Monday Jun 8, 2020

Monday, June 8, 2020

San Juan The

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A Sauté to the Internet?

Ballet Could Come Alive Online

400,000 Strays

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By Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)

Number Could Increase Due to Court Ruling Against Free Neutering Clinics Governor Speaks Up, Orders Evaluation of Judge’s Decision P4

US House to Examine COVID-19 Economic Impact in PR

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NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

Japan’s Secret to Virus Fight Success P13

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

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June 8, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star, the only paper with News Service in English in Puerto Rico, publishes 7 days a week, with a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday edition, along with a Weekend Edition to cover Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Today’s

Fifty PR soldiers deployed for mission in Iraq

Weather

By THE STAR STAFF

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ome 50 soldiers belonging to the United States Army Reserve in Puerto Rico left Sunday from Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport for a mobilization station, before being sent to Iraq.

It was the first group of reservists to move off the island amid the pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus.

“We had to adjust the training due to the pandemic,” said 1st Sgt. Fernando A. Colón Rodríguez, the highest-ranking sergeant in the group. “But we managed to complete all the standards and requirements without major problems, always maintaining the health of the soldiers, and preparing our families.”

Soldiers belonging to the Army Reserve’s 266 Munitions Management unit were training for the mission for about a year. The military unit will be stationed in Iraq for nine months, in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, which aims to defeat the Islamic state (ISIS).

“Our ammunition management and distribution mission is highly visible at the Pentagon level,” added Colón Rodríguez, who is from Ponce. “I cannot say

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that it will be an easy mission, but the soldiers are very prepared and they know what must be done to accomplish the mission.”

Sgt. Yanixel Cardec Martínez, 22, is one of only five women in the unit. She has three younger brothers and joined the Army Reserve inspired by the example of her father.

“This is my first mobilization. This is not training, it is a real mission in Iraq. I am ready,” said Cardec Martínez, a native of the Abra Honda neighborhood of Camuy who works as a munitions specialist. “We are a family. We are going to take good care of each other and we are going to return well.”

Gen. Jeffrey W. Jurasek, the highest-ranking officer in the Army at the federal level in the Caribbean, went to the airport to fire up the troops.

“Today you depart in representation of the long tradition of military service of Puerto Ricans,” Jurasek said. “Remember that you have a complete community that is proud of you and that supports you.”

According to a press release, the soldiers’ deployment will not hamper the ability of the Reserve command to respond in the event of a local emergency in support of the civil authorities.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

Governor, pet lovers, unite against court ruling that impedes the Spayathon4PR Judge bars volunteer off-island vets from performing neuterings in Puerto Rico

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

G

ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced on Sunday lamented the decision by judge Anthony Cuevas Ramos to declare null a series of executive orders that authorized veterinarians not licensed in Puerto Rico to perform spaying procedures on stray dogs and cats on the island during extraordinary, limited-time events like the Spayathon for Puerto Rico (Spayathon4PR), which offers free neutering for pets. Such events are part of an effort to curtail the stray population on the island, currently estimated at some 400,000 animals.

“I am ordering a thorough evaluation of the [court] decision to find the proper course to deal with the issues pointed out in the legal action so that we can offer essential services like these, free of charge,” Vázquez said in a written statement published by La Fortaleza on Sunday.

“We deeply lament the court’s decision and the adverse impact it will have on services offered in the Spayathon4PR, which already has provided free services to more than 52,000 pets. Especially now, after seeing how the various recent emergencies on the island adversely affected pets and other animals.”

The Spayathon4PR is a limited-time event led by non-for-profit organizations that offers free neutering services for pets and strays islandwide. It was a pet project of Beatriz Isabel Areizaga, wife of the previous governor, Ricardo Rosselló Nevares. It was Rosselló who signed the executive orders that permitted vets from other jurisdictions to volunteer with the Spayathon4PR to sterilize pets at no cost to their owners.

The lawsuit that resulted in the revocation of the executive orders was started by veterinarians Mónica Pagán Mutt, Víctor Oppenheimer Soto and María Cueto Ruiz. The trio sued the government of Puerto Rico for allowing unlicensed vets to practice on the island. This, despite the fact that they were only taking part in specific, low-risk, spaying

procedures during a brief period of time and free of charge.

“This is a situation where I can see their point of view. I understand their concern.

They want to earn a living,” said Neva Kaya, founder of The Puerto Rico Dog Project. “But as a country we have an estimated 400,000plus stray animals, living in horrendous situations. And that is something that not only affects animal lovers, it affects everybody on the island. It even affects tourism, because so many people who visit Puerto Rico, which I consider one of the most beautiful places in the world, get here and are saddened by the stray animal situation.”

Kaya, who owns a business on the west coast of the island, where she was born and raised, added that “[t]he stray animal situation in Puerto Rico is a third-world problem in what most of us like to think is a first-world island.”

So far, the Spayathon4PR has neutered 52,524 animals on the island, 64 percent dogs and 35 percent cats. These procedures have potentially prevented 316,680 births, if taking into account the projected birth rates for the first year after the operation.

Kaya said some vets see these statistics and don’t see the aid it offers pet owners, only seeing loss of potential revenue.

“These vets do not want us to have these events. We bring some of the best veterinarians from the United States and other countries to help us with this huge problem. They come to volunteer on this project, and they do not get paid,” said Kaya, who has seen similar projects be successful elsewhere. “It is correct that they are not licensed to practice their profession here on the island, but those executive orders allowed them to come for a very brief time to help us in the Spayathon4PR.” “Before I came back to Puerto Rico with this project, I was volunteering with the same program, in Mexico,” the animal activist said.

“Mexico would also allow vets from other countries to go and volunteer, because like in Puerto Rico they have a big problem with the stray population and like Puerto Rico they need all the help they can get.

“In Mexico I was greatly impressed with the fact that wherever we took the neutering project the local vets would go to the clinics and help us spay as many animals as possible.

They did it out of the goodness of their hearts because they saw the problem with strays every day and wanted to aid in our efforts to

solve the problem. This is not about money.

But I think some see it as a money issue only.”

Kaya said she even discussed the project with one of the plaintiffs.

“Víctor Oppenheimer -- I offered to pay him for his time so that he would perform sterilization procedures at a reduced cost,” she said. “Unfortunately, the adjusted rate he quoted us for his services was still too high for a totally volunteer-manned, not-for-profit organization like us to pay.

“If a non-profit entity like ours offers someone like Dr. Oppenheimer a monthly stipend of something like $5,000 -- which for us would be an exceedingly difficult amount to collect monthly but we would do it -- to work alongside us with the stray problem in his area, in my opinion that would be a good proposition for a clinic too. That is not a small amount of money. But we would ask that the vet neuter let us say, 20 animals, more or less.

However, the prices that Dr. Oppenheimer quoted us were not attainable for us. It seemed

to me that he just was not too interested in working with our program.

“If these vets are disinclined to offer neutering procedures at prices more accessible to the general public, they should not then block efforts of other people who do want to help with this serious problem.”

Kaya said several of the non-profit organizations that work together on the Spayathon4PR are considering throwing their figurative hats into the legal ring to try and overturn the ruling.

“We definitely are considering it,” Kaya said. “Already the feedback through social media had been strongly in favor of fighting this. There are many who see the importance of efforts like these. I am not sure that the three veterinarians who took this legal action understand that the immense majority of Puerto Ricans live in a different reality than the one they apparently live in.”

“This is not a settled issue,” she added.

“It’s not the end of this story, yet.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

5

US House to examine Coronavirus’ economic impact in PR

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he U.S. House Natural Resources Committee will hold a public hearing on Thursday to examine how the coronavirus pandemic has affected Puerto Rico’s economy and the implementation of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court legitimized the sevenmember board overseeing the island government’s finances.

House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), has summoned Natalie Jaresko, the executive director of the Financial Oversight and Management Board, and Omar Marrero, director of the Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority.

Grijalva introduced legislation in May that would overhaul PROMESA, which includes allowing the island government to discharge part of the $120 billion debt including pension liabilities. The bill would also ensure that the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), which over the weekend revealed it will end the fiscal year with a negative cash flow of $164 million, has enough funding to operate. It would also prohibit oversight board members from being officials of the island government.

The congressman wants to put the amendments to PROMESA up for a vote, but the bill lacks support.

The Grijalva bill also ensures funding for public health care, education, safety, pensions and the UPR, creates a publicly funded commission to audit Puerto Rico’s debt and

assigns federal funding for the operation of the oversight board, which reduces the burden on the commonwealth government.

On May 27, the oversight board certified a new fiscal plan for the central government that postpones government right-sizing for a year and reduces by 65 percent the money that will be available to pay debt given new government projections.

Marrero, who represents the government of Wanda Vázquez Garced on the board and is also the main financial officer of the island government, has projected that this fiscal year ending June 30 will close with a deficit of $1.6 billion because of the fiscal effect of the coronavirus pandemic emergency.

House measure would allocate funds to CRIM for towns

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

S

peaker of the House of Representatives Carlos “Johnny” Méndez Núñez has filed House Joint Resolution 719, which aims to allocate about $185 million from the central government’s Emergency Fund to the Municipal Revenue Collections Center (CRIM by Spanish acronym) to distribute among Puerto Rico’s 78 municipalities.

According to the legislation’s statement of purpose, “the difficult economic situation places the municipalities in a vulnerable position and puts at risk their capacity to provide essential services to citizens.”

“This is why we decided to separate part of the resources of the Emergency Fund so that within this fiscal year they can be used to temporarily help the 78 municipalities of Puerto Rico,” the bill says.

The measure, which is co-authored

by Vice Speaker of the House José “Pichy” Torres Zamora and Majority Leader Gabriel Rodríguez Aguiló, orders the island Treasury Department to transfer the funds to CRIM within a period of no more than 10 days.

The legislation also empowers the CRIM governing board to establish the parameters for the disbursement of the resources to the 78 municipalities with the objective of satisfying obligations contracted previously or after the ap-

proval of the legislation.

Law 1 of 1966, which created the Emergency Fund, establishes in Article 3 that the money “will be applied to face unexpected and unforeseen public needs, caused by calamities, such as wars, hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, floods, plagues, and in order to protect people’s lives and property,

and public credit.”

The Financial Oversight and Management Board, meanwhile, authorized the use of $260 million from the Emergency Fund during earthquake activity in the island’s southwest region earlier this year, of which around $85 million had been used by the central government.

Primaries to be delayed until August

By THE STAR STAFF

G

ov. WandaVázquez Garced signed into law Senate Joint Resolution 556 on Saturday to delay political primaries to Aug. 9 because of the state of emergency caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The delay comes after the government over two weeks ago began the process of allowing non-essential businesses to open.

A 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew remains in effect for all residents. Moving the primaries to August means candidates will only have a little over three months for campaigning.

“The emergency situation that we are experiencing directly affects the electoral calendar prior to the primaries,” Vázquez said in a written statement. “To the point that, due to the suspension of the State Elections Commission’s work, the entity has not been able to start the preparations

preceding the electoral event, originally scheduled for June 7.”

The measure authorizes the State Elections Commission (SEC) president to coordinate the adjustment in the established electoral calendar with the political parties that hold primaries so that they can make the necessary preparations.

“In compliance with the rules of social distancing and measures for the prevention of COVID-19 contagion, the Commission may by regulation authorize protective measures, as established in the resolution,” the governor said. “In addition to guaranteeing the right to vote for duly registered voters, the Commission will ensure that they are protected as well as safeguard the integrity of the processes.”

The SEC will present to the Legislature a detailed report on the changes to be made to the primary processes before June 30.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

Measure to open farmers’ markets filed in Senate

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

S

en. José Nadal Power filed RCS 567 late last week, a measure ordering the island Family Department to open family agricultural markets.

The legislation is in response to the communication that farmers received in May from the Puerto Rico Agriculture Department informing them that the Family Department had requested to paralyze the markets, also known as farmers’ markets, until October.

“We know the importance of family markets not only for farmers, but also for Puerto Rican families as they buy fresh food from local farmers,” Nadal Power said last Friday. “When the pandemic and the respective executive orders were declared with curfews, the production of the vast majority of the island’s farmers was lost, these markets

being the main forums for marketing and selling the island’s agricultural production.”

“This situation was aggravated for farmers especially when on May 11, they received a communication from the Secretary of Agriculture informing them that the Family Department had suspended [farmers’ markets] for 180 days, leading to their reopening possibly as late as October,” the senator added.

“We believe that the Agriculture Department has already started to recertify the farmers attached to the family market program,” Nadal Power said. “We demand that once this work begins, it does not stop, but rather that it be expedited so that in a few weeks, [the farmers’ markets] will be restored and this important and necessary line of our economy does not reflect more losses during the current year.”

“Family markets are essential in

farmers’ sales projections,” the senator said.” We are aware that the farmers have presented a Plan for the Reacti-

vation of Family Markets that has the safety measures and social distancing that the times require.”

ASES rejects proposed sale of Molina Healthcare plan

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he Puerto Rico Health Services Administration (ASES by its Spanish acronym) announced Sunday that it has rejected the proposed sale of the Molina Healthcare plan to insurer Triple-S.

ASES Executive Director Jorge E. Galva sent a letter to Carlos A. Carrero, president of Molina Healthcare Puerto Rico, in which he rejected the proposed sale and gave him five working days to submit an acceptable plan for ASES and other commonwealth and federal regulatory agencies with jurisdiction over the island governmentsponsored Vital Plan.

Molina Healthcare had planned to cease operations by handing them over to Triple-S on July 1.

In his letter, Galva clarified that ASES will enforce all the terms of the contract under the Vital Plan until it approves the transition and departure of Molina Health from it.

“In addition, Molina Healthcare must continue offering its services until an orderly transition is approved [by which] Molina ceases its functions in Puerto Rico,” Galva said.

The ASES executive director noted that “after a risk assessment, the ASES Board of Directors, specialized advisers and our team determined that the proposed transaction is contrary to the best interests of the beneficiaries and providers of the Vital Plan.”

Currently, Molina has some 168,000 beneficiaries assigned to the government health plan.

Galva, who is also a health services administrator, stressed that ASES hopes to have a meeting with the insurer’s managers to discuss the issue this week.

“We will keep beneficiaries and service providers assigned to the Molina Healthcare insurer informed of

the transition plan that is finally approved, which we will communicate appropriately,” he said, But the health executive emphasized that “in this process, the patient has and will have the power to choose his insurer and we will ensure the protection of the interests of providers in the current Molina network.”

Currently, theVital Plan serves 1.1 million beneficiaries and is served by five insurers (MCOs), which are: First Medical, MMM, Mennonite Health Plan, Triple S and Molina Healthcare.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

7

Protests swell across America as Floyd is mourned near his birthplace

By DIONNE SEARCEY and DAVID ZUCCHINO

P

rotesters in Philadelphia stood on the steps of an art museum and demanded cuts to the city’s police budget. A crowd gathered outside the Minnesota governor’s mansion stood silently to hear stories from victims of police abuse.

At a huge rally in Washington, D.C., demonstrators filled the streets, and speakers cried out to ensure that a death like that of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer never happens again.

Demonstrations across America that began as spontaneous eruptions of outrage over police violence appeared to have cohered by Saturday into a national mass protest movement against systemic racism, marked more by organization and determination than by street fury.

Protesters vowed to keep up the momentum toward overhauling what they said was a broken law enforcement system plagued by racial injustice. Some took credit for changes that had already occurred in some cities.

In Minneapolis, which has been convulsed with protests for the past 12 days, city officials announced measures Friday that are meant to rein in aggressive police tactics, including a ban on chokeholds and strangleholds. And in Denver, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order Friday to restrict the use by the police of rubber bullets and tear gas on protesters.

“I think we’re all just trying to keep the pressure on and make sure this issue stays at the forefront of the national discourse,” said Mary Levy, 50, a law professor at Temple University who was part of a throng of protesters outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Saturday afternoon.

Many of the day’s gatherings appeared larger than previous rallies, especially the one in Washington. At one point, it felt as if the entire city had emptied into downtown as lines of protesters snaked their way through side streets while others converged in nearby parks, eclipsing the turnout at prior protests.

Outside Lafayette Square, where federal law enforcement officers had forcibly evicted peaceful protesters Monday, the atmosphere Saturday was more like that of a street fair or a music festival.

Cookies and Cool Ranch Doritos were arrayed on folding tables, and masks emblazoned with “I can’t breathe” were on sale along with Black Lives Matter T-shirts. Even portable toilets were on hand.

Marchers on 16th Street did a coordinated dance, “the wobble,” as rapper V.I.C. blared through speakers. North of the White House, a Shake Shack handed out water.

For all that, the black chain-link fences forming a perimeter around the White House grounds had been reinforced with concrete Jersey barriers, and security personnel from an alphabet of agencies, including the National Guard, stood by in a kaleidoscope of uniforms, braced for any trouble.

Joelle Mitchell, 17, was unfazed as she made her way toward the White House. She had been working at a dog day care facility outside Annapolis, Maryland, all week, and this was her first day to join the protests.

