Tuesday Jun 23, 2020

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

San Juan The

50¢

DAILY

Star

Dogs to Suffer Anxiety Once Lockdown Is Over P22

Carraízo Water Levels Keep Dropping

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With 313 LLC Chief’s Lips Sealed, House Health Committee Will Go to Court Again P3

Photo By TODD HEISLER / NYT

PREPA Grid Now in Private Hands

Board of Directors Votes for Luma Energy to Operate System Oversight Board Welcomes New Deal; Not Everyone Is Happy

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Caguas te quiere 15-19 de junio de 2020 | Boletín Informativo | Edición 10 Municipio Autónomo de Caguas

Lista de cotejo para reapertura de negocios

Caguas Temporada de Huracanes 2020

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 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

Atención residentes de Caguas y comunidad en general

No se pierda el taller virtual:

“Prevención y preparación ante la temporada de huracanes en tiempos de pandemia” sábado, 27 de junio de 2020 10:00 a.m.

Facebook Live y YouTube Live Panelistas: • Ernesto Morales - Director de Avisos Servicio Nacional de Meteorología • Miguel Neris - Director Oficina Municipal de Manejo de Emergencias (OMME), Municipio de Caguas • Zaid Díaz - Planificador Municipio Autónomo de Caguas Moderador • Roberto Cortés Reportero Ancla del Tiempo, Telemundo Puerto Rico

¡Nuevo!

Directorio de Comercio Electrónico ¿Eres de Caguas y puedes ofrecer de Caguas: compraencaguaspr.com productos o servicios

a través internet? y "freelancers" Apoya losdel negocios de la ciudad.

#CompraenCaguas

PROM

CAGUAS

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 Orientación e información oficial sobre el manejo del coronavirus en Caguas: • caguas.gov.pr/coronavirus • Municipio Autónomo de Caguas Corporación SANOS

CENTRO Y CORAZÓN DE PUERTO RICO

#QuédateEnCasa

GOOD MORNING

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June 23, 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.

House Health Committee to 313 LLC: See you back in court

Today’s

Weather

By THE STAR STAFF

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

Health Science Legals Sports Games Horoscope Cartoons

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ep. Juan Oscar Morales Rodríguez, who chairs the Health Committee in the Puerto Rico House of Representatives, announced on Monday that he will go to court over what he described as “obstruction” on the part of attorney Ricardo Vázquez Hernández, who is the president of a company called 313 LLC, when evading questions during an investigation into the island Health Department’s acquisition of tests for the detection of COVID-19.

“It seems to me that this deponent this morning has not cooperated in the investigative process, and for us it is very important to know what the acquisition price of these tests was and how much they finally sold for to the people of Puerto Rico,” the legislator said in a written communication. “I believe that this must be public and should not be hidden from the people.”

Morales Rodríguez noted that Vázquez Hernández appeared only after being taken to court by the committee, under threat of contempt. Among the documents the committee requests is the “copy of the invoices issued by this company; it is important for us to know what the acquisition price was versus the sale price to the Government of Puerto Rico,” Morales Rodríguez said.

“During the interrogation, which was characterized by evasions by the deponent, alleging that the questions were not relevant to the legislative investigation, Vázquez Hernández did indicate that the Health Department, specifically Adil Rosa, contacted them, after communicating with the company Zogen Genetics, of which 313 is the representative on the island, for the acquisition of rapid tests,” Morales Rodríguez said. “According to the witness, the agency made a first order, for 1,500 [units], which were paid at $45 each, and another order, for a total of 100,000 additional tests, which were paid

Ricardo Vázquez Hernández, president of 313 LLC.

in full for a total of $3.6 million. However, claiming that not only was it not pertinent to the investigation, but that it was a ‘business secret,’ Vázquez Hernández repeatedly refused to offer the information about the price that 313 LLC paid Zogen, for testing.”

Morales Rodríguez said the committee will evaluate all the questions that the deponent refused to answer, such as his links with other companies, among which the name of Vertical Consulting came up, whose email was used to send the quotes to the Health Department, according to documents held by the committee.

Given this, the committee chairman pointed out that it is necessary to know the participation of this and other companies in which Vázquez Hernández apparently appears as a resident agent, among which Galaxy Games was mentioned.

“We are going to evaluate all the questions that this deponent avoided answering, because it seems to us that it is an obstruction of the investigation that is being conducted by this House of Representatives,” Morales Rodríguez said.

The legislator said the interrogation was a frustrating one “not only for me, but for the people of Puerto Rico, which should not only cause frustration, but also indignation, that a person who was awarded $3.6 million in public funds would come here to try to obstruct and not provide information that I believe is public.”

“It is worrisome that merchants who have benefited from this emergency have assumed the conduct that this gentleman has assumed today,” Morales Rodríguez said.

He also pointed out that the lack of responses from the 313 LLC president does not paralyze the filing this week of the report on the investigation and if the court so determines, they will again summon the deponent to offer all details of the transaction.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

PREPA’s transmission & distribution officially under private management

By THE STAR STAFF

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he Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority’s (PREPA) board of directors approved on Monday in a divided vote the contract that would put the energy utility’s transmission and distribution (T&D) system under private operator Luma Energy following a process that took almost two years and was kept under wraps.

“I have mixed feelings because what seems to be a good project did not have public participation,” said Tomás Torres, the public representative on the PREPA board. “It was supposed to have public participation before the [Puerto Rico] Energy Bureau.”

Torres, who announced he will be issuing a written vote, noted that the contract with the private operator may have a negative impact on the utility’s debt restructuring process.

On May 18, the Public-Private Partnership (P3) Authority, which negotiated the contract on PREPA’s behalf, filed a request with the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau (PREB) for a certificate of compliance for the T&D management contract.

The record of that request was not made public because the PREB had agreed to designate the contract and other documents as confidential, a move opposed by the PREPA workers union, which had recently found out about it.

Under the contract, PREPA remains the owner of the utility’s T&D system. The certificate

means the preliminary contract complies with Puerto Rico’s energy policies.

Although details of the contract were not made public, Omar Marrero, head of the Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority, described the contract as good for the people of Puerto Rico.

The move by PREPA’s board came after the PREB last week approved the certificate of compliance for the contract in a divided vote without analyzing the impact it will have on consumers’ electricity rates.

PREB Commissioner Ángel Rivera came out against issuance of the certificate, arguing that the information on record could not help him

make a determination on whether the contract violates public policy that all rates be fair and reasonable.

“It is important to note that there is no documentation on the administrative record of the instant case regarding the impact the preliminary contract will have on rates,” Rivera said in a dissenting opinion. “Neither is there a cost-benefit analysis specific to the preliminary contract.”

“Even if the transfer of the operation of the T&D System is mandated by law, such transfer must meet the public policy of establishing just and reasonable rates,” he added.

Rivera also charged that the contract removes the PREB from the annual budget review process of PREPA that helps determine if budgets are consistent with rates.

He said the contract establishes that the P3 Authority -- the entity that negotiated the contract with the private operator on PREPA’s behalf -- and not the PREB will conduct the budget review and make rate determinations.

“This provision essentially removes the Energy Bureau from the annual budget review process, limiting its visibility to the budgets that will be in effect during any given year,” Rivera said.

The majority opinion of the PREB, however, says provisions in the contract that seek to limit its authority are unenforceable.

The contract will not be “construed, in any way whatsoever, as to impair, restrict, relinquish or abridge the scope of the Energy Bureau’s administrative powers; statutory and regulatory jurisdiction and/or authority; statutory and regulatory oversight and enforcement powers; rights; duties; and obligations, all in accordance with the applicable laws and regulations,” the PREB said.

Under the agreement, LUMA Energy will operate, manage, maintain, repair, and restore PREPA’s transmission and distribution system to help the transformation of PREPA into a modern power company able to deliver reliable, clean, and more affordable electricity to Puerto Rico’s households and businesses.

“This transformation is important to every individual, every business and every potential investor,” said the Oversight Board Chairman José Carrión.

“The people of Puerto Rico deserve a power system that can withstand hurricanes to ensure they are safe in their homes, and Puerto Rico’s businesses deserve to open every day without relying on backup generators to ensure they can serve their customers.

Puerto Rico deserves manufacturing and the service industry jobs created by investors who don’t turn away because its electric power system is unreliable and antiquated.”

Health chief stresses expanded testing & notification process at airport

By THE STAR STAFF

H

ealth Secretary Lorenzo González Feliciano, along with Canóvanas Mayor Lornna Soto, emphasized on Monday the COVID-19 testing process at Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport.

“Another station has been added in the JetBlue terminal area. It is voluntary.

Serological and molecular tests are being done. The Aguadilla airport is being added, the Ponce airport is being added and then what is going to be used is the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] platform, the SARA Alert [monitoring system], a communication platform,” González Feliciano said at a press conference. “We who receive our [family members from off the island] recognize that one of the

Health Secretary Lorenzo González Feliciano and Canóvanas Mayor Lornna Soto. requests that the population of Puerto Rico must make for visitors is, if you come to my house, bring your proof from the airport with you and guarantee that it is a

negative. We are talking about social and medical awareness.”

Soto spoke about the outbreak of COVID-19 that occurred in the San Isidro

sector of Canóvanas, where one person came from the United States to attend a family activity and five people ended up testing positive for COVID-19 even though there is testing at the airport.

The mayor also announced that she will hire an epidemiologist for Canóvanas.

“Canóvanas’ situation is under control,” she said. “… There is no outbreak.

There has not been an outbreak since we started.”

“It is an outbreak [only] in reference to a group of people, it is an outbreak in a particular community, five or six cases related to the same positive, and what we are going to guarantee is that these people continue to be tested and that there is not another overexposure of people,” Soto added.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

5

Carraízo water level continues to drop; two other plants under observation

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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ater rationing in the eastern area of the island seems inevitable.

Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA) Executive President Doriel Pagán said Monday that the level of the Carraízo reservoir continues to drop, while authorities believe two other plants in the eastern part of the island could face a rationing plan.

“The Carraízo reservoir continues its descent,” Pagán said in a radio interview.

“From yesterday [Sunday] to today [Monday] it had a decrease of 12 to 13 centimeters. It is at 37.86 meters.”

She noted that when it reached 37.2 meters, the reservoir would enter its control level. The necessary decisions will be made at today’s weekly interagency meeting.

“We know that there are many variables

at the moment impacting our service,” Pagán said. “This situation with Saharan dust, heat, temperature, consumption. …

We have many variables that are affecting our operation, so we always ask for the help of clients with the proper use of water.”

Pagán added that PRASA staff are directly observing two other plants that are supplied by rivers -- the Espino Filtration Plant in San Lorenzo and the Humacao Filtration Plant, which supplies Las Piedras -- as the levels could change from one day to the next.

“These are the two plants … if there is not a change in the next few days, they will also be considered for a service interruption plan,” she said.

The PRASA chief pointed out, meanwhile, that a service interruption plan was established for subscribers who use the San Lorenzo Jagual filtration plant. It started at 8 a.m. Monday and will be for periods of 24 hours for the Nuevas Parcelas, Viejas Parcelas, Capilla, Melilla and Cantera sectors. About 2,000 clients would be affected by this plan. Previously, PRASA established rationing plans for the Canóvanas, Loíza and Río Grande sectors.

Masks should be worn for protection against Sahara dust, too

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

P

ulmonologist Luis Nieves Garrastegui warned on Monday that not only people who suffer from respiratory conditions will be affected by the large cloud of dust from the Sahara Desert that is expected to engulf the island all week long, but that all citizens will feel some effect, so keep using the face mask as a good prevention practice.

“This time it has been phenomenal in the sense that the amount of particulate that has come in this cloud is so dense that the indication is no longer only for people who suffer from rhinitis, asthma, COPD, emphysema, or chronic bronchitis,” Nieves Garrastegui said in a radio interview.

“It is not only for people who have critical lung conditions; this is going to affect the entire population because it is very dense.”

“The air becomes unhealthy,” he added. “In fact, the use of masks that we are promoting so much to avoid COVID-19, helps us a lot if we have to go out to avoid inhaling [the dust].”

The physician also recommended premedication with antihistamine and an anti-inflammatory for the nose, something that is very important both for patients with chronic respiratory diseases and for those who do not suffer from them.

“There can be symptoms as simple as itchy eyes, itchy skin, sore throat, hoarseness,” Nieves Garrastegui said.

“Those with chronic illnesses may have sneezing, coughing, fibrillation, snoring, shortness of breath. Practically like getting sick. It is very important that you understand the level we are at.”

He added that exercising outdoors is not recommended

unless you are wearing a mask and protecting your eyes. “It is not recommended that there be any activity outside until this peak of Sahara dust passes,” the pulmonologist warned.

“Dust from the Sahara has always been with us in the Caribbean,” Nieves Garrastegui noted. “This is not new.

What is new is the composition and how dense this [cloud] is in particular.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Advocate: Nationwide child care reopening to cost $50 billion

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com he national child-care system is a vital part of the economy and will require an investment of $50 billion to restart after closing down in response to the coronavirus pandemic, said Dr. Lynette Fraga, executive director of Child Care Aware of America, which includes Puerto Rico.

“Absent child care it is difficult for communities to recover from the coronavirus,” she said. “Without child care, parents face incredible barriers to returning to work.”

Child Care Aware of America is a national non-profit organization based in Arlington, Va. and dedicated to assuring that each and every child has access to an affordable childcare system.

“The outbreak of the [coronavirus that causes] COVID-19 has only increased the challenge being faced to providing child care,” Fraga said.

She noted that 30 to 50 percent of child

care centers have been closed nationwide because of the virus.

“Child care centers are small businesses and as small businesses, they need the resources and support to make themselves whole,” Fraga said.

In order for childcare providers to be able to provide safe, healthy, nurturing, supportive care for children and parents, it is necessary to have a system that provides for that, she said.

“That requires a real investment,” Fraga said.

Parents also need to be made aware of the challenges of keeping their children safe from the virus. This is particularly true for drop off and pick-up points where the children are particularly exposed to the possibility of contracting the virus, she said.

For more information, visit the Child Care Aware website at childcreaware.org.

Child Care Aware has also set up website dedicated to Puerto Rico at: https://www. childcareaware.org/state/puerto-rico/.

strategy, whose main goal is the preservation of the employee’s capital and the prevention of fluctuations in the balance of his or her account due to market behavior.

When the employee decides to retire, he or she will be able to choose between continuing to invest their money, requesting a full installment distribution, or making a transfer to another qualified plan in Puerto Rico or an IRA. Retirement systems have educational tools and resources available to help obtain the necessary knowledge to

make investments according to the individual interests of each public servant.

Currently, the public servant makes a minimum contribution of 8.5 percent of his or her monthly salary, with the opportunity to increase it to a maximum of 20 percent of salary.

“I urge you to get oriented and familiarize yourself with the tools we have at our online Financial Education Center, where you will have access to courses, calculators, and tools to help you …” Collazo Rodríguez said.

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Public pension regime explained

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

P

uerto Rico Government Retirement Board Executive Director Luis Collazo Rodríguez announced on Monday the beginning of the second phase of the Defined Contribution Plan for government public employees.

Retirement Plan Law 106 was established as a result of Law 106-2017, which created a new defined contribution plan for more than 110,000 public servants. Now, government employees will be able to view their account balances, select their investments, designate their beneficiaries, transfer balances to other investment funds and increase their contributions.

Collazo Rodríguez said it is now public employees who decide how to invest their money.

“This has been a historic demand that we addressed with the new Plan 106,” he said in a written statement. “For the first time, the Government of Puerto Rico has managed to create a new and true defined contribution

plan for the public servant.”

The official noted that during the first phase, which began on Dec. 19, employees have been able to educate themselves and select among investment alternatives such as basic funds and/or investment funds with a specific date (Target Retirement Date).

“It is important to note that if the employee did not select the fund to invest in during the first phase, he/she will automatically be directed to a conservative fund that guarantees the principal and is called the PR Capital Preservation Fund,” Collazo Rodríguez said. “The employee may change the selection of the fund without penalties at any time.”

A basic fund invests in a combination of securities, such as stocks, bonds, money market instruments, and other assets. On the other hand, the combination of funds in a fixed-date retirement fund is based on the time the employee lacks to retire. The combination gradually becomes more conservative as its retirement date approaches.

