Tuesday Jun 9, 2020

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

San Juan The

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DAILY

Star

How to Hug During a Pandemic P23

Governor Mute on Lack of Contracts Info $1.25 Million Bail Set for Officer Charged in Floyd’s Killing P7

Island Malls Say Restricted Hours Account for Most of $77 Million in Lost Sales Since Reopening P5

Oversight Board Sues Gov’t Over Missing Paperwork from Multi-Million-Dollar Tests Deals Vázquez Reserves Comments for ‘Another Time’

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

P4

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

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GOOD MORNING

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June 9, 2020

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

WIPR employees living between hope and despair

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Plans to keep the governmentowned corporation afloat could face hurdles from oversight board, FCC

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mployees of the government-owned Corporation for Public Broadcasting have welcomed the financing and managerial plans that its president, Eric G. Delgado Santiago, hinted at last week. But the workers still worry that the plan could end up being nothing more than a temporary reprieve to stay the financial execution of the Corporation for a few months or even a few weeks.

During an interview with The San Juan Daily Star last Thursday, Delgado Santiago spoke in some detail about his still secret plan to comply with the orders of the Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB), which cut off all public funding and demanded the privatization of the Corporation, also known as WIPR, its Federal Communications Commission (FCC) call letters. He claimed to already have the alternative financing needed to keep the Corporation afloat and a slew of new partnerships to provide content to other stations.

Delgado Santiago said he would announce all the details of his plan at a press conference during the third week of this month.

Although hopeful that Delgado Santiago’s plans come to fruition, employees of WIPR still feel like they’re under the sword of Damocles. Government funding for WIPR runs out at the start of the next fiscal year, which begins July 1.

“It may be true that Delgado Santiago may have found a new source to finance the station. That would be a positive thing,” said Gonzalo Cobo Londoño, a WIPR employee and delegate of the General Workers Union, to which 138 Corporation employees belong. “But it can end up as just a temporary fix because in this matter the mission of the FOMB is to put WIPR in private hands by any means necessary. And if Delgado Santiago just found funds to keep the station operational, it would still be owned by the government and that seems contrary to the FOMB’s orders.”

Cobo Londoño believes that the path forward should not only involve finding independent financing, but also the assurance that the approximately 200 employees of WIPR keep their positions as government workers.

“We believe that any plan that changes our status as government employees is not appropriate, be it a public-

private partnership or any other variant that would put our jobs in danger,” Cobo Londoño said. “Once they sign such an agreement, the incoming private management would eventually look to change that employee status.”

The Corporation and its staff have been in this seesaw situation for years now, with no positive end in sight, the union delegate observed.

“The feeling among us is that of despair, because we do not know what the immediate future holds for all of the station employees and their families,” Cobo Londoño said. “This constant worry is harmful for all of us.”

An additional stumbling block for the Corporation could be the relicensing of WIPR with the FCC this year.

For a station to renew its license, it must show that it is financially sustainable, which might be difficult at this time.

A way out Cobo Londoño said the whole idea of turning WIPR into a privately held company as a measure of reducing the island’s debt was simply a subterfuge for the FOMB and its plans to get rid of the longstanding cultural project that resides within its walls.

“If you think about it, the whole yearly budget of the Corporation is around $8 million, which is insignificant in terms of the debt with the FOMB,” he said. “It would not lower the debt one bit; it would be no more than a miniscule amount of money.”

An alternative, Cobo Londoño believes, is to establish a funding system similar to the ones in Europe, using a TV-licensing tax.

“We can use the BBC model, where everybody who owns a TV pays a small yearly tax and that money goes directly to the Corporation,” he said. “Even if we go by the low estimates, there probably are more than a million households on the island that own at least one television. If each one were to pay a tax of $10 yearly, that would be more than enough to finance WIPR. And that would be paying less than a dollar per month to keep the station and its programing.”

There is just one potential problem with that idea at the moment.

“I spoke to a politician about that idea and he said it sounded great, but that nobody is going to propose a new tax in an election year,” Cobo Lodoño said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Oversight board sues gov’t over contracts disclosure; governor reserves comment for ‘another time’

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico sued the island government in U.S. District Court on Monday to require the government to provide documents regarding the procurement and negotiation of contracts to purchase COVID-19 testing equipment and other medical supplies during the state of emergency caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The oversight board wants information on the multi-million-dollar contracts with Apex General Contractors, 313 LLC and others, in order to determine the processes under which the contracts were negotiated.

“The rules for how the Government spends money must be clear and transparent at all times, including under the immense pressure of emergencies,” the oversight board’s executive director, Natalie Jaresko, said in a written statement. “Contracts of this magnitude must be fair and free from any doubt.”

The Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act gives the oversight board authority to review and approve commonwealth government contracts to ensure market competition and consistency with the Certified Fiscal Plan. The oversight board has made its contract reviews public on its website.

Considering the coronavirus pandemic emergency, the oversight board agreed to temporarily relax certain contracting procedures for the procurement of some COVID19-related items, but the government for its part was supposed to provide a copy of any such contract to the board.

During the lockdown that began on March 15, the government tried to purchase some $40 million in coronavirus testing equipment from firms that had no experience in medical supplies. The contracts were subsequently cancelled, but none of them were sent to the oversight board for evaluation.

The suit, Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico v. Vázquez Garced, said news reports in April revealed that one of the contracts for COVID-19 procurements was given to Apex, a firm owned

by Robert Rodríguez López, who is a regular donor to the governor’s political party, the New Progressive Party (NPP). Additionally, the government contracted to purchase 101,500 COVID-19 test kits from 313 for a total of $3.6 million. Both companies, Apex and 313, had “been linked to Grupo Lemus, a consulting and lobbying firm founded in 2018 by NPP activist” Juan Suárez Lemus, who reportedly has “close ties to top political figures in the community.” Neither Apex nor 313 had previously dealt in medical products prior to the

COVID-19 pandemic.

The reports said the two companies sold the equipment to the government for substantially higher prices than the tests cost in the market, and even at a cost up to three times higher than another Puerto Rican company with extensive experience in the sale of medical equipment.

The oversight board says it has sought for two months to obtain the government’s COVID-19-related contracts,

as well as information and documents from the government concerning the negotiation and procurement process. It has since received some of the contracts, but not all of the documents requested.

“The Oversight Board’s efforts to address these deficiencies have not been addressed and in some cases completely ignored,” Jaresko said.

The governor declined to comment on the suit.

“At another time,” she said.

Fiscal board rejects proposed allocation to CRIM

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

F

inancial Oversight and Management Board Executive Director Natalie Jaresko warned the Puerto Rico government not to approve a resolution that would allocate $185 million from the Emergency Fund to the Municipal Revenue Collections Center (CRIM by its Spanish acronym) that would be distributed among the island’s 78 municipalities as relief from the current economic situation.

The warning came in a letter that Jaresko sent last Friday to Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced, Speaker of the House of Representatives Carlos “Johnny” Méndez Nuñez and Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz.

“To avoid any misunderstanding, keep in mind that the Fiscal Control Board has determined that the approval and/or implementation of the draft resolution, before complying with all the requirements of Section 204, would harm and nullify the purposes of PROMESA [the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act], as determined by the Fiscal Control Board,” Jaresko said in the threepage letter. “Therefore, the Legislature is prohibited from approving the draft resolution and the executive branch is prohibited from applying the draft if it is approved in violation of PROMESA.” Likewise, the letter establishes that the allocation of funds proposed in the draft resolution is not contemplated in the certified fiscal year budget, which would

constitute unauthorized reprogramming unless it is duly certified by the oversight board.

In addition, Jaresko points out in the letter that the oversight board has not received a request to analyze and/or certify the reprogramming of funds contemplated in the draft measure, which is a condition for the adoption of such reprogramming by the Legislature or to carry out any reprogramming by any government official or employee.

“We remind you that the Fiscal Control Board has authorized the government to provide a line of credit to CRIM in the amount of $185 million, the exact amount contemplated by the resolution,” Jaresko said in the letter. “This line of credit is designed to help municipalities cover their

cash deficits for the months of April, May, June, and July, 2020 attributable to their decision to defer the filing date of personal property tax returns and, therefore, the collection of personal property tax payments. This line of credit would provide the municipalities with the cash necessary to provide services to the people of Puerto Rico. The CRIM, however, has decided not to accept this line of credit.”

Jaresko also pointed out that legislative measures such as the draft resolution do not help the municipalities of Puerto Rico in the long term, since they only provide economic relief in the short term, “but they do not provide or promote fiscal stability and the solidity that municipalities need to achieve a permanent situation of financial independence.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

5

Malls have lost more than $100 million since reopening

By THE STAR STAFF

S

ince opening their doors over a week ago, commercial shopping malls have lost $77 million in sales as they are operating at 60 percent capacity because of the coronavirus pandemic emergency, and officials want the governor to extend their hours of operations until 9 p.m. weekdays and allow them to open on Sundays.

At a press conference held Monday, officials from the island’s main shopping centers, including Céntrico, Plaza del Caribe, Plaza las Américas, San Patricio Plaza, The Mall of San Juan, Plaza Río Hondo, Plaza del Sol, Plaza del Norte, Plaza Escorial, Plaza Fajardo, Plaza Cayey, Plaza Isabela, Plaza Walmart, Plaza Vega Baja, Senorial Plaza and Plaza del Atlántico, provided an overview of their first week.

The officials said the trend of “curb shopping,” in which customers pick up their purchases in the parking lot after buying an item or items online, appears after the first

week of reopening to be a new trend that will remain.

“We are proud of the result of the reopening, since it was carried out in a responsible manner, putting everyone’s health as a priority,” said César Vázquez, president of Céntrico. “This in turn will continue to increase economic development in a safe way and little by little we will return to normality.”

Still, the malls have suffered losses, including $77 million in sales; $20.3 million in direct, indirect and induced wages; $8.4 million in collections for the government coffers (CRIM, sales & use and business taxes); and more than 52,000 direct, indirect and induced jobs.

Adolfo “Tito” González, head of Empresas Caparra and president of the Shopping Centers Association, said most of the losses are because the shopping malls are operating in restricted hours.

It is estimated that between 60 percent and 90 percent of the establishments in shopping centers have reopened. Some, the large ones, are planning to reopen at a later time. Officials said it was too early to say if some stores will

reopen at all. However, the current schedule is especially damaging to the restaurant sector, which represents 25 percent of the tenants at shopping centers. These have seen their operations significantly affected because of the limitation of hours, which practically eliminates dinner time, and the current limitation to 25 percent restaurant occupancy. Sales losses in this sector are estimated at 50 percent.

In response to questions, however, they said they have not detected any suspected cases of COVID-19 and reaffirmed that the shopping centers are ready for the next stage, which is to further open their doors.

“This past week with the reopening of the shopping centers, it was demonstrated that there was a need that must be filled,” González said.

“We appreciate the great collaboration of the tenants and employees who made all this possible, and furthermore we recognize the excellent collaboration of the citizenry because with their cooperation, by following all the rules and protocols, we can verify that we are ready for the next phase.”

Amendment to Veterinary Medicine Practice Act filed

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

S

en. William Villafañe Ramos filed legislation on Monday, by petition, to amend the Puerto Rico Veterinary Medicine Practice Act to exempt veterinarians from obtaining a local veterinary license in order to provide their services on the island through a non-profit organization dedicated to the protection of animals.

The amendment was filed for the exclusive purposes of an emergency situation declared by the governor in office through executive order.

As the bill’s explanatory statement states, “Puerto Rico is overcrowded with abandoned pets and a large number of citizens who do not have the financial means to [pay for] the veterinary services they need.

Due to this situation, which worsened after Hurricane Maria, several organizations in the United States set about bringing free sterilization clinics to Puerto Rico.”

The legislator also pointed out that “the need to facilitate these services is evident, even more so when they are offered at no cost and in the spirit of improving animal health conditions in Puerto Rico.”

Executive orders 2020-15 and 2020-18, based on a public policy aimed at guaranteeing the welfare and protection of animals, allowed non-profit organizations to provide protection, shelter and veterinary services.

However, following a lawsuit filed by three licensed veterinarians in Puerto Rico, a judgment was issued that declared the aforementioned executive orders null and

void for circumventing the requirement of local licensing to provide the corresponding veterinary services.

As previously reported by The Star, the animal welfare community in Puerto Rico is outraged at the result of the lawsuit, as it would prevent spaying clinics and events like Spayathon4PR from continuing to offer their free assistance locally.

It should be noted that the Puerto Rico Veterinary

Physicians Association never favored the lawsuit filed by the trio of veterinarians to invalidate the executive orders that allowed veterinarians from other jurisdictions to carry out sterilizations in Puerto Rico.

Villafañe stressed that “through this change in Law 194 [of August 4, 1979, as amended], which regulates the veterinary profession in Puerto Rico, events such as the Spayathon4PR are made feasible and have proven to be successful in meeting the needs of veterinary services, such as sterilization, on a massive scale.”

Organizations that assisted in free sterilizations were reported to have submitted licenses from other states to the island veterinarians association, according to the Humane Society of the United States.

According to statistics published by the Humane Society, these sterilization clinics were of great benefit locally: Some 52,524 pets were sterilized in Puerto Rico and 63.9 percent of pets had never visited a veterinarian.

Additionally, it was reported that 70.72 percent of pets had never received a rabies vaccine, 41.83 percent had already had at least one litter, and 316,680 pets had prevented births.

“This is an opportunity to look beyond individual economic interests and focus on the public health of the island,” Villafañe Ramos. “We highly appreciate all the health professionals who have contributed to each of the sterilization clinics that have taken place in Puerto Rico. We hope that this measure has a prompt response from the Legislature, for the health benefit of our pets and our society.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Don’t answer fraudulent calls from Latvia and Russia

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

scheme begins and they keep you online while they are making international calls that are obviously going to be reflected in your bill,” the official said.

Torres also urged consumers not to have credit card images or sensitive

information on cell phones, as they may also be subject to the fraud scheme.

“They can access [cell phone information],” she said. “It is programming.

The more time they keep you there (on the call) telling you or talking about an offer, those minutes they are using to make international calls, and to give you an idea, the cost of these calls can be from three to seven dollars per minute. That is why the bill is going to be quite high.”

Anyone with a complaint to make about such calls can contact the Puerto Rico Police Department at 787-3432020 or 787-793-1234. They can also file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) at https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/ en-us or by calling 1-888-225-5322.

“Don’t answer those kinds of calls is our call to the public,” Torres said.

“It doesn’t matter that every ‘x’ time the same number rings for you. That number is not a real number. It is a supplanted number. It is called impersonating, which is also known as ‘caller ID spoofing.’ Do not answer it, and call and report it to the Cyber Crimes Unit. The FCC is also making the same appeal.”

Muñoz Marín, let alone other great leaders in Puerto Rico. Machinating behind Puerto Ricans’ backs in favor of inequality and [undermining] their right to choose freely is the worst act that can be committed against their own people.”

Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced recently

announced that State Elections Commission President Juan E. Dávila has already requested the funds for the upcoming November plebiscite. All that remains is to present the ballot and the educational campaign to the U.S. Department of Justice for evaluation.

P

uerto Rico Telecommunications Bureau Commissioner Sandra Torres warned consumers on Monday that they should not answer calls from countries such as Latvia and Russia because they are part of a fraudulent scheme.

“When these people make these types of calls, the ‘one ring tone’ as they call it, here at the local level the Police Cyber Crimes Unit is urging people to call to complain as they are in an investigative process,” Torres said in a radio interview with NotiUno. “When a consumer receives a type of call like this, our first petition is that they do not answer, because that is precisely the scheme,” she said. “The phone rings in places known as ‘caller ID spoofing,’ which is nothing more than stealing identity. That is purely programming. They are numbers that are reflected there. It is not necessarily from that number that they are calling you.”

During the weekend, a large number of people on the island reported receiving calls from international numbers

with area codes such as: 375, 371, 563, 255 and 381. Torres said millions of such calls have also been reported in the mainland United States.

“Once you answer or if they persist and you return the call, that’s when the

Lawmakers scrap over plebiscite

By THE STAR STAFF

N

ew Progressive Party (NPP) Rep. José Enrique “Quiquito” Meléndez on Monday criticized the actions of Popular Democratic Party (PDP) Rep. Rafael “Tatito” Hernández after the latter asked United States Attorney General William Barr to refuse to validate the Nov. 3 status plebiscite.

Meléndez said Hernández’s statements in his letter to Barr are not valid since the admission plebiscites that were held in Alaska and Hawaii were the same.

Those two territories became states 49 and 50, respectively, in 1959, and ballot papers asked their residents whether or not they wanted their territory to become another state of the American union.

“The actions of the Popular Democratic Party and Tatito Hernández are aimed at denying Puerto Ricans the privilege of deciding whether or not they want to obtain the same rights and opportunities as the millions of American

citizens living in all 50 states,” Meléndez said.

“It is the continuation of the plan they have carried out through the past decades. Continue to keep Puerto Rico as a colony and continue to discredit ourselves as Puerto Ricans before the federal government.”

The NPP legislator said that while the entire world is speaking out on the streets against inequality, the PDP and its leaders oppose their citizens deciding their future and obtaining more rights.

“We all lived through and remember what happened after Hurricane Maria, when, being a territory, and not having the same rights and representation in the federal Congress, we could not receive the same aid and benefits as we would have had we been a state,” Meléndez said. “The Popular Democratic Party once again shows that it is on the wrong side. As our party fights for equal rights, the PDP insists that our people continue to be treated as a colony or second-class territory. Today’s leaders in the Popular Democratic Party are not the leaders who followed the legacy of [former Gov. Luis]

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

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Bail set at $1.25 Million for officer charged with murder in George Floyd case

By KIM BARKER and MATT FURBER

T

he white police officer charged with murder in the killing two weeks ago of George Floyd, a black man whose death in custody led to nationwide protests, was given a bail of $1.25 million Monday afternoon.

Derek Chauvin, a 19-year veteran, participated in his initial hearing at the heavily fortified Hennepin County courthouse on a video feed from jail. Chauvin, who has been behind bars since he was arrested May 29, faces charges of second-degree manslaughter and second-degree murder, a more serious count than he had originally faced. He faces up to 40 years in prison.

