Thursday Jun 4, 2020

Thursday, June 4, 2020

San Juan The

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DAILY

Star

Celebrating Pride on Film P20

More National Guard Troops for Reopening of Another Airport Terminal Expensive Equipment Bought with Public Funds Missing from Gov’t Agencies

As More Passengers Keep Arriving in Puerto Rico

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Gov't Bank Accounts Drop P5

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

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GOOD MORNING

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June 4, 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.

La Fortaleza, Police Dept. and Oncological Hospital are recent victims of apparent theft

Today’s

Weather Day

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By JOSÉ A. SÁNCHEZ FOURNIER Twitter: @SanchezFournier Special To The Star

78ºF

Precip 10%

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Wind: Humidity: UV Index: Sunrise: Sunset:

All three entities have reported expensive equipment missing

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From E 16 mph 63% 10 of 10 5:47 AM Local Time 6:58 PM Local Time

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

Health Science Legals Sports Games Horoscope Cartoons

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t has been five days since the initial police report was made and the investigation is what could be appropriately described as the La Fortaleza caper, as the police inquiry has barely moved an inch.

On May 21, incoming La Fortaleza property manager José Candelaria decided to make a full inventory check in the governor’s residence and when the list was finished, he realized there were various items missing. Chief among them were a baby play yard and a massage armchair.

Generally known as “corrales” in Puerto Rico, play yards can cost from $50 to over $300 and are designed for babies and toddlers.

Of the last three residents of La Fortaleza, former Govs.

Luis Fortuño, Alejandro García Padilla and Pedro Rosselló Nevares, only the latter had small children.

The therapeutic armchair in question was equipped for giving massages and can cost around $3,000 or more.

After realizing the equipment was missing, Candelaria waited eight days before filing a formal complaint with the Police. He did so at 11:35 a.m. on May 29.

La Fortaleza Public Affairs Secretary Osvaldo Soto said during a radio interview on Tuesday that they are still verifying in-house in an effort to find the missing items in case they were simply misplaced. He noted that La Fortaleza has several warehouses where it keeps some of its furniture, decorations and other equipment that is not in use at any given time.

If the articles are not found, however, the established protocol dictates that the previous property manager for La Fortaleza is liable for the missing equipment.

“But there is a whole procedure, including an internal search and investigation, that must be followed [before legal action would be taken against the previous property manager],” Soto said.

‘Sticky fingers’ in high places Unfortunately, the La Fortaleza caper is just one of several cases of theft or misappropriation of government property that have come to light recently.

There has also recently been news regarding the neverending story of the notorious Chevy Suburban Premiere bought by the Rosselló Nevares administration at a whopping $224,100. The vehicle caused much controversy when it

originally came to light that the bulletproof luxury vehicle with a premium level interior had been special ordered for the governor.

The backlash was of such force that La Fortaleza distanced itself from the purchase, later announcing that the Suburban would be given to the commonwealth police department, to be used as it saw fit.

On Wednesday, Public Safety Secretary Pedro Janer informed the Office of the Comptroller, Yesmín Valdivieso, that they had no idea where the Suburban Premiere was located. Even worse, they did not know of the automobile, which was paid for in full on Oct. 25, 2018.

The Office of the Comptroller was reportedly told by Janer that there were no records of this vehicle being delivered to the Puerto Rico Police Department (PRPD) or to the General Services Administration. They could not even ascertain if it ever arrived in Puerto Rico from Texas, where it was sold to the government.

As if these two cases were not enough, the San Juan Investigative Bureau of the PRPD is also looking into the theft of approximately $200,000 in equipment from the Oncological Hospital of Puerto Rico.

In a similar way to what happened in La Fortaleza, a recent inventory check made by hospital management could not account for equipment they said was valued at the aforementioned amount. Also as in the La Fortaleza caper, only a relatively small amount of personnel were supposed to have access to the expensive, now lost, equipment.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

PRNG: Troops ready for reopening of another terminal at LMM airport Aerostar floated the idea of putting the JetBlue terminal back in operation

By JOSÉ A. SÁNCHEZ FOURNIER Twitter: @SanchezFournier Special To The Star

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rusting of his troops and confident in their readiness for action, Puerto Rico National Guard (PRNG) Adj. Gen. José Juan Reyes Peredo did not hesitate in his response to a proposal from Isla Verde International Airport administrators to open another terminal to better deal with the increasing number of visitors arriving daily on the island.

“We had a meeting with Aerostar [Airport Holdings], the administrators of the airport, on Monday and they were considering the possibility of opening the JetBlue terminal so that they could better accommodate the rising number of flights and people flying into Puerto Rico,” Reyes Peredo said during a telephone interview with The San Juan Daily Star late on Wednesday afternoon. “They did not give us a timetable or tell us a specific date for the opening of the JetBlue terminal. But we are ready

for them today and will be ready for whenever they decide it should be open.”

Also present at the meeting were island Health Secretary Lorenzo González Feliciano, Ports Authority Director Joel A. Pizá Batiz and federal personnel from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control who are currently assigned in Puerto Rico.

“It was a request that came from Aerostar,” Reyes Peredo said. “They did not put a specific date on the reopening, but they did express their interest in reopening the JetBlue Terminal specifically. We are ready.”

Aerostar is a Mexico-based private company that specializes in port management.

“Typically in this situation what we do is we have one day for training the troops in the specific mission requirements, and on that day we check their medical records to make sure that each and every one is in optimal physical condition and without any health condition,” the adjutant general added.

Reyes Peredo gave assurances that the PRNG has plenty of personnel to man another open terminal, whenever it is decided to reopen it.

“Currently, we have an estimated 250 to 260 active soldiers working on the mission at the airport, rotating in six-hour shifts,” he said.

“This is not including the civilian personnel like

the 140 to 150 med school students working with us to check temperatures and examine all incoming passengers. I think that the reopening of the JetBlue terminal will require an additional 50 to 60 soldiers. The Puerto Rico National Guard has approximately 8,500 soldiers currently and we have around 1,000 of those currently on active duty working in our different missions, so we possibly will activate another 50 or 60 more and assign them to the airport mission.”

Reyes Peredo added that “[t]he specific date for the reopening of the JetBlue terminal was left undecided, but we are immediately available to carry out this mission.”

The PRNG chief took the opportunity to comment on a video that went viral in social media recently, which showed a man arriving in Puerto Rico and allegedly disembarking without going through the health checkpoints in the terminals.

“I think it must be emphasized that the best medicine against this COVID-19 pandemic is responsible social behavior. And the people of Puerto Rico certainly have shown to be socially responsible. They have followed the measures proposed by the experts and kept social distancing guidelines,” Reyes Peredo said. “No mission is perfectly executed, of course. This tourist is obviously a socially ir-

responsible individual and his conduct should be denounced by everyone. He should be sent back to Texas, where he came to Puerto Rico from.”

“Although he claims that he did not even get his temperature taken, I believe that we did take his temperature because we have 11 video cameras in that exit area and it captures every arriving passenger’s temperature being checked,” the adjutant general added. “We also offer a voluntary COVID-19 test to all incoming passengers. So far, we have administered 17,000.”

Still not up to 98%, but close Since the islandwide coronavirus pandemic emergency was first projected to last until after the beginning of hurricane season, June 1, Reyes Peredo has focused himself on a nearly impossible mission. His goal is to deploy 98 percent of all PRNG service members to the different missions around the island, where they will be closer to potential danger areas in case of bad weather, earthquakes, or any other natural disaster.

“We are currently at 96 percent and working on fixing some non-operational equipment so that it can be deployed around the island,” Reyes Peredo said. “I expect that we will reach that 98 percent when those small details are taken care of.”

DMO chief: Puerto Rico ready to open tourism industry when gov’t lifts quarantine

By THE STAR STAFF

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he destination marketing organization Discover Puerto Rico has launched on its website a section containing a list of hotels, attractions and other tourism sector businesses.

During a webinar Wednesday, Discover Puerto Rico shared a Destination Analysts study showing that what consumers are looking for, after weeks locked in their homes due to the coronavirus pandemic, is well aligned with what the island has to offer.

According to the survey, 32.7 percent of all potential travelers in the United States want to go to beach destinations, 27.5 percent want to go to rural destinations and 21 percent to national parks.

“Hotel occupancy in the United States has increased every week for the past six weeks, with the latest figures at an average occupancy of 35 percent for hotels,” said Brad Dean, chief executive officer of Discover Puerto Rico.

“Airlines have started adding capacity again. In Puerto Rico, the airlines have published encouraging itineraries for the latter part of this year, which indicates a potential for economic recovery in the coming months.”

“The leisure tourist continues to have the longest booking window, with most flights booked more than 90 days in advance,” Dean said. “Because the reservation window

for trips to Puerto Rico has increased so dramatically, we know that Discover Puerto Rico needs to reach consumers now to get them to come in the fall.”

In addition to efforts on the internet and social media to keep the island on the minds of travelers, Discover Puerto Rico recently launched a condensed and easy-to-read consumer version of health and safety guides for visitors, established by the Puerto Rico Tourism Co. The objective is to provide visitors with a quick and easy-to-understand document on the island’s COVID-19 protocols.

The ongoing survey from Northstar Global Meeting Planners continues to show that roughly 85 percent of meeting planners are working and of those, 75 percent say they are in the planning mode now. Which means they are either researching, sourcing or even booking future years.

The survey shows that over 90 percent of the meeting planners will be booking new business in the next 12 months.

“We are seeing positive movement in the generation of new leads,” said Discover Puerto Rico CSO Ed Carey.

“During the week of May 10, we saw signs that new event room night requests were showing signs of recovery. At 15,000-plus new lead room nights, it was the best week since the beginning of March. To help us generate those leads, a new 360 degree tour platform from the Puerto Rico Convention Center has been added to our selling toolkit that allows us to highlight one of the most architecturally

stunning centers in the Caribbean and all of the United States, next to El Distrito.”

Dean noted that “while everyone has been impacted” by the global coronavirus pandemic, “no industry has been harder hit than tourism.”

“Thankfully, our government and healthcare officials responded quickly, because of this, we are winning the battle of public health, and of course, that is the top priority,” he said. “Now, all of us, public sector and private sector together, must attack the economic crisis with the same commitment, the same determination and the same collaboration. We are encouraged to see so many businesses implementing new guidelines and protocols to protect the health and safety of employees and visitors. This will show consumers that Puerto Rico is the safest destination to visit on their next trip.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

5

Commonwealth and instrumentalities bank account balances drop

By THE STAR STAFF

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uerto Rico’s government bank accounts totaled $19.6 billion as of April 30, an 11.7 percent increase over the balance on March 31, which was $17.5 billion, according to a Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority report.

The Treasury Single Account (TSA), however, decreased to $8.3 billion on April 31 compared to $8.6 billion on March 31. That is a $293 million decrease, stated the report published Tuesday.

The filing was an unaudited summary of the island’s government and its instrumentalities’ account cash balances and excluded some entities such as the Legislature.

The rise was mainly driven by a $2.2 billion hike in the central government’s non-TSA balances mainly due to federal funds for new coronavirus (COVID-19) relief, a $95 million increase in the accounts of public corporations and legally separate entities, and a $30 million

increase in pension-related accounts.

Restricted accounts showed a $7 million decrease. These are accounts subject to Title III proceedings.

The report showed that the liquidity of the Puerto Rico Highways and Transportation Authority fell to $258.7 million as of April 30, from $275 million as of March 31.

The bank account balance of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority rose to $488.8 million in April, from $488.6 million in March.

Meanwhile, the account for the Puerto Rico Sales Tax Financing Corp. fell to $21.2 million on April 30. During the global pandemic lockdown, which began on March 15, certain items were exempted from the sales and use tax.

The bank account balance for the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority fell to $834.3 million in April from $850.2 million in March, and the balance of the account for the University of Puerto Rico fell to $433.7 million in April from $451.6 million the previous month.

Governor signs measures to benefit seniors, PRASA & PREPA customers

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced announced on Wednesday that she signed two measures that benefit citizens by granting a compensatory credit to people over 65 and ordering the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) and the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA) to establish a payment plan for customers who request one.

Joint House Resolution 687 directs the Treasury secretary to pay in full the reimbursable personal compensatory credit for people aged 65 or older for the 2016 and 2017 taxable years.

“On or before August 31, 2020, the Secretary of the Treasury shall reimburse, for each of the 2016 and 2017 tax years, persons 65 years of age or older who qualify as provided in Section 1052.02 of the Internal Revenue Code for the New Puerto Rico, the additional $200 that corresponds to the reimbursable personal compensatory credit,” the governor said in a written statement.

Vázquez noted that the difference of $200 in credit for each tax year will benefit more than 140,000 older Puerto Ricans, distributing close to $56 million.

According to the measure, which was co-sponsored by Rep. Antonio “Tony” Soto

and House Speaker Carlos “Johnny” Méndez, seniors will be entitled to a refundable personal compensation credit of $400 to every individual who, on the last day of the tax

year, are 65 years of age or older, but only if that individual’s gross income for the taxable year, added to the items excluded from gross income under Section 1031.01 (b) for that

year, does not exceed $15,000. In the case of married taxpayers, each one, separately, will have the right to claim the credit provided in this section if both qualify for it.

Vázquez noted that Treasury Secretary Francisco Parés Alicea, in compliance with the aforementioned Section 1052.02 of the Internal Revenue Code, paid out $400 for the tax year beginning Jan. 1, 2018.

Meanwhile, the governor signed House Joint Resolution 668 for PREPA and PRASA to establish payment plans for subscribers and customers who request it, after the end of the state of emergency due to the imminent impact of COVID-19 on the island.

The measure was introduced by Rep. Jorge Navarro Suárez.

“Just as we prohibited PREPA and PRASA service outages for non-payment, as established in Executive Order 2020-020 for two additional cycles during this COVID-19 emergency, we are directing the [public] corporations to establish payment plans, once the validity of OE-2020-020 has ended, so that customers have the opportunity to update their accounts in an orderly manner,” Vázquez said. “These plans should be reasonable and flexible.”

The governor emphasized that subscribers will have the right to appeal the charges appearing in each of the invoices after the end of the state of emergency.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

Police investigate threat against La Fortaleza

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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olice are investigating an alleged threat to burn down La Fortaleza posted on social networks after protesters amassed on Tuesday afternoon in front of the Executive Mansion, San Juan Police Department Area Commander José Juan García said Wednesday.

“On their [protesters’] part, there was no social distancing. They were all together,” García said in a radio interview. “They had their masks, I can say that. Most of them had masks, but there was a large [contingent] saying; ‘Burn the La Fortaleza’; ‘Wanda out’. They were said to be protesting racism, too, but they were expressing another kind of situation there. This was expressed on the [social] networks, and we have evidence [from a post], that La Fortaleza had to be burned down.”

“We are looking into it,” García added. “Everything that is put on social networks is public and if we have to consult with other agencies, we also will consult them.”

The area commander confirmed that starting Tuesday afternoon municipal police conducted surveillance at the “Black Lives Matter” demonstration on Calle Fortaleza at the intersection with Calle Cristo, and that at night some protesters started throwing objects and liquids toward police agents.

“At about 8:30 at night there was a riot, but we managed to control it and the rest happened without another

[similar] event,” García said. “We do not intervene with the exercise of free expression. That is guaranteed in the Constitution, but there are times when the tempers of the people who are participating are heated, and they began to throw, as on other occasions, bricks, liquids -- apparently engine oil -- [and] there were knives that were thrown at the agents. We had female police officers attending to the situation and they [protesters] threw motor oil at them. There were stones.”

García said Sgt. Jahaira Otero was treated by paramedics after suffering an injury to her left arm. She was then transported to the Industrial Hospital for treatment because she was unable to move one of her arms and was in a lot of pain, he said.

Meanwhile, agent Laura M. Rivera also received assistance after her eye became irritated when dark liquid, thought to be engine oil, was sprayed at her.

Ten other officers were similarly affected, García said.

The San Juan Police official confirmed that he had to activate containment groups to control the situation, but that it was not necessary to activate the Tactical Operations Division or to launch tear gas or fire rubber bullets.

García said about 350 people could have participated in the demonstration.

“About 200, or 300 people, or 100 in a hostile way, is a group that can do harm,” he said. “In fact, they wrote on the walls again in some places in Old San Juan. On Calle Fortaleza you can see the walls full of oil.”

Despite the fact that there are several calls for demonstrations in the coming days, García said the police are ready with established work plans and that “we hope that everything will go in order.”

Agent José Pellot, who is attached to the Assaults Division of the San Juan Criminal Investigations Corps, investigated the incident in coordination with agent Ángel Rivera of the San Juan Property Division. Agent Héctor Díaz, of Technical Services, took photos of the incident.

SJ mayor urges solidarity with stateside protests, reflection on homegrown discrimination

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

R

eacting to protests in numerous cities across the United States in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police officers, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto on Wednesday urged Puerto Ricans to reflect on racism and discrimination that people experience in Puerto Rico.

“Expressions of solidarity are important and necessary. Each of us can join, from their own space, in a gesture that makes it clear that we are NOT going to continue tolerating racism, homophobia, police brutality, racial profiling and discrimination,” the mayor said. “As a gesture of solidarity, the flags of the Municipality of San Juan will be at half-mast

for 46 days, one for each year of George Floyd’s life. They were also at half-mast in remembrance of Alexa Negrón Luciano.

In San Juan we have strived to build a city of inclusion for all. But we have to be aware that when one of us suffers this injustice, we all suffer it.”

