islands are previously undescribed species native to those islands.

The team of scientists argues that the lizards

likely rode ocean currents up to 1,500 miles in some cases, from Indonesia northeastward, where they naturally colonized these Pacific islands hunou can’t accuse a monitor lizard of being a dreds of thousands of years ago. picky eater.

“Some of those islands are so remote. It’s pretThe carnivorous, fork-tongued reptiles ty difficult to explain how they got there,” feed on insects, spiders, bird eggs, molsaid Valter Weijola, a biologist at Finlusks, crabs, fish, amphibians and roland’s University of Turku and lead audents — dead or alive. Deer represent a thor of the study. But his team’s research large portion of the diets of the Komodo shows they made this ocean crossing dragon, the largest monitor lizard spewithout help from humans. And since cies, which is native to eastern Indonetheir disembarkment, they’ve evolved sia. into two distinct species.

“They’ll feed at garbage piles and Researchers examined more than 50 eat chicken bones. Whatever’s availMicronesian monitor lizard specimens able,” said Fred Kraus, an evolutionary from museums around the world. First, biologist at the University of Michigan. they compared physical characteristics, “They probably would take puppies, measuring and noting details like body too, if they get them.” proportions, scale pattern and tongue Monitor lizards have been found color. living on the most far-flung islands of Then they ran molecular tests on Micronesia in the Pacific Ocean. For tissue samples. DNA sequencing and decades, people assumed humans analysis revealed two Micronesian spedropped off these unfussy carnivores, cies were genetically distinct from other turning them into especially threatenknown monitor lizards in the Asia-Pacific ing ecological invaders. But a study published Wednesday in Royal Society A young specimen of Varanus bennetti, a newly described species of moni- region. It also suggested each evolved in geographic and genetic isolation long Open Science refutes this presumption, tor lizard on Losiep Island, Micronesia. before any humans arrived in Micronesia.

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The San Juan Daily Star LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA DE CAGUAS.

RODRIGUEZ MALAVE: JO HAN MARIE RODRIGUEZ CRUZ Y JUAN FRANCISCO RODRIGUEZ CRUZ

Monday, June 1, 2020 SOBRE: CANCELACION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

Parte Demandada CIVIL NÚM. CG201CV04475. A: JOHN DOE V RICHARD SALÓN: SOBRE: LIQUIDAROE o sea, las personas CION DE COMUNIDAD HEParte Demandante vs. ignoradas que puedan REDITARIA. EMPLAZAMIENTSUCESION DE JUAN POO RE DICTO. DEL ESTADO ser tenedores del pagaré RODRIGUEZ MALAVE: JO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERextraviado.