Chauvin, who placed his knee on the neck of Floyd for nearly nine minutes in a video that prompted anguish and outrage across the nation, has been a focus of anger, referred to as the most hated man in the world. Activists said they feared he would not abide by bail restrictions if he is permitted to go home until trial.

The bail set for Chauvin is significantly higher than the bail of at least $750,000 given last week to the other three officers accused of aiding and abetting in Floyd’s death. Lawyers for two of those men, both rookies who had just days on the job, blamed Chauvin, a training officer. The third former officer has cooperated with authorities. Those are all indications that the police officers will not be presenting a united front, unusual in cases where police are charged in a death.

All four men were fired the day after Floyd died.

On that evening of May 25, an employee of a corner store in south Minneapolis called police, reporting that a counterfeit $20 bill had been used to buy cigarettes.

The two rookie officers, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane — who between them had seven days on the job — responded first.

Floyd, sitting in a nearby car, stiffened when the officers tried to put him in the back of their police car and fell to the ground, according to an arrest affidavit.

Floyd told the officers that he was not resisting arrest but was claustrophobic and did not want to get in the back seat of the car.

Then Chauvin and his partner, Tou Thao, arrived. Floyd struggled and began saying he could not breathe, the affidavit says. Chauvin pulled Floyd out of the passenger side of the squad car at 8:19 p.m. Still handcuffed, Floyd went to the ground.

The rookie officers held Floyd’s back and legs. As Chauvin held his left knee on Floyd’s neck over almost nine minutes, Floyd said “I can’t breathe” and “Mama” and then, after a time, nothing at all.

The protests started the next day in Minneapolis before spreading to the world. Although some protests have turned into violent clashes with police, and arsons and looting were reported in the early days in some pro-

A memorial site for George Floyd in Minneapolis. tests, demonstrations were largely calm in recent days.

It is a temporary peace, activists cautioned, if Chauvin is not convicted.

“There is a real significant discrepancy between what happens when a policeman does something and a black man does something,” said one protester, Sara Semi, who just got “#icantbreathe” tattooed on her neck. “Chauvin needs to get life in prison if we want to see justice.”

A lawyer for Chauvin declined to comment.

Since the protests, Minneapolis has made changes.

The University of Minnesota, the city school board and the parks department have cut ties with police. On Sunday, a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to dismantle the city’s Police Department and create a new system of public safety in a city where police have long been accused of racism.

In addition, Chauvin’s wife of almost 10 years has filed for divorce. They separated three days after Floyd’s killing.

Chauvin, 44, did not always want to be a police officer. He studied food preparation at a technical college, classes like “pantry food preparation,” “job seeking skills” and “stocks, sauces and soups,” according to his personnel file with the Minneapolis Police Department.

He worked as a cook at McDonald’s and made ribs and chicken at Tinucci’s Restaurant. Then he switched paths, becoming a military police officer in the U.S. Army, serving in Germany.

At the police department, his record was mixed.

Chauvin appears to have been reprimanded — and

possibly suspended — after a woman complained in 2007 that he needlessly removed her from her car, his personnel file showed. She told authorities that he searched her and put her in the back of a squad car for driving 10 mph over the speed limit.

Chauvin was also the subject of at least 16 other misconduct complaints over two decades. His personnel file, heavily redacted, included no details on these.

But he was also given at least two medals of valor.

One was for his role in fatally shooting someone who was pointing a sawed-off shotgun at officers in 2006, the records said. The second was for a domestic-violence call in 2008. Chauvin broke down a bathroom door; after a struggle, he twice shot the person being sought, his file said.

Chauvin was awarded two medals of commendation.

In 2008 he was recognized for apprehending a man accused of pointing a gun at a man and woman — Chauvin and his partner followed the man with a gun, eventually tackling the man, who dropped a loaded .357.

His second was for working off-duty as security in November 2008 outside El Nuevo Rodeo. After he saw a man in an altercation fire off two rounds, Chauvin arrested him, the records showed. He also arrested some of the man’s friends, the records said, all of whom were accused of being part of a street gang.

That club may have been Chauvin’s only earlier connection to Floyd, who had also worked security at El Nuevo Rodeo for much of the year before their fatal encounter. It was uncertain whether they knew one another.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

‘Cruise ships on land’: As Las Vegas reopens, a huge test for casinos

People play craps at a table with transparent partitions after the reopening of the Bellagio Hotel & Casino Thursday in Las Vegas.

By JO BECKER

I

t was among the last of the big conferences before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the massive casinos lining the Las Vegas Strip in March. More than 1,000 people gathered at MGM Resorts International’s Mirage Hotel & Casino for the Women of Power Summit, after organizers of the networking event for executive women of color assured attendees that the risk of attendance was “extremely low.”

That seemed a reasonable bet, given that Las Vegas had yet to record a single coronavirus case. What no one realized was that one of the conference speakers, a New Yorker, had already contracted the virus by the time she landed at McCarran International Airport on March 6. Two days later, she was in the hospital.

Nevada’s case count now stands at more than 9,600, and as of Sunday afternoon, 438 people had died. But the case involving the Women of Power speaker is nowhere to be found in those grim totals, despite the fact that she stayed, tested positive, was hospitalized and recovered in Las Vegas.

That is because the state’s coronavirus tally does not include visitors who get sick there or soon after returning home. Instead, only state residents who test positive are counted.

If one of the trickiest aspects of containing the pandemic is figuring out when and where people contract the virus and then quickly tracing their contacts, then there is perhaps no place in the nation where that is as tricky a task as in Las Vegas, where last year guests outnumbered residents by 20 to 1.

Casinos along the Strip last week reopened their doors to a flood of visitors, masked and unmasked but equally eager to test their luck after a 78-day hiatus. An over-the-top water show set to Elvis’ “Viva Las Vegas” at the Bellagio Hotel marked the occasion, and a marquee sign at the Aria Resort & Casino summed up Sin City’s new social distancing ethos: “Think dirty thoughts, but keep your hands clean.”

As Nevada embarks on one of the most epidemiologically complex reopening experiments in the nation, Gov. Steve Sisolak said he is confident that “every precaution possible” has been taken to ensure that the famed resorts can both serve guests and protect public health. Dealers and players are separated by Plexiglas, dice are doused in sanitizer after every throw, and guests, encouraged though not required to wear masks, are subject to mandatory temperature checks.

“I don’t think you’ll find a safer place than Las Vegas,” the governor said during a recent call with reporters. But he added that he is closely tracking the state’s case numbers and will “pull back if it causes any type of problem.”

But as the MGM case illustrates, those numbers offer only a partial picture of virus spread, one that could prevent officials from seeing and acting upon dangerous spikes in real time. Moreover, the state cannot readily identify clusters of cases among employees at a given casino. And while the contact-tracing challenges faced by Las Vegas are extreme, they highlight larger national systemic problems.

The resident-focused tallying method used

by Nevada is shared by states across the nation,

adopted to avoid counting the same cases multiple times.

The problem with that methodology, experts say, is that it can obscure whether a venue with super-spreading potential is becoming a hot spot, particularly in tourist destinations where visitors from around the world gather en masse.

Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the system, which assigns the lead investigatory role to officials in a person’s state of residence, worked fine for past outbreaks of diseases such as Legionnaires’ disease. But COVID-19, he said, is different.

“Here you have not only an issue of magnitude, but also a long incubation period and the factor of super-spreaders — one person can go into a casino and infect 200 people,” he said. “It’s a real challenge for any place with a high concentration of visitors, and it needs to be addressed.”

A handful of states keep a separate, public log of cases involving visitors who test positive for COVID-19 within their borders. Florida, home to snowbirds and Disney World, is one. Nevada is not.

“If you are drawing a map, you don’t leave out mountains because that would be an incomplete map,” said Alberto Moscoso, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Health. “It’s the same thing here.”

Last year, 42.5 million visitors flocked to Las Vegas. A little over one-fifth came from California, while another fifth were foreigners. Only a very small percentage of guests on the Strip were from Nevada.

Much depends on Las Vegas’ ability to lure those visitors back: Nevada casinos generated nearly $8.8 billion in revenue last year, and the state’s unemployment climbed to 28% during the shutdown, the highest in the nation.

Rebecca Katz, director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University, is an infectious disease expert advising the Vatican as well as Wynn Resorts, which operates two casinos in the city, on reopening risk mitigation. Asked which was more complicated, she didn’t hesitate: “Vegas!”

“This is a group of folks working to find a way to reopen in a way that is safe, but it’s really hard,” she said. “If I get on a plane and show up in Las Vegas, and I go to three restaurants and play cards and go to a pool, there’s no national system in place to say, ‘Hey whoever came into contact with me needs to get tested.’”

In the case of the Women of Power Summit at MGM’s Mirage, casino executives said the woman who became sick initially felt unwell on the plane, but did not immediately realize what was wrong. She gave her speech and interacted

with guests and staff before telling hotel security she needed to go to the hospital.

After she tested positive for the coronavirus, Dr. Fermin Leguen, the acting chief health officer for the Southern Nevada Health District, said he notified New York that it had a case involving a woman hospitalized in Nevada, issued a public notice and asked summit organizers to notify attendees.

It is unclear what organizers did with that information or if other participants got sick; Caroline Clarke, chief brand officer for Black Enterprise, which hosted the event, declined to comment.

Reopening regulations require casinos to notify health authorities if they learn of a COVID-19 case at their property. But they are under no obligation to follow up with guests after they leave, and different resorts have adopted different policies.

MGM is providing a contact email and asking guests to voluntarily notify the company if they test positive within two weeks of their stay. But other casinos, including two owned by Wynn Resorts, have decided to leave that job to health officials.

Leguen said that ultimately he relies upon health officials in other states or countries to notify him if a person who visited Las Vegas during the incubation period tests positive after they leave.

But understaffed health departments can barely keep up with what is happening within their own states. Leguen received only 17 such out-of-state notifications through April 2, according to a spokeswoman, even though by that point the virus was raging.

And visitors to Las Vegas tend to mill about in ways that present a contacting tracing nightmare. Nearly three-quarters of visitors to the Strip gamble, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor Authority, hopping not only from table to table but from resort to resort, and more than half of them see shows.

Consider the scale of Wynn Resorts alone: On any given day before the shutdown, some 10,000 visitors walked through its doors, where they consumed an average of 34,000 drinks and 17,000 meals among 19 restaurants.

“Cruise ships on land,” D. Taylor, the president of UNITE HERE, a union representing casino workers, calls the mega-casinos.

Mariano Mintero, 64, works in housekeeping at the Bellagio, another MGM property. He was eager to return to work after so long without a paycheck, but worried, too. In the days following the shutdown, he said, he had heard that a number of housekeeping employees had contracted the virus.

“I know we are working for a good company,” Mintero said, “but I’m a little scared.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

9

Amid pandemic and upheaval, new cyber risks to the presidential election

By DAVID E. SANGER, NICOLE PERLROTH and MATTHEW ROSENBERG

W

ith the general election less than 150 days away, there are rising concerns that the push for remote voting prompted by the pandemic could open new opportunities to hack the vote — for President Vladimir Putin of Russia, but also others hoping to disrupt, influence or profit from the election.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that mail-in ballots invite voter fraud and would benefit Democrats. It is a baseless claim: Mail-in voting has resulted in little fraud in the five states that have used it for years, and a recent study at Stanford University found that voting by mail did not advantage either party and might increase voter turnout for both parties.

But there are different worries. The rush to accommodate remote voting is leading a small number of states to experiment with or expand online voting, an approach the Department of Homeland Security deemed “high risk” in a report last month. It has also put renewed focus on the assortment of online state voter registration systems, which were among the chief targets of Russian hackers in 2016.

Their security is central to ensuring that, come November, voters actually receive their mail-in ballots or can gain access to online voting.

While Russian hackers stopped short of manipulating voter data in 2016, U.S. officials determined the effort was likely a dry run for future interference. To head off that threat, last summer the Department of Homeland Security hired the RAND Corp. to reevaluate the nation’s election vulnerabilities, from poll booths to the voter registration systems. RAND’s findings only heightened the long-standing fears of government officials: State and local registration databases could be locked by hackers demanding ransomware or manipulated by outside actors.

Homeland Security officials have been focusing “intensely on hardening registration systems,” said Christopher C. Krebs, who leads the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. He said his teams had been wor-

king to make sure that towns, counties and states patch software vulnerabilities, back up their systems and also have paper printouts of poll books — the registration lists used on Election Day — should criminals or adversary nations render the digital versions inaccessible.

Now the problem has grown more complex as states around the country race to accommodate mail-in voting even for those who are not away from home. And courts are intervening with contradictory rulings, many of which are being appealed, adding to the sense of chaos and uncertainty about what procedures will be used on Nov. 3.

Krebs’ agency is also concerned about vulnerabilities surrounding internet voting that Delaware, West Virginia and other states are using. In May, it issued a confidential report to voting vendors and election officials in all 50 states opposing online voting, warning that ballots “could be manipulated at scale,” meaning hackers could change large volumes of votes undetected.

Separately, researchers at the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a study on Sunday concluding that one platform already facilitating internet and remote voting could, in certain cases, be manipulated to alter votes — without being detected by the voter, election officials or the company that owns it.

The platform, called OmniBallot, was used for internet voting in Delaware’s primary last week and will be used to a smaller extent in West Virginia’s this week.

Both states also plan to use it in some form come November, as does Colorado. (New Jersey quietly used it experimentally last month in local elections.)

Various jurisdictions in Colorado, Florida, Oregon, Ohio and Washington also use the platform as a way for voters to mark ballots remotely and submit them by email, fax or mail.

The researchers discovered that both uses of the system presented opportunities for hackers or nation states to compromise an election.

“Online voting raises such severe risks that, even in a time of unrest and pandemic, these jurisdictions are taking a

National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. major risk of undermining the legitimacy of their election results,” said one of the researchers, J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at Michigan.

Bryan Finney, chief executive of Democracy Live, which offers OmniBallot, defended the platform, saying that before the pandemic it primarily served voters with disabilities and U.S. service members overseas. “No technology is bulletproof,” he said. “But we need to be able to enfranchise the disenfranchised.”

The threat of foreign interference remains real. U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that Russia is once again meddling in the presidential election. Last month, the National Security Agency warned that Russian state hackers had targeted an email program used by dozens of congressional candidates to steal emails, as Russian hackers also did four years ago.

On Thursday, Google said Chinese hackers were targeting the personal email accounts of campaign staff members working for former Vice President Joe Biden.

It also confirmed reports that Iran had targeted Trump’s campaign.

But the White House, where Trump continues to dismiss the hacking accusations against Russia in the last election, has directed little attention to the problems beyond the president’s unfounded claims that mail-in ballots favor Democrats and

“will lead to massive fraud and abuse.”

(In fact, mail-in ballots create a paper trail that helps prevent abuse.)

Even the perception of vulnerabilities could have a profound effect on the actual vote, security specialists warn. It could raise doubts about the election’s integrity, at a moment when Trump’s critics allege he is already preparing the ground to challenge the result if he loses.

An Open Door to Hackers It was four years ago this month when officials in Arizona discovered that election officials’ passwords had been stolen, one of the first indications that the 2016 election was under cyberattack.

Studies led by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI later said that Russia had most likely conducted research and reconnaissance against election networks in all 50 states.

The integrity of the November election hinges on the same registration systems, which are “public-facing” — connected to the internet and accessible to a wide variety of state and county officials and often the companies they hire to run their election systems. But that access also leaves them open to potential attack.

A well-known threat comes from ransomware, when an invasion of a comContinues on page 10

10 From page 9

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

An $89,000 Digital Ballot Before the coronavirus outbreak, the advantages of online voting were obvious for Americans with disabilities, those living abroad, military personnel posted to remote locations — even Alaskans living in the wilderness.

But the risks were made vivid a decade ago in Washington state. An online voting experiment was called off after researchers hacked the system to elect HAL 9000 — the computer from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” — and played the University of Michigan fight song every time a ballot was cast.

The experimenting is back, but once again it is not going well. New Jersey is a case in point.

In April, with the virus sweeping the state, officials moved quickly to expand mail-in voting. But they also decided to explore online voting by hiring Democracy Live, whose OmniBallot system was identified by Michigan and MIT researchers as vulnerable to undetected hacking.

New Jersey officials made the online voting available to county clerks for municipal and school board elections last month, but did not publicize it widely for fear of inviting trouble.

“We didn’t want to put out an explanation for potential bad guys to decide that this was something they wanted to exploit,” said Alicia D’Alessandro, spokeswoman for New Jersey’s secretary of state.

The result: Just one voter used the online system. The cost to the state: $89,000, and still no real test of whether it works or not.

Like New Jersey, Delaware, West Virginia and Colorado have contracted with Democracy Live.

Halderman of Michigan and Michael A. Specter, a researcher at MIT, determined that Democracy Live’s online voting and ballot-marking systems could not withstand concerted hacking attempts, and also presented privacy concerns.

The researchers reported that ballots could be manipulated to change votes and that, in some cases, the company’s servers received voters’ identifying information.

“Democracy Live is getting a database of how every single voter voted,” Specter said. “What if that ends up in bad hands?”

The report concluded that while OmniBallot’s mail-in option was reasonably secure, the online options represented “a high risk to election integrity and could allow attackers to alter election results without detection.”

Finney, the Democracy Live executive, said the company never shares or sells voter data. He also said voters concerned with online security always have the option to print and mail their ballots, something Halderman recommended as prudent.

Finney said Democracy Live’s security had been previously vetted in two reviews he could not share publicly and noted that OmniBallot had been used in over 1,000 elections over the past decade, without security issues.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers from MIT, including Specter, found similar problems with Voatz, another app-based voting platform. Voatz insists its system is secure.

Warnings about turning to online voting too quickly have also come from countries that use it successfully. Kersti Kaljulaid, Estonia’s president, noted last month that her country had moved to electronic ballots only after an ambitious project — known as E-Estonia — to secure 1.3 million Estonians’ digital identities.

“You need to make sure you have perfect understanding of everyone’s identity first,” she said.