“We cannot speak about what is happening in the United States without reflecting on what is happening in Puerto Rico,” Cruz Soto added. “We have to root out discrimination in all its manifestations and face what that means in our society.

Police brutality is one of those manifestations of institutional racism that it is time for us to end. A real change is what we need.”

“Our goal,” the mayor said, “should be to live in a society where instead of hearing all the time ‘rest in peace,’ we can simply live in peace.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

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George Floyd protests: Impassioned rallies continue across U.S.

By THE NEW YORK TIMES Peaceful protesters defied curfews, but minimal mayhem was reported overnight.

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or an eighth day and night, tens of thousands of people staged peaceful protests and impassioned marches across the United States, while the widespread destruction and looting that had followed demonstrations in recent days was largely absent.

President Donald Trump called on states to bring in the military to restore order and combat “lowlifes and losers,” as an infantry battalion from Fort Bragg was dispatched to the nation’s capital as part of a broader show of force. But governors resisted the president’s entreaties, instead bolstering the police presence, changing tactics and imposing curfews to prevent people from using the protests as cover to wreak mayhem.

While demonstrators in many cities defied curfews, they did so peacefully.

They sang “We Shall Overcome” at the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn, New York. Outside Wrigley Field in Chicago, crowds chanted “Hands up” as they raised their arms to the sky. In Los Angeles, hundreds gathered outside the home of Mayor Eric Garcetti, who earlier in the day had joined the crowds and taken a knee as he listened to pleas. On a bridge in Portland, Oregon, hundreds lay face down, hands behind their backs, for a “die in” intended to emulate the death of George Floyd.

Floyd, a 46-year-old black security guard, died after his neck was pinned under a white police officer’s knee for nearly 9 minutes in Minneapolis last week. The officer has been charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter. The killing, captured on video, was the spark for the outpouring of anger and anguish expressed in demonstrations in more than 140 cities for more than a week.

As the sustained protests have made clear, the fuse has been burning for a long time, and despair had mounted with each case of a black person dying at the hands of the police.

A week after Floyd’s death, Minnesota said it had started a human rights investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department, citing evidence of systematic discrimination against people of color, particularly African-Americans.

The Floyd family gathered in Houston on Tuesday for a

memorial and were joined by about 60,000 people, according to city officials.

Speakers offered emotional testimonials to a man they recalled as a “gentle giant.” A video of Floyd’s 6-year-old daughter, Gianna, taking in the outpouring of support was shared widely around the country.

“Daddy changed the world,” she said.

— Washington: More than 1,000 protesters on Tuesday faced off with officers across a newly erected chain-link fence outside the White House, but the demonstrations remained largely peaceful. Dozens of military vehicles were deployed on the capital’s streets.

— New York: Hundreds of demonstrators violated an 8 p.m. curfew in a standoff with the police at the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. But overall there were fewer violent confrontations between the police and protesters and fewer acts of looting and vandalism than in recent days.

— Atlanta: Police and military personnel used tear gas to disperse a large crowd near Centennial Olympic Park shortly after the city’s 9 p.m. curfew.

— California: The Los Angeles police made hundreds of arrests throughout the city on Tuesday night, said a spokesman, Officer Tony Im. Santa Monica enacted among the strictest curfews in the nation, starting at 2 p.m. local time.

— Philadelphia: Hundreds of protesters had gathered outside City Hall by Tuesday afternoon, and later tried to pull down a statue of a former Mayor Frank Rizzo, an early proponent of white identity politics. Mayor Jim Kenney said later that the

statue had been taken down.

— Charlotte, N.C.: Protesters and the police skirmished after authorities ordered the crowds to disperse. Video showed officers surrounding demonstrators and using stun grenades, pepper spray and pepper pellets, tactics that were criticized by a black state lawmaker who represents Charlotte. The police, who said that they would conduct an internal review of the exchange, said that officers had been hit by bottles and rocks, and that a protester had thrown what they called a chemical agent at an officer on a bicycle. One protester who was arrested had a military-style rifle and two 30-round magazines, police said.

— St. Louis: Trump tweeted his condolences to David Dorn, a retired police captain who police said had been shot by a looter on Monday night. Dorn died the same night that four active-duty police officers were shot during protests.

Combat troops are deployed to the nation’s capital and placed on standby.

Less than two hours before Washington’s 7 p.m. curfew went into effect on Tuesday, military vehicles assumed positions across the city.

A crowd of protesters in Lafayette Square near the White House appeared to be at least twice that of a day earlier, and swelling.

With the imminent arrival of military units and the use of helicopters to suppress protesters on Monday night — a tactic used for battles with insurgents abroad, now applied on U.S. soil — some in the crowd whispered that more soldiers were on the way.

Continues on page 8

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Thursday, June 4, 2020

From page 7 Alec, a 32-year-old protester who spent two deployments in Afghanistan, said he had seen things over the past two days that he never expected to see in his own country.

“There are real problems here,” he said, declining to give his last name because he works for the government, “and no amount of uniforms or soldiers are going to fix them.”

While the evening ended with only flashes of confrontations, the city’s downtown is being flooded with agents from the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Marshals, Customs and Border Protection, and several other agencies, along with the military. Transportation Security Administration officers have also been called out of airports to help protect federal property.

The militarization of the response to the protest has stirred deep concerns and drawn widespread criticism, including from retired Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that “our fellow citizens are not the enemy, and must never become so.”

“I am deeply worried that as they execute their orders, the members of our military will be co-opted for political purposes,” he wrote in an opinion piece in The Atlantic published on Tuesday, adding that America’s cities and towns “are not ‘battle spaces’ to be dominated, and must never become so.”

The federal law enforcement response is being run by Attorney General William P. Barr. It was also Barr who ordered federal officers to clear peaceful protesters out of Washington’s Lafayette Park on Monday so that Trump could walk to a historic church and have his picture taken there, according to a Justice Department official.

In all, about 1,600 troops were being moved into the Washington area, according to the Pentagon, which described the troop movements as “a prudent planning measure.”

After a UCLA stadium was used as a ‘field jail,’ for protest arrests, the university says it won’t happen again.

The University of California, Los Angeles says it will not allow a campus stadium to serve as a “field jail” in the future, after faculty members raised concerns about its use to process people arrested over curfew violations this week.

It was not immediately clear how many people were detained at the stadium, which is named after Jackie Robinson.

But about 2,500 people were taken into custody in Los Angeles from Friday to Tuesday morning, according to authorities. Scores more were arrested on Tuesday evening.

A group of 16 faculty members raised concerns about the use of the stadium in a letter made public on Tuesday by Ananya Roy, a professor of urban planning at the university.

“Testimony from arrested protesters is chilling,” they wrote.

“UCLA students were arrested for engaging in the constitutionally protected right to peacefully protest against racial injustice, which is pervasive in American policing. They were detained and processed at a stadium on their own campus named after Jackie Robinson, an icon of the long and unfinished struggle for black freedom.”

The letter says that social distancing protocols put in place because of the coronavirus pandemic were violated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department, with officers not wearing masks or following other guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The cruel irony that this took place at a location used as a COVID-19 testing site is not lost on those arrested or on us,” they wrote.

The university issued a statement on Twitter saying that it was troubled by the accounts of how the stadium was being used.

“This was done without UCLA’s knowledge or permission,” it wrote. “As lessee of the stadium, we informed local agencies that UCLA will NOT grant permission should there be a request like this in the future.”

‘We cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism,’ Pope Francis says.

Pope Francis said on Wednesday that he was watching the “disturbing social unrest” in the United States with “great concern.”

“We cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human life,” he said during his weekly general audience. He said he was praying for “the repose of the soul of George Floyd and of all those others who have lost their lives as a result of the sin of racism.”

He called for “national reconciliation and peace” and said the recent violence on U.S. streets “self-destructive and self-defeating.”

The San Juan Daily Star The pope’s comments came a day after Christian leaders criticized Trump for using two religious sites in Washington for what they said were acts of political theater.

On Monday, Trump posed holding a Bible outside the historic St. John’s Church, and on Tuesday he and the first lady spent about 10 minutes inside the St. John Paul II National Shrine.

Front-line medical workers clap for ‘front-line’ demonstrators.

For months on end, health care workers across the United States have cared for hundreds of thousands of people sickened by the coronavirus and even lost their own lives to the pandemic. They have also seen the virus infect and kill black people in the country at disproportionately high rates.

And just as New Yorkers have offered their applause in appreciation of those workers each evening, on Tuesday night the tables were turned and it was medical professionals offering their applause in support of the protests that have swept the country.

Dressed in scrubs, lab coats and protective equipment, doctors and medical personnel came out in droves in New York City to show support for the thousands who have taken to the streets in protest to call for an end to systemic racism.

Some joined protesters in New York City’s Times Square, while others lined the streets outside hospitals, clapping for protesters as they walked past.

The organizers of a “Front Lines for Front Lines” group wrote on Twitter: “Every night, at 7pm, the city has clapped for us.” On Tuesday, they said, “We’re re-purposing that show of support.”

Elsewhere in the country, medical workers have handed out masks and milk to protesters in Minneapolis to ease the effects of tear gas. And in Washington, D.C., a doctor told a local news outlet that he would be riding a bike around protests in the city to offer first aid.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

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‘They let us down’: 5 Takeaways on the CDC’s Coronavirus response

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

L

ong considered the world’s premier public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has fallen short in its response to the most urgent public health emergency in its 74-year history — a pathogen that has penetrated much of the nation, killing more than 100,000 people.

The agency made early missteps in testing and failed to provide timely counts of infections and deaths, hindered by aging technology across the U.S. health system. It hesitated in absorbing the lessons of other countries,\ and struggled to calibrate the need to move fast and its own imperative to be cautious. Its communications were sometimes confusing, sowing mistrust, even as it clashed with the White House and President Donald Trump.

“They let us down,” said Dr. Stephane Otmezguine, an anesthesiologist who treated coronavirus patients in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The agency issued a statement saying it was “providing the best, most current data and scientific understanding we have.”

But a New York Times review of thousands of emails, and interviews with more than 100 state and federal officials, public health experts, CDC employees and medical workers, documents how the COVID-19 pandemic shook longstanding confidence in the agency and its leader, Dr. Robert R. Redfield. These are some of the key findings.

Aging data systems left the agency with blind spots As the virus began to spread in the United States in January, the CDC’s response was hampered by an antiquated data system and a fractured public health reporting system, relying in part on information assembled or shared with local health officials through phone calls, faxes and thousands of spreadsheets attached to emails.

The CDC could not produce accurate counts of how many people were being tested, compile complete demographic information on confirmed cases or even keep timely tallies of deaths. Backups on at least some of these systems are made on recordable DVDs, a technology that was state-of-the-art in the late 1990s.

The overall result was an agency that had blind spots at just the wrong moment. The disconnect between hospital record-keeping systems, the CDC and state and local public health departments delayed sharing critical information that could help patients.

“We got crappy data,” said Fran Phillips, Maryland’s deputy health secretary.

The CDC clashed with White House aides who viewed them as the ‘deep state’ As the crisis deepened, tensions between the agency and the White House increased, with aides to Trump referring to the scientists at the CDC as members of the “deep state” who were eager to wound him politically by leaking to the press.

At the same time, some CDC employees watched with growing alarm as Trump, facing criticism for his administration’s response, repeatedly undermined the agency. And they paled at

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, long considered the world’s premier health agency, made early testing mistakes that contributed to a cascade of problems that persist today as the country tries to reopen. what they saw as meddling by politically motivated Trump aides.

Trump and his aides often expressed extraordinary skepticism about the virus and the steps that would have to be taken to curb it. He said the virus would disappear “like a miracle” even as CDC scientists described it as a real threat. When the CDC urged Americans to wear masks, he said, “I don’t see it for myself.”

Just before Memorial Day weekend, Trump ordered the CDC to issue guidance that would allow churches to reopen.

“I said, ‘You better put it out,’” Trump told reporters. “And they’re doing it.”

“I would expect the CDC to coordinate with the White House,” said Lawrence Gostin, the director of a legal center at the World Health Organization and a former CDC official. “But this is not team work. This is not coordination. This is confrontation.”

The CDC’s culture slowed its response The culture at the CDC — risk-averse, perfectionist and ill suited to improvising in a quickly evolving crisis — shaped its scientists’ ambitions and contributed to some of its failures as it tried to respond to the pandemic.

“It’s not our culture to intervene,” said Dr. George Schmid, who worked at the agency off and on for nearly four decades.

He described it as increasingly bureaucratic, weighed down by “indescribable, burdensome hierarchy.”

Former officials said the CDC’s culture locked some of the agency’s employees into a fixed way of thinking, helping to produce its first and most consequential failure in the crisis: its inability early on to provide state laboratories around the country with an effective diagnostic test.

The culture — along with the failure of the test — also contributed to the agency’s decision to restrict who could get tested in the early days of the crisis. When doctors in Washington state and elsewhere forwarded the names of about 650 people in January who might have been infected, the CDC agreed to test only 256.

“If we were able to test early, we would have recognized earlier” the scale of the outbreak, said Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, the chief health officer in King County, Washington. “We would

have been able to put prevention measures in place earlier and had fewer cases.”

Redfield felt he was ‘on an island’ between his agency and the White House The coronavirus pandemic underscored the need for Redfield to manage the mercurial demands of the president who appointed him and the expectations of the career scientists at the agency he leads.

White House aides saw Redfield as an ally, but his meandering manner irritated a president drawn to big personalities and assertive defenders of his administration. Although he is on the White House coronavirus task force, Redfield soon found himself eclipsed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s most famous infectious disease specialist, and Dr. Deborah Birx, an AIDS expert and former CDC physician.

While praising his friend as “a terrific, dedicated infectious disease doctor,” Gallo, who also co-founded the Global Virus Network, said in an interview that Redfield “can’t do anything communication-wise.”

Meanwhile, Redfield’s bonds with some of his own staff have frayed. One associate recounted him saying that the agency’s scientists had a “myopic” view of their roles and characterized his relationship with his top deputy, Dr. Anne Schuchat, a career CDC scientist deeply respected in the agency, as growing strained.

He has not been in Atlanta recently, shuttling instead between his home in Baltimore and the West Wing. One person familiar with his thinking described Redfield as feeling “a little bit on an island.”

Confusing guidance left doctors, public officials and others to look elsewhere As the national clearinghouse for critical public health information, the CDC is supposed to provide medical guidance to health workers while offering easy-to-understand information for political leaders, business executives and the general public.

But the agency has struggled at times to provide clear and timely guidance, leading many to say they now look to universities, mailing lists or online research articles for detailed recommendations about how to safely care for infected patients.

After initially recommending that all doctors and nurses coming in contact with coronavirus patients wear N95 respirators, the CDC announced that less protective surgical masks were “an acceptable alternative” except in some cases. The change angered health care workers like Lori Freeman, chief executive of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, who said that “mistrust crept in.”

As Miami Beach begins to reopen its economy, Mayor Dan Gelber said he wished the CDC would provide more specific steps that cities should follow if cases surge again, adding, “It’s almost as if they just said, ‘Open up and figure out whether it’s a good idea or not afterward.”

An agency press officer said the CDC has “issued countless guidance and recommendations based on the best available science and data,” pointing to 114 advisory documents for disaster and homeless shelters, retirement communities, taxis, pediatric clinics and other venues.

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

Rosenstein, key figure in Russia inquiry, defends Mueller appointment

By CHARLIE SAVAGE, KATIE BENNER and NICHOLAS FANDOS

R

od Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general, defended during congressional testimony Wednesday his decision to appoint a special counsel to lead the Trump-Russia investigation, as Republican allies of President Donald Trump on the Senate Judiciary Committee sought to keep a skeptical spotlight on that matter heading into the fall’s election.

Rosenstein was a key figure in the investigation. He oversaw it as the acting attorney general for the inquiry because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself over his role in the Trump campaign. Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel in May 2017 and oversaw his work until Trump replaced Sessions in November 2018.

Although Rosenstein stepped down just over a year ago, he last testified before Congress in June 2018, well before the end of the Russia inquiry and other major related developments. They will most likely be fodder for questions by the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and other senators on the panel.

Conservatives have attacked his appointment of Mueller.

Rosenstein was sworn in to the No. 2 post at the Justice Department just weeks before the president fired James Comey as the FBI director, and within days Trump publicly and privately linked the dismissal to the Russia investigation. Rosenstein then called Mueller, a former FBI director and prosecutor, out of retirement to lead the inquiry.

Mueller’s investigators found that while the Russian government covertly intervened in the 2016 election with a goal of helping Trump defeat Hillary Clinton, and while the Trump campaign welcomed that assistance and had many links to Russian figures, the evidence was insufficient to prove any criminal conspiracy.

Attorney General William Barr has subsequently portrayed the entire investigation as illegitimate. Senators are expected to ask Rosenstein whether, knowing what he knows now, he would have appointed Mueller. In a written opening statement released as the hearing began, Rosenstein explained why he made that decision.

Among other things, he noted, Trump had ousted most of the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys en masse and he did not think that Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI who took over the bureau as acting director, should stay in charge of the investigation.

“As a result of events that followed the departure of the FBI director, I was concerned that

the public would not have confidence in the investigation and that the acting FBI director was not the right person to lead it,” Rosenstein said in his prepared statement. “I decided that appointing a special counsel was the best way to complete the investigation appropriately and promote public confidence in its conclusions.”