She expressed surprise at how peaceful the day was, given the bleak news coverage she had seen about protests across the city and the country.

“It really is our responsibility that this doesn’t happen anymore,” Mitchell said.

As the protests were getting underway Saturday, mourners at a memorial service in the tiny railroad town of Raeford, North Carolina, passed by the plush blue coffin of Floyd, whose body was dressed in a tan suit and a brown tie. He was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, about 25 miles away, and dozens of his relatives, including a sister, live in the area.

Floyd’s coffin arrived at the viewing, held at a Free Will Baptist church called Cape Fear Conference B, in a black hearse as a large group of people outside chanted “Black power,” “George Floyd!” and “No justice, no peace.” Some wore T-shirts printed with “I Can’t Breathe,” and a few carried small posters.

At the service, the local sheriff received a standing ovation when he said of the nation’s police officers, “We are part of the problem.”

The sheriff, Hubert Peterkin of Hoke County, North Carolina, told mourners that law enforcement officers must recognize and eliminate racism within their ranks. Looking directly at Floyd’s relatives in the front rows of the church, Peterkin, who is black, said ingrained racism had led to Floyd’s death.

“If there were four brothers that threw a police officer on the ground and one of them put his knee on that officer’s neck and killed him on a video,” he said, there would have been “a national manhunt — and they would have been charged with murder immediately.”

Floyd’s body was transported from Minneapolis, where another memorial service was held. After the memorial Saturday, it was to be taken to Houston for a third memorial service and burial.

Floyd, a 46-year-old African American, died May 25 after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a white police officer. Video widely shared on social media showed Floyd crying out for his mother and pleading that he couldn’t breathe.

Many demonstrations now include 8 minutes, 46 seconds of silence, marking the length of time the police officer’s knee was pressed into Floyd’s neck.

Demonstrations were continuing in Minneapolis on Saturday, still large but considerably calmer and more organized than those in the previous week, although no less passionate.

Police officers hung back or did not appear at all at the rallies — a marked difference from the clashes between officers and protesters last weekend.

Outside Mayor Jacob Frey’s house, protesters shouted at him when he would not commit on the spot to abolishing the police department, local news outlets reported. They yelled “Go home, Jacob, go home!” and “Shame! Shame!” as he walked away from the crowd.

Hundreds of demonstrators stood in silence outside the governor’s mansion in neighboring St. Paul to hear relatives of a dozen men who had died in police custody share their experiences.

Rallies took place Saturday in small towns and suburbs, drawing hundreds of people to communities that in many cases had not yet held protests, as well as in major cities where marches with masked demonstrators toting Black Lives Matters

Mourners gather for a public memorial service for George Floyd in Raeford, N.C. signs have quickly become part of the daily fabric of pandemic life. The protests have spread overseas to Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.

So many protests sprang up across South Florida on Saturday that demonstrations filled the entire day. In the evening, hundreds of people embarked on a march along Biscayne Boulevard, the main thoroughfare in downtown Miami. The crowd was nearly equal parts black, white and Hispanic and ranged widely in age, with numerous families taking part. Police officers stayed in the background. At one march, students handed out Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

Groups of protesters in Los Angeles clustered in Plummer Park in the West Hollywood section, the scene of daily gatherings, and processions were held downtown, at the Cochran Avenue Baptist Church in the Miracle Mile neighborhood and all over the city.

Darlene Chan, a book publicist who lives near Fairfax Avenue, which saw huge crowds and unrest a week ago, called this the new normal: “Random, unexpected protests popping up all the time.”

Thousands of people marched peacefully across the Golden Gate Bridge, briefly bringing traffic to a halt.

“This is the awakening of America,” said one of the marchers, Nate Payne, who was wearing a gold San Francisco 49ers jacket and holding a cardboard cutout of a kneeling Colin Kaepernick, the former 49ers quarterback known for kneeling during the national anthem before games as a quiet protest against social injustice.

In New York City, thousands of people gathered near the northwest corner of Central Park for a demonstration called the March for Stolen Dreams and Looted Lives, and other events and marches in the city also drew sizable crowds.

Constance Malcolm, whose son Ramarley Graham was killed by a New York City police officer in his home in 2012, had to fight back tears before speaking into the megaphone.

“I’m tired of crying,” Malcolm said. “We need our voices to be heard. That’s happening now and we need to take advantage of it.”

She then had a simple directive: “Vote.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

Young protesters say voting isn’t enough. Will they do it anyway?

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

B

arack Obama has a favorite saying on the campaign trail: “Don’t boo — vote.”

And young protesters, galvanized by police brutality and a rash of political disappointments, seem to be sketching out a present-day response: Sure, maybe. But first, some well-directed fury.“I’m tired. I’m literally tired. I’m tired of having to do this,” said Aalayah Eastmond, 19, who survived the 2018 massacre at her high school in Parkland, Florida; became a gun control advocate; saw many legislative efforts stall; and is now organizing protests in Washington over police violence against fellow black Americans.

Eastmond could be forgiven, she suggested, for doubting that the electoral system would meet the moment on its own.

“We do our job,” she said, “and then we don’t see the people we vote in doing their job.”

As nationwide demonstrations continue to simmer, interviews with millennial and Generation Z protesters and activists across racial lines reflect a steady suspicion about the value and effectiveness of voting alone.

Their disillusionment threatens to perpetuate a consistent generational gap in election turnout, hinting at a key challenge facing Joe Biden. The former vice president, who announced Friday evening that he had earned a majority of delegates in the Democratic primary contest, has struggled to generate youth enthusiasm despite the demographic’s broad disapproval of President Donald Trump.

To some degree, this dynamic has figured in political fights across the decades: Voters are disproportionately old; marchers are disproportionately young. (Even in the 2018 midterms, when youth engagement spiked compared with four years prior, turnout registered at about 36% for voting-age citizens younger than 30 and nearly twice that for those 65 and older, according to Census Bureau data.)

But the frustrations of today’s younger Americans also speak to the particular conditions of the era, with a preferred candidate in the past two Democratic presidential primaries, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, falling short twice and a sense that those in office have done little to stem a flood of crises.

The deaths of black people at the hands of law enforcement. The relentless creep of climate change. Recurring economic

Ritchie Torres, a New York City council member, in New York. uncertainty — this time amid a pandemic exacerbated by missteps across the federal government.

“In an ideal world, all of these issues would be solved by going out and voting,” Zoe Demkovitz, 27, who had supported Sanders’ presidential campaign, said as she marched against police violence in Philadelphia. “I tried that. I voted for the right people.

“And this,” she concluded, adding an expletive, “still happens.”

Democratic leaders are plainly aware of this perception and mindful that a stronger showing from Hillary Clinton among young voters four years ago probably would have turned her fortunes.

Some have moved in recent days to explicitly urge protesters not to overlook November.

In a post on Medium, Obama disputed the notion that racial bias in criminal justice “proves that only protests and direct action can bring about change, and that voting and participation in electoral politics is a waste of time.”

“Eventually, aspirations have to be translated into specific laws and institutional practices,” the former president wrote, italicizing liberally, “and in a democracy, that only happens when we elect government officials who are responsive to our demands.”

Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking African American in Congress, suggested that protests were so valuable in part because they helped introduce new leaders to old systems. At 79, Clyburn still delights in reminding audiences that he met his wife in jail after a civil rights march in 1960.

“I stayed involved,” Clyburn said, “and I’m now in the United States Congress.”

Some younger protesters do not dismiss this prospective path — or the wisdom of voting, however grudgingly.

But they say several of the most stinging policy letdowns in recent years have come after nominal election successes.

In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio won office in 2013 with a pledge to dramatically reform the city’s police culture, memorably showcasing his biracial family throughout his campaign. Through a recent stretch of demonstrations that included the arrest of his own daughter, de Blasio has largely defended the department’s approach despite news accounts and videos of officers responding to peaceful protests with often striking aggression.

“The mayor’s transformation has been so pronounced that I have trouble wrapping my head around it,” said Ritchie Torres, 32, a Bronx city councilman now running for Congress.

For younger New Yorkers, he said, it was a reminder that electing ostensibly likeminded leadership was not enough.

“Young people rightly and clearly see the limitations of voting,” he said, calling it “a necessary but insufficient condition for political engagement.”

Even Obama’s White House tenure, made possible in large part by his strength with younger voters, has come in for mixed appraisals.

Evan Weber, 28, the political director for the Sunrise Movement, a group of young liberal environmental activists, cited the dissatisfaction among progressives his age over Obama’s record on financial reform and some climate issues.

“People are turning to protest out of necessity,” Weber said. “We have grown up — millennials and especially Generation Z — with a system that has either delivered too little or not at all.”

People of color have signaled a particular weariness with the implication that voting is a cure-all, especially given the scale of voter suppression efforts and other barriers

to the ballot.

Jess Morales Rocketto, 33, a progressive strategist and former campaign aide to Obama and Clinton, said the standard get-out-andvote message tended to sound most palatable to people who were planning to vote anyway.

“What we’re really wrestling with is not whether or not people vote but whether people believe institutions matter,” she said.

“That disillusionment is actually about the fight for a generation of civic participation.”

On that score, some academics say, the protests might help.

Daniel Gillion, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, said that his research — detailed in a recent book, “The Loud Minority,” about the importance of demonstrations since the 1960s — showed that areas with meaningful protest activity often saw increased turnout in subsequent elections.

Whether younger Americans find a candidate to believe in is another matter.

Jason Culler, 38, who also attended the march in Philadelphia, predicted that the current election cycle would not produce leaders who adequately reflected the crowds filling the streets.

“Not this election, not the Democratic Party, not the Republican Party,” he said.

“These people don’t represent us. That’s why we’re out here still fighting the same thing.”

Aalayah Eastmond, 17, a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high shooting, in Coral Springs.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

9

Birthday for Breonna: A campaign to mourn and honor

By ALISHA HARIDASANI GUPTA

O

n Friday, Breonna Taylor would have turned 27.

Taylor, an emergency medical technician, was killed by the police on March 13 during a late night drug investigation in Louisville, Kentucky. Three officers barged into her apartment, using a so-called no-knock search warrant, which allows the police to enter without warning.

Her boyfriend, who said he thought someone was breaking into the apartment, shot an officer in the leg. The police ended up shooting Taylor eight times.

To mark her birthday, thousands of demonstrators gathered in downtown Louisville at around 7 p.m. Many had been protesting all day in different parts of the city, but in the evening they gathered specifically for Taylor’s birthday.

Her face, as painted by artist Jaylin Stewart, was projected onto City Hall. The protesters sang “Happy Birthday.” They chanted “Say Her Name!” And they marched around the city for hours. There was anger and pain, but there was also hope and tender love.

Online, a campaign aimed to flood Instagram and Twitter with Taylor’s name using the hashtag #BirthdayForBreonna.

The campaign’s other action items included signing an online petition calling for justice, donating to an online fund for Taylor’s family and sending birthday cards to Kentucky’s

the online fund for Taylor’s family had raised more than $5 million — far exceeding its initial goal of $500,000.

“It has just been growing and growing,” said Cate Young, a Los Angeles-based film and culture critic, who created the campaign. “People really stepped up.”

“I discovered on Instagram that some bakers had even started making cakes for her, and one greeting card company designed cards for her,” she added.

In the weeks immediately after Taylor died, her case didn’t receive much news media and political attention, falling in line with a long-standing pattern in which police brutality against black women is rendered invisible.

“I had just been following the story about police brutality and about George Floyd, and her name stopped coming up,” Young said. “I was really frustrated to see her be erased in real time.”

Because she is immunocompromised,Young wasn’t able to participate in the protests against police brutality that are Protesters singing the black national anthem in Louistaking over cities across the United States amid the coronaville, Ky. virus pandemic. So she decided to galvanize people online.

“I just wanted to do something,” Young said. “I was attorney general, Daniel Cameron, urging him to charge the like, I’m going to drive myself insane with worry and panic three officers. if I don’t do something.”

Some celebrities, like Kerry Washington, Busy Philipps We should be showing up for black women “in the and Charlize Theron, joined in by sharing the hashtag and the campaign’s list of action items. By Saturday afternoon, same way that we show up for black men,” she added.

U.S. Marine Corps issues ban on Confederate battle flags

By JENNY GROSS

T

he U.S. Marine Corps on Friday issued detailed directives about removing and banning public displays of the Confederate battle flag at Marine installations — an order that extended to such items as mugs, posters and bumper stickers.

“Current events are a stark reminder that it is not enough for us to remove symbols that cause division — rather, we also must strive to eliminate division itself,” the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. David Berger, said in a statement Wednesday.

As protests across the United States have erupted over police brutality, pressure has grown on officials to remove monuments and flags seen as symbols of racism.

Dozens of statues were removed after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and protesters demonstrating over the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis, are targeting some that remain.

In several states, anger has given way to the damaging or defacing of more than a dozen symbols of the Confederacy.

The mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, this past week ordered the removal of a contentious Confederate statue from a public park a day after dozens demonstrated against it.

Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia said he planned to order the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond to be removed. And the city of Philadelphia this past week removed the statue of its former mayor, Frank Rizzo, who took a confrontational approach to black and gay people as police commissioner in the 1960s and ’70s.

The Marine Corps said in a statement on Twitter that the Confederate battle flag had “all too often been co-opted by violent extremists and racist groups whose divisive beliefs have no place in our Corps.”

“This presents a threat to our core values, unit cohesion, security, and good order and discipline,” the statement said.

“This must be addressed.”

The move came after an announcement in April by Berger that the ban would be put in effect. At the time, however, it was not clear how it would be applied and whether it would extend to clothing and cars owned by Marines, for instance.

“I am mindful that many people believe that flag to be a symbol of heritage and regional pride,” Berger said in a letter in April to his fellow Marines. “But I am also mindful of the feelings of pain and rejection of those who inherited the cultural memory and present effects of the scourge of slavery in our country.”

The rule announced Friday for the first time articulated in detail what sorts of displays would be prohibited in office buildings, naval vessels, hangars, ready rooms, conference

rooms, individual offices, cubicles, tool and equipment rooms, workshops and other areas.

Among other items, the ban includes posters and flags depicting the Confederate battle flag. The order allows for inspections to take place and directs that any nonconforming displays be removed.

It was not immediately clear when the directive would be carried out. A Marine Corps representative could not be reached Saturday night.

The directive said that displays in which the Confederate battle flag was depicted, but not the main focus of the display, were exempted from the ban. This could apply to a presentation of the flag in a work of art or an educational or historical display depicting a Civil War battle, for instance.

Lecia Brooks, chief workplace transformation officer at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Saturday that the Confederate battle flag was a symbol of white supremacy and the enslavement of black people.

“We urge the other branches of the U.S. military to follow the U.S. Marine Corps’ example, including the National Guard, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other law enforcement branches of the federal government and agencies governed by the Department of Homeland Security, and remove all symbols of the Confederacy,” she said.

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

Vote for Trump? These Republican leaders aren’t on the bandwagon.

By JONATHAN MARTIN

I

t was one thing in 2016 for top Republicans to take a stand against Donald Trump for president: He wasn’t likely to win anyway, the thinking went, and there was no ongoing conservative governing agenda that would be endangered.

The 2020 campaign is different: Opposing the sitting president of your own party means putting policy priorities at risk, in this case appointing conservative judges, sustaining business-friendly regulations and cutting taxes — as well as incurring the volcanic wrath of Trump.

But, far sooner than they expected, growing numbers of prominent Republicans are debating how far to go in revealing that they won’t back his reelection — or might even vote for Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee. They’re feeling a fresh urgency because of Trump’s incendiary response to the protests of police brutality, atop his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private discussions.

Former President George W. Bush won’t support the reelection of Trump, and Jeb Bush isn’t sure how he’ll vote, say people familiar with their thinking. Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah won’t back Trump and is deliberating whether to again write in his wife, Ann, or cast another ballot this November. And Cindy McCain, the widow of Sen. John McCain, is almost certain to support Biden but is unsure how public to be about it because one of her sons is eyeing a run for office.

None of them voted for Trump in 2016, but the reproach of big Republican names carries a different weight when an incumbent president and his shared agenda with Senate leaders are on the line.

Former Republican leaders like the former Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner won’t say how they will vote, and some Republicans who are already disinclined to support Trump are weighing whether to go beyond backing a thirdparty contender to openly endorse Biden. Retired military leaders, who have guarded their private political views, are increasingly voicing their unease about the president’s leadership but are unsure whether to embrace his opponent.

Biden himself, while eager to win support across party lines, intends to roll out his “Republicans for Biden” coalition later in the campaign, after fully consolidating his own party, according to Democrats familiar with the campaign’s planning.

The public expressions of opposition to Trump from parts of the Republican and military establishment have accelerated in recent days over his repeated calls for protesters to be physically constrained, “dominated,” as he put it, and his administration’s order to forcefully clear the streets outside the White House so he could walk out for

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) wears a face mask as she arrives for the weekly Senate Republicans luncheon on Capitol Hill in Washington. a photo opportunity. His conduct has convinced some leaders that they can no longer remain silent.

