Wednesday May 20, 2020

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

San Juan The

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DAILY

Star

The Sad Story Behind Hopeful Hero ‘Stargirl’ P20

Plenty of Crimes Unmasked Attorney Warns on Legal Consequences

Jaresko: $500 Gov’t Check?

Not So Fast, Governor P5

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

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Fiscal Board Should Set a Moratorium, Economist Says

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Wednesday, May 20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

GOOD MORNING

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May 20, 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.

Should the federal court end PREPA’s RSA?

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he Puerto Rico Unsecured Creditors Committee believes the U.S. District Court should terminate the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority’s (PREPA) restructuring support agreement, arguing that the federal Financial Oversight and Management Board is not moving it ahead.

The motion to evaluate the settlement to restructure PREPA’s $9 billion debt has been postponed numerous times since last year.

The oversight board recently told the court that it does not have sufficient data to determine if PREPA’s restructuring as contemplated by the utility’s restructuring support agreement (RSA) is feasible.

The document filed by the unsecured creditors this week quoted reports in which PREPA officials have placed the utility’s RSA in doubt.

For example, PREPA Executive Director José Ortiz

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has said the coronavirus pandemic has opened “all the doors to rethink” the debt deal.

“The PREPA 9019 Motion has now been pending for more than a year, since May 2019,” the group said in court documents. “Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Oversight Board had repeatedly delayed the hearing on the motion due to its lack of confidence in securing legislative approvals necessary to implement the RSA on its current terms. Based on the impact of COVID-19, the PREPA Status Report, and PREPA’s recent public statements, it is now clear that the PREPA RSA is no longer viable and that no hearing on the current PREPA 9019 Motion will ever take place.”

Similar to PREPA’s debt deal, the congressionally appointed fiscal board said in a commonwealth status report that the debt settlement for the central government agreed upon in February cannot move forward because the federal panel must assess the impact of the pandemic on government finances.

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Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Plenty of crimes so far

Although not yet complete, the House investigation has already unmasked plenty of illegal activity, say committee chairman, Senate hopeful

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

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o far, sworn testimony given during the island House of Representatives’ investigation into the dealings behind the canceled $38 million COVID-19 test kit contract has elicited conflicting testimony from high-level government employees and wealthy private contractors. In perhaps the highlight of the hearings so far, the inquest even made Juan Maldonado de Jesús, a former deputy secretary of Transportation and Public Works, plead his Fifth Amendment constitutional right to not incriminate himself when answering questions put forth by Rep. Juan Oscar Morales, whose Health Committee is investigating this and other suspicious transactions made in the early days of the islandwide coronavirus pandemic emergency.

The testimony can only be described as incriminatory, especially for Maldonado de Jesús and his friend and partner Robert Rodríguez, whose construction company Apex General Contractors LLC secured the $38 million purchase order, which

was handled by Maldonado. Their complicity in the matter turned a darker hue on Tuesday when a series of texts between them was made public.

In the texts, given by Rodríguez to the Health Committee, Maldonado writes Rodríguez that “the virus was productive” in the same message informing him that they had been awarded the $38 million purchase order.

The coronavirus had caused 124 deaths in Puerto Rico as of Tuesday afternoon, according to the Emergency Management and Disaster Administration Bureau.

Former Sen. Ramón Luis Nieves, a practicing attorney, has been a loud voice in favor of a criminal investigation by the commonwealth Justice Department into the matter of the government contracts for COVID-19 test kits. He believes that enough sworn testimony has been given in the committee’s hearings to begin criminal procedures against Maldonado, Rodríguez, Vick and others.

“Obviously, it is not my responsibility to make the determination of what crimes have been committed. That is the job of the Justice Department and of the federal District Attorney if applicable,” said Nieves, who represented the District of San Juan in the Senate from 2013 to 2017, and is a Popular Democratic Party primary candidate for the seat. “But I believe that with what we’ve heard so far, we can see the possibility of several crimes being committed. For example, how did Rodríguez’s signature appear on an Apex corporate resolution authorizing Aaron Vick to sign the $38 million contract in the company’s name? Rodríguez claims he did not sign it. Without his signature, the document is not valid and thus the purchase order is also invalid.”

“If true, that would also be false representation,” Nieves added. “And if a notary registers a document without the proper signature, and if he falsifies the person’s signature himself, for Maldonado that could mean a legal problem as well as an ethical one that should be investigated by the Supreme Court.

“And Maldonado apparently promised Vick money to use

The San Juan Daily Star him as the $38 million contract’s signee. That would also be a potential violation of interstate commerce laws, which could also make it a federal case.

“I don’t think there’s any need to wait. With the sworn testimony elicited so far, the Justice Department could begin arresting them now.”

Morales, however, believes that there might be more potential illegal conduct and that the wisest strategy would be to wait until his committee completes its investigation and makes the appropriate referrals.

He also believes that the investigation should look into ways that these types of situations, so prevalent in the past, could be extinguished for the future.

“Unfortunately, I must admit that this is not a one-time thing or a one-administration problem. It seems as if it is a problem of the system as it is designed,” Morales told The San Juan Daily Star on Tuesday. “And that is a question that must be answered if we want to solve this matter. What do we have to do, or what laws must we pass to stop this conduct? Because at times in the past, when schemes like these have been unearthed, the culprit simply gets a small slap on the wrist and is let go.”

“As it stands today, the system has provoked situations like these -- the fact that it does not have the appropriate personnel in key posts to be able to see potential problems coming,” the Health Committee chairman added. “They do not have the academic education needed for that type of sensitive position; they are not given the technical preparation needed to oversee these processes.

“And it is not only at one level or another. It is across the board. If you watch our hearings, of all the government employees related to the purchasing of equipment for the government that we’ve interviewed, from top to bottom, nobody seemed able to talk with any confidence about Law 73, approved in 2019. Not one of them. And you will find that ignorance no matter how high or low the person in the chain of command.

You find it at all levels.”

Economist: Fiscal board must declare moratorium

By THE STAR STAFF

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he federal Financial Oversight and Management Board must declare a one-year moratorium on all debt payments and proposed new debt deals for the central government and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, an economist with the pro-transparency group Espacios Abiertos (EA) said Tuesday.

“When we analyze the international context and the situation of Puerto Rico in the light of the economic projections contained in the most recent fiscal plan, published by the Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority on May 3, it becomes clear that the austerity policies proposed in all the fiscal plans certified so far have contributed to a worsening of the current crisis and, in the final analysis, the unsustainability of the public debt,” said Daniel Santamaría Ots, an economist and EA senior public policy analyst.

The oversight board will present its response to the commonwealth fiscal plan next week. The government is proposing in the plan a two-year suspension of all austerity measures, but EA said the austerity measures should be postponed indefinitely.

The deterioration of the economy as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, international events and the economic projections contained in the fiscal plan published on May 3 point to the unsustainability of the $120 billion public debt, Santamaría Ots said.

He said that for fiscal year (FY) 2020-21, all of the money

in the government general fund as well as federal financial assistance funds should be invested in strengthening Puerto Rico’s economy and meeting the citizens’ most pressing needs — all with the purpose of overcoming the health and financial crises created by the pandemic.

Puerto Rico’s creditors should be asked to grant a moratorium or “standstill” of no less than one year on all debt payments, the economist said. He also urged the oversight board to publish all audited financial statements for 2017, 2018 and 2019 and to draft a plausible macroeconomic plan.

“Puerto Rico needs a moratorium that will not worsen the general fund situation,” the debt specialist said. “Given this new pandemic scenario, we should analyze the sustainability of the public debt with integration of a macroeconomic plan and an updating of the audited financial statements that will allow us to go to the capital markets in the future with guarantees.”

The recent commonwealth fiscal plan issued earlier this month presents projections of declines in Puerto Rico’s real gross national product (real GNP) of -3.8 percent for FY 2020 and -7.8 percent for FY 2021, Santamaría Ots said.

The government made economic projections on the impact of the coronavirus using three scenarios for the period from 2020 to 2025 in the fiscal plan. The first, an optimistic estimate, suggests a low impact from the coronavirus crisis, resulting in an average surplus of $502 million each fiscal year.

The second is a “baseline” scenario that predicts the im-

pact of the COVID-19 crisis will result in an average primary fiscal surplus of $32 million from 2020 to 2025. The third scenario, or pessimistic estimate, predicts an annual average deficit of $578 million in each fiscal year through 2025 as a result of the pandemic, he said.

“Once the structural reforms and austerity measures are implemented, Puerto Rico will face primary fiscal deficits as early as 2030, rather than 2039 as had been projected in the February 2020 fiscal plan,” the economist said.

Santamaría Ots said the government has been able under the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act to move forward on the restructuring of Puerto Rico Sales Tax Financing Corp., or COFINA, bonds, leaving a final debt balance of $12.02 billion. The second debt restructuring was that of the Government Development Bank, leaving a final debt balance of $2.6 billion.

In February, the oversight board unveiled an adjustment plan that would reduce the central government debt to about $14 billion from $35 billion, but Santamaría Ots said the plan is not feasible.

“The next step should be the tacit recognition of the impossibility of repaying the debt and that in this pandemic environment, there should be a one-year moratorium in the payment of all debt, the repeal of austerity measures, a restructuring taking into account debt sustainability, the development of a macroeconomic plan, and the completion and publication of audited financial statements,” he said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

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Fiscal board would agree with $500 check, but with one condition

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

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inancial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) Executive Director Natalie Jaresko wrote Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced on Tuesday, confirming that the board has received the governor’s proposal of a one-time $500 government check to private industry employees and retirees, but also asking her to put a bigger focus on the most vulnerable members of the island’s population.

To go forward, the proposal would need the approval of the congressionally appointed oversight board.

“We have received your proposal to use an additional $349 million to distribute incentive checks of $500 to private sector employees and retirees …” Jaresko said in the letter. “We agree that cash subsidies of this type are a viable mechanism to maintain economic activity, particularly in the current unprecedented climate due to the sharp decline in economic activity caused by the curfew. At the same time, we acknowledge that both the government of Puerto Rico and the federal government of the United States have already taken prompt measures to benefit home finances through various mechanisms, including increasing unemployment benefits.”