Rosenstein had a role in a plagued set of wiretap applications.

In December, the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael Horowitz, released a damning report about errors and omissions by the FBI in applications to obtain a national security wiretap order targeting Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, in October 2016,

tocols to ensure that every fact was verified,” he said, adding: “Whenever agents or prosecutors make serious mistakes or engage in misconduct, the Department of Justice must take remedial action. And if existing policies fall short, those policies need to be changed.”

Mueller said Rosenstein never stopped him from taking investigative steps.

Senators may question Rosenstein about his discussions with Mueller, particularly about the possibility of subpoenaing the president.

In March 2019, Mueller completed his report without subpoenaing Trump to require him to talk to investigators about such topics as what he knew about his campaign’s interactions with Rus-

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, left, arrives to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in Washington, as well as three renewal orders in 2017.

The Justice Department has subsequently told a court it did not think the available evidence met the legal standard to keep invading Page’s privacy for the last two renewals. While Rosenstein was not involved in the early iterations of that monitoring, he signed off on the third and final renewal application for that surveillance, and senators are expected to question him about the matter.

In his opening statement, Rosenstein blamed the FBI for the problems, citing the inspector general’s findings that the FBI did not follow its procedures and that blamed the bureau’s chain of command for management failures.

“Every application that I approved appeared to be justified based on the facts it alleged, and the FBI was supposed to be following pro-

sian representatives and with WikiLeaks, which published archives of emails Russia stole from Democrats.

Mueller testified that he was skeptical of written answers supplied by Trump but also said that Rosenstein had not stopped him from any specific investigative step he had decided to take.

Rosenstein’s opening statement referred in glancing to his supervisory conversations with Mueller without addressing any specific matter they discussed.

“I also established a supervisory chain of command,” Rosenstein said in the statement.

“Highly qualified department attorneys met regularly with the special counsel team to review recommendations about which matters to investigate and to approve significant steps, in consultation with me.”

Rosenstein was at the center of other early tumult.

In the chaotic period immediately following Trump’s firing of Comey, law enforcement officials debated whether to open an investigation into whether the president’s move constituted obstruction of justice. Rosenstein suggested secretly recording his conversations with the president, who had enlisted him earlier to help draft an unrelated justification for ousting Comey. He also discussed the possibility of Trump’s Cabinet removing him using the 25th Amendment.

Senators are expected to grill Rosenstein about those discussions, which he has said were not in earnest. He did not address them in his opening statement.

The hearing is just a start for Republicans’ plan to showcase investigators’ missteps.

Trump, who is portraying the effort to understand the scope of Moscow’s covert manipulations and the nature of his campaign’s links to Russia as a partisan conspiracy to sabotage him, sees rewriting the narrative of the Russia investigation as a key to his reelection campaign. Republicans are keen to use their Senate majority to help.

“We will be talking about how it got off the rails, who is responsible for it getting off the rails, and making sure that they are punished appropriately and the system is changed, so that in the future no other candidate for president, no other sitting president has to go through this,” Graham said in his opening statement outlining the work he plans to do. “That is why we are here.”

On Thursday, Graham and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, both plan to ask their respective panels to grant them substantial powers to issue subpoenas for reams of records related to the Russia investigation and for testimony from dozens of current and former law enforcement and national security officials, including prominent Obama administration officials.

Among them are Comey; former Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch; Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser; Denis R. McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff; and McCabe.

The issues in question have already been exhaustively studied by Horowitz and are still being scrutinized by a federal prosecutor, John Durham, whom Barr hand-picked to examine his concerns about the investigation. But where those inquiries largely take place out of view, Graham and Johnson are planning public hearings throughout the summer leading up to this fall’s elections that will emphasize the ways they believe Trump was mistreated.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

11

Zuckerberg defends hands-off approach to Trump’s posts

By MIKE ISAAX, CECILIA KANG and SHEERA FRENKEL

M

ark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, on Tuesday stood firmly behind his decision not to do anything about President Donald Trump’s inflammatory posts on the social network, saying that he had made a “tough decision” but that it “was pretty thorough.”

In a question-and-answer session with employees conducted over video chat software, Zuckerberg sought to justify his position, which has led to fierce internal dissent.

The meeting, which had been scheduled for Thursday, was moved up to Tuesday after hundreds of employees protested the inaction by staging a virtual “walkout” Monday.

Facebook’s principles and policies supporting free speech “show that the right action where we are right now is to leave this up,” Zuckerberg said on the call, referring to Trump’s posts. The audio of the employee call was heard by The New York Times.

Zuckerberg said that although he knew many people would be upset with Facebook, a policy review backed up his decision. He added that after he made his determination, he received a phone call from Trump on Friday.

“I used that opportunity to make him know I felt this post was inflammatory and harmful, and let him know where we stood on it,” Zuckerberg told Facebook employees. But though he voiced displeasure to the president, he reiterated that Trump’s message did not break the social network’s guidelines.

The Facebook chief held firm even as the pressure on him to rein in Trump’s messages intensified. Civil rights groups said late Monday after meeting with Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, that it was “totally confounding” that the company was not taking a tougher stand on Trump’s posts, which are often aggressive and have heightened tensions over protests on police violence in recent days.

Several Facebook employees have resigned over the lack of action, with one publicly saying the company would end up “on the wrong side of history.” And protesters showed up late Monday to Zuckerberg’s residential neighborhood in Palo Alto, California, and also headed toward the social network’s headquarters in nearby Menlo Park.

The internal dissent began brewing last week after Facebook’s rival, Twitter, added labels to Trump’s tweets that indicated the president was glorifying violence and making inaccurate statements. The same messages that Trump posted to Twitter also appeared on Facebook. But unlike Twitter, Facebook did not touch the president’s posts, including one in which Trump said of the protests in Minneapolis: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Timothy Aveni, a Facebook software engineer who resigned after Zuckerberg’s decision to leave up Trump’s posts, said on his Facebook page on Monday that the company wasn’t enforcing its own rules to ban speech that promotes

Mark Zuckerberg, left, the chief executive of Facebook, and Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy, arrive to testify at a senate hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington. violence.

“Facebook will keep moving the goalposts every time Trump escalates, finding excuse after excuse not to act on increasingly dangerous rhetoric,” Aveni said.

On Tuesday in the virtual meeting with employees, Zuckerberg spent 30 minutes laying out what had happened with Trump’s posts. He said the president’s looting-andshooting message, which went up on Friday, was immediately spotted by Facebook’s policy team. Zuckerberg woke up at 7:30 a.m. in Palo Alto that day to an email about the post.

The policy team called the White House, he said, telling officials there that Trump’s message was inflammatory.

Zuckerberg spent the rest of last Friday morning talking to policy officials and other experts at Facebook. He ultimately decided Trump’s post had not broken Facebook’s policies.

Zuckerberg said Trump’s post relied on a call for “state use of force,” which Facebook allows under its guidelines.

He said that in the future, the social network might reassess that policy, given the photos and videos of excessive use of force by police that have spread across social media in recent days.

After explaining his thought process, Zuckerberg took questions from employees in the virtual meeting on Tuesday, according to a copy of the call. One Facebook employee in New York expressed support for Zuckerberg’s position. But

the vast majority of questions were pointed and the call became increasingly contentious.

Zuckerberg was asked whether any black Facebook employees were consulted in the decision-making process.

He named one. A Facebook employee in Austin, Texas, then said that he felt the company’s political speech policy wasn’t working and needed to be changed.

One persistent feeling shared among Facebook’s rankand-file came out in a direct moment between Zuckerberg and another employee during the call.

“Why are the smartest people in the world focused on contorting and twisting our policies to avoid antagonizing Trump?” the employee asked.

In a statement, a Facebook spokeswoman said that “open and honest discussion has always been a part of Facebook’s culture,” and that Zuckerberg was “grateful” for employees’ feedback.

The call did little to soothe the feelings of employees.

More than a dozen current and former Facebook employees said the call only deepened the frictions inside the company; some said that trying to persuade Zuckerberg to change his mind was futile.

“It’s crystal clear today that leadership refuses to stand with us,” Brandon Dail, a Facebook engineer, tweeted about the call.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

Stocks

Wall Street surges on signs of economic rebound

W

all Street jumped in a broad rally on Wednesday, closing ground on all-time highs as signs of recovery from mandated economic shutdowns helped investors look beyond ongoing social unrest and pandemic woes.

Financials, industrials and tech led the three major U.S. stock indexes well into the black, with the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq on course to post their fourth straight day of solid gains.

The Nasdaq, the S&P 500 and the Dow have rebounded sharply from March lows hit as coronavirus-related lockdowns shocked the stock market, and they are now about 1.6%, 8.1%, and 11.6%, respectively, away from overtaking record closing highs set in February.

The Nasdaq 100 .NDX is now within half a percent of its February record.

“With the market returning to all-time highs, there’s sentiment out there that the economy will get better in the second half of the year,” said Joseph Sroka, chief investment officer at NovaPoint in Atlanta. “There are a number of gates in the way between now and 2021, but barring another COVID-like event, there should be a fairly robust return to growth.”

Nationwide protests over the death of an unarmed black man in police custody extended through their eighth night as protesters ignored curfews, but violence subsided after President Donald Trump threatened to deploy the military.

A spate of grim economic data was not as bad as economists feared, with ADP reporting much fewer private-sector job cuts in May than expected.

Market participants now await the U.S. Labor Department’s more comprehensive May jobs report, which is expected to show unemployment soaring to a historic 19.7% The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI rose 440.59 points, or 1.71%, to 26,183.24, the S&P 500 .SPX gained 38.06 points, or 1.24%, to 3,118.88 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 75.11 points, or 0.78%, to 9,683.48.

Of the 11 major sectors in the S&P 500, all but healthcare .SPXHC were in positive territory.

Boeing Co (BA.N) gave the biggest boost to the blue-chip Dow, its shares rising 10.4% following news that billionaire investor Daniel Loeb’s Third Point had taken a stake in the company.

Lyft Inc (LYFT.O) jumped 10.4% after the ridesharing platform reported rides increased 26% in May.

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Thursday, June 4, 2020

13

Coronavirus infects famed research lab working on at-home test

By RUTH MACLEAN

F

or months, researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Dakar, a prestigious biomedical research center in Senegal, have been working to produce a low-cost, rapid, at-home test for the coronavirus — the kind that countries across Africa and elsewhere have been most eager to have.

Now the coronavirus has infected a cluster of staff members at the institute, one of whom has died, according to its director, Dr. Amadou Sall. He did not say how many workers had tested positive, but local media reports said it was five.

Their contacts have been isolated and the work is continuing, according to Cheikh Tidiane Diagne, a researcher at the lab.

The center’s work has been crucial in efforts to contain the spread of the virus in West Africa: In the early stages of the outbreak, it trained laboratory staff from more than a dozen countries in how to test for the virus.

The institute says it is now working on a test kit that would cost as little as $1, and could be used at home. In other countries like the United States, home test kits for the coronavirus have yet to be widely approved or distributed, with many public health experts concerned about whether results would be accurate. So far, the World Health Organization has not recommended them for clinical use, but only in a research setting.

Oyewale Tomori, a virologist who leads a Nigerian government committee on COVID-19, said that if it worked, a $1 antigen test kit would be a “game-changer,” because test kits now sell for more than $50 apiece.

The Pasteur Institute in Dakar, Senegal, in March.

But he had concerns about whether it would be sensitive enough to detect the virus, and said it should be tested in other countries as well as Senegal, to show that it could work in other environments.

Senegal now has 3,739 confirmed cases of coronavirus, and 42 deaths. A full lockdown was never imposed, but there is a curfew, restrictions on movement between the country’s regions, and mandatory mask-wearing in public spaces.

“Whatever their level, the staff of the Dakar Pasteur

Institute as well as their families are facing the same restrictions, risks and life realities as all Senegalese people, with whom they share the same living conditions,” Sall said in a statement. “The virus spares no one.”

The British diagnostic company Mologic said it had been working with the institute to make both an antigen test, which detects whether someone has the coronavirus, and an antibody test which shows whether a person’s immune system has been exposed to it. The diagnostic kit will have two components: a saliva test and a blood test. The 10-minute antibody test should be available first, Mologic said — in June, if production goes according to plan.

Mologic’s co-founder developed the first home pregnancy test, and the COVID-19 home tests use the same basic technology.

Full production is planned to begin in July, according to staff at the institute, which is part of an international network of research centers named after the French biologist Louis Pasteur. The center in Senegal was founded in 1896 by one of the disciples of Pasteur, and has worked on diseases like yellow fever, rabies and malaria.

Researchers hope that home test kits could help increase the testing capacity in countries across Africa, where laboratories have struggled to obtain diagnostic equipment.

Diagnostic equipment is sold on the open market, with no system to help lower-income countries get access, as is the case with vaccines, or to agree on pricing. African countries often have to pay higher prices for them because they buy them in small numbers relative to Western countries, many of which have bulk purchasing arrangements with companies.

Powerful cyclone lashes Mumbai as city grapples with Coronavirus

By SAMEER YASIR and KAI SCHULTZ

A

powerful cyclone slammed into India’s coast Wednesday afternoon, striking the commercial hub of Mumbai, lashing beach towns with heavy rain and strong winds, and pushing thousands of people into emergency shelters.

Cyclone Nisarga made landfall with unusual force in the state of Maharashtra, home to Mumbai, a city of about 20 million. The region rarely experiences cyclones, and the last storm to threaten Mumbai with such intensity was more than 70 years ago.

Uprooted trees crashed into parked cars, and local television news reports showed cargo ships struggling to navigate choppy waters. But as the cyclone moved inland, passing over Mumbai in the afternoon, authorities said the city may have averted the worst. There have been no immediate reports of casualties.

Efforts to blunt the cyclone’s destruction were threatened by the coronavirus outbreak. Mumbai, which sits on a narrow

peninsula, is struggling to contain a rising number of infections, and more than 100 COVID-19 patients had been evacuated from a makeshift hospital to higher ground.

The city is densely populated and low-lying, making it particularly vulnerable, and a lockdown to contain the virus is still in effect. The cyclone is “more tragic news,” said Anil Parab, a minister with Maharashtra’s governing Shiv Sena party.

South Asia has considerable experience preparing for cyclones, which are referred to as hurricanes in the Atlantic and the northeastern Pacific. Last month, about 3 million people were evacuated when another storm, Cyclone Amphan, struck eastern India and Bangladesh, killing more than 80 people.

As Cyclone Nisarga moved closer to India Wednesday morning, Uddhav Thackeray, the chief minister of Maharashtra, ordered Mumbai’s residents to stay home for two days and the city’s airport was closed. Officials said they had evacuated up to 65,000 people from several coastal districts in the state.

In the neighboring state of Gujarat, which was also in the storm’s path, authorities said they had evacuated tens of thousands

of people from coastal areas and provided them with shelter.

The storm, powered by unusually warm water in the Arabian Sea, made landfall around 1 p.m. near the town of Alibag, about 30 miles south of Mumbai, with top wind speeds as high as 75 mph.

In recent years, India has significantly improved its disaster response capabilities, drafting meticulous evacuation plans and building thousands of emergency shelters.

But many storm facilities have recently been converted into COVID-19 quarantine centers, stretching state resources thin, particularly in Maharashtra and Gujarat, the Indian states hit hardest by the coronavirus.

When Sunil Deshpande, a fisherman in the Raigad district of Maharashtra, arrived at a shelter on Tuesday, government officials told people to maintain social distancing, but the building was so crowded that doing so was “nearly impossible,” he said.

“When we left home it was already raining,” he said.

“The sea looked rough and angry.”

14

Parisians savor more than the coffee as cafes reopen

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Thursday, June 4, 2020

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othing during the 11-week coronavirus lockdown could replace the ritual: a table in the sun with a tiny cup of black coffee on it. On Tuesday, Parisians rediscovered their favorite moment of sociability — coming together while remaining apart.

Cafes throughout France were allowed to reopen, and the relief was universal, if dispersed.

Many kept tables resolutely piled indoors. In Paris, still officially classified as a virus risk zone, cafes were not allowed to serve inside. No downing the petit noir — the little cup of coffee — at the bar. On the outdoor terraces that did open, tables had to be 3 feet apart. And they were not overflowing with customers. This liberation is too new.

Still, Tuesday brought a welcome hint of the life before. From luxurious carriage-trade establishments like the mirrored Left Bank Café de Flore to everybody’s grimy neighborhood “zinc” (argot for bar), Paris reconnected Tuesday with a key element of its urban life.

Parisians could once again sit down with one another, separately. They could be convivial without getting too close to one another, a French ideal. They could be in roughly the same space together without ever having to talk to one another (only tourists talk across neighboring tables to strangers, a strict Parisian nono). They could linger for hours if they needed to: the essential difference between the French cafe and its trans-Atlantic cousin.

On a brilliant spring day, the moment could be savored, even if with reserve, restraint and logic.

“It’s obviously the most important turning point for returning to true Parisian life,” Michel Wattebault said.

A retired employee of the nearby Bank of France, he was sitting at one of the handful of outdoor tables at L’Avant-Première, just behind the Palais Royal. “We’ve been waiting for this moment with impatience,” said his friend, Amélie Juste-Thomas, a translator.

It helped that, with the total absence of tourists, the street was as “quiet as a Sunday in August,” Juste-Thomas said.

Behind them, lingering over his coffee in the sunshine, sat a curator from the grand establishment across the Rue des Petits-Champs, the National Heritage Institute. Farhad Kazemi was planning to find another outdoor terrace at noon, for lunch. It was only about an hour away.

