Tuesday May 19, 2020

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

San Juan The

50¢

DAILY

Star

Will Cirque Du Soleil Rise Again?

P21

Whose Fault Is It Anyway?

Possible Coronavirus Vaccine Showing Early Promise

P10

Apex Head Cooperating with Feds

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Governor and Evertec Keep Passing the Hot Potato on Unemployment System Failure Meanwhile, Thousands Are Waiting for a Check at Least; Long Lines at Labor Dept.

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NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

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Tuesday, May 19, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

GOOD MORNING

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May 19, 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.

Oversight Board: Challenges to COFINA debt deal should be dismissed

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he federal Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) says three challenges to the Puerto Rico Sales Tax Financing Corp. (COFINA) debt settlement that went into effect in February 2019 should be dismissed because they are moot.

The oversight board’s response was made in three court cases that were consolidated and are before the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals: Rene Pinto Lugo vs. COFINA, Mark Elliot vs. COFINA and Hein vs. FOMB. Oversight board members said the appellants’ actions come too late. The debt deal to restructure $19 billion in COFINA debt that went into effect in February 2019, included an exchange of bonds.

Had the appellants requested a stay of the debt deal or filed an expedited appeal, the oversight board says, the district court and the appeals court could have found alternatives to help them.

The congressionally appointed board said the appeals are moot because at this juncture it would be nearly impossible to unwind the COFINA debt deal and the tens of thousands of transactions conducted in accordance with the adjustment plan.

“Appellants ask the Court for a legally unfounded and practically infeasible result: an order overturning the comprehensive plan of adjustment for the Puerto Rico Sales Tax

Financing Corporation, which settled a colossal dispute with the commonwealth, was overwhelmingly endorsed by creditors and confirmed by the district court, and has been implemented for more than a year,” the oversight board said.

The relief sought by the appellants, the board said, would require the court to rescind the new COFINA bonds, thereby invalidating all the trades made on those bonds and payments made thereunder; restore the old COFINA bonds; disgorge billions of dollars of distributions to creditors; and order the parties to revisit various plan litigation settlements.

The district court addressed the objections presented by the three appellants and dismissed them.

The three cases argued that their rights can not be subjected to a plan of adjustment, an argument dismissed in the case Puerto Rico v. Andalusian Global Designated Activity Company.

“The holding in Andalusian also defeats Elliott Appellants’ takings argument because it confirms they have no property right subject to the takings clause,” the oversight board said. “That COFINA and the commonwealth settled their competing claims to the same property does not mean there was a taking of COFINA’s property pledged to secure bonds.”

The district court ruled that Hein’s claim was duplicative and dismissed it.

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Tuesday, May 19, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Evertec strikes back

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

D

uring an April 28 press conference to update information related to the coronavirus pandemic emergency in Puerto Rico, Evertec Vice President Carlos Ramírez made a very public mea culpa, claiming full responsibility for the total collapse of the island Labor Department’s automated system for claiming benefits under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program.

“This interface program was produced in just two weeks of a non-stop, almost 24-hours-a-day work schedule and with almost no time to test it,” Ramírez said at the time. “Certainly, there was a mistake. But it was on our side of the equation, not on the Labor secretary’s side.”

“Certainly, if we had done a perfect job there would not have been problems,” he added. “Certainly, there was a mistake on my side or on the part of the [virtual] cloud that I am using, which is a Microsoft cloud. We are looking for a solution, and it will be fixed.”

The tech company’s tune changed on Monday, however, in response to comments made by Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced.

“In recent days, you may have read or heard that the reason you were unable to receive unemployment benefits is due to technology,” Evertec said in a written statement published via the web and through social media. “That is not right. The technology is working, but operational processes are missing to complete the transaction. The operational processes of eligibility, approval and processing of unemployment benefits are not the responsibility of Evertec.”

The former Banco Popular subsidiary was responding to strong words from Vázquez, who publicly warned the company that they still had to completely iron out the continued techno-

logical problems that kept hounding the PUA automated claim processing system.

“In addition to developing that system that we already delivered, the Labor Department asked us to create a new portal to collect data on the internet from employees on their own account so that the Department could enter them manually. This portal, which was delivered on April 28, was intermittent and was corrected within 24 hours,” Evertec added in its press release. “In our efforts at full disclosure, we took part in a press conference on April 28 to clarify any doubts the people of Puerto Rico may have and we decided not to charge for the development of that portal.”

The governor wasted no time in responding to Evertec’s press release.

“Who is the private contractor responsible for programing and automating these processes?” she said during an interview with radio station WKAQ. “That’s why we are

working with Evertec on this matter. You can be sure that if that process depended exclusively on the Labor Department, then that was already done and Evertec was not mentioned in all this.”

The spat between La Fortaleza and Evertec unexpectedly threw Labor and Human Resources Secretary Briseida Torres Reyes into the role of mediator. In a separate interview, Torres Reyes, an attorney by trade, said that after listening to the governor’s position on the matter she met in the department’s offices with Evertec representatives and they agreed to begin the fusion of Labor’s and Evertec’s programs in an effort to facilitate and streamline both the process of applying for unemployment benefits and the processing of claims.

“We hope that with this very important step we can finally take care of claims already submitted and begin providing [claimants] the benefits they are entitled to and have worked very hard for,” the Labor secretary said.

Drive-thru service set up for partial unemployment claims

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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abor and Human Resources Secretary Briseida Torres Reyes announced on Monday the opening of a drive-thru drop-box system in front of the agency’s headquarters in Hato Rey to receive any documentation required to process unemployment claims, particularly partial claims.

Torres Reyes said the latter type of claim cannot be processed online or by other automated means.

“These are claims from people who are working short hours and require the submission of an employer certification of hours worked and earned income,” the Labor secretary said in a written statement. “Although until now we have been receiving them by mail and email, the high volume of cases and inquiries that we receive daily has caused a delay in the handling of these claims and payment processing. In this way, the delivery will be direct and in a matter of days we will be processing the documentation.”

In addition to partial claims, agency employees will be receiving forms from employers, as well as required

documentation from claimants who have so-called controversial points, such as copies of checkbooks, among other things.

“Controversial point situations will continue to be handled, through direct calls to claimants,” Torres Reyes said. “In these cases, the required documentation may vary and would be specifically requested from the claimant and/or employer by the agent in charge of resolving the situation.”

She added that once the effectiveness of the drop-off system has been evaluated, it may be expanded to include other transactions.

The drive-thru system for the delivery of partial claims is available, for the time being, at the Labor and Human Resources Department’s headquarters on Muñoz Rivera Avenue, at the corner of Domenech Avenue, from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The Labor secretary noted that during the next few days, similar measures could be enabled at the agency’s various local offices, once certain logistics and security elements necessary for the proper functioning of the process are coordinated, without putting the health of workers and claimants at risk.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Apex head switches teams Is cooperating with state and federal investigations, claims his life has been threatened

By JOSÉ A. SÁNCHEZ FOURNIER Special to The Star

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Monday’s much anticipated session of the House of Representatives Health Committee saw an unexpected change in the witness lineup, when after a brief meeting behind closed doors it was announced that Robert Rodríguez López, proprietor of Apex General Contractors LLC, is cooperating with both the state and federal investigations into his company’s aborted $38 million contract with the Puerto Rico Health Department for 1 million COVID-19 test kits.

The day’s session began with Rodríguez López asking, through his legal counsel, attorney Juan Ramón Acevedo Cruz, that his testimony be given in an executive (non-public) hearing. After a brief argument between the attorney and Health Committee Chairman Juan Oscar Morales, a short recess was called to hear the witness’ reasons for the request.

When the public hearings resumed, Morales announced that Rodríguez López’s testimony would be given first, and in

an executive session. This tool allows a witness to testify under oath but away from reporters and the public, which can help minimize the leaking of sensitive information.

Originally, Morales seemed dead set against the idea that the owner of Apex General Contractors LLC be allowed to testify behind closed doors. Acevedo Cruz said the reasons for asking that the testimony be given in an executive session were compiled in a letter sent to the committee on May 14.

Morales replied that the witness would have plenty of time to read the letter out loud during his open testimony. Among the statements in the letter to the committee were that Rodríguez López was cooperating with both the state and federal investigations on the matter, and that he feared for the well being of his family and himself because he had been threatened.

However, Acevedo Cruz was able to sway the committee chairman, who first acquiesced to a brief closed-door session to hear Rodríguez López’s reasons to ask for an executive session and -- when the committee came back on record a while later -- then announced that the committee would question Rodríguez López in an executive session later on in the day.

“Acevedo asked us for an executive hearing. We had a brief recess to hear his arguments and then we decided by unanimous vote to have an executive hearing to hear the testimony of the proprietor of Apex General Contractors LLC,” Morales said during the break in the proceedings. “I cannot go into the details of what he told us that convinced us to have [the closed-door hearing].

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But they were valid reasons and the whole committee agreed.”

“We heard all his arguments and we decided, so that this investigation can bear fruit, to hear his testimony today in an executive session,” the chairman added. “He will bring forth all the information he has related to the transaction. We believe it is very important to listen to this testimony.”

Castro test kits priced at $11 but of questionable quality Rodríguez López’s turn under oath would follow the open testimony of Ricky Castro of Castro Business. Castro’s company agreed to supply 50,000 test kits to the island government at a price per unit of $11.10 and later $13.

The price per unit of the test kits in the final purchase agreement between the Health Department and Apex General Contractors was $38.

Under Castro Business’ purchase contract with the Health Department, Castro delivered 8,900 of the 50,000 test kits inside the contracted deadline. He has not been paid.

Beginning on March 30, shipments were stopped by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

313 is a no-show Ricardo Vázquez, president of 313 LLC, was supposed to testify on Monday but did not, which could mean legal troubles for the executive.

“They [313 LLC] made a similar request [for an executive session] but gave no evidence that would require one,” Morales said.

“I had anticipated that he would not testify today,” the chairman said, adding that the committee will consider appropriate action.

Vázquez could be charged with contempt and arrested.

“All actions have consequences,” Morales said.

Governor to announce which businesses may reopen next week

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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ov. WandaVázquez Garced announced on Monday that in the coming week La Fortaleza will announce the social, economic and religious activities that will be able to start operating a little more than two months after the start of the islandwide home quarantine that was ordered in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“This week we are going to start notifying those businesses, those activities that are going to be able to start …,” Vázquez said in a radio interview. “We are going to see this week some businesses and some social and religious activities that are going to be able to start in the middle of this week, and for the next executive order that I will sign next week.”

The governor said the members of her Economic Task Force delivered their recommendations regarding reopenings on Monday. In another radio interview, Economic Development and Commerce Secretary Manuel Laboy said they are evaluating the real estate area, sports and outdoor recreational activities, certain retail sales sectors, restaurants, car sales, and barbershops and beauty salons.

Meanwhile, Vázquez urged citizens to take individual safety measures, since that will no longer be the respon-

sibility of the government.

“From now on, when the social, religious and economic activities begin to open, it is the responsibility of each citizen, not the government, of each citizen to protect themselves,” she said. “[The coronavirus that causes] COVID-19 is outside, it is an enemy that we have to live with, so it is everyone’s responsibility to comply with safety measures such

as masks and hand sanitizers.”

The governor added that “this is not a switch that you turn on and people go out to work the next day.”

“People on the street are afraid of contagion and I have to listen to that, and I have a responsibility for the workplace to produce safety measures,” she said. “Remember what happened with the [school] lunchrooms and that there are 50 infected employees.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Financial aid available for artists, cultural groups affected by pandemic

By THE STAR STAFF

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he Institute of Puerto Rican Culture (ICP by its Spanish initials) announced Monday the availability of funds under the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act for individual artists and cultural organizations whose operations have been negatively affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

“We invite the cultural arts community to apply for these grants that are being offered in support, both for individuals and organizations that have been economically affected due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” ICP Executive Director Carlos Ruiz Cortés said in a written statement.

“We hope that these efforts will provide relief from the challenges we are facing.”

The financial assistance or grants are capped at up to $7,000 for individual artists and up to $20,000 for organizations.

The deadline to apply for a CARES Act COVID-19 grant is June 12. Grants will be awarded in the order that they are received, after validating their compliance, until the deadline or the availability of funds ceases.

To learn more details, those interested can participate in a virtual orientation on Wednesday at 2 p.m. through the Zoom platform. The workshop is for individual artists and cultural organizations.

Individuals who are eligible to apply for the grant are individual artists who are U.S. citizens or have a legal lawful permanent residence. In addition, they must be residents of Puerto Rico whose projects were interrupted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Applicants must have successfully completed all fiscal, programmatic, and administrative requirements set forth in the grants.

Likewise, cultural organizations must also comply with each and every one of the criteria established

in the Single Guide to apply for a CARES Act Grant -- COVID-19, which is available at https://www.icp. pr.gov/cares/.

The announcement comes after public event and entertainment sector officials announced health protocols to avoid spreading the coronavirus as they seek to reopen theaters and other entertainment revenues.

The plan includes the economic impact of the measures and requests made to the government to help the industry, which has been on lockdown since Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced imposed a shelter in place and curfew that began on March 15. Puerto Rico’s entertainment industry employs more than 12,000 people and yields $150 million in annual revenues to the economy.

Consultant hired for drafting of island gaming regulations

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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inancial Advisory Authority and Fiscal Agency (AAFAF by its Spanish initials) Executive Director Omar Marrero Díaz announced on Monday the selection of Gaming Laboratories International (GLI) to provide consultation and advisory services to the island government’s Gaming Commission, created under Law 81-2019.

“GLI will assist the Commission in drafting the regulations that will govern its operations and will provide advisory services to the Commission regarding all industries or activities under its jurisdiction, which include sports betting, fantasy contests and electronic games, commonly

known as ‘esports,’” Marrero Díaz said in a written statement. “In addition, the company will be in charge of developing the procedures applicable to the operations of the Commission, using as an example the processes developed in other jurisdictions of the United States.”

GMI is a global leader in gaming industry consulting, auditing and certification. Since its inception, it has offered consulting services to regulatory entities for the regulation and implementation of sports betting operations, internet gambling, esports, fantasy games, casinos and lotteries.

As stated, in February 2020, the AAFAF published a request for proposals to identify qualified firms that meet the

necessary requirements for the development of regulations on so-called gaming activities in Puerto Rico.

These activities represent new forms of legal gambling and constitute a new source of economic activity and revenue for the island government. Projections indicate that such activities could report profits of around $87 million for the government of Puerto Rico in a term of five years, Marrero Díaz said.

Economic Development and Commerce Secretary Manuel Laboy Rivera stressed that “our work will include ensuring that the implementation and the regulations that result from the process are consistent with the public policy of promoting innovation and economic

development in Puerto Rico by responsibly adopting betting on sporting events, electronic games and fantasy contests.”

Gaming Commission Executive Director José A. Maymó Azize added that during recent months the commission carried out a number of procedures for the development of its operational structure. He said that once the regulations are approved, the action plan consists of starting the supplier licensing processes, as well as the licensing of operators, which implies the evaluation not only of the legal, financial and technical requirements established by the regulation, but also of compliance with protocols for responsible gaming and prevention of money laundering.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

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If Democrats hold a big convention, will anybody come?