“However, it is critical to recognize that there are significant segments of the population of Puerto Rico that fall in that vast category described as “vulnerable” and that include the homeless, those with low income, those without food security and those

with physical disabilities, both adults and children,” the letter read.

Jaresko wrote that “in a rough estimate, 218,000 individuals have received direct help through the different aid given to freelance and government workers.”

“Another 300,000, approximately, are enrolled in the expanded unemployment benefits,” she wrote.

“Finally, the United States Treasury has financed over $3 billion that would aid these people as well as an additional 2,300,000 residents of Puerto Rico, when the total aid amount is distributed. Assuming that another 80,000 people are not eligible due to their income, we estimate at between 150,000 and 250,000 the number of Puerto Ricans who remain outside of any federal or local stimulus approved so far.

“Establishing a stimulus program to help these vulnerable people could cost the government between $150 and $250 million, assuming the support amount would be $1,000 per person. … We believe that the current situation represents the ideal opportunity to focus increased and urgent efforts on the people who need it the most. Helping the most ‘vulnerable,’ as previously described, as well as those with ‘accessibility’ problems due to lack of internet access, transport, due to physical impairment or due to other personal factors must be a key goal of any additional aid proposed by the Government of Puerto Rico.”

“The next step should be that your government develop and present a proposal to the FOMB that distributes aid to the ‘vulnerable,’” the letter reads.

“We are aligned with your pledge to completely use the available funds to help the people of Puerto Rico, although instead of providing additional support to parts of the population that already have access to other local and federal aid programs, we suggest a more proportional and equitable solution that would reach a larger part of the population.”

New incentive payments issued to frontline COVID-19 workers

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced announced on Tuesday the sending of new incentive payments for nurses and other public sector employees who have been working long hours amid adverse conditions since the coronavirus pandemic emergency began.

“This round of incentive payments of $4,000 for nurses in the public sector will reach 744 other professionals directly to their bank accounts starting today,” Vázquez said. “This new bond disbursement is $ 2,976,000, which added to the $3.6 million we have distributed since April, reaches more than $ 6.5 million for this sector.”

The governor said the initial payments for the health professionals were first sent in April to the different agencies so that they could in turn distribute them to their employees.

“The deposit was also made in their bond accounts for the following first-response employees: $700 to 1,129 bailiffs,

$3,500 to 220 employees of the Forensic Sciences Bureau, and $3,500 to 489 employees of the Medical Emergencies Bureau,” Vázquez added.

Treasury Secretary Francisco Parés Alicea noted that a total of 5,508 nurses from the public sector will benefit.

“So far, we have paid through the different agencies, and this time directly, 1,591 workers in this sector who continue to contribute daily with their work so that those affected by the coronavirus can recover,” he said.

Parés Alicea added that nurses in the private sector, numbering an estimated 24,460, are assigned a bonus of $3,000, as are another 6,460 additional nurses who work as professional service providers.

At the end of next week the Treasury will enable a link so that both groups can safely access the SURI platform and thus enter their bank account details. In this way, the Treasury Department will obtain the necessary information to process the disbursements in an expedited manner, as required by the governor.

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Wednesday, May 20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Pierluisi: Steady reopening of economy needed to roll back curfew’s ill effects

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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ew Progressive Party (NPP) gubernatorial hopeful Pedro Pierluisi said Tuesday that the economy must continue to be reopened to avoid further negative effects on the island as a result of the continuation of the curfew as one of the measures to control the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

“This uncertainty that we have right now with the curfew is unacceptable,” Pierluisi said in a radio interview. “Here you have for practically a very long time, large stores and megastores open, and yet small and medium-sized businesses that could take measures more easily than those mega-stores to limit the entry of people who enter their establishments, are closed. Here there are many people suffering, many merchants and staff suffering the consequences of this uncertainty.”

“It is necessary to continue opening, with caution, with suitable steps, without so much ambiguity,” the former resident commissioner added. “But surely the economy must continue to be reopened if it is to be prevented from falling apart. They cannot think that federal funds are going to solve all this because federal funds have an expiration date. If thousands of small businesses close here, we will do enormous damage to the entire people of Puerto Rico.”

After two months since the beginning of the quarantine to contain COVID-19 infections, Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced has allowed the gradual reopening of some economic activities.

Pierluisi pointed out that, given the foreseeable avalanche of applications for the Nutritional Assistance Program and for unemployment benefits resulting from the quarantine, it was necessary for the government to allocate all the neces-

sary resources.

“These are managerial failures that would not occur with me,” Pierluisi said, stating that if he becomes governor, he will retain those agency heads who have done their jobs properly and will remove those who have not.

Meanwhile, Pierluisi said he favored the approval of a “Statehood Yes or No” status plebiscite.

“I am glad that they [the Puerto Rican Independence Party] are taking a position and they are going to advocate the ‘No,’ because that is recognition that this is a fair consultation that allows everyone to express themselves,” Pierluisi said. “By definition it is a fair consultation; it is a question that has not been asked in the past.”

He added that “when we have a majority of the voters of the people of Puerto Rico saying yes to statehood, asking for that equality, we will have the best letter of presentation

that can be had before Congress, and I guarantee it.”

“I didn’t have that cover letter [when I was resident commissioner],” he said.

Meanwhile, Pierluisi attributed the filing of a complaint

by Popular Democratic Party Rep. Luis Vega Ramos over the gathering of people at a meeting of the NPP board of directors -- despite the executive order requiring social distancing to avoid the spread of the coronavirus -- to politicking.

“Measures were taken to protect the health of everyone,” Pierluisi said. “Masks, disinfectants, gloves -- everything that could be done was done. What I think is that this is really a distraction because we see a representative of the Popular [Democratic] Party going to the extreme of filing a complaint with the Department of Justice. How far will this go? This was a crucial issue -- the date of the primary that now even the Popular Democratic Party has accepted.”

New housing units announced for Río Piedras

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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he island Housing Department and Housing Finance Authority on Tuesday announced the start of construction for De Diego Village, a new housing complex in the Río Piedras urban center.

With an investment of $33.8 million, the new project — which seeks to contribute to the urban development of the area — will be available to low-income individuals and families.

“We are excited to begin the construction of this project, a rebirth of central Río Piedras and the surroundings of the island’s main university center,” said Housing Secretary Luis Fernández Trinchet. “De Diego Village seeks to lay the groundwork to attract new projects to

the area, which will join the initiatives of socioeconomic development that promote the community.”

The Housing chief also stressed that De Diego Village is another example of how the Community Development Block Grant Program for Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) contributes to the socioeconomic development of Puerto Rico, in particular its affected urban centers.

De DiegoVillage will have 94 units in two buildings: 72 two-bedroom apartments and 22 three-bedroom apartments.

Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced said the construction of this type of housing complex offers low-income families the opportunity to have a roof and a safe place for their families. That is why the funds destined for this type of construction are important for Puerto Rican families.

All apartments will include an electric stove, refrigerator, smoke detectors and water heater.

The complex, which also includes 112 parking spaces, will be on Del Pilar Street at the corner of Brumbaugh and Paseo de Diego. Construction will take approximately 36 months.

The total cost of De Diego Village is $33.8 million, of which $15.7 million is from federal tax credit capital (Low-Income Housing Tax Credit), $18.1 million is from CDBG-DR, and $10.3 million comes from internal financing.

The project was successful in the round of tax credits under the 2016/2017 Notice of Availability of Funds. Its general contractor is QB Group LLC, the design will be done by ACC Architects PSC, and the managing agent is SP Management.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

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FBI finds links between Florida military base attack and al-Qaida

By KATIE BENNER and ADAM GOLDMAN

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he gunman in last year’s deadly shooting at a military base in Florida was regularly in touch with al-Qaida for years, including the night before the attack, the country’s top law enforcement officials said Monday. They also accused Apple of costing them valuable time by refusing to help unlock the gunman’s phone.

The FBI found that the gunman, 2nd Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a Saudi air force cadet training with the U.S. military in Pensacola, had communicated with leaders of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and had joined the Saudi military to carry out a “special operation,” Attorney General William Barr said at a news conference.

The FBI recently bypassed the security features on at least one of Alshamrani’s two iPhones to discover his al-Qaida links.

Christopher A. Wray, director of the FBI, said the bureau had “effectively no help from Apple,” but he would not say how investigators obtained access to the phone.

The evidence found on Alshamrani’s phone showed that the Pensacola attack was “the brutal culmination of years of planning and preparation,” Wray said.

The investigation has served as the latest skirmish in a fight between the Justice Department and Apple pitting personal privacy against public safety. Apple stopped routinely allowing law enforcement officials into phones in 2014 as it beefed up encryption. It has argued that data privacy is a human rights issue and that if it were to develop a way to allow the U.S. government into its phones, hackers or foreign governments like China could exploit the same tool.

But law enforcement officials have said that Apple is creating a haven for criminals. The company’s defiance in the Pensacola shooting allowed any possible co-conspirators to fabricate and compare stories, destroy evidence and disappear, Wray said.

“It was clear at the time that the phones were likely to contain very important information,” Barr said, adding that President Donald Trump had also asked Apple for help.

Apple pushed back Monday, saying that it complied with investigators immediately after the shooting by giving the FBI access to Alshamrani’s online storage accounts and providing continuing support to investigators.

“The false claims made about our company are an excuse to weaken encryption and other security measures that protect millions of users and our national security,” Apple said in a statement.

Law enforcement officials would not say that al-Qaida directed Alshamrani to carry out the shooting, which killed three sailors. But they emphasized his communications with al-Qaida leaders, saying they proved that his relationship with the group went beyond simply being inspired to act based on watching YouTube videos or reading extremist propaganda.

Alshamrani paused to fire at his iPhone during a firefight with security officers, and he was found with a second, badly damaged phone that he had destroyed, leading investigators to conclude that the devices held important data and to seek court orders authorizing them to search the phones.

In January, when Barr designated the shooting an act of

The coffin of The remains of Ensign Joshua Kaleb Watson, one of the people killed in the attack at Naval Air Station Pensacola, is transferred at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. terrorism, Apple refused a Justice Department request to help open the iPhones, prompting speculation that the government would seek another court order to force the company to comply.