HAN MARIE RODRIGUEZ TO RICO. Por Ia presente se es notifica que se ha presentada ante CRUZ Y JUAN A: JOHAN MARIE este tribunal una Demanda, FRANCISCO RODRIGUEZ RODRIGUEZ CRUZ en el caso de epígrafe, en Ia CRUZ #2710 Dixie LN, Kissimee cual se solicita a cancelación Parte Demandada . Florida 34744 de dos (2) pagares, los cuaCIVIL NÚM. CG201CV04475. POR LA PRESENTE se le emles se relacionan continuación: SALÓN: SOBRE: LIQUIDA- plaza y se le notifica que una a) Pagaré favor de Estados CION DE COMUNIDAD HE- Demanda ha sido presentado Unidos de America actuando REDITARIA. EMPLAZAMIENT- en su contra, la cual obra en el por conducto de Ia AdminisPOO RE DICTO. DEL ESTADO expediente de el Honorable Tritración de Hogares de AgriLIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUER- bunal de Primera Instancia sala cultores, o a su orden, por Ia TO RICO. de Caguas, en el caso de epí- suma principal de $26,500.00, 1. A: JUAN FRANCISCO grafe y se le requiere para que con intereses al 8.25 % anual, conteste la demanda dentro de vencedera en 33 años, según RODRIGUEZ CRUZ: #2710 Dixie LN, Kissimee los treinta (30) días siguientes consta de a escritura número a la publicación de este edic- 274, otorgada en Canóvanas, . Florida 347 44 to, radicando el original de su el 25 de mayo de 1978, ante POR LA PRESENTE se le emcontestación ante el Tribunal el Notario Miguel Bauzó Colon, plaza y se le notifica que una correspondiente y notificando inscrita at folio 286 del tomo Demanda ha sido presentado con copia de la misma a la par- 108 de Canóvanas, finca núen su contra, la cual obra en el te demandante por conducto de mero 5726; b) Pagaré favor expediente de el Honorable Trisus abogados. de Estados Unidos de America bunal de Primera Instancia sala VAZQUEZ & ASSOCIATES actuando por conducto de Ia de Caguas, en el caso de epíLAW OFFICES grafe y se le requiere para que f:/ LCDA. ROSA L. VAZQUEZ LOPEZ Administración de Hogares de Agricultores, o a su orden, por RUA2 0486 conteste la demanda dentro de 319 CALLE CESAR GONZALEZ Ia suma principal de $8,000.00, los treinta (30) días siguientes HATO REY, PR 00918 con intereses al 9.25 % anual, a la publicación de este edicTEL: (787) 766-0949/ vencedera en 33 años, según to, radicando el original de su FAX: (781) 771-2425 consta de Ia escritura número contestación ante el Tribunal CORREO ELECTRÓNICO: 50, otorgada en Canóvanas, el VAZOUEZYASOC!ADOSPR@ correspondiente y notificando 7 de agosto de 1986, ante el GMA!L.COM con copia de la misma a la parte demandante por conducto de Se le apercibe que de no hacer- Notario Marcos Rivera Ortiz, lo, se podrá dictar Sentencia en inscrita al folio 288 del tomo sus abogados. rebeldía concediendo el reme- 108 de Canóvanas, finca núVAZQUEZ & ASSOCIATES LAW OFFICES dio solicitado en la demanda, mero 5726. Urbana: Solar radif:/ LCDA. ROSA L. VAZQUEZ LOPEZ sin citarle ni oírle. EXPEDIDO cado en Ia Urbanización Villas RUA2 0486 BAJO MI FIRMA y sello del de Loiza, situada en el Barrio 319 CALLE CESAR GONZALEZ Tribunal , hoy dia 18 de mayo Canóvanas del Municipio de HATO REY, PR 00918 de 2020. C.armen Ana Pereira Loiza, marcado con el número TEL: (787) 766-0949/ FAX: (781) 771-2425 Ortiz, Sec Regional, Carmen R 4 del Bloque AD, con un rea de CORREO ELECTRÓNICO: Diaz Caceres, Sec de Servicios 230.00 metros cuadrados. En VAZOUEZYASOC!ADOSPR@ lindes por el Norte, en 10.00 a Sala GMA!L.COM metros, con los solares 45 y Se le apercibe que de no hacerLEGAL NOTICE 46; por el Sur, en 10.00 metros lo, se podrá dictar Sentencia en ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO con Ia calle 24; por el Este, en rebeldía concediendo el remeDE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- 23.00 metros con el solar 5 y dio solicitado en la demanda, NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA por el Oeste, en 23.00 metros sin citarle ni oírle. EXPEDIDO SALA DE CAROLINA-SALA con el solar Contiene una casa BAJO MI FIRMA y sello del de concreto reforzado, diseñaSUPERIOR. Tribunal , hoy dia 18 de mayo da para una familia. Consta insVICTOR RIVERA de 2020. Carmen Ana Pereira RIVERA Y YOLANDA crita al folio 286 del tomo 108 Ortiz, Sec Regional, Carmen R de Canóvanas, finca 5,726, Diaz Caceres, Sec de Servicios CARRASQUILLO ROSA Registro de Ia Propiedad de a Sala Demandante, Vs. Carolina, Sección Tercera. Se ESTADOS UNIDOS le advierte que este edicto se LEGAL NOT ICE DE AMERICA POR publicará en un periódico de ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO circulación general una sola CONDUCTO DE LA DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL vez y que si no comparece a ADMINISTRACION GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIcontestar dicha Demanda denDE HOGARES DE BUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANtro del término de treinta (30) CIA DE CAGUAS. AGRICULTORES (USDA), días, contados a partir de Ia ELIZABETH JOHN DOE Y RICHARD publicación de este edicto, el RODRIGUEZ BAEZ ROE, tribunal podrá dictar sentencia Parte Demandante vs.