The PR Capital Preservation Fund is a mutual fund with a conservative investment

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

7

New York City enters its broadest reopening yet: Offices

By MICHAEL GOLD and TROY CLOSSON

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ore than 100 days ago, buildings across New York City shut their doors and companies sent their workers home. As the coronavirus pandemic swept across the city, lockdown orders left offices dormant, stores shuttered and streets and sidewalks all but abandoned.

On Monday, two weeks after it began easing restrictions, New York City marked another major milestone when it entered a much larger reopening phase, allowing thousands of offices to welcome back employees for the first time since March.

“It’s exciting,” said Mike Chapman, 54, a technology consultant at a bank who was hustling to his workplace in midtown Manhattan for the first time in three months.

This step toward pre-pandemic normalcy, the city’s broadest yet, will pose a major test for continued efforts to keep the coronavirus at bay with hundreds of thousands people projected to return to jobs that keep them in enclosed spaces for hours at a time.

“Phase 2 is the single biggest of all the phases,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday, when he first announced that the city would further loosen prohibitions as it seeks to recover from an outbreak that has killed over 21,000 New Yorkers and devastated its economy.

While the positive test rate in the city hovers around 1%, down significantly from about 60% in early April, many companies have decided to not bring workers back for months, if not longer.

On Monday morning, a time when midtown Manhattan would typically be crammed with workers, the sidewalks remained largely vacant and the subway cars still felt relatively empty.

“What Monday is going to look like at this point is going to be anyone’s guess,” said Ken Fisher, a partner at Fisher Brothers, which owns more than 5 million square feet in five office towers in midtown Manhattan.

De Blasio estimated that as many as 300,000 workers would return to their jobs this week — a far cry from the numbers that usually jostle elbows on crowded subways and cram into high-rise elevators.

Beside offices, the reopening plan also permits outdoor dining, some in-store shopping and also allows hair salons, barbershops and real estate firms to restart their work.

In a survey conducted this month by the Partnership for New York City, an influential business group, respondents from 60 companies with Manhattan offices predicted that only 10% of their employees would return by Aug. 15.

Several major media and technology companies with Manhattan offices had already extended their workfrom-home policies through the summer. Others have said employees can work remotely through the end of the year.

JPMorgan Chase, one of the city’s largest commercial tenants, said it would not send employees back to their

Employees at the Fisher company have their temperature taken as they demonstrate the company’s safety precautions in New York. offices this week and has not set a return date. Other financial services firms, like Goldman Sachs, anticipate a small number of employees returning to their offices but have said that most workers will not come back until well into next year.

Those returning will find significantly different workplaces awaiting them.

“It’s not going to feel normal to be in the office,” said Ciara Lakhani, the chief people officer of Dashlane, a software company with about 100 employees in New York. “You can’t socialize the same way, you can’t really attend meetings in person, so people need to understand that we’re not getting back to any sense of normalcy.”

Worried about a surge of virus cases in states that moved more quickly to reopen, New York officials are requiring that strict social distancing guidelines remain in place. Offices and businesses must limit their maximum capacity, put physical distance between workers and require masks for employees and visitors.

More than 100 cases per day of the virus are still being reported in New York, according to city data. A contact tracing program that is supposed to help track the spread of the virus as the city reopens has gotten off to a slow start.

Several landlords of commercial buildings said they had been preparing for months to reopen by implementing new safety and cleaning protocols.

Husein Sonara, chief operating officer at the Sapir Organization, which manages two properties in midtown Manhattan, said his company had put markers on sidewalks outside its buildings, in the hallways inside and in elevators so workers can maintain social distancing.

Fisher said his buildings would use thermal scanners to check the temperatures of everyone who entered.

Hand sanitizer stations would be placed in all public areas, and only four people at a time would be allowed in the elevators.

To minimize contact on high touch surfaces, the company implemented a Bluetooth-based system that will allow people to enter buildings without touching doors or keypads.

As more businesses call employees back to work, Fisher’s company expected to recalibrate its procedures.

“We’re calling Monday kind of a soft opening,” he said, “because we don’t anticipate every tenant, obviously, coming back all at once.”

Despite the public health concerns and all the necessary precautions, several business owners and workers said they were eager to return to their desks.

“Some people though have told us, ‘Just to be able to see the plants in the office or to feel like I commute, that’s going to help me personally and mentally,’” Lakhani said of her employees. “And we get that.”

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Tuesday, June 23, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Jail only allowed white staff to guard ex-officer charged with killing George Floyd

By NICHOLAS BOGEL-BURROUGHS

S

taff members working at the jail that held Derek Chauvin, the white officer charged with murder in the killing of George Floyd, say that only white employees were allowed to guard him when he was first brought to the facility last month.

Eight officers have filed complaints with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, saying that the superintendent of the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul kept them from bringing Chauvin to his cell — or even being on the same floor as him — last month, solely because of their race.

The officers, half of whom are Black and all of whom are people of color, said the orders from the superintendent, Steve Lydon, who is white, amounted to segregation and indicated

Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with murder in the killing of Mr. Floyd.

that he thought they could not be trusted to do their jobs because they are not white.

After initially denying that officers’ contact with Chauvin had been determined by race, a spokesman for the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office acknowledged the move this weekend and said Lydon had been temporarily removed from the superintendent role as the sheriff investigates the officers’ claims.

Roy Magnuson, the spokesman, provided a statement that he said Lydon gave to investigators. In it, Lydon said he had segregated employees because he believed having people of color interact with Chauvin could have “heightened ongoing trauma.” He said he had only done so on short notice and for 45 minutes before realizing that he had made a mistake, after which he reversed the order and apologized. Officers said it had lasted longer — affecting one shift two days later — and that not enough had been done in response.

The discrimination complaints, which were first reported byThe StarTribune, were the latest instance in which correctional officials have been accused of giving preferential treatment to a white inmate. Some activists have for years argued that officers were too kind to Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, when they placed him in a bulletproof vest and bought him food from Burger King. Critics said that a Black suspect in a similar crime would not have gotten the same treatment.

In this case, one of the officers said in his complaint that he had seen, on the jail’s cameras, a white lieutenant let Chauvin use her phone inside his cell, a violation of the facility’s policy. Magnuson said the Sheriff’s Office was opening an internal investigation into that claim.

A Black sergeant who filed a complaint said in an interview that he was in charge of booking on May 29, when Chauvin was brought to the jail, and that after he had patted Chauvin down, Lydon told him not to have more contact with Chauvin and asked him who could transport the fired officer instead.

When the sergeant pointed to two white officers, Lydon seemed satisfied, said the sergeant, who is a captain in the U.S. Army Reserve and has worked at the jail for more than a decade.

He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation from other law enforcement officers.

The officers said in their complaints that employees quickly realized, after Chauvin arrived, that many of the jail’s nonwhite employees had been sent to the third floor. Some began to cry, they said, and the sergeant said some openly questioned whether they should quit and considered walking off the job. He said tensions were already high among employees because people had burned down a Minneapolis police precinct the night before in protest of the killing of Floyd, who was Black.

The sergeant and other officers said that, about an hour after Chauvin was booked into the jail, they were again kept from doing their jobs when an uncooperative inmate needed to be taken to the fifth floor, where Chauvin was being held. The sergeant said the officers had to wait until there were enough white officers to bring the inmate to the fifth floor, a special housing unit where high-profile, uncooperative and suicidal people are held.

Bonnie M. Smith, a lawyer in Minneapolis who is representing the eight officers, said at a news conference in front of the jail on Sunday that Lydon’s claim that his order was meant to protect officers of color was “absurd,” and that it had made the jail less safe.

“This order didn’t help protect anyone,” Smith said. “It was a blatantly discriminatory order.”

She said none of her clients had been interviewed as part of the internal investigation. They are asking the Sheriff’s Office to permanently remove Lydon from overseeing the jail and increase bias training. They are also asking the county to pay them unspecified money for emotional distress and compensation for shifts that some officers said they had missed because they were upset by what had happened.

The Minnesota Department of Human Rights will investigate the claims. That office had launched a civil rights investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department earlier this month. Chauvin was moved, last month, to the Oak Park Heights state prison just outside of St. Paul.

Another shooting at Seattle’s protest ‘autonomous zone’

By MIKE BAKER

A

nother night of gunfire at Seattle’s protester-led “autonomous zone” sent one person to the hospital with injuries, the second round of gun violence over the weekend in an area where officers had pulled out of the police station.

Susan Gregg, a spokeswoman at Harborview Medical Center, said one person who had been shot in or near the zone was brought by private vehicle for treatment late Sunday.

The victim was in serious condition, Gregg said. The Seattle Police Department said it was investigating a reported shooting inside the zone.

On Saturday morning, separate shootings left a 19-yearold man dead and another in critical condition.

The zone was declared this month in the wake of clashes between protesters and police after the death of George Floyd, a Black man whose death in police custody in Minneapolis touched off protests around the globe.

The city decided to board up its police station in the neighborhood in hopes of deescalating tensions after several nights of standoffs in the streets.

Since then, protesters have operated across several blocks they have variously labeled the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” and the “Capitol Hill Organized Protest.” During the day, the territory has had a festival-like atmosphere, with

speeches, music, art and a co-op that provides free food and supplies.

But the city has found in meetings with businesses and residents in the area around Cal Anderson Park that the situation in the neighborhood has become more dangerous at night, said Kelsey Nyland, a spokeswoman for Mayor Jenny Durkan.

Durkan said she was working with different groups to focus on deescalation strategies in the neighborhood.

“In the coming days, I believe together we can create a Capitol Hill environment that allows for peaceful demonstrations at Cal Anderson, quality of life for residents, and take concrete steps towards a new vision for policing in our city,” she said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

9

Trump poses ‘danger for the republic’ if reelected, John Bolton charges

By PETER BAKER and LUKE BROADWATER

P

resident Donald Trump poses a “danger for the republic” and would be an even greater threat if he wins a second term this fall because he would be unconstrained by future electoral considerations, John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser, said in an interview aired Sunday night.

In one of the most scathing public assessments of a sitting president by such a high-ranking former aide in modern times, Bolton depicted Trump as an “erratic and impulsive” leader who cares only about his own needs, does not fully understand democracy or the Constitution, is played “like a fiddle” by Russia and is not “fit for office.”

“The concern I have, speaking as a conservative Republican, is that once the election is over, if the president wins, the political constraint is gone,” Bolton told Martha Raddatz of ABC News in his first television interview publicizing his memoir of 17 months as Trump’s top security adviser. “And because he has no philosophical grounding, there’s no telling what will happen in a second term.”

Bolton’s book, “The Room Where It Happened,” has become the talk of Washington even before its scheduled publication on Tuesday. The Trump administration went to court to try to block its publication, only to be rejected by a federal judge, and the president has been railing about what he considers Bolton’s betrayal. But the beginning of the book tour means that Trump will be confronted with the portrait laid out in the volume for days or weeks to come.

Bolton, a veteran of three previous Republican administrations, says in the book that the House should have investigated Trump for impeachment not just for his Ukraine scheme but for his willingness to intervene in criminal investigations on behalf of dictators and otherwise seeking foreign help for his reelection campaign.

In the interview with ABC, he went even further by accusing Trump of lying when the president denied linking U.S. security aid to his demand that Ukraine incriminate his Democratic political rivals, and Bolton dismissed the White House defense at the Senate impeachment trial as “utter nonsense.”

Rather than being deterred by the impeachment trial, he added, Trump became emboldened by his acquittal by the Senate almost entirely along party lines. “He didn’t learn lessons from it, other than that he could get away with it, which leaves only the last guardrail — is the election this November,” Bolton said.

But even as Bolton said Trump had adopted “obstruction of justice as a way of life,” as he put it in the book, House Democrats on Sunday eschewed interest in opening new impeachment proceedings against him. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said it would be a waste of time because Senate Republicans were too “corrupt” to consider Bolton’s statements.

“The Senate Republicans were not interested in any evidence,” the chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, said on the CNN program “State of the Union.” “They were corrupt in that respect.”

The book’s revelations have been met with frustration from Capitol Hill Democrats, who were angry that the former national security adviser waited until the release of his book — for which he was reportedly paid $2 million — to accuse Trump of misdeeds that went far beyond those for which he was impeached. At the same time, Republicans dismissed the book as either false or motivated by money.

After Nadler’s appearance on CNN, Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, appeared on the program and disputed several claims in Bolton’s book. He also said the former national security adviser should be prosecuted.

“That guy should be turning in his seersucker suit for an orange jumpsuit,” Navarro said. “John Bolton has put highly classified information sprinkled throughout a very large book. I predict this: He will not only not get the profits from that book, but he risks a jail sentence.”

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., said on Sunday that Bolton should have testified under oath in the House’s impeachment inquiry of the president, so that he could have been cross-examined on the explosive details of his memoir.

“I do wish Mr. Bolton would have come into the House, under oath, and testified,” Scott said on “This Week.” “We would have more information about fact patterns that he suggests are true.”

Scott, however, was one of the Senate Republicans who voted against calling Bolton as a witness in the Senate trial. Bolton did not testify during House proceedings, saying he would wait to see how a judge ruled on White House

objections. When the Senate took up the case, Bolton volunteered to testify if subpoenaed, but Senate Republicans blocked him and any other witnesses.

On ABC, Bolton defended himself, saying House Democrats mishandled the inquiry by moving too fast and focusing too narrowly on Ukraine, turning the issue into a “partisan catfight.”

Bolton said other officials like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Attorney General William P. Barr all understood what the president was really doing with Ukraine. And he said the defense team’s assertion that Trump was only concerned about corruption in Ukraine was ludicrous.

“He wanted a probe of Joe Biden in exchange for delivering the security assistance that was part of the congressional legislation that had been passed several years before,” Bolton said. “So that in his mind, he was bargaining to get the investigation, using the resources of the federal government, which I found very disturbing, and I found it using national security to advance his own political position.”

Bolton said he considered Biden unacceptable and would write in “a conservative Republican” in November but made clear he hoped Trump would lose. Asked how history will remember Trump, he said: “I hope it will remember him as a one-term president who didn’t plunge the country irretrievably into a downward spiral we can’t recall from. We can get over one term.” He added, “Two terms I’m more troubled about.”

John R. Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, with President Trump in the Oval Office in August.

10

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

In a GOP stronghold, a vacant House seat gives Democrats hope

By JESSE MCKINLEY

L

ast time around, Nate McMurray seemed to have everything going his way.

The man he was trying to unseat, Rep. Chris Collins, was hit with federal insider trading charges three months before the 2018 general election. Collins, a Republican, temporarily suspended his campaign; even when he resumed, he raised little money and made few public appearances in the district in western New York.

Despite those advantages, McMurray, a Democrat, fell short, losing by less than 1,100 votes. The result underscored McMurray’s challenge, then and now.

The 27th Congressional District is about as Republican as New York, a deep blue state, can get. Donald Trump carried the district by some 25 points in 2016, and Collins had been one of the president’s earliest and most ardent supporters.

But Collins’ tenure came to a screeching halt last fall, when he resigned and pleaded guilty, creating a vacancy that will be filled by a special election on Tuesday.

McMurray is back to try again — and will face state Sen. Chris Jacobs, the Republican candidate, in a race that is potentially a harbinger of the electoral mood before November’s presidential election.

Despite the long odds, McMurray, a lawyer and former town supervisor in Grand Island, New York, northwest

of Buffalo, has been buoyed by what he sees as concern in some Republican ranks: Last week, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., recorded a robocall for Jacobs, a move that came on the heels of an endorsement on Twitter from the president himself.

The backing from the Trumps — and Jacobs’ embrace of the president — is somewhat striking considering that fellow Republicans regularly criticized the senator as too moderate in the past.

Now, however, Jacobs seems to be banking on the president’s appeal and McMurray’s disdain for him.

“It’s clear that Nate hates Trump,” Jacobs said, adding, “The majority of the voters in this district support Trump.”

Indeed, on one point, at least, Jacobs and McMurray seem to agree: 2020 will be a referendum on the president.

“A win would be a punch in the eye to Trumpism,” said McMurray. “A close loss would be the same.”

But if Democratic Party leaders think the contest has added significance, they are not acting that way: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, for instance, has done little to support McMurray’s campaign.