The department said that it sought Apple’s help in opening the phones only after other agencies and third-party technology vendors had failed, and it accused the company of slowing the investigation and allowing leads to go cold.

“Finally getting our hands on the evidence Alshamrani tried to keep from us is great,” Wray said. “But we really needed it months ago, back in December, when the court issued its warrants.”

Both Apple and law enforcement were likely to hold up the Pensacola case as evidence of their arguments. Apple has said law enforcement does not need its help to build cases, and the company could argue that the FBI’s entry into one of Alshamrani’s phones shows that. Law enforcement has said that Apple’s refusal to help has hamstrung countless investigations, and Barr emphasized that the FBI’s unlocking of Alshamrani’s phone was not a “scalable solution.”

Indications have emerged that Apple’s security has grown more vulnerable. Last week, Zerodium, a company that acquires and sells weaknesses in smartphone encryption to U.S. agencies to hack into the devices, announced that it had a surplus of such exploits for Apple’s iOS mobile operating system.

The firm’s claims undermine the Justice Department’s and the FBI’s assertions that Apple’s security is preventing lawful interception of data collection, especially on older-model phones.

Alshamrani had an iPhone 7 and an iPhone 5.

Barr has maintained one of the department’s “highest priorities” is to find a way to get technology companies to help law

enforcement gain lawful access to encrypted technology.

“Privacy and public safety are not mutually exclusive,” he said.

“We are confident that technology companies are capable of building secure products that protect user information and, at the same time, allow for law enforcement access when permitted by a judge.”

Wray and Barr appeared in lockstep during the news conference. For Barr, it provided a platform to publicly support Wray, whom Trump has complained about privately over the FBI’s handling of the Russia investigation.

While the FBI has spent the past few years primarily trying to thwart international terrorism inspired by the Islamic State, Wray told lawmakers last year that al-Qaida still wants to conduct “large-scale, spectacular attacks” but is “likely to focus on building its international affiliates and supporting small-scale, readily achievable attacks.”

U.S. counterterrorism efforts have diminished the capabilities of al-Qaida in Yemen and the Pakistan-Afghanistan region, but the Pensacola shooting still shows the group’s ideology can inspire attacks. In 2016, authorities warned of a vague al-Qaida threat.

Even though the casualty count in Pensacola was relatively low by al-Qaida standards, simply “pulling off a successful attack on U.S. soil can provide al-Qaida and its affiliates with a momentum boost and allow the group bragging rights over the Islamic State, which is important in terms of recruitment, prestige and propaganda,” Colin P. Clarke, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, a New York-based research organization, said in an email Monday.

“This illustrates just how dangerous one operative can be,” Wray said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

ACLU warns against fever-screening tools for Coronavirus

By NATASHA SINGER

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irports, office buildings, warehouses and restaurant chains are rushing to install new safety measures like fever-scanning cameras and infrared temperature-sensing guns.

But the American Civil Liberties Union warned Tuesday against using the tools to screen people for possible coronavirus symptoms, saying the devices were often inaccurate, ineffective and intrusive.

In a new report, “Temperature Screening and Civil Liberties During an Epidemic,” the ACLU said that such technologies could give people a false sense of security, potentially leading them to be less vigilant about health measures like wearing masks or social distancing. The group also cautioned that the push for widespread temperature scans during the pandemic could usher in permanent new forms of surveillance and social control.

The organization’s advisory reflects a wider tension in the United States over concerns about reopening the economy at a time when the virus

is still spreading undetected in various regions of country.

In particular, the report said that infrared temperature-sensing guns can be unreliable partly because they gauge skin temperature, in contrast to oral thermometers, which calculate core body temperature. The guns provide a superficial measure, the report noted, that can vary if a person is sunburned, is sweating or has just come in from outside.

Similarly, the report said that many freestanding thermal cameras, which gauge a person’s temperature at a distance, can be inaccurate, finicky and may need to be frequently recalibrated.

Even if the temperature-scanning tools were more accurate, however, the ACLU said they could miss many people who were infected with the coronavirus but not running a fever.

“Nobody should imagine that blanketing our public spaces with thermal sensors is going to serve as any kind of effective automated ‘COVID detection network,’” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU, wrote in the report, “or that this technology is likely to contribute sig-

nificantly to stemming the spread of the virus.”

Recent studies have reported that as many as a quarter of people infected with the novel coronavirus, or perhaps even more, do not exhibit fever or other symptoms. Even so, guidelines on reopening the economy from the White House ask companies to monitor workers for symptoms like fevers. The idea is that such screening might at least reduce the risk of coronavirus outbreaks in the workplace.

To meet surging demand from factories, warehouses and office buildings, technologymakers haven been rushing to market a range of thermal cameras as coronavirus fever-screening tools. Companies have been encouraged to do so by the Food and Drug Administration. The agency said in April that it would temporarily allow device-makers to market thermal cameras, which have not been vetted by federal health regulators, for temperature checks in places like warehouses and factories.

But IPVM, an independent site that tests surveillance cameras, reported this year that numerous makers of temperature scanners had

overstated their accuracy or made false claims.

Among other things, the site identified systems that automatically adjusted people’s temperatures to put them in the normal range or that failed to detect high fevers. The site also found companies that were marketing heat-sensing tools designed simply to detect the presence of humans, or for fire detection, as fever-screening devices.

“A core issue is there are no independent tests of thermal camera performance,” IPVM said in a recent overview of the technology. “This has allowed manufacturers to tout products meant for body/fire detection as a fever solution, or falsely claim pinpoint accuracy at long distances.”

In its report, the ACLU recommended that public health experts study the effectiveness of temperature-scanning technologies “to determine if the trade-offs are worth it.” Otherwise, the group said, the fever-screening systems should not be deployed.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers a lower-tech solution: “Ask employees to take their own temperature either before coming to the workplace or upon arrival

A springtime of death in New Orleans

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

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ince early March, nearly 500 people have died of the coronavirus in New Orleans.

Roughly three-quarters of them were black.

Death is not a stranger to the city, with its long history of hurricanes, gun violence and other epidemics. But New Orleanians have endured, gathering to remember and celebrate lives well lived. Now, in one of the deadliest seasons in memory, those rituals have been stifled.

“In April we did four times what we would normally do in one month,” said Malcolm Gibson, the owner of Professional Funeral Services in New Orleans. “I probably had five husbandand-wife funerals. I’ve never had that.”

Gibson recalled going to a house where a woman had died of the virus and seeing her sister give the woman a final kiss as they took the body away. He would end up burying both sisters.

The hardest part for Gibson has been telling families that only 10 people were allowed at funeral services because of state social-distancing restrictions. “That’s my grandmother!” distraught family members would say to him.

“She raised me! You’re telling me I can’t be in the room?”

Many families are waiting to have funeral ceremonies for those they have lost. Some are going forward with burials this weekend, as state restrictions are scheduled to loosen slightly. But packed sanctuaries and crowded repasts are still a long way off.

For much of the spring, the rules were clear: small services, swift burials and no funeral parades, even for community icons who would have drawn thousands.

‘I felt like I did him a disservice.’

Eight pallbearers, wearing gloves and masks, carried Ronald Wilson’s coffin under the oak trees down an uneven and unmarked aisle of the Free Land section of Carrollton Cemetery No. 1.

Wilson owned an air conditioning and heating business for 24 years.

“There were so many people he fixed their AC for free that we don’t even know about,” Christian Lewis, Wilson’s niece, said. “He just did work, and they didn’t have the money, or they never paid him, but he did it just ‘cause that’s who he was.”

In normal times, there would have been a couple of hundred people at the service.

“I felt like I did him a disservice because

he really didn’t ask for much,” Lewis said.

The Rev. Juan Crockett had been Wilson’s pastor for 35 years. “There is no such thing as a proper home-going ceremony these days,” he said.

‘We are beyond normal.’

Normally, a service would last for hours, with large crowds of family and friends singing hymns and telling stories together. The closest thing to that recently was a ceremony Crockett described as a “drive-by viewing”: cars lined up for blocks so people could pay their respects at a distance.

“We are beyond normal,” Crockett said.

He has lost four of his friends. Two others, he said, were recently told they had a short time left to live.

‘It didn’t turn out like I wanted it to.’

Even families untouched by the virus have been robbed of mourning rituals.

On April 13, Patricia Jackson Joseph died of a heart attack. But the restrictions for her funeral were the same as for everyone else. Her husband, Aurbrin Joseph, 47, had face masks printed with her picture.

“With all the people she knows, she would have had a big service,” Aurbrin Joseph said. As

it was, there was not even room for some of his closest family members. “It didn’t turn out like I wanted it to.”

‘I’ll fly away.’

For families that have lost someone to the virus, the farewells have been especially distorted.

Bessie Lacoste, 85, had a vision for her funeral, with a packed sanctuary, a gorgeous coffin and multiple soloists. When she was buried on May 7, 10 family members attended.

Family had been able to say their goodbyes to her in hospice, dressed in full protective gear.

It was unclear whether she knew in those last days that her husband, Wilbert, had died of the virus just a couple of weeks earlier.

Bessie Lacoste was cremated. A daughter delivered the prayer at the graveside, the pastor of Lacoste’s church having himself succumbed to the virus.

Mischell Davis, a granddaughter, sang an old hymn, one that has long been heard at New Orleans funerals: I’ll fly away, oh, glory I’ll fly away When I die, Hallelujah, by and by I’ll fly away

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

9

Hasidic school with 60 children is closed for violating virus ban

By LIAM STACK and NATE SCHWEBER

T

he buses arrived early Monday to drop off dozens of children at a Hasidic school in Brooklyn.

Neighbors watched with alarm as the children, few of them wearing masks, filed into the building, crowded into classrooms and played on the roof at recess in violation of public health orders that have kept schools across the state closed since March.

“It was definitely a regular day for them, like business as usual,” said Joe Livingston, who lives across from the school building in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. “That’s dangerous.”