No such system exists in any American state. So election officials, faced with the pandemic and an immutable general election date, are trying to make do.

In New Jersey, before the pandemic, “we ran drills on all different kinds of scenarios that could disrupt our election,” said D’Alessandro.

“We even had a scenario that dealt with a public health crisis,” she continued. “But I can tell you that simulating a measles outbreak in two towns does not prepare you for a global pandemic.”

puter system locks up records, making them inaccessible. Atlanta and Baltimore have been hit by devastating attacks that made it impossible to pay parking tickets or record deeds, and towns from Florida to Texas have also been paralyzed with ransomware.

For elections, there is a separate concern that hackers, short of shutting down a system, could undermine the integrity of voter information.

If hackers slip into voter registration lists and modify addresses, or falsely indicate that voters moved out of state, the result could be digital disenfranchisement. Even just getting into the lists — without manipulating them — hackers could seed doubts of tampering. That may explain why Russian hackers made a show of stealing Illinois voter data in 2016, according to DHS officials, even though they didn’t tamper with it.

“As we looked out across the country and saw ransomware running wild across state and local government agencies, it was reasonable to conclude that voter registration databases, highly networked and highly centralized, could be next,” said Krebs, the Homeland Security cyber chief. States have “stepped up” over the past year, he added.

Indeed, security is now better across the country, but voter registration data is still vulnerable and accessible to the outside world.

Some states and counties manage their registration systems internally, but many rely on a maze of private contractors that can be ripe targets. The firms retrieve the data over the internet and keep it in the cloud, often with limited security.

In 2016, one contractor, VR Systems, was targeted by Russian hackers, according to aclassified assessment by the National Security Agency. The company, which has long maintained that any attacks were unsuccessful, had access to registration data in swing states like North Carolina, Florida and Virginia.

“Most people don’t realize how many times registration systems are accessed by vendors and parties with little security,” said Hursti, the security consultant. “The justification for this is that it is public data, so nobody can steal it, but that ignores how dangerous it would A voter at the Trinity Luther Church polling station in Quakertown, Penn., June 2, 2020. be if someone modifies it.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

11

The idea: Build it, and they can find Coronavirus tests

By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI

F

or the past two months, the 9-to5 jobs at their recruiting software company were just the start of a busy work day for Joe Essenfeld, Boris Kozak and Matt Geffken.

After a short break for dinner and a little family time, the three friends would jump on an 8:30 p.m. Zoom call with a dozen other volunteers to work on AllClear, a website to help people find information about testing locations for COVID-19, and stay at it until 2 or 3 a.m.

AllClear now has a directory of more than 10,000 U.S. locations where people can be tested for COVID-19 or for antibodies to the coronavirus. The listing for each location is displayed on a map and contains information such as the test type and whether an appointment is necessary.

The excitement of doing something new felt familiar to the three men, who worked together at Jibe, a software company that Essenfeld started. Last year, Jibe was sold to iCIMS, a recruiting software company where they still work. But there is no financial reward awaiting them this time. They have already spent $35,000 of their own money for something that they promise won’t ever make a cent.

They are representative of a digital volunteerism that has emerged during the pandemic. As the coronavirus has spread and frustration with the federal response to the crisis grew, some entrepreneurs and engineers applied their startup ethos to help.

Among them are Carl Bass, former chief executive of the software company Autodesk, for example, is assembling 1,500 face shields a day for nurses and doctors from a robotics warehouse in Berkeley, California, and sending them across the country. Lan Xuezhao, founding partner of Basis Set Ventures, a venture capital firm in San Francisco, tapped her connections in China to procure tens of thousands of medical masks straight from the factories for hospitals.

When Essenfeld, Kozak and Geffken, who all live in the New York metro area, set out to build AllClear in mid-

The creators of the testing directory, AllClear, clockwise from top left: Matt Geffken, Joe Essenfeld, and Boris Kozak.

March, the original vision was to create a social network for people to share their experiences with the virus, including whether they had been tested.

It was the type of half-joking, halfserious idea that the trio regularly bounce off one another, like the time they considered selling caffeinated pickles or iced coffee that smelled like hot coffee.

But as the seriousness of the pandemic became clear, they felt the itch to do something.

“Feeling powerless during this crisis was difficult to deal with,” Essenfeld said.

“But building this has been helping us cope with that.”

They honed in on making it easy to find testing sites. At the time, it was difficult to find information on where and how people could be tested. The information that was available was dispersed across the internet on a variety of websites and came from local health agencies, hospitals and even social media. The data was often unreliable and inconsistent.

The challenge of collecting and organizing data, however, was familiar to them. At their startup, they had faced similar issues with job listings, information that changed frequently and was dispersed across the web.

“We’ve done this over and over again,” Kozak said. “We were confident in our ability to get it done, and we weren’t confident in the government’s ability to do it.”

There is no shortage of websites to help people find testing locations. But some are run by local or state health agencies and provide locations only within a specific region. Other websites are run by health care providers and show only affiliated locations. Some sites by volunteer groups use unverified, crowdsourced information. Apple is allowing health care providers and labs to register as testing locations that will appear on Apple Maps, but it requires busy labs and medical offices to come forward.

AllClear’s creators say they believe their site is the only national testing location service providing verified information that is not affiliated with a health care provider or a specific type of test.

With no background in medical testing, the three men contacted two doctoral candidates from Cornell University’s medical school for advice. The pair, whom Essenfeld had met at a genetics conference, were the first to agree to volunteer by helping to organize the specific information to collect about testing sites and how it should be displayed.

The AllClear founders also tapped their professional network from their startup days and reached out to Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, a San Francisco law firm that represented Jibe since its early years.

The firm agreed to take on AllClear pro bono to handle the nonprofit paperwork and make sure the project

complied with data privacy rules and guidelines for handling health information under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. They also drafted terms of service.

The men recruited volunteers to help work on the look and function of the site. They leaned on friends and current and former colleagues to bring on engineers, designers and product strategists.

The group has now grown to more than 30 volunteers, many of whom gather on a nightly Zoom planning call.

Kozak said no one said no when he asked for help.

To collect the information about testing locations, AllClear posted an advertisement on Upwork, which helps companies hire freelancers, looking for researchers to scour the internet. It offered to pay $4 to $7 per hour for the work, depending on the location and experience of the researcher.

After a day, around 130 freelancers from around the world expressed interest.

Through interviews, they narrowed the pool to 20 candidates, focusing on those who had demonstrated some knowledge of the virus. On the first night, the 20 candidates came back with information about 2,000 testing locations.

Eventually, AllClear whittled the group down to five researchers — two from India, two from Egypt and one from Poland — who work 40 hours a week and monitor 10 states each. The researchers comb sites from state and local agencies, medical providers and even Twitter for leads on possible testing site information. A team of volunteers verifies that the information is correct before it is published.

So far, AllClear has spent $35,000 to pay researchers as well as cloud computing costs to keep the site up. It is hoping to find a sponsor to pay the running costs.

The site became public in late April.

It is drawing several thousand people a day, and soon its location results will start appearing in Google search results.

“Our technology and efforts will continue to focus on helping reduce anxiety around getting tested and finding out the results,” Essenfeld said.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Stocks

Nasdaq hits record close, confirms bull market on economic recovery hopes

T

he Nasdaq hit a record high close on Monday, becoming the first of the major indexes to confirm a new bull market, and the Dow and S&P 500 jumped as expectations for a swift recovery from a coronavirus-driven downturn increased.

The S&P 500 ended in positive territory for the year to date.

Rising technology and communication stocks have driven gains in the Nasdaq, which confirmed a new bull market just 16 weeks after coronavirus fears crushed stocks and pushed the U.S. economy into recession.

The Nasdaq has climbed 44.7% from its March 23 bottom. A bull market is generally considered to be a rise of more than 20% from the low point.

A closely watched monthly jobs report on Friday showed an unexpected fall in unemployment rate, bolstering views that the worst of the economic damage from the virus outbreak was over.

“It’s optimism surrounding the reopening of the global economy, and the likely confirmation that the U.S. economy will experience a V-shaped recovery in the second half,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA Research in New York.

Stocks added to gains late in the session after the U.S. Federal Reserve eased the terms of its “Main Street” lending program.

The energy sector climbed the most among the 11 major S&P sectors, rising 4.3%, as major oil producers agreed over the weekend to extend a deal on record output cuts.

Beaten-down shares of cruise operators Carnival Corp and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd continued to recover. The S&P 1500 airlines index jumped 9.9%.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 461.46 points, or 1.7%, to 27,572.44, the S&P 500 gained 38.46 points, or 1.20%, to 3,232.39 and the Nasdaq Composite added 110.66 points, or 1.13%, to 9,924.75.

Investors will also focus this week on the Fed’s twoday policy meeting, ending on Wednesday, where the jobs report will most likely be discussed.

It would be the first meeting 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.

Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a 4.61-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 3.02-to-1 ratio favored advancers.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

13

China vowed to keep wildlife off the menu, a tough promise to keep

By STVEN LEE MYERS

B

amboo rats lifted Mao Zuqin out of poverty. Now, because of the coronavirus pandemic, poverty threatens again.

Mao has over the last five years built a viable farm in southern China with 1,100 bamboo rats, a chubby, edible rodent that is a delicacy in the region. Then, in February, China’s government suspended the sale and consumption of wildlife, farmed or captured, abruptly freezing a trade identified as the likely source of the outbreak.

He still has to feed them, though, and has no way to cover his costs or investments.

“I’m up to my ears in debt,” he said.

China has been lauded for suspending the wildlife trade, but the move has left millions of workers like Mao in the lurch.

Their economic fate, along with major loopholes in the government’s restrictions, are threatening to undermine China’s pledge to impose a permanent ban.

China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, adjourned its annual session late last month without adopting new laws that would end the trade. Instead, the congress issued a directive to study the enforcement of current rules as it drafts legislation, a process that could take a year or more.

The delay is raising fears that China may repeat the experience of the SARS epidemic in 2003, when the country banned sales of an animal linked to the outbreak — the palm civet — only to quietly let the decree lapse a few months later after the crisis peaked.

“The momentum is not favorable,” said Peter J. Li, an associate professor at the University of Houston-Downtown and a China policy adviser for the Humane Society International.

In moving to restrict the wildlife trade, China’s government is fighting deeply rooted cultural and culinary traditions, including a canon of ancient literature extolling the medicinal benefits of ingesting animals like bears, tigers and rhinoceroses.

The pandemic spread from a market in Wuhan, where animals were sold from

Bear bile capsules for sale in Beijing, April 16, 2020. The Chinese government has moved slowly to permanently stop the sale and consumption of wild animals in the wake of the coronavirus epidemic, raising fears the practice may continue.

cages and slaughtered on the spot, in lessthan-ideal sanitary conditions, because of a premium placed on freshness.

While directives from the Communist Party leadership are rarely challenged openly, a permanent ban has powerful constituencies and interests arrayed against it. There are already signs of internal debates.

Some cities have moved ahead with bans on hunting and selling wild game, including Beijing last week. Wuhan also announced a five-year ban. In rural regions like Mao’s, though, officials have been lobbying for exemptions, in part to meet the target set by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to eradicate extreme poverty by this year.

The Ministry of Agriculture last week removed dogs from its “whitelist” of approved domesticated livestock — a victory for those who have campaigned against the tradition of eating dog meat. But it also added two new species previously considered wild, emus and Muscovy duck, allowing for them to be sold.

It did not add bamboo rats, despite appeals from farmers in Mao’s region, Guangxi. The rats are covered by a sepa-

rate government list of 54 wild animals approved for capture, sale and consumption, reflecting the myriad and overlapping laws governing the trade.

“It is disappointing that China has lost this rare opportunity to take the lead and set a great example for the world by passing progressive legislation for preventing future pandemics,” Pei Su, who leads ACTAsia, an international animal rights organization, said in a statement.

The government has already made exceptions for the use of wild animals for fur and traditional Chinese medicine, which Communist Party authorities have actively promoted, including the use of bear bile as a treatment for COVID-19.

The exemptions have created loopholes that could feed an illicit trade for game meat. There is one for pangolins, an endangered animal that has been identified as a possible carrier of the coronavirus. Its meat — prized by some as a source of virility — is contraband, but it is legal to purchase medicines made from its scales.

When the coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, the Chinese moved swiftly against the wildlife trade, at least initially, raising

hopes of those who have long campaigned against the exploitation of animals.

The first cluster of cases occurred in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a sprawling maze of shops and stalls that included a number of vendors who sold live animals. It was shut down Jan. 1, even before officials fully understood or acknowledged the severity of the outbreak.

China’s Center for Disease Control later reported that it had found the coronavirus in environmental samples taken from that part of the market. Officials have not yet linked the coronavirus to any specific animal, though it likely originated in bats, as did the severe acute respiratory syndrome pandemic, and then jumped to another mammal and finally to humans.

Zhong Nanshan, a prominent Chinese scientist involved in the fight against the outbreak, identified two other possible intermediaries: badgers and bamboo rats.

Both were on sale in Wuhan.

At the end of January, the national government ordered markets to stop selling live animals — though it made an exemption for fish, crabs and other seafood.

A month later, as the death toll began to soar, it announced that it would suspend the trade in all terrestrial wild animals.

Xi himself called for an end to the tradition. “We have long recognized the risks of consuming wildlife,” he said in February, “but the game industry is still huge and poses a major public health hazard.”

His remarks reflected a growing backlash in China toward indulging in exotic wildlife, often for little more than status or unproven medicinal benefits.

Aili Kang, director of the China program for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said societal attitudes have shifted dramatically since the SARS epidemic, when breakneck economic development fueled supply and demand for wildlife of all kinds. “People are talking about ecological civilization now,” she said.

Kang noted that the work report delivered by Premier Li Keqiang at the National People’s Congress was the first to mention the illegal trade in wildlife.

“I feel positive about the progress,” she said.

14

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

U.K. lab to sidestep drug industry to sell potential virus vaccine

Imperial College is using a technology described as self-amplifying RNA that was pioneered by Prof. Robin Shattock over decades of research.

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

A

prominent British laboratory is forming a special partnership that would sidestep the drug industry to sell a potential vaccine against the coronavirus without profits or licensing fees in Britain and in low- and middle-income countries.

Scientists, nonprofit groups and public health experts have urged that any successful vaccine to combat the pandemic be distributed at the lowest possible cost and on the basis of need rather than profit. But for-profit drug giants or biotechnology startups have dominated the development race, especially in the United States, a vital market because of its high drug prices.

The British laboratory, at Imperial College London, could alter that landscape, in part because its technology has the potential to develop a vaccine that is cheaper and easier to manufacture than others, said Robin Shattock, the lead scientist on the project.

If successful, he said, the vaccine’s lower cost could appeal to the large donor organizations that typically supply low-income countries, which make up much of the world. It could also provide a cheaper alternative in affluent countries.

“Somebody who’s developing a product that’s

going to be of very high cost will actually ultimately lose out if the high-volume market doesn’t support that,” Shattock said.

Clinical trials are beginning this month, and if the vaccine is proven safe and effective, the first doses could be available early next year.

To make the vaccine as widely and cheaply available as possible, Shattock said, Imperial College is creating what it calls a “social enterprise” — a special-purpose, for-profit company chartered to sell the inoculation.

Imperial College is forming the company in partnership with the investment firm Morningside Ventures, which is based in Hong Kong. The new entity will be called VacEquity Global Health.

Morningside Ventures was founded by the Chan family, which is also a major donor to the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University.

Imperial College has promised that VacEquity Global Health will make its vaccine available at the lowest possible cost in Britain as well as in low- and middle-income countries. VacEquity would work with specialized drug manufacturers in a process similar to the production and sale of generic drugs.

The new company may charge higher prices in wealthier countries such as the United States, Singapore or the Persian Gulf monarchies.

A clinical trial involving 300 participants in Britain — an unusual combined phase one and two — is set to begin June 15. If that shows the drug to be safe, Imperial College will conduct a 6,000-participant phase in October to test the vaccine’s effectiveness. The location of the later phase will depend on where the virus is spreading rapidly at the time.

The Imperial College is using a novel technology that has never before produced a licensed vaccine. It is described as self-amplifying RNA and was pioneered by Shattock over decades of research.

The vaccine consists of specially engineered genetic material — RNA — that instructs muscle cells in the body to produce a distinctive “spike” protein found on the surface of the coronavirus.

If the vaccine is successful, those proteins will trigger an immune response that will kill the virus.

Moderna, a biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has started clinical trials for a vaccine using similar technology, known as messenger RNA. The U.S. government has agreed to provide as much as $483 million to Moderna to advance its research, and reports of positive results in the trial’s early stages have sent the company’s stock soaring.

Imperial College’s self-amplifying RNA vaccine, Shattock said, would require a much smaller dose than the Moderna vaccine — 50 to 100 times smaller — which would greatly lower the cost per dose. The Imperial College vaccine would also require smaller and less costly manufacturing facilities than vaccines using other technologies, such as those involving the neutralized or modified versions of existing viruses, he said.

The British government has provided more than $50 million in financial support for the Imperial College effort, and it has also attracted $5 million from other donors.

The University of Oxford, which is beginning phase three clinical trials of an alternate potential vaccine, has tried a different approach to low-cost distribution. The university reached an unusual agreement with British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, which has pledged to distribute the potential vaccine at no profit for the duration of the pandemic.

AstraZeneca has already received hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. government, the British government and major nonprofit organizations to begin manufacturing as many as 2 billion doses of Oxford’s potential vaccine even before its effectiveness has been proven.

If demand persists after the pandemic has faded — perhaps persisting as a seasonal virus — AstraZeneca has said it may seek to profit from the sale of the vaccine.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

15

Europe’s patchwork reopening

By PAIGE McCLANAHAN

A

s the summer tourist season approaches and Western Europe’s COVID-19 crisis continues to subside, leaders across the Continent are deciding whether and how to lift the border restrictions that they imposed amid a flurry of emergency measures in March. The European Commission has urged its members to coordinate their reopening, but a patchwork of strategies has emerged. Some countries — Italy and Germany among them — are reopening earlier and more widely. Others — like Switzerland, Denmark and the Baltic States — are proceeding more slowly, opting for “travel bubbles” or bespoke lists of countries whose citizens will be allowed entry.