By REID J. EPSTEIN

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hree months before their national convention is to kick off in Milwaukee, Democratic Party officials are planning for three scenarios depending on the severity of the coronavirus pandemic at the time.

But the planners face a substantial problem in putting on the quadrennial event that is recognizable to Americans as the traditional launch of the presidential general election campaign: Many of the delegates don’t want to go.

Interviews with 59 members of the Democratic National Committee and superdelegates who will formally nominate former Vice President Joe Biden in August found that the vast majority of them don’t want to risk their own health or the health of others by traveling to Milwaukee and congregating inside the convention facilities.

The reluctance was spread across all age groups and expressed by both longtime delegates and would-be first-time attendees.

Even those who plan to go have reservations; one said he would haul his own boat from Tennessee and stay on Lake Michigan rather than risk a hotel room.

“I have heard from people who have gone to many conventions, people who are die-hards, saying, ‘I’m not going to that,’ ” said David Pepper, the Ohio Democratic Party chairman. “One thing that may drive the decision is people saying they’re not going to go.”

For now, Democratic officials responsible for the convention have outlined three contingencies, people familiar with the planning say: a full convention, if health conditions permit; a mostly virtual convention that features a limited in-person presence in Milwaukee, or an entirely remote convention.

The uncertainty surrounding their convention puts Democrats in stark contrast with Republicans, who at President Donald Trump’s urging are moving “full steam ahead” in planning their convention, which is scheduled for Charlotte, North Carolina, the week after the Democratic event. On Saturday the Republican National Committee said “nearly 50,000 visitors” would gather for the GOP convention.

The diverging approaches are part of the growing partisan divide over the coronavirus, with Democrats urging caution and respect for public health officials while Republicans

The Democratic National Convention is still scheduled to take place at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee in August. are increasingly following Trump, whose skepticism about the virus and enthusiasm for reopening the nation’s economy have driven some states to end stay-at-home mandates.

“I can understand why people are more drawn to a message that gives a sense that trouble is behind us and the show must go on, but we have been and will always be transparent and honest with people about our planning,” said Joe Solmonese, the chief executive of the Democratic National Convention. “As often as not, that means the answer is we don’t know. It doesn’t feel as good as when you say, ‘We are certain and we’re plowing full speed ahead,’ but it’s the truth.”

Of the 59 delegates interviewed in the last week, nine said they are planning to attend the convention. Just seven said they’d made travel arrangements to get to Milwaukee and only two said they believe it will be safe to travel to and attend the event.

The possibility that Republicans would put on a full convention, with an arena thronged with cheering Trump supporters, the week after a scaled-down Democratic event to nominate Biden, has DNC members concerned that Democrats will further cede the political spotlight and momentum to Trump, who already enjoys the advantage of the presidential bully pulpit.

If much of the Democratic convention

is virtual, or if Biden himself remains quarantined in his Delaware home, planners will be left to produce an event for television without its star attraction.

The Biden campaign said it is delaying decisions about how large a footprint it will have in Milwaukee until more is known about the pandemic.

“We are considering a variety of formats for this to take place, but we are certain that in the end it will capture the enthusiasm and spirit that we have to making Donald Trump a one-term president and transforming our country,” said a Biden spokesman, Bill Russo.

With an eye toward attracting network coverage, DNC members said the convention could emulate recent television events like the annual WrestleMania extravaganza, which was televised from a studio without fans in Orlando, Florida, and the National Football League’s draft, which aired from the homes of the league’s executives, coaches and drafted players.

The convention is being planned by the veteran producer Ricky Kirshner, who has produced each Democratic National Convention since 1992 in addition to Super Bowl halftime shows and the Tony Awards.

Stephanie Cutter, a Democratic strategist who worked on the campaigns of John Kerry and Barack Obama, is putting together the program of speakers, work that typically isn’t

completed until the final month before the convention.

But because of the virus, some decisions will need to be made in the coming weeks.

Veterans of past national conventions said it takes two months to retrofit an arena — everything from building a podium to laying cables and wiring.

The DNC chairman, Tom Perez, has acknowledged privately that the scope of the convention will be far smaller than originally anticipated, which could move the event out of the Fiserv Forum, the city’s pro basketball arena, to a nearby theater or convention center, if it becomes clear that not enough delegates will travel to fill the seats. Perez, whose wife grew up in the Milwaukee suburbs, has insisted the convention will not move out of the city.

Solmonese said it is too soon to make a decision about which venue will host the convention. Mayor Tom Barrett said Milwaukee remains eager to host national Democrats and is being “nimble” with organizers.

“It’s not as though you have dozens of other events that need to be canceled to make room for this,” Barrett said.

Democrats believe the potential of days of network television exposure may be more important for Biden than it has for any candidate in decades. The former vice president has not made a public appearance outside his Delaware home since the final Democratic primary debate two months ago.

And while Biden and his team trumpet the number of people who have consumed the campaign’s content online, officials acknowledge the difficult balance between chasing an audience on network television and risking exacerbating the public health crisis.

Solmonese said he’s less concerned with the Nielsen ratings of the convention and more about how Biden’s message will be received among the smaller slice of the electorate that will be critical to winning an Electoral College victory.

“How many people watch it on the traditional networks is important, but we are focused on how many of the people that we need in the four or five states that we need to win can we reach,” he said, adding that it was important “that we get that content into the hands of the people most important to a victory for Joe Biden in November.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Freed by court ruling, Republicans step up effort to patrol voting

By MICHAEL VINES

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ix months before a presidential election in which turnout could matter more than persuasion, the Republican Party, the Trump campaign and conservative activists are mounting an aggressive national effort to shape who gets to vote in November — and whose ballots are counted.

Its premise is that a Republican victory in November is imperiled by widespread voter fraud, a baseless charge embraced by President Donald Trump, but repeatedly debunked by research. Democrats and voting rights advocates say the driving factor is politics, not fraud — especially since Trump’s narrow win in 2016 underscored the potentially crucial value of depressing turnout by Democrats, particularly minorities.

The Republican program, which has gained steam in recent weeks, envisions recruiting up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious. That is part of a $20 million plan that also allots millions to challenge lawsuits by Democrats and voting-rights advocates seeking to loosen state restrictions on balloting.The party and its allies also intend to use advertising, the internet and Trump’s command of the airwaves to cast Democrats as agents of election theft.

The efforts are bolstered by a 2018 federal court ruling that for the first time in nearly four decades allows the national Republican Party to mount campaigns against purported voter fraud without court approval. The court ban on Republican Party voter-fraud operations was imposed in 1982, and then modified in 1986 and again in 1990, each time after courts found instances of Republicans intimidating or working to exclude minority voters in the name of preventing fraud. The party was found to have violated it yet again in 2004.

The 2018 ruling merely “allows the RNC to play by the same rules as Democrats,” a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, Mandi Merritt, said in a statement.

“Now the RNC can work more closely with state parties and campaigns to do what we do best — ensure that more people vote through our unmatched field program,” the statement said.

But the program escalates a Republican focus on limiting who can vote that became a juggernaut after the Supreme Court dismantled the Voting Rights Act in 2013. But beyond that, it also reflects an enduring tension in American life in which the voting rights of minorities — whether granted in 1870 by the 15th Amendment or nearly a century later by the Voting Rights Act

A voter fills out her ballot in a early vote center in Merced, Calif., in March. of 1965 — seldom seem free from challenge.

Besides the national party and Trump’s campaign strategists, conservative advocacy groups are joining lawsuits, recruiting poll monitors and mounting media campaigns of their own.

Leading them is a new and well-funded organization, the Honest Elections Project, formed by Leonard Leo, a prolific fundraiser, advocate of a conservative judiciary and confidant of Trump.

Republicans will have an Election Day operations program “that probably no other presidential campaign has had before,” Josh Helton, a Republican consultant, said at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee in March. “It’s going to be all hands on deck.”

In battleground states, that extends even to comparatively quiet places like Fond du Lac County, an eastern Wisconsin outpost of about 100,000 people and 1,200 farms midway between Green Bay and Milwaukee.

“I think the big push is going to be for poll observers” in November’s general election, the Republican Party county chairman, Rohn Bishop, said this month. “No harm in making sure.” Indeed, he said that training sessions for election monitors were already in the works.

Democrats who have been tracking the effort say the goal is not to limit fraud, but to make the supposed threat of election theft the tentpole of a coordinated campaign by Republicans and their allies to limit the number of Democratic ballots counted in November.

“This is a burn-it-down strategy, a strategy to win at all costs,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the senior adviser at Fair Fight, the voting rights group founded by Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia.

“They see this as central to victory.”

Fair Fight claims that the groups’ combined spending on lawsuits, election monitoring and spreading allegations of cheating will far exceed the $20 million announced to date. That message, blasted out, in particular by Trump, has stirred concerns that the Republican fraud

drumbeat could lay the groundwork for Trump and his supporters to reject the election results should he lose.

Neither the Trump campaign nor the Republican National Committee responded to requests for interviews, although the committee provided a summary of its work and policies. In essence, Republicans say Democratic efforts to relax voting restrictions are partisan moves that demand a firm response, and that Republican countermeasures reflect standard political mobilizing.

Others say the Republican focus on vanishingly rare cases of fraud targets a politically useful phantom.

“It’s utter nonsense. This has been shown over and over,” said Kenneth R. Mayer, an elections expert at the University of WisconsinMadison. “The continued insistence that there are material levels of intentional voter fraud is itself a form of fraud.”

But political strategists insisted at the conservative committee conference in March that ballot fakery was a major concern. “In some of these areas where there’s no Republican presence whatsoever, then they’re going to cheat, and they’re going to cheat early and they’re going to cheat often,” Helton said at the March conference. At polling places, he said, “just having a presence of some sort is a deterrent for probably 80% of the bad behavior.”

Being present at the polls isn’t unusual; in fact, both parties monitor polls. Monitors check whether poll workers follow the rules and can complain to election supervisors or summon party lawyers if differences are not resolved.

They also can challenge voters’ right to cast a ballot — if, for instance, a voter lacks a required ID card. That can force voters to cast provisional ballots that are not counted unless they prove their eligibility.

But Democrats say the Republican focus on monitors and repeated allegations of fraud are part of a coordinated strategy to depress turnout, especially by minorities, by fueling anxieties among voters already suspicious of the authorities.

“They don’t need to keep millions of people away” from the polls, said Groh-Wargo. “Challenge a couple of voters here, a couple there, and it all aggregates up. They realize they’re going to win or lose this thing at the margins.”

Among other things, Democrats cite Trump’s repeated demands that law-enforcement officers patrol the polls and the recent creation of voter-fraud task forces by Republicans in four state governments, at least in part at the national party’s urging.

They also point to a meeting in February

attended by conservative political luminaries and at least one national Republican Party official, sponsored by the Center for National Policy, a group of conservative power brokers.

The topic was voter fraud and “ballot security” operations, particularly in inner cities and areas with Native American populations, according to The Intercept, which published excerpts from a recording of the meeting.

One group represented at that meeting, Texas-based True the Vote, is recruiting military veterans to become poll monitors. The group, an offshoot of a Houston Tea Party branch, was scrutinized by local prosecutors after its first pollmonitoring effort in 2012 sparked complaints of voter intimidation.

The group’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, told the gathering that Democrats could inundate the polls with phony votes. “The swarming tactics of a radicalized socialist mindset,” she warned, “is a dangerous thing to behold.” The group did not respond to a request for comment.

History also offers reason for Democrats’ concern. The court order vacated in 2018 involved repeated efforts to depress Democratic turnout. In the first instance, the party recruited off-duty police officers wearing “National Ballot Security Task Force” armbands to monitor polling places in black and Latino neighborhoods in New Jersey. A Democratic lawsuit claimed the officers hectored poll workers and voters and stopped volunteers from helping voters cast ballots.

At the Conservative Political Action Committee conference, Justin Clark, a Trump campaign senior adviser overseeing Election Day operations, argued that the court order had handed a decadeslong edge to Democrats.

“We were really operating with one hand behind our back,” he said.

Speaking to Wisconsin Republicans in November, Clark said the party’s expanded pollmonitoring plans were accelerated by defeats last November in governor’s races in Kentucky and Louisiana.

The party has named three regional directors of Election Day operations, is hiring directors in 15 key states and will beef up the paid staffs that recruit and work with volunteers. Wisconsin, for example, is to receive 100 operatives, compared to 62 in 2016.

One aim, he said, is to expand poll monitoring beyond the usual big-city Democratic strongholds. Clark, in remarks which were posted online by the Democratic opposition group American Bridge, cited a county where he said Trump won by 14,000 votes in 2016.

“But maybe he should have won by 17,000,” he said. “Their cheating doesn’t just happen when you lose a county.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

9

‘I feel like a hero’: A day in the life of a grocery delivery man

By AARON RANDLE and BRITTAINY NEWMAN

W

hen he heard the news about the coronavirus pandemic and the citywide shutdown, Gerald Timothee called his family back home in Portau-Prince, Haiti.

He wondered how long he could keep his job delivering groceries for the Instacart app with the deadly airborne disease running rampant. And how long would it be before the disease overtook him as he made deliveries?

“I told them I was going to die,” Timothee, 35, recalled. “I thought my life was over. I didn’t know how I could work with this.”

The possibility of getting sick is a reality Timothee and thousands of other workers in New York City’s gig economy have had to face each day as they venture out onto the city’s streets not only to earn a living, but also to feed other residents.

Yet for many of these workers, their initial terror has been steeled with a sense of duty and pride. “It’s all about us right now,” Timothee said. “We are holding this city together. I feel like a hero.”

Following a dramatic increase in demand during stay-at-home orders, Instacart’s personal shopper ranks in New York City alone have swelled to more than 14,000 since March, according to company officials, an increase of more than 150%.

The company employs workers to shop for and deliver groceries and other household items ordered online through an app, paying them a fee for each delivery.

With a more than 400% increase in sales since March, Instacart has seen a greater rise since the pandemic than any other company — even Amazon or Walmart. It is one of several on-demand grocery delivery services, including Prime Now, Peapod, FreshDirect, and Shipt, which send legions of delivery people around the city every day.

Most of the money Timothee makes from his work as an Instacart shopper goes to help family back home in Haiti. But he and some friends from Port-au-Prince also pool money to buy food for needy families back home — packages filled with rice, oil and fish that have helped dozens of families in Haiti get through the pandemic.

Timothee’s day begins each morning with an hourlong trek from his small studio apartment in East New York, Brooklyn, to Midtown Manhattan, where, he said, wealthier city dwellers are more prone to use the app and its shoppers rather than brave the stores themselves. He boards a usually desolate No. 2 train and starts shopping at noon.

Unlike many Instacart workers who own cars, Timothee is a “walker,” making his deliveries on foot.

“I walk anywhere from 5 to 6 miles a day,” he said from behind his face mask one brisk overcast afternoon in late April. Perched outside an apartment on 52nd Street and Third Avenue, he scrolled the Instacart app in search of his next shop, or “batch” as Instacart shoppers call them.

Gerald Timothee, who sends much of the money he makes as a personal shopper for Instacart home to his family in Haiti, makes a delivery in Manhattan.