The police brought the school day to an abrupt end around noon, after a neighbor who had seen the children playing on the roof called 311, officials said. Officers found about 60 children at the school, and quickly sent them all home, Sgt. Mary Frances O’Donnell, a police spokeswoman, said.

The dispersal of students from the yeshiva was the latest of several episodes that have ignited tensions between the authorities and Hasidic Jews since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Although the virus has killed Hasidic Jews at a rate that public health data suggests may exceed the rates for other ethnic or religious groups, social-distancing rules have repeatedly been broken in areas where Hasidim dominate, especially at activities like weddings, funerals or religious education.

Friction between the community and the authorities boiled over last month after 2,500 mourners packed the streets in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn for a funeral that drew a sharp rebuke from Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The mayor went to Brooklyn to personally oversee the dispersal of the funeral crowd, and he later vowed to enforce social-distancing rules more vigorously.

Two days later, the police issued five fire code violations and six summonses after officers found large groups of worshippers hiding in two Hasidic synagogues in Williamsburg, Congregation Yetev Lev D’Satmar and Congregation Darkei Tshivo of Dinov.

The doors at both synagogues were chained shut and black garbage bags covered the windows, the police said.

There were more than 100 children spread between two rooms at one of the synagogues, a law enforcement official said.

On Monday, de Blasio said the city would move to ensure that the school in Bedford-Stuyvesant did not reopen as long as the state’s stay-at-home order remained in effect.

Hasidic groups say a small minority of the community is responsible for the violations, and they bristle at the attention the incidents have received from elected officials and the news media.

But as the pandemic has continued, Hasidic parents in Brooklyn have increasingly complained that yeshivas are secretly operating again. In the tight-knit community, they say, that creates strong social pressure to send their children into crowded classrooms despite the advice of

A yeshiva school in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section. public health officials.

“Parents who try to keep their children home are faced by the dilemma of letting their child be the only one who’s not joining the class, which is obviously extremely hard and can have a serious social effect for years to come,” said one parent in Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood, who declined to be named because he feared retaliation.

Building records indicate that the school visited by the police Monday, Nitra Yeshiva, may be affiliated with the Nitra sect of Hasidim. But a spokesman for the Yeshiva of Nitra Rabbinical College in Mount Kisco, New York, a center for the sect, said he did not know anything about the BedfordStuyvesant school.

Avrohom Weinstock, associate director of education at the Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish umbrella organization, said there were “no excuses” for a yeshiva to violate the stay-at-home order, even though many Hasidic families feel under strain.

Weinstock said his organization had been in touch with the school’s administrator who told them “no formal classes were held.”

“He said that individual students were studying together on their own accord, and with masks and extreme social distancing in place,” Weinstock said. “I can’t comment on the facts as we were not present, but felt it was important to convey another side to this story.”

Most of the students found at the school appeared to be teenagers, and no summonses were issued to anyone on the premises, O’Donnell said. Neighbors said that Monday had been the first day in weeks that students arrived at the yeshiva, which made little effort to conceal their presence.

The students arrived in a small fleet of buses, a sight that Livingston found jarring after so many weeks of quiet. Another neighbor said his apartment offered a clear view through the school’s windows, which were uncovered all morning.

He said he had seen dozens of students in classrooms, which reminded him of the bustle of the school in January.

Few of the students were wearing face coverings, and many of those who were had them pulled down beneath their chins, he said.

“It just seemed like they were trying to see what they could get away with,” he said. “It’s not safe.”

Tommy Leonard, who lives next door to the school, shook his head as he recounted seeing the buses roll up, the students pour into the school and, eventually, a television news helicopter hovering overhead as the police shut the yeshiva down.

“No masks or nothing, just jumping off the bus and into the school,” Leonard said. “Of course it’s unfair, everyone’s wearing masks but not them.”

He added: “It’s terrible.”

10

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Isolated Key West will reopen. For some people, it will be too late.

By FRANCES ROBLES

H

eather Schrater can be found each day at the front door of Two Friends Patio Restaurant, beside bottles of hand sanitizer and a touchless thermometer she uses to check customers’ temperatures.

The tables have been sanitized and rearranged to ensure social distancing, but these days the restaurant is usually empty.

Outside, the Jimmy Buffett songs that normally permeate the Key West air have been replaced with the constant roar of asphalt rollers — it turns out there is no better time than a pandemic to repave deserted streets.

The casualties of two months of coronavirus lockdowns are visible: Around the block, many shop windows on the Duval Street tourist strip are covered in brown paper. Other retail businesses have put out handwritten signs: “Everything must go!”

“I go back and forth on it,” Schrater, a bartender, said of reopening amid an ongoing pandemic. “But we need the business.”

After nearly two months with the only access roads closed off by checkpoints, the Florida Keys will reopen to visitors June 1, officials announced Sunday night.

To stop the spread of the virus from more heavily affected cities further north, the archipelago in southern Florida has been blocked off since late March to anyone who does not work or live there. Hotels were ordered closed, and passengers who flew in through the airport were screened and instructed to self-quarantine for two weeks. The isolation measures were among the strictest in the country.

The actions worked: The Keys had just 100 COVID-19 cases and three deaths, according to data from the Florida Department of Health. The three counties to the north that make up South Florida — Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach — had a total

of more than 25,000 cases and 1,000 deaths. But as officials make the preparations to take the roadblocks down and open a tourist town to tourists, there is little agreement on what is the best course. Critics worry that the consequences will be severe; others say the economic price paid has already been too high.

Jessica Haim, who owns five retail shops on Duval Street, filed a lawsuit arguing that the “military-style” roadblock was illegal and ineffective.

Nothing prevented people in the Keys from driving to Miami, getting infected and coming back, her lawyers, Angelo M. Martin and Alan A. Fowler, argued in court papers. Nor were workers who live in other counties tested for illness as they drove through the checkpoint.

Business owners, said Haim, were all the while becoming increasingly desperate.

“We were at our wit’s end,” she said. “I was getting two to three dozen emails a day from people that were telling me: ‘We burned through our savings. We can’t wait another week. We’re waiting on food lines four days a week to feed our families.’”

Scott Atwell, the vice president and CEO of the Key West Chamber of Commerce, said at least 20 businesses have failed, and electric company records suggest that the number may be closer to 60.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘devastating,’ but for some people, it’s been devastating,” he said. “They had to pack up. They just couldn’t make it.”

Atwell said that the lack of cruise ship passengers has been particularly problematic for many businesses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a no-sail order that prohibits cruise voyages for the time being.

Most people supported the shutdown — for a while, he said.

“People’s patience had waned,” Atwell said. “They understood, had done their part, but it was now time to get back open or

After nearly two months with the only access roads closed off by checkpoints, the Florida Keys will reopen to visitors on June 1, officials announced Sunday night.

risk economic catastrophe.”

Tourism is a $2.4 billion business in the Florida Keys, and about 44% of jobs are related to that industry. The region was able to bounce back from past crises, such as hurricanes, because the rest of the country was not affected and continued to travel. But business owners say they cannot survive on locals’ dollars alone.

More than 5 million people normally visit each year.

Heather Carruthers, the mayor of Monroe County, where the Florida Keys are located, said that the decision to reopen was hard, because it was clear that it was precisely because of the strict measures that the county was able to keep the virus at bay.

But as the infection rates in Miami and Fort Lauderdale have improved, she said, it became clear that the Keys had to come up with its own “new normal.”

“I have to say, it’s probably one of the toughest decisions we have ever had to make as a county,” Carruthers said. “First, closing the Keys to visitors was heartbreaking. We knew what an impact that would have on our locals, and it’s not who we are. We’re the ‘come as you are’ county.”

Airport screenings will also end June 1. Lodging establishments will have to submit a sanitation plan in order to reopen, and hotels will be allowed to book only at 50% capacity.

Jason G. Barnett, who owns the Artist House, a bed-andbreakfast in Key West, said he had not yet decided whether to reopen in June. If strict COVID-19 guidelines mean he cannot serve a delicious buffet breakfast or have a daily happy hour, and that he can rent only three of seven rooms, is it worth it?

“We are not reopening unless our guests and employees are safe, and I have all different concerns about that,” he said. “My gut is telling me this is a terrible idea. I pray for us, because I don’t think this is going to end well for us.”

Florida began reopening May 4, though at the time, that excluded Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, which experienced the brunt of the pandemic and remained on lockdown a little longer. Palm Beach County restarted businesses last week, and Miami-Dade and Broward counties on Monday.

Beaches are open throughout the state, except for MiamiDade and Broward. Across the state, movie theaters, bars, nightclubs and theme parks remain closed.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has asked theme parks to submit plans for safely getting back to work and play.

“We wanted to make sure that we were proceeding very methodically, driven by data,” DeSantis said at a news conference in Orlando on Monday.

He said a spike in coronavirus cases in Miami-Dade over the weekend happened because a private lab reported hundreds of positive test results that were three weeks old.

He added that clusters of infection at prisons and especially nursing homes have been to blame for recent increases in the number of cases. Virtually all of the most recent cases in the Florida Keys are tied to a single nursing home.

Zulma Segura, who owns Bliss Restaurant in Key West, decided she was not going to wait to see what happened with infection rates. After shelling out more than $10,000 in rent for the months she was closed and $400 every month for electricity, she closed her restaurant, the end of an 11-year run.

“It’s not safe for service, not safe for cooks, not safe for anybody,” she said. “I feel like everybody’s attitude is, ‘If it doesn’t work and we all get sick and die, hey, we went for it.’”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

11

‘Way too late’: Inside Amazon’s biggest outbreak more to fill orders. Bezos told investors that pay increases, safety measures and testing efforts would cost more than $4 billion this quarter.

Still, toilet paper and jigsaw puzzles almost vanished from the site, and the 100 million American households that are Prime members watched Amazon struggle. Finding a balance between meeting the promise of one- or twoday delivery and keeping employees safe has been a challenge for the company ever since.