Both approaches have drawn criticism. Bubbles or corridors risk creating confusion and could be seen as discriminatory, some observers say. But opening borders among countries where the epidemiological situations are vastly different risks triggering an increase in cases, which officials are determined to avoid. Indeed, all of the announced plans for reopening have come with an important caveat: If COVID-19 cases start to tick back up, then borders could again be forced to close.

“We need to be sure that a summer tourist season won’t come at the high price of a second wave of infections,” Heiko Maas, Germany’s foreign minister, said in May. “So there will be no ‘normal’ summer holiday this year. Whether the Baltic or the Mediterranean — the social distancing and hygiene rules will apply everywhere,” he said.

For American tourists, Europe will remain off-limits this summer, with a few exceptions. Portugal is allowing entry to U.S. citizens without a quarantine requirement. Britain, the Republic of Ireland and Belarus are also open to U.S. citizens, but require a two-week quarantine. Americans and other non-European Union nationals may be able to visit Iceland from June 15, but all visitors will be subject to a COVID-19 test upon arrival. Other European nations remain closed to visitors coming from across the Atlantic.

Some Countries Move Quickly Italy — which has Europe’s second-highest COVID-19 death toll, after Britain — has jumped ahead of its neighbors in welcoming back tourists, lifting border restrictions on visitors arriving from European countries as of June 3. The next major date in the Continent’s reopening calendar will be June 15, when Germany and Belgium will allow entry to all EU nationals, as well as Britons and citizens of nations like Iceland, Norway and Switzerland that are within Europe but outside the EU. Prime Minister Edouard Philippe of France has indicated that France will do the same, allowing quarantine-free travel for European visitors as of June 15. (However, starting Tuesday, France will ask British visitors to complete a voluntary 14-day self-quarantine.)

The June 15 border openings will be like a “D-Day” for tourism in Europe, Italy’s foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, told Italian broadcaster RAI. He added that Germans account for a significant share of Italy’s visitors, especially for high-end travel. The tourism sector accounts for 13% of Italy’s gross domestic product.

“We must salvage what we can salvage from the summer to help our hoteliers and entrepreneurs,” Di Maio said.

The Problem With Travel Bubbles While Italy, Germany and France are planning to open up widely, other European nations are proceeding more cautiously,

Cities like Hamburg, Germany, above, will be opening to most countries in Europe, beginning this month. drawing up selective lists of countries from which travel will be allowed, or establishing “travel bubbles” along the lines of the one being considered by Australia and New Zealand.

Spain, one of the hardest-hit countries in Europe, is waiting until July to lift most of its travel restrictions. At that point, the country plans to open up to visitors arriving from a list of nations where the epidemic is under control, according to Manuel Muñiz, the Spanish government’s State Secretary for Global Spain. That list hasn’t been finalized, Muñiz said in an interview, but it will probably include most European nations, and could be expanded to a select group of countries from outside the region. (The country’s land borders with neighboring France and Portugal are due to reopen June 22.)

He added that Spain has asked the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control for specific guidance on how the country should draw up its list.

“When you talk to epidemiologists, what they tell you is that if you have these two containers with equivalent amount of COVID risk, it’s almost irrelevant if there are transfers of movement of people from one place to the other,” said Muñiz. He added that tourist destinations need to be able to do four things in order to welcome visitors safely: Track the virus’ spread; test anyone with symptoms; trace the contacts of those who test positive; and treat those who fall ill.

“When countries open needs to be fundamentally linked to how the disease is performing there, and whether those capabilities are in place,” Muñiz said.

This patchwork of reopening strategies is chaotic and will ultimately undermine European tourism, said Eduardo Santander, the executive director of the European Travel Commission, an association of national tourism organizations in Europe.

“I think that creating corridors, bubbles, bilateral agreements between countries only creates more confusion and frustration for the end consumer,” Santander said. He added that his organization

has been lobbying for a harmonized return of travel and tourism across Europe.

“The information that is out there is so fragmented; it’s also so confusing,” he said, adding that freedom of movement is a pillar of European identity. “It’s not about cutting a deal with your neighboring country,” he added. “We cannot create these kind of competitive advantages and disadvantages.”

Others Take It Slowly In many European countries — especially those along the Mediterranean coast — renewing the flow of tourists will be critical to keeping national economies afloat. But it’s not yet clear how many people will be willing to cross a border for their summer vacations.

“We don’t have tourism anymore. Corona has taken it all,” said Marjan Dasic, the manager of Tarsa, a popular restaurant in Rijeka, a Croatian seaside city that was selected as one of Europe’s cultural capitals for 2020.

Normally, you would have to call at least a year in advance to reserve a table at the restaurant, which can seat up to 200 people and welcomes tourists from across Europe and beyond, Dasic said. The restaurant reopened in May after two months of closure, “but it’s like we didn’t open, because no one is coming,” Dasic said, adding that another month without customers will force the restaurant to close for good.

In France, the mountain resort of Chamonix is preparing for a quieter summer than usual. Major events like mountain races, climbing competitions and music festivals have been canceled, but the area’s trails will be open for hiking and mountain biking, and cable cars will be operating with new hygiene measures in place.

Claire Burnet, a spokeswoman for the Chamonix tourist office, predicted that tourists would come to the mountains to avoid the crowds one might find at the beach or in a city.

“We are pretty optimistic, especially for the French market,” Burnet said. “For the European market, we’re waiting to see.”

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Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Mexico’s leftist leader rejects big spending to ease virus’ sting

By AZAM AHMED

F

or the second time in a month, top business leaders sat down with Mexico’s president to implore him to do more to save the economy.

People were losing jobs by the tens of thousands, they warned. Small- and medium-size companies, which employ more than 70% of the Mexican workforce, were running out of cash. The government needed to intervene, they argued. The data was irrefutable.

“I have other data,” shrugged the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, according to two businesspeople with direct knowledge of that conversation in April. “You do whatever you think you need to do, and I’ll do what I need to do.”

Across the globe, governments have rushed to pump cash into flailing economies, hoping to stave off the pandemic’s worst financial fallout.

They have mustered trillions of dollars for stimulus measures to keep companies afloat and employees on the payroll. The logic: When the pandemic finally passes, economies will not have to start from scratch to bounce back.

In Mexico, no such rescue effort has come. The pandemic could lead to an economic reckoning worse than anything Mexico has seen in perhaps a century. More jobs

Bonnie Castro volunteers at the Coastal Bend Food Bank in Corpus Christi, Texas. The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 100,000 Americans and brought much of the economy to a grinding halt.

were lost in April than were created in all of 2019. A recent report by a government agency said as many as 10 million people could fall into poverty this year.

Yet most economists estimate that Mexico will increase spending only slightly — by less than 1% of its economy — a small amount compared with many large nations.

The reason? Critics and supporters agree: López Obrador.

Hostile toward bailouts, loath to take on public debt and deeply mistrustful of most business leaders, Mexico’s president has opted largely to sit tight despite what is expected to be widespread pain up and down the economic ladder.

“The government should help the private sector as much as it can, otherwise our gross domestic product could drop as much as 10%, which would be a disaster,” said Carlos M. Urzúa, a former minister of finance under López Obrador.

“It can be done,” Urzúa continued, noting the relatively low public debt levels in Mexico. But “López Obrador really has no clue of the storm that is coming.”

In a time of utter polarization in Mexico, when reactions to López Obrador vacillate between complete devotion from supporters and vitriolic anger from detractors, the need to mount an economic response has offered a rare glimmer of unity.

Still, López Obrador, a populist leftist, has resisted the pressure to do more, wary of taking on public debt and saddling the country with bills it may struggle to pay down the road.

Some of the pressure on López Obrador has come from predictable places: opposition politicians, pro-market economists and the wealthy business community, groups that tend to find wrong in nearly every step he takes.

But members of the president’s own Cabinet have also urged him to take action, arguing that failing to do so could cripple the nation, government officials say. So, too, have federal bank officials and a range of economists sympathetic to his politics.

“Every day counts,” said Santiago Levy, an economist who was offered the role of finance minister in López Obrador’s government shortly after his election in 2018. “A recession was inevitable, but the cost of not doing more is going to be a much longer and deeper recession.”

A group of state governors, including one from López

Obrador’s own party, has formed a coalition to demand that he do more to help them financially. Some have even threatened the equivalent of financial secession.

“We need a strategy of unity, and instead we have received absolutely nothing,” said Martín Orozco Sandoval, the governor of Aguascalientes in central Mexico.

The government says it will take a cautious approach to bailouts and heavy spending.

Graciela Márquez, the secretary of the economy, challenged assertions that Mexico could easily increase debt to spend more. The cost would be prohibitive, she said, and taking on debt liberally could ultimately be more problematic than beneficial.

“If at a certain point we need to raise more debt, we will,” said Márquez, a Harvard University-trained economist. “It’s not a closed-off road.”

For now, the government is spending more, she said, including by issuing micro-credits and other payments to the most vulnerable people.

As for whether that additional spending is sufficient, she noted that even the $2 trillion stimulus package in the United States has not been enough.

“What is sufficient under these conditions?” she asked. “It must be done responsibly, without generating more problems than the ones it is trying to resolve.”

Economic damage from the pandemic is a given.

But the difference between a long, protracted crisis and a meaningful recovery, in the eyes of many economists, depends on a government’s ability to help companies and workers stay afloat until the worst is over.

European nations have spent trillions to counter the financial devastation and are considering raising more than $800 billion in collective debt to stave off economic collapse.

Some of Mexico’s Latin American neighbors have acted decisively: Chile, Peru and Brazil have all passed packages valued at 8% to 12% of their economies.

But in Mexico — between tiny business loans and spending for cash-transfer programs for the poor, young and elderly — additional government spending is less than 1% of the economy, most economists calculate.

“Mexico is way below the world’s average in terms of the amount of resources being channeled to help the economy,” said Oberto Vélez Grajales, an economist at Centro de Estudios Espinoza Yglesias, a left-leaning research group.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

17

Is this the Trump tipping point?

By JENNIFER SENIOR

Y

ou never want to say that you’ve reached a tipping point with this administration. Donald J. Trump has proved to be the Nosferatu of American politics: heartless, partial to Slavs, beneath grace and thus far impervious to destruction.

Even when I read my colleague Jonathan Martin’s fine piece on Saturday, about how some high-profile Republicans refuse to vote for Trump or are struggling with publicly lending him their support, I thought: yes, but. They’re just a handful. They’re the usual suspects.

Too few of them have coattails.

Yet something right now really is different. I think.

Before diving into the more entrancing developments, I’ll start with the obvious: Trump’s old tactics, once so reliable, are starting to fail him, utterly.

It was a winning strategy to crow about a border wall with Mexico, but it’s a loser — and a sign of pure cowardice — to build one around your own White House. He once basked in the reflected glow of “his generals”; now those generals are laying waste to him, with James Mattis, his former defense secretary, explicitly condemning Trump’s immature and divisive leadership, and John Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff, saying yep, sounds about right.

Maybe there was a time when religious conservatives would have applauded a photo of Trump standing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Bible in hand.

But using pepper balls and flash-bang grenades to clear anguished protesters out of the way backfired.

The Episcopal bishop of Washington reacted in horror; Trump’s support among white Catholics slipped 11 points between April and May. Maybe there was a time when stigmatizing all progressive protesters as invading marauders would have worked — bigotry, it gets the job done — but not now. His proposal to suppress the tumult with the military was greeted with disapproval by his current secretary of defense, Mark Esper, and disgust by Mattis; the Black Lives Matter movement now polls at an all-time high, with 66% of Americans disapproving of how Trump has handled the response to George Floyd’s death.

Trump is flailing like an overturned turtle. A historic health crisis, an economic crisis and a social crisis all at once — it’s far too much for a reality TV star to handle, no more manageable than it’d be for him to land an airplane. What this moment may have revealed, ironically enough, is that only in a time of stability and outrageous decadence could the United States have had the luxury of picking such a dark and

divisive candidate with the intellectual firepower of a water gun. When Trump asked voters “What have you got to lose?” most never dreamed that the answer could be: Everything.

Now, for the subterranean tremors that most beguile me — a suggestion that something deeper is afoot.

Trump, right now, is trying to stoke white fears about protests in the street. But he’s having little luck.

On Wednesday, Lara Putnam, the chairman of the history department at the University of Pittsburgh, tweeted a modest but persuasive thread highlighting the easy victory by Summer Lee, a progressive African President Trump walking to St. John’s Church near the American woman elected to the Pennsylvania state- White House on Monday. house in 2018, in the Democratic primary Tuesday.

“Based on the history of the district — and the ing for Darth Vader. They’re pining for a healer. It’s range of voters I’ve talked to there myself — it seemed healing words of empathy that have thus far won the entirely plausible that there would be white backlash day. Trump may have been fumbling with his Bible, but it was Nancy Pelosi who read aloud from Eccleagainst her in this moment,” Putnam told me.

If ever there were a moment for a backlash, siastes, and it was Joe Biden who said in a heartfelt, she pointed out, this would have been it: Images of 24-minute speech that he wished the president would social unrest were all over Pittsburgh television the open it every once in a while.

It’s probably too much to hope for. But for the weekend before the primary, and Lee had been an outspoken proponent of the protesters. Voters could first time in three years, change is not. have selected her primary opponent, a moderate white borough councilman who had the backing of the county’s most powerful Democrat — and its Democratic Party.

Instead, voters doubled down. Lee was already winning on Election Day — we now know this, based PO BOX 6537 Caguas PR 00726 on mail-in ballots — and as the ballot counting conTelephones: (787) 743-3346 • (787) 743-6537 tinued the next day, she pulled ahead. Her victory (787) 743-5606 • Fax (787) 743-5100 suggested that the white suburban women and retirees in her district were unswayed by Trump’s demonizing and dog-whistling.

In these protests, it is possible we are seeing the rumblings of a new Democratic coalition. On Saturday, Putnam and two of her colleagues wrote that the scale Publisher and geographic diversity of these demonstrations were without American precedent.

Manuel Sierra Sharon Ramírez General Manager Legal Notices Graphics Manager We already know that Trump’s support among white women is sliding in the polls, both with college María de L. Márquez Elsa Velázquez degrees and without; It’s probably not an accident Business Director Reporter that the first Senate Republican to endorse Mattis’ views of Trump was Lisa Murkowski, a white woman R. Mariani José Sánchez Fournier from Alaska. (And perhaps, as Jonathan Martin’s piece Circulation Director Reporter hinted, other Republican senators will start to follow, Lisette Martínez María Rivera and refrain from giving him their support.) As Barack Advertising Agency Director Graphic Artist Manager Obama pointed out in his recent town hall, “a far more representative cross-section of America” is out Ray Ruiz protesting in the streets than in the 1960s.

Legal Notice Director At a time of genuine crisis, Americans aren’t pin-

Dr. Ricardo Angulo

18

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Allies, don’t fail us again

By CHARLES M. BLOW

I

n 1964, during what was called Freedom Summer, over 700 mostly white young liberals descended on Mississippi to help register black voters.

The attention that effort generated helped convince the powers in Washington to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In fact, white liberals were involved in many parts of the civil rights movement, in participation, organization and funding.

But the backlash was quick. A New York Times survey conducted just months after the Civil Rights Act was passed found that most white New Yorkers believed that the civil rights movement had gone too far.

Two years later, when Martin Luther King Jr. moved to Chicago to begin the Chicago Campaign to push for fair housing, he was met by vicious, violent protests from white mobs and resistance from many of the same white legislators who had supported the Civil Rights Act. At one protest King was hit so hard by a rock that it knocked him to the ground. As the Chicago Tribune reported, a riot broke out that day: “At least 30 people were injured, some by a hail of bricks and bottles accompanied by racial epithets. Some counter demonstrators were clubbed by baton-wielding police officers. More than 40 people were arrested when a crowd of whites blocked adjoining streets and cursed the police, several of whom were hurt.”

King would say after the riot, “I have seen many demonstrations in the South but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.”

In a 1967 speech at Stanford, King bemoaned: “I’m convinced that many of the very people who supported us in the struggle in the South are not willing to go all the way now. I came to see this in a very difficult and painful way. In Chicago the last year, where I’ve lived and worked.

Some of the people who came quickly to march with us in Selma and Birmingham weren’t active around Chicago. And

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Protesters walking across the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday in New York.

I came to see that so many people who supported morally and even financially what we were doing in Birmingham and Selma, were really outraged against the extremist behavior of Bull Connor and Jim Clark toward Negroes, rather than believing in genuine equality for Negroes.”

Many of the white liberals who supported the movement had been moved by embarrassment, moved by images of cruelty rather than the idea of genuine, equitable inclusion.

White allies had disappointed, once again.

One of the most hopeful and heartening features of the current protests has been the images of people of all races, in this country and around the world, openly supporting antiracism, carrying Black Lives Matter posters and using more sophisticated language in discussing the matter of state violence against black people.

The challenge here is to sustain the current sentiment and not let this version of Freedom Summer be yet another moment when allies fail.

We must make sure, make a statement, that this is a true change in the American ideology and not an activistchic, summer street festival for people who have been cooped up for months, not able to go to school or graduate, not able to go to concerts or bars.

This is not the social justice Coachella. This is not systemic racism Woodstock. This has to be a forever committed, even after protest eventually subsides.

Once again, many white allies, to some degree, have been moved by the embarrassment at intransigence and by

the image of public cruelty, in much the same way as it happened in the 1960s.

This feels bigger; it is bigger.

But we must resist efforts to simply pacify and quell, to simply stop the awful images. We must strike at the root: that the entire system operates in a way that is anti-black, that it disadvantages and even punishes blackness, that part of your privilege is built on my oppression.

We will have to come to see and accept that this system of oppression has been actively, energetically designed and deployed over centuries, and it takes centuries of equally active and energetic efforts to dismantle it.

We must make ourselves comfortable with the notion that for the privileged, equality will feel like oppression, and that things — legacy power, wealth accumulation, cultural influence — will not be advantaged by whiteness.