Enjoying the terrace at the Café de Flore in Paris, on Tuesday, as cafes and restaurants reopened in France.

“It is a super pleasure,” said Kazemi, smiling. “I’ve been waiting for this moment.”

The relief Tuesday was all the greater as Parisians, cooped up in small apartments, are used to treating cafes as an extended living space, a release they have been deprived of for nearly three months.

“It’s my second living room,” said Mathieu Nogueira, settling in at last at Les Quatre Saisons, in western Paris. “Mine is too little.

Less light, and less beer,” he said.

Café owners and managers spoke Tuesday of a moment of release after weeks of being cooped up and cut off — from customers, cash and commerce. At L’Avant-Première, Sébastien Fumel was in no doubt that the moment was long overdue.

“Oh, yeah, it was necessary,” he said.

“Mental reasons. Personal reasons. Professional reasons. Human reasons. Just a mix of things, you know? This is all about the human. About exchanging,” said Fumel, as he tended to a customer’s demand for an ‘‘express,’’ or espresso.

At the delightful, wood-paneled Bar du Moulin, in the nearby Place des Petits-Pères, the manager, Alex Cardao, had taken over the tiny side street, setting down tables with the required distancing. He was beaming as he ferried out round trays of steaming ‘‘express’’ to the customers basking in the sunshine and could barely stop to talk.

“This does me such good! Two months sitting at home, doing nothing!” he said.

On Rue Montorgueil, the cafe as a source of inspiration was on the mind of Jean-Claude Haag, settling in Tuesday morning at the Bianco. “Ideas, projects were born on these terraces,” Haag said. “Paris without its terraces would not be Paris.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

15

They’re calling it the ‘Conga line Parliament’

By STEPHEN CASTLE

T

he line of lawmakers waiting to vote stretched around an ancient hall, out through a cobbled courtyard and along an underground passage before snaking around an atrium to the cafeteria — all told, it was over half a mile in length.

On Tuesday, the joke was that Britain’s Parliament was a bit like Disneyland but without the fun.

At the insistence of their government, lawmakers returned from a short vacation to find themselves obeying pre-pandemic rules that, in line with traditions that reach back centuries, require voting in person.

With the added burden of social distancing rules, however, lawmakers standing in what was being called the “conga line Parliament,” waited, with varying degrees of impatience, to play their part in the democratic process.

For some, this was a welcome, if inconvenient, return to the time-honored ways of a Parliament that survived a devastating fire in the 19th century and the bombs of the Luftwaffe in World War II. To others, it was an incomprehensible decision to prevent lawmakers from using modern technology to vote remotely, as they had been doing during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s an absolute disgrace, a total shambles,” said Ben Bradshaw, a Labour lawmaker, as he waited in line, adding that some of his colleagues had almost been crushed as they navigated an escalator.

Another lawmaker took a more philosophical approach, despite a wait of around 40 minutes. “At least I’m now in the queue,” said John Healey, from the Labour Party, using the British word for a line, “rather than the queue for the queue.”

Yet here, of all places, the rules are the rules, and on Tuesday those who tried to force the authorities to continue with digital voting were confronted by the awkward fact that they had to vote for it, in person.

Then, to make matters worse, they lost.

The episode was particularly galling for those lawmakers who are among the 2 million Britons deemed most vulnerable to COVID-19 because of their age or preexisting conditions. Those groups have been instructed to stay home almost all the time, and until Tuesday, the lawmakers among them could still do their jobs, debating and voting digitally.

“There will probably be a couple of hundred MPs who won’t be able to vote,” said Robert Halfon, a Conservative, referring to the 650 members of Parliament. Halfon is among those lawmakers.

The government led by his party leader, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, “was snipping away against the democratic rights of MPs, turning us all into parliamentary eunuchs, and part of this is because of a kind of He-Man, Tarzan-like mentality,” Halfon told the BBC. In a minor concession, the government has said that it would allow those medically unable to attend to contribute digitally to parliamentary procedures but not to vote.

Instead, the government said, they could seek an agreement to stay away with a lawmaker from an opposing party, effectively canceling each other’s vote.

But that has left many angry, particularly lawmakers from areas far from London who worry that they risk spreading the virus by traveling the length of the country. Their fears are not ill-

British lawmakers lining up outside of the House of Commons in London on Tuesday. founded, because before strict social distancing rules were put in place, Parliament was the site of an early outbreak of COVID-19, the disease that is caused by the virus.

“This is ridiculous when we have an app developed to do the job,” Catherine McKinnell, an opposition Labour lawmaker, fumed on Twitter. “What is the Government so afraid of that they will risk spreading a deadly virus over allowing Members of Parliament to vote online?”

There are also worries that if lawmakers from Scotland, for example, feel unable to attend, that could weaken democratic accountability, with negative consequences for the unity of the nation.

What makes the turn of events more surprising is that Parliament had been operating a surprisingly smooth “hybrid” system with no more than 50 lawmakers in the compact House of Commons at a time, and others calling in from home via Zoom.

Voting, too, had taken place electronically for the first time in the history of Parliament. This also seemed to work, even if on one occasion the chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, accidentally voted remotely the wrong way.

“The risk is that this turns Parliament from a global leader in adapting to the pandemic into an international laughingstock,” said Ruth Fox, director of the Hansard society, a research organization focused on Parliament. Insisting on physical voting, she added, could mean that the votes would take as long as the debates.

Some have speculated that the hostility toward a virtual Parliament comes from Johnson, who has looked uncomfortable during Prime Minister’s Questions, his weekly duel with the new leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer.

With a maximum of 50 lawmakers allowed in the chamber at a time, and none of the usual cheering on display, it has become an exchange more suited to the forensic courtroom skills of Starmer, a former lawyer, than the bombastic prime minister.

But since that restriction on numbers in the chamber will remain, it seems unlikely that the noise level will rise.

Fox believes that the real motivation is the government’s desire to maintain discipline among its lawmakers, something that is much harder when they are spread around the country.

Government business managers may also hope that opposition lawmakers will be less inclined to amend government bills because of the time each vote will take.

At the center of the furor is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the House of Commons, and a man who has built a whole career on cultivating a self-consciously old-fashioned demeanor.

During the peak of the pandemic he agreed to remote working but has since pressed for a resumption of business as usual, arguing that the digital Parliament is less effective than the real thing.

On Tuesday, Rees-Mogg told Parliament that many people were going back to work and that lawmakers “have a role as leaders” to do the same, glossing over the fact that official government advice is that those who can work from home should continue to do so.

Voting in Parliament should not be done “quietly and secretly,” he said, before noting that “some people tweeted that they were doing it while going for a walk and things like that.”

“Is that really the way to be voting on laws?” he asked.

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Thursday, June 4, 2020

Yemen aid falls short, threatening food and health programs

By VIVIAN YEE

I

nternational donors pledged about $1.35 billion in humanitarian aid for Yemen on Tuesday, far short of the $2.4 billion the United Nations had said was needed to pull a country shredded by years of war, hunger and disease from the brink of further disaster.

Mark Lowcock, the United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator, was blunt about the results of the donor conference, which was hosted, virtually, by Saudi Arabia.

“We cannot be satisfied where we got to today,” he said. In addition, he noted that the money raised had not yet been paid, only promised.

Funding had withered this year over donors’ concerns that the Houthis, the Iran-backed armed group that controls

northern Yemen, were interfering with aid distributed in their territory. The Houthis have since made some concessions to allow aid to flow more freely, said Lise Grande, the United Nations’ top official in Yemen.

U.N. officials warned that without more donations, nearly 400 hospitals and health care centers it finances would have to reduce services just as the coronavirus pandemic has surged in Yemen. Already, food rations have been halved for 8.5 million hungry Yemenis, and 10,000 health care workers have lost the U.N. payments that for many are their only salary, Grande said.

Since the war began five years ago, pitting the Houthis against a government backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Yemenis have endured doomsday after doomsday: relentless airstrikes against hospitals and schools by the

Distributing aid to people displaced from their homes in northern Yemen last year. A donor conference for humanitarian aid to Yemen fell far short of its goal on Tuesday.

Saudi-led military coalition using American-made weapons, a severe cholera outbreak, the ever-present threat of famine, a health care system in collapse and now the coronavirus.

“Yemenis themselves say things are worse today than at any time in their recent history,” Lowcock said in his appeal to donors, asking “whether the world is prepared to watch Yemen fall off the cliff.”

Though COVID-19 deaths appear to be multiplying quickly across Yemen, Yemeni authorities have done little to check the virus’s spread. The Houthis, in the north, have denied the outbreak’s existence; their enemies, battling for dominance of the south, are too weak and divided to respond.

As the pandemic bore down, Saudi Arabia, which has poured tens of billions of dollars into the war to little tangible end, announced a unilateral cease-fire in Yemen in early April. But that has not prevented conflict from erupting in the weeks since, as the Houthis continue to mount attacks, a separatist group battles the internationally recognized government for control in the south, and bombs from the Saudiled coalition keep falling.

Aid groups urged all sides on Tuesday to negotiate an end to the war — the only real hope of resolving Yemen’s many humanitarian crises. And critics of Saudi Arabia said the fortune it had spent on aid for Yemen, including the $500 million it pledged on Tuesday, meant little if it continued to bomb civilians and blockade supplies from reaching Houthi territory.

“Millions of Yemeni people are staring down the double barrel of starvation and a global pandemic,” said Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Relief Council, an aid group that works in Yemen, urging donors to reach back into their pockets. “But money alone is not enough. These pledges are worth little if people are still fleeing from bombs and crossfire and their hospitals attacked.”

Even as he issued his appeal, however, the hostilities marched on.

On Monday, a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, Col. Turki al-Malki, said the Saudis had intercepted two Houthi drone strikes aimed at civilian targets across the border in Saudi Arabia. And on Tuesday, soon after Saudi Arabia trumpeted its hosting of the donor conference in a series of news releases, the Houthis said that Saudi Arabia had launched several airstrikes on its territory.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

17

Cameras won’t stop police from killing

By FARJAD MANJOO

A

chilling word keeps coming to mind this week, like a scratched-up record stuck on a lazy loop in my tweet-addled brain. Impunity.

If you can bear it, watch one of the videos of George Floyd’s death last week at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. Focus on the eyes of Derek Chauvin, the officer who has been charged with murder and manslaughter for pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck for a torturous 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

At several points, Chauvin makes smirking eye contact with the camera. He even halfheartedly reaches for what looks like pepper spray when the phone-wielding bystanders get a bit rowdy in their insistence that Floyd is dying before their eyes. But the presence of the bystanders doesn’t stop him; it’s almost as if Chauvin knows nothing can touch him.

Impunity is the only word I can think of for it.

Keep a close eye, too, on Tou Thao, Chauvin’s partner, who engages with the crowd in the manner of a security guard at an amusement park. As Chauvin pins Floyd down, Thao is almost polite in his colloquy with the people recording the scene. It’s as if he knows he’s going to be all over social media later, so he’s going to play it cool.

I’ve watched the Floyd videos at least a dozen times, and every time, it’s Thao’s composure that stiffens the hairs on the back of my neck. Thao comes off as completely unashamed of the misconduct he witnesses and, with his silence, encourages, in full public view.

Cameras were supposed to eliminate this sort of horror. Here, they hardly make it better.

Ever since the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991, America has been flooded with videos — captured by bystanders and by law enforcement officers on dashboard and body cams — that have highlighted the routine abuse and killing of unarmed black people at the hands of the police.

As these cameras have become ubiquitous, we have gotten a better picture of the scale of the horror. At times, as in the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island in 2014, bystanders have managed to capture the precise moment at which police misconduct becomes fatal.

Yet in the Garner video, the police try to push the camera away. The cops seemed at least embarrassed by it.

What’s particularly nauseating about the Floyd videos is that the officers know they’re being watched, yet they are not deterred and don’t even seem bothered by the cameras.

A similar shamelessness was on display in the innumerable clips showing police officers brazenly assaulting protesters and journalists during protests this weekend.

As I scrolled through endless collections of these online, I found it hard to escape the conclusion that America’s

A police officer wearing a body cam is seen during a demonstration on May 31, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia. police forces are not just unfairly brutal — they also do not seem to care anymore about being caught on tape.

While videos have catalyzed protest movements like Black Lives Matter, documenting police misconduct in America has had little effect in reducing it.

Not long ago, many reformers saw video as a key way to improve policing. In 2014, after the killing of Michael Brown by the police in Ferguson, Mo., the Obama administration allocated funds to help police departments purchase tens of thousands of body cameras. Even some civil liberties groups endorsed the idea.

The theory was simple: If there were bad cops on the force, body cams would root them out and make it easier to prosecute them.

But it hasn’t worked out that way. One major study of body cameras in American policing, which followed more than 2,000 officers in Washington, D.C., found that the cameras did little to alter police behavior. Officers equipped with cameras used force and faced complaints from civilians at rates similar to those for officers who didn’t have cameras.

What’s more, in several high-profile cases, jurors were reluctant to convict, even with eyewitness and body-cam videos capturing wrongdoing. In 2015, Michael Slager, a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, who had been caught on video shooting a black man named Walter Scott multiple times in the back, was charged with murder. The trial ended in a hung jury when a lone juror declared himself unable to convict. (Slager later pleaded guilty to the federal crime of violating Scott’s civil rights and was sentenced in 2017 to 20 years in prison.)

One problem is that video is often open to interpretation — where critics of the police see clear brutality, jurors who are inclined to give police officers the benefit of the doubt may excuse as sins actions in the heat of the moment.

There are also a hodgepodge of policies governing body cameras. Different states have different rules about when officers are supposed to turn them on and who gets access to the video when there are questions about officers’ conduct. In some cases, officers equipped with body cameras have conveniently neglected to turn them on. On Monday, the mayor of Louisville, Kentucky, fired the city’s police chief after discovering that two officers involved in the fatal shooting of a black business owner had not turned on their body cameras.

What happens when, time and again, law enforcement officers are recorded brutalizing citizens but left unpunished? I worry that police violence will become even more normalized, turning into a crude spectacle that loses even the ability to shock. How else to explain the orgy of violence on display this weekend?

“The whole world is watching” is what American pundits might say to China’s leaders when they round up Uighurs to send to re-education camps, or to Vladimir Putin of Russia when he banishes dissidents to an Arctic military base.

The phrase applies to our country, too. The whole world is watching and has been for decades. Yet little changes, because merely watching is not nearly enough.

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Thursday, June 4, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

In America, protest is patriotic

The police on Sunday arresting protesters marching against the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

By THE NYT EDITORIAL BOARD

W

hen George Floyd died under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, the scourge of police violence, festering for generations, became a rallying point for Americans yearning for the fulfillment of this country’s founding aspiration to promote life, liberty and happiness.

Yet as they turned out to exercise their most basic rights as citizens, these Americans have often encountered only more contempt for those rights from the people who are supposed to protect them.

Some protesters crossed the line into violence. Some people took advantage of the chaos to loot. But all too often, facing peaceful demonstrations against police violence, the police responded with more violence — against protesters, journalists and bystanders.

In a handful of cities, local leaders recognized what was at stake, and their response can point the way forward for the country. In Houston, the police chief, Art Acevedo, told protesters: “We will march as a department with everybody in this community. I will march until I can’t stand no more. But I will not allow anyone to tear down this city.”

He had the sense to recognize that a vast majority of demonstrators wanted what he wanted, a better city. And he clearly saw that the responsibility of the police was not to abridge but to safeguard the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, assembly, the press and religion.

In many places, the country is experiencing a communal breakdown so complete that mayors have thrown up their hands and ordered curfews or called in the National Guard. Unable to maintain urban life, they have tried to suspend it, just as they had done in response to the spread of the coronavirus.

Healing the wounds ripped open in recent days and months will not be easy. The pandemic has made Americans

fearful of their neighbors, cut them off from their communities of faith, shut their outlets for exercise and recreation and culture and learning. Worst of all, it has separated Americans from their own livelihoods.

Fear of the police has further separated communities from those sworn to protect their rights.

President Donald Trump, who tends to see only political opportunity in public fear and anger, is in his customary manner contributing heat rather than light to the confrontations between protesters and authority. In the absence of national leadership, it is all the more vital that mayors and governors affirm the rules that ought to govern American society. The nation is founded on the freedom of speech — and particularly the right to gather in protest against the government. Politicians must hold the police accountable for protecting the rights of everyone they are sworn to protect and serve.

In the same vein, city and state leaders should pursue the reopening of houses of worship in consultation with public health authorities. Particularly in this agonizing time, many Americans want to turn to their communities of faith for support. And religious leaders have often been at the forefront of nonviolent social change.

The chaos unleashed by the death of Floyd defies simple prescriptions; it is a result of too many underlying conditions. Authorities are facing a stern test: It can be all but impossible to police the boundaries of legitimate protest, particularly on the ground. And it must be painful for many police officers who put their lives on the line to hear themselves criticized by their fellow citizens.

Yet the testimony of local journalism, eyewitnesses and videos posted online make clear that too many police officers have little interest in protecting legitimate protest. While some officers have joined protests or knelt in solidarity, others, often in the same cities, have acted savagely, inciting or exacerbating violence.

Just a few weeks ago, the police demonstrated remarkable forbearance as heavily armed groups turned out in several state capitals to oppose coronavirus-related public heath measures. Now the police are demonstrating an equally remarkable intolerance to protests against their own behavior.