At the 600,000-square-foot warehouse where Kelly worked, in Hazle Township, products shipped from China and elsewhere are removed from trucks and broken down into smaller packages that are trucked to Amazon’s other facilities for shipment to shoppers. Safety measures began arriving at the warehouse in mid-March, but they were introduced without rigor. When a team that oversaw safety protocols posed for a photo March 17, wearing green

An Amazon executive said that the warehouse is in a region with a high infection rate and that he didn’t think employees had caught the coronavirus at work.

By KAREN WEISE

T

herese Kelly arrived for her shift at an Amazon warehouse March 27 to find her co-workers standing clustered in the cavernous space. They were awaiting a buildingwide announcement, a rarity at the complex known as AVP1. Over a loudspeaker, a manager told them what they had feared: For the first time, an employee had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Some of the workers cut short their shifts and went home. Kelly, 63, got to work, one of the hundreds of thousands of Amazon employees dealing with the spike in online orders from millions of Americans quarantined at home.

In the less than two months since then, the warehouse in the foothills of the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania has become Amazon’s biggest COVID-19 hot spot. More employees at AVP1 have been infected by the coronavirus than at any of Amazon’s roughly 500 other facilities in the United States.

Local lawmakers believe that more than 100 workers have contracted the disease, but

the exact number is unknown. At first, Amazon told workers about each new case. But when the total reached about 60, the announcements stopped giving specific numbers.

The disclosures also stopped at other Amazon warehouses. The best estimate is that more than 900 of the company’s 400,000 blue-collar workers have had the disease. But that number, crowdsourced by Jana Jumpp, an Amazon worker, almost certainly understates the spread of the illness among Amazon’s employees.

Amazon saw the pandemic up close before many American companies. In early February, it fretted about its global supply chain and consulted an infectious-disease specialist. Based in Seattle, an early epicenter of the outbreak, the company told its 50,000 employees there to work from home starting March 5.

About that time, Amazon was hit by a massive wave of orders, a surprise surge the likes of which it had never experienced. Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and chief executive, called it “the hardest time we’ve ever faced.”

The company paid workers extra to stay on the job and announced that it would hire 175,000

The warehouse’s loading docks remained busy in late April without social distancing, an Amazon worker wrote on Facebook. for St. Patrick’s Day, its members stood right next to one another, without social distancing. Yellow tape marked off 6-foot increments on a main walkway, but many people worked much closer together, Kelly said, “just like every other day.”

On April 1, Kelly, who had worked at the warehouse for nine years, noticed that four hand sanitizer pumps affixed to a pole were empty.

Later that day, feeling ill with a scratchy throat, she left work early. She tested positive for COVID-19 a few days later.

Dave Clark, who runs Amazon’s global operations, said in a statement that “we were earlier than most when rolling out broad protec-

tive measures for our teams, and we’ve adapted every day to make improvements.” He pointed out that the warehouse is in a region with a high community infection rate and said he didn’t think employees had caught the virus at work.

“We believe our efforts are working,” Clark said.

But workers and community leaders began worrying early on that Amazon wasn’t doing enough.

The company in February began consulting with Dr. Ian Lipkin, an infectious-disease specialist at Columbia University, who advised introducing checks for fever, social distancing and other measures.

“They wanted to stay ahead of the science as best they could,” Lipkin said.

Still, some standard safety advice didn’t become common practice at AVP1 for almost two months, according to interviews with six workers, community advocates and elected officials, some of whom asked that their names not be used for fear of retribution.

In the dark early morning of April 11, trucks from a pest control company pulled into the facility’s parking lot. A team in hazmat suits wearing respirators sprayed disinfectant fog in the building between shifts.

There were other safety improvements.

Where two people once had moved a stack of 10 empty pallets, one person instead moved five at a time. Managers told workers to tip and slide heavy items instead of lifting them with another person. Masks were required.

Still, by late April, a few places could still be too congested for employees to feel safe. One worker told colleagues in a Facebook group that social distancing was practiced everywhere but the busy area near the loading docks known as End of Line. Another wrote that she had seen 25 people working face to face across pallets, grabbing products to prepare for shipments.

“If anyone is going to get infected, it’s going to be from tonight,” she wrote in a Facebook post. She later said she had told a manager, who spaced people out more.

Since Kelly returned to work in late April, she has often worked almost 11-hour shifts — overtime to make up for some lost pay while she was out sick.

She said she was glad to see some work stations had been removed while she was away, because they had been too close together. And some workers had been hired just to refill all the sanitizer bottles.

“It’s just way too late,” she said.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Stocks

Euro gains on EU recovery-fund plan, oil wavers

T

he euro and European government debt rallied on Tuesday, lifted by a Franco-German proposal to fund grants for regions hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic, while oil traded mostly higher on growing demand as countries eased business lockdowns.

A gauge of global equity markets retreated late in the session after Wall Street skidded on a report from medical news website STAT that said Moderna Inc did not provide enough critical data to assess its potential COVID-19 vaccine.

Moderna shares closed down 10.4% after surging 20% on Monday when it said a small-early stage trial showed promising results, news that rallied equity markets around the world.

Gold prices rose as some investors sought the safehaven asset on recession fears after a 30.2% decline in U.S. housing starts in April, the biggest percentage drop on record.

Permits for future construction tumbled, adding to data showing the pandemic will drive the deepest U.S. economic contraction in the second quarter since the Great Depression.

The euro rose 0.05% to $1.0918, paring gains on the Franco-German plan for a 500 billion euro European Union recovery fund was announced on Monday.

“The Franco-German proposal represents a material step forward towards harnessing joint fiscal capacity to provide sustained fiscal stimulus to support the economic recovery,” said Lee Hardman, currency analyst at MUFG. Spanish and Portuguese government bond yields fell after a big drop in Italian yields on Monday.

Europe’s STOXX 600 index slipped 0.61% after the worldwide surge in equity markets on Monday. But MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe shed 0.21%.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 390.51 points, or 1.59%, to 24,206.86. The S&P 500 lost 30.97 points, or 1.05%, to 2,922.94 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 49.72 points, or 0.54%, to 9,185.10.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told U.S. lawmakers that the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed in March was “critical” to the Fed’s ability to expand credit to offset the economic blow from the coronavirus.

U.S. Treasury yields were lower. The benchmark 10year yield slid 4.9 basis points to 0.6931%.

Crude oil prices traded higher most of the session but Brent eased toward the end.

U.S. crude rose 68 cents to settle at $32.50 a barrel, while Brent fell 16 cents to settle at $34.65 a barrel.

U.S. gold futures settled 0.6% higher at $1,745.60 an ounce.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

13

Italy’s great beautification: Hair salons are back

By JASON HOROWITZ

A

s Italy further loosened Europe’s first lockdown against the coronavirus and allowed restaurants, bars, churches and stores to open, Lucilla Vettraino went directly to her hair salon.

“I look like a witch with this hair!”

Vettraino, 78, said Monday as she held strands the color of Campari.

She said she had washed, colored and then color-sprayed her hair at home during the more than two-month lockdown. But as the coronavirus ravaged Italy, she said she was “desperate” to reconnect with her stylist behind the Pantheon.

Vettraino secured a salon appointment for the next day. Then she held up her hands in disgust.

“Look at these nails,” she said. “I called my aesthetician and I couldn’t get an appointment until June 26!”

Across the globe, the coronavirus has revealed structural inequalities, the resilience of humanity and the weakness of health care systems. But it has also demonstrated that personal grooming is really central to a segment of society.

That passion for primping is often sharply felt in Italy, where — amid fights between the national and regional governments, concerns about a resurgent epidemic and fears of a coming economic catastrophe — Italians greeted Monday’s opening as a chance for the Great Beautification.

Italy is a capital of coiffuring, with 104,000 hair salons and tens of thousands more beauty parlors for nail care, eyebrow threading, body waxing and massaging, according to a government study by the agency representing the Chamber of Commerce.

European countries with similar population sizes to Italy have significantly less access to embellishment. The United Kingdom has less than half as many hair and beauty salons, and France has only 85,700 hair salons, according to official numbers.

Roberto Papa, secretary-general of Confestetica, an association that represents nearly 20,000 of Italy’s 35,000 beauticians, said his members had packed agendas, with manicures, pedicures and body waxing most in demand.

“Summer,” he said.

But many beauticians remained worried about the longer term outlook, lead-

A hairdresser open in Milan, Monday, after over two months of closure due to the coronavirus. ing Confestetica to lobby lawmakers to consider their treatments as “essential, not superfluous” in order to reduce a tax on the services by half. “They reflect people’s needs,” he said.

Giorgio Gori, mayor of the northern town of Bergamo, among the places hardest hit by the virus in Italy, seemed to agree.

“Now it’s really phase two,” Gori wrote on Facebook, where he documented the phases of his own haircut.

On Monday, clients and owners said that the simple pleasure of the salon returned a measure of normalcy after such long, destabilizing months.

Italy has officially lost more than 32,000 people to the virus, the most behind the United States and Britain, but the real toll is considered much higher. Italians have been forced to endure not only the lethal virus, but a constant barrage of government decrees, followed by often contradictory information from regional or municipal governments, which variably found the national measures too reckless or

conservative.

The national papers have become social calendars seeking to explain to citizens the lockdown relaxation dates for what they could and could not do, where they could and could not go, and whom they could and could not see.

On Monday, Italy allowed unlimited travel within individual regions. Businesses opened up across most of the country in an effort to revive an economy that is estimated to shrink this year by at least 8%, the largest drop since World War II. “We are facing a calculated risk,” Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said in a Saturday night news conference announcing the measures. He said that while the data over the last two weeks, since Italy began loosening its lockdown, had been “encouraging,” the government remained aware “that the epidemiological curve could go back up.”

But many restaurants decided not to open because rules requiring tables to be 6.5 feet apart would make it impossible to

turn a profit. And the coffee shops where Italians love to gather at the bar resembled banks, with baristas looking like tellers behind tall sheets of plexiglass.

“It’s really difficult,” said Andrea Salvatore, 30, who worked a cash register behind plexiglass at Tazza d’Oro, a famous coffee bar often packed with tourists, especially Chinese visitors. It was empty.

But the salons had customers. Roberto Perilli worked the door of his salon like a promoter at a velvet rope, checking names, and temperatures, of guests who came in.