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ blistering criticism of Trump and the admission this past week by Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska that she is “struggling” with whether to vote for the sitting president of her own party have intensified the soul-searching taking place, forcing a number of officials to reckon with an act that they have long avoided: stating out loud that Trump is unfit for office.

“This fall, it’s time for new leadership in this country — Republican, Democrat or independent,” said William H. McRaven, the retired Navy admiral who directed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. “President Trump has shown he doesn’t have the qualities necessary to be a good commander in chief.”

McRaven, in an interview on the 76th anniversary of D-Day, noted that those wartime leaders inspired Americans with “their words, their actions and their humanity.”

In contrast, he said, Trump has failed his leadership test. “As we have struggled with the COVID pandemic and horrible acts of racism and injustice, this president has shown none of those qualities,” McRaven said. “The country needs to move forward without him at the helm.”

Trump won election in 2016, of course, despite a parade of Republicans and retired military officers who refused to support him. Far more current GOP elected officials are publicly backing Trump than did four years ago. Among his unwavering supporters are Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and past foes like Sens. Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham. And polls today indicate that rank-and-file Republicans are squarely behind the president, although that is

in part because some Republicans who can’t abide Trump now align with independents.

Yet it would be a sharp rebuke for former Trump administration officials and well-known Republicans to buck their own standard-bearer.

Individually, they may not sway many votes — particularly at a time of deep polarization. But their collective opposition, or even resounding silence, could offer something of a permission structure for Trump-skeptical Republicans to put party loyalty aside.

John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and a retired Marine general, would not say who he would vote for, though he did allow that he wished “we had some additional choices.”

Dan Coats, a former Republican senator who was Trump’s director of national intelligence, “has been concerned about the negative effect on the intelligence community by the turmoil of turnover at DNI,” said Kevin Kellems, a longtime adviser to Coats, adding that the former spy chief is “encouraged by the confirmation of a new DNI and career intelligence deputy.”

As for who Coats will vote for, “ultimately he remains a loyal Republican but he believes the American people will decide on Nov. 3,” Kellems said.

Joseph Maguire, a retired three-star admiral who served as Trump’s acting intelligence chief, invoked the comments of Mattis and two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who also criticized the president this past week.

“Jim Mattis, Mike Mullen and Marty Dempsey are all good friends, and I respect them tremendously,” Maguire said. “I am in alignment with their views.”

Asked who Boehner and Ryan will vote for in November, representatives to both former House speakers declined to say.

Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, who both served as secretary of state under Bush, have also so far declined to state their intentions.

A number of current GOP lawmakers and governors are also wrestling with what to do — and what to say — as they balance conscience, ideology and the risk to themselves and their constituents that comes from confronting Trump.

Rep. Francis Rooney of Florida has donated millions of dollars to Republican candidates over the years, served as Bush’s ambassador to the Vatican and hasn’t voted for a Democrat in decades.

But Rooney said he is considering supporting Biden in part because Trump is “driving us all crazy” and his handling of the virus led to a death toll that “didn’t have to happen.”

Rooney is not seeking reelection, so he is not worried about future electoral prospects. He said his hesitation with Biden owes to uncertainty about whether left-wing Democrats would pull the former vice president out of the political ma-

instream.

“What he’s always been is not scary,” Rooney said. “A lot of people that voted for President Trump did so because they did not like Hillary Clinton. I don’t see that happening with Joe Biden — how can you not like Joe Biden?”

Rooney has been gently lobbied by one of Biden’s closest allies in Congress: Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, who has effectively become the former vice president’s emissary to current and recent Republican lawmakers.

Among the anti-Trump Republicans now out of office, recent events have only vindicated their sense of alarm — and nudged them toward embracing Biden.

“For people who were long waiting for that pivot, the last week has shown, if anything, he’s dug in and not even making an attempt to appeal to anybody outside his hard base,” said former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, who is close to Coons and in conversation with him about how and when to formalize his support for Biden.

Former Rep. Mark Sanford, who briefly challenged the president in the Republican primary, said last year that he’d support the president if he won the nomination.

But now Sanford believes Trump is threatening the stability of the country. “He’s treading on very thin ice,” said Sanford, also a former South Carolina governor, who is engaged in frequent conversations with other Republicans about how to proceed.

There are already a number of Republican groups dedicated to defeating to Trump, and former lawmakers, strategists and policymakers who are plotting what and when to say about the election.

“There is an organized effort about how to make our voices useful in 2020,” said Kori Schake, who worked at the National Security Council and State Department under Bush and was an editor with Mattis of the book “Warriors and Citizens,” about the civil-military divide.

She said a number of officials who worked for both Presidents Bush and Ronald Reagan, many of whom signed a 2016 letter opposing Trump, were on Zoom chats and group emails trying to determine how to express their opposition and whether it should come with an endorsement for Biden. The effort to gather more anti-Trump Republicans to speak out is being spearheaded by John B. Bellinger III, who also worked in Bush’s NSC and State Department.

Some Republicans believe Mattis made their task easier.

“It laid the cornerstone of fighting back against Trump,” said former Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, who noted that as Navy secretary he once served as “boss” to Mattis, then a youthful Marine officer. “He said: ‘I can judge the man.’”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

11

Coronavirus shutdowns: Economists look for better answers

By EDUARDO PORTER

A

s COVID-19 cases took off in New York in March, Gov. Andrew Cuomo imposed a lockdown of nonessential businesses to slow the spread of the coronavirus, calling it “the most drastic action we can take.”

Now researchers say more targeted approaches — in New York and elsewhere — might have protected public health with less economic pain.

Businesses in New York City, where an initial phase of reopening is to begin Monday, have been mostly shut down for 11 weeks. But a study has found that the economic cost could have been reduced by a third or more by strategically choosing neighborhoods to close, calibrating the risk of infection for local residents and workers with the impact on local jobs.

The ZIP codes most affected by the outbreak are not necessarily the places with the highest concentration of jobs. It would be possible to keep businesses in certain areas open if the chances of spreading the virus there were low, especially if the economic cost of closing them was disproportionately high, the researchers found.

“The blunt instrument of a uniform policy causes more economic and related health harm than is necessary to accomplish the same goal of not increasing infections,” said John Birge, a mathematician at the University of Chicago who was an author of the study.

Other researchers are taking on the problem by assessing the relative level of risk posed by different businesses.

“The distinction between essential and nonessential businesses is very arbitrary,” said Katherine Baicker, an economist at the University of Chicago involved in the research. “In a world where policymakers could be nuanced across type of business, geography and time, the policy response could be much better.”

With daily COVID-19 deaths abating in New York and many other parts of the country, and cities and states easing lockdowns, researchers are beginning to assess alternative strategies to manage the spread of the virus. Much of their work involves using data to devise less restrictive containment policies, in the United States and elsewhere.

In Europe, France and Spain have adopted versions of a plan put forth by Bary S.R. Pradelski, an economist at Oxford University, and Miquel Oliu-Barton, a mathematician at the Université Paris-Dauphine, to divide countries into dangerous red and safer green zones, and allow travel within and between the green while curtailing

it in the red.

In the United States, a group of researchers including Baicker is following a different track: using cellphone data and surveys to identify which businesses are more crowded, as well as how much of their business is conducted indoors, and how much interaction it involves, either person to person or via touching shared surfaces.

Customers tend to linger longer in a Chuck E. Cheese than in a Chick-fil-A, increasing their risk of contagion if somebody nearby is infected. Chick-fil-A, however, receives a lot more customers per square foot, bringing more people in contact with one another. Nail salons involve more personal interaction than lawn and garden stores. Some restaurants are packed at certain times, while others receive a steady trickle throughout the day.

The researchers’ idea is that businesses could retrofit in ways suited to each — say, spacing out tables or limiting foot traffic — while safeguarding health. Moreover, with access to real-time information, consumers could avoid riskier businesses and shop when their preferred stores might be less crowded.

The New York City study also relied on cellphone data. That research, by Birge and Ozan Candogan of the University of Chicago and Yiding Feng of Northwestern University, is based on the premise that residents of one neighborhood can become infected, or infect others, while at work in another — depending on how long they spend there and the infection rate in both. The risk of spreading the virus by opening a given neighborhood to business also rises with the size of its susceptible population.

“Mobility plays a key role,” Candogan said. “With smart policies we could reduce the spread of the disease and minimize job losses.”

The study identifies the plan that preserves as much employment as possible even as it contains the disease.

“With appropriate targeting,” the scholars wrote, “it is possible to achieve a reduction in infections with up to 33% to 42% lower economic cost than uniform citywide closure policies.”

New York City is not in absolute control of its destiny. If adjoining areas in Westchester County, Long Island and New Jersey remain open for business, New Yorkers who are infected while at work there will spread the virus in the city when they return home.

But even at the peak of contagion in midApril, assuming 80% of businesses remained open in neighboring counties, judiciously shutting down businesses would have allowed New York City to reduce infection rates in every neighborhood while keeping 40% of its economy open, the three researchers found.

The challenge gets easier as the infection rate declines. If New York reaches a point over the summer in which infection has faded and the task is to prevent the virus from reasserting itself, many more businesses could reopen, according to the researchers.

In the first case, during the peak of the outbreak, Wall Street would have had to remain shuttered, as indeed most businesses in Manhattan. But companies in Manhattan’s garment district, where there are lots of jobs but only a small resident population, could have opened for business, as well as those across a large swath of the other boroughs. Their risk of contagion from outsiders coming in to work there was small enough, and the gain from maintaining their jobs large enough, to justify keeping them humming.

When New York manages to sharply reduce infection rates, and the challenge becomes

preventing a second wave, the city could keep 87% of its economy running even if adjoining counties were operating at 80% capacity, the researchers said. Jackson Heights and Corona in Queens would have to keep most of their businesses closed, as would some big chunks of Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Kingsbridge Heights in the Bronx. But most neighborhoods could allow business to resume operation.

It’s unclear to what extent these studies could yield useful policy. It might be difficult for Cuomo or Mayor Bill de Blasio to close down a neighborhood and keep the adjoining ones open.

One striking feature arising from this research, in any case, is the extent to which data could help steer decisions.

Both American studies rely on cellphone data reflecting patterns of movement and commerce. Researchers do not have access to information about individual users.

But more data is available. Researchers from Pennsylvania State University, the University of Chicago and the University of California, San Diego, studied what could be done with cellphone tracking data that, instead, detailed the travel history of people who had become infected. That’s what happened in South Korea.

South Korea detected its first case of COVID-19 on Jan. 20, one day before the United States did. By May 26, 295 out of every 1 million Americans had died from the disease, almost 60 times South Korea’s rate. And it contained the disease without a lockdown. The International Monetary Fund expects South Korea’s economy to contract by only 1.2% this year, compared with 5.9% for the United States.

South Korea started testing people much earlier than the United States, allowing health authorities to track potential routes of contagion and isolate the infected. But the researchers point out that South Korea’s strategy also relied critically on the publication of their travel histories.

South Koreans received text messages whenever new cases were discovered in their neighborhood, as well as information and timelines of infected people’s travel. Although businesses were not shut down, South Koreans knew which Starbucks had served an infected person and could stay away from it for a while.

Using cellphone data to track changes in people’s commutes, the economists estimated that in Seoul alone, public disclosure would reduce the number of cases over two years by 400,000 and the number of deaths by 13,000.

And achieving the same death rate using citywide lockdowns such as those done in NewYork would double the economic cost.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

Stocks

Wall Street Week Ahead: Bond investors look for Fed to justify steepening yield curve

E

xpectations that the global economy has dodged the worst-case coronavirus pandemic scenarios have led to a dramatic sell-off in U.S. government bonds from their record highs, pushing the yield curve to its steepest level since March.

Investors will get a chance next week to see whether the U.S. Federal Reserve agrees with their optimism. The U.S. central bank’s two-day meeting, ending on Wednesday, will be the first since April when Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the U.S. economy could feel the weight of the economic shutdown for more than a year.

The meeting will follow a surprise gain in the Labor Department’s closely watched jobs report on Friday that pushed benchmark 10-year Treasury yields to the highest since early March.

“The sell-off in the bond market in the last few weeks seems to be justified,” said Subadra Rajappa, head of U.S. rates strategy at Societe Generale.

While the Fed could introduce additional bond-buying programs known as quantitative easing or yield-curve control measures to target short-term rates, fund managers say they expect yields will need to rise significantly to justify any intervention in the bulk of the curve. Instead, they are watching for hints that the central bank believes the worst part of the coronavirus crisis has passed.

“They are really in this transition phase,” said Eric Stein, co-director of global income and portfolio manager at Eaton Vance. “Markets are functioning, if not all the way back to pre-shock levels, with very strong debt issuance and market improvement, even though the real economy is incredibly weak.”

As a result, Stein is looking for signs that the Fed believes the economic rebound can support the rise in yields.

“The Fed will be OK with a slow creep higher, particularly with a backdrop of a recovery, but if it moves too much and destabilizes the recovery, there’s a reason for concern,” he said.

Ed Al-Hussainy, senior interest rate analyst at Columbia Threadneedle, expects the Fed to focus on its newly announced Main Street Lending Program to support smalland medium-sized businesses facing financial strain from the pandemic, rather than introducing significant new stimulus measures.

“The Fed is likely to communicate that there is more scope for fiscal measures but that is a very uncomfortable spot to be in,” he said. “We won’t have a clear sense of direction of the economy until well into the fourth quarter because all the sequential data now is massively positive.”

The manufacturing ISM index rose to 43.1 in May from 41.5 in April, while weekly jobless claims fell to 1.877 million from 2.126 million the week before.

“Recent economic reports in the U.S. have been uniformly weak, though not any worse than expected,” said Kevin Cummins,senior U.S. economist at NatWest Markets.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

13

Is the secret to Japan’s virus success right in front of its face?

By MOTOKO HAVASHI

RICH

AND

NORIKO

W

hen the coronavirus arrived in Japan, people did what they normally do: They put on masks.

Face coverings are nothing new here.

During flu and hay fever seasons, trains are crowded with commuters half-hidden behind white surgical masks. Employees with colds, worried about the stigma of missing work, throw one on and soldier into the office. Masks are even used, my hairdresser once told me, by women who don’t want to bother putting on makeup.

In the United States, where masks only recently arrived on the scene, they have been a less comfortable fit — becoming an emblem in the culture wars. A vocal minority asserts that nobody can force anyone to put a mask on. Protesters have harassed mask-wearing reporters. The president himself has tried to avoid being seen in one.

As Japan has confounded the world by avoiding the sort of mass death from coronavirus seen in the United States, I began to wonder whether the cultural affinity for masks helped explain some of this success.

It also got me thinking about the evolution in my own feelings about face coverings.

A decade ago, before we moved to Tokyo when I became The New York Times bureau chief, my husband, two children and I visited Japan to see family and friends. I had picked up a cough on the plane, and my Japanese godfather pointedly dropped into a convenience store to buy me a packet of masks.

Shame on me, but I declined to wear one — they seemed unsightly and uncomfortable.

Fast forward to early this year, when news of a strange virus started emerging from China, and Japan soon reported its first case.

Advice on masks that I was reading from international experts was mixed, if not outright skeptical. The surgeon general of the United States implored the public in a tweet to “STOP BUYING MASKS!” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initially said it was not necessary to wear one if I wasn’t sick.

Still, living in Tokyo, I had grown accustomed to seeing them everywhere. I decided it was better to buy some for me and my family. By then, masks were sold out in

As Japan has confounded the world by avoiding the sort of mass death from coronavirus seen in the U.S., Motoko Rich began to wonder whether the cultural affinity for masks helped explain some of this success. most Japanese drugstores, but the Tokyo bureau of The Times managed to procure a small supply that we had to ration.

I was sometimes confused about when to wear one, though I did so when reporting near the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship that was the site of a large coronavirus outbreak, or when I attended crowded news conferences in unventilated rooms.

It took some getting used to. The mask made my glasses fog. I didn’t like the feeling of my own breath on my face.

But I’m now a convert, especially since Tokyo was placed under a state of emergency in mid-April. I bought handmade cloth face coverings from a Facebook friend in Okinawa. We wash them daily and line them with coffee filters. Even though the emergency declaration was lifted in late May, I still won’t let anyone in my family leave our apartment without putting on a mask.

With paper masks sold out everywhere, the Japanese government sent cloth masks in the mail in April. The initiative, which cost about $400 million, became the butt of jokes, when people discovered the masks were too small to cover most adults’ mouths and noses.

The masks became a symbol of failings in the government’s coronavirus re-

sponse. In the early months of the pandemic, Japan seemed not to follow much of the conventional epidemiological wisdom, deliberately restricting testing and not ordering a lockdown.

Yet a feared spike in cases and deaths has not materialized. Japan has reported more than 17,000 infections and just over 900 deaths, while the United States, with a population roughly 2 1/2 times as large, is approaching 1.9 million cases and 110,000 deaths.

“Japan, I think a lot of people agree, kind of did everything wrong, with poor social distancing, karaoke bars still open and public transit packed near the zone where the worst outbreaks were happening,” Jeremy Howard, a researcher at the University of San Francisco who has studied the use of masks, said of the country’s early response.