Being on foot forces Timothee to think strategically about each job he accepts. On a recent afternoon, there was a gig on 73rd Street that could score a $45 payment (including tip), and another on 59th Street that would net him $34. He chose the 59th Street option, noting its proximity to a nearby Gristedes market.

“It’s a bit like chess, being a walker,” he said. “You have to be smart. You have to be patient.”

As he does in most trips, he made his way to the grocery store and then to his customer’s building through a mix of walking and public transit.

Shuffling past eerily quiet Midtown streets at 2 p.m.

— past empty bagel shops and sushi bars, an Equinox gym and New York souvenir shop — he hopped on a northbound city bus. With hardly anyone riding anymore, swiping was unnecessary. He entered the bus through its rear exit, and took a seat.

In the past, at this time of day, the bus might have been standing room only. But that day, there were only three riders. “This is the new norm now, man,” he said. “It takes some getting used to.”

He is a slender man just a little taller than 6 feet, with tattoos on his neck and a nose ring. But these days, his features are almost always hidden. His protective mask hardly ever comes down below his nose. “It’s my armor,” he said with a laugh. “I never take it off.”

He carried a rolling aluminum and nylon reinforced

shopping trolley that he uses to transport his groceries, and a backpack, stuffed with protective equipment provided by Instacart, including hand sanitizer and packs of protective gloves.

For weeks Instacart, and a number of other gig economy businesses like Amazon, drew criticism from workers for not adequately protecting them from the coronavirus.

After months of protests, strikes and walkouts, Instacart said it has improved its protective efforts, including an investment of more than $20 million in the past few weeks on packs of person protective equipment, or PPE, for shoppers.

Now, all Instacart shoppers are able to use the company app to have a package (including a face mask, protective gloves and sanitizer) mailed to them.

Timothee, who has been shopping with Instacart since 2016, said he had never had problems getting equipment from local stores. “You have to know who to ask,” he said.

Entering Gristedes, he began a well-honed routine. He put his cart near the register and approached the shopping baskets. Putting his phone into this pocket, he took a pair of fresh latex gloves from his backpack and slid them onto his hands as he grabbed a small bottle of hand sanitizer and began disinfecting the basket. He then retrieved his phone and sprayed it down.

“You never, ever touch anything first,” he said.

Just then a woman came by and moved his shopping basket to the side. With a sigh, he repeated the process.

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Moderna Coronavirus vaccine trial shows promising early results

By DENISE GRADY

T

he first coronavirus vaccine to be tested in people appears to be safe and able to stimulate an immune response against the virus, its manufacturer, Moderna, announced Monday.

The findings are based on results from the first eight people who each received two doses of the experimental vaccine, starting in March.

Those people, healthy volunteers ages 18 to 55, made antibodies that were then tested in infected cells in the lab and were able to stop the virus from replicating — the key requirement for an effective vaccine. The levels of those so-called neutralizing antibodies matched or exceeded the levels found in patients who had recovered after contracting the virus in the community.

Though encouraging, the findings do not prove that the vaccine works. Only larger, longer studies can determine whether it can actually prevent people in the real world from getting sick. Moderna’s technology, involving genetic material from the virus called mRNA, is relatively new and has yet to produce any approved vaccine.

Early results from a handful of test subjects may not seem like much to go on, but the world is desperate for good news. With the highly contagious virus defying most efforts to control its spread, vaccines are seen as the best and perhaps only hope of stopping or even slowing a pandemic that has sickened nearly 5 million people worldwide, killed 315,000 and locked down entire countries, paralyzing their economies.

Moderna produced the vaccine in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the institute led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, which has been leading the clinical trials. That institute, a part of the federal National Institutes of Health, is also involved in research on other experimental coronavirus vaccines.

The news helped buoy Wall Street, rallying the markets. In recent months, Moderna’s stock has soared as it pursued a vaccine, and it was up more than 25% by midafternoon Monday.

Dozens of other companies and universities are also rushing to create coronavirus vaccines, and several have also begun to test their candidates in human subjects, including

Moderna headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech; Chinese company CanSino; and the University of Oxford, working with AstraZeneca.

Experts agree that it is essential to develop multiple vaccines because the urgent global need for billions of doses will far outstrip the production capacity of any one manufacturer.

At the same time, there is widespread concern that haste could compromise safety, resulting in a vaccine that does not work or even harms patients. Vaccines have generally taken years, sometimes a decade or more, to reach the market. A significant part of that time is taken up by large trials in thousands of subjects, waiting to see if the vaccine prevents infection and making sure that it does not make the illness worse — a known, though uncommon effect called disease enhancement.

Moderna’s early stage of testing, phase one, is continuing, Two more age groups, 55 to 70, and 71 and older, are now being enrolled to test the vaccine.

The actual data from these preliminary tests has not been published or shared publi-

cly but has been submitted to the Food and Drug Administration, which does not comment on trials still in progress. The company said it hoped to make data publicly available this summer, when its final stage of testing is due to begin.

Moderna has said that it is proceeding on an accelerated timetable, with the second phase involving 600 people to begin soon, and a third phase to begin in July involving thousands of healthy people. The Food and Drug Administration gave Moderna the goahead for the second phase earlier this month.

If those trials go well, a vaccine could become available for widespread use by the end of this year or early 2021, said Dr. Tal Zaks, Moderna’s chief medical officer. How many doses might be ready is not clear, but Zaks said, “We’re doing our best to make it as many millions as possible.”

Two shots, four weeks apart, are likely to be needed, meaning that however many doses are produced, only half that number of people can be vaccinated.

There is no proven treatment or vaccine against the coronavirus at this time. Dozens of

companies in the United States, Europe and China are racing to produce vaccines, using different methods. Some use the same technology as Moderna, which involves a segment of genetic material from the virus called messenger RNA, or mRNA. Moderna said that additional tests in mice that were vaccinated and then infected found that the vaccine could prevent the virus from replicating in their lungs and that the animals had levels of neutralizing antibodies comparable to those in the people who had received the vaccine.

Three doses of the vaccine were tested: low, medium and high. These initial results are based on tests of the low and medium doses. The only adverse effect at those doses was redness and soreness in one patient’s arm where the shot was given.

But at the highest dose, three patients had fever, muscle pains and headaches, Zaks said, adding that the symptoms went away after a day.

But the high dose is being eliminated from future studies, not so much because of the side effects but because the lower doses appeared to work so well that the high dose is not needed.

“The lower the dose, the more vaccine we’ll be able to make,” Zaks said.

Moderna uses genetic material — messenger RNA — to make vaccines, and the company has nine others in various stages of development, including several for viruses that cause respiratory illnesses. But no vaccine made with this technology has yet reached the market.

Work on the new coronavirus started in January, as soon as Chinese scientists posted its genetic sequence on the internet. Researchers at Moderna and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases identified part of the sequence that codes for a spikelike protein on the surface of the virus that attaches to human cells, helping the virus to invade them.

The idea behind Moderna’s vaccine is to inject the mRNA for part of the spike protein and have it slip into the cells of a healthy person, which then follow its instruction and crank out the viral protein. That protein should act as a red flag for the immune system, stimulating it to produce antibodies that will prevent infection by blocking the action of the spike if the person is exposed to the virus.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

11

How Wall Street is hampering some small businesses seeking aid

By EMILY FLITTER

W

hen Michael Sullivan borrowed $22 million from a specialist Wall Street lender in 2018 to buy and renovate two Florida hotels, he had no idea how costly that decision would prove to be.

He found out recently, once visitors stopped coming to his properties because of the pandemic, prompting him to seek help from the federal government’s new small business loan program. But first, he had to tussle with his lender, the credit fund Benefit Street Partners, just to win permission to get the government loan. The legal fight cost him thousands of dollars and a month in lost time.

Sullivan said he had no other option because the terms of his contract with Benefit Street contained severe restrictions on future borrowing, and the lender was unwilling to budge.

“Their mindset was, this is your problem, not ours,” Sullivan said.

Most small business owners dip into their savings or borrow from traditional banks. But many, like Sullivan and others in the hotel or restaurant business, borrow from private lenders such as hedge funds, credit funds or investors in securities backed by pools of commercial mortgages. The contracts governing such loans can be complicated and are designed to ensure that lenders are paid back every penny they’re owed. To that end, they often prevent the borrower from taking on new debt without getting permission from them first, and they frequently seek the right to control the terms of any new loans as well as what the newly acquired money is used for.

The coronavirus relief bill, which created the government’s Paycheck Protection Program that Sullivan borrowed from, prohibits any loan money from being controlled by other lenders. At the same time, it does not outlaw lenders like Benefit Street from enforcing existing contracts with borrowers seeking government funds.

The $650 billion paycheck program has helped millions of small businesses, but its rollout was uneven and slowed by confusing rules. The program’s structure itself created other challenges. For example, the aid came in the form of loans that could be forgiven under certain circumstances, but some businesses hesitated to spend the money because they were unsure about how exactly the forgiveness would work. And for businesses such as Sullivan’s, the program’s structure has required them to fight costly legal battles simply to get any funds at all.

In April, Sullivan was close to getting a government loan through First Florida Integrity Bank. But the bank paused because he was wrangling with Benefit Street.

The fund’s lawyers wanted him to agree that if he failed to satisfy any of the conditions of the government’s loan terms, Benefit Street could try to recoup its money by

To get government help, some owners who borrowed money from credit funds and bond investors had to fight their lenders first. going after Sullivan’s personal assets. He found the condition too onerous and refused.

Instead, Sullivan offered to put the aid money — he was seeking $217,000 to pay employees and other expenses — into an escrow account under Benefit Street’s control while its lawyers worked on a deal with him and his two business partners. But his bank wouldn’t agree to that solution, citing the coronavirus relief bill’s restrictions around having the loan controlled by another lender.

Sullivan eventually found another bank to process his application. This time, to satisfy Benefit Street, Sullivan had to deposit $200,000 into an “interest reserve” fund, guaranteeing that the lender would be paid on time. By then, he had spent roughly $10,000 on legal fees, including for Benefit Street’s lawyers, and lost about a month to negotiations, during which he laid off some of his hotel workers. He had also fallen sick with COVID-19.

“You had to jump through those hoops because it was a loan,” Sullivan said. “It delayed everyone getting those funds.”

Pholida Barclay, a spokeswoman for Benefit Street, which is owned by the mutual fund company Franklin Templeton, said the fund had “gone out of its way to be helpful” to borrowers suffering under lockdowns and that

it had worked “quickly to create a framework” that would allow its borrowers to accept government loans. The fund “never asked Mr. Sullivan, or any other borrower, for an escrow of any PPP funds, if they were obtained,” she said.

It is impossible to tell how many borrowers like Sullivan, their businesses devastated by the pandemic, are wrestling with their lenders for some flexibility so that they can avail themselves of government funds.

But ironclad contracts and rigid or unresponsive lenders also strained the process of getting government loans for small hotel owners and other real estate businesses that borrow money from the commercial mortgagebacked securities market. In this market, lenders package many mortgages together to create bonds that yield guaranteed regular payments, which they then sell to investors.

Close to 7,000 such borrowers have sought help from the companies that service their loans, according to Fitch, a credit ratings agency. They represent onequarter of all the borrowers with outstanding loans from commercial mortgage bondholders and owe a collective $149 billion. Not all of those borrowers are as small as Sullivan and his partners, and not all of them contacted their servicers asking for permission to accept government help.

One group of hotel owners in Wisconsin had to file two lawsuits — one in New York and one in Florida — against the banks and other entities handling the securitized loans on their four hotels just to get in touch with someone who had the authority to let them tap the government’s paycheck program.

One of the banks involved in managing the hotel owners’ loans was Wells Fargo. According to the Florida lawsuit, filed by Beechwood Lakeland, the hotel company, the owners tried for more than 10 days in late March to get an answer from the bank about whether they could apply for a government-backed small-business loan. They expected the aid program to open up in less than a week, and they were worried that without the proper permission they would lose their chance to participate.

“As you know, timing is especially important since any delay means the funding for these relief loans could be quickly exhausted,” Mark Arnot, the hotel owners’ general counsel, wrote in an email to Wells Fargo.

Wells Fargo sent the owners to a different company, Rialto Capital Advisors, to get permission. A Rialto representative sent them back to Wells Fargo.

For the entire month of April, Wells Fargo and Rialto representatives ping-ponged the owners’ requests back and forth. On May 1, the owners sued the trustees representing the securitized loans. It worked. Five days later, they reached a deal with the various parties that gave them permission to accept the government’s forgivable loans.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Stocks

S&P 500 closes at 10-week high on vaccine hopes, stimulus pledge

U

.S. stocks jumped on Monday, and the S&P 500 closed at a 10-week high, on encouraging earlystage data for a potential coronavirus vaccine and on the promise of more stimulus to lift an economy beaten down by the pandemic.

Drugmaker Moderna Inc (MRNA.O) surged 19.96% after the company said its experimental COVID-19 vaccine showed promising results in a small early-stage trial.

After rallying more than 32% from a multi-year low hit in March, the S&P 500 had been trading in a tight range in May as investors weighed the hopes of an economic recovery against the fears of another wave of infection as states lifted virus-led restrictions.

“The fact that Moderna came out with the Phase 1 trial that seems to be positive, that certainly is igniting the storm,” said Ken Polcari, chief market strategist at SlateStone Wealth LLC in Jupiter, Florida. “That will ignite the storm because if there is a vaccine then all this uncertainty about the economy and the virus goes away.”

Stocks that have been particularly battered by government lockdown measures implemented to stem the spread of the coronavirus surged on Monday.

Travel-related stocks were among the biggest gainers, with cruise line operators Carnival Corp (CCL.N), Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd (RCL.N) and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd (NCLH.N) all outperforming the broader market with gains of at least 15%.

Airline stocks also soared as Delta Air Lines (DAL.N) said it would resume flying several major routes in June.

The NYSE Arca index .XAL gained 14.14%, with Delta up 13.91%.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI rose 911.95 points, or 3.85%, to 24,597.37, the S&P 500 .SPX gained 90.21 points, or 3.15%, to 2,953.91 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 220.27 points, or 2.44%, to 9,234.83.

The benchmark S&P 500 notched its biggest one-day percentage gain since April 8, with all 11 major S&P sectors higher.

Markets also took heart from comments by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over the weekend forecasting a gradual economic recovery and his affirmation that more monetary stimulus would be on the way if required. Powell is set to speak before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday to discuss how economic rescue efforts are working.

Cyclical plays were in favor with the energy .SPNY and industrial .SPLRCI sectors climbing as a gradual recovery in economic activity pointed to more demand for oil and manufactured products.

MOST ASSERTIVE STOCKS

PUERTO RICO STOCKS

COMMODITIES

CURRENCY

LOCAL PERSONAL LOAN RATES Bank

LOCAL MORTGAGE RATES Bank

FHA 30-YR POINTS CONV 30-YR POINTS

BPPR Scotia CooPACA Money House First Mort Oriental

3.00% 0.00 3.50% 0.00 3.50% 2.00 3.75% 2.00 3.50% 0.00 3.50% 0.00

3.50% 000 4.00% 0.00 3.75% 2.00 3.75% 2.00 5.50% 0.00 3.75% 5.50

PERS.