He said he was booked for the upcoming weeks. But he was more worried about what the months ahead held. He could now see a dozen clients daily with social distancing measures — down from about 40 a day before the virus — and was not sure that would be enough for his business to survive.

Some aestheticians said the phones had been ringing off the hook.

“They’d call and say, ‘you don’t know how much of a pleasure it is to hear you,’” said Sabrina Angelilli, owner of I Barberini Beauty & Relax in Rome’s Monteverde neighborhood.

“I’m so happy,” said Cristina Gerardis, 47, who had her nails painted red by a beautician in a visor on the other side of a plexiglass wall at BAHR (Beauty, Ablution, Hair, Relax). When the government announced the opening, “the first thing I did was make an appointment at the hair salon and the aesthetician,” she said.

Laura Foglia, 70, a former model, who had her nails done in a Milan salon, said that what she missed most during the lockdown was her weekly manicure and hair appointment.

“I had to spend three whole months with my natural curly hair,” she said, “I hate curly hair.”

And especially in Milan, where people like to see and be seen, aperitivo bars on Monday hoped a more dolled-up clientele would draw more business. Some patrons were doing their part and then some.

Elisa Panteghini, 54, who drank white wine with a friend at Milan’s Grapes bar, said she hadn’t yet gone to the salon, but had found time to visit her plastic surgeon for a consultation on an upcoming eye lift.

“Today was a great day,” she said. “I saw what freedom looks like again.”

14

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Merkel, breaking German ‘taboo,’ backs shared EU debt to tackle virus

Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed to a $545 billion pandemic recovery fund backed by borrowing by the entire bloc and it would be a major step toward greater European unity.

By STEVEN ERLANGER

F

aced with economic calamity and the threat of the coronavirus further fracturing the European Union, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany on Monday broke with decades of German economic orthodoxy and agreed to back the idea of collective European debt to help those countries that have been hit hardest by the pandemic.

If the other member states agree to the plan, it would be a major step toward a more unified Europe and a sign that the pandemic might actually bring the bloc closer together instead of splintering it.

Merkel joined with President Emmanuel Macron of France to propose borrowing 500 billion euros, or $545 billion, for a common recovery fund. Its repayment would be the financial responsibility of the entire bloc, but it would primarily benefit the poorer south, which has been hit hardest by the virus.

Such a joint approach to borrowing has long been resisted

by Germany and other member states in the north, and that reluctance has proved an obstacle to further European integration.

In recent years, the European Union has been battered by a series of challenges that have shaken its foundations, from the migrant crisis to the exit of Britain from the bloc. Now, the pandemic is further dividing it, prompting border closures within the bloc and severely damaging the economies of member states.

Southern states have been turning to Brussels for help and pushing better-off countries like Germany and the Netherlands for less selfishness and greater collective action. Back home in coun-

tries like Italy, where many feel abandoned by their neighbors, anti-European and populist sentiment has spiked markedly.

In the face of this emergency, Macron said, Europe’s two big powers have agreed to try to patch the deepening cracks and pull the bloc together with “a real common strategy to supplement our European budget.”

“This is a major step,’’ he said.

Mujtaba Rahman, chief European analyst for the Eurasia Group, said, “It’s a European revolution — if it goes through.”

For the first time, Rahman said, Europe will be able to “raise money and transfer it directly to the countries, regions and industries most in need, without further impairing their economic situation by increasing their debt.’’

Although the proposal represents a significant shift in German thinking, Merkel described it as a “one-off effort,’’ with Germany agreeing to a plan whereby the European Commission, using its excellent credit rating, would borrow money for the fund. The debt would be paid back over time through the joint EU budget, which is financed by a set formula by member states.

“We are experiencing the biggest crisis in our history,’’ Merkel said in a joint video news conference with Macron. “It is time to fight back. Germany and France are fighting together for the European idea.”

She added: “Because of the unusual nature of the crisis we are choosing an unusual path.’’

For Merkel, the proposal holds political risks at home, where it might bolster the far-right Alternative for Germany party, founded on a euroskeptic platform. That party is just beginning to stir back

to life as the country reopens.

But the move might also be the only way to salvage a deeply divided currency union and the chancellor’s legacy on European unity.

The proposal must be agreed to by the other 25 member states of the bloc, some of which have flatly rejected collective indebtedness in the past. Austria has already suggested that it and countries like the Netherlands want to help the afflicted states only with loans, not grants, as called for in Monday’s proposal.

“There is still work to do,” Macron acknowledged. “But it is a profoundly unprecedented step.”

Details of the plan were scare Monday, but the leaders said that the money would be provided to the sectors of the economy and the regions the worst affected by the virus. That would include countries like Italy and Spain, whose borrowing costs are much higher than countries like Germany.

Those receiving the funds would not be responsible for repaying them, Macron said. That would be the responsibility of the European Union as a whole through its joint budget.

Both Merkel and Macron underscored that all the member states of the bloc must agree to the proposal, with the specifics of the plan to be worked out by the European Commission.

But traditionally, any joint French-German agreement carries enormous weight inside the bloc because they are the largest economies and have even more influence now that Britain has left.

Criticism, if not outright opposition, is likely to emerge from the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden or Austria, considered fiscal hawks. In the past, they have often hidden behind Germany in opposing collective European bonds.

The bold move by France and Germany was an attempt to resolve a deadlock faced by the commission and its president, Ursula von der Leyen, who has been struggling to come up with a European recovery fund that would get consensus. The commission said last week that it was unlikely to have a proposal ready for member states until May 27.

Macron, in a rare moment of modesty, noted that the commission would soon make its own proposals and said, “We hope that the French-German deal will help.’’

Von der Leyen said in a statement that she welcomed “the constructive proposal made by France and Germany” because it “puts the emphasis on the need to work on a solution with the European budget at its core.”

But then she added a sharp word of caution and asserted her role, saying: “This goes in the direction of the proposal the commission is working on, which will also take into account the views of all member states and the European Parliament.”

Henrik Enderlein, president and professor of political economy at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, said in a Twitter post that the proposal indicated that collective European debt, a long-held “taboo,” for German politicians, “could become reality.”

This, Enderlein said, could signal a “Hamiltonian moment” for Europe. The federal assumption of state debt engineered by Alexander Hamilton played a crucial role in forming a collective identity for the United States in its early days.

“What matters most today,’’ Enderlein went on, “is that France and Germany have agreed that in a crisis the EU can issue its own debt at a large scale. The political signal here is that the EU is more than a grouping of nation states and has its own federal identity.’’

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

15

Toronto was obeying social distance rules. Then came adorable baby foxes.

By CATHERINE PORTER

A

crowd of people bunched shoulder to shoulder one recent spring day on a boardwalk overlooking Lake Ontario. They leaned over a waist-high fence, taking pictures with their phones.

Only one wore a mask.

Seriously, Toronto?

Canada’s largest city has been under coronavirus lockdown since mid-March. Mayor John Tory was the first to go into self-isolation, and the rest of Toronto — a city known for adhering to the rules — soon followed.

So that scene at the boardwalk?

There was a baby fox, you see — a whole family of foxes, in fact, newly taking up residence beneath the boardwalk.

For a few weeks starting in April, it seemed as if all anyone was talking about, other than the virus, were the foxes — mom, dad and four kits. Or was it five? No one was really sure.

There were reports of people picking up the kits and hand-feeding them. Paparazzi assembled at dusk and dawn, hunting for shots of the kits in the honey light beloved by both photographers and, it turns out, foxes. They made the national news.

At first, they were a welcome distraction. But they quickly became a full-on attraction.

“I watched a lady trying to take a selfie with the fox in the background,” said Erwin Buck, a retired advertising executiveturned-local-photographer who lives nearby. “People have been locked up for the last six to seven weeks and this is the first excitement they’ve seen. They go overboard.”

The poets and philosophizers of Toronto think there is more behind the city’s captivation with the fox family.

They are wild and free, when the rest of us feel trapped. They are new, beautiful life, while we are transfixed with death. And they offer hope that maybe we can make it

A family of foxes play outside of a den their family set up under the boardwalk at Woodbine Beach in Toronto.

through these hard times.

Foxes, after all, are highly adaptable, able to flourish in almost any environment. In literature, they are the classic tricksters, emerging unscathed from every deadly snare.

“They are full of courage, full of wit, full of resource and unremitting effort to survive,” said Al Moritz, Toronto’s poet laureate.

“We want to protect these foxes,” said Mary Lou Leiher, a manager with the city’s animal services department. She noted that in Toronto, a provincial law ensures the protection of wild animals unless they are destroying private property, which these foxes are not.

City workers put up a bigger fence around the fox den.

Then, they extended it all the way down to the water, so the foxes had their own private beach.

Soon after, volunteers with the Toronto Wildlife Center, a local charity that rehabilitates sick and injured wild animals, swooped in. They were concerned that the animals were becoming habituated to human contact, which could prove their undoing: If they scratch or otherwise injure a human, the city would euthanize them and test their brains for rabies, Leiher said.

So the volunteers replaced the fence along the boardwalk with an even taller one, and wrapped it in green cloth, and the foxes were spared not just reaching hands but prying eyes.

As a rule, Canadians have deep respect and fear of wild animals, grown from living in a country of vast forests and few people. The country’s literature is filled with stories of Young foxes playing outside their family den, located wolves and bears; Canadian coins are stamped with caribou under the boardwalk, at Woodbine Beach. and beaver.

But inside city limits, there’s a different calculus. In Toronto, wildlife is mostly derided as pests that dig up freshly planted bulbs (squirrels), jimmy open city compost bins and strew the smelly contents everywhere (raccoons), or — worst — eat beloved pets (coyotes).

Still, in the midst of pandemic, Toronto seems open to making an exception for foxes.

“The fox is a little flash of beauty and resourcefulness,” said Moritz, the poet laureate. “It manages to live in alleyways and backyards. It’s a fugitive and it’s lovely.”

It is also a little more discreet than some of its fellow urban wildlife.