Walter Mondale, who was a young senator from Minnesota in the 1960s, seemed to agree, saying: “A lot of Civil Rights was about making the South behave and taking the teeth from George Wallace.” But, he continued, Fair Housing “came right to the neighborhoods across the country. This was Civil Rights getting personal.”

How will our white allies respond when this summer has passed? How will they respond when civil rights gets personal and it’s about them and not just punishing the white man who pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck? How will they respond when true equality threatens their privilege, when it actually starts to cost them something?

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

19

Aseguran que Delgado lleva la delantera en la carrera primarista del PPD P L or THE STAR

a campaña a la gobernación de Charlie Delgado Altieri anunció el lunes que el alcalde de Isabela es el aspirante con el mayor número de alcaldes y presidentes de comités municipales del Partido Popular Democrático (PPD) respaldando su candidatura a la gobernación.

“Durante los pasados meses y semanas, Charlie ha recibido el apoyo de una cantidad considerable de alcaldes y presidentes de comités municipales. Podemos decir categóricamente que, de los tres candidatos a la gobernación, es quien cuenta con el mayor apoyo

del liderato del PPD hasta el día de hoy”, sostuvo Josué Brenes, director de comunicaciones de Delgado Altieri.

Entre los alcaldes que apoyan la candidatura de Delgado Altieri a la gobernación se encuentran Luis Raúl Sánchez, alcalde de Humacao, Jorge L. Márquez, alcalde de Maunabo, Rafael “Rafy” Surillo, alcalde de Yabucoa, Norberto Soto, alcalde de Patillas, José Luis Cruz, alcalde de Trujillo Alto, Marcos Cruz, alcalde de Vega Baja, Carmen Maldonado, alcaldesa de Morovis, Clemente “Chito” Agosto, alcalde de Toa Alta, José “Chely” Rodríguez, alcalde de Hatillo, Jorge Estevez, alcalde de Añasco, Carlos López Bonilla,

alcalde de Rincón, Jorge González, alcalde de Jayuya, e Isidro Negrón, alcalde de San Germán. Se espera que durante los próximos días más alcaldes se sumen a listado de alcaldes que respaldan a Delgado Altieri.

Se informó además que algunos de los presidentes de comité municipal que también apoyan a Delgado Altieri son José Márquez de Las Piedras, Fabian Arroyo de Lares, Wilfredo “Juny” Ruiz, Ismael “Titi” Rodríguez de Guánica y Yadira Ramos de Yauco.

Del mismo modo, los representantes Ramón Luis Cruz Burgos del Distrito 34 y Carlos Bianchi del Distrito 20 y los senadores Cirilo Tirado y José Nadal Power también apoyan la candidatura de Delgado Altieri.

Comienza la reactivación del turismo con nueva estrategia promocional Por THE STAR

L

a Compañía de Turismo de Puerto Rico (CTPR) anunció el lunes, la reactivación oficial del turismo en Puerto Rico apostando al turismo interno como motor para emprender el resurgir del sector en lo inmediato.

“Apoyamos la labor que está haciendo Discover Puerto Rico para estimular la demanda del exterior.

Reconocemos que la fase de planificación de viajes de estos visitantes que provienen de fuera de la isla se extenderá durante varios meses y, que para ser eficientes en los esfuerzos para estimular dicha demanda, se hacen necesarias enmiendas a las Órdenes Ejecutivas vigentes ante la consideración de la Gobernadora una vez el Task Force Económico haga entrega de su próximo informe. Por tal razón, la oportunidad inmediata para generar estímulo económico para el sector en las próximas semanas descansa sobre el turismo interno. Luego del impacto del COVID-19, sabemos que un 62.2% de nuestros residentes buscan estrictas medidas de higiene y salubridad a la hora de vacacionar. Con la puesta en marcha del Programa de Salud & Seguridad de la CTPR el mes pasado, nos aseguramos de que las empresas turísticas están listas para recibir visitantes, a la vez que activamos los esfuerzos de promoción y mercadeo para motivar a que el mercado local haga Turismo Interno”, expresó la directora ejecutiva de la CTPR, Carla Campos.

Luego de la más reciente revisión a la Orden Ejecutiva emitida por la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced y la ejecución del nuevo protocolo de Salud y Seguridad elaborado por la CTPR, el sector del turismo está listo para recibir a los residentes y capitalizar la demanda del periodo pico de verano.

Basándose en los resultados de un estudio reciente de investigación entre los residentes de la Isla,

la CTPR presentó su nueva estrategia de mercadeo, la cual busca activar a 410,000 residentes a hospedarse y hacer turismo interno durante los meses de junio a septiembre. Según revela el estudio, un 75 por ciento de los que considerarían vacacionar en verano escogerían a Puerto Rico como su primera opción. Sin embargo, un 41 por ciento de los puertorriqueños encuestados aún están considerando si van a vacacionar o no este verano.

Campos aseguró que las hospederías y empresas turísticas en la Isla, las cuales en su gran mayoría redujeron sus operaciones a un mínimo durante la cuarentena, hoy están preparadas y listas para recibir a turistas locales.

Con los objetivos de despertar interés e inspirar a los residentes a consumir el producto turístico e infundir confianza sobre los altos estándares de higiene establecidos a través del programa de Salud y Seguridad, la nueva iniciativa titulada “Check-In Por Tu Isla” persigue la venta de 500,600 cuartos noches, lo cual se traduce a 63.5 millones de dólares en ingresos y 5.8 millones de dólares en impuestos por habitación.

“Check In por tu Isla” contará con esfuerzos multimedios que dirigirán al turista al portal electrónico de Voy Turisteando, marca oficial de turismo interno, www.voyturisteando.com. En el portal actualmente se encuentran más de 35 ofertas exclusivas para el turista local durante todo el verano, comenzando desde 69.99 dólares.

Campos informó que “durante los meses de verano el mercado local representa hasta un 47 por ciento del total de registros en habitaciones de hoteles.

Durante el año 2019, un total de 653,000 residentes se alojaron en hospederías tradicionales (Hoteles, Resorts, Paradores, Bed and Breakfasts, Guest Houses, Posadas y Condo-Hoteles). Éstos generaron un ingreso en habitaciones de 135.5 millones de dóla-

res y aproximadamente 12.5 millones de dólares en impuestos por habitación (Room Tax)”.

“Check In significa que llegaste, que estás aquí, quiere decir que estás bien y seguro, Check In es compartir tus lugares favoritos y es decir presente por tu gente y por Puerto Rico. Confiamos que este esfuerzo resultará de inspiración para todos los puertorriqueños a hacer turismo interno de manera segura y responsable y así lograr el resurgimiento de la economía para el sector turístico en todo Puerto Rico”, comentó Imaris Arocho, directora de promoción y mercadeo de la CTPR. “Los residentes son un motor clave para el desarrollo de la economía del visitante. Pero, en estos tiempos del COVID-19, hay que ir más allá de crear inspiración y motivación. Hay que recalcar la tranquilidad de vacacionar en casa bajo los más altos estándares de salubridad. Nuevamente, el turismo da un pie al frente para fomentar el desarrollo económico de la Isla, acorde con nuestra nueva realidad y con ofertas extraordinarias para estimular el resurgir sólido de nuestra industria. Con esta nueva estrategia, el turismo interno ya se activó. El próximo paso es unirnos para apoyarlo y que Puerto Rico se restablezca como un destino turístico competitivo a nivel global”, concluyó Campos.

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Tuesday, June 9, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

You live outside New York. Are you ready to return to Broadway?

A barren West 45th Street in Manhattan’s theater district during the coronavirus pandemic

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

N

ew Yorkers are reluctant to return to the theater this fall, according to a survey commissioned by The New York Times. What about out-of-towners, who make up more than two-thirds of the Broadway audience? What would it take for them to be comfortable?

We put that question to readers of the Theater Update newsletter and received hundreds of responses, most of them pessimistic — and pained. Here is an edited sampling: “I’m ready now. I’ll wear the mask, I’ll wash my hands, I’ll sit every third or fourth seat. Whatever I need to do to get back in front of a live performance while safely and respectfully protecting my neighbors and theater staff!”

— Corinne Rossi, Stonington, Connecticut “Without a vaccine or a cure, to attend a performance would not be a rational choice. The issue is not the statistical probability of getting the virus. Rather, it is the anxiety of being infected that prevents devout thespians, like yours truly, from going back. I actually had the virus and survived, and I do not wish this experience on anyone.”

— Alexander Waintrub, Los Angeles “My husband and I talked about this because we miss the theater so much. He would go back right now to Broadway as long as people were wearing masks. I would go back at 50% capacity.”

— Barbara Parker, Miami “What might it take for us to come to Broadway again? Well, to start, probably a car drive rather than a flight, and socially distanced seating with mask wearing.

Does that mean Broadway would have to present twice as many performances to accommodate playgoers at a safe distance? Have to leave that to the analysts, bean counters and presenters.”

— Phillip Levy, Raleigh, North Carolina “I am 29 and would be comfortable going back. At all the shows I’ve been to, people are kind, respectful and well mannered. So I trust them to use their best judgment. If theaters offered flexibility and refunds due to sickness, I believe that would help people feel less pressured to go if they were feeling the slightest bit under the weather.”

— Joshua Chang, Tempe, Arizona “My husband and I live in rural northern California. On our last threeweek trip to New York in January, we attended 14 performances: theater, opera,

music and contemporary dance. We want to come back, but we are 83 and 81 years old and live in a retirement community.

We feel a special responsibility not to inadvertently bring the virus back home with us. For that reason it is unlikely that we will return to New York theater until there is a vaccine and/or a dramatic reduction in transmission rates.”

— Merna Villarejo, Davis, California “There is no aspect of life that theater doesn’t help me understand. You ask what it would take for me to feel comfortable enough to come to New York? A ticket and a free Saturday. I can provide my own face mask.”

— Sebastian Ryder, Burlington, Vermont “There would have to be: a vaccine; effective and viable treatment; checking for symptoms at the door; reliable social distancing and protection interventions; significant and effective ventilation; hand sanitizing stations throughout the theater; all metrics for reopening to have been reached and maintained for a 12-month period. I am sure this is not what you want to hear, but my love of theater is not so important to me that I risk dying for it.”

— Frank Greene, Nashua, New Hampshire “I am in the same cohort that many Broadway theatergoers are. I will be 65 this year and have co-morbid conditions.

Getting on a plane from California has always been somewhat risky, but now it feels impossible. Going into a packed theater also feels impossible too. All of it breaks my heart. On the bright side, I think a lot more can be done in the virtual space. I watched “Love Letters” — I had never seen it and thought it was perfect for that presentation.”

— Beth Eagleson, San Clemente, California “I’m a subscriber at three theaters in Baltimore: Center Stage and Everyman, both small houses with a generally gray-haired clientele (though Center Stage has become more diverse), and the 2,000-plus seat touring company venue the Hippodrome. As a gray-hair myself, I can’t imagine how I’m going to comfortably attend the Hippodrome, with its claustrophobically tight seating and mob-

scene lobby. I can more likely imagine the smaller theaters devising a safer, spacedout seating arrangement. But with fewer ticket sales, how will they pay the bills?”

— Jana Korman, Owings Mills, Maryland “I think I’d be OK with face masks.

Longer intermissions (so the bathroom line could be spaced out). Maybe maxing out at 50% capacity (not even sure if that is financially viable, however). I honestly, though, would most likely want to see how things go in the fall — whether there’s a reemergence of the virus, or if it fades away. But if theaters open in the fall I would seriously be weighing the risks and deciding whether to go or not — and my feeling now is that I most likely would go.”

— Rachel Dorrian, Neptune Beach, Florida “Assuming there is no second wave in the fall, I would come back with adjusted seating and masks worn by audience and staff members. I would also pay a reasonable surcharge to make up some of the lost revenue from lost seats. Prayers for you, New York!”

— Julie Moore, Brownsburg, Indiana “I bought tickets last year to see Hugh Jackman in “The Music Man,” in September. I would wear my mask, not go to the bathroom and wash hands and do almost anything to be there if it could happen. Given the issues of putting on a production, I am getting a sinking feeling it won’t.”

— Joann Berkson, McLean, Virginia “If Broadway reopens this fall, I will not be in the audience. Nor will I be at one of my favorite restaurants, or warmly welcomed at the Blue Bar by Christian, the head bartender who seemed to pull seats out of thin air so we could join the crowd. I am wary of spending any time in close quarters with people who have not suffered with me in my particular quarantine “bubble.” I miss New York. I miss Broadway. I miss paying $108 for a double Veuve Clicquot before seeing Springsteen, or enjoying the signature “Hadestown” margarita. I miss it, but I don’t see any way back in. Not now, and not soon.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

21

10 Comic books to celebrate Pride

By GEORGE GENE GUSTINESS

T

hese comic books and graphic novels chronicle chance encounters, leaps through time and first romances. They also transport readers to unexpected locations like the alien landscapes of Mars to front-row views of mixed martial arts tournaments. Uniting these tales are characters who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

Always Human In this future society, technology can be used to alter one’s physical appearance in seconds. But one character, Sunati, has noticed another, Austen, who stays in her natural form. After Sunati summons the courage to ask her on a date, the two young women embark on a relationship with the usual fits and starts. It almost feels like eavesdropping as they start to open up with each other.

By Ari North for Little Bee Books.

Barbalien: Red Planet This five-part story is about Barbalien, a superhero from Mars who also fights crime as a police officer (Mark Markz), though he is being shunned by his fellow detective after an unwanted advance. This adventure is set in the 1980s, during the AIDS crisis, and delves into the hero’s life on his home planet and on Earth, where he was originally sent on a reconnaissance mission. An encounter with an AIDS activist opens his eyes to a new world.

Written by Tate Brombal and Jeff Lemire; drawn by Gabriel Hernández Walta; colored by Jordie Bellaire for Dark Horse Comics; available in the fall.

Bingo Love Two teenagers, Hazel Johnson and Mari McCray, first spot each other during church bingo. They become classmates and inseparable friends — until Mari is sent away after the girls are caught kissing. Time passes, and Hazel gets married and has children, but a chance encounter at bingo brings the women back together, and Hazel makes major life changes to be true to herself.

Written by Tee Franklin; drawn by Jenn St-Onge; colored by Joy San for Image Comics.

Flamer Aiden Navarro is having a rough summer. The other boys in his Flaming Arrows scout group all seem to be con-

In an undated handout photo from Jenn St-Onge/Image Comics, a panel from “Bingo Love.” Two teenagers, Hazel Johnson and Mari McCray, first spot each other during church bingo. sumed with thoughts of sports and girls.

Aiden feels different and is wrestling with his identity. The story is based on the life of the cartoonist and does not shy away from his troubled thoughts, including one particularly bleak moment.

By Mike Curato for Godwin Books; available Sept. 1.

The Infinite Loop, Vol. 1 Teddy is a time traveler whose job is to eliminate paradoxes that threaten reality. She does her work dutifully until she meets Ano, an anomaly in human form who sweeps her off her feet. They begin a romance that leads Teddy to question her mission and to champion the right of Ano — and others like her — to exist.

Written by Pierrick Colinet; drawn and colored by Elsa Charretier for IDW Publishing.

Kill a Man Things are not going well for James Belly, a mixed martial arts fighter living in the shadow of his father, who died during a bout. After James is forced out of the closet, his middleweight championship title is disqualified on a technicality. He vows to return to the top even if it means being coached by the man who killed his father.

Written by Steve Orlando and Phillip Kennedy Johnson; drawn and colored by Alec Morgan for AfterShock Comics; available Oct. 7.

Liebestrasse Set in the 1930s, this narrative features Samuel Wells, who travels to Berlin as part of his job for a U.S. bank. He meets an art dealer named Philip Adler, and there is an immediate spark. But their romance blossoms as fascism is rising in Germany, increasing the risks of their relationship. When they are caught in a raid at a gay bar, their lives are changed.

Written by Greg Lockard; drawn

by Tim Fish; colored by Héctor Barros for Comixology Originals.

The Magic Fish Reading fairy tales together is a routine that brings a boy, Tien, and his immigrant parents closer. It also helps bridge a language barrier between the two generations. The family’s communication skills are put to a test when Tien decides to tell his mother he is a gay, a word he cannot find in Vietnamese.

By Trung Le Nguyen for Random House Graphic; available Oct. 13.

In an undated handout photo from Ari North/Little Bee Books, a panel from “Always Human.” In this future society, technology can be used to alter one’s physical appearance in seconds.

New Mexico.

Written by Alex Sanchez; drawn and colored by Julie Maroh for DC; available Tuesday.

Youth Franklin and River are disaffected young men trying to escape the troubles and monotony of their small town, but hitting the road — in a stolen car — only leads to more woes. There is drinking, drugs and infidelity before another twist: A meteorite gives them and some new friends strange abilities. And that’s only the end of Chapter 1.

Written by Curt Pires; drawn by Alex Diotto; colored by Dee Cunniffe for Comixology Originals.

In an undated handout photo from Tim Fish/Comixology Originals, a panel from “Liebestrasse.” Set in the 1930s, this narrative features Samuel Wells, who travels to Berlin as part of his job for an American bank.

You Brought Me the Ocean This coming-of-age story is about Jackson Hyde, a teenager who in other comics becomes Aqualad, the protégé of Aquaman. Jackson wrestles with college — whether it will separate him from his best friend — experiences his first romance and discovers the origin of his powers in Truth or Consequences,

In an undated handout photo from Elsa Charretier/IDW Publishing, a panel from “The Infinite Loop, Vol. 1.” Teddy is a time-traveler whose job is to eliminate paradoxes that threaten reality.

22

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

‘Pandemic pets’ reducing stress, boosting mental health

R

esearch consistently shows the benefits of pet ownership during stressful times As has been discussed in so many articles, sharing our lives with pets is good for our health. Not only do they make us healthier in normal times, in stressful times the benefit of a pandemic puppy (or cat), or other non-human companion, goes even further.

During a pandemic, people can be stressed and fearful for their lives and the lives of those they love. Research has shown that where there is a bond between human and animal, the presence of a nonhuman companion — especially a dog — decreases psychological arousal and stress, and creates physiological changes that make us feel better.