“But the one thing that Japan did right was masks.”

Japanese leaders eventually urged karaoke bars and other businesses to close and cajoled employees into teleworking.

Schools were closed at the beginning of March — far earlier than most countries — and large cultural and sports events were canceled. None of these restrictions were mandatory.

But one of Japan’s most visible re-

sponses has been near-universal mask wearing, seen here as a responsible thing to do to protect oneself and others, and as a small price to pay to be able to resume some semblance of normalcy.

Japan’s experience with masks goes back hundreds of years. Mining workers started using them during the Edo period, between the 17th and 19th centuries, to prevent inhalation of dust. The masks were often made from the pulp of plums, said Kazunari Onishi, author of “The Dignity of Masks” and an associate professor at St. Luke’s International University in Tokyo.

Onishi said that early in the 20th century, the Japanese viewed masks as unattractive, but were persuaded to wear them during the 1918 flu pandemic. More recently, the Japanese public has used masks during the SARS and MERS outbreaks — which also left Japan relatively unscathed — as well as to protect against pollution and pollen.

The scientific evidence on whether a mask protects the wearer from infection is mixed. But experiments show that masks can be effective in blocking the emission of respiratory droplets that may contain the virus, even when someone has no symptoms of illness. And there is some evidence that infected people with no symptoms can still transmit the coronavirus.

A study published last month suggested that just talking can launch thousands of small droplets.

“Wearing a simple cloth mask could significantly block speech droplets from being released,” two of the study’s authors, Philip Anfinrud and Adriaan Bax of the National Institutes of Health, wrote in an email.

Dekai Wu, a professor of computer science and engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has modeled the potential for mass mask-wearing to significantly reduce infections.

While it may be possible to establish only correlation, not causation, he said, “if the downside is nothing, and the upside is huge, then you take the bet.”

Still, most scientists say, masks alone are not enough; social distancing is also needed.

“Many people think that just covering their mouth and nose is enough,” Onishi said. “If they wear a mask, they think they can go to crowded areas, but that is still very dangerous.”

14

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

COVID-19 nearly ended street homelessness in U.K. Maybe not for long.

A homeless person’s tent on the steps of a church in London’s financial district,

By CEYLAN YEGINSU

D

riving through the East London borough of Newham recently, Ryan Anderson and Billy Tattingham pointed out some of the places they had slept before the coronavirus outbreak.

An underpass at a train station; an alleyway; the crime-ridden walkways of a local shopping center; on particularly cold nights, a subway elevator.

But all that changed for the childhood best friends in late March.

As part of Britain’s effort to contain the spread of the virus, the government required local councils in England and Wales to provide emergency accommodation in budget hotels to every homeless person living on the streets.

For Anderson and Tattingham, it has been a revelation.

“It’s so surreal to wake up in a bed every morning, my own room with my own door and bathroom,” Anderson said.

“To tell you the truth, corona has been the best thing that has happened to the homeless. No one has benefited as much as us.”

Since the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown, more than 90% of people sleeping on the street have been offered a place to stay, according to government statistics. At the same time, a new, undocumented wave of homelessness is hitting the streets as people made jobless by the

pandemic are being evicted from rooms they were renting.

Nevertheless, homeless charities say the initial success of the government’s homeless program has proved what they have long maintained: that an injection of funding and support from the government can quickly and effectively bring people off the streets.

“It was an amazing effort, and it shows what you can do when you have the political will and a willingness to spend the money,” said Dominic Williamson, the executive director of strategy and policy for the British homeless charity St. Mungo’s.

Health officials and homeless advocates say the number of cases among the homeless sleeping on the street has been very low because the councils moved quickly to get them off the streets. And in the hotels, people were given their own rooms, communal areas were closed and outside visitors were strictly prohibited.

But now, homeless advocates are concerned over what will happen when the emergency legislation runs out.

“Moving people into hotels does not resolve the homelessness,” Williamson said. “They are still homeless. A hotel is not a home.”

Even before the pandemic, Britain was grappling with a spiraling housing crisis, the product of soaring home and rental

prices, housing shortages and benefit cuts.

The number of “rough sleepers,” as Britain calls the street homeless, has increased by 141% since 2010.

Each year, thousands of people are excluded from social housing registration for any of several reasons, including a history of rent arrears, insufficient time spent in a local area or anti-social behavior.

In recent weeks, as businesses shuttered in accordance with the coronavirus lockdown and millions of people lost their jobs, a new wave of homelessness has spread across the country. Hit particularly hard are people in the hospitality industry who had sublet from private landlords without tenancy agreements and were therefore unable to benefit from the government’s temporary ban against evictions.

In London’s Trafalgar Square, the usual crowds of tourists have been replaced by hundreds of homeless people who line up each night for hot food and drink, distributed daily by volunteers.

Nadia Balan, a 26-year-old bartender and artist from Romania, became homeless for the first time in April after she lost her job at a pub and was evicted from her room in a shared house because she could no longer afford the rent.

“I work very hard. I never thought I would lose my job,” Balan said, sitting on a pile of her belongings under a restaurant doorway. “I am so scared, I can’t sleep.

Every night the streets empty, only druggies and gangs stay here and they are like zombies. There is nowhere to sleep safely.”

Balan signed up for hotel accommodation, but it was not clear when she would be placed. Those sleeping on the streets must first be verified by an outreach team, which then passes the information to the local authorities.

The government pledged an initial 3.2 million pounds, nearly $4 million, to help local councils accommodate the street homeless at the start of the pandemic. Since then, it has kicked in an additional 3.2 billion pounds to assist the councils with the immediate pressures of the pandemic, including homelessness.

“We are also accelerating plans for new rough sleeping services — backed by 433 million pounds — which will ensure 6,000 new housing units will be put into the system, with 3,300 of these becoming

available in the next 12 months,” a spokesman for the Ministry of Housing said.

Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow secretary of state for housing, said that while she welcomed the government’s newfound interest in ending street homelessness for good, it needed to go further.

“The government must now also act to ensure that people who rent their home do not fall into arrears as a result of coronavirus by strengthening the social security system, and that those who have fallen into arrears are not evicted in July when the temporary evictions ban ends,” she said.

Outreach workers running operations in the hotels are scrambling to register people for more permanent housing amid concerns that government funding may soon run out and the hotels will reopen to their regular clients.

In Newham, which has the highest rate of homelessness in the country, many of those who have been placed in the hotels are registering for permanent housing for the first time.

“It is unheard-of that someone like Ryan would under any circumstances be offered a hotel room to wait out a housing application,” said Anneke Ziemen, lead outreach manager at the Thames Reach homeless charity. “There is still the usual gatekeeping from the side of the local council, but it has made a big difference to have everyone in a stable place where they can focus on getting the applications in.”

For Tattingham, the experience at the hotel has been transformational. A former boxer, who has been in and out of jail for years and has been trying to overcome a heroin addiction, he says this interlude is the first time that he has been able to take stock of his life.

“When I lie on my bed, I manage to leave everything behind and just reflect,” he said with a pensive look. “I realize that high-level crime didn’t get me anywhere, it just led me to more crime and more time in jail. I gained nothing from it.”

Now, Tattingham has applied for housing for the first time.

“The next step is to get my own place and distance myself from these likeminded people, who don’t really do me any good,” he said, referring to the other homeless people in the establishment.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

15

Amazon deforestation soars as pandemic hobbles enforcement

By ERNESTO LONDOÑO, MANUELA ANDREONI and LETICIA CASADO

S

ince coming to office, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil has enabled increased razing of the Amazon rainforest.

Now, the coronavirus has accelerated that destruction.

Illegal loggers, miners and land grabbers have cleared vast areas of the Amazon with impunity in recent months as law enforcement efforts were hobbled by the pandemic.

Those recently cleared areas will almost certainly make way for a rash of fires even more widespread and devastating than the ones that drew global outrage last year. The newly cleared patches are typically set ablaze during the drier months of August to October to prepare the land for cattle grazing, often spiraling out of control into wildfires.

“The trend line is shooting upward compared to a year that was already historic in terms of a rise in deforestation,” said Ana Carolina Haliuc Bragança, a federal prosecutor who leads a task force that investigates environmental crimes in the Amazon. “If state entities don’t adopt very decisive measures, we’re looking at a likely tragedy.”

The fallout from the pandemic has exacerbated the ecological degradation set in motion by government policies under Bolsonaro, who favors expanding commercial development in the Amazon and views environmental regulations as a hindrance to economic growth. But some career civil servants are still working to enforce environmental protections.

An estimated 464 square miles of Amazon tree cover was slashed from January to April, a 55% increase from the same period last year and an area roughly 20 times the size of Manhattan, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, a government agency that tracks deforestation with satellite images.

Already last year, deforestation in the Amazon had reached levels not seen since 2008.

At the same time, the coronavirus has killed more than 34,000 people in Brazil, which now is recording the highest daily number of deaths in the world. It

has also fueled political polarization and dominated headlines and policy debates in recent months, eclipsing the increased damage to the rainforest.

Environment Minister Ricardo Salles, who supports Bolsonaro’s loosening of environmental regulation, said in late April that he saw the pandemic as an opportunity to reduce restrictions while attention was focused elsewhere.

“We need to make an effort here during this period of calm in terms of press coverage because people are only talking about COVID,” he said during an April 22 Cabinet meeting.

A video of the meeting was made public.

The remarks, which Salles later said referred to his efforts to streamline red tape, led federal prosecutors to call for an investigation into what they said amounted to dereliction of duty.

The association that represents government environmental workers issued a statement calling Salles a “criminal” who has been “hollowing out” his own ministry.

Enforcement actions by the country’s main environmental protection agency, the Brazilian Environmental and Renewable Natural Resources Institute, or Ibama, fell sharply during 2019, Bolsonaro’s first

year in office, according to an agency document obtained by The New York Times.

In 2019, Ibama reported 128 instances of environmental crimes, a 55% decrease from the year before. The amount of illegally logged timber seized by the agency fell by nearly 64% from 2018 to 2019, according to the document.

Government officials and environmental activists say the rise in deforestation is being driven by a prevailing sense among illegal loggers and miners that tearing down the rainforest carries minimal risk of punishment and yields significant payoff.

Bolsonaro’s government fired three senior officials at Ibama in April after the agency carried out a large operation targeting illegal miners in Pará state in the north.

In May, a law enforcement official in uniform was swarmed by illegal loggers in Pará after a truck with timber was intercepted. After a small mob heckled the agent, one of the loggers struck him in the face with a glass bottle, according to a video of the incident.

Later in May, the government transferred oversight of federal natural reserves from the Ministry of the Environment to the Ministry of Agriculture, paving the way for commercial development in

Brazilian Environmental and Renewable Natural Resources Institute, or Ibama, agents during an enforcement action near Rio Pardo in Brazil’s Rondônia state, in September 2019.

protected areas.

The government is also championing legislative initiatives that would give land titles to squatters who have taken possession of tracts in the Amazon and other biomes.

Roughly 50% of the tree cover lost during the first four months of this year was on public land, according to Ipam Amazônia, an environmental research organization. Ane Alencar, the director of science at Ipam Amazônia, said that much of the destruction is by people who expect to be ultimately recognized as rightful owners of the land.

“I see opportunism fueling illegality as people take advantage of the fragility of the moment we’re living, politically as well as economically,” she said. “This coronavirus crisis is turning into an environmental crisis, too.”

Eduardo Taveira, the top environmental official in Amazonas state, said illegal loggers, who usually take pains to avoid being fined and having their equipment destroyed by federal agents, are operating more openly than in years past.

“There’s a sense that the government is focused only on fighting the coronavirus, so this type of illegal activity is happening more boldly than in recent years,” he said.

Fearing a new wave of international condemnation, the Bolsonaro administration in May dispatched a few thousand troops to the Amazon and tasked them with preventing environmental crimes for 30 days.

“We don’t want Brazil to be portrayed in front of the rest of the world as an environmental villain,” Vice President Hamilton Mourão said as the initiative was launched.

In an emailed statement, the Defense Ministry said it had devoted 3,800 service members, 11 aircraft, 11 boats and 180 vehicles to support the mission. The operation, it said, “clearly demonstrates Brazil’s firm determination to preserve and defend the Amazon.”

Environmental activists say they welcome any increase in enforcement, but most see the military operation as a public relations ploy that will not change the trajectory of deforestation or lead to punishment for the key people driving the destruction.

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Monday, June 8, 2020

Libyan commander backed by Russia says he’s ready for talks to end war

By DECLAN WALSH

T

he Libyan commander backed by Russia, whose forces suffered a string of battlefield losses in recent days, declared on Saturday that he was ready to stop fighting and enter talks to end his oilrich country’s grinding civil war.

The announcement was unlikely to bring an immediate end to the fighting.

But it offered new evidence of the decisive clout of Turkey, on the other side of Libya’s war, whose intervention on the side of the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli has thwarted Russia’s ambitions and shifted the course of the conflict.

The Libyan commander, Khalifa Hifter, made the cease-fire offer in Cairo as he stood alongside his Egyptian ally, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. Egypt, along with Russia and the United Arab Emirates, have

invested heavily in supporting Hifter and are now scrambling to limit his losses after the dramatic collapse of his 14-month campaign to capture Tripoli.

The scale and speed of Hifter’s losses have stunned Libyans, and analysts say the retreat not only marks the end of his assault on Tripoli but also is likely to reshape the broader military and political landscape in the country.

“All of our bearing points are changing,” said Tarek Megerisi, an analyst with the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“It’s very unclear what things will look like once the dust settles. But this is Hifter on the ropes. It’s the first time we’ve seen him make any compromise or concession since he returned to Libya in 2014.”

Libya, which has Africa’s largest oil reserves, has been mired in chaos since the ouster of its longtime dictator, Moam-

Celebrating with Libyan national flags in Tripoli on Friday after fighters loyal to the U.N.backed government captured the town of Tarhuna from rival forces loyal to the commander Khalifa Hifter

mar Gadhafi, by an American-backed coalition during the Arab Spring in 2011.

An eruption of fighting between Libyan factions in 2014 quickly escalated into a regional proxy war fueled by foreign powers that poured arms, money and mercenaries into the fight.

Over the years, the country became divided between east and west, with Hifter based in his eastern stronghold in the city of Benghazi. The U.N.-backed government is based in Tripoli, in the west.

President Recep Tayyib Erdogan of Turkey deployed a warship, armed drones and thousands of Turkish-funded Syrian fighters in January to push back Hifter’s assault on Tripoli. The Turkish-backed forces have scored a string of major victories in recent days, routing Hifter’s forces entirely from western Libya and driving them hundreds of miles to the east.

After capturing Tripoli’s international airport earlier in the week, government fighters captured Tarhuna, Hifter’s last stronghold in western Libya, on Friday.

Fleeing fighters left behind helicopters, expensive Russian-built weapons systems and large stores of ammunition.

By Saturday evening, government forces had reached the edge of the city of Sirte, 230 miles east of Tripoli, where heavy fighting erupted. Government fighters were hit by airstrikes from drones and warplanes.

At least 19 government fighters were killed, according to Libyan news reports.

In the south, oil production restarted at the giant Sharara oil field after Hifter’s forces deserted it, Reuters reported.

The main question now, said Wolfram Lacher, an analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, “is what the Russians will do.”

Hundreds of Russian mercenaries employed by the Wagner Group, a Kremlinlinked private military company that played

a critical role in the Tripoli offensive, have retreated to the relative safety of a Hiftercontrolled air base.

The Russians could use their air power to prevent the government advance from reaching a crescent-shaped stretch of coastline that is the center of Libya’s oil industry and currently controlled by Hifter.

Another possibility, Lacher said, is that the putative cease-fire announced in Cairo could be a pretext for Egyptian airstrikes or other military action in support of Hifter in the next week.

“I see this as a warning to the government forces that Egypt will enforce red lines if they don’t stop their advance,” he said.

“The Egyptians would want to keep the oil crescent under Hifter’s control.”

The battlefield developments mark a dramatic reversal of fortunes of Hifter, 76, a former CIA asset.

Since launching his first offensive in 2014, Hifter has developed a reputation as a truculent, iron-fisted commander who spurned politics, played his foreign allies against each other, and regularly boasted of his intention to seize power by force.

But he cut a chastened figure in Cairo on Saturday as he stood meekly beside elSissi, proposing to implement a cease-fire that would start Monday morning.

In his remarks, Hifter railed against what he called “Turkish colonizers” and appealed for all foreign fighters and foreign-supplied weapons to be sent out of Libya — a striking call given how heavily Hifter has relied on outside arms, men and money to mount his doomed assault on Tripoli.

His assault on Tripoli was going well, with Russia’s help, until January, when Turkey intervened to save the ailing Tripoli government. Erdogan stepped into the fray for a mix of commercial and geostrategic reasons.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

17

What if there were no George Floyd video?

By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

I

magine that no one had shot video of George Floyd being killed by police in Minneapolis.