Demandados en rebeldía en su contra y conCIVIL NUM. CA2020CV01060. ceder el remedio solicitado en SUCESION DE JUAN

ELIZABETH RODRIGUEZ BAEZ

@

staredictos1@outlook.com

a demanda o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su discrición, lo entiende procedente. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), el cual puede acceder utilizando Ia siguiente dirección electrónica: https:// unired.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio. El abogado de Ia parte demandante es: Lcdo. RaOl Rivera Burgos, RUA 8879, Estancias de San Fernando, Calle 4, Numero 4, A-35, Carolina, P.R. 00985, Tel. (787) 238-7665, Email: EXPEDIDO bajo ml firma y sello de este Tribunal de Carolina, Puerto Rico, hoy día 19 de mayo de 2020. Lcda.

Marilyn Aponte Rodriguez, Secretaria Regional. Eliann Reyes Morales, Secretaria Auxiliar del Tribunal.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA REGION JUDICIAL DE CAROLINA SALA SUPERIOR DE TRUJILLO ALTO.

CENTURION INSURANCE AGENCY, INC. por sí y como parte interesada Demandante V.

COOPERATIVA DE AHORRO Y CRÉDITO DE LOS EMPLEADOS DEL CENTRO MÉDICO JOHN DOE y RICHARD DOE

Demandados CIVIL NÚM. TJ2020CV00010.

SALA: SOBRE: Cancelación o Restitución de Pagaré Hipotecario. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. S.S.

A: JOHN DOE/ RICHARD DOE

Quedan notificados que la demandante de epígrafe ha radicado en este Tribunal una Demanda contra ustedes como co-demandados en la que se solicita la cancelación de un Pagaré Hipotecario a favor de la Cooperativa de Ahorro y Crédito de los Empleados de Centro Médico, o a su orden, por la suma principal de $113,000.00 e intereses al 4.75% anual y vencimiento el 1ro de junio de 2039, mediante la Escritura Número 2 otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico ante el notario público Federico Rivera Sáez. El mencionado Pagaré Hipotecario grava el inmueble que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar radicado en la

(787) 743-3346

25 Urbanización Fair View, sita en el Barrio Cuevas de Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, marcado con el número seis (6) del Bloque “G”, compuesta de cuatrocientos cincuenta y nueve punto cuarenta y cinco metros cuadrados (459.45 mc). En lindes por el NORTE, con solares treinta y dos (32) y treinta y cuatro (34), distancia de trece punto ochenta y ocho metros (13.88 m); por el SUR, con calle número once (11), distancia de dieciséis punto setenta y cinco metros (16.75 m); por el ESTE, con solar número cinco (5), distancia de treinta metros (30.00 m) y por el OESTE, con solar número siete (7), distancia de treinta metros (30.00 m). Enclava una casa de concreto diseñada para una familia. Consta inscrita al folio 60 del tomo 98 de Trujillo Alto, finca número 4,355, Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección IV de San Juan.Se les advierte que el presente Edicto se publicará en un periódico de circulación general una sola vez y se le requieres para que contesten la Demanda de epígrafe dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación del edicto, radicando el original de su contestación en el Tribunal correspondiente y notificando con copia de la misma a la parte demandante a la siguiente dirección: BUFETE APONTE & CORTÉS, LLC. LCDA. ERIKA MORALES MARENGO PO Box 195337 San Juan, Puerto Rico 00919-5337 Tel. (787) 302-0014 / (787) 239-5661 / Email: emarengo16@yahoo.com Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se presente por derecho propio. Se le apercibe que de no hacerlo, el Tribunal podrá dictar Sentencia en rebeldía concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda, sin citarle ni oírle. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy día 13 de febrero de 2020. Lcda. Marilyn Aponte Rodriguez, Sec Regional. Mayra Carrasquillo Betancourt, SubSecretaria.