The police have imposed arbitrary limits on protests, creating excuses for confrontation. They have fired countless rounds of tear gas and rubber bullets into unarmed crowds, sometimes without warning. They have attacked with fists, truncheons, shields — and cars.

They have behaved as if determined to prevent peaceful protest by introducing violence.

In some of the most troubling attacks, police officers have singled out those who spoke up, wading into crowds of protesters and silencing the loudest voices.

In Charleston, South Carolina, a black man dropped to

one knee and told the police, “All of you are my family.” The police arrested him.

In Kansas City, Missouri, a black man shouted from a crowd of protesters, “If you ain’t got the balls to protect the streets and protect and serve like you were paid to do, turn in your damned badge.” The police arrested him.

In scores of incidents across the country, police officers also have deliberately attacked journalists reporting on the protests. Minneapolis police arrested a CNN crew on live television. Video captured Louisville police firing pepper bullets at a local TV crew. The Manhattan district attorney’s office is investigating the alleged assault of a Wall Street Journal reporter by the police. Protesters have also targeted reporters, including a Fox News crew outside the White House.

In a brazen display of this administration’s disregard for the First Amendment, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General William Barr, ordered federal officers to clear a peaceful protest in front of the White House.

The police used tear gas, rubber bullets and riot shields to drive away protesters, journalists and priests standing on the private porch of St. John’s Church, all so Trump could pose for photos. The photo op managed to take aim at the freedom of assembly, speech and religion all at the same time.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration sent more troops into the streets of Washington. Armored vehicles patrolled downtown. Helicopters buzzed overhead. Soldiers trained for war in foreign countries stood on the corners of American streets, hands on guns.

Americans aren’t holding their breath for the president to change his incendiary behavior. But city leaders and governors have plenty of room to act in the meantime.

There are signs some leaders recognize the damage that has been done. In Richmond, Virginia, where the police gassed peaceful demonstrators on Monday evening, the mayor, Levar Stoney, apologized Tuesday and promised to join a march. The chief of police, William Smith, took a knee in a show of contrition and solidarity.

The governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, apologized to the CNN reporters arrested in Minneapolis, and then took a moment to dilate on the importance of a free press.

“The protection and security and safety of the journalists covering this is a top priority, not because it is a nice thing to do, because it is a key component of how we fix this,” Walz said. “Sunshine, disinfectant and seeing what’s happening has to be done.”

On Tuesday, Walz ordered a civil rights investigation into the “systemic racism” of the Minneapolis Police Department. It is not enough, right now, for officials to focus on protecting private property. It is not enough even for them to think only of protecting life, though that is critical. They need to also protect the freedoms of assembly and expression, and then, like Walz, to hear what’s being said. That’s where the healing may begin.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

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Populares radican querella contra gobernadora por supuesta violación a veda electoral Por THE STAR representantes del Partido Popular Democrático Lchios(PPD), Jesús Manuel Ortiz González y Carlos BianAngleró, junto a los aspirantes a representantes Ya-

ramary Torres Reyes y Domingo Torres García, radicaron el miércoles, una querella contra la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez ante la Oficina de Ética Gubernamental por supuestamente publicar anuncios de naturaleza política en su red social personal en abierta violación de ley.

Según se desprende de la querella, el domingo, 31 de mayo de 2020 la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced, quien es aspirante primarista a la gobernación por el Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), publicó en su red social Twitter, @wandavazquezg, una producción bajo el título “Mejor Preparado para responder a Temporada de Hurcanes”. El anuncio promociona las alegadas gestiones de su administración para enfrentar la temporada de huracanes que comienza el 1 de junio de 2020.

“La gobernadora publicó ese anuncio en una cuenta de Twitter que también utiliza para promocionar sus asuntos de campaña política. Es evidente que Wanda Vázquez está utilizando sus planes y proyectos como gobernadora para impulsar su candidatura. La Oficina de Ética Gubernamental debe cumplir con su responsabilidad de evitar violaciones a la ley electoral”, manifestó Ortiz González en comunicación escrita.

Por su parte, Bianchi Angleró consideró innecesario el anuncio publicado por la gobernadora en su red social, ya que el pasado 29 de mayo de 2020 ofreció una conferencia de prensa en las instalaciones de la Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica (AEE) en Palo Seco para hablar precisamente sobre los preparativos del gobierno ante el inicio de la temporada de huracanes.

“Los visuales denotan que se utilizaron las faci-

lidades de una corporación pública, en este caso la AEE, para hacer un anuncio político relacionado a la campaña primarista de la gobernadora. De hecho, en el anuncio se utiliza gran parte de la conferencia de prensa, en la que participó el personal de varias agencias de gobierno y en donde no existe justificación alguna, dada las propias Órdenes Ejecutivas de la gobernadora, para que personas que trabajan para una campaña política se personaran en una facilidad pública para grabar y hacer la producción que fue expuesta en el vídeo”.

Ante esta situación, los legisladores y candidatos a

representantes por el PPD indicaron que la OEG debe solicitar inmediatamente a La Fortaleza y a la AEE los videos, fotos, audios y cualquier otro material relacionado a dicha conferencia de prensa, la cual ha sido utilizada para adelantar las aspiraciones políticas de la gobernadora.

Según los líderes del PPD, “las acciones de Wanda Vázquez se encuentran en clara violación de la Ley de Ética Gubernamental, por lo que debe iniciarse una investigación y procesar a los funcionarios que violaron la ley en la utilización de la propiedad y fondos públicos para fines político partidistas”.

Anuncian pagos de incentivos a enfermeros, tecnólogos médicos y médicos residentes del sector privado Por THE STAR La gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced anunció el miércoles, el desembolso de incentivos por más de $69 millones para miles de enfermeros y enfermeras, tecnólogos médicos y médicos residentes del sector privado, activos en la lucha contra el COVID-19.

“Continuamos desembolsando la ayuda económica que prometimos a nuestros profesionales de la salud que se han mantenido en la primera línea de trabajo desde que comenzó esta pandemia.

En esta ocasión, pagamos $69,109,000 a 24,231 trabajadores del sector privado que completaron la solicitud disponible desde el pasado sábado, a través del Sistema Unificado de Rentas Internas (SURI), del Departamento de Hacienda”,

explicó Vázquez Garced en comunicación escrita.

La primera ejecutiva informó que al mismo tiempo continúan depositando los pagos de Impacto Económico, aprobados en la Ley CARES. “Se desembolsaron $66,782,190 adicionales del Pago de Impacto Económico correspondientes a la fase 1 y fase 2 del programa para 39,915 familias.

También sigue en proceso la tercera y última fase del plan de distribución de ayuda, que incluye a los beneficiarios del Programa de Asistencia Nutricional (PAN), del Seguro Social, pensionados y otros ciudadanos que no tienen que rendir la Planilla de Contribución sobre Ingresos. Los exhortamos a que visiten la página web pagodeimpactoeconomico. com, para que ingresen su información

y puedan recibir el pago”, dijo la mandataria.

Por su parte, el secretario de Hacienda, Francisco Parés Alicea, destacó que el desembolso para los profesionales de la salud del sector privado representa un 70 por ciento del estimado total del incentivo.

“Estimamos que 35,000 profesionales de la salud de este sector son elegibles para el incentivo, por lo que estamos cerca de completar los pagos que continuarán procesándose mientras vayan completando las solicitudes”, sostuvo.

Para solicitar el incentivo, las personas que no tengan cuenta en SURI, podrán entrar a la página principal y en el área de ‘Enlaces rápidos nuevos’, seleccionar ‘Incentivo Profesionales de

la Salud – Sector Privado’ e ingresar la información. Los que tienen sus cuentas de SURI, podrán proveer la información usando el menú de Alertas y el enlace titulado ‘Incentivo Profesionales de la Salud – Sector Privado.

El secretario añadió que estos profesionales fueron identificados por el Departamento de Salud, de acuerdo a su base de datos de profesionales con licencias activas durante la emergencia declarada por el COVID-19. Si la información del Individuo Elegible no concuerda con la base de datos provista, el sistema no le permitirá completar el proceso y en esos casos, deberá someter una solicitud de reclamación al Departamento de Salud, a través de correo electrónico incentivoprofesionales@salud.pr.gov.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

Celebrating Pride on film

By ERICK PIEPENBURG

I

t’s June, and that normally means it’s time to celebrate Pride. But with protests, a deadly pandemic and record unemployment convulsing the country, it feels like there’s little reason to party.

That doesn’t mean Pride is over. Parades and events may have been canceled or postponed. But Pride Month festivities are moving online, with virtual drag shows, benefit concerts and many other events daily around the globe.

Movies are no substitute for a rainbow-drenched parade. But they can be entertaining and evocative — and let’s face it, shorter — ways to experience queer community and commune with the past. Here are seven films that will deliver the revolution, camaraderie and flirtatiousness of Pride right to your home.

— ‘Gay USA’ (1977): Stream on Amazon Prime.

Director Arthur J. Bressan Jr. was an indie polyglot who made adult films and the under-the-radar 1985 AIDS drama “Buddies” (beautifully restored in 2018). But Bressan, who died from the disease in 1987, also made this carefully observed documentary about Pride in New York and other cities. It’s a fascinating, scrappy time capsule of queer life in post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS epidemic America that chronicles the revelry and protest that greeted the modern gay liberation movement. “Gay USA” also features footage, taken by activist Lilli Vincenz, of New York’s first gay pride parade, in 1970, on what was then known as Christopher Street Liberation Day. — ‘Before Stonewall’ (1984): Stream on Fandor or Kanopy. Rent or buy on Amazon or iTunes.

The first Pride parades were revolutionary. But for the generation of LGBTQ people who came of age before the Stonewall riots in 1969, a parade was only the latest, if most visible, sign of public resistance and self-respect. The uncovering of that past is the mission of this documentary, directed with tenderness and urgency by Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg (and selected for the National Film Registry). The movie is chockablock with grainy footage of early Pride parades. But even more fascinating are the Mod-style drag queens, the butch lesbian nuptials and the other people and moments that show how a future for queer life was being forged a future well before Pride officially took the parade route.

— ‘Jeffrey’ (1995): Stream on Fandor or Hoopla. Rent or buy on Amazon or iTunes.

New York City Pride makes a cameo in Paul Rudnick’s snappy screen adaptation of his hit 1993 off-Broadway play, set in the uneasy years after the first panicked decade of the AIDS crisis. This sharp-tongued romantic comedy, directed by Christopher Ashley, is about a gay man (Steven Weber) whose plan to swear off sex grows complicated when he falls for an HIV-positive muscle boy (Michael T. Weiss). The sunny, ohso-’90s Pride scenes — did we really wear that much flannel?

— were shot in Central Park and on the streets of Manhattan.

They’ll make you wistful for queer marching bands and boastful moms, thanks to Olympia Dukakis’ cheeky appearance as

Marsha P. Johnson, in a 2017 documentary about her directed by David France. the devoted mother of a transgender daughter.

— ‘Milk’ (2008): Stream on Starz. Rent or buy on YouTube or iTunes.

Sean Penn won an Academy Award for his performance as Harvey Milk, the slain gay rights leader, in Gus Van Sant’s biopic set in 1970s San Francisco. In one memorable scene, the firebrand Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California, urges a Pride rally crowd to come out and “break down the myths and destroy the lies and distortions” perpetuated by homophobes. The Hollywood treatment is rousing, but it’s also worth checking out footage of Milk himself from the UCLA Film & Television Archive. A clip of Milk speaking at the Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade, just months before he was shot to death in 1978, is a glorious snapshot of how his fiery charisma lit a match under a movement.

— ‘Pride’ (2014): Stream on Amazon Prime.

Gay Pride marches bookend this rousing feel-good dramedy, directed by Matthew Warchus, about the uneasy alliance between mineworkers and gay and lesbian activists during a labor strike in the mid-’80s that rattled Britain under the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. Many of the characters are based on people from the LGBTQ and labor communities who marched together despite often violent opposition. Writing in The New York Times, Stephen Holden called “Pride” “a stirring film” that’s accentuated by “the kind of hearty, blunt-force drama with softened edges that leaves audiences applauding and teary-eyed.”

— ‘BPM (Beats Per Minute)’ (2017): Stream on

Hulu or Kanopy.

The smiles: that’s what lifts a parade scene in Robin Campillo’s stirring drama about the Paris chapter of AIDS activist group Act Up. Beyond a biography, the film is a remembrance of how LGBTQ people found ways to love and celebrate despite death, despair and other bleak markers of a plague. In a joyous montage, beaming men bounce about in pink cheerleader skirts, waving pink pompoms. Yet they’re also wearing Act Up’s signature black T-shirts featuring pink triangles (the Nazi emblem identifying gays that was reclaimed as a pride symbol) and the urgent precept “silence = mort” (“silence = death”). The jarring juxtaposition of mortality and camp is a poignant reminder of how an afternoon of joy meant the world to a generation that didn’t have a minute of rage to spare.

— ‘The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson’ (2017): Stream on Netflix.

Murder or suicide? That’s the heartbreaking question that fuels David France’s documentary about Marsha P. Johnson, the trailblazing transgender activist, performer and highprofile elder of the Stonewall uprising who was found dead in the Hudson River in 1992. Yet embedded among the investigative elements of the film is a treasure trove of archival footage of Johnson, described in a 2018 obituary in The New York Times as “a fixture of street life in Greenwich Village.”

To watch Johnson resiliently parade down Christopher Street during Pride, her beaming smile accentuated by her signature glossy lip, is to see a revolution in heels.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

21

Crowds define Opera. They’re also keeping it from returning.

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

M era.

ost of Verdi’s “Aida” is focused on intensely dramatic scenes for only one, two or three singers at a time.

But it’s crowds that define the experience of this op-

It’s not just the spectacular Triumphal Scene. In the first act, priests, ministers and military officers, summoned by the King of Egypt, assemble to learn who has been chosen to command their troops against advancing Ethiopian invaders. Fullthroated choral outbursts shift from avenging threats against their enemies to stirring expressions of Egyptian resolve.

Crowds are essential to this moment — and, really, to opera as an art form. Choruses fill the stage; musicians cram into the orchestra pit; thousands of people sit shoulder to shoulder in the theater. The Metropolitan Opera, one of the world’s largest houses, seats an audience of nearly 4,000. And it would probably have been packed for the season’s opening night Sept. 21, the premiere of a new “Aida” production.

But it’s no longer certain when opening night will happen. The Met announced Monday that its coming season’s performances would be canceled at least until New Year’s Eve, as social distancing measures to curb the coronavirus pandemic continue to keep theaters across the United States shuttered. Opera fans will have to endure once-unimaginable disappointment, although this loss is nothing compared with the devastating impact that the virus has had on countless lives, and that the shutdown has had on the livelihoods of artists and innumerable backstage staff.

Of course, opera revels in glorious solo voices; I’ll never forget my first “Aida,” starring a radiant Leontyne Price, when I was a teenager. Yet in this dismaying moment, as an opera lover, a Met regular and a New Yorker, it’s crowds that I miss the most. They add to the mystique of classical music in spaces of all sizes, from an intimate recital room to Carnegie Hall’s spacious auditorium. In opera, however, they are not only crucial but special: When a rousing chorus breaks out, the audience feels swept away, pulled right into the music and the drama.

Every aspect of going to a Met performance involves mingling closely with others. You take the subway to Lincoln Center. If you’re grabbing dinner with a friend beforehand, you count yourself lucky to have a little table during the preperformance rush at a nearby restaurant. You walk across the plaza, which is usually bustling. Then you settle into your seat and wait for the crowds to assemble onstage.

If the opera happens to be Puccini’s “La Bohème,” in Franco Zeffirelli’s enduringly popular and extravagant 1981 production, the Café Momus scene offers a glorified — some would say prettified — representation of the buzzing streets we in the audience just left behind. The set depicts a small cafe opening into a large square in Paris teeming with nearly 240 revelers, street urchins, vendors, soldiers and a marching band. It’s shamelessly spectacular, musically infectious and utterly enjoyable.

I’ve always been most affected by the crowd scenes in

which choristers, following a long-standing convention of the genre, face the audience and voice their phrases collectively. Take the final scene of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” when the beloved master singer Hans Sachs arrives to attend the annual song contest in Nuremberg. In the Met’s vividly old-fashioned Otto Schenk production, it seems like the entire town has assembled onstage. The choristers, facing Sachs and the audience, sing a stirring chorale in tribute to this decent, modest man, a cobbler, and hail him in full-voiced salutations. It’s a glorious, overwhelming sound.

Another such moment comes at the end of Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” which was to have returned to the Met in November in Herbert Wernicke’s splendid production. Men who have been unjustly jailed by an autocratic governor are liberated and joined by their jubilant wives and children. Everyone sings a rousing chorus, celebrating freedom and hailing the heroism of Leonore, who has rescued her husband, a political prisoner. Beethoven’s ode to joy in this choral scene is just as thrilling as his setting of Schiller’s actual “Ode to Joy” in the finale of his Ninth Symphony.

Solemn crowd scenes can be soberly beautiful, like the chorus of priests at the temple of wisdom in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte,” which was to have been presented in a new production by Simon McBurney opening on New Year’s Eve. (Instead, Julie Taymor’s staging will be revived.) During the first act of this fairy-tale opera, the good and bad characters are deliberately ambiguous. But in Act II, the music for the

priests — sonorous refrains, and a full-voiced, beautiful chorus — lends them depth and poignancy. For a moment the stage is filled with people who, however flawed, are striving after truth.