Pandemic pets Early in the COVID-19 pandemic there was pet abandonment in large numbers in Wuhan, China.

Fearful that the same would happen locally, many animal rescue organizations set out to empty their shelters. Worldwide there was an unprecedented upsurge in adoptions and fostering.

Although many people did this for the animals, they, perhaps unwittingly, set themselves up for better mental health during the pandemic. Aside from the stress-mitigating impacts of pets mentioned above, having a pet may be a powerful influencer in maintaining health-protective behaviours, such as eating

well or going out for a walk.

Dogs and cats can increase physical rehabilitation goals through behaviour such as “bending, reaching, ambulating and using both arms in a functional manner to provide food, water, and grooming.” These basic activities involved in animal care actually provide exercise, which is very important for people who spend the day in a stationary position.

Human-animal relationships When the COVID-19 pandemic began, I had just started a research study asking people about their relationships with their non-human companions. The preliminary results of this online survey include people between their late 30s and early 90s. They live in Canada, the United States, England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland and come from all walks of life. Onethird have completed high school or less, 30 per cent completed college and/or an apprenticeship and the rest completed some kind of university degree. At the time of the survey, almost all of them were spending their time at home, some were alone, others with family and for others pets were their only companions.

When asked, in an open-ended question, what it has been like having animal companions with them during the pandemic, their answers included words like “comforting,” “good/great,” “helpful.” Several people said that they work full-time, so they were en-

joying the time with their animal and getting to see what their pet does all day. Several people indicated that they would be lost without their pet.

One participant said, “I don’t know what I would do without the company of my dog, she has kept me going.” Another said, “It is the only thing that is keeping me sane.” And others said the presence of a pet was salvation (a life saver) and brought joy. There were also those who said they talk with their pet and that it helped stave off loneliness.

Artificial pets?

Another question I ask in my research is whether robot pets can be used to replace live animals, so it was interesting to see that robot pets were being provided to older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In my survey during the COVID-19 pandemic, respondents were asked whether, given the choice, they would choose a robot pet or a live animal. Out of 102 people who answered this question, not one of them said they would choose a robot pet — even those who currently did not have a pet did not want a robot pet. The vast majority said they would choose a live pet, and a few said that they would rather have no pet at all.

When asked why, they said things like, “It is not about the companionship alone. It is about the emotional connection. To get that from a robotic creation is not love. We need the love that comes with these pets.” It was very clear that the robots were “not the same as a living breathing animal.” That a robot could not take the place of a pet because pets are “unique and make me smile and love them.”

The results of this survey are similar to those found during non-pandemic research: pets stave off loneliness, and living with pets helps people to be more active, even if it is only the movement associated with basic tasks, such as cleaning the litter box or filling food bowls. Most importantly, we are comforted by these non-human companions. The presence of a dog or a cat in the home may be the only thing between an isolated person and despair.

Given how important dogs, cats and other nonhuman companions are to our well-being, it is important to remember them when developing programs to support isolated people. When there is not enough money to go around, “it is not unheard of for people to feed their dog before they feed or acquire medications for themselves.”

As the economic reality of sustained unemployment unfolds, it is important for public services to consider not only food security for humans, but also for their non-human companions in order to prevent the possibility of a tsunami of pet abandonment due to an inability to provide care.The Conversation

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

23

How to hug during a pandemic

By TARA PARKER-POPE

A

Canadian woman was so desperate to hug her mother during quarantine that she created a “hug glove” using a clear tarp with sleeves so the women could hug through the plastic. A video of two young cousins in Kentucky hugging and weeping after weeks apart in quarantine was shared thousands of times.

“We did not expect for them to react the way they did,” said Amber Collins, who recorded the reunion of her 8-year-old son, Huckston, with his cousin Rosalind Arnett, age 10. “They were so overjoyed they didn’t know how to express themselves, except to cry. This hug shows how powerful the human touch truly is.”

Not only do we miss hugs, we need them. Physical affection reduces stress by calming our sympathetic nervous system, which during times of worry releases damaging stress hormones into our bodies. In one series of studies, just holding hands with a loved one reduced the distress of an electric shock “Humans have brain pathways that are specifically dedicated to detecting affectionate touch,” said Johannes Eichstaedt, a computational social scientist and psychology professor at Stanford University. “Affectionate touch is how our biological systems communicate to one another that we are safe, that we are loved and that we are not alone.”

To learn the safest way to hug during a viral outbreak, I asked Linsey Marr, an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the world’s leading experts on airborne disease transmission, about the risk of viral exposure during a hug. Based on mathematical models from a Hong Kong study that shows how respiratory viruses travel during close contact, Marr calculated that the risk of exposure during a brief hug can be surprisingly low — even if you hugged a person who didn’t know they were infected and happened to cough.

Here’s why. We don’t know the exact dose required for the new coronavirus to make you sick, but estimates range from 200 to 1,000 copies of the virus. An average cough might carry anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 viruses, but most of the splatter lands on the ground or nearby surfaces. When people are in close contact, typically only about 2% of the liquid in the cough — or about 100 to 200 viruses — would be inhaled by

Of the many things we miss from our pre-pandemic lives, hugging may top the list. We asked scientists who study airborne viruses to teach us the safest way to hug. or splashed on a person nearby. But only 1% of those stray particles — just one or two viruses — actually will be infectious.

“We don’t know how many infectious viruses it takes to make you sick — probably more than one,” Marr said. “If you don’t talk or cough while hugging, the risk should be very low.”

There’s tremendous variability in how much virus a person sheds, so the safest thing is to avoid hugs. But if you need a hug, take precautions. Wear a mask. Hug outdoors. Try to avoid touching the other person’s body or clothes with your face and your mask. Don’t hug someone who is coughing or has other symptoms.

And remember that some hugs are riskier than others. Point your faces in opposite directions; the position of your face matters most. Don’t talk or cough while you’re hugging. And do it quickly. Approach each other and briefly embrace. When you are done, don’t linger. Back away quickly so you don’t breathe into each other’s faces. Wash your hands afterward.

And try not to cry. Tears and runny noses increase the risk for coming into contact with more fluids that contain the virus.

While some of the precautions may sound like a lot of effort for a simple hug, people need options given that the pandemic will be with us for a while, said Julia Marcus,

an infectious disease epidemiologist and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.

“There’s a real challenge right now for older people who worry that they won’t be able to touch or connect with family for the rest of their lives,” Marcus said. “Keeping hugs brief is particularly important because the risk of transmission increases with more prolonged contact.”

Here are the dos and don’ts of hugging, based on the advice of Marr and other experts: DON’T hug face to face “This position is higher risk because the faces are so close together,” Marr said.

“When the shorter person looks up, their exhaled breath, because of its warmth and buoyancy, travels up into the taller person’s breathing zone. If the taller person is looking down, there is opportunity for the huggers’ exhaled and inhaled breaths to mingle.”

DON’T hug cheeks together, facing the same direction This position, with both huggers looking in the same direction, also is higher risk because each person’s exhaled breath is in the other person’s breathing zone.

DO hug facing opposite directions For a safe, full-body hug, turn your faces in opposite directions, which prevents you from directly breathing each other’s exhaled particles. Wear a mask.

DO let children hug you around the knees or waist Hugging at knee or waist level lowers risk for direct exposure to droplets and aerosols because faces are far apart. There is the potential for the child’s face and mask to contaminate the adult’s clothing, so you might consider changing clothes, and wash your hands after a visit that includes hugs.

The adult also should look away so as not to breathe down on the child.

DO kiss your grandchild on the back of the head In this scenario, the grandparent is minimally exposed to the child’s exhaled breath. The child could be exposed to the taller person’s breath, so kiss through a mask.

Julian Tang, a virologist and associate professor at the University of Leicester in England who studies how respiratory viruses travel through the air, said he would add one more precaution to a pandemic hug: Hold your breath.

“Most hugs last less than 10 seconds, so people should be able to manage this,” Tang said. “Then back away to at least 2-meter separation before talking again to allow them to catch their breath at a safe distance.

Holding your breath stops you exhaling any virus into their breathing zone, if you are unknowingly infected — and stops you inhaling any virus from them, if they are unknowingly infected.”

Yuguo Li, a University of Hong Kong engineering professor and senior author on the paper that Marr cited to make the calculations, said that hugs probably pose less risk than a longer face-to-face conversation. “The exposure time is short, unlike conversation, which can be as long as we like,” he said.

“But no cheek kissing.”

Li said the risk of viral exposure may be highest at the start of the hug, when two people approach each other and could breathe on each other, and at the end, when they pull apart. Wearing a mask is important, as is hand-washing, because there’s a low risk of picking up the virus from another person’s hands, skin or clothes.

Marr noted that because the risk of a quick hug with precautions is very low but not zero, people should choose their hugs wisely.

“I would hug close friends, but I would skip more casual hugs,” Marr said. “I would take the Marie Kondo approach: The hug has to spark joy.”

24 LEGAL NOTICE

solo predio desde sus respec-

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO

las escrituras números diecisie-

DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU-

tivas compras, efectuadas por te(17) del 17 de abril de 1979,

NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA ante Amílcar Soto Santiago y SALA DE CAROLINA. doce (12) del 17 de octubre de

EVA ILIA PÉREZ CRESPO, WILFREDO APONTE PÉREZ Y LIAM MAGAL Y APONTE PÉREZ

1985, ante el mismo Notario.

Ni los referidos dos lotes, ni la propiedad formada por los

mismos y que los Peticionarios

PETICIONARIOS

desean inscribir ahora como

CIVIL NÚM. CA2020CV0060.

cargas o gravámenes de clase

DOMINIO.

que se publique la pretensión

EX PARTE

SOBRE:

un solo predio, están afectos a

EXPEDIENTE EDICTO.

DE

ESTA-

alguna. Este Tribunal ordenó

DOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA por tres (3) veces durante el EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. término de veinte (20) días en UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASO-

un periódico de circulación ge-

A: todo el que tenga algún interés propietario, o derecho real sobre el inmueble descrito en la Petición de Dominio del caso de epígrafe, a las personas ignoradas a quienes pueda perjudicar la inscripción del mismo, y, en general, a toda persona que desee oponerse.

personas arriba mencionadas

CIADO DE PR.

neral diaria, para que todas las

y todas aquellas desconocidas a quienes pueda perjudicar la

inscripción o deseen oponerse,

puedan así hacerlo dentro del

término de veinte (20) días a partir de la última publicación

del presente edicto. Por tanto firmo expido la presente en Carolina, Puerto Rico, a 26 de

mayo de 2020. Lcda. Marilyn

Aponte Rodriguez, Secretaria

Regional. Eliann Reyes Mo-

PAGÁN, FULANEJO Y SUTANEJO DE TAL, POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; NANCY ESTRADA T/C/C NANCY ESTRADA PAGÁN, GLORIA MARGARITA ESTRADA PAGÁN, MARITZA ESTRADA PAGÁN, IRIS ENEYDA ESTRADA PAGÁN y LUCÍA ESTRADA PAGÁN COMO HEREDERAS DE GONZALO ESTRADA GARCÍA Y DE GLORIA PAGÁN RIVERA T/C/C GLORIA PAGÁN DE ESTRADA; SUTANO Y PERENCEJO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ PARTE DEMANDADA

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CIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRA-

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DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDEN-

DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ

Queda usted notificado que en este Tribunal se ha radicado demanda

sobre

cancelación

de pagaré extraviado por la vía

judicial. El 28 de diciembre de

1999, Gonzalo Estrada García

y su esposa Gloria Pagán Rivera t/c/c Gloria Pagán de Estrada

constituyeron una hipoteca en

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GUAS.

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LEGAL NOTICE

tienen sobre la siguiente pro-

DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU-

terreno denominado Parcela

SALA SUPERIOR

ción localizado en el barrio Cedros de Carolina, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de

mil seiscientos sesenta punto cuatro mil doscientos dieciocho

metros cuadrados (1,660.4218.

MC), equivalentes a punto cuatro mil doscientos veinticinco diezmilésimas de cuerda (.4225

Cda.) y en lindes: por el Norte con terrenos de la Sucesión

de Agustín Rodríguez; ahora,

Eleuterio Álamo Resto; por el Sur, con Parcela marcada Dos del mismo Plano, ahora Luis

Cruz; por el Este, con quebrada y área a dedicarse a uso público y por el Oeste, con camino de uso público.” Dicho

lote es parte de la finca número 43,955, inscrita al folio 259 del

tomo 1047, finca número de la

Sección II de Carolina, propiedad de Elíseo Casillas Pérez de quien la copeticionaria Eva l.

Crespo Pérez y su esposo Wilfredo Aponte Aponte adquirieron el lote que desean inscribir

mediante este procedimiento,

en dos predios con cabidas originales de 1, 147.62 M.C y

796.02 M.C y que los Peticionarios poseyeron como si fuera un

@

DE

CA-

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

PARTE DEMANDANTE VS.

DORAL FINANCIAL CORPORATION POR CONDUCTO DE SU AGENTE RESIDENTE, DORAL MORTGAGE CORPORATION T/C/C DORAL MORTGAGE, LLC., POR CONDUCTO DE SU AGENTE RESIDENTE CT CORPORATION SYSTEM; FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION (FDIC) COMO SÍNDICO DE DORAL BANK; LA SUCESIÓN DE GONZALO ESTRADA GARCÍA COMPUESTA POR FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; LA SUCESIÓN DE GLORIA PAGÁN RIVERA T/C/C GLORIA PAGÁN DE ESTRADA COMPUESTA POR GONZALO ESTRADA

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Fax: (787) 789-1826, correo ministración y Manejo de casos electrónico:

oficinabelmaa- (SUMAC), al cual puede acce-

lonso@gmail.com, dentro del der utilizando la siguiente directérmino de treinta (30) días de ción electrónica: https;//unired. la publicación de este edicto, ramajudicial,pr, salvo que se excluyéndose el día de la publi- represente por derecho propio,

cación, se le anotará la rebeldía en cuyo caso deberá presentar y se le dictará Sentencia en su su alegación responsiva en la

contra, concediendo el remedio secretaria del Tribunal. La consolicitado sin más citarle ni oír- testación a la demanda debe

le. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y este Tribunal se ha radicado el sello del Tribunal, hoy 29 de Mortgage Corporation o a su ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO demanda sobre cancelación abril de 2020, en Toa Alta, Puerorden, con intereses al 8.75% DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- de pagaré extraviado por la to Rico. LCDA. LAURA I. SANanual y vencedero el 1ro ene- NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA vía judicial. El 30 de noviembre TA SANCHEZ, SECRETARIA ro de 2030, sobre la siguiente SALA SUPERIOR DE TOA de 1978, Francisco Ramírez REGIONAL. KARLA P. RIVERA propiedad: URBANA: Solar ALTA. Doubón y su esposa Susan marcado con el número 26 del BANCO POPULAR DE Newman de Ramírez, consti- ROMAN, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR DEL TRIBUNAL bloque J de la Urbanización PUERTO RICO tuyeron una hipoteca en San Caribe Gardens, radicada en PARTE DEMANDANTE VS. Juan, Puerto Rico, conforme LEGAL NOTICE el Barrio Tomás de Castro del THE LINCOLN FINANCIAL a la Escritura núm. 271 autoESTADO LIBRE ASOClADO término municipal de Caguas, rizada por el notario Héctor MORTGAGEES, INC. DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUPuerto Rico, con una cabida suMoyano Noriega en garantía T/C/C COLONIAL NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA perficial de 300.00 metros cuade un pagaré por la suma de MORTGAGE SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN SEdrados. En lindes por el NORBANKERS CORP., POR $35,000.00 a favor de The Lin- BASTIAN..

TE, en una distancia de 24.00 coln Financial Mortgagees, Inc, de $85,500.00 a favor de Doral

TE DE LOS E.E.U.U. EL ES- metros, con el solar número 27 rales, Secretaria Auxiliar del TADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE del bloque J de la Urbanización; Tribunal. por el SUR, en una distancia de PUERTO RICO. **** A: NANCY ESTRADA T/C/C 24.00 metros. Con el solar nú-

POR LA PRESENTE: se les

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

mero 25 de dicho bloque J: por

el ESTE, en una distancia de 12.50 metros, con el solar 29 del expresado bloque J de la

Urbanización: y por el OESTE,

en una distancia de 12.50 metros, con la calle número 7 de

la expresada Urbanización. Enclava una casa. La propiedad y

la escritura de hipoteca constan

inscritas al folio 250 del tomo 1502 de Caguas, Finca 14430.

Registro de la Propiedad de

Caguas, Sección I. Inscripción octava. La parte demandada 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.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación

responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal. Se le advierte que si

no contesta la demanda, radicando el original de la contestación en este Tribunal y enviando copia de la contestación

a la abogada de la Parte Demandante, Lcda. Belma Alonso García, cuya dirección es: Terrazas de Guaynabo, H-26 Calle Las Flores, Guaynabo Puerto Rico 00969,

Teléfono

y Fax: (787) 789-1826, correo electrónico:

(787) 743-3346

oficinabelmaa-

CONDUCTO DE SU AGENTE RESIDENTE THE PRENTICE-HALL CORPORATION SYSTEM PUERTO RICO INC., DORAL MORTGAGE CORPORATION T/C/C DORAL MORTGAGE, LLC., POR CONDUCTO DE SU AGENTE RESIDENTE CT CORPORATION SYSTEM, FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION (FDIC) COMO SÍNDICO DE DORAL BANK, FRANCISCO RAMIREZ DOUBÓN, SUSAN NEWMAN DE RAMÍREZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS, FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ PARTE DEMANDADA

CIVIL NÚM. TA2020CV00023.

SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE

PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO POR LA VÍA JUDICIAL. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉ-

RICA EL PRESIDENTE DE

LOS E.E.U.U. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: FRANCISCO RAMIREZ DOUBÓN, SUSAN

o a su orden, con intereses al

9½% anual y vencedero el 1ro de diciembre del 2008, sobre la

siguiente propiedad: URBANA:

Solar marcado con el No. 19 del

NORBERTO VAZQUEZ SOTO Demandante Vs.