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

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO, COMO AGENTE DE SERVICIO DE PENTAGON FEDERAL CREDIT UNION (PFCU) (PENFED)

Demandante

RAMON ENRIQUE BURGOS GARAY, MARELIS JUDITH MENDOZA GUEVARA Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS, FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. BY2019CV04699.

SALA: 505. Sobre: SUSTITUCION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: RAMON ENRIQUE BURGOS GARAY, MARELIS JUDITH

MENDOZA GUEVARA Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS; FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS

(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 13 de mayo 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 18 de mayo de 2020. En SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, el 18 de mayo de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretario(a). F/ MILITZA MERCADO RIVERA, Secretaria Auxiliar.

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26

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

These athletes had the Coronavirus. Will they ever be the same?

By ANDREW KEH

I

t was the end of March, and Josh Fiske, a urologist from Livingston, N.J., was in the hospital fighting an uphill battle against the coronavirus. Just a week earlier, he had easily jogged a 5-mile route around his neighborhood. But his body was failing him now.

His oxygen levels dipped dangerously low, and his fever rocketed to a worrying 104 degrees. Shifting his body in bed exhausted him. Walking a few steps felt like “hiking in thin air.” Opening a bottle of iced tea was “a huge task.”

Fiske kept fighting, though, and eventually, with the help of his doctors, he turned a corner. Yet even as he did, even as he seemed assured of avoiding the worst outcomes of the virus, a different sort of anxiety consumed him.

“I started to think, ‘Am I going to be able to run again? Am I going to be able to walk the golf course?’” said Fiske, 46, who does a marathon or half-marathon every year. “These are things I love to do.”

The coronavirus has infected millions of people around the world. Athletes tend to view themselves as perhaps better equipped than the general population to avoid the worst consequences of the disease the virus causes, COVID-19.

Yet interviews with athletes who have contracted the virus — from professionals to college athletes to weekend hobbyists — revealed their surprise at the potency of its symptoms, struggles to re-establish workout regimens, lingering battles with lung issues and muscle weakness, and unsettling bouts of anxiety about whether they would be able to match their physical peaks.

Experts warn that the virus does not discriminate.

That was the lesson Andrew Boselli, an offensive lineman at Florida State, learned as members of his family — including his father, Tony, 47, a former NFL lineman — began showing symptoms in March.

“I knew I was young and healthy,” said Boselli, 22, who moved home to Jacksonville, Fla., after the university closed its doors.

“I play Division 1 football, and I’ve been training my butt off all winter and spring.

I thought I had no worries. I wasn’t going to get it.”

That bullish attitude faded days later,

Tsang Yee-ting, left, a karateka from Hong Kong, worried about regaining her form. She says she has. when he awoke feeling sluggish and short of breath. That night, his body temperature climbed to 104.

“It was the sickest I’ve ever felt,” said Boselli, who continued to feel shortness of breath and fatigue for about a week and a half.

In Italy, Paulo Dybala, an Argentine player with Juventus, described his own unnerving experience dealing with respiratory symptoms.

“I would try to train and was short of breath after five or 10 minutes,” Dybala said in an interview with the Argentine Football Association, “and we realized something was not right.”

Panagis Galiatsatos, a pulmonary physician and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins, said that, like much about the disease, the long-term consequences for athletes who contract it are not fully understood.

Athletes, though, represent interesting case studies for doctors, given their generally good baseline health and nuanced awareness of their own bodies.

“Patients who are athletes, I love them,

because they will pick up subtle changes sometimes way before even the tests identify a disease,” Galiatsatos said.

Galiatsatos singled out three complications from COVID-19 that could be of particular concern to athletes.

First, coronavirus patients, like anyone with a serious respiratory infection, were at risk for long-term lung issues. He often saw patients “who three months ago had a bad virus and still can’t get their breathing back to normal.”

“Sometimes a bad virus creates an airway disease similar to asthma,” he said.

“They can ravage the lungs, where the lungs were rebuilt, but not well, and patients are stuck with an asthma-like reactive airway disease situation.”

Another complication that Galiatsatos considered particularly concerning to athletes, and one that experts were still trying to wrap their heads around, was the high incidence of blood clots that doctors were seeing in coronavirus patients. People diagnosed with blood clots, and prescribed blood thinners, are typically discouraged

from participating in contact sports.