“Foxes are typically more shy and not as obvious,” said Burton Lim, assistant curator of mammalogy at the Royal Ontario Museum, and one of the authors of Toronto’s guide to local mammals — which, incidentally, has a fox on its cover. “They aren’t rummaging around in garbage cans like raccoons, but they are still eking out a living in the city,” hunting mice and birds.

But jogging by their den one morning, it occurred to me that in our efforts to protect the foxes, we had locked them into their own quarantine.

Had we made them a whole different symbol for the pandemic? Would they be able to fox their way out?

“The fox is put here to test us,” said Stephen Knifton, who works in documentary video and also jogs by the lockdown den every day. “To see if we can be civilized and rational about this pandemic.”

In other words, to remain polite, rule-following Torontonians.

16

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Super cyclone bears down on India and Bangladesh

By SAMEER YASIR and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

A

crushing cyclone barreled up the Bay of Bengal on Tuesday, heading for a swampy stretch along the border of India and Bangladesh and threatening to unleash 165 mph winds and massive floods when it makes landfall Wednesday.

As the cyclone, Amphan — categorized by Indian meteorologists as equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane — neared the coastal areas, hundreds of thousands of people in India and Bangladesh were bracing for the worst and had started moving toward emergency shelters.

In the eastern Indian state of Odisha, authorities have fewer shelters to work with because many have been turned into COVID-19 quarantine centers. Indian officials are now struggling to evacuate people and prepare for floods and destruction while still under a partial lockdown to fight the coronavirus. Humanitarian officials are worried that by packing people into shelters, coronavirus infections could spread even further.

Satya Narayan Pradhan, chief of India’s National Disaster Response Force, said the incoming storm could “wreak havoc.”“We must take it very seriously,” he said.Indian officials said the storm was one of the most dangerous super cyclones to hit India in decades, since a cyclone in 1999 killed more than 9,000 people. That storm packed winds of more than 170 mph, devastating many states along India’s coast.

Since then, authorities in India

A satellite image of Cyclone Amphan over the Bay of Bengal on Sunday. and Bangladesh have significantly improved their emergency response measures, drafting meticulous evacuation plans and building thousands of sturdy emergency shelters, some of which can accommodate several thousand people each.

Last year, Indian authorities whisked more than 1 million people out of the path of a huge storm, deploying millions of text messages, tens of thousands of volunteers, nearly 1,000 emergency workers and television commercials, coastal sirens, buses, police officers and public address systems.

Many scientists believe that climate change and warmer temperatures are making these superstorms even worse.

In Bangladesh, officials said the

storm could bring slashing rains to the muddy, wooden shacks of about 1 million Rohingya refugees living in Cox’s Bazar. Those refugees fled ethnically driven massacres in Myanmar in 2017 and have been rendered stateless, stuck in limbo in squalid camps in Bangladesh that have been flooded time and again.

Many people in Bangladesh, apparently, are not heeding the calls to evacuate and move into emergency shelters, despite being told about the risks.

“There is a sense fear among people,” said Selim Shahrier, a station manager at a community radio station in southwestern Bangladesh. “They hesitate to leave their belongings.”

Cyclone Amphan is expected to make landfall Wednesday afternoon,

and the storm surge is likely to inundate low-lying areas.

“Our lives have always been filled with fear,” said Arjun Mohanty, a teacher in the Bhadrak district of Odisha, where the government had turned a shelter into a quarantine center for suspected COVID-19 cases. “First it was coronavirus, now the storm wants to kill us.”

In eastern India on Tuesday, emergency crews dressed in orange jumpsuits prowled coastal areas, blaring messages from megaphones that urged people to move into shelters as soon as possible. Indian television channels showed footage of the crews moving from place to place, as behind them, the sea was whipped into a whitegreen froth.

Indian officials also sent fleets of buses to scoop up vulnerable people and bring them to the shelters, which are stocked with water and food.

The storm is likely to cause extensive damage to crops, houses, power lines and vegetation, Indian officials said.

Fierce winds and intense rains have already pounded the southern Indian state of Kerala, uprooting trees, knocking down electricity poles, ripping the tiles off the roofs of many homes and damaging a famous temple.

Eashwari Thampan, a shopkeeper in the Kottayam district of Kerala, said she was sitting at home with family members when a tree crashed on their roof. Her family, she said, ran for their lives.

“The wind was so strong it felt as if it was going to take us with it,” Thampan said. “We thought all of us would die.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

17

The phony Coronavirus class

By MICHELLE GOLDBERG

A

Washington Post article Sunday described people in a posh suburb of Atlanta celebrating liberation from coronavirus lockdown. “I went to the antique mall yesterday on Highway 9 and it was just like — it was like freedom,” said a woman getting a pedicure.

“Yeah, I’m going to do the laser and the filler,” said a woman at a wine bar, looking forward to cosmetic dermatology. “When you start seeing where the cases are coming from and the demographics — I’m not worried,” said a man lounging in a plaza.

Only one person was quoted expressing trepidation: a masked clerk in a shoe store. “I live an hour away and was driving in this morning, only me on the road, and I was thinking, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’” she said.

Protesting coronavirus restrictions in Harrisburg, Pa., on Friday.

Lately some commentators have suggested that the coronavirus lockdowns pit an affluent professional class comfortable staying home indefinitely against lege degree, there are naturally many such people among the lockdown protesters. a working class more willing to take risks to do their jobs.

But it’s a mistake to treat the growing ideological divide Writing in The Post, Fareed Zakaria tried to make sense over when and how to reopen the country as a matter of class of the partisan split over coronavirus restrictions, describing a “class divide” with pro-lockdown experts on one side and rather than partisanship. The push for a faster reopening, even those who work with their hands on the other. On Fox News, in places where coronavirus cases are growing, has signifiSteve Hilton decried a “37% work from home elite” punish- cant elite support. And many of those who face exposure as ing “real people” trying to earn a living. In a column titled they’re ordered back to work are rightly angry and terrified.

Because here’s the thing about reopening: It’s liberation “Scenes From the Class Struggle in Lockdown,” The Wall to some, but compulsion to others. If your employer reopens Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan wrote: “Here’s a generalizabut you don’t feel safe going to work, you can’t continue tion based on a lifetime of experience and observation. The to collect unemployment benefits. In The Texas Tribune, a working-class people who are pushing back have had harder waitress in Odessa spoke of her fear when she was called lives than those now determining their fate.”

The assumptions underlying this generalization, how- back to work at a restaurant that hadn’t put adequate social ever, are not based on even a cursory look at actual data. In distancing measures in place. “It scared me, so I left,” she a recent Washington Post/Ipsos survey, 74% of respondents said. “Then I had to remember that if I do quit, I would have agreed that the “U.S. should keep trying to slow the spread of to lose my unemployment.”

Meatpacking workers have been sickened with corothe coronavirus, even if that means keeping many businesses navirus at wildly disproportionate rates, and all over the closed.” Agreement was slightly higher — 79% — among country there have been protests outside meatpacking plants respondents who’d been laid off or furloughed.

Researchers at the University of Chicago have been demanding that they be temporarily closed, sometimes by the tracking the impact of coronavirus on a representative workers’ own children. Perhaps because those demonstrators sample of American households. They’ve found that when have been unarmed, they’ve received far less coverage than it comes to judging policies on the coronavirus, “politics is those opposed to lockdown orders.

Indeed, across America there’s been a surge in labor the overwhelming force dividing Americans,” and that “how activism as people made to work in unsafe conditions stage households have been economically impacted by the COVID strikes, walkouts and sickouts. “It sounds corny, but we’re crisis so far” plays only a minimal role. moving towards a worker rebellion,” Ron Herrera, president Donald Trump and his allies have polarized the response to the coronavirus, turning defiance of public health direc- of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, told the Los tives into a mark of right-wing identity. Because a significant Angeles Times.

Meanwhile, financial elites are eager for everyone else chunk of Trump’s base is made up of whites without a col-

to resume powering the economy. “‘People Will Die. People Do Die.’ Wall Street Has Had Enough of the Lockdown,” was the headline on a recent Vanity Fair article. It cited a banker calling for “broad legal indemnification for employers against claims related to the virus” so that employees can’t sue if their workplace exposes them to illness. Here we see the real coronavirus class divide.

In some ways I can relate to the exultant Georgians who’ve decided to deny the danger of coronavirus. I too hate life under lockdown and I yearn for some social distance from my children; every day I scan the news for information about whether schools will reopen in the fall. I’d love a pedicure, or a drink with a friend.

And I know that plenty of people desperate to escape these grim new limits on our lives have far more urgent needs: to save a business or support their families.

But when it comes to the coronavirus, willingness to ignore public health authorities isn’t a sign of flinty working-class realism. Often it’s the ultimate mark of privilege.

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Wednesday, May 20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

We should help workers, not kill them

A food bank line in Brooklyn.

By PAUL KRUGMAN

A

s far as I can tell, most epidemiologists are horrified

by America’s rush to reopen the economy, to abandon much of the social distancing that has helped contain COVID-19. We know what a safe reopening requires: a low level of infection, abundant testing and the ability to quickly trace and isolate the contacts of new cases. We don’t have any of those things yet.

The epidemiologists could, of course, be mistaken.

But at every stage of this crisis they’ve been right, while predictions of a quick end to the pandemic by politicians and their minions have proved utterly wrong. And if the experts are right again, premature opening could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths — and backfire even in economic terms, as a second wave of infections forces us back into lockdown.

So where is the push to reopen coming from?

Some of it comes from right-wing crazies. Only a small minority of Americans believes that freedom includes the right to endanger other people’s lives (which is what congregating in large groups in the midst of a pandemic does); that wearing a mask is un-American, or unmanly, or something; that COVID-19 is a hoax perpetrated by liberals.

But that minority has huge influence within the Republican Party.

Some of it comes from Donald Trump’s obsession with the stock market. His initial refusal to do anything to prepare for the pandemic reportedly reflected concern that any acknowledgment of the threat would “spook the market.” And the push to reopen may similarly reflect a belief that going back to normal life would be good for the market, even if it kills many people. Let’s die for the Dow! One thing I keep hearing, however, is that we must reopen for the sake of workers, who need to start earning wages again to put food on their families’ tables. So it’s important to realize that this is a really bad argument.