Jacobs, a scion of a wealthy Buffalo family, earned the Republican nomination in late January after being endorsed by eight county chairs in the district, an anvil-shaped chunk of suburban and rural towns between Buffalo and Rochester.

The special election is for the remainder of Collins’ term,

Nate McMurray, a Democrat, is making his second bid in roughly 18 months to capture a House seat in a Republican district.

which ends this year; the seat will be contested again in November for a full two-year term.

In a peculiar wrinkle, Jacobs is not only running against McMurray in the special election; he is also simultaneously running in the Republican primary against two challengers — Beth Parlato and Stefan Mychajliw Jr. — on Tuesday.

Like campaigns nationwide, the race in the 27th has been complicated by the coronavirus outbreak and intensified by the civil unrest that erupted following the George Floyd killing on Memorial Day. Jacobs, who cuts a quieter, more subdued figure than McMurray, is in his second term representing a district comprising a number of Buffalo suburbs, after a stint as county clerk in Erie County. He dismisses the notion of an upset, saying that McMurray is wildly out of step with the mores and mood of the 27th.

“His politics are wrong for this district,” said Jacobs, who is 53, married, with a toddler at home. “He is very liberal. He is for much more of a socialist America. And this district does not align with that.”

He added: “I think that he’d be much more appropriate running in Manhattan.”

In late March, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo moved the election from April 28, lengthening the campaign by two months; he later increased access to absentee voting by mail, which McMurray believes boosted his chances. Early voting began June 13; his campaign asserted that many absentee and other early-voting ballots have been cast by Democratic voters.

The district’s demographics undoubtedly favor Jacobs: There are about 40,000 more Republicans than Democrats, as well nearly 14,000 Conservative Party members, who generally vote for Republicans.

For farmers like Doug Tillotson, the pressing issues of this election are immigration, which is vital to supply agricultural labor, as well as crop subsidies.

“We don’t look for a handout, though we have to take it,” said Tillotson, one of a handful of people attending an event for Jacobs at Hi-Land Farms, a family-run dairy farm in Wyoming, New York. “I just hope he can see the plight of different people in New York.”

At a recent rally in Batavia, however, McMurray’s supporters were more vocal, chanting the candidate’s name through protective masks and waving campaign signs.

“We’ve had a bad streak of Chrises running for the Republicans,” said Michael Plitt, the Genesee County Democratic chairman, mentioning Collins, Jacobs and another local congressman, Chris Lee, who resigned in 2011 after sending a shirtless photo to a woman who was not his wife. “We need someone different: Nate.”

All told, about 50 people circled around as McMurray, wearing work boots, jeans and a dark plaid shirt, strode back and forth promising a victory on Tuesday.

“We can’t be timid, this is not a time for timidness,” he said. “Our country is at a crossroads, right? We’re at a crossroads. And if we don’t change things, it’s going to get worse.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

11

A tidal wave of bankruptcies is coming

By MARY WILLIMAS WALSH

A

lready, companies large and small are succumbing to the effects of the coronavirus. They include household names like Hertz and J. Crew and comparatively anonymous energy companies like Diamond Offshore Drilling and Whiting Petroleum.

And the wave of bankruptcies is going to get bigger.

Edward Altman, creator of the Z score, a widely used method of predicting business failures, estimated that this year will easily set a record for so-called megabankruptcies — filings by companies with $1 billion or more in debt. And he expects the number of merely large bankruptcies — at least $100 million — to challenge the record set the year after the 2008 economic crisis.

Even a meaningful rebound in economic activity over the coming months won’t stop it, said Altman, the Max L. Heine professor of finance, emeritus, at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “The really hurting companies are too far gone to be saved,” he said.

Many are teetering on the edge. Chesapeake Energy, once the second-largest natural gas company in the country, is wrestling with about $9 billion in debt. Tailored Brands — the parent of Men’s Wearhouse, Jos. A. Bank and K&G — recently disclosed that it, too, might have to file for bankruptcy protection. So did Weatherford International, an oil field services company that emerged from bankruptcy only in December.

More than 6,800 companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year, and this year will almost certainly have more. The flood of petitions from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression could swamp the system, making it harder to save the companies that can be rescued, bankruptcy experts said.

Most good-size companies that go into bankruptcy try to restructure themselves, working out payment agreements for their debts so they can stay open. But if a plan can’t be worked out — or isn’t successful — they can be liquidated instead.

Equipment and property are sold off to pay

debts, and the company disappears.

Without reform in the system, “we anticipate that a significant fraction of viable small businesses will be forced to liquidate, causing high and irreversible economic losses,” a group of academics said in a letter to Congress in May. “Workers will lose jobs even in otherwise viable businesses.”

Among their suggestions: increasing budgets to recall retired judges and hire more clerks and giving companies more time to come up with workable plans to prevent them from being sold off for parts.

“Tight deadlines may lead to overly optimistic restructuring plans and subsequent refilings that will congest courts and delay future recoveries,” they wrote.

The pandemic — with its lockdowns, which have just started to ease — was enough on its own to put some businesses under. The gym chain 24 Hour Fitness, for example, declared bankruptcy last week, saying it would close 100 locations because of financial problems that its chief exe-

cutive attributed entirely to the coronavirus.

But in many cases, the coronavirus crisis exposed deeper problems, like staggering debts run up by companies whose business models were already struggling to deal with changes in consumer behavior.

Hertz has been weighed down by debt created in a leveraged buyout more than a decade ago and added to it with the acquisition of Dollar Thrifty in 2012. As it was battling direct competitors, the ascent of Uber and Lyft further upended the rental car industry.

J. Crew and Neiman Marcus were carrying heavy debt loads from leveraged buyouts by private equity firms while struggling to deal with the changing preferences of shoppers who increasingly buy online.

Oil and gas companies like Diamond and Whiting borrowed heavily to expand when commodities prices were much higher. Those prices started to fall as production increased and plunged further still

when Russia and Saudi Arabia got into a price war shortly before the economic shutdowns began.

(And then there are cases that have nothing to do with the pandemic but nonetheless take up time and energy in the courts. Borden Dairy, a Dallas company with a history that goes back to 1857, declared bankruptcy in January, a victim of declining prices, rising costs and changing tastes.)

A run of defaults looks almost inevitable. At the end of the first quarter of this year, U.S. companies had amassed nearly $10.5 trillion in debt — by far the most since the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis began tracking the figure at the end of World War II. “An explosion in corporate debt,” Altman said.

Having a lot more debt to deal with is likely to make the coming bankruptcies a bruising experience for unsecured creditors, who may include retirees with pensions or health benefits, vendors waiting to be paid, tort plaintiffs whose lawsuits are cut short and sometimes even current workers. If a company goes into bankruptcy with more secured debts than the value of its assets, the secured creditors — including vulture investors who bought up the debt for a song — can walk away with virtually everything.

The sums at play in some of these cases will be enormous. Altman expects at least 66 cases with more than $1 billion in debt this year, eclipsing 2009’s mark of 49.

He also predicted 192 bankruptcies involving at least $100 million in debt, which would trail only 2009’s record of 242.

Robert Keach, a director of the American College of Bankruptcy, said many companies had so far managed to put off bankruptcy by amassing cash and conserving it as best they can: drawing down existing credit lines, furloughing workers, delaying projects and taking advantage of federal and state pandemic-relief programs.

But when those programs expire, the companies will start burning through their cash. That’s when bankruptcy filings are likely to soar and stay elevated, Keach said.

Expect “a COVID-19 cliff” in the next 30 to 60 days, he said.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Stocks

Wall Street Week Ahead: Index reshuffle to give healthcare stocks a bigger profile

T

he U.S. healthcare sector looks set for a bulked up profile in growth indexes when FTSE Russell reconstitutes its stock indexes late next Friday, an annual event that historically creates one of the biggest trading volume days of the year.

The Russell rebalance becomes final on the fourth Friday every June, after markets close. Stocks are added or deleted from Russell’s family of indexes, including the Russell 1000 large cap and Russell 2000 small cap, prompting fund managers to adjust portfolios to reflect new weightings and components.

Russell bases the placesment in the indexes on a number of factors, including market capitalization, voting rights requirements and country of domicile.

Telegraphing the reconstitution can create additional buying and selling stocks. Some investors may use the additional liquidity to take advantage of any resulting price dislocations, or to adjust the holdings in their portfolios, especially in smaller companies that have much lower liquidity.

The resulting surge in trading volume crests right before the market close. FTSE Russell says more than $15 trillion is currently benchmarked to its indexes globally and about $9 trillion to its U.S. indexes.

“I’m already at the spot where I will be happy when Russell is behind us because it is an emotionally elevated day, everybody has to really be on their toes, there is a lot of messages and a lot of traffic coming down,” said Gordon Charlop, a managing director at Rosenblatt Securities in New York.

The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, because of the scale of the revamp, reinforces the rules for trades on the close and contingency plans in the event of unusual market conditions. During the June 2019 reconstitution, Nasdaq said 1.279 billion shares representing $42.59 billion were executed in its “closing cross” in 1.14 seconds across Nasdaq listed stocks.

This year’s reconstitution is also influenced by market volatility generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. While other index providers delayed rebalancing that was scheduled for earlier in the year, FTSE Russell has moved forward with the reconstitution as originally scheduled.

“Our policy team did consult the market on whether any temporary measures were needed to accommodate the market volatility and the overwhelming feedback was that it wasn’t required and we should proceed according to the published rules,” said Catherine Yoshimoto, director, product management at FTSE Russell.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

13

Bullfighting, already ailing in Spain, is battered by lockdown

By RAPHAEL MINDER

E

xtremeño, an imposing black bull who weighs more than half a ton, was set to fight to death next month in the neoclassical ring of the Spanish city of Valencia.

Instead, the coronavirus gave 4-year-old Extremeño an unexpected lease on life. Valencia’s fiesta was called off, along with the bulk of a Spanish bullfighting season that normally runs from March to October.

Although Spain ended its COVID-19 state of emergency Sunday, bull breeders and matadors are continuing to lock horns with a leftwing Spanish government that they accuse of wanting to use the epidemic as an accelerator for bullfighting’s permanent removal, in line with the wishes of animal welfare activists.

“I find it deplorable that the fiesta of the Spanish people has become so politicized,” said Aurora Algarra, who owns Extremeño and is among the few women to run a bull farm, which she took over after her father died in 2006. “We now find ourselves under tremendous attack from Spain’s government, but at least this crisis has united us in the face of adversity in a way that I had not seen before.”

Algarra had been preparing to send 70 bulls this year to fight in the rings of Spain and southern France. Instead, the coronavirus lockdown had led her to send 30 of them to the slaughterhouse. She is earning about 400 euros, or $450, for each animal’s meat. That is only onetenth of the cost of its upkeep during the four years in which a bull roams her nearly 2,000 acres of land in the empty countryside of Andalusia, the southern and largest region of Spain.

For now, Algarra is keeping Extremeño and her other bulls, while hoping bullfighting can restart soon. A breeder can earn thousands of euros by providing six bulls for a traditional fight, or corrida, with the world-famous Pamplona festival paying as much as 15,000 euros for each animal, Algarra said.

The Pamplona festival, famed because its bulls also run the city’s streets, was among the main events that were scrapped shortly after Spain declared its state of emergency in midMarch.

In recent years, bullfighting has not only been caught in strong political and economic crosswinds in Spain, it has also increasingly found itself denounced by activists who see it as publicly torturing animals.

During a corrida, the matador skillfully draws the bull toward him, at the risk of getting gored. At the end of a fight, the matador usu-

A Spanish bullfighter in an empty bullring in Málaga, Spain, in late May. ally plunges his sword deep between the bull’s shoulders; then the dead animal is dragged from the ring. In some rare instances, the public spares a bull’s life by asking for it to be “pardoned” for its bravery.

In 2013, after the global financial crisis also significantly hurt the bullfighting sector, the conservative government at the time came to its defense by declaring bullfighting part of Spain’s cultural patrimony. This declaration was also a response to the growing separatist movement in Catalonia, whose regional Parliament voted to ban bullfighting in 2010.

Idled by the coronavirus, several leading matadors have recently waded more vigorously into Spain’s debate over bullfighting, both on social media and on the streets.

“We now have a government in Spain that sees the coronavirus as an opportunity to remove bullfighting altogether,” said Andrés Roca Rey, a Peruvian matador who joined a demonstration in Seville on June 13, when defenders of bullfighting rallied in several Spanish cities.

The government, however, insists that it is not mistreating the bullfighting sector. Faced with calls for his resignation, Spain’s culture min-

ister, José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes, met with bullfighting representatives June 17 in Madrid.

Afterward, the industry’s officials said they had received the minister’s promise that bullfighting would be excluded from a planned law that would protect animals against mistreatment.

Still, the tensions are simmering. Last month, Pablo Iglesias, Spain’s deputy prime minister and leader of the far-left party Unidas Podemos, said in Parliament, “It makes me very uncomfortable that something is promoted as a cultural practice that I cannot avoid seeing as delivering a lot of pain to an animal in a show for the enjoyment of people.”

Most opinion polls suggest that Spanish society is deeply split over bullfighting, just as it is increasingly fragmented over politics.

Juan Pedro Domecq, deputy president of the union of Spanish breeders, said Spain’s government, no matter its political leanings, had “a constitutional obligation to support bullfighting because it is the backbone of Spanish culture.”

“The coronavirus hit a sector that was already in a complicated economic situation, reliant exclusively on spectators and without sponsorship or television revenues,” Domecq said.

Advertising revenues have evaporated, he said, because “no sponsor wants to face the fierce attacks of animal activists.”

Since the lockdown, some animal welfare associations have asked the government to disburse funds to help those working in bullfighting find alternative jobs. Many workers are contractually tied to a specific matador, making it hard for them to get jobs elsewhere. Even so, most of the support staff earn money only when there is a fight.

Ana Belén Martín, a politician from Pacma, a party that defends animal welfare, said that bullfighting had been declining for more than a decade and that it was heading for a natural death, with or without COVID-19. Last year, 1,424 bull fiestas were held in Spain, down from 2,684 in 2009, according to government figures.

But Martín said the COVID-19 crisis should not become a reason to extend a lifeline to bullfighting.

“This is the culture of our past, not that of the society we want to build, focused on compassion and empathy rather than on people who applaud while watching an animal agonizing,” she said.

14

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

8 Hospitals in 15 hours: A pregnant woman’s crisis in the pandemic

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and SUHASINI RAJ

N

eelam Kumari Gautam woke up at 5 a.m. with shooting labor pains. Her husband put her gently in the back of a rickshaw and motored with her to a hospital. Then another. Then another. Her pain was so intense she could barely breathe, but none would take her.

“Why are the doctors not taking me in?” she asked her husband, Bijendra Singh, over and over again. “What’s the matter? I will die.”

Singh began to panic. He knew what he was up against. As India’s coronavirus crisis has accelerated — India is now reporting more infections a day than any other nation except the United States or Brazil — the country’s already strained and underfunded health care system has begun to buckle.

A database of recent deaths reveals that scores of people have died in the streets or in the back of ambulances, denied critical care. Gautam’s odyssey through eight different hospitals in 15 hours in India’s biggest metropolitan area serves as a devastating window into what is really happening in the country.

Indian government rules explicitly call for emergency services to be rendered, but still people in desperate need of treatment keep getting turned away, especially in New Delhi, the capital. Infections are rising quickly; Delhi’s hospitals are overloaded; and many health care workers are afraid of treating new patients in case they have the coronavirus, which has killed more than 13,000 people in India.

The bigger picture is that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is struggling with overlapping crises. Last week, Chinese troops beat 20 Indian soldiers to death along their disputed border in the Himalayas, triggering the most dangerous showdown between the two nuclear powers in decades.

At the same time, India’s economy is nose-diving, and the coronavirus pandemic has cost this country more than 100 million jobs.

Desperate to turn the economy around, Modi has rejected health experts’ counsel to put the country back under lockdown, saying that India must “unlock, unlock, unlock.”

When things got better, Singh and his wife had hoped to buy an apartment in a gated community in Noida, a satellite city of New Delhi crammed with tall glass buildings, many malls and many hospitals. She worked on an assembly line producing electrical wire. He serviced machines at a printing press.

Together, Singh, 31, and Gautam, 30,

Patients waiting to get examined for fever and other symptoms at a government-run homeopathic hospital in New Delhi in March. earned a respectable $8,000 a year, putting them solidly in India’s rising middle class. “Two wheels of a well-oiled machine, making our family go around,” Singh said.