CREDIT CARD

AUTO

BPPR --.-- 17.95 4.95 Scotia 4.99 14.99 4.99 CooPACA

6.95 9.95

2.95

Reliable

--.-- --.--

4.40

First Mort 7.99 --.-- --.-Oriental 4.99 11.95 4.99

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

13

COVID-19 outbreak in Nigeria is just one of Africa’s alarming hot spots

The coronavirus has been slower to take hold in Africa than on other continents, but blazing hot spots are beginning to emerge.

By RUTH MACLEAN

I

n the northern Nigerian city of Kano, some people say they now get four or five death notices on their phones each day: A colleague has died. A friend’s aunt. A former classmate.

The gravediggers of the city, one of the biggest in West Africa, say they are working overtime. And so many doctors and nurses have been infected with the coronavirus that few hospitals are now accepting patients.

Officially, Kano had reported 753 cases and 33 deaths attributed to the virus as of Friday. But in reality, the metropolis is experiencing a major, unchecked outbreak, according to doctors and public health experts. It could be one of the continent’s worst.

The coronavirus has been slower to take hold in Africa than on other continents, according to the numbers released daily by the World Health Organization.

But blazing hot spots are beginning to emerge. Kano is only one of several places in Africa where a relatively low official case count bears no resemblance to what health workers and residents say they are seeing on the ground.

In Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, officials say that burials have tripled. In Tanzania, after cases suddenly rose and the U.S. Embas-

sy issued a health alert, the Tanzanian government abruptly stopped releasing its data.

Kano’s state government, until recently, claimed a spate of unusual deaths was caused not by the coronavirus but by hypertension, diabetes, meningitis or acute malaria. There is little social distancing, and few people are being tested.

“The leadership is in denial,” said Usman Yusuf, a hematology-oncology professor and the former head of Nigeria’s national health insurance agency. “It’s almost like saying there is no COVID in New York.”

He said he thought a significant portion of the population was probably infected in Kano, a city with an estimated 5 million people (although there has been no census since 2006).

Although they have now acknowledged they have a problem with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, authorities in Kano spent precious weeks denying it, despite the surge in what Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, the state governor, called “mysterious deaths.”

“So far, there’s been nothing to suggest that they are linked with COVID-19,” Ganduje posted on Twitter on April 27, when, according to doctors in Kano’s hospitals, the city was already firmly in the grip of a serious coronavirus outbreak.

There was nothing mysterious about

what doctors said they were seeing at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, the city’s main public hospital. Starting well before Kano’s first case was reported April 11, the hospital saw a steady stream of older patients with fevers, coughs, difficulty breathing and low oxygen saturation levels, many of them with underlying health conditions.

Doctors at the hospital called the government’s response team. Sometimes it took 24 hours to get a call back. Sometimes, the team refused to test or isolate patients, saying they did not qualify because they had not traveled recently.

About 60% to 70% of the elderly patients who went to the hospital and later died had arrived with full symptoms of COVID-19, said a doctor in the medical department, who, along with another doctor, spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.

One doctor said the department’s death registers for April showed far more patients had died than normal. Most patients were sent home, he said, and the hospital’s staff members often would hear later that they had died.

With no personal protective equipment except surgical masks, the doctors said they knew the risks they were running in treating these patients. They said that they begged the hospital management for N95 masks, face shields, gloves and aprons, but that none came. They asked for an isolation center at the hospital, scared that patients with other ailments would be infected. They wanted the facilities fumigated. Nothing happened.

And then it was too late. The doctors began to get sick.

“All of us were exposed,” said the other doctor. “Ultimately, what we feared has happened.”

Twenty of the 91 doctors in the hospital’s medical department tested positive, the doctors said. Overall in Kano, 42 doctors and 28 nurses have tested positive, and one doctor has died, according to Dr. Sanusi Bala, chair of the Kano branch of the Nigerian Medical Association. Laboratory technicians in what was then Kano’s only testing laboratory got sick, too, and it closed for several days. The city’s health system, already extremely limited, was crippled.

Nigeria, a country of about 200 million

people, says it can in theory do 2,500 tests a day, and Kano up to 500. But it has been conducting far fewer tests, typically 1,000 to 1,200 daily. Test results in Kano can take two weeks. Doctors awaiting their test results cannot go to work. People in quarantine cannot leave.

“If I say thousands of people are dying from COVID, I don’t think I exaggerated the figure,” said the doctor who begged for PPE. “So many people are dying without being tested, without even going to the hospital.”

While the government loosened lockdowns May 4 in the capital, Abuja, and biggest city, Lagos, it extended the one in Kano.

But few people observe it. The many funerals are well attended, residents said.

Many in the city think the coronavirus is a hoax, perhaps because public messaging about it is mostly in English, which most Kano residents do not speak, health experts said.

Others believe that a COVID-19 diagnosis is a death sentence, the experts said, and do not want their neighbors to think they are infected. So they avoid being tested and try to behave as if all is normal.

By late April, the Kano state government finally admitted there was a COVID-19 problem and asked the federal government for help. Sarkinfada, the medical microbiologist, said that the federal government focused its efforts on increasing Kano’s testing capacity, and that test results were now coming in sooner.

“The Kano situation has seen us through deception, denial, defiance, denunciation, disagreement and finally acceptance and action to control the disaster,” said Oyewale Tomori, a virologist who leads a Nigerian government committee on COVID-19.

Kano’s location, population and connectivity to the rest of the region mean the consequences of an uncontrolled outbreak could be severe.

Already there are reports of hundreds more people dying “mysterious deaths” in Nigeria’s northern states of Jigawa, Yobe, Sokoto and Katsina, including three emirs, or traditional Muslim rulers, and a former health minister.

“If Kano falls, the whole of northern Nigeria falls. The whole of Nigeria falls,” Yusuf said. “It spreads into the whole of West Africa and the whole of Africa.”

14

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

How France lost the weapons to fight a pandemic

France has become a case study in how some countries are now reconsidering their dependence on global supply chains built during the past two decades on the mantra of low costs and quick delivery.

By NORIMITSU ONISHI and CONSTANT MÉHEUT

W

hen President Emmanuel Macron repeatedly declared “war” on the coronavirus in March, he solemnly promised that France would support “frontline” health workers with “the means, the protection.”

The reality was that France was nearly defenseless.

The government’s flip-flopping policies on past pandemics had left a once-formidable national stockpile of face masks nearly depleted. Officials had also outsourced the manufacturing capacity to replenish that stockpile to suppliers overseas, despite warnings since the early 2000s about the rising risks of global pandemics.

That has left France — unlike Germany, its rival for European leadership — dependent on foreign factories and painfully unable to ramp up domestic production of face masks, test kits, ventilators and even thermometers and over-the-counter fever-reducing medicines to soothe the sick.

Today, as it has begun loosening one of the world’s strictest lockdowns, France has become a case study in how some countries are now reconsidering their dependence on global supply chains built during the past two decades on the mantra of low costs and quick

delivery. Even now, France has no guarantees that it can secure enough supplies in the coming weeks to protect against a potential second wave of the virus.

“In times of crisis, we can no longer switch from one production zone to another to get our essential products,” Louis Gautier, the former director of the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security, a powerful interministerial unit inside the prime minister’s office that coordinates the response to largescale crises, said in an interview. “The issue of strategic stocks and secure supplies has to be reconsidered. A new model has to be invented.”

France had long identified masks as indispensable in a pandemic, yet the government had mostly stopped stockpiling them during the past decade, mainly for budgetary reasons. Domestic production collapsed at the same time the country’s pharmaceutical industry was also moving overseas.

To many critics, France’s defenselessness in the face of the virus was the logical conclusion of the hollowing out of France’s manufacturing base — a transformation that has deepened inequality and fueled violent protests, like the yellow vest movement.

In the early 2000s, Germany had a slight edge over France in manufacturing and exporting PCR test kits — the most widely used today to detect the virus — and oxygen

therapy equipment, according to United Nations data. But by 2018, Germany had a $1.4 billion trade surplus for PCR test kits, whereas France had a deficit of $89 million.

While Germany was able to mobilize its industry quickly to fight the pandemic, France was paralyzed. It couldn’t carry out largescale testing because it lacked cotton swabs and reagents, low-value but crucial elements that had been outsourced to Asia.

In France, shortages have affected even basic goods. Drugstores ran out of thermometers. Supplies of paracetamol — a common pain reliever sold as Tylenol in the United States — became so dangerously low that authorities restricted its sale.

The last European factory producing the medication was in France, near the city of Lyon, but it closed in 2008, according to France’s National Academy of Pharmacy. The association has long warned of a growing dependence on foreign drugmakers, noting that 60% to 80% of active pharmaceutical ingredients in Europe are imported — compared with 20% three decades ago.

In 2006, a government pandemic plan recommended a series of measures, including creating stockpiles of masks. A year earlier, France’s Health Ministry signed a five-year contract to buy 180 million masks a year that Bacou-Dalloz, then the biggest mask-maker in France, would produce at a factory in Plaintel, about 280 miles from Paris.

Details from the contract, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, reveal the government’s strategic thinking at the time. Securing a domestic supplier would help France avoid being “exclusively dependent on importations that would be disrupted in the context of a pandemic.”

The contract would ensure the government’s “renewal of its stockpile of masks” as older stocks reached their expiration dates.

And during a pandemic, the government could requisition the plant’s production.

The government order “monopolized the Plaintel factory’s entire production capacity,” said Jean-Jacques Fuan, a former director of the plant.

By 2008, the government issued a white paper that for the first time cited pandemics as a potential national threat, ranking it fourth behind terrorism, cyberwarfare and a ballistic missile attack.

“In the next 15 years, the arrival of a pandemic is possible,” the paper warned. It could be highly contagious and lethal, it said, and could come and go in waves for weeks

or months.

But soon afterward, many politicians began criticizing the policy of stockpiling masks and medication as wasteful. About 383 million euros spent in 2009 on acquiring 44 million vaccinations against the H1N1 flu caused a political scandal after less than 9% of French people were vaccinated.

In 2013, the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security issued new pandemic directives emphasizing “overall savings” and reducing the importance of maintaining a stockpile. Surgical masks would be stocked, but not the more sophisticated FFP2 masks that, the report noted, cost 10 times as much.

The directives also transferred the responsibility — and costs — for securing and stockpiling masks to public and private employers. This contributed to the severe shortages that France has suffered in recent months, as government officials became less engaged on the issue.

Gautier, the former director of the general secretariat, said that the new directives had been intended to improve the distribution of masks by requiring employers, like hospitals, to stock them and make them legally responsible for the protection of their employees.

But he acknowledged that “it would have been logical to transfer the credits and not only the costs to the employers. We should have also put in place measures of control to ensure that the reforms had been applied correctly.”

But the new policy also undermined France’s capacity to produce masks. Employers, now charged with procuring masks, naturally sought cheaper suppliers abroad.

And to save costs, the government placed large orders that only Chinese factories were able to satisfy, said Francis Delattre, a former senator whose 2015 report warned of the depletion of masks.

“Small French factories were losing orders,” Delattre said. “It was very dangerous to entrust only one or two Chinese conglomerates with the health protection of the country.”

And without its single government customer, the factory in Plaintel, which had once been running 24 hours a day, saw its business shrivel and eventually closed in 2018, Fuan said.

As expired masks were disposed of, France’s national stockpile shrank from 1.7 billion in 2009 to 150 million in March.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

15

Wandering a grand hotel emptied by Coronavirus, and checking 1,400 taps

By RAPHAEL MINDER

E

very five days, Daniel Ordoñez opens 1,400 pipe taps in a waterfront hotel here in Barcelona that locals call “The Sail” because of its shape.

Each tap has to run for about five minutes, so the task takes him a full day.

“It’s probably the most boring part of my job, but it’s needed,” he said, to avoid a form of pneumonia that can be spread by bacteria in the water: Legionnaires’ disease.

Ordoñez, who is in charge of maintenance at the hotel, has been its sole continuous occupant for the past two months, wandering its ghostly halls because of another illness that has ravaged the country and the globe: COVID-19.

When the hotel closed in mid-March as part of a nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus, Ordoñez, an industrial engineer, agreed to self-isolate inside in order to avoid any deterioration of the premises that could delay its reopening, whenever that might be.

He now lives alone on the 24th floor, which gives him an unrivaled view of the city, its beaches and the Mediterranean.

“At the start, I thought I would be here for about two weeks,” said Ordoñez, who is single.

“But now it’s been eight, with no clear end in sight.”

Arguably Barcelona’s most emblematic luxury lodging, the W Hotel stands 325 feet tall and 27 stories high, dominating the city’s waterfront.

Some might find walking its deserted corridors, peering into its vacated salons, or dining alone on a plate of fried chicken and vegetables cooked in a cavernous restaurant kitchen unsettling, but Ordoñez does not.

“It’s been a bit weird to watch my few socks spin inside the washing machine of a huge laundry room, but I’ve now also had time to get used to that,” he said with a wry smile in a recent interview with a visitor from a safe distance.

With an official death toll of just over 27,000, Spain has been one of the European countries hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic. This month, the government in Madrid started to gradually

ease lockdown restrictions in order to return the country to what Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez calls “the new normalcy” by late June.

But there is no indication of when Spain will recuperate losses from a tourism industry that accounted for 12% of its economy last year. As of Friday, foreign visitors face a 14-day quarantine upon arrival, a measure that will be maintained “as long as necessary” to avoid “imported cases” that could annul the gains of the domestic lockdown efforts, the Spanish health minister, Salvador Illa, warned Tuesday.

Ordoñez, 37, left behind a house on the outskirts of Barcelona to take up room in the grand hotel and continue his maintenance duties. Still, he said, he would stay as long as needed in a hotel where he knows every nook and cranny, from its ventilation shafts to its underground storage areas.

“This was already my second home before the lockdown,” he said.

The lockdowns and border closures imposed around the globe to limit the spread of the coronavirus left many people stranded in unlikely locations, including two friends who hunkered down in an empty London pub or a couple on an extended honeymoon in the Maldives. Many wealthy people fled big cities, finding a haven in their countryside homes or even a wellness center on Bali.

But the Barcelona hotel’s decision to ask Ordoñez to stay inside highlights a different issue: infrastructures that need looking after, even when business has ground to a halt.

Barcelona, one of Europe’s main tourism destinations, drew almost 12 million visitors last year. Before the coronavirus hit, residents and politicians had been debating the impact of this record tourism influx, including issues like the flood of day-trippers disembarking from cruise ships and the proliferation of Airbnb apartments that raised property prices in central Barcelona.

Now the absence of tourists has left Barcelona and other vacation destinations across Spain facing an ominous economic threat.

Exceltur, a Spanish tourism lobby, forecast in March that Spain’s tourism revenues would fall

Daniel Ordoñez reads in his room at the W Hotel in Barcelona, Spain. by at least 55 billion euros — nearly $60 billion — this year.

“If countries like Spain, Italy and Greece are now also not going to get a summer tourism season, the countries in the north will also suffer because they will face a much larger European bailout,” said Bary Pradelski, an associate professor of economics at the National Center for Scientific Research in France.