Finally, Galiatsatos said people unfortunate enough to be placed in intensive care could deal with “ICU acquired weakness.”

Patients placed on ventilators and confined to a bed often lost between 2 percent and 10 percent of their muscle mass per day, he said.

Ben O’Donnell, a triathlete who lives in Anoka County, Minn., lost 45 pounds during a four-week hospital stay during which he was placed on a ventilator and a short-term life support machine.

O’Donnell, 38, a former college football player who completed an Ironman race a couple of years ago and was planning on doing another this fall, said he was pulled back from the brink of death after struggling with dangerously low levels of oxygen and kidney and liver failure in the intensive care unit.

In mid-February, in anticipation of ramping up his training, O’Donnell had completed a two-day, comprehensive physical exam and received a clean bill of health.

Doctors believe he contracted the virus five days later.

Back at home after his harrowing month in the hospital, O’Donnell has set his sights on competing in an Ironman race in Arizona this fall. He acknowledged it was a lofty goal.

“They’re not sure if I’ll ever get full lung capacity back,” he said. “I may or may not.”

Had he not contracted the virus, O’Donnell, an executive at a chemical company, would be doing three runs, three swims and three bicycle workouts per week at this point in his training cycle. But the virus derailed his life plans.

After returning home, he needed a walker just to go out to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. In his first attempt to exercise, two days after he left the hospital, he walked for seven minutes at a speed of 1.2 mph using supplemental oxygen. He has been trying to add a minute of time, and a bit of speed, each day.

O’Donnell said he was struggling with “a fair amount of doubt” about his ability to get back in shape for the race. But he has motivated himself with the secondary goal of raising money for coronavirus relief, and he has been repeating the same mantra ever since he was struggling in his hospital bed: “Don’t stop. Don’t quit. Keep moving forward.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

27

Why major sports might risk comebacks during the pandemic

By MATTHEW FUTTERMAN

O

nce more, the pronouncements arrived in a torrent, although this time they were about rebirth rather than cancellation.

The NBA was planning to start up again in late July. The NHL announced that a playoff tournament would take place through the summer. MLB was continuing negotiations with its players for a shortened season. The NFL was moving toward opening training facilities. Soccer leagues for both men and women in North America were completing plans for summer tournaments. Toptier soccer leagues in England, Italy and Spain announced they would resume play in June.

After months filled with pessimism, hesitation, quiet planning and uncertainty about whether major sports would happen again in 2020, nearly every sport was preparing to come back, provided that work agreements with players could be negotiated and that public health authorities raised no objections.

Player representatives, league officials, lawyers and business consultants who work closely with them say the sudden shift resulted from a mix of dramatic changes few could foresee a month ago.

There has been an increase in the availability of testing, which has allowed some of the leagues, like many other businesses, to secure all the kits they believe they need. There were also far more mundane developments. Lisa Baird, commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), said a final linchpin for her league’s plan was gaining approval from its insurance company.

“Science has advanced,” Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, wrote recently in an email. “We know more than what we did before, and just speaking personally, my expectation is that science will continue to progress forward with therapies, testing and vaccines. I’m actually more optimistic about a vaccine coming early than what others

The Baltimore Ravens’ stadium. The N.F.L. has been moving toward reopening its training facilities. expect.”

Not everyone is as bullish as Cuban about the prospects for a vaccine, with most experts saying one won’t be widely available until at least early next year.

And while testing has increased both nationally and in the hardest-hit areas, it remains below a level that some epidemiologists say is needed to help mitigate future outbreaks.

But with reopening plans underway in all 50 states and with elected officials and the public eager for business activity to resume, league officials had a growing sense that there would be minimal opposition if they moved ahead with plans.

Also, people who work closely with the leagues and team owners said, the financial consequences of not returning, potentially billions of dollars in losses across the leagues, made trying to come back vital.

“The economics of missing an entire season are just really, really bad,” said Irwin Raij, co-chairman of the sports law practice at O’Melveny & Myers, who is in constant contact with numerous team officials and owners.