There would have been a bland statement that he had died resisting arrest, and none of us would have heard of him.

Instead, the horror of that video has ignited protests around the world. Racism in that video is as visceral as a lynching.

Yet there is no viral video to galvanize us about other racial inequities: — There is no video to show that a black boy born today in Washington, D.C.; Missouri; Alabama; Louisiana; Mississippi or a number of other states has a shorter life expectancy than a boy born in A demonstration in Brooklyn on Friday.

Bangladesh or India.

— There’s no video to show that black children still are often systematically shunted to second-rate redlining, to mass incarceration, to voter suppression, to schools and futures, just as they were in the Jim Crow police brutality and more. And it is undeniably harming era. About 15% of black or Hispanic students attend health and prematurely ending black lives.”

The Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society said in so-called apartheid schools that are less than 1% white. a statement a few days ago, “Structural racism is more — There’s no video to show that blacks are dying from the coronavirus at more than twice the rate of harmful to the health and well-being of children than whites, or that a result of the recent mass layoffs is that, infectious diseases, including COVID-19.”

Sociologists like Orlando Patterson have noted that as of last month, fewer than half of African American while whites increasingly have progressive views about adults now have a job.

“There is another kind of violence, slower but just race in general, they often still favor public policies that as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the disadvantage African Americans. For example, they may night,” Robert Kennedy said in 1968 shortly before his oppose multioccupancy housing in their affluent suburbs, assassination. “This is the violence of institutions, indif- reducing affordable housing and perpetuating segregation. ference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence Or they may support a broken local funding system for that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men education that results in apartheid schools.

“Confinement to segregated, poorly funded schools because their skin has different colors. This is a slow interferes with children’s life chances,” said Rucker destruction of a child by hunger and schools without Johnson, a professor of public policy at the University of books and homes without heat.”

Health statistics bear that out. A black newborn in California, Berkeley, and author of a book, “Children of the United States is twice as likely to die in infancy as the Dream,” about integration. Johnson found that U.S. a white newborn, and a black woman is 2 1/2 times as public schools achieved peak integration in 1988 and likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as a white woman. have since become more racially segregated.

Structural racism doesn’t easily go viral, but it is “Racism is nothing short of a public health crisis,” deadly.

A recent study of insurance records found that Michelle Williams, dean of the Harvard School of Pubwhen blacks and whites with COVID-19 symptoms like lic Health, told me. “That reality is palpable not just in the scourge of police violence that disproportionately a fever and cough sought medical help, blacks were less kills black Americans but in the vestiges of slavery and likely to be given a coronavirus test.

I wonder about doctors who didn’t get black pasegregation that have permeated the social determinants tients tested — or officials who didn’t allocate tests to of health.

“Racism has robbed black Americans from benefit- clinics in black neighborhoods. I’m sure many were welling from the advancements they’ve fought for, bled for meaning and had no idea that they were discriminating. and died for throughout history. That reality manifests But unconscious racial bias is widespread, resulting in in myriad ways — from underfunded schools to the what scholar Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has called “racism gutting of health care and social programs, to financial without racists.”

Scholars have found, for example, that professional baseball umpires are more likely to call strikes when they are of the same race as the pitcher (whatever their race, although this mostly benefits white pitchers). Likewise, professional basketball referees are more likely to call personal fouls against a player of a different race.

Much of the research seems bleak, but three things give me hope. First, many metrics show improvement. Second, robust evidence shows what policies would help. For example, a careful study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine last year showed how we could reduce child poverty by half — hugely reducing racial inequality. What we lack isn’t tools or resources; it’s political will.

My third reason for hope has to do with those biased basketball referees. That research angered the NBA and caused painful controversy — which laid the groundwork for progress. A follow-up study found that after the first research was absorbed, those biased calls disappeared. It appeared that once people were forced to have anguished discussions about racial bias, they were able to overcome it.

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Monday, June 8, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Bonfire of Trump’s vanity

Ivanka Trump carries a handbag with the Bible that President Donald Trump held up as a photo-op prop in front of St. John’s Church after demonstrators had been tear-gassed there, near the White House in Washington, June 4, 2020

By MAUREEN DOWD

M

y mom always spelled out I Street as Eye Street when she addressed mail there, so it wouldn’t be confusing.

On May 30, the eyes of the world were on Eye Street, where The Times’ office is located, as the street became a hellscape of American pain, going up in flames during protests fanning out from the White House.

I kept thinking about the small yellow church around the corner, known as the “Church of Presidents,” where James Madison paid the rent and Abraham Lincoln sat in a pew in the back. It was just a few years ago that Barack Obama and his family sometimes attended church there. A week ago, there was a towering bonfire in front of the church and then a fire in the basement.

How could we possibly, in a brief stretch, have gone from the euphoria of our first black president to the desolation of racial strife ripping apart the country?

I was so happy the day of Obama’s inauguration because it was the first time I had seen my hometown truly integrated. Armed with a bag of croissants and a bottle of Champagne, I made my groggy houseguests get up at 4 a.m. the next day, so we could watch the new era dawn at the Lincoln Memorial.

Beyoncé’s security turned us away — the singer had performed the night before and the guards were still there — but it didn’t matter. We caught a glimpse of Abe in the pink light as the Obama family settled into their new home.

I’ve always cherished Washington’s luminous monuments. So it was excruciating this past week to see the chucklehead who has waged war on our institutions, undermined our laws and values, stoked division at every turn, blundering around defiling the monuments that symbolize the best about America.

After the country was rocked to its soul by the sight of a handcuffed black man dying while being held down by a police officer as those around begged for mercy, President Donald Trump could hardly summon a shred of empathy. His only move was to grab a can of kerosene and cry “Domination!”

Turning the American military against Americans was a scalding tableau that was a nadir even for the former military school bully. The creepy William Barr, who gets to be called “General,” had troops clear out mostly peaceful protesters so Trump could walk through Lafayette Park, preening as a fake tough guy, and pose in front of St. John’s. Ivanka went into her luxe purse to hand him his prop, a Bible, which he held up awkwardly. It’s a wonder his hand did not burst into flames.

That night, the sound of summer in Washington was a

Black Hawk helicopter shadowing the protesters.

This misuse of the military and the sight of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, walking in camouflage while protesters were blasted with chemicals, at long last spurred Jim Mattis to push back. Mattis wrote to The Atlantic that he was “angry and appalled” at Trump for making “a mockery of our Constitution.” He suggested that we all just move beyond the depraved divider if we are to have any hope of uniting the country.

The brutish scene conjured Tuesday at the Lincoln Memorial, with National Guard troops in rows on the steps below the Great Emancipator, was unconscionable. Soldiers ominously stood on the hallowed ground where Marian Anderson sang in 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution would not let her perform at Constitution Hall because she was black, and where Martin Luther King Jr. made his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. Trump tweeted Wednesday that he had done more for black Americans than any president “with the possible exception of” Lincoln.

Lincoln gave his life trying to stop a clash of civilizations, “with malice toward none,” while Trump spends his presidency ginning up a clash of civilizations, with malice toward all.

(When Kayleigh McEnany had the temerity to compare Trump to Churchill, one lawyer I know dryly noted: “We shall fight them on the golf courses; we shall fight them on Twitter; we shall fight them at Mar-a-Lago.”)

On Friday, Trump was so giddy about the surprisingly good jobs report that he mused about getting an RV so he and Melania could drive to New York. Cue “Green Acres.” Since even a man killed by the police should offer Pence-like praise of Dear Leader, Trump blithely observed, “Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying, ‘This is a great thing that’s happening for our country.’”

That afternoon, as protesters in front of St. John’s danced to Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” the president threw racial chum in the Potomac. He tweeted that Drew Brees “should not have taken back his original stance on honoring our magnificent American Flag. OLD GLORY is to be revered … NO KNEELING!” He called Muriel Bowser, the poised black mayor of D.C. who wanted the federal troops out of the capital, “incompetent” and then upgraded her to “grossly incompetent.”

Friday night, he retweeted someone who posted that “Barack Obama put a target on the back of every cop in this country.”

It’s sad to see the tall black fences going up around the White House, turning the “People’s House” into an outpost as dark as the psyche of the man who lives within. But Bowser offered the best troll on the First Troller when she had the words “Black Lives Matter” painted in yellow in front of the White House and St. John’s. She tweeted that she was renaming the area “Black Lives Matter Plaza.”

And that matters.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

19

Avanza proyecto Entreprenuer Challenge, seleccionarán a 10 jóvenes para desarrollar sus ideas negocios Por THE STAR n su segunda fase de selección de jóvenes empreEllenge, sarios, se encuentra la iniciativa Entreprenuer Chaliderada por el Programa de Desarrollo de la

Juventud (PDJ) del Departamento de Desarrollo Económico y Comercio (DDEC) y la organización INprende, así lo anunció el secretario del DDEC, Manuel A. Laboy Rivera.

“Tras lanzar el reto por segundo año consecutivo en el mes de febrero, 280 jóvenes dieron un paso al frente y se registraron para participar del proyecto.

Luego de una evaluación inicial se seleccionaron 125 participantes. Estos jóvenes participaron de capacitaciones grupales que culminaron en el mes de mayo y que fueron adaptadas debido al distanciamiento social para evitar la propagación del Covid-19. Pese a las nuevas condiciones de vida desde mediados de marzo, este grupo de jóvenes no se rindió y lograron a través del uso de la tecnología, completar sus 16 horas de capacitación para el desarrollo de sus modelos de negocios. Perseverar y reinventarse en tiempos difíci-

les es clave para el éxito empresarial. Definitivamente, el talento local reúne estas características y por eso, como lo ha manifestado la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced, es uno de los pilares del desarrollo económico de Puerto Rico”, afirmó Laboy Rivera.

Para la última fase de la iniciativa solo se elegirán los 10 participantes que cumplieron con las 16 horas de capacitación, con ideas de negocios viables y que hayan cumplido con otros requisitos. Los seleccionados tendrán la oportunidad de recibir asesoría individual, validar su idea y exponer su modelo de negocio frente a un panel de expertos, en el evento conocido como Demo Day. Natalia Bonderenko, directora ejecutiva de INprende, destacó “este año, pese a los retos que nos trajo la pandemia, logramos digitalizar el programa y hacerle llegar a los participantes la herramienta complementaria a sus hogares. Los objetivos de la primera fase del programa se cumplieron en su totalidad y en el tiempo estipulado. Tuvimos participación perfecta, la motivación, y ganas de continuar hacia adelante predominó en todo momento. Los 125 jóvenes organi-

zaron y estructuraron sus ideas de negocio a través de la metodología educativa de Entrepreneur Challenge sin ninguna limitación”.

Por su parte, el director del Programa de Desarrollo de la Juventud del DDEC, Roberto Carlos Pagán Santiago, explicó “todos los participantes de la primera fase que cumplieron con las 16 horas de capacitación empresarial recibirán un certificado que les permitirá solicitar ayudas económicas e incentivos para jóvenes empresarios provisto por el DDEC. Mientas que, durante el Demo Day, los jueces seleccionarán los 4 ganadores que obtendrán mentoría individualizada para desarrollar su empresa y premios ascendentes a $25,000”.

El secretario del DDEC, detalló que el primer lugar recibirá un premio de $10,000 para comenzar el proceso establecer su negocio. Mientras que el segundo modelo de empresa seleccionado, contará con una aportación de $8,000. Entretanto, el tercer lugar recibirá $5,000 y el cuarto premio será de $2,000. Estos fondos son asignados por el Programa de Desarrollo de la Juventud del DDEC.

Fundación Hospital Pediátrico suministra equipo de protección personal y otros recursos en respuesta a la pandemia Por THE STAR uando el país comenzó a enfrentar la emergencia C por el coronavirus, conscientes de la situación la Fundación Hospital Pediátrico (FHP) estableció el Fondo

Extraordinario COVID-19 para adquirir los recursos necesarios para proteger a los profesionales de la salud que combaten en la primera línea de la batalla. La respuesta con aportaciones en metálico de empresas privadas, organizaciones y de la ciudadanía a nuestro llamado alcanzó un total de más de $240,000.00. Asimismo, se recibieron unas donaciones en especie (in kind) por un valor de más de $175,000.00 para la adquisición de equipo de protección personal (PPE) y suministros esenciales para la comunidad del Hospital Pediátrico Universitario, Dr. Antonio Ortiz del Centro Médico de Río Piedras.

“Todas las ayudas pequeñas y grandes recibidas fueron muy apreciadas y esenciales para lograr nuestro cometido. Agradecemos la confianza que estos grupos depositaron en nuestra organización para lograr adquirir el material de equipo de protección personal, ventiladores y otros materiales necesarios en el momento. La respuesta inmediata nos permitió entregar estas donaciones de una forma efectiva y rápida”, expresó Rebeca Quiñones, directora ejecutiva de la Fundación Hospital Pediátrico.

En equipo de protección personal, la Fundación continúa con su compromiso de repartir artículos de un inventario aproximado de más de 50,000 que incluye guantes, mascarillas, batas, protectores de rostros “face shields”, hand sanitizers y alcohol entre otros. De igual manera, la FHP adquirió dos ventiladores y está en el proceso de adquirir dos adicionales. Por otro lado, se continúa en la entrega de medicamentos como lo son; albuterol y aero chambers y equipo especializado de

limpieza. Además, de miles de artículos de primera necesidad como lo son; pañales, toallas húmedas, ropa de dormir, fórmula y artículos de higiene personal.

“La oportunidad de continuar apoyando al Hospital Pediátrico con las herramientas necesarias le permite a su excelente equipo de trabajo ofrecerles a nuestros niños lo que necesitan y merecen, nos llena de gran satisfacción. Todo esto ha sido posible al desprendimiento y compromiso de todos nuestros donantes que inmediatamente respondieron a nuestro llamado para aportar y juntos enfrentar esta emergencia. A nombre de nuestra junta de directores, pero más aún de nuestros niños, médicos, enfermeras y todo el personal de salud que se beneficia de estas ayudas muchas gracias”, indicó Manuel Cidre, presidente de la Junta de Directores de la Fundación Hospital Pediátrico.

Por otro lado, esto ha permitido que la FHP pueda compartir el equipo y las donaciones con otros hospitales como lo son: Hospital Industrial, Hospital Cardiovascular de Puerto Rico y del Caribe, Hospital de Trauma de Centro Médico, Hospital Universitario de Adultos (UDH), Hospital Oncológico, Clínicas del Recinto de Ciencias Médicas en el Reparto Metropolitano, Hospital Universitario Ramón Ruiz Arnau de Bayamón (HURRA), Hospital UPR Carolina-Dr. Federico Trilla, Escuela de Farmacia UPR, Sala de Emergencias de ASEM, Hospital del Niño, Recinto de Ciencias Médicas UPR y otras entidades dentro del Hospital Pediátrico Universitario.

“Nos enorgullece el poder brindar ayuda adicional para proteger y equipar a nuestros profesionales de la salud del Hospital Pediátrico y poder extender nuestra mano de ayuda a otros hospitales y entidades. El recibir de parte de todos ellos ese agradecimiento genuino, de corazón, nos llena de energía para continuar aportando

con nuestro granito de arena a la salud de nuestro país”, añadió Quiñones, quien a su vez agradeció la aportación de las empresas privadas que apoyaron la iniciativa.

Las empresas y entidades que contribuyeron con donaciones en metálicos son: Detergente Ace, Club Rotario de Río Piedras, Fundación Banco Popular, Fundación Bechara, Sam’s Club, Triple S, Assurant, The Allergan Foundation, Red Ventures, Autos Vega Group y Baxter.

También, se recibieron donaciones necesarias de PPE para medicinas y otros recursos por parte de: Correa Foundation, Extra Bases, Ford Motor Company, Destilería Serralles, Multy Medical, Tony Mojena-Manos por Puerto Rico, Veltek Associates, Seko, Suiza Dairy Corporation, Ricky Martin Foundation, BPPR, Walmart, Flatiron Pediatrics, SPS Specialty Pharmacy, Atlantic University College e Hispanic Leader Group.

Otras entidades y empresas que apoyaron con materiales y esfuerzo fueron: Mall of San Juan, BPPR, Pedro Capó, Triple S, Mars, Rovira, Pan Pepín, MMM, Frito Lay, Gerber, Instituto Español, Rosa T. Hopgood y Viviana Rivera.

“La pobreza en Puerto Rico será mayor que antes de la pandemia por lo que continuaremos ahora más que nunca apoyando a los pacientitos y familias necesitadas con equipos de protección personal, artículos de primera necesidad y vales de comida durante su hospitalización”, apuntó la directora ejecutiva de la FHP. Para continuar apoyando puede contribuir accediendo a www.fundacionhospitalpediatrico.org o ATH Móvil/ FHP/donar. La tienda online está disponible en shopfundacionhospitalpediatrico.org. Si desea, puede enviar un cheque a nombre de la Fundación Hospital Pediátrico al PO Box 10728, San Juan PR 00922 o llamar al 939-450-7090.

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Monday, June 8, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Can Ballet come alive online?