He has been advocating for holiday travel to resume rapidly — at least between regions within the European Union with a very low risk of infection.

Travel is big business for the EU, of which Spain is a member (tourism accounts for 10% of the bloc’s gross economic output). Free movement across borders is also a core element of life in an interconnected continent. In a bid to salvage the summer tourism season, the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, recommended Wednesday that countries with similar levels of coronavirus outbreaks should ease travel restrictions.

The commission said this should ultimately lead to a restoration of free movement among the bloc’s 27 member states. But its advice is not binding, and each member is likely to stick to its

own policies.

One night in the penthouse at the W Hotel in Barcelona can cost as much as 13,500 euros (about $14,660). The hotel’s management declined to discuss the financial consequences of keeping the suite and its other 472 rooms closed since March, but last week, its parent company, Marriott, reported a slump in first-quarter earnings.

Marriott also said that its revenue per available room fell 90% in April.

On his own in the hotel, Ordoñez, who is normally in charge of a crew of 20 maintenance workers, has faced some challenges — such as trying to fix something while standing on a stepladder. Occasionally, he has called on the help of the only other person on duty in the building: a rotating guard who monitors the hotel’s security cameras from a basement control room. (The guard does not sleep in the hotel.)

But there is an upside to working in a deserted space, Ordoñez said. This month, he tested the hotel’s public address system without worrying about disturbing the clientele.

“A fair share of our time normally involves responding to customer complaints,” he said. “This issue has certainly gone away for now.”

16

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Hong Kong legislators brawl amid fears over widening Chinese control

By TIFANNY MAY

S

cuffles erupted Monday between lawmakers in Hong Kong as they debated the leadership of a committee that is to consider legislation that pro-democracy politicians fear would tighten China’s control over the semiautonomous territory.

The brawl was the second to break out in Hong Kong’s legislature this month; a similar clash erupted May 8 when lawmakers also battled over the leadership of the committee.

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp has accused establishment lawmakers of illegitimately seizing control of the committee, which for months has been led by Dennis Kwok, a pro-democracy lawmaker. Chinese officials and pro-Beijing lawmakers have accused Kwok of blocking new legislation, including a bill that would criminalize disrespecting the Chinese national anthem.

Hong Kong officially adopted the Chinese national anthem, March of the Volunteers, in 1997 when the former British colony returned to Chinese control. But some of the city’s residents never accepted it as their own, often booing loudly when it is played at soccer games and other public events.

The proposed legislation would criminalize such practices, which have become more popular as tensions between the city and Beijing have strained, and those who insult the song could face steep fines or up to three years in prison.

Monday’s turmoil broke out as a proBeijing lawmaker, Chan Kin-por, prepared to preside over the committee’s election for a new leader to replace Kwok. Pro-democracy lawmakers approached with signs and a black cloth to drape over the speaker’s dais in protest, but they were blocked by more than a dozen security guards who flanked Chan.

At least four pro-democracy lawmakers were then carried or dragged off the floor of the Legislative Council.

Lam Cheuk Ting, a pro-democracy lawmaker, ripped out pages from the legislature’s rule book and scattered them into the fray.

Other lawmakers shouted that Chan and the pro-Beijing camp had improperly seized power over the committee.

Ted Hui, a pro-democracy lawmaker, said Monday afternoon that doctors told him he had sustained an injury to his chest wall after he was kneed during the scuffle, and he posted a hospital document confirming the di-

agnosis on Facebook after an X-ray.

Starry Lee, a pro-Beijing lawmaker, was ultimately elected the committee’s new chairwoman after many pro-democracy politicians were removed from the chamber.

Kwok, who was replaced as acting chair, said that the election violated the practices of Hong Kong’s legislature.

Whenever the “pro-establishment camp don’t like something, they will do whatever it

Lam Cheuk-ting, a pro-democracy lawmaker in Hong Kong, threw the torn pages of the legislature’s rule book at establishment politicians during a brawl on Monday over the leadership of a committee.

takes, including breaking the system that we have and the rules that we have,” Kwok said.

“The price of freedom is constant vigilance.”

Pro-Beijing lawmakers criticized the opposition for starting the fight and disrupting an election that was sanctioned by the Legislative Council’s president. They suggested that the black cloth carried by pro-democracy lawmakers was meant to conceal violent acts.

The tensions convulsing the legislature come as Hong Kong’s protest movement — which had been largely stilled as the coronavirus epidemic gripped the territory — has shown new signs of a resurgence in recent weeks as coronavirus infections have dropped in the city.

Calls have recently emerged for protesters to surround the legislature next week to prevent the passage of the contentious national anthem bill.

Later Monday, 15 prominent pro-democracy politicians and activists appeared in court before a trial over their involvement in anti-government protests that roiled Hong Kong last year. They vowed to supporters that they would continue to fight for the city’s freedoms as a small group jeered outside the courthouse, calling them “traitors” and “sinners of a millennium.”

Chinese ambassador is found dead at home in Israel

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and ADAM RASGON

C

hina’s ambassador to Israel, who took up his post in February, was found dead at his home Sunday morning in a coastal suburb north of Tel Aviv, officials said.

The ambassador, Du Wei, was found in his bed in Herzliya by an embassy worker, officials said. Israeli police found no reason to suspect foul play in the death of Du, 57, officials said, and in preliminary findings, the Chinese government in preliminary findings attributed his death to unspecified health problems.

Investigators — including Chen Kugel, the head of Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine — declined to comment as they left the ambassador’s residence. Du’s wife and son were not in Israel at the time, according to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Du arrived in Israel on Feb. 15 and quarantined for two weeks because of the corona-

virus pandemic before meeting officials of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs on March 3.

He sent his credentials to President Reuven Rivlin on March 23 rather than formally presenting them himself because of restrictions on face-to-face meetings, officials said.

Du had served in China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for more than 30 years, according to a biography on the Chinese Embassy’s website. His first ambassadorship was to Ukraine, from 2016 to 2019.

His stint in Israel put Du in the middle of an increasingly tense dynamic that is creating friction between Israel and the United States.

China has been investing heavily in Israel in recent years, taking stakes in hundreds of technological startups and acquiring a controlling interest in the dairy food-processing company Tnuva.

But Israel has antagonized Washington by allowing Chinese companies to make major infrastructure investments in recent years, including in sensitive locations. A company

majority-owned by the Chinese government has signed a 25-year lease to run Israel’s commercial seaport in Haifa, a frequent port of call for the U.S. Navy, beginning in 2021.

And near Israel’s Palmachim air force base, a Hong Kong-based company, Hutchison Water International, is a finalist to build a desalination plant that Israel says will be the largest in the world.

Trump administration officials have repeatedly warned Israeli officials that intelligence sharing between the two close allies could be impaired or compromised over such investments by China.

In April, Du gave a written interview to the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon in which he insisted that China was a “responsible, ruleabiding and trustworthy country.”

“The investment from China has no geopolitical agenda, no political strings, and poses no threat to Israel’s national security,” he wrote.

Du also compared the demonization of China over its handling of the coronavirus pan-

demic to the historic mistreatment of Jews.

“It is scapegoating,” he told the newspaper. “In history, it has happened many times when the causes of diseases were wrongfully blamed on a specific group of people, which is despicable and should be condemned. The disease is the enemy of all mankind, and the world must fight it together.”

The subject came up again during Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to Israel last week, when he repeated his accusation that China has withheld information that could have helped other countries save lives during the pandemic.

The Chinese Embassy’s spokesman responded with an Op-Ed article in The Jerusalem Post in which he called Pompeo’s remarks “absurd” and repeated the comparison to antiSemitism.

History “shows that pandemic is accompanied by conspiracies and the dark mentality of seeking scapegoats,” the spokesman, Wang Yongjun, wrote. “Jewish friends know it well.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

17

Obama lives in Trump’s head

By CHARLES BLOW

N

o one irritates Donald Trump quite like Barack Obama.

Trump’s run for president was in part triggered by his enmity for Obama, his desire to one-up him, and he has performed his presidency as a singularly focused attempt at Obama erasure, dismantling what he can of what Obama built and undoing policies Obama instituted.

Obama is everything that Trump is not: intellectual, articulate, adroit, contemplative and cool.

He also happens to be a black man. The fact that he could not only ascend to the height of power but also the heights of celebrity and adoration vexed Trump.

Trump set about to demonstrate that none of that mattered, none of it could supersede the talents of a confident counterfeit. He convinced himself that Obama was the convenient recipient of affirmative action adulation from a world thirsty for racial recompense, an assuaging of white guilt.

Trump has held this view well before anyone heard the name Barack Obama. In 1989, Trump said in an NBC News interview, “A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white, in terms of the job market.” Trump went so far as to say that “I’ve said on occasion, even about myself, if I was starting off today I would love to be a well-educated black because I really believe they do have an actual advantage today.”

This was not a compliment. Trump adheres to the theory of unearned black privileges at the expense of white effort, that there is a hand-me-out meritocracy specifically for black people, a form of cultural welfare.

This made Obama an early target for Trump.

He questioned Obama’s birth and his heritage, his abilities and educational pedigree. He questioned his leadership and his work ethic. Trump knew the terrible legions of flaws he possessed and was incredulous that this black man could be devoid of any.

So, he feverishly searched for error, sometimes inventing it, moreover projecting his own error onto Obama.

Obama became Trump’s foil for personal reasons of racial and cultural insecurity. But Trump’s view of him perfectly aligned with a larger phenomenon: A significant swath of white America grated at the uppityness of this black man who would set the tone for how Americans should behave, and his black wife who would lecture them about what to eat.

Obama wasn’t on the ballot in 2016, but in

Former President Barack Obama delivering a virtual commencement address to millions of high school seniors on Saturday. a way he was. Trump wasn’t only running against Hillary Clinton — whom conservatives revile, whom Vladimir Putin reviles, whom the patriarchy reviles — he was also running against the black shadow of a black man.

These voters chose the opposite of Obama, they chose the moral and intellectual antithesis, someone who could arrest the advance that Obama represented: an ascension of multicultural power and a coming erasure of white advantage and the dominance of white culture, all of which establishment forces had either allowed or encouraged.

Trump was elected to restore the cultural narrative of the primacy of whiteness.

Now, with the colossal disaster of his COVID-19 response threatening his reelection prospects, Trump is attempting to draft Obama once again as his primary opponent.

No president would have wanted this pandemic to happen on their watch. There would be death and suffering regardless. But, it is hard to imagine another president handling the situation as poorly as Trump has, which has led to far more death and suffering than was necessary. Where we are with this virus was not inevitable. It is the direct result of Trump’s failed policies.

Trump has tried for months to do what he has always done: invent an alternate reality, lie, blame and brag, deny responsibility and claim victory. But that simply doesn’t work as well when the coronavirus has claimed more American lives in a few months than the Vietnam War claimed in a decade.

It doesn’t work when tens of millions of Americans

are out of work and the economy is teetering on a depression.

So, Trump is reaching past Joe Biden in his basement for an opponent who evokes a more visceral disdain from his base: Obama.

He has cooked up an Obamagate conspiracy, claiming that the former president committed “the biggest political crime in American history, by far!”

Of course, there are no crimes other than the ones Trump himself has committed. But, this is a familiar territory for Trump, projection and deflection.

By using sleight of hand to turn the focus to Obama on a phony scandal, he hopes to make people look away from the mountain of dead bodies on which he is now perched.

Trump is trying to make Obama his Willie Horton, the black criminal George Bush successfully used as a racial cudgel in his race against Michael Dukakis in 1988. Trump believes that there is a seesaw mechanism to his political fortunes: If he can drag someone down, it will lift him up.

For now, that person is Obama, the man who lives in Trump’s head, who stalks his dreams, the countervailing symbol to Trump’s deficiencies.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

I’ll take Biden’s confusion over Trump’s corruption

By FRANK BRUNI

P

lease tell me why I should care whether Joe Biden is declining mentally when President Donald Trump bottomed out morally long ago.

I’m serious. I’d rather drink milk past its expiration date than arsenic.

In case you’ve missed it, Trump and his minions are getting more and more aggressive — shameless is the better adjective — in their portrayal of Biden as a demented wreck.

This peaked last week with an interview that Trump gave to Salena Zito of the Washington Examiner. He not only told Zito that Biden “has absolutely no idea what’s happening.” Trump also said: “He doesn’t know he’s alive.”

This wasn’t some off-the-cuff dig. This is Trump’s reelection strategy — well, much of it — in one nasty quip. “I’m rubber, you’re glue” becomes “I’m egomaniacal, you’re incoherent.” Which is rich, coming from the kook who mused about ingesting household bleach.

Team Trump has been at this for months.

I happened to be watching a lot of Fox News in early March — it’s necessary research, although it feels more like flogging oneself — and barely an hour went by without a host or guest asserting that the Democratic Party had rallied around Biden precisely because they detected a cognitive void where a vice president once existed.

In other words: Because Biden is out to lunch, unprincipled Democratic power brokers can put whatever they want on his plate. He’ll docilely sup on it and then ask for more.

Fox News regular Brit Hume said flatout that Biden was “getting senile.” Rudy Giuliani, throwing stones from his glass house, sputtered that Biden was exhibiting “obvious signs of dementia.”

And that message is now a fixture of the Trump campaign’s social-media efforts. As Nick Corasaniti and Maggie Haberman wrote in The Times on Friday, “The campaign’s ads on Facebook have taken their own dark turn.

Its videos on the platform declare ‘Geriatric Health is No Laughing Matter’ or ‘Joe Biden: Old and Out of It,’ then use selective edits of Biden’s verbal stumbles and meandering soli-

Joe Biden at the Democratic debate in on March 15. loquies to make less-than-subtle suggestions about his mental acuity.”

It’s an ugly tack, but familiar. As Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen observed, media coverage of President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign included references to his apparent confusion, questions about his mental alertness and mentions of the prevalence of dementia and senility among people in their mid-to-late 70s. Reagan was then 73.

Biden is 77 but would be 78 at his inauguration. If he’s elected, Thiessen wrote, “He’ll be older on the day he takes office than Reagan was on the day he left office. So, yes, his mental fitness is a legitimate issue.”

I agree. There have been moments aplenty when Biden’s stumbles have made me wince — particularly a doozy from a few days ago, when he seemingly confused lost jobs with lost lives and upped the COVID-19 death toll to “millions of people.”

But Biden’s bumbling isn’t the defining issue, not even close, and we shouldn’t let Trump use it to do in 2020 what he did in 2016, which was to portray his opponent — then, Hillary Clinton — as so enormously unappealing and recklessly unacceptable that, to many Americans, Trump looked ever so marginally better in comparison, which is

to say that he looked endurable.

There’s negative campaigning and then there’s what Trump engineers and allows, which is in another grotesque league altogether. On Saturday, the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., took to Instagram to insinuate — without a whiff of substantiation — that Biden was a pedophile.

Last time around, the Trump operation’s scorched-earth approach encompassed Russia, WikiLeaks, the parading of Bill Clinton’s accusers, the fanning of ludicrous conspiracy theories, chants of “lock her up!” and the suggestion that somebody might someday need to take a shot at Hillary. This is what I mean about a moral bottom.