Finally, while certain players have expressed concerns about their safety, especially those with compromised im-

mune systems, most are like any other furloughed worker who wants to return to work and get paid, even if that means doing so without the usual comforts of the job.

“We are all going to have to be a little less judgmental,” said Alison Riske, a tennis player who recently participated in a four-player event on a private court in the backyard of an estate in Florida, without her usual support team. “We have to roll with the punches.”

J.C. Tretter, the Cleveland Browns center who is president of the NFL Players Association, said the desire to get back was strong, so long as it could happen safely.

“We all love playing football,” Tretter said last Friday from Cleveland. “We also love our teammates and our families.”

Regardless of the dire financial consequences the leagues were facing, none would have been able to pursue plans to reopen without the promise of fast, widespread testing.

For two months, league officials could not talk seriously about acquiring the necessary tests without giving the impression that their needs were more important than the general public’s.

During the last two weeks, as test-

ing became more widely available, even in the cities the virus has hit the hardest, such as New York, that concern has diminished. One top sports industry executive, who speaks regularly with the leaders of all the major sports, said the NBA had already secured enough tests to screen all of the players as often as they want. An NBA official, who asked not to be identified because the league’s comeback process is still evolving, confirmed that the testing hurdle had been cleared.

Baird said she had finally felt comfortable moving forward when medical experts signed off on an NWSL plan to test players before they arrive for the tournament in Utah, again when they show up, and then at least weekly during the monthlong competition.

Brian McCarthy, a spokesman for the NFL, said the league was still working on its testing process and securing the necessary kits.

According to people familiar with its plans, the NFL is weighing a series of scenarios in which it plays with no fans, or with stadiums at varying levels of spectator capacity.

McCarthy said the league was “preparing to play the 2020 NFL season as scheduled and with increased protocols and safety measures for all players, personnel and attendees.” He said health was the league’s “primary focus.”

Playing without fans would hardly be a panacea.

Gate revenues, concessions and other money that fans spend at games account for roughly 25 percent of the NFL’s $15 billion in revenue. Baseball collects about one-third of its $11 billion from the gate. But getting the games on television will generate at least some cash flow — and plenty of attention before fans decide to invest their passion and their disposable income elsewhere.

“You can offset some losses, but this is about going beyond 2020,” Raij said. “They need to keep the fans engaged.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

Champions League final to be moved from Turkey

By TARIQ PANJA

T

he Champions League final, one of sports’ most-watched annual events, will not be held in Istanbul, as had been planned, because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

UEFA, European soccer’s governing body and the event’s organizer, is considering alternative sites at which to complete the competition, which was in the round of 16 when, as with most other sporting events, it was paused indefinitely.

With national leagues starting to emerge to complete their seasons, UEFA is concluding talks on how to finish the Champions League and the secondarylevel Europa League in August. The Europa League final had been set for Gdansk, Poland. A decision will be made after a meeting of the executive committee June 17, said the person, who declined to speak publicly because talks on the alternative sites were still in progress.

UEFA will hold further talks this week with Turkish officials on moving the event. Istanbul could be picked to host the final at a later date.

Leagues that have restarted, or are planning to restart, are adopting strict hygiene protocols to ensure that games can be played safely while the virus remains a danger. UEFA is certain to adopt similar strategies, with games set to take place in empty stadiums and players being tested regularly. With European travel limited, and quarantine laws still in effect in some countries, it is also likely that most of the remaining games will take place at the site picked for the final.

The Spanish news media reported late last week that UEFA was planning to hold this year’s Champions League final, an event that draws more viewers globally than the Super Bowl, in Lisbon, Portugal. There are a few other candidates, according to the person with knowledge of the matter.

“A working group has been set up

Ataturk Olympic Stadium will no longer host this year’s Champions League final. with the participation of representatives from the leagues and clubs to examine calendar solutions and format options

that would allow for the completion of the current season,” a UEFA spokesman said. “A variety of options is being looked at, and no decisions have been made at this stage.”

What is certain is that the competition is unlikely to look like anything before, with calendar constraints necessitating that it be completed in as short a time as possible so players can rest before the next season starts in September.

The original date for the final at Ataturk Olympic Stadium in Istanbul was Saturday.