Then there’s the feisty crowd in Act I of Bizet’s “Carmen,” which was scheduled to return to the house in October. Workers on break from a Spanish tobacco factory, Carmen among them, are joined in a square by idle soldiers and townspeople.

She sings the seductive “Habanera,” likening love to an untamed bird. The crowd echoes her words and cheers her on with collective choral refrains. Who could resist her?

In April, the Met presented an inspiring, four-hour virtual gala with some 40 artists in quarantine performing live from their homes around the world. But there were a few prerecorded offerings, and the most moving one featured members of the chorus and orchestra in an elegant account of “Va, pensiero,” from Verdi’s “Nabucco.”

This resplendent chorus, with a wistful melody that soars over a simple, steady orchestra accompaniment, is sung by exiled Hebrews who send their thoughts “on golden wings” to their distant homeland. In the Met’s production, the choristers just sit atop stone walls and steps, facing the audience, which makes the music all the more moving: Although far from home, they can at least rekindle sweet memories.

“Nabucco” is slated to return to the Met in March. We have to hope that New York performing arts institutions will be able to welcome exiled artists and audiences home by then.

Olga Kulchynska, center, in “La Bohème,” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York

22

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

The best movies and tv shows coming to Netflix, Amazon and more in June

From left, Jonathan Majors, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Clarke Peters and Delroy Lindo in “Da 5 Bloods.

By SANDRA E. GARCIA

A

strange school year is coming to an end, giving way to an uncertain summer. More and more of the world is reopening for business, in hopes of returning to some semblance of normalcy. But honestly? Right now, at least for entertainment options, it seems unlikely June is going to be dramatically different from May. We can probably expect at least another month of hunkering down in our living rooms, looking for something to watch on TV. Thank goodness the major streaming services still have a lot of pre-pandemic product in their pipelines, including some shows and movies that have been buzzed about for months — or in some cases, years. Here are our picks for the best new films and TV series premiering in June, plus a roundup of some of the other notable titles that will be available to stream. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice.)

New to Netflix ‘Da 5 Bloods’ Starts streaming: June 12 The pandemic may have scuttled plans to put Spike Lee’s latest movie in theaters, but that doesn’t make its Netflix premiere any less of an event. Part war movie and part caper picture, “Da 5 Bloods” is about a group of black Vietnam veterans who re-

turn to their old battleground, searching for buried treasure while seeking some closure on a painful chapter of their lives. Lee and his Oscar-winning “BlacKkKlansman” collaborator, Kevin Willmott, have reworked a Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo screenplay that was originally about white soldiers.

With the help of a stellar cast — including Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Chadwick Boseman — Lee and Will-

mott mean to grapple with the enduring legacy of America’s time in Vietnam and its effects on the people who fought.

Also arriving: June 2 “Fuller House” Season 5, Part 2 “Garth Brooks: The Road I’m On” Sea son 1 June 3 “Spelling the Dream” June 5 “The Last Days of American Crime” “13 Reasons Why” Season 4 “Queer Eye” Season 5 June 10 “Lenox Hill” “Reality Z” June 12 “Dating Around” Season 2 “F Is for Family” Season 4 “The Search” “The Woods” June 14 “Marcella” Season 3 June 17 “Mr. Iglesias” Part 2 June 18 “The Order” Season 2 June 19 “Father Soldier Son” “Feel the Beat” “Floor Is Lava” “Lost Bullet” “One-Way to Tomorrow”

Elizabeth Moss, left, and Odessa Young in “Shirley.”

“The Politician” Season 2 “Wasp Network” June 23 “Eric Andre: Legalize Everything” June 24 “Athlete A” “Crazy Delicious” “Nobody Knows I’m Here” June 26 “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” “Home Game” June 30 “BNA” “George Lopez: We’ll Do It for Half” New to Hulu ‘In My Skin’ Starts streaming: June 4 For everyone who has burned through “Never Have I Ever” and “Normal People” and is now in need of another thoughtful and honest take on teen life, this awardwinning BBC Three series might fit the bill. The “In My Skin” creator, Kayleigh Llewellyn, draws on her own experiences for this dark and very adult dramedy, about a Welsh teenager named Bethan (Gabrielle Creevy) who’s dealing with the usual adolescent anxieties about peer approval and her own sexual awakening. But at the same time she is also dodging a violent alcoholic father and taking care of a mother with bipolar disorder. The subject matter can be bleak, but Llewellyn and the director, Lucy Forbes, allow their heroine small victories as well as moments of youthful high jinks, in a show that’s attuned to how kids often have complicated private lives beneath their veneer of above-it-all cool.

‘Shirley’ Starts streaming: June 5 Elisabeth Moss gives an alternately terrifying and heartbreaking performance in “Shirley,” playing author Shirley Jackson as a deeply cynical and depressive recluse, barely enduring a marriage of convenience with the charismatic Bennington College professor Stanley Hyman (played by the equally excellent Michael Stuhlbarg). Adapted by screenwriter Sarah Gubbins from a Susan Scarf Merrell novel, the mostly fictional “Shirley” presents Jackson’s life through the eyes of Rose (Odessa Young), the new wife of another faculty member who becomes the writer’s aide, confidant and twisted disciple. Like director Josephine Decker’s previous film, “Madeline’s Madeline,” this

The San Juan Daily Star is a hazy and sensuous drama, illustrating how the rituals of privilege and academia can’t keep one mentally ill woman from spinning out of control.

‘We Are Freestyle Love Supreme’ Starts streaming: June 5 We have to wait until July for the muchanticipated arrival of “Hamilton” on Disney Plus. In the meantime, fans of Lin-Manuel Miranda can see him in “We Are Freestyle Love Supreme,” a documentary about the hip-hop improv troupe the actor and composer has performed in for more than 15 years. The “Hamilton” director, Thomas Kail, and actor Christopher Jackson, who played George Washington in the musical’s original cast, have also been part of this loose collective of theater nerds and amateur rappers that persisted even as their individual careers took off. This film combines old footage with a behind-the-scenes look at Freestyle Love Supreme’s recent Broadway engagement to tell a story about spontaneous creativity and the restorative powers of collaboration.

Also arriving: June 2 “Maxxx” June 12 “Crossing Swords” “Into the Dark: Good Boy” June 19 “Love, Victor” “Taste the Nation With Padma Lakshmi” New to Amazon ‘7500’ Starts streaming: June 19 Early in the low-boil suspense film “7500,” terrorists commandeer an ordinary European commercial flight, forcing the pilot, Tobias Ellis (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), into life-or-death decisions for his passengers and crew — all while he’s confined to a cockpit with only a limited-perspective security camera to show him what’s happening in the main cabin. First-time feature filmmaker Patrick Vollrath (who was nominated for an Oscar for his 2015 short film, “Everything Will Be Okay”) keeps “7500” largely free of any hard-hitting sociopolitical message. This movie is more of a clever exercise in telling a simple story on a confined set. It’s also an intense character study, closely following a conscientious man who’s just trying to puzzle out the best way to keep people alive.

Also arriving: June 5 “El Presidente” June 12 “Gulabo Sitabo” June 19 “LOL: Last One Laughing Australia”

Thursday, June 4, 2020

June 26 “Cómo Sobrevivir Soltero” New to HBO ‘I May Destroy You’ Starts streaming: Sunday British playwright, poet and actress Michaela Coel broke through to a wide international audience with her semi-autobiographical E4 and Netflix series, “Chewing Gum,” about a young Londoner raised in a religiously devout family who is contemplating losing her virginity. Coel takes a different approach with the ambitious “I May Destroy You,” a more unsettling half-hour drama, all about a popular libertine writer named Arabella (Coel) whose anything-goes persona changes after she’s drugged and assaulted during a night out with friends. The 12-part series alternates between big-picture stories about Arabella’s similarly sexually adventurous peers and some more subjective and disturbing sequences where she reckons with the lingering trauma of what happened to her. “I May Destroy You” is not always an easy show to watch, but it should be a conversation-starter.

‘Perry Mason’ Starts streaming: June 21 Don’t expect any old-fashioned courtroom drama in HBO’s new take on author Erle Stanley Gardner’s character Perry Mason. This moody and explicit neo-noir series deviates widely from the source material, with an original story that explores the superlawyer’s origins in Depression-era Los Angeles, doing whatever it takes to make a buck. Matthew Rhys plays Mason as a hardboiled private detective, working alongside his future associates Della Street (Juliet Rylance) and Paul Drake (Chris Chalk) while trying to crack cases that involve fictionalized versions of real-life LA celebrities from the early 20th century. The plotting is intricate and the performances are energetic; this “Perry Mason” has more in common with “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential” than with its predecessor.

‘Search Party’ Season 3 Starts streaming: June 25 Despite critical acclaim, the satirical dramedy “Search Party” was hardly a sensation when its first two seasons aired on TBS back in 2016 and 2017. Perhaps it’ll find a more appreciative audience now that it’s moving to HBO Max — complete with a new season that continues the story of a group of New York millennials whose lives are upended by mysteries and murder. The latest episodes aren’t for newcomers. Creators Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers presume viewers already know about the restless antiheroine Dory (played by

23

MOVIES

Judi Dench in “Artemis Fowl.” the marvelous Alia Shawkat) and her circle of arty friends, who at the end of Season 2 faced ramifications for many bad choices.

Even as the plot intensifies in Season 3, “Search Party” remains a show about young adults looking for a purpose in a society that increasingly values their money more than their ideas.

‘Welcome to Chechnya’ Starts streaming: June 30 With his documentaries “How to Survive a Plague” and “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson,” journalist and filmmaker David France has combined history and activism, taking a frank and sometimes furious look at pivotal moments in the larger story of increased LGBTQ visibility in the 20th century. France’s new film, “Welcome to Chechnya,” moves that story to the present day, covering a remarkable underground organization that has worked to sneak persecuted gay people out of a Russian republic. The personal narratives of these refugees have the tension of a high-stakes political thriller, which is amplified by France’s use of cutting-edge digital effects to disguise his subjects, giving them other people’s faces as “masks,” to help keep them and their families safe.

Also arriving: June 6 “Ad Astra” “Yvonne Orji: Momma, I Made It!” June 10 “Infinity Train” Season 2 June 18 “Karma” “Summer Camp Island” Season 2 June 19 “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn”

June 20 “Ford v Ferrari” June 25 “Adventure Time: Distant Lands — BMO” “Doom Patrol” Season 2 June 27 “Doctor Sleep” June 28 “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” New to Disney Plus ‘Artemis Fowl’ Starts streaming: June 12 When the first book in Eoin Colfer’s “Artemis Fowl” series arrived in 2001, the author’s kid-friendly fantasy franchise — about a brilliant adolescent master-thief operating in a magical world of elves and fairies — seemed fated to be the next Harry Potter, inspiring blockbuster movies. Instead, it’s taken nearly 20 years for the first “Artemis Fowl” film to hit the screen — and it’s the small screen, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Ferdia Shaw as Artemis (with Colin Farrell playing his mysterious missing father), the movie isn’t so much an adaptation of Colfer’s books as it is a compressed introduction to their rich universe, which draws on Irish folklore and relies on the kind of arcane rules and hierarchies common to young adult fiction. The film is frenetically paced and visually busy, but it’ll keep the grade-school set occupied for 90 minutes.

Also arriving: June 12 “Walt & El Grupo” June 19 “Schoolhouse Rock” Season 1 June 26 “Into the Unknown: Making Frozen 2”

24

Thursday, June 4, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

How you should read Coronavirus studies, or any science paper

By CARL ZIMMER

A

lot of people are reading scientific papers for the first time these days, hoping to make sense of the coronavirus pandemic. If you’re one of them, be advised the scientific paper is a peculiar literary genre that can take some getting used to. And also bear in mind that these are not typical times for scientific publishing.

It is hard to think of another moment in history when so many scientists turned their attention to one subject with such speed. In mid-January, scientific papers began trickling out with the first details about the new coronavirus. By the end of the month, the journal Nature marveled that over 50 papers had been published. That number has swelled over the past few months at an exponential rate, fitting for a pandemic.

The National Library of Medicine’s database at the start of June contains over 17,000 published papers about the new coronavirus. A website called bioRxiv, which hosts studies that have yet to go through peer review, contains over 4,000 papers.

In earlier times, few people aside from scientists would have laid eyes on these papers. Months or years after they were written, they’d wind up in printed journals tucked away on a library shelf. But now the world can surf the rising tide of research on the new coronavirus. The vast majority of papers about it can be read for free online.

But just because scientific papers are easier to get hold of doesn’t mean that they are easy to make sense of. Reading them can be a challenge for the layperson, even one with some science education. It’s not just the jargon that scientists use to

compress a lot of results into a small space. Just like sonnets, sagas and short stories, scientific papers are a genre with its own unwritten rules, rules that have developed over generations.

The first scientific papers read more like letters among friends, recounting hobbies and oddities. The first issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published on May 30, 1667, included brief dispatches with titles such as “An account of the improvement of optick glasses,” and “An account of a very odd monstrous calf.”

When natural philosophers sent their letters to 17th-century journals, the editors decided whether they were worth publishing or not. But after 200 years of scientific advances, Victorian scientists could no longer be experts on everything. Journal editors sent papers to outside specialists who understood the details of a particular branch of research better than most scientists.

By the mid-1900s, this practice evolved into a practice known as peer review. A journal would publish a paper only after a panel of outside experts decided it was acceptable. Sometimes the reviewers rejected the paper outright; other times they required the fixing of weak points — either by revising the paper or doing additional research.

One lesson I’ve learned is that it can take work to piece together the story underlying a paper. If I call scientists and simply ask them to tell me about what they’ve done, they can offer me a riveting narrative of intellectual exploration. But on the page, we readers have to assemble the story for ourselves.

Part of the problem may be that many scientists don’t get much training in writing. As a result, it can be hard to figure out precisely what question a paper is tackling, how the results an-

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swer it and why any of it really matters.

The demands of peer review — satisfying the demands of several different experts — can also make papers even more of a chore to read. Journals can make matters worse by requiring scientists to chop up their papers in chunks, some of which are exiled into a supplementary file. Reading a paper can be like reading a novel and realizing only at the end that Chapters 14, 30, and 41 were published separately.

The coronavirus pandemic now presents an extra challenge: There are far more papers than anyone could ever read. If you use a tool like Google Scholar, you may be able to zero in on some of the papers that are already getting cited by other scientists. They can provide the outlines of the past few months of scientific history — the isolation of the coronavirus, for example, the sequencing of its genome, the discovery that it spreads quickly from person to person even before symptoms emerge. Papers like these will be cited by generations of scientists yet to be born.

Most won’t, though. When you read through a scientific paper, it’s important to maintain a healthy skepticism. The ongoing flood of papers that have yet to be peer-reviewed — known as preprints — includes a lot of weak research and misleading claims. Some are withdrawn by the authors. Many will never make it into a journal. But some of them are earning sensational headlines before burning out in obscurity.

But just because a paper passes peer review doesn’t mean it’s above scrutiny. In April, when French researchers published a study suggesting that hydroxychloroquine might be effective against COVID-19, other scientists pointed out that it was small and not rigorously designed. In May, a much bigger paper was published in the Lancet suggesting that the drug could increase the risk of death. A hundred leading scientists published an open letter questioning the authenticity of the database on which the study relied.

When you read a scientific paper, try to think about it the way other scientists do. Ask some basic questions to judge its merit. Is it based on a few patients or thousands? Is it mixing up correlation and causation? Do the authors actually present the evidence required to come to their conclusions?

One shortcut that can sometimes help you learn how to read a paper like a scientist is by making judicious use of social media. Leading epidemiologists and virologists have been posting thoughtful threads on Twitter, for example, laying out why they think new papers are good or bad. But always make sure you’re following people with deep expertise, and not bots or agents of disinformation peddling conspiracy nonsense.

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The San Juan Daily Star ANTONIO NEGRÓN RIVERA, CARMEN ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE SOCORRO NEGRÓN PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SURIVERA Y JOSÉ RAÚL PERIOR DE BAYAMON. NEGRON RIVERA, L A MARIBEL NEGRÓN ORTIZ SUCESIÓN DE HERMIN Demandante vs.

NEGRÓN SANTANA, LA SUCESIÓN DE ANGEL compuesta por todos los NEGRÓN MARRERO demandados; la JOHN Y LA SUCESIÓN DE DOE Y JANE DOE ENGRACIA SANTANA Demandados APONTE compuesta CIVILNUM: NJ20I9CV00011.