In anticipation of November, Trump has already tried to extort political help from the president of Ukraine. Remember impeachment? I sometimes get the sense that it has faded from consciousness. (A pandemic can have that effect.) Don’t forget Trump’s “perfect” phone call, because it’s not history. It’s harbinger. There are surely dirtier tricks to come.

To hold on to power, this president will do whatever it takes. And in the middle of all of this dying and impoverishment, it’s going to take a lot.

It’s going to take the transformation of

China into the most nefarious global menace ever, of Gretchen Whitmer into a communist dominatrix, of the Obama administration and the FBI into a deep-state cabal and of Biden into a doddering, drooling imbecile who’d be tucked away in some attic if he hadn’t already taken refuge in the basement.

Put another way, Trump has to make himself just slightly less awful than everyone and everything else. He has to get a crucial number of voters who are either genuinely wavering, considering a third-party candidate or looking for an excuse to vote for him to say what many of them did four years ago: “The Democrats haven’t given me any real choice.

There are no good options.”

It was a false equivalence then and it’s an even falser one now that we know what a Trump presidency looks like, now that we’ve been subjected to the endless lying and the baseless bragging and the self-pity and the self-dealing and the grandiosity and the corruption and the incompetence and Jared and Ivanka and the whole wretched crew of delusional opportunists.

Two flawed candidates don’t add up to a jump ball.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Biden has lost a few steps. Let’s posit that while he was always a font of gaffes, he’s now a geyser of them. Let’s assume that his herkyjerky conversational gait betrays a herky-jerky intellectual one.

It nonetheless remains true that he got through a two-person, two-hour debate with Bernie Sanders in mid-March without embarrassing himself in the slightest. Besides, the precise agility of his mind has nothing to do with the fundamental decency of his values.

At the end of the day, Biden can be trusted to do what Trump didn’t and won’t: stock his administration with qualified professionals. He could compensate for any supposed cognitive deficit with a surplus of talent.

Trump can’t fill his moral vacuum. By its nature, it prevents him from recognizing or caring about it. Confused is fixable. Rotten isn’t.

So let Trump tweet and bleat to his heart’s content about Biden as some blithering idiot. It’s not just over the top; it’s irrelevant.

At least Biden’s not poison.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

19

Alcaldes federados se expresan a favor de la aprobación del Código Municipal Por THE STAR

E

l presidente de la Federación de Alcaldes, Carlos Molina Rodríguez, se expresó el lunes en representación su matrícula, a favor de la aprobación del Código Municipal en el Senado.

“Este Código Municipal aprobado hoy por el Senado de Puerto Rico es de suma importancia para nosotros los alcaldes, porque se declara como política pública del gobierno, otorgar a los municipios la mayor autonomía, herramientas fiscales y los poderes inherentes a la subsistencia y las facultades necesarias para asumir una función central y fundamental en el desarrollo urbano, social y económico.

Esto se logró gracias al compromiso del líder senatorial, Thomas Rivera Schatz, con nosotros”, enfatizó el también alcalde de Arecibo en comunicación escrita.

Explicó Molina Rodríguez que por iniciativa del Presidente del Senado se llevaron a cabo una serie de Cumbres Municipales, para atender las necesidades de los municipios mediante un espacio que permitió a los primeros ejecutivos y legisladores municipales, a presentar preocupaciones y sugerencias sobre cómo ofrecer mayor autonomía y recursos a los gobiernos municipales a través de legislación.

De otra parte el alcalde del municipio de Cataño, Félix “El Cano” Delgado Montalvo también expresó

su satisfacción ante la aprobación del Código. “Entre las muchas bondades de este Código está, el que ahora los municipios podremos realizar acuerdos colaborativos y Alianzas Público Privadas (APP) para llevar a cabo cualquier función municipal necesaria para el beneficio de nuestros residentes y aquellas funciones que los gobiernos municipales consideremos pertinentes”, señaló Delgado Montalvo.

La Federación de Alcaldes siempre ha sido muy vocal en todo lo que respecta a legislación que incida positiva o negativamente a los ayuntamientos.

Ha dicho presente en vista públicas, oculares y en todo aquel foro relacionado a estos temas. Para su presidente “no se trata solamente de preocuparnos sino también de ocuparnos”.

“Estamos verdaderamente agradecidos con el presidente del Senado, Thomas Rivera Schatz, por tomar acción con todas las iniciativas que ha tenido en favor de los municipios pero, sobre todo, que se aprobara este Código. Con esta pieza legislativa tenemos un sinnúmero de beneficios y poderes que redundaran en un desarrollo económico y social para nuestra gente”, expresó por su parte, Noé Marcano, alcalde de Naguabo.

Asimismo, para el presidente de la Federación de Alcaldes ahora está en manos de la Cámara de Representantes hacer lo propio. “Estamos confiados en que la Cámara actúe tan diligentemente como lo ha

hecho el Senado y se le dé paso a este Código para el beneficio de todos”, acotó Molina.

Exigen Hacienda audite máquinas de videojuego administradas por Hipódromo Camarero Por THE STAR

E

l representante José Aponte Hernández, solicitó el lunes al secretario del Departamento de Hacienda (DH), Francisco Parés Alicea, una auditoría completa y detallada de la operación de todas las máquinas de videojuego administradas por el Hipódromo Camarero Racetrack, así como las demás autorizadas por dicha dependencia.

“Solicitamos al secretario de Hacienda que antes de cualquier decisión sobre el uso de estas máquinas, se auditen e inspeccione cada una de las mismas de forma minuciosa. Queremos saber cuánto realmente dejan porque existe mucha data encontrada y no se sabe cuál es la verdadera. Con la auditoría se sabrá, como también conoceremos quien de verdad se lleva el dinero generado de las maquinitas del hipódromo”, comentó el representante por acumulación en declaraciones escritas.

Según dijo el también presidente de la Comisión

de Relaciones Federales, Internacionales y de Estatus de la Cámara Baja, un informe de la Administración de la Industria y el Deporte Hípico para el año 2017 establece que las operaciones de las máquinas de video juego operadas por Camarero dejan, en promedio, unos 28.8 millones de dólares en un año normal.

El legislador reiteró que un estudio abarcador de la firma Spectrum, encomendado por la Compañía de Turismo de Puerto Rico (CTPR) en el año 2009, estableció que, con la eliminación de todas las maquinitas ilegales de la calle, el gobierno podría obtener unos 171.7 millones de dólares adicionales en ingresos, “mucho mas que las migajas que está repartiendo el hipódromo y los demás”.

Finalmente, dijo que un detallado estudio de la National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling, establece que el costo al gobierno de cada jugador compulsivo ronda entre los 14,006 y 22,077 dólares por año.

20

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Two projects are filming again. Here’s how they’re doing it.

By NICOLES SPERLING

B

altasar Kormakur, the Icelandic director best known in the United States for “Everest” and “Contraband,” turned to a color-coded armband system to get his Netflix sci-fi series “Katla” back into production in Reykjavik after the coronavirus shut it down in mid-March.

Producer Lucas Foster made the difficult — and expensive — decision to isolate his entire cast and crew in a small town in Australia to make a reimagined horror film based on the Stephen King short story “Children of the Corn.”

The two filmmakers are among the few who have found their way back into production amid a pandemic. Armed with expansive medical staffs, stringent protocols and imposing security guards willing to yell “Two meters!” whenever anyone gets too close, Kormakur and Foster are the unlikely trailblazers at the dawn of a new era in film.

Everyone wants to know how they did it. In lengthy phone interviews, the two explained the steps they took to get cameras rolling again.

Color-coding on an Iceland soundstage Kormakur has talked through his methods with London’s film commission, the American Society of Cinematographers, and his former partners at Working Title and Universal Pictures. He’s making a video for Netflix to share with other eager creators looking for a way back.

“I will probably be more known for COVID than for any of my films,” Kormakur said with a laugh. “That is kind of sad.”

In March, he began filming “Katla,” an eight-episode supernatural drama centered on a subglacial volcano that disturbs a tranquil small town. He owns the 50,000-square-foot soundstage where they were working for four days before the government shut the production down along with the rest of the country. Sheltering at home with his four children, Kormakur engineered a system he thought would allow the cast and crew to return once the virus had peaked.

His method involved a color-coded armband system: Those wearing yellow

Baltasar Kormakur in Iceland working on the Netflix series “Katla.” Only workers with yellow armbands could work near the cameras. could be near the camera; the actors, and the makeup and costume professionals, wore black and spent most of their prep time in a cordoned-off area of the set; and the producers, script supervisors and visual effects people wore red and were sequestered near the monitors. A few lucky ones were given blue armbands, which allowed them access to all areas of the set. No group had more than 20 people in it.

“This way we could monitor each other,” he said. “It’s hard with crews. People have a tendency to roam, and it’s easy to lose control of it.”

Kormakur’s system was only possible because of Iceland’s rigorous testing policies. Netflix, too, was heavily involved, with executives testing Kormakur’s methods. The streaming giant financed the extra costs associated with the safety protocols and paid the cast and crew salaries when they were shut down.

First, under the system, Kormakur and his entire 80-person cast and crew were tested. Then, each morning, the temperature of everyone entering the set was scanned. Catering was turned into individual boxed meals. Doorknobs, toilets and other surfaces were sanitized on the hour.

Most everyone except the actors wore masks, and the makeup artists and production designers were gloved.

“So much for protecting the environment,” Kormakur quipped.

Production has been up and running now for four weeks. And though Kormakur and the other directors filming the series have yet to try a scene involving any close contact or intimacy, it has continued without incident. (Kormakur said they would address those scenes once restrictions loosen further. If that doesn’t happen in time, they will retest actors before filming them.

Iceland is currently reopening in phases.)

Isolating in an Australian town Foster, a “Children of the Corn” producer, was 10 days out from finishing his film when we spoke, and at the end, he said he would turn to the mountains of phone messages and emails from eager filmmakers looking for advice.

In a recent phone interview, he wondered whether his experience could be translated elsewhere: “I finished my 24th day of photography, so I have 24 days of experience doing this and learning,” he said. “I think that’s the valuable part. But what we did in Australia is not a direct crossover to, say, shooting in Los Angeles.”

The need for a cornfield in November was what first brought Foster from his Los Angeles home to Richmond in New South Wales. The pandemic is what kept him there. And on May 28, he and writer-

director Kurt Wimmer are to complete production on their horror film, shot entirely during the spread of the coronavirus.

Like Kormakur’s set, this one was divided by job function. A nurse, a paramedic and a doctor were present daily. The cast and crew were required to fill out wellness questionnaires at the beginning and end of each day. Temperatures were checked. Surfaces were sanitized. During one particularly challenging sequence shot at night, the actors were dressed in neoprene suits both to keep them warm and to offer them another level of protection when they came in close contact during the scene. (According to Australia’s policies, the “2 meters” rule did not have to be observed when the cameras were rolling.) Hand sanitizer was ubiquitous.

It was also crucial that most of the movie be filmed on an isolated farm in a small town. (The cast and crew have taken over hotels, Airbnbs and some cottages in and around Richmond.) Australia has also been successful in flattening the curve and has begun opening its economy.

But for Foster, who said that the extra precautions added at least 20% to the initial $10 million budget of his indie film, the most crucial decision he made was to house his entire cast and crew together, including the guardians for more than 25 child actors and one actor’s dog.

“It was an uncomfortable decision but one that made this whole thing possible,” said Foster, who has been isolating with his film family for close to 80 days.

“It’s not an inexpensive way to operate a film.”

He also contended with a shortened shooting schedule because of the usual restrictions placed on minors, navigated the stress levels of a disparate crew, and found replacement actors when a few dropped out at the last minute. One 12-year-old was too afraid to get on an airplane from Los Angeles. Another actor, based in Sydney, decided against making the trip to Richmond.

“There is no cheat sheet for this,” Foster said. “Every single thing that everybody in every department has to do” must be rethought, he added. “Retraining on the job has been the most challenging thing.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

21

Will Cirque du Soleil rise again?

Olivier Sylvestre, a 29-year-old Cirque performer, out on his “German wheel” for the first time in months at Parc Lafontaine in Montreal, Quebec, Canada

By DAN BILEFSKY

U

ntil the coronavirus pandemic hit, Mongolian contortionist Uranbileg Angarag wowed spectators nightly at Cirque du Soleil shows on a cruise ship, contorting her body into a ball and balancing on a vertical stick held in her mouth.

For the past 50 days, however, the 26-year-old has been stuck in a cramped cabin off the Italian coast, doing a handstand and splits while conducting WhatsApp video calls and wondering when the storied circus will perform again.

“Luckily, I’m used to contorting my body into small spaces,” she said from the ship where she has been grounded since her show shut down in March. “I can’t wait to get back to Cirque, but we have no idea when the world will be ready to go see live shows again.”

From Broadway to sporting arenas, the pandemic has paralyzed the world of live entertainment, including Cirque du Soleil, the famed Quebec circus behemoth.

In the space of weeks, it was forced to shutter 44 shows in dozens of cities, from Las Vegas to Hangzhou, China, and has temporarily laid off

nearly 5,000 employees — 95% of its workforce — and stopped payments to dozens of show creators.

Even before the pandemic, the company was struggling with bloat and creative fatigue after a consortium led by an U.S. private equity firm acquired it in 2015 and accelerated a debt-fueled global expansion spree.

Now, with no certainty on the timing of a coronavirus vaccine or when cities will allow large public gatherings again, some are asking whether Cirque can survive.

“No one had ever modeled what we would do if we lost 100% of our revenue,” said Mitch Garber, Cirque’s chairman, comparing the pandemic to the Great Depression for the live entertainment industry. “We can’t function without fans.”

It is hard to overstate the hold that Cirque du Soleil has on the Canadian and global imagination.

The Montreal-based circus originated in the 1980s when a group of Quebec performers, stilt-walkers and fire-breathers, including the Cirque’s accordion-playing co-founder Guy Laliberté, delighted local residents on the shores of the St. Lawrence river.

Born in 1984, its animal-free mix of awe-inspiring acrobatics, dance,

lavish costumes, live music, hightechnology stagecraft and narrative whimsy created a new vision of what a circus could be.

Before the coronavirus outbreak, its seven shows in Las Vegas alone — including the critically acclaimed “Ka,” featuring battle scenes 70 feet in the air, and the water-themed extravaganza “O” — drew some 10,000 people nightly. The Cirque had more than $1 billion in revenues last year — although now it also has nearly $1 billion in debt.

Today, the circus’s normally frenetic costume-making atelier in Montreal, which occupies the length of a city block and produces 18,000 painstakingly tailored costume parts each year, sits eerily empty. Half-sewn wigs and unfinished masks are scattered on workstations, along with half-drunk cups of tea.

Gabriel Dubé-Dupuis, the creative director of two recent Cirque shows — “Cosmos” and “Exentricks” — has worked 23 years for the circus,

In an undated handout photo, Uranbileg Angarag, a contortionist who performed for Cirque du Soleil.

where his father was a famous clown.

He said he was owed tens of thousands of dollars.