UEFA’s television contract for the Champions League is one of the richest in sports, with most of the money being paid out in prizes to teams that participate in the tournaments. Last season, UEFA paid nearly 2 billion euros ($2.2 billion) to participating teams.

Should it not be able to complete the tournament, UEFA would have to pay a ruinous rebate worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

A Danish soccer team invited 10,000 fans to a Zoom watch party

By TARIQ PANJA

W

hile their rivals in Denmark’s top soccer league returned to action without the support of their fans last week, the players at Aarhus-based AGF could rely on the presence of at least 10,000 spectators for their game against a local rival, Randers.

Well, kind of.

In a test of a fan experience that may become more common in the post-pandemic age, AGF’s fans took in the game not the club’s home field, Ceres Park, but as part of a giant Zoom meeting arranged by the team. Through 90 minutes of ebb and flow action, their shouts were piped into the stadium’s loudspeakers, and their faces were projected as a giant video wall of support as the Danish Superliga team sought a way for match-going fans to keep connected even as new hygiene protocols mean it may be several months before fans can set foot inside a stadium again.

The events are perhaps the best example yet of the innovation teams and leagues are be-

ing forced to consider as the sports industry grapples with ways to return to competition despite rules banning large public gatherings.

For millions of people the world over, the cherished ritual of attending a favorite arena, ballpark or stadium has been upended. In many places, that is likely to remain the case for at least the rest of the year.

So creative solutions, from drive-in movie theaters to broadcast feeds enhanced with crowd noise to AGF’s Zoom meetup last Thursday are suddenly part of a new gameday reality that would have seemed absurd only a few months ago.

To make Thursday’s meeting happen, AGF partnered with Zoom, the videoconferencing company whose technology — first launched only seven years ago — has been one of the breakout success stories of this year’s global lockdown.

Ahead of the game, AGF had asked fans to sign up for virtual tickets in the section of the stadium where they would normally sit and then grouped them together on video calls of up to 18 people. Each group was then briefly

projected onto one of the giant video screens set up inside Ceres Park before being replaced by another section of supporters.

There was even a smaller screen dedicated for “visiting” Randers fans.

“We are trying to re-create a community where you have your seat where you have always had it, so a season-ticket holder can come to the stadium and see those people that usually sit by them,” Carlsen had said in an interview earlier last week.

Fans did their best to shrink the distance.

Some dressed both themselves and their homes for the occasion, passionately displaying their support for AGF. At other times, the scene was more ordinary: a couple cuddling on a couch or a family gathered around a dining table.

For all the planning — moderators were hired to police the feeds for inappropriate behavior, and two fans were removed for exposing themselves — AGF officials and staff members said they were always conscious that nothing could substitute for the real thing.

Though the video screens took up a large chunk of the lower tier of the main stand, most

of the rest of the arena was a sea of empty gray seats, a reminder that things are not how they should be. And piped-in crowd noise — another attempt to improve the atmosphere — sometimes drowned out the fans’ Zoomenabled cheers.

Still, the experiment was closely watched by teams and leagues far and wide; executives from teams in Norway, the Netherlands and England have been in touch with AGF, and a spokesman for Zoom said West Ham United had approached its fans about the possibility of showing their reactions on the team’s video screens when the Premier League resumes play June 17.

“Football is supposed to be watched together in the stadium, so of course we would prefer not to do this,” Carlsen said.

For one day, though, the distance, and the medium, hardly seemed to matter when AGF’s captain, Patrick Mortenson, turned in a shot in injury time to help AGF pinch a 1-1 tie.

As the team’s fans celebrated on live video streaming in from hundreds of kitchens and living rooms, the joy was as clear as day.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

Sudoku

29

How to Play:

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

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

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 1, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

An exciting career opportunity is beckoning. Stop insisting you lack the necessary experience to land this position.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Your willingness to take risks will be extremely profitable. The public is yearning for something fresh, exciting and challenging. A big reason for your success is because you are surrounded by accomplished people. When a seasoned expert gives you advice, take it. You’ll avoid some embarrassing mistakes thanks to their insight.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Your home life demands your attention and fortunately you can spend most of your time at your abode, preparing delicious meals, redecorating rooms and planning a garden.