SOBRE: DOMINIO CONTRApor sus herederos: HECTOR JOSÉ NEGRÓN DICTORIO. EDICTO. ESTADOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESANTANA; RITA NEGRÓN UNIDOS SIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL SANTANA. IDA IRIS ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE NEGRÓN SANTANA, P.R. ERNESTO LUIS NEGRON A: ERNESTO LUIS SANTANA; NELIDA NEGRÓN SANTANA; NEGRÓN SANTANA; LA MARÍA ELENA NEGRON SUCESIÓN DE ANGEL ORTIZ, CARLOS RUBEN NEGRÓN SANTANA NEGRÓN ORTIZ, ANGEL compuesta por sus RAFAEL GUTIERREZ herederos, ELSIE MIRIAM NEGRÓN; IRIS EDUARDA NEGRON ORTIZ, ANGEL GUTIERREZ NEGRÓN, NEGRÓN ORTIZ; MARÍA Y JARMINA RAMÍREZ ELENA NEGRON ORTIZ, JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE, CARLOS RUBEN CUALQUIER PERSONA NEGRON ORTIZ Y LUIS IGNORADA A QUIEN ALBERTO NEGRÓN PUEDA PERJUDICAR ORTIZ; LA SUCESIÓN LA INSCRIPCIÓN DE OSCAR NEGRÓN SOLICITADA O A SANTANA, compuesta CUALQUIER PERSONA por sus herederos: QUE TENGA INTERÉS NORMA IRIS NEGRÓN O DERECHO REAL EN RIVERA; JOSÉ ANTONIO DICHO BIEN INMUEBLE NEGRÓN RIVERA, LUIS Y QUE PUEDA SER ANGEL NEGRÓN RIVERA, PERJUDICADA POR CARMEN SOCORRO DICHA INSCRIPCIÓN NEGRÓN RIVERA Y JOSÉ Por la presente se les notifica RAÚL NEGRON RIVERA; que la parte demandante ha presentado en este Tribunal una LA SUCESIÓN DE MARÍA acción para que el Tribunal OrESTHER NEGRÓN dene inscribir a su nombre como SANTANA, compuesta por titular registral, la propiedad que sus herederos: MARÍA se describe como sigue y que es segregación de la finca núNATASHA GUTIERREZ una mero Seis Mil Cuatrocientos SeNEGRÓN; ANGEL tenta y Uno (6,471): “RUSTICA: RAFAEL GUTIERREZ PARCELA NUMERO TRES (3): NEGRÓN; CARMEN RITA Predio de terreno radicado en el GUTIERREZ NEGRÓN, Barrio Cedro Abajo del término municipal de Naranjito, Puerto E IRIS EDUARDA Rico con una cabida superficial GUTIERREZ NEGRÓN, de SEIS MIL OCHOCIENTOS LA SUCESIÓN DE PILAR UNO PUNTO SETENTA Y SEIS MIL DOSCIENTOS TREINTA Y NEGRÓN SANTANA, UNO METROS CUADRADOS compuesta por sus (6,801.76231 me) equivalente herederos: JOSÉ LUIS a UNO PUNTO SETENTA Y RODRÍGUEZ NEGRÓN Y TRES MIL CINCUENTA Y CINA N A B E L RODRÍGUEZ CO CUERDAS (1.73055 cdas); NEGRÓN, LA SUCESIÓN en lindes por el NORTE y ESTE, con Parcela Numero Dos SEDE LUIS OSCAR NEGRÓN GREGADA, por el SUR, con la RIVERA, compuesta por carretera municipal existente, y por el OESTE, con el remaJARMINA RAMIREZ, nente de la finca principal”. Que y La SUCESIÓN DE el predio antes descrito es una EUSEBIA RIVERA segregación de la finca inscrita a ALICEA, compuesta por nombre de la Sucesión de Angel NORMA IRIS NEGRÓN Negrón Marrero, número Seis M RIVERA; LUIS ANGEL i l Cuatrocientos Setenta y Uno NEGRÓN RIVERA, JOSÉ (6,471), inscrita al Folio OchenLEGAL NOTICE

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Thursday, June 4, 2020 ta y Dos (82), Tomo Noventa y Tres (93) de Naranjito, Catastro Número Cuarenta y Dos guión Ciento Sesenta y Ocho guión Cero Cero Cero guión Cero Cero Tres guión Cero Ocho (42-168000-003-08). Se le notifica además a toda persona que tenga algún derecho real sobre el inmueble anteriormente descrito o cualquier persona ignorada que pueda ser perjudicada por esta inscripción y en general a todo el que tuviere motivo para oponerse, que comparezca a alegar cualquier derecho que tuviere en un término de veinte (20) días, a partir de la fecha de publicación del último edicto, excluyendo el día de su publicación, presentando su alegación a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr. salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal. Representa a la parte demandante, el abogado cuyo nombre y dirección se consigna de inmediato: LCDO. HECTOR M. MARRERO MARRERO 95 CALLE GEORGETTI, SUITE 1 APARTADO POSTAL 283 NARANJITO, PUERTO RICO 00719 TELÉFONO: 787-869-0806 EMAIL: marreroh@gmail.com En Bayamón, Puerto Rico a 21 de febrero de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria Regional. Verónica Rivera Rodriguez, Secretaria Auxiliar del Tribunal I. ***

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMER INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMON.

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante V.

SUCESIONES DE ANDRÉS NALES ESCOBAR e IRIS DOMINGA PÉREZ RUIZ compuesta por sus hijos: CARMEN YOLANDA, ANDRÉS, EDNA, VÍCTOR, NEREIDA, ÁNGEL, SAMUEL, RUBÉN e IRIS LUISA, todos de apellidos NALES PÉREZ, FULANO y MENGANO DE TAL, como posibles herederos desconocidos; UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Demandado CIVIL NUM: BY2019CV06070 (SALON 504). SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE GARANTÍAS. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

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ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. Nereida Quites Santana, Sec Au- esta notificación ha sido archivaxiliar del Tribunal I. da en los autos de este caso, con SS. fecha de 28 de mayo de 2020.

A: ANDRÉS, EDNA, LEGAL NOTICE En CAROLINA, Puerto Rico, el VÍCTOR, NEREIDA, Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto 28 de mayo de 2020. MARILYN ÁNGEL, RUBÉN e Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE APONTE RODRIGUEZ, SecretaIRIS LUISA ,todos de JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera ria Regional. DENISSE TORRES apellidos NALES PÉREZ Instancia Sala Superior Municipal RUIZ, Secretario(a) Auxiliar. como miembros de las de CAROLINA.

Sucesiones de Andrés Nales Escobar e Iris Dominga Pérez Ruiz Calle 7, GG-19, Victoria Heights Bayamón, Puerto Rico 00959 DE: ORIENTAL BANK

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva a la demanda enmendada dentro de los 30 días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramaiúdicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal.

Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Este caso trata sobre Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Garantías en que la parte demandante solicita que se condene a la parte demandada a pagar: la suma principal de $80,818.18, intereses a razón de 7%, desde el I de mayo de 2019, que se acumulan diariamente hasta su total y completo pago, más la suma de $1,823.54 por cargos por mora, más la suma de $10,000.00 por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado hipotecariamente asegurados. Se le apercibe que si dejare de hacerlo, se dictará contra usted sentencia en rebeldía, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la demanda enmendada, sin más citarle ni oírle. Se ordena a los herederos a que dentro del mismo término de treinta (30) días contados a partir de la fecha de notificación, ACEPTEN O REPUDIEN la participación que les corresponda en la herencia del causante Andres Nales Escobar, Iris Dominga Pérez Ruiz. Se les apercibe que de no expresarse dentro del término de (30) días en torno a su aceptación o repudiación de herencia, se tendrá por aceptada. EXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y Sello del Tribunal, hoy 26 de mayo de 2020. LCDA. LAURA L SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria Regional.

(787) 743-3346

COOPERATIVA DE AHORRO Y CREDITO DE MEDICOS Y OTROS PROFESIONALES DE LA SALUD (MEDICOOP) Demandante V.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

SUCESION DE LUIS R. PARTE DEMANDANTE v.

BETANCOURT OLIVER PEDRO L. GONZÁLEZ COMPUESTA POR LUIS SEIJO, X, Y, Z, POR SÍ Y RAUL BETANCOURT COMO MIEMBROS DE LA AGOSTO; ERNESTO SUCESION DE MARIA S. RODRIGUEZ SUAREZ MONSERRATE PARTE DEMANDADA COMPUESTA POR LILIBETH RODRIGUEZ CIVIL NÚM: SJ2019CV01677.

(901). SOBRE: COBRO JOHN DOE Y FULANO SALA DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO DE TAL COMO POR EDICTO POSIBLE HEREDEROS A: X, Y, Z, (HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; DESCONOCIDOS) POR CENTRO RECAUDACION SI Y COMO MIEMBROS DE INGRESOS DE LA SUCESION MUNICIPALES “CRIM” DE MARIA SOLEDAD Demandados MONSERRATE CUEVAS, Civil Núm. CA2019CV00217.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y parte codemandada en el caso de: EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO

A: LUIS RAUL BETANCOURT AGOSTO COMO MIEMBRO DE LA SUCESION DE LUIS R. BETANCOURT OLIVERO; JOHN DOE Y FULANO DE TAL COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESION DE ERENESTO RODRIGUEZ SUAREZ

(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 10 de mayo de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en Ja 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 Ja publicación de este edicto. Copia de

Banco Popular de Puerto Rico vs., Pedro L. González Seijo, Fulana de Tal y la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales Compuesta por Ambos , Civil Núm.: SJ2019CV01677 (901), sobre Cobro de Dinero (Procedimiento Ordinario).

Se le notifica a usted: X, Y, Z, (HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS) POR SI y COMO MIEMBROS DE LA SUCESION DE MARIA SOLEDAD MONSERRATE CUEVAS, que en la Demanda que originó este caso se alega que usted le adeuda a la parte demandante , BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO, las siguientes cantidades: A: $16,181.46 de principal e intereses devengados hasta el 11 de diciembre de 2018, más los intereses que se devenguen a partir de la fecha de radicación de la Demanda al tipo legal , hasta el total y completo pago de la obligación , y una suma razonable para las costas , gastos y honorarios de abogado, por concepto de las sumas desembolsadas bajo una tarjeta de crédito VISA cuyos últimos 4 dígitos son 3678. B. $1,407.15 de principal e intereses devengados al tipo pactado hasta el 11 de diciembre de 2018 más los intereses que se devenguen de ahí en adelante al tipo pactado hasta el total y completo pago de a obligación , y una suma razonable para las costas , gastos y honorarios de abogado , por concepto de las sumas desembolsadas bajo una línea dd reserva de la cuenta cuyos últimos 4 dígitos son 9092.

C. $12,230.47 de principal e intereses devengados al tipo pactado hasta el 11 de diciembre de 2018 , más los intereses que se devenguen, al tipo pactado hasta el total y completo pago de la obligación, y una suma razonable para las costas , gastos y honorarios de abogado, por concepto de las sumas desembolsadas bajo una tarjeta de crédito AMEX cuyos últimos 4 dígitos son 6987.

D. $15,188.23 de principal e intereses devengados al tipo pactado hasta el 11 de diciembre de 2018, más los intereses que se devenguen al tipo pactado hasta el total y completo pago de la obligación, y una suma razonable para las costas , gastos y honorarios de abogado, por concepto de las sumas desembolsadas bajo una tarjeta de crédito AMEX cuyos últimos 4 dígitos son 4684.

E. $8,675.26 de principal e intereses devengados al tipo pactado hasta el 11 de diciembre de 2018, más los intereses que se devenguen a partir de la fecha de radicación de la Demanda al tipo legal hasta el total y completo pago de la obligación , y una suma razonable para las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado , por concepto de las sumas desembolsadas bajo una tarjeta de crédito VISA cuyos últimos 4 dígitos son 3558. Se le emplaza y requiere que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto, a través del Sistema Unificado de Administración y Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Deberá notificar a la licenciada: María S. Jiménez Meléndez al PO Box 9023632, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00902-3632; teléfono: (787) 723-24551 abogada de la parte demandante, con copia de la contestación a la demanda enmendada. 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 enmendada, o cualquier otro, si el tribuna, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Expedido en San Juan, Puerto Rico, a 9 de marzo de 2020. GRISELDA RODRIGUJEZ COLLADO, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. MYRIAM RIVERA VILLANUEVA, SECRETRAIA DE SERVICIOS A SALA.

LEGAL NOT ICE Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior Municipal de CAROLINA.

PR RECOVERY AND DEVELOPMENT JV, LLC Demandante V.

EMILIO CABRERA COLON, ANDREA RODRIGUEZ ORTIZ & LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS H/N/C EA CARE

Demandado(a) Civil Núm. CA2019CV03372.

SALA 407. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y ORDINARIO Y EJECUCION DE GRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO

A: EMILIO CABRERA COLON H/N/C EA CARE POR SI Y EN REPRESENTACION DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALESURBANIZACION LOS COLOBOS CALLE ROBLE CAROLINA, PUERTO RICO 00987-8313.

ANDREA RODRIGUEZ ORTIZ-H/N/C EA CARE POR SI Y EN REPRESENTACION DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALESURBANIZACION LOS COLOBOS 512 CALLE ROBLE CAROLINA, PUERTO RICO 009878313.

(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 20 de mayo de 2020 , este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en Ja 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 Ja publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 29 de mayo de 2020. En CAROLINA, , Puerto Rico, el 29 de mayo de 2020. LCDA. MARILYN APONTE RODRIGUEZ, Secretaria Regional. MARY D. CARRASQUILLO BETANCOURT, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

Why the NBA is planning on going to Disney World

By BROOKS BARNES

S

inging pirates and spinning teacups. Mickey Mouse-shaped waffles. Impossibly chipper employees chirping, “Have a magical day.” Stroller gridlock.

Pre-eminent sports venue?

Walt Disney World is known for many things, but few people would immediately associate it with athletics, unless you count endurance walking or Super Bowl winners gleefully exclaiming their intention to visit, a marketing gimmick that started in 1987. Tucked behind oak trees and sabal palms on the southern edge of the Florida mega-resort, however, is ESPN Wide World of Sports, a 220-acre basketball, soccer, volleyball, lacrosse, baseball and competitive cheer complex that serves as an overlooked Disney World engine — and is expected to soon become the capital of the basketball universe.

The NBA has been in negotiations with Disney to restart its season by holding games and practices at the complex. Players, coaches and staff would also stay at Disney World, where Disney owns 18 hotels, ostensibly providing a protective bubble from the coronavirus. The yellow-walled sports complex, which has twice hosted the Jr. NBA Global Championship, has been vacant since March 15, when Disney World closed because of the pandemic, causing Disney to furlough more than 43,000 Florida workers.

“We obviously have the capacity,” Bob Chapek, Disney’s chief executive, said by phone last week, adding that he was “very optimistic” about making a deal with the league. Chapek noted that the ESPN complex has “turnkey” broadcasting capabilities, including an ultrahigh-speed fiber-optic connection to ESPN’s headquarters in Connecticut. Disney-owned ESPN is a top broadcast partner for the NBA, which suspended its season March 11.

The talks with Disney involve a late-July restart to the season.

“We hope to finalize those plans soon,” Mike Bass, an NBA spokesman, said in an email earlier this week.

Here are some things to consider as Disney and the league complete an agreement:

What is the Wide World of Sports Complex?

Everything about Disney World is colossal — at 25,000 acres, it is nearly twice the size of Manhattan — and the sports facility is no exception. Three arenas can be configured into 20 basketball courts, according to Faron Kelley, vice president for ESPN Wide World of Sports, Water Parks and runDisney. That would allow the NBA to play two games at once (no fans in the stands) and still have a practice space. The compound also offers restaurants, a nine-lane track and field complex, 17 grass playing fields and a 9,500-seat baseball stadium, which the Atlanta Braves used for spring training for more than two decades.

(They decamped last year for a new park near Sarasota, Fla. Disney has not secured a new tenant.)

“Disney-style customer care, of course, has been drilled into everyone who works there,” Richard Lapchick, director of the DeVos Sport Business Management program at the University of Central Florida, said by phone last Saturday.

How did the NBA zero in on Disney World?

The league considered a number of locations, including IMG Academy, the Endeavor-owned sports complex in Bradenton, Fla., but two spots stood out on

the list: Disney World and Las Vegas. In addition to safety — creating that bubble — costs came into account. It was certainly not lost on Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, that Disney is the league’s biggest customer, paying an analyst-estimated $1.4 billion a year to broadcast games on ESPN and ABC. Disney World also has fewer opportunities for players to get into off-court trouble.

Silver and Robert Iger, Disney’s executive chairman, who has been leading the talks from the Disney side, have what you might call a bromance. Last summer, they posed for photos together — along with Mickey and Minnie — at the opening of the NBA Experience, a two-story interactive attraction at Disney Springs, an outdoor Disney World shopping mall.

“Disney creates memorable experiences better than anyone,” Silver said at the time.

What is the benefit for Disney?

Disney World’s four major theme parks will reopen in mid-July, but attendance will be severely restricted, at least at first. A deal with the NBA would give the resort a much-needed shot in the arm. It would put employees back to work, offer the invaluable marketing message that the property is safe to visit and generate facility fees and hotel spending. At a minimum, analysts said,

the NBA will spend tens of millions of dollars.

But the real value for Disney would come from ESPN, which has been starving for live sports to broadcast. Michael Nathanson, a media analyst, recently estimated that ESPN would lose $481 million in ad revenue if the NBA did not complete its season and playoffs.

Lapchick called the pending deal “a huge win-win” for the league and Disney.

Where will players stay at the resort?

Fans have been having fun imagining how Disney World lodging might be doled out. Should the highest-ranked players get the most luxurious digs, like $1,150-a-night lake-view villas at Disney’s Grand Floridian? One blog suggested that the New York Knicks pitch tents at Fort Wilderness, the resort’s $102-a-night campground. Ouch.

Disney and the NBA have not commented, but there is no chance that players will be sprinkled across a dozen hotels. The league will use one or two.

The 443-room Four Seasons is high on the draft board; it sits inside a gated, ultraexclusive area near the center of Disney World called Golden Oak. What about Major League Soccer?

MLS has also been talking to Disney about return-to-play scenarios, but haggling within the league over timing and pay has created speed bumps.