Their son, Rudraksh, turned 6 just before their new baby was due.

As Gautam entered her ninth month, she ran into some health problems and spent five days in late May and early June in the hospital for pregnancy-related high blood pressure, bleeding and possibly typhoid.

On June 5, as she began to go into labor, the first hospital they tried was the ESIC Model Hospital, a sprawling government facility in Noida. Singh said that the first thing the doctor said to her was, “I’ll slap you if you take off your mask.”

They were shocked, Singh said. But Gautam was having trouble breathing. They didn’t argue. She begged for oxygen, which the hospital had, along with ventilators. But instead of helping, the doctor told them to go to another government hospital, on the other side of town.

There, too, she was turned away.

An administrator at the first hospital declined to comment, and a doctor at the second hospital said Gautam needed intensive care, which the hospital couldn’t provide.

Even before COVID-19 arrived, Indian hospitals were beleaguered. The Indian government spends less than 2,000 rupees (about $26) per person per year on health care. The hope during India’s lockdown, which began in late March but was mostly lifted by early June, was that the restrictions would slow the spread of the

virus and give cities time to scale up hospital capacity before the worst hit.

That didn’t happen, or not nearly enough, and Delhi now finds itself thousands of beds short; the central government just repurposed hundreds of railway cars to be used as sick bays.

And still there is great confusion about admitting patients who don’t have the coronavirus.

Some hospitals say they need to test every patient before treating them. Others simply perform a quick temperature check.

The third hospital that Gautam went to, Shivalik Hospital, was the one that had treated her for her prenatal troubles. This time, doctors gave her a little oxygen, but her husband said they feared she might have the coronavirus and abruptly ordered her to leave.

“We are a small mother and child hospital,” said the hospital’s director, Ravi Mohta.

“We did what we could.”

The couple hobbled back to the rickshaw.

Gautam was fading. She stopped talking and began heavily sweating. She clung to her husband’s hand.

It wasn’t simply that the doctors couldn’t help her, her husband said. It was as if they didn’t want to help her.

“They didn’t care if she was dead or alive,” he said.

At a fourth hospital, a branch of Fortis, an Indian health care giant, he pleaded for a ventilator. Singh said the doctor’s response was, “She’s going to die. Take her wherever you wish.”

In a statement, the hospital said they had no space for her.

They tried three other hospitals, hurry-

ing from one to the other, losing precious time.

When all refused, Singh called the police.

He said that two officers met him at the entrance of the Government Institute of Medical Sciences, a large public hospital, and tried to persuade the doctors to admit his wife. But the doctors wouldn’t listen to the police officers, either.

Administrators at that hospital declined to comment.

After that failed, they raced in an ambulance to Max Super Specialty Hospital in Ghaziabad, more than 25 miles away. It was now late afternoon, still bright, around 100 degrees outside. More than eight hours had passed since Gautam and her husband had set off from their home, eager to meet their new baby soon.

But the Max hospital — their eighth that day — gave them the same heartbreaking answer: no beds.

Gautam closed her eyes and whispered, “Save me.”

Singh told the ambulance to rush back to the Government Institute of Medical Sciences.

He hunched in the back, leaning over his wife, pleading with her not to give up. He looked down at her face. She reached up and clutched his shirt. Her hands tightly clenched the fabric.

As they finally pulled into the hospital, she stopped breathing. Her neck slumped. Singh jumped out of the ambulance, grabbed a wheelchair and frantically wheeled her into the emergency room.

At 8:05 p.m., after 8 different hospitals and 15 hours, Gautam was pronounced dead.

The baby also died.

A preliminary government investigation said, “Hospital administration and staff have been found guilty of carelessness.”

She has not been the only pregnant woman to die in labor after being turned away. The same thing happened to a young mother in Hyderabad and another in Kashmir. In that case, the family said, the hospital staff were so uncaring that they didn’t even help with an ambulance to take the body home. The woman’s family had to wheel her body down the road, in a stretcher, for several miles.

As authorities consider criminal charges in Gautam’s case, her husband spends his days at home looking after his son, Rudraksh. The boy asked him to throw away all of his mother’s clothes.

“They remind me of her,” he said.

The spark has gone out of Rudraksh’s eye, Singh said.

A few days ago, he told his dad that when he grows up, he wants to be a doctor, so “I can make dead people come alive.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

15

Under Coronavirus lockdown, a Philippine priest hits the streets

By JES AZNAR and MIKE IVES

W

hen the Rev. Eduardo Vasquez dresses for work these days, his vestments are as protective as they are holy. His cassock has been replaced by a safety suit, his collar hidden behind an N-95 respirator mask. All that identifies him as a priest is his stole, a scarf about 6 feet long, the perfect length to measure an acceptable social distance.

After Manila, the Philippine capital, was placed under lockdown in March, Vasquez moved his daily Mass online. That kept him safe from the coronavirus but left some of his poorest parishioners — the ones without cellphones — beyond his reach.

So he set off to find them. In the metro area’s teeming slums, already reeling from President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody anti-drug campaign, he celebrated Mass, served the Eucharist, and distributed food and face masks.

“Journalists, doctors, garbage collectors and undertakers were out doing their duties” during the lockdown, he said in Caloocan city, where he works. “It’s a big knock on the Catholic Church if we don’t.”

The Philippines has nearly 1,200 deaths from COVID-19 and more than 30,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, one of Southeast Asia’s highest tallies.

As the caseload rose this spring in Manila, a metro area of nearly 14 million people, Vasquez and fellow church volunteers began providing meals, face masks and other assistance to about 300 homeless people a night in Caloocan, a city in the area’s north. They refer anyone who exhibits COVID-19 symptoms to hospitals.

On many days, Vasquez, 47, tends to his churchyard garden, baptizes children, and attends to the dead at funeral parlors and crematories. On one occasion, he traveled to a village outside Manila, where residents had asked him to bless it as a protection from the virus.

After each trip, he disinfects his personal protective equipment so it can be reused.

“Wearing PPE conveys that there is danger, that you should be careful,” he said. “At the same time, it also sends the message that ‘Even if it’s dangerous, I am here for you, but I will never compromise your safety.’”

The bishop of Caloocan, Pablo Virgilio David, told Vasquez in a letter this

Father Eduardo Vasquez and a fellow priest, Rey Amancio, offering prayers for the dead in Caloocan, a city in Metro Manila, in May. month that he had been “God sent” to the diocese for the pandemic.

“Thank you for your out-of-the-box pastoral responses that make the poor know that they are cared for and loved by the church,” Virgilio wrote.

Vasquez grew up in Bicol, a region southeast of Manila on the island of Luzon, and began working in Caloocan last year. In the slums he is known as Father Pon, a play on his nickname. He said that Pon-pon, his nickname in the Bicol dialect, describes one who gathers things and often applies to those who care for the undesirable or defend the vulnerable.

As a boy, Vasquez said, he initially dreamed of becoming a businessman, but changed his mind when he saw a poster with a question that is often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi: “Lord, what do you want me to do?”

He attended seminary on the southern island of Mindanao, where Muslim insurgents have long battled the

government of this Catholic-majority country. He was ordained as a priest in Mindanao in 2003.

Five years later, he moved to Maguindanao, a parish on Mindanao Island where a local church had been burned by looters. His first task was convincing the townspeople not to shoot a Muslim man they accused of committing arson.

As the Muslim insurgency displaced people across Mindanao, Vasquez converted his church’s grounds into an evacuation center. He also assisted journalists who were investigating one of the country’s worst political massacres, and served as a spiritual adviser for people in witness-protection programs, including former warlords and jihadis.

Sammy Abdulgani, 33, a former jihadi in Mindanao who met Vasquez while he was serving a prison term, said the priest had been a supportive presence at a particularly difficult time in his life.

“He’s always a good example of what

a religious man should be,” Abdulgani said.

“He knew who I am, or was, and the things I did when I was a rebel. But he placed his utmost trust in me.”

Vasquez said that his experience in Mindanao turned out to be good preparation for the pandemic. Among other lessons, he said, it taught him that local officials could not be trusted to help the poor in a time of crisis.

“In Mindanao, we knew that corruption was real,” he said. “Those goods would never reach the needy.”

In Manila, where unemployment is surging and a citywide lockdown has been eased but not yet scrapped, some people have criticized Vasquez on social media for his recent outreach to the poor. They say it implies he has lost faith in the power of his own church.

He disagrees.

“God gave you the capacity to think; it is not enough to rely on faith alone,” he said. “It has to be coupled with actions.”

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Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Political grip shaky, Belarus leader blames longtime ally: Russia

By ANDREW HIGGINS

T

he longtime authoritarian leader of Belarus, under threat like never before ahead of what was supposed to be just another rigged election, is taking a surprising new tack that he hopes will win him sympathy in the West: blaming Russian election meddling.

In power for 26 years, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, sometimes called Europe’s last dictator, has become so unsettled by a surge of discontent and support for prospective rivals in the Aug. 9 election that he has turned his propaganda machine on Moscow, long his closest ally and principal benefactor.

Once praised by a large segment of the population for keeping Belarus stable and avoiding the turmoil and mass unemployment seen across much of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, Lukashenko has recently faced a groundswell of criticism at home, particularly over his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, as relations with Moscow have soured and those with Washington have improved.

For years he has manipulated the rivalry between East and West to keep himself in power. Speaking on Friday during a meeting with economic officials in Minsk, Belarus’ capital, Lukashenko claimed that he had thwarted a plot to foment revolution with the arrest a day earlier of Viktor Babariko, a would-be election rival and the former head of a Russian-owned bank.

While not pointing a finger directly at the Kremlin, he said the “masks have been ripped away not only from the puppets we have here but also the puppeteers who sit outside Belarus.”

Nobody was in any doubt that he was talking about Russia.

For two decades, Babariko headed Belgazprombank, a Belarus bank mostly owned by state-controlled Russian energy giant Gazprom. He and his son, who ran his father’s election campaign, were arrested Thursday, on suspicion of financial wrongdoing.

Despite the president’s long record of disparaging those who speak Belarusian instead of Russian and jailing Belarus nationalists, he said he would not allow anyone to threaten the country’s sovereignty.

President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus at a parade marking the end of World War II last month in Minsk.

“There is no greater value than a sovereign and independent Belarus,” he declared.

Scores of demonstrators who took to the streets in Minsk and other cities to protest the arrests were detained by security forces, now perhaps Lukashenko’s last unwavering base of support.

Babariko’s long affiliation with Gazprom, which has often been used by the Kremlin as a geopolitical tool, made him an easy target.

Another would-be candidate, Sergei Tikhanovsky, a popular video blogger and former businessman, has also been arrested and accused of having ties to Russia, notably through a Kremlin-linked oligarch.

Investigators claim to have found nearly $1 million stashed behind a sofa at his home and have suggested the money was from Russia.

Artyom Shraibman, the founder of Sense-Analytics, a Minsk consulting firm and research group, said that Lukashenko has always sought to discredit his political rivals by portraying them as stooges manipulated by foreign powers. But he used to call them agents of Western plots.

“Times have changed,” he said, “So they are now trying to play on anti-Russian sentiment in the West.”

Belarus diplomats, Shraibman said, have started telling their European counterparts not to view the arrest of

Lukashenko’s political opponents as an attack on the democratic process, but as a necessary response to Russian interference.

The argument has had few takers.

The European Union protested Babariko’s arrest and called for his immediate release. The United States has not commented on the former banker, but the U.S. Embassy in Minsk posted a statement on Twitter urging the Belarusian government “to uphold its international commitments to respect fundamental freedoms,” and release the detained protesters.

Belarus has not had an election considered free and fair by independent observers since 1994. Lukashenko has won five presidential elections in a row, and they have often been accompanied by tough crackdowns.

Lukashenko’s latest tilt away from Moscow became particularly pronounced after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Minsk in February. After that visit, the first by a secretary of state since the early 1990s, Washington appointed its first ambassador to Belarus in more than a decade, a sign that it wants to normalize relations.

The collapse in oil prices triggered by the pandemic has also influenced Lukashenko’s turn from Russia. In the past, Belarus generated at least 10% of its gross

domestic product — some estimates say 20% — by buying cut-price crude oil from Russia, processing it and then selling it to Europe. But that game ended this year when Russia started demanding market rates for its crude and prices for refined products slumped.

Belarus, Shraibman said, is also locked into long-term natural gas contracts with Gazprom that require it to pay far more than the current market rate.

Furious with Russia over energy prices and emboldened by thawing relations with Washington, Lukashenko has increasingly resisted pressure from Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, to fuse Belarus and Russia into a so-called “union state,” a project that was conceived in the 1990s but then stalled.

Lukashenko now seems convinced that he can blunt Western criticism of his preelection crackdown by presenting it as a necessary response to Russian meddling.

The announcement of Babariko’s presidential bid shocked Lukashenko, who had previously considered him a reliable member of the business elite. Belarus’ former ambassador in Washington, Valery Tsepkalo, has also announced plans to run against Lukashenko.

Before his arrest Thursday, Babariko had collected 425,000 signatures in support of his candidacy, a huge number in a country with fewer than 10 million people.

Shortly before his arrest, Babariko gave an interview to Ekho Moskvy, a liberal-leaning Russian radio station that is majority owned by Gazprom, and scoffed at the accusation that he was a stooge for Russian interests and was backed by Moscow.

He noted that he had in the past been criticized in Russia for “using Gazprom’s money to develop the Belarus national movement,” a reference to his decision to fund the writings of Svetlana Alexievich from Russian into Belarusian. Alexievich, a Belarusian who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in literature, has been highly critical of Russia under Putin.

“Russians have always said that I am a Belarus nationalist while Belarusians said that I was pro-Russian, because I worked for Gazprom,” Babariko said. “The West does not know what to think.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

17

Has Trump the autocrat found his moment?

By JENNIFER SENIOR

T

wo weeks ago, I wrote that perhaps, at long last, we had reached a tipping point in Donald Trump’s popularity, and I stand by it. On Thursday, a poll conducted

by Fox News (Fox!) showed him trailing Joe Biden by 12 percentage points; the Tulsa arena hosting his comeback rally on Saturday was two-thirds empty. The man is ripe for the ultimate “Downfall” video. Especially given his recent sojourn in an actual bunker.

Yet it’s precisely because Trump feels overwhelmed and outmatched that I fear we’ve reached a far scarier juncture: he seems to be attempting, however clumsily, to transition from president to autocrat, using any means necessary to mow down those who threaten his reelection.

Whether he has the competence to pull this off is anyone’s guess. As we know, Trump is surpassingly incapable of governing. But he has also shown authoritarian tendencies from the very beginning. For over three years, he’s been President Trump at the White House on Thursday. dismembering the body politic, institution by institution, norm by norm. What has largely spared us from total That was all on Wednesday and Thursday. Just Wednesevisceration were honorable civil servants and appointees. day and Thursday.

Trump has torn through almost all of them and replaced In recent months, Trump has escalated his war on them with loyalists. He now has a clear runway. What we both the safeguards of American government and his own have left is an army of pliant flunkies and toadies at the citizenry. In April and May, he got rid of five inspectors agencies, combined with the always-enabling Mitch Mc- general. He has replaced intelligence community veterans Connell and an increasingly emboldened attorney general, with partisan loyalists who’ve raised questions about the William Barr. validity of the Russia probe. He’s threatened to use the miliWill Barr’s depredation ever approach some kind of as- tary to quell civic unrest. He used pepper balls and smoke ymptote? Doubtful. Last week, his Justice Department argued canisters on protesters for a campaign photo op. in court for John Bolton to heed its temporary emergency In her new book “Surviving Autocracy,” Masha Gessen restraining order and pull all copies of his memoir from the points out that our system of government is more prone to shelves ahead of its publication this week. (It was denied.) an “autocratic attempt” than one might assume. Our other Barr then tried to replace Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. two branches of government should theoretically check attorney for the Southern District of New York, with a Trump executive power. But that executive power sometimes loyalist who had zero prosecutorial experience — at a time spills into their turf. The president appoints federal judges, when Berman was actively investigating Trump’s personal for instance, stocking the bench with his favorites like so lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and a Turkish bank that Trump sug- many farm-raised trout, and the Justice Department is part gested to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he’d of the executive branch, not the judiciary, meaning there’s try to protect. (Berman stepped down, but Trump did not nothing stopping a capo like Barr from behaving as Trump’s get the appointee he desired.) personal advocate rather than a custodian of the public trust.