By GIA COURLAS

W

hen Sara Mearns wavered for a millisecond during a supported pirouette in George Balanchine’s “Diamonds,” my breath caught in my throat. I forgot where I was: in the kitchen drinking coffee on a rainy Saturday morning.

I cherish performances by Mearns and Russell Janzen, her partner, but I didn’t think “Diamonds,” which New York City Ballet streamed in May, would be the ballet to sweep me into the sensation of liveness — losing track of time, the chills, the whole nine yards.

Up to that point, little that I had seen online affected me so palpably. And while I admire “Diamonds,” it can feel distant, with a thin performative line between poise and anguish. That it felt authentic was a relief because, like it or not, video is our reality now.

As spring seasons are lost and debuts and premieres erased, ballet companies have been releasing digital content at breakneck speed. The two major companies usually at Lincoln Center at this time of year, American Ballet Theater, which would now be celebrating its 80th anniversary at the Metropolitan Opera House, and New York City Ballet, which would just have finished its season, have reimag- The two major companies usually at Lincoln Center at this time of year, American Ballet Theater, which would ined programming for your screens. Quality varies. now be celebrating its 80th anniversary at the Metropolitan Opera House, and New York City Ballet, which would But digital programming doesn’t just mean a straight- just have finished its season, have reimagined programming for your screens. forward performance. Before the coronavirus pandemic, ancillary experiences like discussions, open rehearsals and teaching variations. In her apartment. For you.

Arts organizations are hurting, and no one can blame lecture-demonstrations tended to fall under the category of “Variations with Bella,” which like Fairchild’s inter- Ballet Theater for going ahead with its gala: Money is needdonor-friendly fare. They scratched the surface or seemed views, is on YouTube and separate from her company’s ed. But its hourlong presentation last month felt more like overly staged. digital season, is another lively program to come out of the a branch of its marketing arm than a company taking a stab That has changed. Now when extra content with sub- quarantine. In life and in her dancing, Boylston is full of at making art online. There was more talking than dancing stance and depth is added to the mix, it helps to bring a casual joie de vivre; where classical interpretations in story — and too many awkward toasts from well-wishers like Al dance to life through accumulation, immersion — especial- ballets can lean toward melodrama, she lends them a fresh, Roker, Katie Couric and Jennifer Garner. ly with artists guiding the way. carefree modernity. In an Instagram post featuring “La EsI wasn’t expecting much under sheltering-at-home A podcast places a dance in broader context; a tuto- meralda,” she substituted a frozen pizza (wrapped in plas- conditions, but the gala was trivial — and sad. Throughout rial shows a ballerina dancing her heart out — and faltering, tic) for a tambourine. the program an unspoken question persisted: Is Ballet Thetoo — in her apartment. Taken together, this braiding of You’re not in a lecture hall; you’re in her kitchen. But ater essential in the age of a pandemic? Is ballet? forms may not create the feeling of a live performance, but she’s not joking around as she demonstrates her variations Clearly, of the two big New York companies City Balit generates an authentic excitement: It paves the way for and shares — slightly out of breath — details from coaches, let has an advantage: It has been able to stream works in remembering that spirit of aliveness. as well as her own opinions. For “Giselle,” she stressed that their entirety this season because it already had a process in When watching a dance, you’re faced with two it should look natural. “You’re a peasant girl,” she said. place. About 10 years ago, the company negotiated with its choices: to daydream or to pay attention. In recent weeks, “You haven’t gone to dance school. You just taught your- unions to have broader promotional capabilities, including more than the companies it has been the dancers — their self, basically.” filming some performances for its social media channels. resiliency is astounding — who have given me reason to Her series shows more of what makes Ballet Theater Ballet Theater is not in the same position. Union ispay attention, from their online classes to their interview distinctive, unfortunately, than any of the company’s offi- sues and licensing rights prevent it from broadcasting persegments. cial digital offerings on its website. Ballet Theater is strug- formances that were recorded for programs like Live From I can’t get enough of Megan Fairchild’s YouTube gling to find an imaginative digital voice. It can be puzzling. Lincoln Center and Dance in America, although negotiachannel. A principal at City Ballet, Fairchild is working her And it can be downright strange. During its recent digital tions to secure rights for some of those are in progress. The way through the dance world with her informal talk show: gala, the company compared the coronavirus pandemic to company’s archival recordings, shot from the back of the It’s not only of the moment, but it reminds me of her glori- “Swan Lake.” As ambulances wailed past my window, the house, are regarded as records of performances and the ous dancing: fast and seamless, full of intelligence and wit. analogy seemed dubious at best. The logic had something quality is not ideal.

Dancers are opening up their world and their art — to do with a heroine’s ability to push through her fears and But that isn’t the only reason Ballet Theater isn’t getto you. Isabella Boylston, the Ballet Theater principal, is hold onto hope. Is “Killing Eve” about the coronavirus, too? ting the job done right. What sets the company apart — its

The San Juan Daily Star arsenal of story ballets, its emphasis on acting — is also what can make it seem stuck in another time: the dusty glamour of the 1980s. A digital discussion about the female roles in “La Bayadère” with Boylston and the former principal, Cynthia Harvey, was telling. Harvey, who played the original Gamzatti, spoke about being inspired by Alexis on “Dynasty.”

Now it’s basing much of its digital output on reliving memories. In a recurring video feature, dancers and staff look back at performances at the Met. In one, Susan Jones, the principal ballet mistress, explains the plot of “La Bayadère” while pictures pop up, decorated with cartoon emojis of hearts and tears. It undermines the seriousness of the art form.

But City Ballet has created a universe for its ballets.

In addition to showing complete works, there is its weekly podcast, often hosted by dancer Silas Farley, which started before the pandemic and improves each week; and City Ballet Essentials, a series of movement workshops that focus on specific works.

For one about George Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments,” the principal dancer Adrian Danchig-Waring spoke about the ballet — including how Balanchine was influenced by African American vernacular dance, which is not the sort of thing you see in program notes, but should.

Danchig-Waring led a barre warmup to get participants, he

Monday, June 8, 2020

said, “settled in their bodies.” Then he taught choreography, one phrase at a time.

It was not only detailed and serious, it was somehow holistic. Danchig-Waring, with his stellar direction, was not facile; the workshop was predicated on the mindbody connection and it had a clear result: To get inside of the dance.

My “Diamonds” experience was enhanced by a pair of podcasts in which Farley interviewed former principal Merrill Ashley and Mearns. Each was strangely thrilling.

Ashley cried out as she described the dynamism and speed of the finale: “You can’t believe he could have built it any more,” she said, referring to Balanchine, “and he does!”

The ballet’s overwhelming mix of beauty, complexity and power, she continued, “just hits you in your soul somewhere.”

And Mearns’ impassioned play-by-play of dancing the ballet — what she is feeling, thinking in every moment — made the performance come to life again. In preparation, Mearns and Janzen had worked with Suzanne Farrell, the original lead; Mearns spoke about how Farrell changed penchés — when a dancer tilts forward while extending the back leg — into arabesques and told them that in “Diamonds,” the spatial pattern was about etching diagonals and angles onto floor in the shape of the actual jewel.

She also told them not to try to be as big as Tchai-

21

kovsky. “You’re not going to win,” Mearns said, recalling her words.

Were those changes part of the reason their “Diamonds” was so breathtaking? To a certain degree. Beyond that, though, I know that the ballet will mean something more to me after the pandemic; more than its outward beauty, I’ll feel its essence, and that’s because of digital programming.

But it was also about Mearns and Janzen’s approach: calm and internal. We had to lean into them; they were more in the moment — in their moment — then they were performing for us.

During Fairchild’s YouTube interview with Mearns, she spoke of how present her friend’s dancing is. “I don’t know if you know what you do, but it’s like everything has such a care to it,” Fairchild said. “And it’s almost like you don’t just step. It’s with such care. It’s almost like you’re dancing on glass.”

Is it that authentic care and purpose transcend a screen? In the end, it’s not just the ballets we’re missing, it’s the dancers that make them come to life. Janzen and Mearns, Fairchild and Boylston don’t just bring their bodies to the stage. They bring their being, their light, their minds — the way they move through the world when they aren’t dancing. And they have never been more essential than now.

Art Basel cancels September fair converted into an online fair.

On April 27, Art Basel wrote to concerned exhibitors sayrganizers of Art Basel, the centerpiece of the European ing that if the Swiss fair were canceled it would refund prepaid art market calendar, have canceled the show in Basel, fees. Organizers also said that 25% of booth fees retained after Switzerland, in September because of ongoing health the cancellation of the Hong Kong fair could be rolled over into and safety concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic. fees for subsequent Art Basel fairs.

The 50th anniversary edition of the event, featuring more However, Claes Nordenhake, an Art Basel participant than 250 international galleries, had originally been scheduled based in Berlin and Stockholm, and other dealers coordinated to take place in June, but had been postponed to Sept. 15-20. a letter of response from participating galleries, sent on May The Swiss Federal Council had delayed its deci30, that urged organizers to reconsider holding the sion on whether the fair could go ahead until later fair. “Art Basel is the most important and powerful art this month. Uncertainty about the regulatory envifair in the world but even in the best possible scenarronment, together with concerns about the financial io, an edition held this year would be a mere shadow risks for exhibitors and partners, as well as “ongoing of its established stature and imperil its reputation,” impediments to international travel,” had been addithe letter said. Signed by more than 50 dealers, it contional factors in the decision to cancel, Art Basel said cluded: “We believe that risks are simply too great in a statement. and that regrettably 2020 is a lost year.”

“We are acutely aware that our galleries are “I really understand it was a difficult decision,” facing unprecedented challenges and economic difNordenhake said, adding, “I’m very relieved. It would ficulties, and we had fervently hoped to support the have been a major threat to our health and our finances. If you look at the demographic of the collectors art market’s recovery with a successful fair in September,” said Marc Spiegler, global director of Art Basel. at Art Basel, many of them are over 60. There would “Unfortunately, the uncertainties that we face remain have been very few of them at the fair.” too high.”

The 2019 edition of Art Basel, held last June, This is another major blow to Art Basel’s beleaattracted 93,000 visitors. guered Swiss parent company, MCH Group. Both the As was the case with Art Basel Hong Kong, collectors will now be able to view the fair online. A vir2020 and 2021 editions of the Baselworld watch fair tual version of the fair will go live from June 19-26, — traditionally the organizer’s biggest moneymaking Visitors to Art Basel, a premier modern and contemporary art fair, in June 2019. with preview days from June 17-19. event — were canceled last month.

By SCOTT REYBURN

O

“To lose both these events is a significant blow to MCH and its shareholders,” said Todd Levin, an art adviser based in New York who is a regular visitor to Art Basel. “Is it a blow for the art world? Obviously, it’s a disappointment, but most people were expecting it,” Levin added. “It’s an art fair where you go to buy stuff. If you don’t go one year, you go another.”

Art Basel Hong Kong, scheduled for March 17-21, was scratched in February because of the pandemic and

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Monday, June 8, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

What will it take to reopen the world to travel?

Countries are rebuilding relationships under enormous economic pressure, while keeping a wary eye on a virus that’s not going away soon.

By DAMIEN CAVE

A

fter months of locked-down borders, countries that have stifled the coronavirus are trying to choreograph a risky dance: how to bring back visitors without importing another burst of uncontrolled contagion.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania dropped restrictions for one another May 15 while keeping out everyone else. Australia and New Zealand are planning to revive unrestricted flights within their own “travel bubble,” which Fiji, Israel and Costa Rica are clamoring to join.

In China, cities are fast-tracking corporate charter flights, although Beijing remains sealed off. In Cyprus, tourists can get in only if they carry health certificates proving they tested negative for COVID-19.

International travel has always been a proxy for trust among nations and people, but the pandemic has poisoned the air. Now, relationships are being rebuilt under enormous economic pressure, with a wary eye on a pathogen that is not going away anytime soon.

The calculations of risk and reward vary.

Some countries are eager to find ways to reopen doors to people from places, like the United States, that are still struggling with the virus but are important sources of trade and tourism. Others are scanning the globe for safer, if less lucrative, partners.

The challenge for every country involves both epidemiology and psychology. Trips for business and pleasure must have enough restrictions to make travelers feel safe but not so many that no one wants to bother.

“We’ll all get back to moving again but in a different way,” said Scott Tasker, a general manager at Auckland Airport in New Zealand. “This is a global shock to the aviation and tourism industry, the likes of which we’ve never seen.”

In interviews, airport executives, tourism officials and travel analysts, along with investors, doctors and government officials, described a momentous effort that is just starting to coalesce.

They predicted a mix of precautions and incentives. Masks, fever checks, contact-tracing apps and even coronavirus throat swabs will

make travel more agonizing, even as discounts and smaller crowds soften the blow. A reduction in flights will mean more connections and longer journeys, testing travelers’ patience.

The baby steps toward a reopened world start with the healthy — the nations that have low rates of death and few active cases.

The Baltic countries have gone first, and Australia and New Zealand are following a similar path. But even for countries with close ties, it is like starting from scratch.

Border agencies, airports, airlines and health officials in Australia and New Zealand have spent more than a month trying to work out a proposal that would let travelers avoid the mandatory 14day quarantine now in place for a smattering of international arrivals. They hope to have the system up and running by September.

Tasker, the Auckland Airport official, said the biggest hurdle was making sure that local transmission of the virus was as close to eliminated as possible. Beyond that, travelers can expect new protocols and constant reminders about social distancing, health and hygiene from booking through return. Australia’s coronavirus tracking app, COVIDSafe, could also be used to share location data between both countries.

If it works for the two island neighbors, the bubble could grow to include other locations.

Many European countries are also starting out with a restricted guest list. Denmark and Norway are opening to each other June 15, for example, but are excluding Sweden, where a looser lockdown has let the virus proliferate.

With every phase of reopening, officials said, more movement means more risk and more work, for governments but also travelers.

“It’s just not going to be as free-flowing and spontaneous as it once was,” said Margy Osmond, chief executive of Australia’s largest tourism association and co-chair of the group working on travel between that country and New Zealand. “I don’t know that it will be more expensive — the jury is still out on that — but it will mean the average traveler has to take more responsibility.”

So will everyone else involved with travel.

At many of the world’s busiest airports, which are just starting to see upticks in traffic after declines of 90% or more, all employees now wear masks and gloves. In Dubai’s giant mall of an airport in the United Arab Emirates, all arriving passengers are scanned for fevers with thermal imaging technology, which is also being rolled out at transport hubs in Europe and the United States.

The San Juan Daily Star Airlines are instituting their own forms of protection. All over the world, they are reducing food and drink service (further diluting its charms) and prioritizing masks for everyone. Ryanair, the popular European budget carrier, requires that passengers ask permission to use the bathroom so that lines do not form.

Smaller-scale collaborations are also beginning to work out what to do with travelers from higher-risk countries.

In June, 500 volunteers will fly from San Francisco to Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, as part of a study by Taiwanese officials and Stanford University. The passengers will be tested for the virus before boarding and then three, five, seven, 10 and 14 days after arrival. Researchers hope to figure out what is the latest day a positive test could emerge — with the goal of shortening the current 14-day quarantine.

“The most important thing is for travelers to feel safe to fly again and for the countries receiving the travelers to feel that they have done a good job in protecting their borders,” said Dr. Jason Wang, director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention at Stanford Medicine.

Some companies are already embarking on journeys of their own. In April, business travel was the first thing to open up between South Korea and some parts of China. Last week, a group of German businesses chartered a flight to Shanghai with 200 workers, some being “fast-tracked” with proof of a negative test and an abbreviated quarantine.

Private jet use is also surging — why share a plane if you don’t have to? — but even for the 1%, first-class treatment may include testing before you go, masks on board and a couple of days locked in quarantine, followed by more screening. A passenger on that flight from Germany tested positive for the virus Sunday.

No wonder analysts expect international travel to recover with the speed of a casual stroll.

“We think short-haul international comes back in the next two to three years, but the longhaul stuff comes back in five to seven years,” said Helane Becker, managing director and senior airline analyst at Cowen, a New York investment bank.

Even that may be optimistic. While places like Sicily and Japan are looking at flight or lodging subsidies to lure visitors, long flights in a mask have limited appeal. And the white-collar crowd — in finance, in consulting — that once traveled without much thought has discovered that it can get the job done without being away from home for 100 or more days a year.

Old habits in corporate travel will eventually return, said David Barger, the former chief execu-

Monday, June 8, 2020

tive of JetBlue, but only after new norms and stability emerge.

“If you’re the person who travels a lot, you want predictability,” he said. “Until there’s certainty, you’ll have people saying, ‘I’ll do the Zoom call, or instead of six trips a year, maybe I’ll do two.’ ” So perhaps the real return to travel will begin closer to home. In the car.

For the foreseeable future, places that were popular with both foreign tourists and locals — Byron Bay in Australia, Disney World, the French Riviera — will probably look more like they did in the 1970s, before deregulation made air travel more affordable. Think of highways with cars packed full of gear and children in the back asking “Are we there yet?”