ELSA ELENA NIEVES REYES

ser presentada acompañada

por el pago de aranceles correspondiente electrónicamente

o si se representa por derecho propio personalmente con sello de rentas internas de $90.00 dólares,, salvo causa legal que

le excepto de tal obligación, o de no poder comprarlo puede

pedir al Tribunal que le excuse

de hacerlo . Usted debe enviarle copia de la contestación de la

demanda a la parte demandante, a la dirección que se indica

arriba el mismo da que presenta la contestación al Tribunal.

Se le apercibe que si dejare de

hacerlo. se dictará contra usted

sentencia en rebeldía, concediendo el remedio solicitado

en la demanda. Usted podrá

Bloque “EF” de la Urbanización

Demandada

cia de 23.00 metros, con el so-

O sea la parte demandada arriha mencionada

LEGAL NOTICE

notifique a: Lcdo . Benjamín Hernandez Lopez 545 Calle Gabriel Cardona Moca Puerto Rico 00676 Tel. 939-202-0892 lcdobenjaminhernandezlopez@ gmail.com

mera Instancia Sala Superior

obtener copia de los documenLevittown, radicado en el Ba- CIVlL NÚM.: SS2020RF00027. tos que se han presentado en rrio Sabana Seca del término SOBRE: DIVORCIO RUPTUeste caso en la Secretarla del municipal de Toa Baja, Puerto RA IRREPARABLE. ESTATribunal, previo el pago de Rico, con un área de 316.25 DOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA arancel. EXTENDIDO BAJO MI El PRES IDENTE DE LOS EE. metros cuadrados. En lindes: FIRMA Y CON EL SELLO DEL por el NORTE, en una distancia UU. ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIATRIBUNAL, hoy día 2 de junio DO DE P.R. SS. de 13.75 metros, con José S. de 2020. Sarahi Reyes Perez, A: ELSA ELENA Alegría (según plano calle No. Secretaria. CARMEN M. RO611); SUR, en una distancia de NIEVES REYES DRIGUEZ ACEVEDO, SubSe13.75 metros, con el solar No. 10714 SHAENPATH cretaria.

2; por el ESTE, en una distan- SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, 78254 lar No. 18; y por el OESTE, en una distancia de 23.00 metros,

con el solar No. 20. Enclava una casa. La propiedad y la

escritura de hipoteca constan inscritas al folio 173 del tomo 170 de Toa Baja, Finca 10049.

Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamon, Sección II. Inscripción

Estado Libre Asociado de PuerPOR LA PRES ENTE se le to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL emplaza y requiere para que DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Pri-

tercera. La parte demandada Advertencia: Este es un docudeberá presentar su alegación mento oficial del Tribunal que responsiva a través del Sistema se relaciona a sus derechos.

Unificado de Administración y Léalo con detenimiento. Si Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al usted no lo entiende consulcual puede acceder utilizando te a un(a) abogado(a). Una la siguiente dirección electróni- demanda ha sido presentada

ca: https://unired.ramajudicial. en su contra. Una copia de la pr, salvo que se represente por demanda y otros documentos

derecho propio, en cuyo caso del Tribunal le esta siendo endeberá presentar su alegación tregados junto a este emplazaresponsiva en la secretaría miento. Si usted no desea que del Tribunal. Se le advierte se dicte sentencia o se expida

que, si no contesta la deman- una orden en su contra sin esda, radicando el original de la cucharle. debe presentar una contestación en este Tribunal y contestación a la demanda por

de FAJARDO.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO DEMANDANTE Vs.

BANCO SANTANDER DE PUERTO RICO COMO SUCESOR DEL BANCO CENTRAL HISPANO PUERTO RICO, DEMETRIO PIÑA Y EUSEBIA CRUZ,ISAAC MULERO MELÉNDEZ Y RUTH HERMINIA VEGA ESCOBAR, FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ DEMANDADO

The San Juan Daily Star CIVIL NUM. FA2019CV00606.

SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE

25

Tuesday, June 9, 2020 Estados Unidos de América.

causante César Augusto Be- su contra y conceder el reme-

rrios López, t/c/c César Berríos dio solicitado en la demanda o

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto)

de este edicto. Copia de esta DOS DE AMERICA EL PRE- ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se notificación ha sido archivada SIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS represente por derecho propio,

López, t/c/c César Berríos. Por cualquier otro sin más citarle ni EL SECRETARIO(A) que sus- en los autos de este caso, con UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE DE PUERTO LA VÍA JUDICIAL. NOTIFICA- CIVIL NUM.: BY2019CV07115. Orden del Honorable Juez de oIrle, si el tribunal en el ejerci- cribe le notifica a usted que el fecha de 23 de abril de 2020. ASOCIADO CIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR SOBRE: Cobro de Dinero y Primera Instancia de este Tri- cio de su sana discreción, lo 15 abril de 2020, este Tribunal En FAJARDO, Puerto Rico, el RICO. SS. EDICTO. A: MARTA I CAMACHO Ejecución de Hipoteca por la bunal, expido el presente Man- entiende procedente. El siste- ha dictado Sentencia, Senten- 23 de abril de 2020. WANDA I PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO POR

A: -Demetrio Piña y Eusebia Cruz, Isaac Mulero Meléndez y Ruth Herminia Vega Escobar

* Alturas de San Pedro, U24 calle F, Fajardo PR 00738 * Alturas de San Pedro, U24 Calle San Gabriel, Fajardo PR 00738 * Alturas de San Pedro, U24 Calle San Andres, Fajardo PR 00738

-- FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ.

EL (LA) SECRETARIO(A) le notifica a usted que el día 14 de

marzo de 2020, este Tribunal

ha dictado Sentencia o Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este

caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos

DEMANDADOS

ORTIZ, MIDOEL Vía Ordinaria. MANDAMIEN- damiento, bajo mi firma y sello ma SUMAC notificará copia al cia Parcial o Resolución en este SEGUI REYES, Secretaria. f/ TO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE oficial, en Guaynabo, Puerto abogado de la parte deman- caso, que ha sido debidamente MERLLY OLMO TORRES, SeCAMACHO ORTIZ AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE Rico hoy 6 de mayo de 2020. dante, el Lcdo. José F. Aguilar registrada y archivada en autos cretaria Auxiliar.

Queda emplazado y notificado DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS Lcda. Laura I. Santa Sanchez, Vélez cuya dirección es: P.O. donde podrá usted enterarse de que en este Tribunal NILDA LEGAL NOTICE EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIA- Secretaria Regional. f/Sara Box 71418 San Juan, Puerto detalladamente de los términos DO DE PUERTO RICO. Por Rosa Villegas, Sec Trib Conf I. Rico 00936-85 18, teléfono de la misma. Esta notificación ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO (787) 993-3731 ala dirección- se publicará una sola vez en DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUCuanto: Se ha dictado en el LEGAL NOTICE jose.aguilar@orf-law.com y a un periódico de circulación ge- NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA presente caso la siguiente Or-

de! caso, el Tribuna! le impar-

te su aprobación y en su virtud acepta !a Demanda en el caso

de epígrafe, así como la interpelación judicial de la parte demandante a los herederos del

codemandado conforme dispone el Artículo 959 del Código

Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. sec. 2787.

Se Ordena a los herederos de! causante, Claudia Berrios y Tanya Zrebiec, a que dentro del

PR RECOVERY AND DEVELOPMENT JV, LLC DEMANDANTE VS.

JUAN FELIX DAVILA VALDES, MICHELLE ORLANDI GUZMAN & LA SOCOEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS DEMANDADOS

término legal de (30) días con- CIVIL NUM.: LO2019CV00181. donde podrá usted enterarse tados a partir de la fecha de la SALA: 406. SOBRE: COBRO detalladamente de los términos notificación de la presente Or- DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENde la misma. Esta notificación den, acepten o repudien la par- TO POR EDICTO. se publicará una sola vez en un A: JUAN FELIX DAVILA ticipación que les corresponda periódico de circulación general VALDES, POR SI Y EN en la herencia del causante en Puerto Rico, dentro de los César Augusto Berríos López, REPRESENTACION DE 10 días siguientes a su notificat/c/c César Berríos López, t/c/c LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE ción. Y, siendo o representado César Berríos. Se le Apercibe a GANANCIALES HC 1 BOX usted una parte en el procedilos herederos antes menciona2311 LOIZA, PUERTO miento sujeta a los términos dos: (a) Que de no expresarse RICO 00772-9746 de la Sentencia o Sentencia dentro del término de (30) días BARRIO MEDIANIA BAJA Parcial o Resolución, de la cual en torno a su aceptación o repuede establecerse recurso de CALLE GALLERA SOLAR pudiación de herencia la misma revisión o apelación dentro del se tendrá por aceptada; (b) #6 LOIZA, PUERTO RICO término de 30 días contados a A: MICHELLE ORLANDI Que luego del transcurso del partir de la publicación por edicGUZMAN, POR SI Y EN término de (30) días contados to de esta notificación, dirijo a a partir de la fecha de la notiREPRESENTACION DE usted esta notificación que se ficación de la presente Orden, LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL considerará hecha en la fecha se presumirá que han aceptado DE GANANCIALES - HC de la publicación de este edicla herencia del causante y por 1 BOX 2311 LOIZA, to. Copia de esta notificación consiguiente, responden por la PUERTO RICO 00772ha sido archivada en los autos cargas de dicha herencia conde este caso, con fecha de 29 9746 - BARRIO MEDIANIA forme dispone el Artículo 957 de mayo de 2020. En FajarBAJA CALLE GALLERA del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. do, Puerto Rico, 29 de mayo SOLAR #6 LOIZA, sec. 2785. Se Ordena a la parte de 2020. WANDA I. SEGUÍ PUERTO RICO demandante a que, en vista de REYES - SEC. REGIONAL. f/ que la sucesión del causante POR LA PRESENTE se le LYDIA E. RIVERA MIRANDA, César Augusto Berrios López, emplaza y requiere para que Sec del Trib Conf I. tic/c César Berrios López, t/c/c conteste la demanda dentro de César Berríos incluyen como los treinta (30) días siguientes

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO

DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU-

NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE GUAYNABO.

Reverse Mortgage Funding, LLC DEMANDANTE VS.

Sucesión de César Augusto Berríos López, t/c/c César Berríos López, t/c/c César Berríos compuesta por Claudia Berríos, Tanya Zrebiec, Centro de Recaudaciones Municipales; y a los

herederos a Claudia Berrios y a la publicación de este Edicto.

Tanya Zrebiec, proceda a notifi- Usted deberá presentar su alecar la presente Orden mediante gación responsiva a través del un edicto a esos efectos una Sistema Unificado de Manejo y

sola vez en un periódico de administración de Casos (SUcirculación diaria general de MAC), la cual puede acceder la Isla de Puerto Rico. DADA utilizando la siguiente direcen GUAYNABO, Puerto Rico, ción electrónica: https://unired. hoy día 21 de abril de 2020. f/ ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se Eillim Torres Rios, Jues Supe- represente por derecho propio,

rior. Por Cuanto: Se le advierte en cuyo caso deberá presentar a que, dentro del término legal su alegación responsiva en la de (30) días contados a partir secretaria del tribunal. Si usted de la fecha de notificación de la deja de presentar su alegación

presente Orden, acepten o re- responsiva dentro del referido pudien la participación que les término, el tribunal podrá diccorresponda en la herencia del tar sentencia en rebeldía en

hoy día 29 de mayo de 2020. en el procedimiento sujeta a los En Carolina, Puerto Rico, el 29 términos de la Sentencia, Sende mayo de 2020. Lcda. Marilyn tencia Parcial o Resolución, Aponte Rodriguez, Secretaria de la cual puede establecerse

Regional. Ida Fernandez Rodri- recurso de revisión o apelación guez, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal. dentro del término de 30 días

LEGAL NOTICE

contados a partir de la publica-

su alegación responsiva en la

Secretaria del Tribunal Superior

de Puerto Rico, Sala de Guayama y enviando copia a la parte

demandante: LCDA. AMERGIE ENID

GARCIA

SANTIAGO,

Calle Francisco G. Bruno #22,

ORTIZ DIAZ, ANA GLORIA Oeste Guayama, Puerto Rico CAMACHO MILLAN, ROSA 00784, Teléfono 787-864-4090,

I CAMACHO ORTIZ ETC, ha amergiegarcia@gmail.com, radicado una demanda en su abogada de la parte deman-

den: ORDEN. Examinada la ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO la dirección notificaciones@orf- neral en la Isla de Puerto Rico, CENTRO JUDICIAL DE GUA- contra sombre Partición de Hedemanda radicada por la par- DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- law.com. EXTENDIDO BAJO dentro de los 10 días siguientes YAMA. rencia. Se le notifica que comte demandante, la solicitud de NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA MI FIRMA y el sello del Tribu- a su notificación. Y, siendo o NILDA ORTIZ DIAZ, ANA parezca ante el Tribunal dentro GLORIA CAMACHO interpelación contenida en la CENTRO JUDICIAL DE CARO- nal, en Carolina, Puerto Rico, representando usted una parte del termino de treinta (30) días misma y examinados los autos LINA.

en cuyo caso deberá presentar

dante. Se le apercibe y notifica que, si no contesta la demanda

radicada en su contra dentro del termino de treinta (30) días

MILLAN, ROSA I CAMACHO ORTIZ , ETC.

a partir de la publicación de de la publicación de este ediceste edicto y exponer lo que a to, se le anotara rebeldía en su

MARTA I CAMACHO ORTIZ, MIDOEL CAMACHO ORTIZ, ETC

que deberá presenta su ale- en la Demanda, sin mas citarle, gación responsiva a través del ni oírsele. Expido bajo mi firma

ción por edicto de esta notifica-

DEMANDANTE vs

DEMANDADO

sus derechos convenga, en el contra y se dictara sentencia en presente caso. Se le notifica su contra, conforme se solicita

Sistema Unificado de Manejo y y sello del Tribunal, hoy día 28 Administración de Casos (SU- de mayo de 2020. Marisol Ro-

CIVIL NUM. GM2019CV00727.

Estado Libre Asociado de Puer- ción, dirijo a usted esta notificaMAC), a la cual puede acceder sado Rodriguez, Sec Regional SOBRE: PARTICION DE HEto Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL ción que se considerará hecha utilizando la siguiente direc- I. M. Cintrón, Sec del Tribunal RENCIA. EMPLAZAMIENTO DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Pri- en la fecha de la publicación ción electrónica: https://unired. Conf I. POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNImera Instancia Sala Superior de FAJARDO.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante v.

SANA INVESTMENT MORTGAGE BANKERS INC., T/C/C SANA MORTGAGE CORPORATION ET ALS Demandado(a)

Civil: Núm. RG2019CV00633.

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

A: THE MORTGAGE LOAN CO. INC. A SU ÚLTIMA DIRECCIÓN CONOCIDA: COUNTRY CLUB 915 AVE. ROBERTO SÁNCHEZ VILELLA, SAN JUAN, PR 00924; COUNTRY CLUB 915 AVE. CAMPO RICO, SAN JUAN, PR 0092; MYRA ENED MEDINA HERNÁNDEZ, MARGARITA MEDINA HERNÁNDEZ A SUS ÚLTIMAS DIRECCIONES CONOCIDAS: KM 1.6SR 958 BO. CIENAGA BAJA, RÍO GRANDE, PR 00745, URB. RÍO PIEDRAS HTS, 220 CALLE RUBICON, SAN JUAN, PR 009263218 Y COOP JARDINES DE SAN IGNACIO, APR 1708-B, SAN JUAN, PR 00927; FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ;

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26

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

The shirts were red. The fans were all white.

By RORY SMITH

T

he story of the Arsenal mural has drifted, over the years, into something more closely resembling a myth. What should be straightforward details are now shrouded in fog, tangled by apocrypha.

Most, some time ago, would have consigned it all to the recesses of memory: a piece of esoteric trivia, a quirk and a folly from the dawn of English soccer’s modern age. But as sports starts to take shape in the era of social distancing and social justice, it has taken on a fresh relevance.

Across the world, teams and leagues are exploring ways to make games held in cavernous, empty stadiums easier on the eye, hoping to retain some semblance of the spectacle on which their industries have been built.

Early attempts have included Zoom conferences in Denmark, montages in Germany, robot drummers in Taiwan and unfortunately sourced dolls in South Korea. The Premier League — scheduled to return to action June 17 — has broached displaying “live reaction” from fans on big screens and cloaking empty seats with giant banners.

But while all of this feels like the first, tentative steps into a new and unwelcome world, it is not new, not exactly. Twentyeight years ago, Arsenal approached exactly the same problem, albeit from a substantially different angle. The answer the club found might provide some inspiration, nearly three decades on, but it also offers something of a warning.

The day before the first game of English soccer’s 1992 season — and the first-ever round of fixtures in the newly minted Premier League — Arsenal’s players gathered on the field at Highbury, the club’s historic home, for one final training session. It was not quite as familiar as it might have been.

One end of the stadium, the North Bank, traditionally home to 15,000 of Arsenal’s most ardent fans, was hidden behind a vast mural, spanning almost the entire breadth of the field. The club had demolished the old grandstand over the course of the summer, and a new, all-seater structure was taking shape. For now, though, the North Bank was a mess of cranes, scaffolding and cement.

The mural was the idea of Arsenal’s then executive vice chairman, David Dein. Dein had a reputation as a visionary — at his behest, Highbury was the first English stadium

Arsenal used a mural to stand in for fans during a construction project in 1992. But before it made its debut, a player noticed a problem. to install giant video screens — and he was keen to find a way to “camouflage” the construction site. He commissioned a design studio, January, which handed the job to one of its resident artists, Mike Ibbison.

Ibbison drew a pencil sketch, around a meter long, depicting what the new stand might look like: a bloc of 1,500 or so fans wearing Arsenal jerseys and holding scarves aloft. False perspective gave it depth from any viewing angle.

Ibbison showed it to Dein, and it passed muster. It was handed off to an illustrator and painted in acrylic, then scanned, printed on vinyl and mounted on a scaffold. The whole process took a month or so. Dein was pleased when he first saw it inside Highbury.

“It was certainly optically preferable to seeing scaffolding and cement mixers,” he said.