That was all on Friday and Saturday. Just Friday and “Its independent functioning is determined by tradition,” Saturday.

Gessen writes. Not design.

What else this past week? Trump’s handpicked head of The Cabinet departments and agencies recently dethe U.S. Agency for Global Media — an ally of Steve Bannon, nuded of their inspectors general are likewise part of the by the way — purged the heads of Radio Free Europe and its executive branch. How can they oversee presidential exthree siblings, in what seemed like an unnerving bid to make cesses if the president isn’t acting in good faith? The system his own version of state-run TV. Then Trump tweeted out a is predicated on good faith. video he knew had been doctored by a meme-generating We may yet find it. Of all people, Lindsey Graham, supporter, a supposed scare segment from CNN about a the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, stood beracist baby. (Twitter first stamped a “manipulated media” tween Trump and his mad lunge for power in the Southern warning on it, then disappeared it entirely.)

District, saying he’d allow New York’s Democratic senators

to veto Trump’s pick. (Let’s see how long that holds.) Joe Biden could of course win, and he could spend his first year in office not just restoring norms but codifying them.

But the true stuff of my nightmares — and the ultimate authoritarian ambush — would be a move by Trump to suppress the vote by a means I haven’t yet imagined. (Voting is left up to the states.) He’s already thrown his weight behind fundraising efforts to aggressively “monitor” polling places, supposedly to weed out fraud, an almost nonexistent threat.

Three years ago, a friend of mine shrewdly pointed out that Trump’s election would be like one long national Milgram experiment, the famous psychological study from the 1960s that revealed just how susceptible people are to authority, how depressingly willing they are to obey even the most horrifying commands.

Participants were told by a researcher to administer shocks of increasing intensity to test subjects every time they answered a question incorrectly. Two-thirds of those participants allowed themselves to deliver the maximum punishment, 450 volts, though the test subjects were screaming in pain.

Luckily, the test subjects were actors and the electric shocks were fake. But Trump’s enforcers are real. And so are the shocks to our system.

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18

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

‘Law and order’ for ‘blacks and hippies’

By CHARLES M. BLOW

L

ast week, Donald Trump stood in the White House Rose Garden and announced an executive order on police reform — a list of minor, unfunded actions that incentivized some changes but mandated none.

This was his response to the anti-racism, anti-police brutality Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the country. I don’t think it was an action he wanted to take, but one that he had to take at this moment when his poll numbers are dipping and people are demanding change.

Not once in his speech did he say the words “protests” or “protesters.”

Instead, it was a whiplash speech that swung from acknowledging the pain of families who’ve lost loved ones to police violence and promising “to fight for justice for all of our people,” to more law-and-order talk and condemnation of riots, looting and arson.

Those lawless acts occurred in some cities in the beginning, but the protests have moved well beyond that now.

Trump knows that, but that is an inconvenient truth.

Trump is a full-blown, unrepentant racist and white supremacist, and many people don his MAGA hats as a form of racist regalia.

Trump has no taste or tolerance for a movement for black lives, only for the instruments to control them and quiet them. And he knows that many of his supporters share this view.

That’s why he paints black protesters as criminals and their white allies as leftist radicals and even antifa.

This is the blacks-and-hippies duo that racists on the right have long targeted. Author Dan Baum wrote in Harper’s Magazine in 2016 that John Ehrlichman, aide to Richard Nixon and Watergate co-conspirator, told him about the birth of the war on drugs: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We

President Trump at a campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday.

could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Trump, too, is trying to vilify what he must see as a nightmare alliance. At his Tulsa rally, he warned, “If the Democrats gain power, then the rioters will be in charge and no one will be safe and no one will have control.”

At that rally he told his supporters: “The unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments, our beautiful monuments.

Tear down our statues and punish, cancel and persecute anyone who does not conform to their demands for absolute and total control. We’re not conforming, that’s why we’re here, actually. This cruel campaign of censorship and exclusion violates everything we hold dear as Americans. They want to demolish our heritage so they can impose their new oppressive regime in its place.”

Make no mistake, the “our” in that passage is “white people’s.” This, for Trump, and Trump culture, is about white heritage, white power and the possibility of displacement.

That’s what it has been about from the beginning.

Blacks and hippies must be controlled and the police are the instruments of that control. He said in the Rose Garden, “Nobody needs a strong, trustworthy police force more than those who live in distressed areas.”

But distress is an issue of resources that cannot be solved by police repression. As the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights has put it: “The safest neighborhoods aren’t the ones with the most prisons and the most police — they’re the ones with the best schools, the cleanest environment, and the most opportunities for young people and working people.”

Trump’s law-and-order talk doesn’t seek to address the rage this inequity has bred, but rather to contain it, to return society to slumber, to have the oppressed suffer in silence so that the oppressors can revel in the void.

As Geoff Nunberg wrote for NPR about the racial coding of Trump’s “law and order” push, “Trump’s single-handed effort to revive the slogan ‘law and order’ is the key to creating the perception of a new crisis of crime and violence.”

The people protesting want justice and equality, an end to racism and a dawning of a new egalitarianism. For a white supremacist, that is heretical. Trump and his supporters see the protests as a crisis, a form of chaos that threatens the order.

Trump said in the Rose Garden, “Americans want law and order, they demand law and order. They may not say it, they may not be talking about it, but that’s what they want.

Some of them don’t even know that’s what they want but that’s what they want.”

That America he is talking to is white America, his portion of it, and he is signaling that “law and order” is the only way to ensure the continuity of their control.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

19

Cámara de Representantes coordina servicios médicos y de rehabilitación gratuitos para Alexis Hernández Por THE STAR

E

l presidente de la Cámara de Representantes, Carlos ‘Johnny’ Méndez Núñez, junto a los representantes Yashira Lebrón Rodríguez y Joel Franqui Atiles, anunciaron el lunes, un acuerdo con la Corporación del Fondo del Seguro del Estado (CFSE) para brindarle al joven puertorriqueño Alexis Hernández Vélez, de 23 años y quien sufriera quemaduras de segundo y tercer grado en su cuerpo hace poco más de un año a causa de una explosión en un apartamento que alquilaba en México; servicios médicos, de rehabilitación y farmacia, entre otros.

“La situación de este joven puertorriqueño es inaceptable. Es por eso que esta Cámara de Representantes decidió actuar a favor de la salud y rehabilitación de Alexis Joel con la coordinación con el Administrador de la CFSE para que se le brinde servicios médicos y de rehabilitación, algo muy importante en estos momentos, a este joven de manera gratuita y bajo la mejor supervisión posible. El norte es mejorar la calidad de vida de Alexis Joel”, señaló el presidente de la Cámara en comunicación escrita.

Las expresiones del líder legislativo surgen luego

de una reunión con Hernández Vélez en El Capitolio en donde la representante Lebrón Rodríguez, junto a Franqui Atiles, ayudaron en la coordinación de los servicios.

“Deseo agradecer al Administrador del Fondo por la disponibilidad. Hoy anunciamos que Alexis Joel será evaluado el próximo miércoles a las 10 de la mañana en el Hospital Industrial en vías de iniciar un agresivo programa de rehabilitación. Vamos a seguir luchando por este joven puertorriqueño”, sentenció Franqui Atiles, quien representa el Distrito #15 de Hatillo, Camuy y Quebradillas.

“Esta es una situación penosa que se tiene que atender, por eso coordinamos esta reunión como primer paso hacia mejorar la calidad de vida de Alexis Joel. No es justo lo que está pasando y se tiene que corregir”, dijo Lebrón Rodríguez, quien representa el Distrito 8 de Bayamón.

“En la Corporación del Fondo del Seguro del Estado la solidaridad con quienes más lo necesitan es un valor importante que guía las acciones de nuestro personal en el ejercicio de facilitarle servicios de salud a los lesionados en Puerto Rico. Es así ya que somos conscientes de que con la intervención de nuestros profesionales de la medicina, muchos pacientes alcanzan la recuperación deseada y retoman el control de sus vidas. Justamente eso es lo que deseamos para Alexis Joel quien como todo un guerrero ha luchado por su vida dándole una importante lección de perseverancia a todos los puertorriqueños. Hoy, con gran satisfacción, ponemos a su alcance los servicios de un hospital de primera como lo es el Hospital Industrial y de una Unidad de Quemados única en Puerto Rico y el Caribe para que reciba servicios médicos y de rehabilitación”, comentó el administrador de la CFSE, Jesús ‘Chu’ Rodríguez Rosa.

Cruz Soto: “La gobernadora quiere ganar con trucos, lo que sabe que no va a ganar con votos” Por THE STAR

L

a precandidata a la gobernación por el Partido Popular Democrático (PPD), Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto catalogó el lunes, como “truco” de la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced, su firma al proyecto del Código Electoral.

“Desgraciadamente cuando uno no ha sido electo, como no ha sido electa la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez, uno no le tiene tanto respeto al poder del voto y a la herramienta del voto en una democracia. La gobernadora sabe que su gobierno no sirve y por lo tanto, está cambiando las reglas del juego para poder robarse las elecciones. El llamado al pueblo de Puerto Rico es que hagan de inmediato para ir a votar, que se inscriba, que tu voto sea una protesta, que tu voto sea un reclamo de que los gobernantes cumplan su palabra”, dijo Cruz Soto en conferencia de prensa.

“Dos cosas son importantísimas de esta firma, número uno, la gobernadora no tiene palabra, que no lo firmaría si no había consenso, que no lo hay. Y dos, la gobernadora quiere ganar con trucos, lo que sabe que no va a ganar con votos”, añadió.

Mencionó que: “queda evidenciado el carácter

de Wanda Vázquez, la que no le pide a la gente que no le envíen la información para no tener que investigar. La que persigue a adversarios políticos. La que le dice al país como jefa de fiscales que en este país se le fabrica un caso a cualquiera. Esa frase tiene una segunda parte, cuando se le fabrica un caso a cualquiera, se le ‘amapucha’ un caso a cualquiera. Y de eso ha

dado ejemplo la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez. Es un día triste para la democracia, pero, ahora el país se tiene que volcar en votos, votos y más votos”.

A pesar de las objeciones de la mayoría de los líderes de la oposición política, la gobernadora convirtió en ley en la tarde del sábado el Código Electoral de Puerto Rico.

20

Tuesday, June 23, 2020a

The San Juan Daily Star

Spike Lee saved my life

By LAWRENCE WARE

I

was raised by an overprotective single mother.

She did her best to prepare me for the realities of being a black man in America, but she also made sure to let me know that not everyone white was a racist. Still, she was terrified of one group of people: the police. And of her son encountering them.

She warned me that the police would treat me differently because, as she put it affectionately, of the “beautiful ebony hue of my skin.” She implored me to never do anything that would raise their suspicions, and, above all, never to drive at night with a white woman in the car. I would nod my head.

Yes, yes, yes. But I was a teenager and not given to listening. Her warnings went in one ear and exited the other. I just did not take her seriously. It was the ’90s in Oklahoma, and I was ignorant of the world around me, of what had happened in Los Angeles in 1992. To me, things had gotten better. Then I saw a Spike Lee movie. And I began to understand. It was the first of many lessons his films would teach me.

I was developing into a film nerd. I devoured all the classic films I could, then I began to look at contemporary filmmakers. The first Spike Lee movie I saw — and my first glimpse of his depictions of the violent and otherwise deeply problematic ways that cops interact with black people — was “Jungle Fever” in 1993. I was too young to understand it all, but even in seventh grade, the message came through. In the drama, a black architect played by Wesley Snipes falls in love with an Italian-American woman from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, played by Annabella Sciorra.

The scene that drove home what my mother had been trying to teach me occurs late in the movie. Seeing the two playfully wrestle in the street, neighbors assume that Snipes is assaulting her and call the police. In what I learned was typical fashion for cops in Lee’s world, New York’s finest show up and put a gun to Snipes’ head. My mother’s warnings about driving alone with white women came to mind. I had merely thought she did not want to lose her son to a woman of a different race, but as I watched the film I realized that the world did not take kindly to a black man being with a white woman. With one scene, Lee did for me what my mother had been trying to do for years.

My education courtesy of Spike Lee did not end there. I saw “Get on the Bus” (1996) as a sophomore in high school. It’s the story of a group of black men who take a cross-country bus trip to

The police roll up in “Do the Right Thing.” attend the Million Man March in Washington. In Knoxville, Tennessee, they are pulled over not for any legitimate reason but simply because as black men they are always targets for the police. Even as one of them tries to reason with the officers — like them, he is a cop, only back home in Los Angeles — they are not impressed. This taught me that even a black officer is not safe from the police in America. As my mother had been saying, I would never be safe in this country. My white friends might get away with underage drinking or smoking, but I had to be circumspect, above reproach.

Yet it was not until the following year, when I caught up with “Do the Right Thing,” that I finally understood. The movie is Lee’s masterpiece.

As I watched the police take the life from Radio Raheem, everything my mother had been trying to tell me was suddenly crystallized. For me, “Do the Right Thing” took the police from an intellectual threat to an existential one. The police, I realized, could kill me … and no one would say a word. I never wondered whether Mookie did the right thing by throwing a trash can through the window of Sal’s Pizzeria, whose owner had fought with Raheem. I

understood Mookie’s pain, his anguish.

These three Spike Lee films prepared me for my own incident with the police. As I drove through a small town just south of Oklahoma City in the fall of 1998, they pulled me over, as they had done many times before. But this time they said I fit the description of a man they were looking for — a black man wearing a do-rag and driving a black car.

My car was red.

Lee’s films had taught me what I needed to know to make it through that encounter. I complied with the police. I did exactly what they said. I sat on the curb as they looked through my car. I did not make any sudden movements. I said “sir” so much that I felt I should tap dance for them. In brief, I did what I had to do to survive. I also never told anyone about that night, especially not my mother. It was my first traumatic experience with the cops, but it would not be the last.

You could say that Spike Lee saved my life. I wish that Amadou Diallo, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Atatiana Jefferson, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks could say the same.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

21

Roosevelt statue to be removed from Museum of Natural History

By ROBIN POGREBIN

T

he bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt, on horseback and flanked by a Native American man and an African man, which has presided over the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History in New York since 1940, is coming down.

The decision, proposed by the museum and agreed to by New York City, which owns the building and property, came after years of objections from activists and at a time when the killing of George Floyd has initiated an urgent nationwide conversation about racism.

For many, the “Equestrian” statue at the museum’s Central Park West entrance had come to symbolize a painful legacy of colonial expansion and racial discrimination.

“Over the last few weeks, our museum community has been profoundly moved by the ever-widening movement for racial justice that has emerged after the killing of George Floyd,” the museum’s president, Ellen V. Futter, said in an interview. “We have watched as the attention of the world and the country has increasingly turned to statues as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism.

Futter made clear that the museum’s decision was based on the statue itself — namely its “hierarchical composition”— and not on Roosevelt himself, whom the museum continues to honor as “a pioneering conservationist.”

“Simply put,” she added, “the time has come to move it.”

The museum took action amid a heated national debate over the appropriateness of statues or monuments that first focused on Confederate symbols like Robert E. Lee and has now moved on to a wider arc of figures, from Christopher Columbus to Winston Churchill.

“The American Museum of Natural History has asked to remove the Theodore Roosevelt statue because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement. “The City supports the Museum’s request. It is the right decision and the right time to remove this problematic statue.”

When the monument will be taken down, where it will go and what, if anything, will replace it, remain undetermined, officials said.

Theadore Roosevelt Sr., the president’s father, was a founding member of the institution; its charter was signed in his home.

Roosevelt’s childhood excavations were among the museum’s first artifacts. New York’s state Legislature in 1920 chose the museum as the site to memorialize the former president.

The museum already has several spaces named after Roosevelt, including Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall, the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda and Theodore Roosevelt Park outside.

“It’s very important to note that our request is based on the statue, that is the hierarchical composition that’s depicted in it,” Futter said. “It is not about Theodore Roosevelt who served as Governor of New York before becoming the 26th president of the United States and was a pioneering conservationist.”