It will also put your professional life in proper perspective. Becoming a professional artist is a strong possibility for you. You’ve been gifted with tremendous creative talent.

Use your gift to make products that are both useful and beautiful. Selling your handiwork for a profit will save you the agony of working in the corporate world.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Scorpio

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Standing in the spotlight feels wonderful. It gives you a chance to show off your creative ability. Whether you act, sing, play music or paint, you’ll get wonderful feedback.

Once people realise how gifted you are, you’ll start getting commissions for work. If you’re still single at that time, you’ll meet someone special on the journey. Your suitor will know all the best places to shop, eat and relax.

Do you have a partner? You’ll rediscover your mutual passion while out in beautiful countryside.

It’s time to become a fully-fledged expert in a subject that has always fascinated you. Getting a degree, certificate or license will greatly improve your professional prospects. Instead of scrambling for work, you’ll be able to pick and choose your assignments. Money from an inheritance, refund or royalty payment will allow you to buy a beautiful home. Even a free spirit like you can enjoy the financial security that comes from being a property owner.

A strong business or romantic partnership relieves you of a great deal of drudgery. While your other half handles tasks that you find annoying, you can exercise your creativity. It’s easy to be generous to your nearest and dearest when you’re emotionally fulfilled. Quitting a bad habit or embarking on a different lifestyle will give you a new lease on life. Stop buying into a limited view of yourself. You can be, do and have anything you wish. Never forget it.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Rendering a perfect performance will earn you extra money. Before turning in an assignment, go over it with a fine-toothed comb. Correct every error, even tiny ones that you think nobody will notice. By gaining a reputation for being a perfectionist, you’ll get better jobs. Your health is improving, giving you more energy to do the activities you love. Spending more time on performing, making art and having fun will give life a sweet aspect that you wouldn’t trade for the world.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

A health regime is paying off. Take this opportunity to shop for some new clothes. You’ll find some fashionable pieces that enhance your best features and reflect your classic taste. Go ahead and spend more money than usual; you’ll cherish these purchases for years.

Your love life is sizzling. Let your partner lavish you with affection. If they want to give you an expensive gift, accept it with an open and happy heart. You deserve this fabulous token.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Having a distinctive home is important to you. It’s fun entertaining people in gorgeous surroundings. If you’re still renting a place, apply to a government agency for financial help. It can direct you to a programme that is tailor-made for people in your situation. Good news about a challenging job that you competed some time ago will reach your ears. Don’t be surprised when you’re offered a position at a big corporation. You’ll enjoy being linked to this prestigious company.

Are you looking for a new job? You’ll find one at an employer with strict rules. At first, you won’t be sure if you can be held to such high standards. Stop making excuses and give this position a try. You’ll love it. If you lack essential skills, take a crash course with a demanding tutor.

Your instructor will be impressed by your ability to soak up information like a sponge. You’ll know that you’ve won their respect when they start laughing at your irreverent jokes.

An important job is on its way to you. Getting paid to exercise your imagination will be so refreshing. The pay won’t be fabulous, but that won’t bother you. Your accomplishments from this assignment will increase your value to the job market.

Your charisma is even more powerful than usual, paving the way to many opportunities. In time to come, your employer will insist on sending you on a glamorous business trip. Touring a country on an expense account will be lots of fun.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Are you looking for a fresh challenge? Be willing to accept an offer to assume leadership of a prominent group.

Overseeing a team of gifted people will be more demanding than expected. Prepare to learn a lot about human nature. A legal matter will be decided in your favour, allowing you to move forward with a stalled personal plan. Now that the traffic light is green, you should move to a new home, embark on a romance or start a creative project.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

A stable partnership deepens your appreciation of life.

With your best friend or amour supporting you, it becomes easier to take risks. This is a wonderful opportunity to pursue a dream you’ve had since childhood. Your other half will be solidly behind you. If you need funding to start a business, enrol in university or write a book, apply to a government agency. Filling out the extensive paperwork will be worth the trouble. Prepare to undergo a dramatic transformation.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Monday, June 1, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

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Ziggy

32

Monday, June 1, 2020

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