The day before the start of the season, Arsenal striker Kevin Campbell was warming up with his friend and teammate Ian Wright.

“He turned to me and asked if I noticed anything about the mural,” Wright told The New York Times last week. “I looked and looked and eventually said no. So he said, ‘There’s no black faces.’”

“We weren’t especially angry or disappointed or anything,” said Wright, who like Campbell is black. “But it was a good observation, because you did see black faces in the crowd at Arsenal.”

When Campbell spotted an opportunity to do something about it, then, he did so.

That morning, Dein was at the stadium, too. He was greeting the players as they came off the field after training when Campbell pulled him aside.

“He asked me why none of his brothers were on the mural,” Dein said. “I had a look and I was horrified. He was so right. I told him we’d correct it immediately.”

That is the part of the story that everyone agrees on. Ibbison and Dein are adamant it was not a deliberate omission. In his original sketch, Ibbison had drawn a crowd — a collection of human-shaped figures — but he had not assigned a “gender or ethnicity” to any of them. “At no point did it occur to me,” he said, “that I was drawing white, middleclass London.”

Certainly, Dein was as good as his word: That night, the mural was repainted by hand, to depict more accurately Arsenal’s diverse fan base. By the time Norwich City arrived

for the match the next day, the changes had been made.

Quite who did that repainting, though, is a matter of some debate. Dein believes it was Ibbison, or at least his colleagues.

Ibbison does not remember being involved: He believes Arsenal sent employees “up on stepladders” to amend it themselves.

It is there that everything becomes a bit apocryphal. A newspaper report from the time quoted Ibbison suggesting that his original sketch included black faces, but that the color had been lost in the printing process. Not true, he said.

It has been suggested that a further complaint was made, suggesting that the crowd was too male, prompting Arsenal to amend it again. That led, the story goes, to yet another change, when it was pointed out that children in the crowd now seemed to be separated from parents or guardians.

And then there are the nuns: painted, so the legend goes, into the mural alongside a solitary Manchester United fan by the artist, presumably out of revenge for having to make all of these changes. These can be debunked, too. Ibbison, the artist in question, is an Arsenal fan, and was adamant that he was not involved in any alterations. Dein insisted the mural was amended only once.

That is not the only mystery. Nobody is sure quite what happened to the mural once it was taken down and the new, improved North Bank was opened to fans. Ibbison had heard squares of it were cut out and sold, but if that was the case, nobody at Arsenal — including Dein — had any recollection of it. Ibbison does not even have his original pencil sketch.

Perhaps that has helped the story of the mural pass into lore. So, too, the idea that it was cursed. Before kickoff in that first game, against Norwich, a parachutist almost collided with the scaffolding while descending as part of the pregame show. Arsenal went on to lose the match, 4-2, after a performance so bad that Dein now jokes that “12 people in the mural got up and left.”

It was not until late September of that season that Wright became the first Arsenal player to score in front of the mural, and the club wound up finishing a disappointing 10th in the league. Finding an Arsenal fan who mourned the departure of the mural would be difficult.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

27

New Pro Sports venture puts women’s sports in the players’ hands

By TALYA MINSBERG

A

thletes Unlimited did not plan to begin a new league amid a pandemic, nor did it anticipate its new league would be perfect for such a situation.

The first of its three new women’s professional sports leagues will begin in August with a six-week softball season outside Chicago.

The games will take place in one location, and the athletes will all live close to the competition site during the season. It’s a model that some leagues, including the NBA, are now planning or exploring as they seek to safely return to play.

But to be clear, Jon Patricof, a founder of Athletes Unlimited, said, this was the organization’s plan all along.

Patricof, a former president of New York City FC, and his fellow founder, Jonathan Soros, envisioned Athletes Unlimited as a new model for professional sports leagues, one that emulated fantasy sports leagues and catered to fans with more of an affinity for individual athletes than teams.

“We didn’t want to follow in the model that had worked for men’s sports,” Patricof said in a telephone interview, adding that he and Soros initially considered investing in an existing women’s team, possibly in the WNBA or the National Women’s Soccer League. “We believe this is the new age of fandom, a fluid fandom.”

So they instead started creating the new leagues — with softball starting in August and indoor volleyball coming in 2021 — in which the athletes are at the forefront of all decision-making. The model prioritizes individual athleticism and in-house storytelling over the traditional infrastructure of team sports.

Each season will take place in one location. Teams are not tied to any one city, and players are not under contract with any one team. Players can earn points based on both their team and individual performances, and will be ranked accordingly. Lineups will change each week, with the top four players becoming captains who can draft new teams.

There are no team owners, and league investors are capping their returns. Athletes will share in the league profits, be involved in the daily decision-making and call the shots in content creation.

“Having played sports professionally, and having been a woman in the sports

Athletes Unlimited, which plans to start a softball league in August and a volleyball league in 2021, is basing its model on the idea that fans care more about individual athletes than teams. world, I believe there are so many great untold stories,” said Anya Alvarez, the head of content for Athletes Unlimited and a former professional golfer. She said her team looks to the athletes when making storytelling decisions. If they aren’t excited about an idea, they won’t do it. “We defer to the athletes,” she said. “We’ve created a very open-door policy with them.”

The model appealed to those who signed on as advisers, including Jessica Mendoza, Kevin Durant and Abby Wambach. And it comes at a time when more professional athletes — and possibly student-athletes — are able to leverage their skills, personal brand and influencer status for cash flow.

Wambach said she thought the model put power back in the hands of the individual athletes, letting them control the outcome of their career without any interference of an overarching association or management.

“You’re getting players in the mindset of being their own bosses and having con-

trol over what their outcome is going to be,” Wambach said. “In the women’s sports world, being able to monetize yourself in all the possible ways matters. It could mean paying your mortgage.”

That has certainly been the case in the past handful of years, as more female athletes have leaned on their ability to supplement their incomes from teams with sponsorships and partnerships across social media channels.

And as individual athletes have found success in off-platform channels, teams and leagues have looked to follow.

The World Surf League, for example, drastically increased its creative output in 2020, releasing 269 episodes of new content across 18 series. That is more than 70 hours of content, which is impressive given the league stopped competitions in March because of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s part of the league’s transition from a “sports league to a media company wrapped around

a sports league,” said Erik Logan, chief executive of the World Surf League.

There are Athletes Unlimited boot camps in the works that will help athletes make the most of their online presences, and a document is circulating to solicit video ideas for continuing series. The league has even hired comedians to write for its coming series, and has posted extended interviews with athletes on its YouTube channel.

“While other leagues will have to invest in ticket sales and ticket marketing, we are taking those resources and putting it into building a digital community and a digital storytelling presence,” Patricof said.

Perhaps what’s most promising, from Wambach’s perspective as a female athlete who has seen a diverse set of working conditions, is a league with a greater sense of stability.

“This gives athletes comfort and security,” Wambach said. “That never happens with female athletes.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

With real-life games halted, betting world puts action on Esports

By SETH SCHIESEL

M

arco Blume, trading director for the sports book Pinnacle, remembers when betting on the competitive video games known as esports was an exotic concept.

“When we started with esports in 2010, we got maybe $100 in wagers in a week and got excited,” Blume said over videoconference from London. “We would watch the screen and cheer as each individual bet came in. When I first pitched esports wagering to my board, they either said, ‘What are you talking about?’ or they laughed.”

Now, in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic, with traditional sports moribund and casinos reeling, no one in the half-trilliondollar global gambling industry is laughing at esports. Instead, they are rushing to offer more betting on it.

Even as overall wagering has declined, betting companies have been buoyed by an enduring casino truism: Gamblers find things to gamble on. Since March, bettors have flocked to computer games and easily understood digital simulacrums of soccer, basketball and football.

Many video game publishers are struggling to respond to the surge, and industry reports in Europe, where sports betting is ubiquitous, indicate that half of all such wagering since early March has been on esports. Some bookmakers have had increases in esports betting of more than 40 times during that time.

“Esports is king now,” Blume said. “Since March, esports has been our No. 1 category globally, and the overall majority of total wagering for us. Every significant bookmaker now offers esports. If you didn’t before, you certainly do now.” (Global online bookmakers like Pinnacle, based in Curaçao, are illegal in the United States but generally legal and popular in much of the rest of the world. Blume’s job of trading director is comparable to running trading and risk exposure for a mediumsize Wall Street firm.)

Overall, worldwide esports gambling revenue is expected to double this year to about $14 billion. And as sports gambling spreads across the United States in the wake of a 2018 Supreme Court ruling, states including Colorado, Nevada and New Jersey are vying to get ahead of others in esports offerings. In Nevada, sports betting has been regulated since 1949. The state approved its first legal esports bet in 2016. It approved two additional tournaments in 2017, and then no more until the pandemic began. Since March, Nevada regulators have approved betting on 13 esports

Thousands of fans packed an arena in Paris for the League of Legends world championship tournament in 2019. leagues and tournaments.

“People out there want to bet on something, and our licensees want to offer betting opportunities for their customers, and by the nature of how esports work, the players can sit in their house and still compete,” James Taylor, chief of the enforcement division of the Nevada Gaming Control Board, said in an interview.

By mid-March, Taylor said, casino operators were filing esports wagering applications at a rate of “almost one a day.” He said his team had approved all of the applications except two, for wagers on leagues that did not satisfy investigators that proper anti-corruption protocols were in place.

“As a regulator, we want to make sure things are done properly with the correct oversight so the entire industry can grow,” Taylor said.

Many of the applications have come from the Nevada subsidiary of William Hill, a British gambling giant, which operates more than 100 sports books in the state.

Seth Schorr, chief executive of the casino management company Fifth Street Gaming and founder of the Nevada Esports Alliance, said of the growth: “I expect that within the next five to 10 years in North America, esports will be third after the NFL and the NBA in terms of total wagering.”

Existing trends ‘are being accelerated by coronavirus’ Offerings have already gone beyond simple bets on whether one world-class video game player can beat another.

While football and basketball wagers still rely on living athletes (usually), humans have

become optional to generating action. Some global sports books now offer betting on completely automated soccer matches within the FIFA 20 game made by Electronic Arts — computer versus computer. In the United States, DraftKings and FanDuel (which offer legal fantasy contests in around 40 states) have each offered new free contests based on automated games of Madden NFL 20, another Electronic Arts title.

FanDuel and DraftKings, which went public in April, also offer paid fantasy contests for real money based on traditional top esports, including League of Legends, by Riot Games, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive,

by Valve Corp. A DraftKings spokesman said that paid esports contests are now attracting 20 times more customers and 50 times more entries than they did before March.

“As with so many things, these trends that have existed for a long time, especially on the internet, are being accelerated by coronavirus,” said Cory Fox, a vice president for government affairs at FanDuel, which is controlled by Flutter, an international gambling company based in Dublin.

States that have embraced sports betting are adjusting yet again With so many states struggling financially, some lobbyists believe that more governments will embrace online gambling — and esports specifically — as a source of taxable income.

“I was originally hopeful for three or four more states coming online for sports betting this year,” said Bill Pascrell III, a partner at Princeton Public Affairs Group who has represented the lobbying interests of bookmakers and gambling technology companies. “Now I think you could double that as we see legislatures come back.”

In Nevada, the next big step for esports betting would be regulatory preapproval of wagering on certain leagues, just like with the NFL and other traditional sports leagues, rather than a requirement of case-by-case petitions.

“It may take a year or two, but I think now it’s inevitable that we will see a whitelist of esports events preapproved for betting in Nevada,” said Blaine Graboyes, chief executive of GameCo, which develops games for casinos and sells esports data to bookmakers.

“This period has cemented esports as part of the core conversation and offerings for casinos and sports books.”

After leading the Supreme Court fight to expand sports betting, New Jersey finds itself trying to catch up on esports.

Its initial law explicitly banned wagers on video games. Under prodding from casinos,

that was quickly changed, but only if all those playing the games were 18 or older. Few esports leagues can make that promise (or answer just to one state), so now Assemblyman Ralph R. Caputo, a Democrat and the chair of the New Jersey state Assembly’s tourism, gaming and arts committee, is shepherding a bill that would allow betting on esports as long as at least half of the competitors are 18 or older, while banning bets on high school events.

Overall, more than 15 states allow some form of legal sports betting. For the moment, gambling executives say that Colorado, which opened sports gambling on May 1, appears to have the nation’s most liberal esports gambling rules.

The $160 billion video game industry is uncertain how to respond Gambling and fantasy sports companies have operated under the belief that they do not need legal permission from any video game’s publisher to offer bets or contests on esports. And unlike the large sporting leagues that opposed expanded betting on their games before the Supreme Court ruling, no major publishers have tried extensively to block gambling on their products (though casino executives said that a Nevada application to offer betting on Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch League in 2018 was rejected by regulators partly because the company opposed betting at that time).

Outside the United States, bookmakers can generally offer new wagers quickly and without specific regulatory approval, helping fuel a boom that has left the $160 billion global video game industry scrambling to respond.

Some publishers are appearing to embrace betting by hiring integrity monitors that also sell data and betting services to bookmakers. For example, in mid-April, Nevada regulators approved Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty League and Overwatch League for betting. Three weeks later, the leagues announced an “integrity services” deal with the Swiss company Sportradar, modeled on similar deals that Sportradar has with traditional sports organizations like the NFL and the esports pioneer Riot Games, the creator of League of Legends, one of the most popular esports.

“When we first looked at esports, it was the Wild West,” said Doug Watson, head of esports insights for Riot, which is owned by the Chinese media and gaming behemoth Tencent. “Sports betting is a big part of the ecosystem and was going to happen regardless of whether we said it should happen or not. So we decided to invest to protect the sport and ensure its longevity and legitimacy.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Sudoku

29

How to Play:

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

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

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

You’re not afraid of healthy competition. On the contrary, you welcome it. Take this opportunity to test your abilities against those of a worthy rival. No matter who takes the top prize, you will both benefit from this heated contest. Don’t be surprised when you’re put in charge of an important department. Your ability to bring out the best in others has resulted in this assignment. Even the laziest members of the group work hard to impress you. That’s because you don’t fall for their excuses.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Organising your living space will clarify your thinking.

It’s easy to keep things in perspective when you can find everything easily. Conversely, coming home to a chaotic environment can create distress and anxiety. Choose what kind of life you would prefer. You could be at the forefront of social reform. It’s not that you have anything against tradition. It’s just that you see no point in pursuing a path if there’s a better one within view. Your fiery enthusiasm will attract the attention of several admirers.

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)

Are you looking for ways to contribute something positive to the world? Seek a chance to work for an educational, religious or cultural initiative. Teaching underserved people some valuable skills will be rewarding for everyone involved. Your patience is a decided virtue with this work. A sale on your favourite items will soon become available. Take this opportunity to stock up on creature comforts that bring you joy. If there’s anything you enjoy, it’s getting a big bargain.

Being a good partner is important to you. When you’re paired with a highly competent person, it can be challenging to feel valued. Stop dwelling on what you don’t do well and start asserting yourself in areas that bring confidence. Your powers of persuasion are strong. If you want to sell or promote something, now is the time to do so. It will be virtually impossible to resist your charm. You could also win someone’s heart with some playful flirting.

Your best friend or romantic partner takes comfort in your reliability. Because they know you will never let them down, they’re able to take financial, emotional and creative risks. It’s time to give yourself permission to gamble. Kindness and consideration for others will result in a big promotion. Everyone likes working with you, which makes you the natural choice to assume a public relations job. Instead of applying a one size fits all’ approach, you tailor solutions to individual needs.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Working hard gives you lots of pleasure. You enjoy surpassing the expectations of your employer and customers.

Thanks to your diligence, profits will soar. It’s time to ask for a raise. Requesting what you are worth will command more respect. Spending more time outside will improve your health. Don’t worry if the weather is nasty. Getting fresh air into your lungs will be therapeutic. Turn off your mobile and tune into the sounds of nature. Drink in the beauty of the sky.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Don’t be afraid to satisfy your sensual desires. If you’re in a romantic relationship, take this opportunity to enjoy some private time with your amour. Getting lost in their embrace will inspire a fabulous idea. Jot down the concept for a song, movie or novel. Strong desires could prompt you to do something that is totally out of character. Maybe you’ll risk financial security for the sake of owning your dream home. Perhaps you’ll stand up to an oppressive relative who is trying to cramp your style.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Pick your words carefully when discussing a sensitive topic. The last thing you want is to offend a powerful person with sarcastic remarks. Beware of making contemptuous facial expressions, as these can also cause great resentment. Appearing neutral will work to your advantage. Playing a game gives the intellectual stimulation you crave. Whether you enter a trivia contest between friends or play online poker, you’re sure to come out ahead. It’s fun to be rewarded for your sharp intellect.

Saving money for a big purchase can be an enjoyable experience. Turn the process into a game. For instance, every time you receive a particular denomination of cash, put it into a container. You can also give yourself rewards every time you reach savings goals. Honesty and integrity are your watchwords. People know you will charge a fair price and give a realistic estimate when dealing with you. As a result, you thrive even during the hardest economic times.

Reaching a lofty goal fills you with pride. Take this opportunity to bask in the glow of success. Going from one task to the next without pause will result in burnout. The more time you enjoy your triumphs, the faster they will multiply. Working to improve your home life is another worthy endeavour. Whether you’re clearing your abode of clutter, fixing up a dingy room, or finding your dream house, you’ll soon find success. You could also be asked to run a property for a silent partner.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Working behind the scenes is rewarding. It’s a relief to escape a micromanager who is always trying to alter your methods. When left to your own devices, you zip through chores like a hot knife through butter. Use your leisure time to relax and dream. Your understanding and compassion pave the way to loving relationships. Friends, relatives and colleagues know they can count on you for reassurance.

That’s why they’re always confiding their hopes, dreams and fears. They know you’ll give good advice.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Associating with established people improves your professional prospects. Your friends will recommend you for the lucrative jobs you desire. They’ll also introduce you to special people who share your desire for success. Don’t hesitate to call on them for help. The chance to study an esoteric subject will fall in your lap. There’s never been a better time to learn everything you can about astrology, the Tarot or numerology. It helps that your instructor is a patient, practical person.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

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Ziggy

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Tuesday, June 9, 2020

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