Some countries, including New Zealand, have set aside money for a tourism reset, encouraging providers to serve local customers and higher-value visitors.

Cruise ships, whose image has been battered by coronavirus outbreaks, are also rapidly adapt-

Car traffic picks up in Paris after months of lockdown

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TRAVEL

ing, with increased spacing among everyone on board.

But some regular travelers have learned that they can be perfectly happy not traveling at all.

Paul Davies, a respected physicist who teaches at Arizona State University, spent years bouncing around to science conferences and lectures.

But when the pandemic hit, he was in Sydney, where he used to live — and that is where he was quite happy to remain.

He noted that during World War II, when travel was severely constricted, great discoveries occurred as the world’s sharpest minds stayed home and mulled the universe.

“Many of us have been saying for years that we have too many committees, far too many meetings and not nearly enough quiet thinking time,” Davies said.

“Jetting around the world and doing all these meetings — personally I find myself a bit uncomfortable doing that now. And I think that if people get more into the habit, this could be a better way of conducting our affairs.”

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Monday, June 8, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Foods to cut dementia risk

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

E

ating foods high in flavonoids — a group of nutrients found in many fruits and vegetables — may lower your risk for dementia, researchers report.

The study, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, looked at 2,801 men and women who were 50 and older and free of dementia at the start. Over an average of 20 years of followup, researchers gathered diet information at five periodic health examinations; during that time, 193 of the participants developed Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.

Compared with those in the 15th percentile or lower for flavonoid intake, those in the 60th or higher had a 42% to 68% lower risk for dementia, depending on the type of flavonoid consumed.

Intake of one type of flavonoid, anthocyanins, abundant in blueberries, strawberries and red wine, had the strongest association with lowered risk. Apples, pears, oranges, bananas and tea also contributed.

The study controlled for many health and behavioral characteristics, including how strongly participants adhered to the government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which in addition to fruits and vegetables emphasize whole grains, lean meats and other heart-healthy foods.

The senior author, Paul F. Jacques, a scientist with the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, said that the amount consumed by those who benefited the most was not large. Their monthly average was about seven half-cup servings of strawberries or blueberries, eight apples or

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pears, and 17 cups of tea.

“It doesn’t take much,” he said. “A couple

of servings of berries a week, maybe an apple or two.”

Sharing bikes, cutting accidents

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

C

ould bike share programs lead to greater cycling safety?

In April 2015, Philadelphia introduced a bike share program. By 2019, there were more than 1,300 bikes and 400 pedal-assisted electric bicycles available. People used them for about 50,000 trips a month.

Before the introduction of the bike share program, the rate of bicycle-car accidents had been gradually increasing. By May 2015, the month after the introduction of the program, the rate was twice that of January 2010.

But the researchers, writing in the American Journal of Public Health, found that from that time through the end of 2018, the rate decreased

by an average of 13% a year, despite the increases over those years in the number of bicycles on city streets, and even though Philadelphia made no major infrastructure changes, like adding many protected bike lanes.

The lead author, Ghassan B. Hamra, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said that it appears there is safety in numbers: The more bikes on the road, the more car drivers adapt to their presence, and the safer cyclists may be.

“We all know that bike riding is a healthy activity, physically and mentally,” he said, “but there might be concerns that if you introduce a bike share program there will be negative consequences. We saw no evidence of that in Philadelphia.”

The San Juan Daily Star guiente propiedad: URBANA: Parcela E-9 de la Urbanización ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO Villas del Sol, sita en el Barrio DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- Martin González del MuniciNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA pio de Carolina, Puerto Rico, SALA SUPERIOR DE CARO- con una cabida superficial de LINA. 244.121 metros cuadrados.

BANCO POPULAR DE equivalentes a 0.0621 cuerdas, colindando por el NORTE, en PUERTO RICO 9.870 metros con la parcela PARTE DEMANDANTE VS. D-9; por el SUR, en 9.119 meEL SECRETARIO tros, con la Calle Gijón; por el DE LA VIVIENDA Y ESTE, en 25.00 metros con la DESARROLLO URBANO parcela E-8; y por el OESTE, en 24.249 metros con la calle T/C/C SECRETARY Mérida. Enclava una casa que OF HOUSING AND mide 22’-9” de ancho por 38’URBAN DEVELOPMENT 8” de largo y tiene en el primer OF WASHINGTON nivel, portal, vestíbulo, baño de visita, sala-comedor, cocina, (HUD) POR SِÍ Y EN lavandería con despensa y esREPRESENTACIÓN calera que conduce al segundo DE ESTADOS UNIDOS piso, con un patio de servicio y DE AMÉRICA; THE área para estacionar dos automóviles, ambos, descubiertos, MORTGAGE LOAN al frente de la casa. El segundo CO. INC. MIGUEL nivel consta de dos dormitorios, ÁNGEL BURGOS tres closets, baño, dormitorios RIVERA, DENNISSE master, baño master, closet RAMOS MARTÍNEZ Y vestidor y escalera que conLA SOCIEDAD LEGAL duce al primer piso. Este solar está afecto a una servidumbre DE GANANCIALES que discurre a lo largo de sus COMPUESTA POR colindancias Norte y Oeste con AMBOS, FULANO Y un ancho de 150 metros a favor de la Puerto Rico Telephone MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES Company. La propiedad y la de hipoteca constan DESCONOCIDOS DEL escritura inscritas al folio 115 del tomo PAGARÉ 1377 de Carolina, Finca 52228.

PARTE DEMANDADA Registro de la Propiedad de CIVIL NÚM. CA2020CV00177. Carolina, Sección II. Inscripción SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE segunda. La parte demandada PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO POR deberá presentar su alegación LA VÍA JUDICIAL. EDICTO. responsiva a través del Sistema ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉ- Unificado de Administración y RICA EL PRESIDENTE DE Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al LOS E.E.U.U. EL ESTADO LI- cual puede acceder utilizando BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO la siguiente dirección electróniRICO. ca: https://unired.ramajudicial.

A: THE MORTGAGE pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso LOAN CO. INC a sus deberá presentar su alegación últimas direcciones responsiva en la secretaría del conocidas: COUNTRY Tribunal. Se le advierte que, si CLUB 915, AVE ROBERTO no contesta la demanda, radiSANCHEZ VILELLA (AVE. cando el original de la contestación en este Tribunal y enCAMPO RICO), SAN copia de la contestación JUAN, PR 00924 y URB viando a la abogada de la Parte DeRIO PIEDRAS HTS, 220 mandante, Lcda. Belma AlonCALLE RUBICON, SAN so García, cuya dirección es: JUAN, PR 00926-3218. PO Box 3922, Guaynabo, PR Queda usted notificado que en 00970-3922, Teléfono y Fax: este Tribunal se ha radicado (787) 789-1826, correo elecdemanda sobre cancelación trónico: oficinabelmaalonso@ de pagaré extraviado por la vía gmail.com, dentro del término judicial. El 29 de abril de 2005, de treinta (30) días de la publiMiguel Ángel Burgos Rivera y cación de este edicto, excluyénsu esposa Dennisse Ramos dose el día de la publicación, se Martínez, constituyeron una le anotará la rebeldía y se le hipoteca en Bayamón, Puerto dictará Sentencia en su contra, Rico, conforme a la Escritura concediendo el remedio solicinúm. 50 autorizada por el nota- tado sin más citarle ni oírle. EXrio Jaime Manuel Rosa Malavé PEDIDO bajo mi firma y el sello en garantía de un pagaré por del Tribunal, hoy 19 de mayo de la suma de $11,095.40 a favor 2020, en Carolina, Puerto Rico. de Secretary of Housing and LCDA. MARILYN APONTE SECRETARIA Urban Development of Wash- RODRIGUEZ, ington (HUD), o a su orden, sin REGIONAL. ELIANN REYES intereses y vencedero el 1ro MORALES, SECRETARIA AUde enero de 2031, sobre la si- XILIAR DEL TRIBUNAL.

LEGAL NOTICE

@

staredictos1@outlook.com

Monday, June 8, 2020 LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE GUAYNABO.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Parte Demandante

MILAGROS VAZQUEZ PEREZ

Parte Demandada CIVIL NUM., GB2019CV01290.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO ENMENDADO POR EDICTO EMITIDO POR TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA DE PUERTO RICO, SALA DE GUAYNABO.

otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Expedido en Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, a 28 de mayo de 2020. Lcda. Laura I Santa Sanchez, Sec Regional.

Diamar T Gonzalez Barreto, Sec del Tribunal.

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

Reverse Mortgage Funding, LLC DEMANDANTE VS.

Sucesión de César Augusto Berríos López, t/c/c César Berríos López, A: MILAGROS VAZQUEZ t/c/c César Berríos PEREZ, parte demandada compuesta por Claudia en el caso de: Banco Berríos, Tanya Zrebiec, Popular ele Puerto Rico Fulano de Tal y Sutano vs. Milagros Vázquez de Tal como posibles Pérez, Civil Núm: herederos de nombres B2019CV01290, sobre desconocidos, Centro Cobro de Dinero. de Recaudaciones Se le notifica al usted, MILAMunicipales; y a los GROS VAZQUEZ PEREZ, que Estados Unidos de en la Demanda que origino América. este caso, se alega que usted le adeuda a la parte demandante, BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO, las siguientes cantidades: a. $35,708.93 de principal, $3,386.86 de intereses devengados hasta.el 6 de agosto de 2019, al tipo pactado de 12.4870%, más los intereses que se devenguen de ahi en adelante hasta el total y completo pago de la obligación, $81.15 de cargos por mora, y la cuantía de $3,562.69 pactada para !as costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado. La deuda es por concepto de un préstamo que le fue desembolsado por la demandante y cuyos últimos cuatro dígitos son 0103. Se le emplaza 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 representen por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaria del tribunal. Deberán notificar a la licenciada: María S. Jiménez Meléndez al PO Box 9023632, San Juan, Puerto Rico 009023632; teléfono: (787) 723-2455; abogada de la parte demandante, con copia de la contestación a la demanda. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referído termino, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM. BY2019CV07115.

SOBRE: Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: Claudia Berríos y Tanya Zrebiec como miembro de la Sucesión de César Augusto Berríos López, t/c/c César Berríos López, t/c/c César Berríos

POR LA PRESENTE, se les emplaza y se les notifica que se ha presentado en la Secretaria de este Tribunal la Demanda del caso del epígrafe solicitando la ejecución de hipoteca y el cobro de dinero relacionado al pagaré suscrito a favor de AAA Concordia Mortgage Corporation, o a su orden, por la suma principal de $292,500.00, con intereses computados sobre la misma desde su fecha hasta su total y completo pago a razón de la tasa de interés de 2.87% anual, la cual será ajustada mensualmente, obligándose además al pago de costas, gastos y desembolsos del litigio, más honorarios de abogados en una suma de $29,250.00, equivalente al 10% de la suma principal original. Este pagaré fue suscrito bajo el affidávit número 29,308 ante el notario Luis O. Dávila Alemán. Lo anterior surge de la hipoteca constituida mediante la escritura número 654 otorgada el 18 de

(787) 743-3346

25 noviembre de 2008, ante el mismo notario público, inscrita al folio 83 del tomo de 1,015, finca número 35,840, Sección de Guaynabo. La Hipoteca Revertida grava la propiedad que se describe a continuación: “URBANA: Propiedad Horizontal: CONDOMiNIO DE APARTAMETOS SAN FRANCISCO JAVIER, Edificio “B”, Apartamento número “B” CiNCO (B-5), Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. Apartamento residencial de forma irregular localizado en la Tercera Planta de! Edificio “B” del Condominio de Apartamentos San Francisco Javier, situado en la Calle San José, entre la Calle Teresa y el Camino Alejandrino del Barrio Frailes del término municipal de Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, con un área aproximada de mil ciento cuarenta y seis punto ochenta y siete pies cuadrados, equivalentes a CIENTO SEIS PUNTO CINCUENTA Y OCHO METROS CUADRADOS (106.58 M.C.).Sus linderos son los siguientes: por el NORTE, en cuarenta y seis pies once pulgadas, con pared medianera que lo separa del Apartamento “B” seis, pasillo y elemento exterior común; por el SUR, con cuarenta y nueve pies once pulgadas, con elemento exterior común; por el ESTE, en veintinueve pies cinco pulgadas y media con pasillo y pared exterior común que lo separa de!

Apartamento “A” seis; y por el OESTE, en veintinueve pies y cinco pulgadas y media, con elemento exterior común. Este apartamento goza del uso exclusivo de un área común limitada de aproximadamente de setecientos ochenta y nueve puto cuarenta y tres pies cuadrados, equivalentes a SETENTA Y TRES PUNTO TREINTA Y SIETE METROS CUADRADOS (73.37 M.C.), que es parte de la Azotea según surge de los Planos del Condominio y cuyo acceso es a través de una escalera espiral situada dentro del Apartamento.El mantenimiento de esta área será responsabilidad del titular del apartamento lo que pueda constituir en dicha área estará en consonancia con el Plano entregado al primer comprador con las escrituras de individualización. Consta de sala, comedor, cocina. “laundry”, dos baños, tres dormitorios. La puerta de entrada de este apartamento esta situada en su lindero Norte. Le corresponde cobro elemento común limitado estacionamiento identificado con el Número Ciento veinticinco (125). Este apartamento tiene una participación de cero cero uno tres tres ocho por ciento (001338%), en los elementos comunes generales del condominio” Finca 35,840, inscrita al folio 80 del tomo 1,015 de Guaynabo, Registro

de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección de Guaynabo. Se apercibe y advierte a ustedes como personas desconocidas, que deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Administración y Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección: electrónica: https://unired.jamajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal. De no contestar la demanda radicando el original de la contestación ante la secretaria del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Guaynabo, y notificar copia de la contestación de esta a la parte demandante por conducto de su abogada, GLS LEGAL SERVICES, LLC, Atención: Lcda. Charline Michelle Jiménez Echevarría, Dirección: P.O. Box 367308, San Juan, P.R. 00936-7308, Teléfono: 787-758-6550, dentro de los próximos 60 días a partir de la publicación de este emplazamiento por edicto, que será publicado una sola vez en un periódico de circulación diaria general en la isla dé Puerto Rico, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará sentencia, concediendo el remedio solicitando en la Demanda sin más citarle ni oírle. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal hoy 6 de mayo de 2020. Lcda. Laura I Santa Sanchez, Sec Regional. f/Sara Rosa Villegas, Sec Trib.

Conf I.

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

CONSEJO DE TITULARES DEL CONDOMINIO ESTANCIAS DEL REY DEMANDANTE Vs.

JORGE RAMIREZ DELGADO, JANE Y JOHN DOE

DEMANDADO CIVIL NUM. CG2019CV02404.

SALA 802. SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO, PROCEDIMIENTO ORDINARIO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: JORGE RAMIREZ DELGADO

EL (LA) SECRETARIO(A) le notifica a usted que el día 15 de abril de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia o 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 Puerto Rico, dentro de los

10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representado usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia o Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 23 de abril de 2020. En Caguas, Puerto Rico, 23 de abril de 2020. CARMEN ANA PEREIRA ORTIZ, Secretario(a) Regional. f:/ CARMEN R. DÍAZ CÁCERES, Servicios a Sala.

LEGAL NOTICE Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico Tribunal General de Justicia Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior de Yauco en Sabana Grande.

AMERICAS LEADING FINANCE LLC DEMANDANTE Vs

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

BOSCO IX OVERSEAS, LLC BY FRANKLIN CREDIT MANAGEMENT CORPORATION AS SERVICER Demandante v.

SUCESION DE JESUS MANUEL DIAZ CARRION T/C/C JESUS M. DIAZ CARRION COMPUESTA POR FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL COMO INTEGRANTES DESCONOCIDOS O PARTE CON INTERES DE DICHA SUCESION; ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO; CENTRO DE RECAUDACIONES DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. SJ2018CV00770 (802). Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIDEMANDADOS POTECA . NOTIFICACIÓN DE Civil Núm.: MZ2019CV01029.

SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE GRAVAMEN A: FULANO Y MENGANO MOBILIARIO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE TAL como integrantes DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. desconocidos con

JERRY AMIL IRIZARRY SANTIAGO

A: JERRY AMIL IRIZARRY partes con interés de SANTIAGO, P/C LCDO. la SUCESIÓN JESUS GERARDO ORTIZ MANUEL DIAZ CARRIÓN TORRES. EL SECRETARIO(A) que sus-

El Secretario(a) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 26 de mayo de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia o Sentencia Parcial en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los DIEZ DIAS siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representado usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia o Sentencia Parcial, de la cual puede estabilecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de TREINTA DIAS contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 4 de junio de 2020. En Yauco, Puerto Rico, a 4 de junio de 2020. Luz Mayra Caraballo García, Secretaria Regional.

Por: DELIA AFONTE VELAZQUEZ, Secretaria Auxiliar I.

cribe le notifica a usted que el 3 de junio de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 3 de junio de 2020.

En SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, el 3 de junio de 2020. GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, Secretario(a). DENISE M. AMARO MACHUCA, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

26

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

Why many athletes will be left out when Olympic training centers reopen

By MATHEW FUTTERMAN

N

early three months after it closed its training centers, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) is preparing to reopen them under a new set of safety guidelines that will severely limit who has access.

Those guidelines may also end up causing a handful of athletes who have lived at the training centers for months to be evicted as the USOPC tries to create a safe training space for its most elite athletes who are seeking a bubblelike setting where they can live and train while other facilities remain closed because of the pandemic.

Under the plan now nearing completion, capacity at the training centers, which under normal circumstances can host hundreds of athletes who live and eat in a dormitory-style environment, will initially be limited to as few as 15 athletes. All of the athletes will have to be tested for the coronavirus when they arrive, quarantine in their rooms for as long as 14 days or until they test negative for the coronavirus, and commit to staying at the center except for the briefest trip to a pharmacy or grocery store.

The USOPC will expand capacity through the summer if there are no disruptions or infections, but for now the organization wants to proceed with the utmost of caution while trying not to lose competitive ground to other countries as the Olympics approach. The Summer Games in Tokyo were postponed one year, to begin July 23, 2021, and the Winter Games in Beijing remain scheduled for February 2022.

“Our focus is going to be on the leadup to Tokyo and Beijing, and that will result in a narrowing in the number of athletes and coaches” who have access to the training center, said Rick Adams, the chief of sport performance at the Olympic committee.

In limiting access, the organization is attempting to balance preparation with avoiding the nightmare scenario of COVID-19 spreading through a training center filled with athletes, many of whom are at varying stages in their careers and often participate in less lucrative sports.

In normal times, they live at the training

The skeleton racer Katie Uhlaender at the 2018 Winter Olympics. She is among the athletes hoping to extend her access to the U.S. Olympic training center in Lake Placid, N.Y. centers because expenses are low and they are often subsidized to some degree by the national governing body for their sport. More successful athletes who can afford not to live at the training centers generally only visit for short stints.

But these are not normal times. During a phone call late last week with leaders of USA Bobsled and Skeleton, several athletes who reside at the training center in Lake Placid, N.Y., were told they will learn in the coming weeks whether they will be allowed to stay there into July.

Katie Uhlaender, a skeleton athlete who is trying to make her fifth Olympic team, has been living since March at the Lake Placid center, where the training facilities are largely closed. She arrived to compete at the national championships, which were canceled, and decided to stay after production was halted on the reality television show she planned to work on. She plans to apply for residency at the facility, but she is 35 years old and 21st in the world rankings, although she

remains the fourth highest-ranked American.

“I am fighting to survive,” said Uhlaender, a two-time gold medalist in the world championships.

Aron McGuire, chief executive of USA Bobsled and Skeleton, said in an email last Thursday he would rely on the USOPC’s guidelines for who gets to stay at the training center.

Jim Leahy, the chief executive of USA Luge, said there are four lugers currently living at the Lake Placid training center.

“We will submit a list, as the others will, too, and we will try to get as many in as we can but some may not fit the criteria,” said Leahy, whose organization and main training facility are based at the training center.

Max Cobb, the chief executive of the U.S. Biathlon Association, said the new limits and safety guidelines presented a major challenge for his athletes, who cannot take two weeks off from endurance training to quarantine at this time of year and usually use Lake Placid as their

main training base.

“It’s devastating for us really, the tiny numbers,” Cobb said.

He added that the athletes may have to shift to another training center in Vermont to make way for Olympians who are a higher priority for the USOPC. Adams said the committee was trying to avoid evicting the roughly 15 athletes now living at the training center in Colorado Springs, which it hopes to reopen on June 22, but it remained unclear whether that would be possible if others with a better chance to perform well in Tokyo want to move in.

In addition to hosting athletes, the training centers are a significant source of revenue for the USOPC. Not being able to fill them or use them to host development camps for rising athletes or guided tours is expected to cost the USOPC about $4 million this year.

Last month, the USOPC let go more than 100 employees as part of a plan to cope with the projected loss of some $200 million during the next five years.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

27

The Big Ten’s new boss wants players talking about big issues

By ALAN BLINDER

T

he scene in Indianapolis in March — Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren grimly explaining why the coronavirus had prompted the abrupt cancellation of the league’s basketball tournament — was hardly how he envisioned his first year running one of the mightiest conferences in college sports.

But in his first six months alone at the Big Ten’s helm, Warren, a lawyer and the first black leader of a Power Five conference, has confronted a public health crisis with no precedent in American athletics.

Now, he is also grappling with the civil unrest that has roiled the nation after the death of a black man in police custody in Minneapolis. Last week, he announced the creation of a Big Ten Conference Anti-Hate and Anti-Racism Coalition.

Before Warren moved to the Big Ten, he was the chief operating officer for the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings and played college basketball at Pennsylvania and Grand Canyon.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

NYT: You worked in Minneapolis as one of the highest-ranking black men in the NFL, and you’re now a top figure in college sports. What are your thoughts on the events of the last few weeks?

Kevin Warren: It’s time for us to have thoughtful action.

We’re at a time in the evolution of our human race that we need to stop the madness, we need to eliminate hate, we need to eliminate racism, and we need to pull together and use every one of our resources, our intelligence, our financial resources, our positions of authority. We need to listen. We need to have open dialogue. We’re going to have to engage in some very painful conversations for us to take action in a manner that will save our country, save the human race and build a better future.

NYT: What have your own experiences with the police been like?

KW: I have the highest respect for

law enforcement because it’s a very important part of our properly functioning in society.

But I’ve had some very uncomfortable experiences, and I articulate to both my 21-year-old son and 23-year-old daughter that they need to make sure that they are smart when they are questioned or stopped by law enforcement. I’ve had to do the same things. There’s just a certain — what we call black man protocol — that we have to have.

My son, every time he goes over to a friend’s house or goes out or even goes to dinner, I have a few words for him: “Be smart, and be safe.” I repeat that over and over again.

The last thing that I want to do as

a black man is have uncomfortable engagement with law enforcement. Do I have stories? Yes. And most people I know like me, we’ve faced issues.

NYT: America has spent generations talking about policing. Do you sense that the mood is different this time?

KW: What has made the difference is the fact that we were able to see it with our own eyes. It’s one thing to read about an issue. It’s another thing to hear about an issue. And it’s another thing to see an issue. I’ve read for many years about Emmett Till, and I’ve seen the pictures of Emmett Till’s body.

But when you see George Floyd die in front of your eyes and when you see Ahmaud Arbery shot, it just does some-

thing to your soul and spirit.

NYT: We’re seeing an unusual number of coaches, players and organizations speak out. Will that have any meaningful effect, or do more people need to do more than issue statements?

KW: I think it does have a positive impact. It’s provided people a platform to express their concerns but also give people comfort. One reason why I was adamant about making sure that we formed our coalition, and why my wife, Greta, and I made a donation to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, is because I thought it would allow people to see that if I was comfortable enough to take a stand on these issues, which people may deem to be sensitive, it would empower them.

NYT: The country is facing all of this during a pandemic that shut down sports. What was the last sporting event you attended?

KW: The first night of the men’s basketball tournament.

When people talk about momentum in a game, you could feel that there was a larger momentum and I just got this sense that at some point in time over the next month I was going to be asked or required to make some very adult decisions, and it ended up being within the next 10 hours.

NYT: What are your days like right now?

KW: I have a daily call with our athletic directors at 7:45 in the morning, and then I have the Power Five commissioners at 9:25. And then I talk regularly with our chancellors and presidents. I’ve been averaging 80 to 85 conference calls every week.

I think the shortest day we’ve had has been 12 hours, and now I understand why people really like their weekends.

But this has taught me to focus on the simple pleasures. I’ve also been spending a lot of time on my prayer life. I actually distributed “Draw the Circle: The 40 Day Prayer Challenge” to my family and whoever on our staff wanted it.

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

Pandemic leaves a void for young athletes seeking to make college

By JOE DRAPE

A

ustin Emile was a chess player before he took up soccer. To him, the pitch was like a chessboard, and he and his teammates were the pieces working in harmony toward victory. Then the coronavirus pandemic came, and Emile was out of moves.

Within days, his high school was closed. The tournaments where he planned to show off his skills to college coaches were canceled, and so were the summer talent identification camps he was supposed to attend. In April, U.S. Soccer ended operations of its Development Academy program, where Emile was part of an elite club team.

Then, on May 1, his grandfather, Thomas Conrad Emile, died after a bout with COVID-19.

Now, Emile’s soccer career is confined to a slab of concrete adjacent to his apartment building in the north Bronx in New York. He doesn’t venture into a park because his mother, Kim, has a compromised immune system, which makes her more susceptible to the virus. While dribbling and shooting on the cement, Emile thinks about the goals that college coaches might never see him score.

“I was in the heart of my recruiting,” said Emile, 16, a junior at Ethical Culture Fieldston School. “There were coaches coming to my tournaments to see me play. I was excited to visit a couple of campuses. Now, I’ve lost a lot. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Before the coronavirus pandemic, youth sports generated more than $15 billion annually and created the “tourna-cation circuit,” as it is known, with scholarship hunters and college coaches intersecting at destination events where players could showcase their skills. With those events canceled, the industry has tanked and the college recruiting ecosystem has also been upended, especially for the nonrevenue sports like soccer and lacrosse at Division II and Division III universities.

In Division I, potential top recruits are identified as early as freshman year and

Austin Emile, 16, does not venture far from his apartment building in the Bronx as he works on his soccer skills these days. tracked.

Virtual campus tours have replaced on-site visits. Live talent analysis from sidelines, often shoulder-to-shoulder with college coaches, have ceded to hours of analyzing game tape. Meet the recruit and parents in their living room?

Only through a Zoom call.

No matter how creative coaches have become and how persistent student-athletes are, both sides know that significant opportunities for better teams and futures are being lost.

“The story here is how hard this is going to impact high school juniors,” said Dennis Bohn, the men’s soccer coach at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. “There are kids that are going to miss getting scholarships or lose financial aid and roster spots. Some people are going to lose the opportunity to go to school altogether.”

Even before the pandemic, much of the recruiting process had moved online. Digital platforms, like Next College

Student Athlete, help coaches see game video, resumes and academic transcripts from student-athletes. In April, 15,000 college coaches and 502,000 athlete profiles were viewed, according to the company, setting a single-month record for activity.

Many athletes take the initiative to market themselves and email coaches links to their social media sites, with highlights not only of their athletic exploits but also windows into their personality and interests. Emile, for example, tries to email at least five coaches a day.

Nothing, however, beats a coach seeing a recruit up close on a basketball court, soccer field or in a swimming pool.

In March, after the National Club Swimming Association spring championships in Orlando, Fla., were canceled, Jimmy Tierney, the swimming and diving coach at McKendree University, realized how dependent he was on the spring and summer circuits.

“I was supposed to meet some of my recruits there for the first time,” said Tierney, who started the program at McKendree, in Lebanon, Ill., after 21 years as the women’s swimming and diving coach at Northwestern University. “Even though you have tape and times, you want to see their technique in the water. Out of it, you want to see how they walk and talk. You want to talk to coaches about reputations. You want to know what you are getting for four years.”

Even student-athletes who have exceptional talent and put in the effort to attract college coaches have been unsettled by the prospect of a summer without showcases.

Last spring and summer, Tommy Zipprich attended soccer camps at Georgetown, Tufts, Harvard, Dartmouth, Middlebury and Amherst after strong performances in tournaments in the spring of his sophomore year. He visited multiple schools in the fall and stayed in touch with about 15 coaches, many of whom intended to scout him in midMarch at the National League tournament in Las Vegas.

When the event was canceled, Zipprich’s list got a little shorter.

“I was lucky enough to get ahead of the process,” said Zipprich, who will be a senior at Loyola Academy in Wilmette, Ill. “There are some schools that backed off a little because they didn’t get to see me play, and there are schools that I didn’t get to see.”

In a normal year, Zipprich would be having final discussions with a small number of schools and close to making his final decision. This is not a normal year and Zipprich’s college future remains up in the air.

On that slab of Bronx concrete, Emile has already ruined one soccer ball and is halfway to ruining another as he copes with the loss of his grandfather and the path to his future that he once thought was sure-footed. The college coaches he speaks with offer encouraging words but no firm offers.

“There’s some things you can’t plan for and this was one of them,” Emile said.

“All I can do for now is stay sharp, in shape and keep the faith.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

Sudoku

29

How to Play:

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

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

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

Disagreements with family are taking a toll on your nerves. There’s no point trying to convert relatives to your point of view. The more you attempt to convince them they are wrong, the more tenaciously they’ll cling to their beliefs. You earn and lose money quickly. These continual financial fluctuations would drive most people to distraction, but they don’t bother you. That’s because you’re smart enough to realise that, like the ocean, money ebbs and flows. Keep riding the waves.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Scheming for the sake of getting ahead will backfire. The best way to land the sort of role you desire is through hard work and attention to detail. Dedicate yourself to the artistic medium you love best. Soon, your work will gain the attention of an important backer. Trust your instincts when it comes to affairs of the heart. If you think someone has a crush on you, you’re right. Follow an impulse to ask them on a date when restaurants re-open. You’ll have a wonderful time, despite your significant differences.

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)

Indiscreet speech will come back to haunt you. If you don’t have anything nice to say about someone, remain silent. You’ll be glad you practiced diplomacy before a newcomer. It will turn out this individual is related to a pest that you’re always mocking. Don’t bother trying to blend in with the crowd. Emphasising your unusual outlook will help you land a new position. Taking the helm of a creative organisation will be a welcome challenge.

Be ready to accept fellow eccentrics into the fold.

Don’t fall for a persuasive sales pitch. An investment that seems too good to be true will drain your bank account. It’s better to keep your hard-earned money in the bank, where it will be safe. Increase your income with a better job. Someone will confide a juicy secret. Don’t spread this information. Instead, use it to your personal advantage. There’s nothing unethical about applying for a job before it becomes officially available. Take this opportunity to gather your references and work samples.

Your self-interest is understandable, given all the excitement you’ve recently experienced. Resist the temptation to talk about yourself incessantly when meeting a new person. The more inquisitive you are about their background, hobbies and attitudes, the easier it will be to make friends. Working with a group of open-minded people will give you a boost.

Your new teammates will not only embrace your ideas, they’ll realise them to impressive effect.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Dwelling on the past is keeping you from fulfilling your potential. There’s nothing wrong with travelling down memory lane, as long as you remember that power rests in the present moment. Make a list of your blessings. Cultivate excitement about the future. Taking the lead of a creative project will be rewarding. Without your input, a good idea won’t ever get off the ground. Trust your instincts for adding a dash of glamour to this work. Why settle for ordinary when you can do something exceptional?

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Following the crowd will be cause for regret. You’re yearning to take the path less travelled, but your friends don’t understand this desire. Stop wasting energy defending your decision. Save it for the big transition ahead. You won’t be sorry. Fuel your interest in a foreign culture or another religious belief. Plan an overseas trip for later in the year, it will be instructive. Experiencing another way of life will be liberating. Don’t be surprised if you’re inspired to move to this beautiful country. You’ll appreciate the slower pace of life.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Are you guilty of harbouring snobbish attitudes? Adopt a more democratic outlook. Someone who doesn’t have any formal education is much more talented than rivals with fancy degrees. By joining forces, you’ll produce some exceptional work. There’s no substitute for raw talent. Stop clinging so tightly to your best friend or romantic partner.

By encouraging their interest in subjects and people you dislike, you’ll strengthen your relationship. After all, you’re not joined at the hip. Give each other some breathing room.

Holding a grudge will drive opportunity from your door.

Just because someone treated you unfairly doesn’t mean you are destined to fail. On the contrary, you have yet another reason to reach the top of your game. Keep going until you cross the finish line. An unusual job offer will arrive. Roll the dice and accept it. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by how much fun it is to perform this work.

Making something that’s both useful and beautiful will fill you with pride.

A misunderstanding with your business or romantic partner will make you angry. It feels like your other half is trying to sabotage you. Try seeing things from their point of view. The sooner you remember your genuine affection for them, you can reach a compromise. Falling in love at first sight is a distinct possibility. It feels impossible to resist the charm of this witty sensualist, but for now keep it to an online chat until we know it’s safe to meet new people.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Constant criticism will turn you into a bitter and angry person. Rather than focus on what’s going wrong, take note of the blessings you often overlook. These can include anything from the joy a new opportunity to the simple beauty of a rose in bloom. An unusual home life suits you well.

You have no intention of living in a housing complex where each building resembles the one next door. By investing in a place filled with historic charm, you’ll cultivate the private life you’ve always wanted.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Confessing a crush will result in disappointment. The object of your affection doesn’t return your affection. Don’t take it personally. You really aren’t well suited. Hold out for someone who shares your love of art, music and film.

Indulging in these pleasures will attract romance. Writing a book, recording a podcast or launching a blog will be a great way to find people with similar interests. Your audience will deeply appreciate your unique outlook. Prepare to become a minor celebrity.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

Herman

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, June 8, 2020

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