“This is a business where circus artists risk their necks each night, and if people aren’t paid, it creates a crisis of confidence,” he said.

On March 18, Moody’s Investor Service downgraded Cirque’s credit rating to near junk status, citing a “high risk” that it would default on its debt.

Québecor, a Quebec telecommunications giant, recently expressed interest in buying Cirque but was coolly received.

Laliberté, Cirque’s poker-loving billionaire co-founder, also floated the possibility that he would get into a “wrestling match” to rescue Cirque.

But people familiar with talks over Cirque’s future said he had sold his shares in the company and was unlikely to buy it back.

Daniel Lamarre, Cirque’s chief executive, said he initially thought the health crisis would be contained to China, where Cirque was forced in late January to close its recently opened show “The Land of Fantasy” in Hangzhou, a keystone of its vaunted China expansion.

But he recalled that, at the beginning of March, just minutes after a crisis meeting in Montreal, one city after another across the world began to shut down. As borders closed, Cirque had to race to load big-top equipment onto giant cargo planes and repatriate 2,000 employees.

“Our world changed overnight,” he said. “When I got the call on March 14 that we would have to close all seven shows in Las Vegas, the reality sunk in.”

Lamarre said Cirque was considering all options, including seeking bankruptcy protection. A recent injection of $50 million from its shareholders had bought some time.

He said he was optimistic the company would bounce back, buoyed by its glittering brand and a public zeal for live entertainment after months of confinement. Cirque was already in talks with its Korean and Chinese partners about reopening shows.

22

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Exotic lizards creep into Georgia. Don’t expect southern hospitality.

By SANDRA E. GARCIA

A

dd it to the list of terrors of the natural world — including murder hornets and feral hogs — that have been disrupting life these days: The Argentine black and white tegu, an invasive lizard species from South America, has taken root in Georgia, where it poses a threat to native wildlife, according to state officials.

“We are trying to remove them from the wild because they can have negative impacts on our native species,” John Jensen, a biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, said in a recent video while holding one of the lizards. “They eat just about anything they want.”

Eggs are one of the tegu’s favorite foods, and it’s not picky about which kind, whether alligator, quail, turkey or gopher tortoise (Georgia’s official reptile).

Tegus, which can grow up to 4 feet long and weigh 10 pounds or more, also eat fruits, vegetables, plants, pet food and insects. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources said that Florida, which has been dealing with tegus for more than a decade, “is not aware of any predatory attacks on pets in that state.”

First spotted in the wild in South Florida in 2008, the lizards quickly

The Argentine black and white tegu, an invasive lizard species from South America, has taken root in Georgia, where it poses a threat to native wildlife, according to state officials.

expanded and found their way into the Everglades, where they encountered a bountiful menu of native wildlife. The reptiles have been trapped and killed as nuisance animals in southern Miami-Dade and Hillsborough counties.

Mr. Jensen said that the lizard, native to Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina, has become established as an “exotic invasive species” in areas of South Florida and in Toombs and Tattnall counties in Georgia.

Since 2018, the department’s

wildlife resources division has been looking into reports of the tegu in parts of eastern Georgia.

Department officials say it is most likely the lizards in the state “originated with captive animals that either escaped or were released.”

Although Georgia permits the ownership of tegus as pets and they are popular in the animal trade, it is illegal to release nonnative species into the wild without a permit, according to the state.

Because they are more tolerant of cold than many reptiles, tegus are likely to spread through Georgia and “cause bacterial contamination of crops and spread exotic parasites to native wildlife,” the department said.

The invaders are also squatters.

Although tegus will make their own burrows, “they will also use the burrows made by other animals, including our native gopher tortoise, and they may displace gopher tortoises in doing so,” Jensen said.

The Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Geological Survey and Georgia Southern University are trapping the tegus, tracking reports and assessing the population.

The department is asking that people who see any tegus in the wild, dead or alive, to photograph their location and report them online.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

23

Have you given yourself a tattoo yet?

By DANI BLUM

S

haved heads, dyed hair, billowing beards: Many are using their newly found free time to alter their appearances.

For some, those changes may be permanent. Stick-and-poke tattooing, which involves repeatedly pricking the skin, is proliferating among those at home, healthy and unhindered during quarantine.

Reddit’s r/quarantattoo thread is filled with guidance; a post on the site features group stick-and-pokes done over Skype, including one that depicts Joe Exotic, of “Tiger King.” More than 100 new members have joined a Facebook group called Stick and Poke Tattoo for Beginners in the past weeks. Kits are sold on Amazon and Etsy but are sometimes sold out.

West Lacount, who owns Stick and Poke Tattoo Kit, a company that manufactures and ships at-home kits, has seen double the typical number of online orders, he said, a bump he usually only sees seasonally. “It has to do with being inside,” he said. “It’s like a long winter we’re all in.”

Three weeks ago, Jaelyn Suarez, 18, a high school senior in Miami, feeling listless, was scrolling through her phone around 3 a.m. when a notification popped up from a friend; it was a link to a YouTube tutorial on stick-and-pokes.

Suarez used a safety pin and pen ink to tattoo a small heart on her index finger, tracing the shape as she described each step to her friend on the phone. She said it felt like a prick for getting blood drawn, 45 times in a row. Her friend inked the same on her own finger.

According to many physicians, there are medical risks associated with this kind of tattooing. “There’s really no safe way to do it at home,” said Dr. Arash Akhavan, a dermatologist in New York City. “There’s probably a 25-50% chance you’re going to have some sort of complication.”

Bacterial infections like staph and MRSA can occur if the tattoo equipment isn’t sterile. Viral infections like hepatitis and HIV can pass through needles.

Many are using their newly found free time to alter their appearances and for some, those changes may be permanent as stick-and-poke tattooing, which involves repeatedly pricking the skin, is proliferating among those at home, healthy and unhindered during quarantine.

“There’s a reason tattoos are a heavily regulated, monitored industry,” Akhavan said.

Still, whether driven by boredom or the closure of traditional tattoo shops, many are trying it. An at-home kit costs about $50. And for some, tattoos are a way to assert control, at least over one’s body.

Quinn Milton, 28, an artist and game designer in Philadelphia, said stickand-pokes provide an outlet for stress.

Milton, who identifies as nonbinary, has given tattoos to both roommates during quarantine. Milton is currently shading an abstract line drawing on the inside left arm, to pass the time.

Others use the tattoos as tributes.

Gavin Morson, 27, of Newcastle, Eng-

land, dedicated his 15th tattoo to the band Death Grips; the top of his foot now reads, “BOTTOMLESS PIT.” Stick-andpokes are a grounding process for him, he said, an almost meditative way to anchor in the present. Besides, he said, “it’s hard to be bored when you’re in pain.”

The pain from stick-and-pokes can last beyond the actual prodding and piercing. Dr. Jason Emer, a dermatologist and cosmetic surgeon who owns a practice in West Hollywood, California, treated complications from amateur tattoos when he was a resident at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, New York, caring for patients from the Rikers Island corrections complex.

Necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh-eating bacteria, can infect a new tattoo, which

can lead to the loss of a limb. If tattoo ink isn’t high quality, Emer said, scar tissue can form around the ink.

“The ink is the most important part,” said Inal Bersekov, a tattoo artist in Toronto who has worked with Drake.

Ink sold on eBay or Amazon may not be certified, Bersekov said. “It could just be printer ink. It’s a disaster. You can have heavy infections. It can even lead to death.” He’s “100%” sure he’ll get a flood of customers after quarantine asking him to cover up their botched DIY tattoos, he said.

Those intent on giving themselves a stick-and-poke — “against all medical advice,” Emer stressed — should keep the area around the tattoo clean, using an over-the-counter antibacterial or antiseptic, and wear gloves and masks. Aftercare is essential. Emer recommended topical antibacterials, silicone-based scar gels and a peptide serum to help the skin seal.

Ruvianne Torres Fetsco, 25, a bartender in Harlem, New York, keeps a sterile tattoo kit at home. Of 16 tattoos, 11 are stick-and-pokes, mostly reminders of “ridiculous bonding events” from art school, lounging in a living room with a group of friends and grabbing sewing needles and rubbing alcohol.

During quarantine, Torres Fetsco is tattooing a branch onto their hand. Every time they complete a goal, even a small task like cleaning their room or taking a walk, they add a leaf to the branch. The process becomes a calming ritual: a glass of wine, “The Sopranos” in the background.

Kaila Arcenal, 21, a spa attendant in Queens, New York, watched “Twin Peaks” while working on her stick-andpoke, stopping periodically to snack on Oreos and oat milk.

She had Googled “simple cute stick and pokes” while bored and found a lumpy, frowning bear that she tattooed on her right ankle. The image will be a reminder of this time, she said, a remnant from a strange chunk of history. It’s also her “last-ditch effort” to have fun during quarantine.

“It’s a grumpy bear,” she said. “And right now, I’m a grumpy girl.”

24

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

The hidden language of masks

By GUY TREBAY

E

arly in the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, when production shortages of medical-grade N95 masks turned obtaining them into a hunt for the grail, DIY ingenuity kicked into gear.

Suddenly people found themselves improvising lesser-grade face masks from fabric, scraps, bandannas, coffee filters, even sanitary pads. Newspapers (including The New York Times) published illustrated guides to making a mask. Both the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts issued new mask-making merit badges.

Multinational luxury goods labels diverted their assembly lines to the manufacture of personal protective equipment. Venerable Savile Row tailors got into the act, and so did a young surfer botanist in Hawaii, David Shepard, whose lacy line drawings of native flora transform a public health necessity into a paean to a biosphere that now feels more menacing than friendly.

Even before the face mask evolved into a defining emblem of the global battle against the virus, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History had mobilized a task force to collect artifacts related to the pandemic — hazmat suits, masks, store-closing flyers — and capture history as it unfolds.

Reached at home, Alexandra Lord, a historian

of medicine and chair of the museum’s Medicine and Science Division, talked about masks and their multiple meanings. (This interview has been edited.)

Q: How did this project get up and running so fast?

A: It was partly coincidence. We had been planning an exhibit titled “In Sickness and in Health’’ for 2021 — a study of two previous epidemics and a pandemic — and had been thinking a lot about the objects in our collections. Then, in December, we began monitoring reports on the virus. Sensing the impact and historical importance of this pandemic, we began focusing our collecting efforts on COVID-19.

Q: How did you decide what to collect?

A: Epidemics impact all parts of society. There is fallout in terms of businesses, schooling, the food services industry, culture. The military may play a role.

Our five divisions came together quickly to create the task force, and as soon as we went to enhanced teleworking in March, our curators began getting in touch with different communities around the country.

Q: We tend to think of pandemics in monolithic terms, yet there would seem to be many intertwining narratives.

A: There are multiple kinds of stories. We started thinking about what kinds of objects we should be collecting and what stories we should be thinking

Masks transformed by illustrations of native Hawaiian flora by the artist David Shepard.

about. Some communities are being impacted more than others: African American communities are being especially hard hit, and nursing homes.

But there are also restaurant workers, the homeless, workers in the food industry, especially meat processing plants. We have five curatorial divisions and 163 in staff in our curatorial departments. Even at that, it is a huge story for us to document.

Q: What are the challenges of collecting objects during lockdown?

A: Some of it is a matter of us thinking about how to obtain the things we need to tell this story. A ventilator is an iconic object of this pandemic, but we obviously don’t want to go out and say we want a ventilator, putting stress and strain on that supply chain. We are apprehensive about going to an emergency room unit and talking to folks who have other things to think about. Masks in some places are still in short supply.

So we’ve gone to the U.S. Public Health Service and asked them to hold certain kinds of objects. A lot of it is telling people to hold on to things they might otherwise throw away.

Q: A mask, for instance?

A: The mask is among the important objects we are collecting. One of the things we are thinking about is what kinds of mask should we collect. Different masks will tell different kinds of stories. There are masks for medical practitioners — the story of medical practitioners is fundamental to this. There are the various designs for homemade masks, including the one in your newspaper. I personally used that design.

There are masks you might make for a child that uses a fabric illustrating Paw Patrol. That object in and of itself — the size, the pattern — will tell visitors of the future what people were doing and how this felt. It will give them insight into the role of parents trying to protect their young. A mask that is not that well made tells you about people struggling to do their best.

Q: Can masks be said to connect us to a larger medical history — germ theory, for instance — and epidemics and pandemics of the past?

A: We had already been doing this exhibition for 2021, so we began our planning long before the coronavirus pandemic occurred. That show begins with two previous epidemics — the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, an 1837 epidemic of smallpox on the Great Plains — and a cholera pandemic that hit California in the wake of the 19th-century gold rush.

When we were planning it, we wanted to give visitors an understanding that diseases have always spread as people migrated. These things have happened before, although not especially on this scale.

Pandemics are nothing new.

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Queda usted notificado que en excluyéndose el día de la publiESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO este Tribunal se ha radicado cación, se le anotará la rebeldía DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUdemanda sobre cancelación y se le dictará Sentencia en su NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA de pagaré extraviado por la vía contra, concediendo el remedio SALA DE MANATI. judicial. El 30 de mayo de 1995, solicitado sin más citarle ni oírMANUEL RIVERA ORTIZ Maribel Ayala Santos constitu- le. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y

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@

A: JUAN DEL PUEBLO Y JUANA DEL PUEBLO COMO POSIBLES TENEDORES Y CUALESQUIER PERSONA DESCONOCIDA CON POSIBLE INTERES EN LA OBLIGAClÓN CUYA CANCELACIÓN POR DECRETO JUDICIAL SE SOLICITA.

pr, salvo que se represente por puede establecerse recurso de de 2008, ante el notario Jaime derecho propio, en cuyo caso revisión o apelación dentro del A. Perez Rosello, garantizado deberá presentar su alegación término de 30 días contados a por hipoteca constituida meEDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS responsiva en la secretaría partir de la publicación por edic- diante la Escritura numero 179 DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDEN- del Tribunal. Se le advierte to de esta notificación, dirijo a otorgada en Florida, Puerto TE DE LOS E.E.U.U. EL ES- que, si no contesta la demanusted esta notificación que se Rico, inscrita al folio 1313 del TADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE da, radicando el original de la considerará hecha en la fecha tomo 617 de Mana ti, fin ca nuPUERTO RICO. contestación en este Tribunal y de la publicación de este edic- mero 13,601, inscripción 7ma.

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Y MANUEL RIVERA MARTINEZ Demandante V.

COOPERATIVA DE AHORRO Y CREDITO DE FLORIDA; JUAN DEL PUEBLO Y JUANA DE PUEBLO y cualesquier persona desconocida con posible interes en la obligación cuya cancelación por decreto·judicial se solicita.

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

EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que

el 15 de abril de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución

en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada

en autos donde podrá usted

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término de 30 días contados a

partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a

usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha

de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de

este caso, con fecha de 13 de mayo de 2020. En Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, el 13 de mayo de

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26

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Trump looks forward to the return of sports with crowds

By BILL PENNINGTON

I

n a telephone appearance during a televised charity golf exhibition on Sunday, President Donald Trump enthusiastically supported the return of live sports events during the coronavirus pandemic.