Critics, though, have pointed to Roosevelt’s opinions about racial hierarchy, his support of eugenics theories and his pivotal role in the Spanish-American War. Some see Roosevelt as an imperialist whose role leading troops fighting in the Caribbean

The equestrian memorial to Roosevelt, which has long prompted objections as a symbol of colonialism and racism, will be coming down. ultimately resulted in American expansion into colonies there and in the Pacific including Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, Cuba and the Philippines.

A nationalist, Roosevelt, in his later years became overtly racist, historians say, endorsing sterilization of the poor and the intellectually disabled.

The statue — created by an American sculptor, James Earle Fraser — was one of four memorials in New York that a city commission reconsidered in 2017, ultimately deciding after a split decision to leave the statue in place and to add context.

The museum tried to add that context with an exhibition last year, “Addressing the Statue,” which explored its design and installation, the inclusion of the figures walking beside Roosevelt and Roosevelt’s racism. The museum also examined its own potential complicity, in particular its exhibitions on eugenics in the early 20th century.

“I’m glad to see it go,” said Mabel O. Wilson, a Columbia University professor who served on the city commission to reconsider the statue and was consulted on the exhibition.

“The depiction of the Indigenous and the African trailing behind Roosevelt, who is strong and virile,” she added, “was clearly a narrative of white racial superiority and domination.”

The exhibition was partly a response to the defacing of the statue by protesters, who in 2017 splashed red liquid representing blood over the statue’s base. The protesters, who identified themselves as members of the Monument Removal Brigade, later published a statement on the internet calling for its removal as an emblem of “patriarchy, white supremacy and settler-colonialism.”

“Now the statue is bleeding,” the statement said. “We did not make it bleed. It is bloody at its very foundation.”

The group also said the museum should “rethink its cul-

tural halls regarding the colonial mentality behind them.”

At the time, the museum said complaints should be channeled through de Blasio’s commission to review city monuments and that the museum was planning to update its exhibits. The institution has since undertaken a renovation of its North West Coast Hall in consultation with native nations from the North West Coast of Canada and Alaska.

In January, the museum also moved the Northwest Coast Great Canoe from its 77th Street entrance into that hall, to better contextualize it. The museum’s Old New York diorama, which includes a stereotypical depiction of Lenape leaders, now has captions explaining why the display is offensive.

De Blasio has made a point of rethinking public monuments to honor more women and people of color — an undertaking led largely by his wife, Chirlane McCray, and the She Built NYC commission. But these efforts have also been controversial, given complaints about the transparency of the process and the public figures who have been excluded, namely Mother Cabrini, a patron saint of immigrants who had drawn the most nominations in a survey of New Yorkers.

On Friday, the mayor announced that McCray would lead a Racial Justice and Reconciliation Commission whose brief would include reviewing the city’s potentially racist monuments.

Though the debates over many of these statues have been marked by rancor, the Natural History Museum seems unconflicted about removing the Roosevelt monument that has greeted its visitors for so long.

“We believe that moving the statue can be a symbol of progress in our commitment to build and sustain an inclusive and equitable society,” Futter said. “Our view has been evolving. This moment crystallized our thinking and galvanized us to action.”

22

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Dogs will suffer from ‘severe separation anxiety’ after Coronavirus lockdown ends

By CHELSEA RITSCHEL

W

hile the coronavirus-imposed lockdown may be frustrating to some people, dogs have been enjoying the constant companionship of their owners.

But, once the risk of spreading the virus has been contained and people begin to resume their daily routines, the impact on the lives of dogs may be severe.

According to Queen Elizabeth II’s corgi trainer, pups may suffer from “severe social anxiety” once social distancing has ended - as they’ve built up a “huge reservoir of over-dependency”.

Speaking to The Times, Dr Roger Mugford, an animal psychologist, explained: “With such an overload of quality time with their families, dogs are building up a huge reservoir of overdependency which could see them suffer when mums and dads suddenly return to work and the children go back to school.”

This distress could manifest itself in a variety of ways, according to Dr Mugford, who said that, when left alone, pet dogs can chew furniture, bark, go to the bathroom inside, and “sometimes even self-harm”.

“Put a webcam on your dog and you’ll see howling and pacing and other distress signs,” he said.

To help furry friends ease into the unavoidable separation that will occur

when social distancing measures are lifted, Dr Mugford recommends owners begin now - by separating themselves from their pet for 30 minutes at a time, several times a day.

The reminder to consider how dogs will respond to the return to daily life comes amid an increase in pet adoption numbers in countries around the world, as people look to animals as a source of comfort.

“One great thing about owning a

pet is that they can offer unconditional love and friendship, which is more important than ever through these challenging and uncertain times,” Vet nurse Joanne Wright from the UK’s leading vet charity PDSA, previously told The Independent.

Research from PDSA found that 84 per cent of pet owners report that having a pet has had a positive impact on their mental health.

The feelings are mutual, accord-

ing to Wright, who added: “What’s even better is that many of our animals, who may otherwise be left alone for extended periods of time, will also be able to enjoy lots of company and fuss at home.”

If your dog does experience anxiety, they aren’t alone - as a study published in March 2020 by researchers at the University of Helsinki in Finland found that most pups suffer from anxiety.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

23

Coronavirus can set off a ‘cytokine storm.’ These drugs may calm it.

By APOORVA MANDAVILLI

M

any coronavirus patients seem to get better at first, then rapidly decline and are overtaken by an overwhelming immune response that causes the body to turn on itself.

This “cytokine storm” was once an arcane phenomenon familiar mainly to rheumatologists who study when and how the immune system’s safeguards fail.

But it has become increasingly clear in the past few months that, at least in a subset of people who have the virus, calming the storm is the key to survival.

At least a dozen candidate drugs to treat the coronavirus rely on this premise. A few devices that purify the blood, as dialysis machines do, are also being tested. One promising drug made by Roche is in several clinical trials, including a late-stage trial in combination with the antiviral drug remdesivir. And a recent paper in the journal Science Immunology described preliminary data on a drug that stems the flood of cytokines at its source, and seems to lead to rapid recovery.

When immune cells first encounter a pathogen, they release molecules called cytokines to recruit even more cells to the fight.

Once the danger recedes, the immune system usually turns itself off. But occasionally “it doesn’t shut up,” said Dr. Jose Scher, a rheumatologist at New York University Langone Health.

“The immune system goes on and on and on and on.”

This unrelenting response can exhaust the immune system; shut down lungs, kidneys and liver; and prove fatal. It can do so even in young people and children who have no underlying conditions. In a milder form, this same mechanism is at play in autoimmune diseases like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Most of the drugs that doctors have tried for the coronavirus, including steroids and hydroxychloroquine, are treatments for those diseases, disrupting their supplies.

“Our medicines have been co-opted from us,” said Scher, adding that they are often being deployed with little insight into their proper use or pitfalls.

Early in the pandemic, doctors in China and Italy recognized the telltale signs of a body in cytokine shock — fever, a racing heart and plummeting blood pressure — and treated patients with the drug tocilizumab. That drug is marketed by Roche as Actemra, which blocks a cytokine called interleukin-6.

In an undated handout image, six views of the coronavirus, which in some patients causes the immune system to overcompensate, causing a reaction called a “cytokine storm.”

Anecdotal evidence and preliminary trials soon confirmed their hunch. Since then, several studies have shown that high levels of IL-6 portend respiratory failure and death, and that Actemra lowers these risks.

Other drugs that quell IL-6 activity have shown promising results, as has Kineret, a drug that quiets a different cytokine called IL-1.

A more efficient solution than blocking any single cytokine would be to break the cycle of inflammation at its origin, experts said. For example, blood pressure drugs that mute the chemical signals that precede cytokines have shown some benefit in mouse studies and are being tested in people.

In the paper published in Science Immunology, scientists identified that the cancer drug Calquence, made by AstraZeneca and also called acalabrutinib, can cut off the cytokine supply at its source.

Treating patients with drugs like tocilizumab is “like cutting the branches off a tree,” said Dr. Louis Staudt, a scientist at the National Cancer Institute who was one of the lead investigators of the study. “Acalabrutinib is going for the trunk of the tree.”

The team identified macrophages — scavenger cells that chew up bacteria and viruses — as the key source of the cytokine surge in COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

“These patients get in trouble because

their house is on fire in their lungs,” Staudt said.

“This drug can put out this inflammatory fire by disabling macrophages.”

The involvement of macrophages might also explain why some people suddenly deteriorate weeks into infection. Large number of the cells would become involved only after the virus had substantially damaged the lungs. “There’s a time delay there,” he said.

People who have diabetes, obesity and hypertension have a higher baseline of inflammation, so it’s also possible, he said, that this may explain why they are particularly vulnerable to becoming seriously ill. AstraZeneca plans to test Calquence in larger trials.

The insights gained from studying COVID-19, especially because of the large numbers of people affected, might allow researchers to understand inflammatory syndromes that have long remained mysterious, Staudt said.

The pandemic has also popularized an approach that is commonplace for treating some diseases, but has not been proved in clinical trials to work for coronavirus patients.

For example, the Food and Drug Administration has authorized the use of a cartridge that continually filters excess cytokines from the blood, similar to the way a dialysis machine removes toxins. The purified blood is then pumped back into the body.

The device, called CytoSorb, is about the

size of a drinking glass and is filled with coarse polymers, each roughly the size of a grain of salt. Every grain, or bead, has millions of pores and channels that add up to a surface area of roughly seven football fields and filter out molecules roughly the size of cytokines. One cartridge can purify an entire body’s blood volume roughly 70 times in a 24-hour period.

Bigger objects like cells go around the beads and are unaffected, and smaller things like electrolytes go straight through, said Dr. Phillip Chan, the chief executive of CytoSorbents Corp., which makes the device. CytoSorb may also remove some proteins that the body needs.

But “in a life-threatening illness when you have a cytokine storm,” Chan said, “it’s more or less a race to remove what will kill you versus the temporary inconvenience of removing things that your body manufactures all the time anyway.”

In Europe, where CytoSorb has been commercially available since 2013, it has been used more liberally. But in the United States, the device had been allowed only for patients who had exhausted all other options. Even now, during the pandemic, its use is authorized only in coronavirus patients who are critically ill, with imminent or confirmed respiratory failure.

Dr. Stephan Ziegeler, who leads a specialized pulmonary intensive care unit at a hospital in Ibbenbüren, Germany, has so far treated eight people with CytoSorb. (Since 2018, he has received speaking fees from CytoSorb’s manufacturer, totaling 5,000 euros, or about $5,600.) Of these people, three have been discharged, three are being weaned off ventilation and two have died.

Patients with bacterial sepsis typically need a maximum of three cartridges — one per day at $1,200 — but coronavirus patients have such astronomical levels of cytokines, Ziegeler said, that some have needed dozens of cycles, with two fresh cartridges per day.

“It seems that COVID-19 has a prolonged cytokine storm — a prolonged, really effective inflammatory state compared to other sepsis states,” he said.

CytoSorb is not the only mechanical approach being used; the FDA has also authorized the use of another device, called Oxiris, for coronavirus patients. And there are plans to try CytoSorb in combination with tocilizumab.

All of these approaches are worth pursuing, Scher said, but they all must be tested in rigorous clinical trials with the right control groups: “That will be the only way to learn for sure.”

24

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Where jaguars are killed, new common factor emerges: Chinese investment

By RACHEL NUWER

I

n May 2019, a headless jaguar carcass turned up at a garbage dump in southern Belize. The killing, one in a series of similar incidents, added to local outrage and inspired authorities, private citizens and companies to offer a combined $8,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the jaguar killer.

More than just a national issue, the graphic killing in Belize seemed indicative of a rise in jaguar poaching across the species’ range, from Mexico to Argentina.

“I suspect for a long time it went unnoticed as authorities simply were not paying attention,” said Pauline Verheij, an independent wildlife crime specialist who has investigated the jaguar trade in Suriname and Bolivia in recent years.

“Tackling wildlife crime in most if not all Latin American countries has had zero priority until only very recently.”

For several years, Verheij and others have warned that the jaguar trade appears to be on the rise, at the same time that the big cats are already threatened with extinction, primarily because of habitat loss and revenge killings for livestock predation. Experts in wildlife trafficking also saw that many of the jaguar cases were linked to Chinese citizens or destinations in China. In Bolivia, for example, authorities intercepted China-bound packages containing hundreds of jaguar canines, which are fashioned into jewelry. But evidence tying these observations together has been scattered and largely anecdotal.

Now, a study published this month in Conservation Biology provides a more complete overview of the illegal trade, bringing together data from all of Central and South America. The findings confirm that seizures of jaguar parts have increased tremendously throughout the region, and that private investment from China is significantly correlated with trafficking of the species.

“For the very first time, we have a big picture of what is happening in Central and South America regarding trade in jaguar body parts,” said Thaís Morcatty, a doctoral student in anthropology at Oxford Brookes University in England, and lead author of the study.

The findings suggest a parallel with poaching patterns seen in Southeast Asia and Africa, in which an increasing presence of businesses from China working on large development projects coincides with increasing legal and illegal wildlife trade, including of big cats.

“What we can learn from this is that the patterns we saw in Asia and then in Africa are now starting to emerge in South America,” said Vincent Nijman, a co-author also at Oxford Brookes University. “If there is demand, it will be fulfilled, even if you go to another continent on the other side of the world.”

“If we can catch this in the beginning, when trade is just increasing, we can change the course of things before it’s too late,” Morcatty added.

Jaguars have almost been poached to extinction in the past. During the 20th century, hunting for their fur nearly

Poaching of the big cats is on the rise, and a new study links their slaughter to corruption as well as invstment from Chinese companies. caused the species to disappear. The U.S. accounted for the majority of the jaguar trade, importing more than 23,000 jaguar skins in 1968 and 1969 alone. With jaguar populations plummeting even in remote regions of the Amazon, policymakers banned the big cats from international trade in 1975.

“In the past, we almost lost jaguars because of a very big hunting pressure in a short amount of time,” Morcatty said. “It’s taken decades of effort and investment from many countries and institutions to recover jaguar populations.”

Jaguars have slowly clawed back, to an estimated 60,000 to 170,000 animals today. But now they are in decline throughout much of their range. While poaching for the illegal trade may not be the primary driver of population losses, it could exacerbate other pressures, Morcatty said.

Ranchers, for example, may be more inclined to kill jaguars on their property if they know they can earn money from the carcasses.

“We shouldn’t let this new threat combine with other threats we already have,” she said.

A similar dynamic is already playing out in Southern Africa. In South Africa, a growing legal trade in the skeletons of captive-bred lions exported to China may have created a new market for poached lion products.

Retaliatory killings of lions that have attacked livestock or people have always occurred in Southern Africa, but now “it’s not just a dead lion that was a problem animal, it’s a dead lion that’s had pieces taken off it and entered into the trade chain,” said Andrew Lemieux, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement. “There’s lots of money to be made.”

To estimate the extent to which the problem has grown, Morcatty and her colleagues searched news stories, technical reports and police records from 2012 through 2018 in all 19 Central and South American countries for mention of seized big cat parts. They found records for 489 seizure incidents representing around 1,000 big cats —

primarily jaguars, but also some pumas and ocelots. They calculated that over just five years, the number of jaguars seized increased 200-fold.

“It’s quite remarkable,” Morcatty said.

Brazil accounted for the highest proportion of cases, followed by Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and Suriname. Most of the seizure records did not indicate the final destination or intended buyer, but Morcatty was able to definitively link 34% to China. China-related seizures contained 13 times the number of jaguar parts, on average, than those intended for the domestic market.

Morcatty and her colleagues analyzed the seizure data against a variety of variables to identify factors that are likely driving the trade. Predictably — and serving as a control — the more jaguars present in a country, the higher the amount of jaguar trafficking. Also not surprisingly, they found that corruption and poverty are significantly associated with the illegal trade.

The second most significant variable after corruption was the direction of private Chinese investment, which has increased tenfold in Central and South America over the last decade, mostly in energy, mining and infrastructure. “In essence, it seems that countries with new Chinese money rolling in are the ones where we see an increase in overseas jaguar trade,” Nijman said.

Chinese investment itself is not a negative thing, and in fact brings many benefits to Central and South America, said Sue Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society who was not involved in the study. “But all efforts should be made to ensure that it is environmentally and socially sound.”