An initial proposal had teams sequestering at Disney World starting early this month. They would practice for a few weeks before resuming play into August.

Now the league — after pushback from the MLS Players Association — may have some teams regroup in their home markets before holing up at Disney World in early July for a tournament lasting several weeks. A league spokesman had no comment.

MLS would bring at least 1,200 people to the resort. One possible living quarters: Coronado Springs, a 2,345-room Disney hotel that typically hosts conventions. It underwent a megawatt renovation and expansion last year. Coronado is also well contained; there are no adjoining hotels, as is the case elsewhere at Disney World.

ESPN, Fox Sports and Univision hold soccer broadcast rights. MLS has been shut down since March 12.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

27

The U.S. Open could go on, with a 2-tournament bubble in New York

By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY

I

n an unusual attempt to save two of the top events in U.S. tennis during the coronavirus pandemic, the United States Tennis Association has proposed staging a doubleheader in New York by moving a tournament that leads into the U.S. Open at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.

The move, under consideration by the men’s and women’s tours, could allow foreign players to remain in one place for the duration of their stay in the United States, and establish a safer bubble for competitors similar to proposals by the NBA and other sporting leagues.

The proposal would move the Western & Southern Open, a combined men’s and women’s event near Cincinnati, Ohio, to New York but keep its general window on the calendar, leading into the U.S. Open at the same venue.

The Western & Southern Open is currently scheduled for Aug. 17 to 23, while the main draw of the U.S. Open is slated for Aug. 31 to Sept. 13.

It is far from certain that either tournament can be played this year, but the maneuver is designed to help draw the needed support of government and public health officials as they manage the outbreak, travel and the economy. It is also unclear, especially given quarantine guidelines, whether enough players would be prepared to travel to New York, one of the disease’s epicenters. Many players have gone without income as both the men’s and women’s tours have been shut down since mid-March and scores of tournaments have been postponed or canceled.

Leaders of the men’s and women’s tours received the USTA proposal this week, according to officials at the USTA and the men’s and women’s tours, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not yet authorized to speak publicly about the potential move.

The tours would need to formally approve the moving of the Western & Southern Open from its home in Mason, Ohio. The USTA owns the men’s event staged there while Octagon, a sports and entertainment agency, owns the women’s event.

The tour officials said that there could still be insurmountable obstacles for the plan, including quarantine rules that could require some athletes to self-isolate after arriving in the United States and again in Europe after returning. But those requirements could be changed for athletes.

“I appreciate that everyone is going outside the box to think of solutions in these

circumstances,” said Bethanie Mattek-Sands, an American once ranked No. 1 in women’s doubles, who has been on the WTA player council. “We don’t really have anything in the rule books for this situation. Putting two big tournaments in the same place is definitely on the right track because it definitely makes it a bit easier to control some things.”

If the tournaments can be held, there would most likely be no spectators on site — a major shift for the U.S. Open, a Grand Slam tournament that attracted more than 850,000 fans last year over three weeks.

With the USTA set to make a decision later this month on its Grand Slam, here is a look at how officials are planning for an Open without fans.

Testing Even without fans or most stadium workers, rigorous testing would still be required at the tennis center to monitor and protect players, support staff and officials.

Stacey Allaster, the USTA’s chief executive for professional tennis, said coronavirus testing would be required for athletes and members of their teams before they traveled to New York, perhaps on charter flights from different continents organized by the USTA. “We will insist on a pretravel health questionnaire that they meet with local physicians and local doctors, and COVID-19 tests will be required for everyone,” she said. “They will have to have been symptom-free for a certain period of time before travel and have had no known contact with anyone with COVID-19.”

Once on site, there would be daily temperature checks and health questionnaires, as well as frequent follow-up testing for the virus.

Rules and Events U.S. Open leaders have pushed unsuccessfully in the past for in-match coaching to be allowed in the main draw — an issue that flared in 2018 when Serena Williams had a heated confrontation with a chair umpire for receiving coaching from the stands. They might finally get approval from both tours and their fellow Grand Slam tournaments in this special situation to add entertainment value for television audiences.

Wheelchair tennis is unlikely but has not been ruled out. The junior and legends events would be eliminated. There would be no ball kids, but adult ball persons would still be used to facilitate play; they would be required to wear gloves but not be allowed to handle player towels.

With players having been out of official competition since March, there has been discussion of changing the format of men’s singles

matches at the U.S. Open from best-of-five sets to best-of-three sets to reduce players’ injury risk. But Allaster said that was not part of the USTA’s current plan.

Venues Both Arthur Ashe Stadium, the tournament’s main show court with nearly 24,000 seats, and the 14,000-seat Louis Armstrong Stadium would still be used even without fans.

Both are fully wired for television and have retractable roofs that would allow for play to continue in case of rain.

With empty stands, ESPN, the tournament’s broadcaster, would need to innovate to create a compelling atmosphere, but the network has pushed hard for the Open to happen if it can be held safely.

“Out of crisis comes creativity. I’m not privy to any inside information, but I would imagine that there will be all sorts of new bells and whistles with no crowd,” said Patrick McEnroe, the former player and longtime ESPN analyst. “What about moving cameras?

Or miking the players? If ever there were a time to try it, now would be it.”

The Bundesliga, the German soccer league that resumed last month without spectators on site, has used artificial crowd noise in its broadcasts to combat the emptiness.

ESPN could do the same at the Open.

“Cheering can be piped in,” Allaster said.

“We are learning from other sports as they go through this journey.”

Player Support The size of tennis entourages has ballooned since the 1990s, when it was considered unusual that Pete Sampras traveled with a personal trainer, Todd Snyder. The WTA already has indicated that if its circuit resumes this year, players will be asked to come to tournaments with just one person. The U.S. Open would also reduce traveling parties.

“An athlete coming with four, five, six, seven people is obviously not going to be possible,” Allaster said.

That could make for some tough choices for players who thrive on routine and ample support.

“They will panic, I tell you,” said Sven Groeneveld, who previously coached Maria Sharapova and is now working with Taro Daniel. “Because all of the sudden, they will have to make a decision on should I take my agent or physiotherapist or coach?”

Donna Vekic, a Croat ranked 24th in women’s singles who was a U.S. Open quarterfinalist last year, said she would be “OK to play without fans” but that “really the worst thing is if we can only come with one team

member.”

She added, “I just don’t see how that is going to be possible and how the top players are going to accept that.”

Player Services With fewer people accompanying them, players could spread out to avoid the close contact that is standard during Week 1 in the Open locker room and training room. Allaster said each seeded player could be offered one of Arthur Ashe Stadium’s unused hospitality suites. To avoid crowding, players will need to book times for locker room or practice court access, Allaster said. Outdoor cafes, usually reserved for spectators, could be converted into recreational areas for players.

“We see them chilling out and having a coffee and having some jazz musicians there,” Allaster said.

To protect their health, players could be restricted to an official hotel, probably outside Manhattan, where they would have access to treatment, training and testing, and be transported directly to the tennis center in Queens.

“Traditionally, we have not been involved in housing for the U.S. Open,” Allaster said. “We need an effective centralized housing system in place.”

Player Field Despite speculation among players and their agents, Allaster said the USTA had not seriously considered reducing the size of the men’s and women’s singles draws from 128 competitors. Qualifying tournaments are likely to be scrapped, and doubles competitions to be included with reduced draws of 24 teams, but no final decisions have been made.

A majority of players on both the men’s and women’s tours come from Europe. A directive from the U.S. government last month granted permission for foreign professional athletes, including tennis players, to travel to the United States for competition even if general travel bans exist. It remains unclear whether a quarantine period would be required after arrival. But it is unlikely that all of the stars would make the journey, even for the U.S. Open. Roger Federer, a five-time U.S. Open singles champion who will turn 39 in August and has four children, is a possible no-show and has expressed his lack of enthusiasm for playing without spectators.

Others may be much more eager.

“I really think if we can pull this off in New York after all that has happened, it will totally be a big inspiration,” Mattek-Sands said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 2020

Sacramento Kings TV announcer resigns over ‘All lives matter’ tweet

By SCOTT CACCIOLA

L

OS ANGELES — The Sacramento Kings announced Tuesday that Grant Napear, their longtime television play-by-play broadcaster, had resigned, two days after tweeting “All Lives Matter” in an exchange with one of the team’s former players.

In addition, Bonneville International, which owns the Sacramento radio station at which Napear had co-hosted a sports show, announced that it had parted ways with him. Napear, the company said, had made comments that it deemed “particularly insensitive” as protests against police brutality continued to sweep across the country.

Napear, 60, had found himself embroiled in controversy Sunday after he had an exchange on Twitter with DeMarcus Cousins, a former All-Star center for the Kings. Cousins asked Napear what he thought of the Black Lives Matter movement. Napear responded, in part: “ALL LIVES MATTER. … EVERY SINGLE ONE!!!”

The phrase “All Lives Matter” has often been used dismissively against people noting the specific prejudices faced by black Americans.

Matt Barnes and Chris Webber, two other former players for the Kings, were among those who sharply rebuked Napear.

“If it came across as dumb I apologize,” Napear

said in another tweet Sunday night. “That was not my intent. That’s how I was raised. It has been engrained in me since I can remember. I’ve been doing more listening than talking the past few days. I believe the past few days will change this country for the better!”

Napear, who was often critical of Cousins during his time with the team, also told the Sacramento Bee in an interview this week that he was “not as educated on BLM as I thought I was.” He added, “I had no idea that when I said, ‘All Lives Matter,’ that it was counter to what BLM was trying to get across.”

The fallout, though, was swift. Bonneville International said Napear’s comments “do not reflect the views or values” of the company. The company also referenced George Floyd, the 46-year-old black man whose death last week after he was handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a white Minneapolis police officer had ignited recent protests.

“In the wake of George Floyd’s tragic death and the events of the last several days,” the company said, “it is crucial that we communicate the tremendous respect that we have for the black community and any other groups or individuals who have cause to feel marginalized.”

Napear, via text message, declined to comment.

The Kings thanked him for his contributions over 32

years, and Napear, in a statement through the team, said he’d “always remain a part of Kings nation in my heart.”

Denver head coach says American football sets a good example for US society

By RT NEWS

A

mid the heightened situation regarding police brutality against people of color in the United States, Denver Broncos head coach Vic Fangio says the NFL actually functions better than general society in terms of racial equality.

The Broncos boss spoke to reporters on a conference call Tuesday, where he talked down the presence of racism within the league, suggesting it was a much larger problem across society as a whole than it is within the confines of the league itself.

“I think our problems in the NFL along those lines are minimal,” he said.

“We’re a league of meritocracy. You earn what you get, you get what you earn.

“I don’t see racism at all in the NFL. I don’t see discrimination in the NFL. We live in a great atmosphere.

Like I alluded to earlier, we’re lucky. We all live together joined as one for one common goal, and we all intermingle and mix tremendously. If society reflected an NFL team, we’d all be great.”

Fangio, who is currently preparing to welcome back his players to the Broncos’ training facility ahead of the 2020 NFL season, also spoke out against the police treatment of George Floyd, who died in police custody, sparking widespread protests.

“I was shocked, sad and angry when I saw what the policeman [did] to a handcuffed George Floyd on his stomach that led to his death,” he said.

“He should be punished to the full extent of the law of the crimes he was charged with in addition to being charged with treason for failing to uphold the badge and uniform he was entrusted with. … It’s a societal issue that we all have to join in to correct.

“The Minnesota cop failed the 99 percent of the police that do a great job, and we are all paying a price for that. I’ve listened to many people talk the past few days.

“The one that resonated with me the most was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He also recognized that 98-99 percent of the police do a tremendous job in tough situations and we must do all we can to correct the small percentage that don’t do a great job on a daily basis. Kareem was one person talking sensibly and with solutions. This is not a political issue.”

Fangio also paid tribute to one of his own players, Broncos safety Justin Simmons, who spoke at a peaceful protest held in Stuart, Fla., near the player’s home town.

“I thought it was great,” Fangio said.

“Justin is a great person, a great leader and has his head screwed on correctly. He sees the problems and how they need to be solved. He’s doing it peacefully and he’s searching for solutions.

“It’s easy for everybody to identify the problems – we all know the problems – but we need to search for solutions.

I think that Justin is one of those guys that will help us find solutions and lead us out of this mess that we’re in.”

Almost 70 percent of the NFL’s players are African American, but the league only has three African American head coaches: Miami’s Brian Flores, Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin and Los Angeles Chargers’ Anthony Lynn. Meanwhile, there is only one Latino head coach, Washington’s Ron Rivera.

In a bid to improve prospects for minorities, the NFL announced changes to their “Rooney Rule,” which requires teams to interview minority candidates for major coaching roles. The league is also considering incentivizing teams that hire minority coaches by awarding additional draft picks.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, June 4, 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

Thursday, June 4, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

You’re fickle in love. One minute, you can’t get the object of your affection out of your mind. The next, you’re indifferent to their charms. Your hot and cold attitude puts people off so maybe you should take time out to assess your feelings. Getting involved in a secret intrigue will be cause for regret. If someone asks you to tell lies for them, turn them down. You don’t want to be implicated in their bad behaviour. Uphold your reputation for being honest and straightforward.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Imposing your moral standards on others is a losing proposition. There are a million different ways to lead life. When someone chooses a different path from yours, it’s their business. Adopting a more lenient outlook will improve both your personal and professional relationships. Working constantly could cause health problems. Learn to switch off and make more time for leisurely pursuits. Spending more time on art, fitness and love will restore your powerful charisma.

It will be fun to turn heads again.

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)

Putting too much emphasis on material matters is causing strain in an intimate relationship. Are you in love with a fiscally irresponsible person? Have an honest talk about your respective attitudes towards money. Unhappiness with the prevailing social order is making you miserable.

Rather than focusing on the things you dislike about the modern world, make a list of things you appreciate. Items can include anything from streaming movies to the Internet to improved customer service.

A lack of refinement can tarnish your reputation. Resist the temptation to make coarse jokes or make fun of a vulnerable person. If you’re joining the trend of group quizzes online, dress for fun. Refusing to follow the mood will only make you appear immature. Using unfair tactics to gain power and prestige will come back to haunt you. If you want a promotion or high-powered job, apply for it the traditional way.

Don’t ask an influential person to pull strings for you. You can land this position on the strength of your achievements.

Excessive sentimentality is stopping you from moving forward. It’s fine to have fond memories, but they shouldn’t keep you from taking joy in the present moment. There are exciting opportunities on the horizon. Take advantage of them before they slip between your fingers. Try not to impose your religious beliefs on others. They’ll resent it and you’ll be frustrated. People are different. One man’s meat is another man’s poison. Don’t take a rejection of your values personally.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Just because you have different beliefs from somebody doesn’t mean you can’t have a romantic relationship. If you truly find your amour’s attitudes offensive, it’s time to explore your own attitudes. Are you being narrow-minded or is it your other half that needs to change? Be honest.

Someone is pressuring you to engage in some less than reputable business tactics. Don’t take the bait. Getting a deep discount or signing an impressive client will reflect badly on you. Obey the rules; you won’t regret it.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Identifying with your career can cause problems in your personal life. There’s more to you than your job title.

Whether you’re spending a romantic evening with your amour or going on a first date over the internet, confine the conversation to topics other than work. Getting drawn into a heated competition will be cause for regret. It’s better to make friends with someone who shares your interests or is in the same industry. Together, you can create some great work. Apart, you’ll waste time, money and effort.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Beware of using your allure to advance your career. You want to advance for what you can do, not how you look.

Although it’s true some of your rivals have climbed the ladder of success through flirting, you don’t need to stoop to their level. Throwing a temper tantrum will drive opportunity from your door. Whether the postal operative drops off the wrong package or a delivery driver pronounces your name wrong. The more gracious you are to a service worker, the easier you’ll be forgiven for your mistakes.

Don’t worry about what people will think of a bold move.

The only person you must satisfy is yourself. Whether this means buying an extravagant status symbol, booking a future luxurious vacation or splashing out on a brandnew wardrobe is unimportant. You’ll have to practice tremendous control when dealing with a pushy relative. It’s tempting to tell this family member what they can do with their guilt trips. Rather than getting into a big fight, remain calm and don’t fall for their manipulative behaviour.

Be scrupulous about your appearance. A neat, tidy image will improve your personal and professional prospects. It doesn’t matter if you’re single or unemployed; looking your best is critical. When you look good, you feel good. Splash on cologne while you’re at it. Giving sarcastic responses to questions will make you look petty. It’s better to treat everyone with courtesy, even when they seem hopelessly stupid. Follow the example of a patient instructor filled in the gaps to your knowledge.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Excessive pride in your accomplishments is a real turnoff. Although you’ve worked hard to achieve excellence, that doesn’t give you the right to look down on others. They value different things. Get off your high horse and give credit where it is due. The harder you work, the more elusive wealth is. If you want to cultivate prosperity, relax. Imagine how it will feel to have lots of money at your disposal. Happiness attracts prosperity; anxiety repels it.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Sulking will drive sympathy from your door. Your nearest and dearest want the best for you, but they’re tired of hearing you complain. The sooner you move past a setback, the faster you’ll earn your family’s respect. Pattern your behaviour after a brave relative. Taunting someone will create deep resentment. Although it’s tempting to tease a person who has always caused you grief, you should maintain a diplomatic silence instead. Your restraint will earn the respect of your loved ones.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Thursday, June 4, 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