“We want to get sports back, we miss sports,” Trump said. “We need sports in terms of the psyche of our country. And that’s what we’re doing.”

On Sunday, at roughly the halfway point of a skins game match involving four of the PGA Tour’s top golfers — Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff — Trump praised NBC for carrying the event, then called for a more robust resumption of activities in all sports.

While Sunday’s golf exhibition was contested without spectators, the president said he hoped that future events would be teeming with fans.

“We want to get it back to where it was, we want big, big stadiums loaded with people,” Trump said. “We don’t want to have 15,000 people watching AlabamaLSU, as an example.”

Trump later added: “We want to get back to normal where you have the big crowds where they’re practically standing on top of each other, not where they’re worried.”

In an interview in late April, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the leading public health expert on Trump’s coronavirus task force, said he would not feel comfortable returning to a stadium until the infection rate was lower.

“I would love to be able to have all sports back,” Fauci said. “But as a health official and a physician and a scientist, I have to say, right now, when you look at the country, we’re not ready for that yet.”

The PGA Tour is planning to become one of the first major American sports to return to competition with the Charles Schwab Classic on June 11 in Fort Worth, Texas. A lengthy, almost weekly schedule of men’s golf tournaments is set to follow, including the PGA Championship in San Francisco in early August, the U.S. Open in mid-September outside New York City and the Masters in November in Augusta, Ga. “When you have the Masters, we want to have big crowds,” Trump told NBC. “And

“When you have the Masters, we want to have big crowds,” Trump told NBC. “And now, right now, that’s not what they’re planning, but you never know what happens. Things can happen very quickly. now, right now, that’s not what they’re planning, but you never know what happens.

Things can happen very quickly.”

Trump added, “We’re getting it back and it’s going to be fast.”

It was not a complete surprise that the president, who is an avid golfer, golf fan and golf course owner, would be included in the NBC broadcast of the first live golf event in more than three months. Golf’s leaders have been in touch with Trump since mid-March, with the PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, consulting with Trump before he suspended the tour’s season on March 13 and canceled a signature event, the Players Championship.

At one point, Trump was asked about his golf outings with professional players, a group that has included McIlroy, who played with Trump in 2017. In a recent interview with the McKellar Golf Podcast, McIl-

roy said he accepted the invitation to play with Trump out of respect for the office of the president, but would not likely do so again.

“I will sit here and say that the day I had with him I enjoyed, but that doesn’t mean I agree with everything, or, in fact, anything he says,” said McIlroy, who also criticized Trump for “trying to politicize” the response to the pandemic.

McIlroy, the top-ranked player in the world, has in recent seasons embraced an off-course leadership role among professional golfers, who are typically a conservative, cautious group.

McIlroy added, “It’s just not the way a leader should act, and there is a bit of diplomacy that you need to show, and I just don’t think he’s shown that, especially in these times.”

But Trump said he relished his time in

the presence of PGA Tour pros.

“Some like my politics very much and probably some don’t,” the president said. “I guess the ones that don’t I don’t get to see as much.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

27

This is what matchday looks like now

By RORY SMITH

A

s soon as you leave Dortmund’s central station, you see the black and yellow. Decked out in the team’s luminous colors, Borussia Dortmund’s club shop draws the eye from across the square.

In the city center, the smiling faces of Dortmund seem to beam out from every other billboard. In the suburbs, flags and banners hang from streetlights throughout the year.

There are people wearing scarves and people wearing hats and people wearing jerseys, whether it is match day or not, binding everything together in black and yellow.

After a while, it starts to feel less like Dortmund is a city that happens to be home to a soccer team and more that it is a soccer team that has somehow generated a city around it.

Soccer is a game, of course. But it is

also a sport, which is what a game becomes when enough people invest in it, financially or emotionally. And it is a business, too, which is how sport metastasizes when the emotional investment generates a return on the financial. But it is also — maybe it is mostly — a form of identity, a sense of belonging.

That is true everywhere, but it is in places like Dortmund where it most easily drifts into focus: a city given over to a team, where in the hours before a game everyone seems to be talking of the same subject, walking in the same direction, dreaming of the same outcome.

Soccer did not return to Dortmund, and to the rest of Germany’s Bundesliga, this weekend. Rather, a new form of it — a vision of its unwanted, unavoidable shortterm future — made its debut: acoustic, pared back, stripped of the spectacle that

lends it power. The streets were quiet. The stadiums, guarded by the police and ringed by steel, were empty.

Many of the bars and restaurants permitted to open chose to remain closed, mindful of the virus’ risks, fearful of the consequences of even small gatherings. Many of the fans who might have packed them, once upon a time, had tuned out. A poll, by the German television network ZDF, had found that 62 percent of fans would have preferred to cancel the season entirely than play out a pale imitation in the shadow of a pandemic.

There was enough interest, though, for Sky Germany’s coverage of the first round of games — headlined by Dortmund’s derby with its fierce rival, Schalke — in this bleak new world to draw in 6 million viewers, a record, each of them watching from home, atomized and all but alone, a tribe still

bound by its colors but unable to gather under its standard.

To some, what they watched was not soccer but mere business, a transaction devoid of emotion, an event held simply to protect broadcasting revenues. Sport, after all, does not have an inherent purpose; we imbue it with meaning, with consequence, and the fans in the stands serve as avatars for the millions more watching at home, their reactions shaping and reflecting ours.

Most of Germany’s powerful organized fan groups had made it plain that games played in isolation, without the public, without the spectacle, could only ever mean nothing. A slim banner was displayed in the stands for Augsburg’s game with Wolfsburg.

“Soccer will survive,” it read. “It’s your business that is sick.”

In those first few minutes of play Saturday, as the players tried to shake off the rust in front of gray, still stands in six cities, and two more Sunday, it was hard not to wonder whether it had any meaning at all. It was not a spectacle. Without the spectacle, it is hard to make a case for it as a business. Without the business, the sport — at least in its current form — cannot go on.

But then, with a little less than half an hour played, something happened. Dortmund’s Julian Brandt flicked the ball into the path of his teammate Thorgan Hazard. His cross evaded Schalke’s defense. Erling Haaland took two paces, opened his body, and steered the ball home: the first goal of soccer’s immediate future.

In that moment, you could see beyond the silence and the grayness and the sorrow, beneath the business and the sport, that soccer is just a game. But it is a good game.

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

As his pay shrinks in the absence of tennis, his heart grows fonder

By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY

R

on Yu fell hard for tennis when he was an undergraduate at Georgia Tech — so hard that he never completed his degree, leaving after less than two years.

“I was just spending so much time playing tennis and hanging around the tennis shop where I’d started to work,” Yu said. “Looking at my grades, they were about ready to kick me out anyway, so it wasn’t so difficult a decision at that stage.”

An American who was born in South Korea and immigrated to the United States as an infant with his Korean parents, Yu became one of the world’s premier racket technicians.

He strings rackets and also customizes them by modifying handles and grips and adding weight to the frames. He has played a role behind the scenes in 23 Grand Slam singles titles for players including Andre Agassi, Lleyton Hewitt, Stan Wawrinka and Roger Federer.

Yu, 52, has worked at the boutique racket services company Priority One since 2001.

Founded by Pete Sampras’ former racket technician Nate Ferguson, Priority One works exclusively for a small group of elite men’s players, including the No. 1-ranked Novak Djokovic and Federer, who has been a client since 2004. The focus is on providing service at the four Grand Slam tournaments and toptier events on the ATP Tour.

But like everyone else who works on the tennis circuit, Yu has had his international life grounded by the coronavirus pandemic. The professional tours are on a hiatus that began in early March and that will last at least four months, perhaps significantly longer.

Priority One has laid off one of its three technicians, Glynn Roberts, who has been the primary stringer for Djokovic and Andy Murray. Yu remained with the company, and he said he was still customizing rackets and stringing one or two a day for non-professional clients. That is a precipitous drop from the 25 to 30 he might string daily at a tournament.

“The way our contracts work with the players, they pay us for the stringing and the customizing when they are playing and traveling and when we are at tournaments,” Yu said. “So currently now revenue has gone to basically zero.”

Yu said he had taken a pay cut at Priority One and moved into a part-time data-entry job near his home in Tampa, Fla., to help compensate for the lost income.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Ron Yu, a racket technician for some of the best players in the world, has lost his primary source of income during the coronavirus pandemic but also remembered how much he loves the sport.

Q: How many weeks are you usually on the road during a normal year?

Yu: It was as high as 33 weeks during the heyday, but it’s now down to 26, and I’ve been happy to be down to 26.

What is it like to be off the road for the foreseeable future?

I enjoy being home with my wife. I love being able to have dinner with her every night sitting out on the patio in the evening. But I miss the travel. I miss being at tournaments, and I miss the friends I’ve made on tour, because the tour is like a little village that goes around the world. Even though you are in a new city you see the same people.

Working a part-time job outside of tennis has really shown to me how much I still love tennis. Not that this new job is terrible, but sometimes after being on the road for four or five weeks, I’d be like, ‘Oh man, I’m just tired of tennis.’ But this has clarified even more for me how great a sport it is.

Q: What has been the impact of this tour stoppage on the racket service community?

Yu: I’ve made a lot of friends who string at Grand Slams as part of the on-site stringing

service, and most of these people have their own tennis shops or work in a tennis shop, and those shops are either closed or have probably lost 80 to 90 percent of their revenue. Even in normal times, you are not going to get wealthy doing this. You may lead a very nice comfortable middle class life, but this is really devastating for the tennis community, for stringers and the shop owners.

Q: Have you tried to support each other financially or emotionally?

Yu: Everyone is in the same boat. I don’t want to say that tennis stringers are hermitlike, but they can be fairly introverted. You might be in a room full of 10 other stringers at a tournament, and yeah, you will joke around a little bit and talk, but when you are really working hard and hustling you might not say a word to anyone for hours.

I’m not sure tennis stringers open up as much as a lot of people, and maybe they don’t ask for help as much. Maybe they should.

Q: When you watch a match, with your knowledge of racket technology and strings, do you watch it differently from the average fan?

Yu: Probably when I see a shot and I say that shot could not have occurred 20 years ago. In the old days when most guys played with natural gut strings, you couldn’t just swing out as hard as you wanted all the time because after five, six shots you’re just going to lose control doing that. Gut is just so lively, for the most part.

Nowadays they have to put a little more topspin on it, but they are swinging almost full speed. Even when there is really a tense point and a lot of pressure, you see guys returning and they are able to swing as hard as they want. Or when a guy comes to the net and somebody on a stretch can pull it crosscourt for a clean passing shot winner, I’m like, “That shot would not happen 25 years ago.”

Q: You’ve said that your family did not approve of your decision to leave Georgia Tech and work as a stringer. How do they feel about it now?

Yu: My mom loves the fact she can tell her friends in Korea that “my son is friends and works with Roger Federer.” So that has eased the pain.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, May 19, 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, May 19, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

Your brain is racing like a runaway train. It’s exhilarating to skip from one brilliant idea to the next. Keep a notebook with you. Scribble down concepts as they pop into your head. Alternatively, record voice memos on your mobile. Soon, several of these notions will weave together into a glorious tapestry. At that point, you can share this idea with the world. People are highly receptive to your fiery energy. It will be virtually impossible to resist your enthusiasm.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Taking a longer distance trip than you have recently, becomes something of a leap of faith. Instead of worrying about every possible eventuality, just make your way to where you need to go, complete the task and return home. You don’t want to get shut out of this extraordinary opportunity. Someone will cover your duties while you make this journey.

You’re always generous with others. Give the Universe a chance to reward you for all these good deeds. You’re overdue recognition.

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)

Don’t speak unless you have something important to say. It will serve you better to look, listen and learn.

This is especially true if you have some administrative work to process. After watching several workers interact, you’ll know who to approach with a request. A person who seems relaxed and receptive will be of tremendous benefit to you. After they dispatch your job with a minimum of fuss, you’ll be eternally grateful.

Send a letter of praise to their employer.

You soak up information like a sponge. This is an ideal time to take a challenging course. While your peers are struggling, you’ll pass every test with flying colours. Best of all, you’ll delight in the learning process. Nothing feels better than exercising your intellect. Graduating from this class will cause your social circle to expand in exciting ways.

You’ll start associating with accomplished people in your desired industry. Soon, you’ll find a benefactor who can set you up with a job interview, role or internship.

Give yourself permission to daydream. When you want to improve your situation, it helps to build castles in the air. This is far more productive than trying to deal with a problem. That’s because when you focus on what exists, your unwanted reality will persist. Imagine your best life instead. Think about how it will feel to have tremendous wealth, find your perfect partner or get acclaim for your creative talent. Linger over these fantasies as much as possible; they’ll put you on the path to success.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

It’s natural that a warm, generous person like you has tons of friends. Take time out of your busy schedule to speak with your favourite people. If there isn’t anything exciting on your calendar, throw an impromptu virtual get together. Socialising makes you glow with happiness, even if it is only online at present. You’ll get an opportunity to travel to a place that’s off the beaten path later in the year. At first, you’ll feel uncertain about taking this trip.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Putting your workspace into an orderly and organised state will help your productivity to soar. Assign a place for everything and then put all that you own in its proper spot. Don’t worry about any impending deadlines.

Your work will be accomplished at the appropriate time.

A passionate encounter awaits you this evening. Nothing stimulates your senses like a good day of work. If you don’t have a romantic partner, you’ll find one on a popular dating app.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Being in the limelight is more fun than you pretend. Although you pride yourself on being a private person, it is fun to show off your artistic talent.

Whether you act, play music or sing, you should obey impulses to perform, even if it is just online at the moment. You’re a born star. A job that forces you to think on your feet is rewarding. It gives you great pleasure to devise innovative solutions to unique problems.

This is a good time to think about what makes you good, both physically and mentally. Spending hours staring at a computer screen each day can never satisfy an adventurer like you. Make it your mission to be outdoors a little more. Devoting more energy to creative pursuits will also cultivate well-being. It doesn’t matter if you sing, paint by numbers or re-enact moments in history. The more playful you are, the more vibrant your mind and body will become.

This is an excellent time to formulate a strategy. If you’ve been yearning for a relationship, concentrate on becoming the kind of partner you desire. Being kind and compassionate will attract someone who is similarly fabulous when the time is right.

It also helps to make space for a companion. Clear out a dresser draw. Make room in your medicine cabinet for someone else’s possessions. Set a table for two instead of eating dinner in front of the television.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Undertaking an ambitious research project will be rewarding. You’re very good at finding elusive information. That’s because you have learned to trust your instincts. When your intuition tells you to look in an unlikely place for data, you obey it. This receptive attitude yields success. What you discover will be shocking to many people. Most of the world has been labouring under flawed premises. You’ve learned there is a much simpler way of attracting abundance. Present your ideas to anyone who will listen.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

The opportunity to share your wisdom with others will arrive unexpectedly. Working with eager, enthusiastic people will renew your own zest for life. Don’t be surprised when you’re inspired to finish an article, book or film that you abandoned long ago. Momentum is building. If you play your cards right, you’ll sell your work for a handsome profit. The public is yearning for a fresh perspective. You’re just the person to provide it with a new way of hoping and dreaming.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

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Ziggy

32

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

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