In addition to bringing new potential buyers of jaguar products into the country, development itself — especially if it entails cutting new roads into pristine areas or clearing forests — can facilitate poaching by putting wildlife and people in closer vicinity. A study published in March, for example, found that agricultural expansion in the Amazon led to increased jaguar poaching. When Chinese companies are linked to such development, it only increases the odds of poached animals entering trade.

“Chinese investment into deforestation accelerates trade — it’s connected,” Morcatty said.

The authors of the new study did not investigate what motivates the demand for jaguar parts among Chinese buyers, but Lieberman and her colleagues have seen advertisements on Chinese social media for jaguar claws and teeth.

“The worst of the trafficking in jaguar parts is not bones to replace tiger bones, but the canines for jewelry,” she said.

China is a major consumer of other big cat species, especially tigers, which have long been sought after for their bones and parts, used in traditional medicine. More recently, tiger teeth and claws have appeared for sale as jewelry.

But as tiger populations have dwindled to fewer than 4,000 animals remaining in the wild, traders have looked to other sources to satiate demand, which jaguars might fulfill for some consumers.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Ferrauioli LLC Looking Forward Lcdo. Luis G. Parrilla Hernández ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO P.O. Box 195168 DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUSan Juan, PR 00919-5168 NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA Tel.: 787-766-7000 / SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN Fax: 787-766-7001 lparrilla@ferraiouli.com JUAN. Abogado de la parte demanPR RECOVERY AND DEVELOPMENT JV, LLC, dante, con copia de respuesta a la Demanda dentro de los Demandante v. treinta (30) días siguientes a SAN JUAN la publicación de este edicto y RESTAURANTS GROUP, radicar el original de dicha conCORP.; RESTAURANTS testación en este Tribunal en ASSOCIATES OF donde podrá enterarse de su contenido. Si dejare de hacer PUERTO RICO, INC. lo, podrá anotársele la rebeldía Uc/c RESTAURANT y se le dictará sentencia conceASSOCIA TES OF PUERTO RICO, INC; DA diendo el remedio solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle. EXPEDIDO YN R. SMITH CHURCHILL bajo mi firma y con el sello del T/C/C DA YN SMITH; Tribunal. DADO hoy en San NANCY MOON SMITH Juan, Puerto Rico, 10 de junio de 2020. Griselda Rodriguez T/C/C NANCY MOON; LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL Collado, Secretaria.

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CIVIL NÚM. : SJ2020CV01483 (602). SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE GRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. SS.

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Ascenda Biosciences, LLC, Plaintiff/ Counterclaim-Defendant v.

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A : DAYN R. SMITH CHURCHILL T/C/C Civil Action No. 20-00278-RGA. DAYN SMITH, NANCY Summons in a Civil Action.

MOON SMITH T/C/C The Strategic Group, P.R., NANCY MOON, Y LA LLC SOCIEDAD LEGAL Robb Rill – Managing DE GANANCIALES Director COMPUESTA POR ELLOS Galeria de Artes y Ciencia, 1077 Ashford A ve., Suite 201 875 Carr. 693 Condado, San Juan, Dorado, PR 00646 Puerto Rico 00907; c/o Scott Wilcox, Esq. Urb. Los Sauces, Calle Moore and Rutt, P.A. Pomarosa, Humacao , 122 West Market Street Puerto Rico 00791; Georgetown, DE 19947 227 Calle Pamarosa, Urb. A lawsuit has been filed against Los Sauces, Humacao you, requesting a trial by jury.

Within 21 days after service of Puerto Rico 00791; the summons on you, (not cou1000 Avenida Conqu nting the day you received it) – istador, Fajardo, Puerto or 60 days if you are the United Rico 00738; States or a United States agen1482 Zachary Taylor Hwy, cy, or any officer or employee Hunt ly, VA 22640; of the United States described

Por la presente se le notifica que se ha radicado en su contra una Demanda de Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Gravamen Mobiliario 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. Se le emplaza y requiere para que notifique a:

@

in Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(a)(2) or (3) -- you must serve on the Counter-Plaintiff an answer to the Counterclaims or a motion under Rules 12 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The Answer or Motion must be served on the Counter-Plaintiff’s attorney, whose name and address are: Daniel C. Herr, Esq., Law Office of Daniels C. Herr, LLC, 1225 N. King Street, Suite

staredictos1@outlook.com

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LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PPJMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE SAN JUAN.

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TO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE EUROBANK AHORA, AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. EL ESTADO ORIENTAL BANK; LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. SS. FEDERAL DEPOSIT

INSURANCE CORPORATION (FDIC); JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE, COMO POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. SJ2019CV07741 (803). Sobre: CANCELACION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

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(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 22 de enero 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 19 de junio de 2020. En SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, el 19 de junio de 2020. Griselda Rodriguez Collado, Secretaria Regional.

Mildred Martinez Acosta, Sec Tribunal Confidencial I.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE, personas desconocidas que se designan con estos nombres ficticios, que puedan ser tenedor o tenedores, o puedan tener algun interés en el pagaré hipotecario a que se hace referencia más adelante en el presente edicto, que se publicará una sola vez.

Se les notifica que en la Demanda radicada en el caso de epígrafe se alega que un pagaré hipotecario fue otorgado ci 20 de mayo de 2003, se otorgó un pagaré a favor de Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaría Puerto Rico o a su orden, por la suma de $150,000.00 de principal, con intereses al 5.5% anual, y vencedero el 1 de junio de 2033, ante la Notario Arline V. Bauza Figueroa, mediante afidávit 20657. La hipoteca que grava la propiedad descrita en el párrafo anterior fue constituida mediante la escritura número 20 del 20 de mayo de 2003, ante la Notario Arline V. Bauza Figueroa, inscrita al folio 121 del tomo 118 de Santurce Sur, finca 5423, inscripción 10, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección I. El inmueble gravado mediante la hipoteca antes descrita es la finca número 5423 inscrita al folio 90 del tomo 174 de Santurce Sur, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección I. La obligación evidenciada por el pagaré antes descrito fue saldada en su totalidad. Dicho gravamen no ha podido ser cancelado por haberse extraviado el original del pagaré. El original del pagaré antes descrito no ha podido ser localizado, a pesar de las gestiones realizadas. Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaría Puerto Rico, hoy Oriental Bank, es el acreedor que consta en el

(787) 743-3346

25 Registro de la Propiedad. El último tenedor conocido del pagaré antes descrito the Oriental Bank. POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva de los 30 días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento, excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), a! cuál puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretarla del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

LCDO. JAVIER MONTALVO CINTRON RUANUM. 17682 DELGADO & FERNANDEZ, LLC P0 Box 11750, Fernández Juncos Station San Juan, Puerto Rico 00910-1750, Tel. (787) 274-1414 / Fax (787) 764-8241 E-mail: jmontalvo@ delgadofernandez.com Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 16 de junio de 2020. GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, Secretararia Regional. Maria M. Cruz Ramos, SubSecretario.

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

FRANKLIN CREDIT MANAGEMENT CORPORATION, AS SERVICER OF DEUTSCHE BANK NATIONAL TRUST COMPANY, AS CERTIFICATE TRUSTEE ON BEHALF OF BOSCO CREDIT II TRUST SERIES 2017-1, Plaintiff, v.

NATIONAL PROMOTER AND SERVICES INC., EAGLE REALTY AND DEVELOPMENT CORP.

Defendants CIVIL NO. 18-01878-DRD. FORECLOSURE OF MORTGAGE COLLECTION OF MONIES. NOTICE OF SALE.

TO: NATIONAL PROMOTER AND SERVICES INC.,

EAGLE REALTY AND DEVELOPMENT CORP; AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC

WHEREAS: On August 20, 2019, this Court entered Judgment in favor of Plaintiff, against Defendants. On January 9, 2020, this Court entered Order for Execution of Judgment. Pursuant to the Judgment, the Defendants were Ordered to pay Plaintiff the principal amount of $153,280.01, accrued variable interest starting at 6.875%, from December 1sr, 2014 until full payment, plus mortgage and risk insurance premiums, late fees and any other amount expressly agreed-upon in the mortgage deed, from the date stated above until full payment thereof, plus 10% for attorneys’’ fees and legal costs in the amount of $16,800.00. WHEREAS: Pursuant to the terms of the aforementioned Judgment and the Order for Execution of Judgment thereof, the following property belonging to the Defendants will be sold at a public auction: Urbana: Solar marcado con el numero Sesenta y Nueve del Bloque D del plano de inscripción de la Urbanización San Antonio, radicada en el Barrio Canas del municipio de Ponce, Puerto Rico, con una cabida de Trescientos Sesenta y Cuatro punto Cero Cero (364.00) metros cuadrados. En linderos: Norte, con la calle número ocho (8) de la urbanización, por donde mide catorce (14.00) metros; Sur, con el solar número catorce (14), por donde mide catorce (14.00) metros; Este, con el solar número setenta (70), por donde mide veintiséis (26.00) metros; Oeste, con el solar número sesenta y ocho (68), por donde mide veintiséis (26.00) metros. Existe en este solar una casa residencia de una sola planta construida de hormigón reforzado, dividida en sala-comedor, tres cuartos dormitorios, cocina, cuarto sanitario, balcón y marquesina. The property is recorded at page 181 of volume 243 of Ponce, property number 12617, Registry of the Property of Puerto Rico, Section II of Ponce. WHEREAS: The property is subject to the following junior liens described as follows: MORTAGE: On behalf of or at the order of National Promoter And Services Inc. in the amount of $49,500.00, with interest at 6.875% annually and expiring on January 1, 2038. This is the result of deed number 177, granted in San Juan on December 31, 2007, before the

notary Elyvette Fuentes Bonilla.

Registered on 20 May 2008 on folio 72 of volume 1096, 23rd registration. LAWSUIT: In the Court of First Instance, Ponce Chamber, a lawsuit was filed on May 5, 2015, followed by Civil Case number JCD20150438 on Collection of Money and Foreclosure of Mortgage by the Ordinary Way, followed

by Scotiabank of Puerto Rico, Plaintiff vs. National Promoter And Services Inc, Eagle Realty And Development Corporation, Defendants, by means of which it is requested to pay the secured debt in the amount of $168,000.00 for principal; plus interest. Condemning the defendant to pay the plaintiff the sum of $153,280.01 principal balance of the referred to pay the interest at the agreed rate of $6,875 principal balance of the referred to pay the interest at the agreed rate of 6.875% per year accrued on such sum from December 1, 2014 and those accruing to the full and complete payment of the principal, late charges incurred up to this date and those accruing to the full and complete payment of the debt, any advances made by the plaintiff for the payment of insurance premiums, property contributions, special contributions, any other expenses paid by the plaintiffs and the sum of $16,800.00 for costs, expenses and attorneys’ fees, as well as any other sum contained in the loan agreement. This is the result of the above annotation. Inscribed on November 9, 2015 on folio 119 of volume 1256, annotation A. Potential bidders are advised to verify the extent of preferential liens with the holders thereof. It shall be understood that each bidder accepts as sufficient the title and that prior and preferential liens to the one being foreclosed upon, including, but not limited to any property tax, liens (express, tacit, implied or legal), shall continue in effect it being understood further that the successful bidder accepts them and is subrogated in the responsibility for the same and that the price shall be applied toward their cancellation. The present property will be acquired free and clear of all junior liens. WHEREAS: For the purpose of the first judicial sale, the minimum bid agreed upon by the parties in the mortgager deed will be $168,000.00, for the property and no lower offers will be accepted. Should the firs judicial sale of the above described property be unsuc-

cessful, then the minimum bid for the property on the second judicial sale will be two-thirds the amount of the minimum bid for the first judicial sale, or $112,000.00. The minimum bid for the third judicial sale, if the same is necessary, will be one-half of the minimum bid agreed upon the parties in the aforementioned mortgage deed, or $84,000.00. (Known in the Spanish language as: “Ley del Registro de la Propiedad Inmobiliaria del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico”, 2015 Puerto Rico Laws Act 210 (H.B. 2479), Articule 104, as amended). WHEREAS: Said sale to be made by the appointed Special Master is subject to confirmation by the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico and the deed of conveyance and possession to the property will be executed and delivered only after such confirmation. The records of the case and of these proceedings may be examined by interested parties at the Office of the Clerk of the United States District Court, Room 150 or 400 Federal Office Building, 150 Chardon Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico.

NOW THEREFORE, public notice is hereby given that the Special Master, pursuant to the provisions of the Judgment herein before referred to, will, on the September 4th, 2020 at 10:00 am, in the Office of the Clerk of the United States District Court, Room 150 or 400, Federal Building, Chardon Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico in accordance with 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2001, will sell at public auction to the highest bidder, the property described herein, the proceeds of said sale to be applied in the manner and form provided by the Court’s Judgment. Should the first judicial sale set hereinabove be unsuccessful, the second judicial sale of the property described in this Notice will be held on the September 11th, 2020 at 10:00 am, in the Office of the Clerk of the United States District Court located at the address indicated above. Should the second judicial sale set hereinabove be unsuccessful, the third judicial sale of the property described in this Notice will be held on the September 18th, 2020 at 10:00 am, in the Office of the Clerk of the United States District Court located at the address indicated above. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, this 16 day of June 2020.

Victor Encarnacion Pichardo, Appointed Special Master.

26

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

The country is reopening. Is it safe to play softball again?

By MATTHEW FUTTERMAN

C

arl Slutz and the rest of the Golden Years Senior Softball League are waiting to hear those magical words in Palm Beach County, Florida: “Play ball.”

The parks are open, but league play was delayed as they waited for permission to play.

So Slutz’s 10-person crew has been holding batting practice at a Boca Raton park a couple of times a week, getting ready for games, which are scheduled to start soon. Everyone takes some swings. Some wear a mask. They store their gym bags and take refuge from the heat in two dugouts rather than one to allow for social distancing.

“Some people are scared to come out of their houses,” Slutz, 85, said in a recent interview. “I’m more of an optimist. My position is, if you are not near someone, you have nothing to fear.”

All across the country, even in the states hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic and those where new cases are rising, the reawakening is underway, for better or for worse.

People are getting haircuts, sitting at restaurants — often at outdoor tables — and they are trying to figure out whether it is safe for recreational activities at a time of year that usually brings a cascade of beach volleyball, Frisbee, twilight tennis, pickleball, youth sports and barbecue sports. Safe or not, they are happening.

Graham Gerhart, a member of California Burrito Ultimate, a San Diego Ultimate Frisbee club, said his teammates had begun to chuck their disks in the park. In Seattle, Jude LaRene, who runs DiscNW, another club, said his teammates had begun to do drills in small groups.

In Tucson, Ariz., Kare Williams, who owns CrossFit Milo, said classes that now allowed only nine students, rather than 15 to 20, regularly filled up. A group of women holds pickleball matches every morning in Colorado Springs.

“You just don’t know what is right and what is wrong,” said David Stothoff, a contractor from Pittstown, N.J., whose daughter is a standout volleyball player who would usually be practicing hard with her club team this summer. “I know precautions and safety measures to keep our employees safe, but it’s much different from the high school sports standpoint. They are shoulder to shoulder at

Members of the Golden Years Senior Softball League have been holding batting practice in Boca Raton, Fla. “My position is, if you are not near someone you have nothing to fear,” Carl Slutz, 85, said. times and face to face at the net. The distance is supposed to be 6 feet in casual conversation, but I’d think during exertion, that has to be increased. How that happens, I don’t know.”

No one really does, not even Dr. Shmuel Shoham, an infectious diseases specialist with Johns Hopkins University. But he is trying to apply rationality to questions of sports and safety.

“You are trying to balance the physical and mental health benefits that sports and exercise bring with the potential risk,” Shoham said.

And it’s not an insolvable problem with intractable rules.

With infection rates still rising in more than 20 states, Shoham has divided sports into three categories: safe, problematic and somewhere in between.

Ones that he views as really safe, provided you are not on top of someone else, include solo endurance sports like running and cycling;

tennis, because the net serves as a divider; and golf (but don’t share a set of clubs).

“And Frisbee has got to be really safe,” he said.

In problem sports, close contact is endemic to the traditional form of the activity: wrestling, indoor basketball and probably soccer for the time being are some examples.

And then there are the sports in the middle, which require some thought and adjustment.

Softball and baseball probably work with a lot of hand cleaning if people are using the same bat. And don’t crowd together on the bench.

Some versions of volleyball are probably OK. And maybe, under certain circumstances, that three-on-three pickup basketball game at the park is not too risky, if you know who you are playing with and all the players have been healthy and limiting their exposure. But not everyone in the doctor’s field necessarily

agrees with that.

“Pickup basketball, that is part of New York, and I don’t mean to sound like I am trying to get in the way of everyone’s fun,” said Dr. Theresa Madaline, a health care epidemiologist with the Bronx-based Montefiore Health System. “I played basketball, and you spend a lot of time running into people and trying to steal the ball. That amount of close contact is problematic. There is risk there.”

Indeed, there is risk nearly everywhere, but managing it and being able to play the summer games Americans enjoy can be done in certain circumstances.

Attending Practice In some areas of the country where infection rates are low, youth sports have returned.

This month, Maryland gave the go-ahead for outdoor high school sports training to resume.

Shoham said the key was to keep things local. If people from a community with few infections want to set up a practice, the risk may be low.

Madaline said practicing with older children was probably safer than with younger ones because they were better at following instructions about social distancing. The important thing for now, she said, is to modify the way the game is played. If it’s soccer or lacrosse or another contact sport, a coach can organize dribbling and running and shooting drills in which there is no contact.

Shoham had this idea for baseball and softball: Ban leading off a base or have the teams agree that the runner on first can take a reasonable lead but the first baseman cannot hold the runner on. That limits their proximity.

Also, at this point, destination tournaments, in which dozens of youth teams from multiple states gather for three days for competition, should not happen, he said.

Playing on the Beach Gerhart, from the Frisbee club, said members of the Facebook group he belongs to had begun to set up small beach volleyball games in San Diego, despite rules that are supposed to prohibit them.

While Shoham is firmly against an indoor six-on-six volleyball game, two-on-two or threeon-three on the beach is doable. “That’s better,” he said.

As for the other beach sports, or any game in which there is shared equipment, like a shuttlecock in badminton or a cornhole beanbag, participants should wash their hands and clean everything when they are done.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

27

A football career on the cusp of glory, dashed by the pandemic

By JERÉ LONGMAN

O

n Feb. 8, cornerback Bradley Sylve scored the first defensive touchdown in the briefly revived XFL. He intercepted a pass for the D.C. Defenders and returned it 69 yards to preserve a victory.

When he reached the end zone, he bounded in joyful arrival, skipping and hopscotching and twisting in a dance called the Griddy.

The ebullient moment, shown on national television, appeared to signal Sylve’s longsought breakthrough as a professional. It came 10 days after his 27th birthday; 15 years after Hurricane Katrina drowned his hometown in rural Louisiana in 2005; four years after he ruptured his left Achilles’ tendon at Alabama while awaiting the 2016 NFL draft; and three years after fringe opportunities with the Buffalo Bills and the New Orleans Saints in 2017 produced no official playing time.

“Your blessing’s going to come,” Micquella Roblow, Sylve’s mother, told him after the game. “Stay prayed up.”

Six days later, Sylve was traded crosscountry to the Los Angeles Wildcats. His luck kept getting worse as the coronavirus pandemic struck. On March 20, the XFL, which first originated and collapsed in 2001, canceled the remainder of its rebooted season as the sports world shut down. On April 13, the league filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Last year, Sylve played in a different spring league, the Alliance of American Football, which also folded during its first season.

“Not again,” he told himself in exasperation. “Please, not again.”

Sylve’s story is familiar among those on the margins of professional sports, the journeymen who straddle the thin line between acceptance and rejection. What makes his odyssey striking is that it has intersected with two of the most catastrophic events of the young century. His journey, which is still not complete, in his view, has required exceptional resilience and perseverance over a decade and a half through natural disaster, untimely injury and global contagion in a thwarted but unflagging pursuit of a football career.

“It’s unfortunate because I think he barely scratched the surface of his potential,” said Cyril Crutchfield, who coached Sylve to multiple state championships in football and track at South Plaquemines High School,

about 50 miles southeast of New Orleans, and was married during that period to Sylve’s mother. “What’s disheartening is that all the circumstances were out of his control.”

Sylve grew up about as far from the big time as could be imagined, in tiny Port Sulphur, La., among the oil, fishing and citrus villages of Plaquemines Parish, where the Mississippi runs through its bird-foot delta to the Gulf of Mexico.

Highway 23 is the only road that runs the full 70 miles of the parish. It is flanked on one side by the river and on the other side by marshes and the Gulf. So accustomed is the watery existence that before Katrina, the nearby village Grand Bayou had a school boat instead of a school bus.

On Aug. 29, 2005, the hurricane poured more than 20 feet of water into lower Plaquemines before submerging New Orleans. Coffins floated out of the ground.

Cows hung by their necks in trees. Almost every home and business in Port Sulphur was destroyed.

In 2006, Sylve and his mother resettled in Port Sulphur, living in a FEMA trailer, the same as everyone else. A new school, South Plaquemines High School, was formed in temporary buildings, drawing about 260 students from three destroyed parish schools.

Students defiantly nicknamed themselves the Hurricanes. Sylve was in eighth grade but played football on the varsity team, already its fastest player.

The devastation of Katrina did not deflate the team with despair. It swelled the

Hurricanes with tenacity and resolve. South Plaquemines won state football titles for small schools in 2007 and 2008 and reached the championship game again in 2009. Sylve played running back, wide receiver, cornerback, even quarterback. And he became one of the nation’s fastest high school sprinters.

“After Katrina, it’s been a lot easier to overcome adversity,” Sylve said. “Nothing’s worse than what we’ve been through.”

He caught the eye of Burton Burns, then the University of Alabama’s running backs coach and ace recruiter, who is from New Orleans. Burns understood and appreciated the persistence of players at South Plaquemines High School, most of them poor, all of whom lost everything in the hurricane.

At Alabama, Sylve played on national championship teams in 2012 and 2015, excelled on special teams and received a bachelor’s degree in human environmental sciences. He became the first among his closest relatives to graduate from college. But he acknowledged that his college career was left unfulfilled by injury and a mostly backup role at cornerback.

He was not invited to the combine before the 2016 NFL draft. But he would have a chance to display his skills on the day league scouts visited Alabama’s campus. He had the one attribute the NFL prized above almost everything else: speed.

Three times in high school, Sylve won state titles in both the 100 and 200 meters, remarkable given that South Plaquemines had no running track. He practiced on the

grass of the football field and placed cones in the end zone to simulate the curve of the 200. To build strength, he and his teammates hoisted one another on their backs and ran up and down the tall, broad levee that held out the Mississippi.

“I’ve never seen a person change gears like Bradley,” said Crutchfield, who later coached several players from New Orleans who reached the NFL, including running back Leonard Fournette of the Jacksonville Jaguars. “With his second or third step, he seemed to be at top speed.”

At Alabama, Sylve had been hand-timed at 4.28 seconds in the 40-yard dash. It was only four-hundredths of a second off the NFL combine record at the time. He had filled out his 6-foot frame to 187 pounds. He was ready for the scouts to visit.

“I was going to kill that 40,” Sylve said.

“It was going to be my meal ticket.”

On March 8, 2016, the day before Alabama’s pro day, Sylve was practicing a routine drill, backpedaling and cutting at a 90-degree angle to his right, when he planted his left foot and heard a loud popping sound. He experienced no pain, only the sensation of something rolling up his calf like a window shade. He poked his left Achilles’ tendon.

“It felt like Jell-O,” Sylve said.

An Alabama trainer squeezed his left calf, but the foot remained limp. Sylve had torn the Achilles’ tendon.

“I felt my soul come out of my body,” he said.

Like any player, Sylve must decide for himself when the window has closed on professional football, said Crutchfield, his high school coach. As summer approached, the two had communicated via Facebook but had not spoken since the XFL ceased operations.

“It’s like when somebody dies, I don’t know how to call and say I’m sorry,” said Crutchfield, now the coach at Broadmoor High School in Baton Rouge, La. The odds may be long for Sylve. But he is not ready to concede his football career.

Not after everything he has been through.

Even when the pandemic struck, the XFL held out for a week longer than some other leagues, and he kept going to practice with the Los Angeles Wildcats.

“I wasn’t worried about the virus,” he said. “I had been through Hurricane Katrina.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

NASCAR investigating noose found in Bubba Wallace’s garage

By AZI PAYBARAH and AIMEE ORTIZ

D

ays after the only Black driver in NASCAR’s top racing series sported a “Black Lives Matter” message and celebrated the organization’s banning the Confederate battle flag, a noose was found Sunday in his garage stall at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama, officials said.

“Today’s despicable act of racism and hatred leaves me incredibly saddened and serves as a painful reminder of how much further we have to go as a society and how persistent we must be in the fight against racism,” the driver, Bubba Wallace, said in a statement Sunday evening.

Wallace, who had called for the battle flag to be banned, said that he had received support from people across the racing industry in recent weeks and that the sport had made a commitment to “championing a community that is accepting and welcoming of everyone.”

In a statement Monday morning, NASCAR said it had opened an investigation.

“We are angry and outraged, and cannot state strongly enough how seriously we take this heinous act,” the organization said on Twitter.

Courtney Weber, a spokesperson for Richard Petty Motorsports, Wallace’s team, declined to provide additional details about the episode and referred to the driver’s statement.

The noose was found about two weeks after NASCAR announced it was banning the Confederate battle flag from its events and properties, spurred by the nationwide protests against racism and white supremacy after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis while in police custody.

In its announcement June 10, NASCAR said the flag’s presence was “contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry.”

Wallace had called for the flag’s ban two days earlier.

“To you, it might seem like heritage, but others see hate,” Wallace said after NASCAR announced its new policy. “We need to come together and meet in the middle and say, ‘You know what, if this bothers you, I don’t mind taking it down.’”

“No one should feel uncomfortable when they come to a NASCAR race,” Wallace told Don Lemon of CNN. “So it starts with Confederate flags. Get them out of here. They have no place for them.”

That same week, Wallace and Richard Petty Motorsports revealed a new black paint scheme for his No. 43 Chevrolet, with the slo-

Bubba Wallace before a NASCAR Cup Series race in Martinsville, Va., this month. gan “#blacklivesmatter” over the rear wheels.

On the hood, a black fist and a white fist clasp in a grip above the slogan “Compassion, Love, Understanding.”

The noose episode is another troubling moment for NASCAR, a motor sports giant that has tried to distance itself from a past in which it had cultivated ties with segregationists and harbored racists and their tropes.

George C. Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, played a crucial role in the de-

velopment of the Talladega speedway, which opened in 1969 and is along Interstate 20 between Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala. In the nearly 51 years since the inaugural competition at Talladega, the track has become known on the racing circuit as one of the most likely places to see a Confederate flag.

And even though the city of Talladega, whose limits do not technically include the speedway, elected its first Black mayor last year, East Alabama can still be rife with racism and its

symbols.

But in recent years, NASCAR, which has seen attendance and television ratings decline, has sought to step away from its history.

In 2015, after a white supremacist killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., officials at top tracks urged people not to fly the Confederate flag at competitions, and some of the sport’s top drivers, like Dale Earnhardt Jr., spoke out about racism and their opposition to the battle flag.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 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

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

Your mind and heart are working in perfect harmony.

This is a good time to make a choice about your home life. Whether you’re wondering if you should relocate or are thinking of starting a family, the answer will become clear after some reflection. Finding a quiet corner where you can think will be therapeutic. Ordinarily, you enjoy being in the centre of the action. After finishing a time-consuming task or project, you’re now ready for a break. Rest, relax and catch up on your sleep.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

You’re able to boost morale among friends and neighbours.

If you sense colleagues feel abused or neglected under changed circumstances, invite them to discuss their feelings.

After airing their grievances, you’ll devise a way for everyone to get the credit and compensation they deserve. Your employer will be very pleased when productivity is maintained because of the changes you make to ensure things keep running smoothly. Don’t hesitate to ask for a raise. It’s only fair you get a share of the profits.

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)

Teaching a practical skill to a relative will be rewarding to you both. You’re extremely patient, which puts them at their ease. Every time they try something new, you give them praise and encouragement, along with helpful advice. Are you looking for love? You will find it by connecting with a friend you have known for years. You’ve always admired their creative talent, but it’s only been recently that you’ve become aware of their charisma.

Losing your heart will be as easy as falling off a chair.

Excellent business sense allows you to make some great deals. You’re willing to make a small investment in a promising idea. Any service or product that gives people comfort will be highly profitable. Support this endeavour any way you can. You can, and will earn respect for your responsible and caring approach to neighbourhood and community concerns. Outside events may not change in the near future but a determination not to be blown off course and to carry on caring for others will keep you going.

A most acceptable amount of money is coming your way. This is welcome news, as you have some significant expenses. If you’ve been thinking about starting your own business, use this windfall as start-up money. You’ll make an immediate impact with an eye-catching logo and a call to action’ slogan.

Someone with extensive connections in the business community will champion your talent. What begins as an interesting conversation could grow into a momentous opportunity.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Teaching an online course will be a great way to make extra money. Students will respond to your energy and enthusiasm. Even people who are obliged to take this class will develop a taste for it. It helps that you are versatile. When someone can’t grasp a concept, you change the way it is presented. As a result, many breakthroughs will occur, leaving people feeling empowered and intelligent. Word will spread like wildfire of your talent. You could be the most popular instructor of the team.

Teaching an online course will be a great way to make extra money. Students will respond to your energy and enthusiasm. Even people who are obliged to take this class will develop a taste for it. It helps that you are versatile. When someone can’t grasp a concept, you change the way it is presented. As a result, many breakthroughs will occur, leaving people feeling empowered and intelligent. Word will spread like wildfire of your talent. You could be the most popular instructor of the team.

Working with a partner will be rewarding. Listen to your other half when they propose ideas about attracting new business.

They have a great feel for what the public wants. You’re better at creating organised systems and winning financial strategies.

If you want to publish a piece of writing, team up with an agent. They’ll be able to get your work into a respected publication. Soon, you’ll be flooded with offers to produce even more work. Two heads are better than one.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Don’t share an exciting plan with anyone else right now.

Give this concept time to mature and develop. The last thing you want is to be discouraged by a well-intentioned critic. By developing this project in secret, you’ll acquire an attractive glow. If you’re in a relationship, your amour won’t be able to keep their hands off you. Feel free to abandon yourself to pleasure with your amour. Are you single? You could strike up a flirtatious friendship with someone in an online chatroom.

A hidden enemy is creating problems for you. If you are Being of service to others gives you pleasure. Whether your job involves advocating for the rights of the underdog or you volunteer for a charitable or voluntary organisation, these duties give your life shape and meaning. You’re not the type to perform work just for the money. If you want to increase your income, find a job in a creative field. An innovative person like you can make a living by creating cutting edge products and services that have a social benefit and will ease the problems others face.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Someone who has been singing your praises will finally have an opportunity to offer you. This intriguing new role will involve various duties that appeal to your sharp intellect. Performing this work will not be boring but will have to be done remotely. It will be best to keep this news under wraps for the short-term future. Events are changing quickly so you should be willing to adjust to any unexpected changes that are made at the last minute; they can’t be helped. It’s a good thing you are naturally flexible.

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

The chance to add to your qualifications is worth pursuing.

If you don’t have the money for expensive tuition, apply for a grant or scholarship. A helpful contact can help you along the way with some online suggestions. Your powers of persuasion are strong. After filling out a complicated application, turn your attention to making life more comfortable and beautiful. Painting a drab room, preparing delicious meals and displaying colourful artwork are all good possibilities.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

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• RURAL • REHABILITACIÓN • TERRENO • COMERCIAL • CONVENCIONAL • VETERANO • CONSTRUCCIÓN COOP LP NMLS #787612

787.733.2821 EXT: 1918, 1223, 1224, 1231, 1251

CAGUAS • LAS PIEDRAS • SAN LORENZO • HUMACAO • TRUIMPH PLAZA • YABUCOA • HATO REY • CAROLINA Ciertas resticciones aplican. El financiamiento será basado en el tipo de producto hipotecario que aplique en la solicitud Los depósitos y acciones están asegurados por la cantidad de $250.000 por COSSEC. En caso de insolvencia, por estar asegurados con COSSEC estamos excluidos de todo seguro federal.

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