For America is fully capable of shielding workers idled by the lockdown from severe economic hardship. As Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, said in a TV interview aired Sunday, we can and should pursue policies that “keep workers in their homes, keep them paying their bills. Keep families solvent.”

And the somewhat surprising fact is that we’re already doing a lot of that. The CARES Act, the $2 trillion disaster relief bill enacted in late March, greatly expanded both eligibility for unemployment benefits and the generosity of those benefits. And those expanded benefits are, despite

early stumbles, increasingly doing what needs to be done.

It’s true that when claims for unemployment benefits began surging in March, unemployment offices — which are run by individual states — were overwhelmed, so that many Americans who were entitled to benefits simply couldn’t get through. And many families still aren’t getting what they should.

Even so, a Brookings Institution study suggests that in April unemployment benefits offset about half the wages lost because of the lockdown — an estimate that matches my own back-of-the-envelope calculations.

And this “replacement rate” has almost surely increased substantially in recent weeks. Unemployment offices are gradually catching up on their backlog, so that benefits are reaching a rising number of unemployed workers. At the same time, the available evidence suggests that labor markets more or less stabilized, at least for now, around a month ago.

So it’s a good bet that at this point most though not all of the loss in wages caused by social distancing is being offset by increased government aid. That’s a largely unheralded success story; most media attention has focused on other parts of the CARES Act, especially small-business support, which is a shambles.

But unemployment assistance, after a troubled start, is doing a lot to help American workers. And credit should go to Democrats, who insisted that this aid be part of the package.

I suspect that the success of unemployment aid helps explain a key feature of the politics of reopening — namely, that the clamor to end restrictions isn’t coming from workers. Job losses have been concentrated among lower-paid workers; but polling suggests that the demand for faster opening is coming largely from high-income Republicans.

So we’ve done a much better job than I think most people realize of protecting American workers from hardship in a time of lockdown. Of course we haven’t been completely successful, and the first few weeks were very rocky.

There is, however, a lot less suffering than you might expect given a true unemployment rate that’s probably around 20%.

But the expanded unemployment benefits that are doing so much good are set to expire on July 31. That should scare you.

Suppose, after all, that the epidemiologists are right, and that premature reopening leads to a second wave of infections. What we’ll need in that case is a second lockdown. But all indications are that Republicans are totally opposed to extending benefits.

What they want, instead, is legislation that would protect businesses from liability if their employees get sick.

That is, they want to force Americans to go to work even if it kills them.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

19

Informe del Inspector General revela irregularidades en sistemas de CESCO Por THE STAR

U

n examen realizado por la Oficina del Inspector General de Puerto Rico (OIG), encontró irregularidades y alteraciones en los sistemas de un Centro de Servicios al Conductor (CESCO), por parte de un exdirector quien pudo haber utilizado su posición para, expedir, renovar licencias de conducir y tarjetas de identificación sin los documentos requeridos y sin el pago de derechos, alterar los documentos sometidos y eliminar multas sin efectuar el pago correspondiente, trascendió el martes.

Según reza un parte de prensa, la evaluación realizada a los documentos, y la información recopilada durante el examen, es relevante, significativa y suficiente para fundamentar las posibles irregularidades, por lo que se realizó un referido al Departamento de Justicia y la Oficina de Ética Gubernamental.

El examen se realizó conforme a los poderes y facultades que le confiere la Ley Núm. 15-2017, según enmendada, conocida como la “Ley del Inspector General de Puerto Rico”.

Del informe se desprende que preliminarmente un funcionario gubernamental, del CESCO del municipio de Utuado, emitió un comunicado al director ejecutivo de la Directoría de Servicios al Conductor (DISCO), en el que denunció que el exdirector del CESCO de ese pueblo, facilitó servicios a los contribuyentes excluyendo disposiciones reglamentarias y directrices de la agencia. Se alegó que el exdirector del CESCO, trató de borrar información para omitir datos y de ese modo, expedir las licencias o documentos aún, cuando no cumplían con los requisitos.

Conforme a la prueba que obra en el expediente, el exdirector del CESCO pudo haber cometido, entre otras, posibles violaciones a la Ley Núm. 22-2000, según enmendada, conocida como “Ley de Vehículos

y Tránsito de Puerto Rico”, delitos tipificados en Ley Núm. 146-2012, según enmendada, conocida como “Código Penal de Puerto Rico”, y a la Ley Núm. 1-2012, según enmendada, conocida como “Ley Orgánica de la Oficina de Ética Gubernamental de Puerto Rico”, por lo que la OIG realiza los respectivos referidos.

No es la primera ocasión en que se conoce de posibles irregularidades por parte de funcionarios que trabajan con transacciones de servicios en los centros de servicio al conductor. Por lo que la OIG, recomendó al

secretario del DTOP a que se realice un análisis exhaustivo de los sistemas de información que permita fortalecer los accesos y registro de las transacciones que realizan por parte los empleados o personas autorizadas.

El recaudo de fondos a través de los centros DISCO, son parte de las fuentes de ingreso al erario y es necesario garantizar que los empleados trabajen bajo los más altos parámetros de controles internos.

Por existir referidos a otros entes y salvaguardar el proceso, no es posible abundar en mayores detalles.

CEE inicia los preparativos para el plebiscito Por THE STAR

T

ras la firma de la Ley 51-2020, conocida como “Ley para la Definición Final del Estatus Político de Puerto Rico” a los fines de disponer las reglas para la celebración de un plebiscito el 3 de noviembre de 2020 la Comisión Estatal de Elecciones (CEE), informó este martes, que comenzó con los preparativos para la planificación del evento.

Según un comunicado de prensa, de conformidad con el Artículo 4.4 de la Ley 51, supra, el Presidente de la CEE debe realizar un sorteo público “para determinar los emblemas y el orden de las posiciones en

que aparecerán las alternativas en las columnas de la papeleta”.

Para cumplir con esta responsabilidad jurídica, se informó que el próximo martes, 26 de mayo de 2020, a las 9:00 a.m., se realizará este sorteo en el segundo piso de la sede administrativa de la Comisión Estatal de Elecciones. Siempre guardando todas las medidas de seguridad y distanciamiento social requeridas por el ordenamiento vigente.

El sorteo será transmitido en vivo por las redes sociales de la CEE, cumpliendo con la Ley Núm. 51, supra, que requiere que el sorteo esté abierto al público en general.

20

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

‘Stargirl’: A hopeful hero born of real-life tragedy

By GEORGE GENE GUSTINES

A

new generation of champions emerge in “Stargirl,” the CW’s latest entry into the superhero genre.

The TV series stars several DC Comics heroes led

by Stargirl, who is based on the comics character created by Geoff Johns. She is a teenager named Courtney Whitmore (Brec Bassinger), who teams with her seemingly not-so-cool new stepfather, Pat Dugan (Luke Wilson), to hunt down the villains who wiped out an earlier group of heroes, the Justice Society of America.

But her motive is not purely altruistic: Courtney believes her father, who disappeared the day the team died, may have secretly been one of the crime fighters.

Along the way, she finds new heroes to inherit the Society’s capes and cowls.

“The idea of legacy is front and center,” said Johns, who wrote the pilot and serves as showrunner, his first time overseeing a series. “Stargirl” premieres Monday on DC Universe and Tuesday on the CW. Johns created Stargirl in his first comic book series, Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E., from 1999. The character was informed partly by Star Spangled Comics from 1941, which featured a child hero and adult sidekick. “I’ve always been a fan of finding these old, kind of forgotten or overlooked ideas from DC’s history and polishing them up,” he said.

The other inspiration was more personal: The character is named after Johns’ sister Courtney, who died in the explosion of TWA flight 800 in 1996.

“I took my love for my sister and DC Comics and combined the two,” he said.

In a recent telephone interview, Johns talked about his sister, his stint as an assistant to film director Richard Donner and his love of comic book lore. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: What aspects of your sister Courtney did you put into Stargirl?

A: My sister was a ball of energy and so optimistic and unafraid. I wanted to try to capture some of that in a character that would be around forever.

Q: Is giving the character flaws difficult since she is based on your sister?

A: No, my sister had plenty of flaws, but also the character, once you start to write her, takes on a life of her own. I find Courtney to be one of the easiest characters to write because she’s always going to try; to me, that is a really inspiring trait. She sees the potential in this old sidekick Pat Dugan where others haven’t. She sees potential in the high school kids who have been overlooked that she recruits into the Justice Society. She finds value in people that others have dismissed.

A new generation of champions emerge in “Stargirl,” the CW’s latest entry into the superhero genre.

Q: You wrote the part of Pat Dugan, the stepfather, for Luke Wilson. Why did you have him in mind?

A: When I first came to LA, I saw “Bottle Rocket” and I just fell in love with him as an actor. He brings this real grounded earnestness and likability and humbleness.

And he’s funny! So when I was writing Pat Dugan, I always envisioned him. When I wrote the pilot, I sent him the script. We ended up having lunch together and he came with all these hilarious ideas about one of the other characters in the series, Pat Dugan’s son, Mike (Trey Romano), who’s like this 45-year-old man in a 14-year-old body. He even picked the Johnny Cash song in Episode 2.

Q: A version of Stargirl appeared in a 2010 episode of “Smallville” that you wrote. What is different about how Brec Bassinger embodies the character?

A: It was fun to see Stargirl onscreen for the first time, but it was very different because she was a supporting character. Thematically, this is a very different experience. We’re lucky to have found Brec — she came in and delivered the emotion, the warmth, the drama, the comedy and the strength that Stargirl and Courtney needed.

Q: The cast of “Stargirl” is notably diverse. Was that a priority?

A: Our lead is Stargirl, so, you know, I do not have

to wave a flag to say, “Look, we have a female lead!”

But it was important to have a diverse set of characters around her, and I wanted to take characters from the comics that I loved and some I never had a chance to write. Yolanda Montez/Wildcat [played by Yvette Monreal] was killed off early in the comics and was forgotten about, as was Beth Chapel, the new Doctor Midnight (Anjelika Washington). Both characters had a lot of untapped potential. The other thing about Yolanda and Beth and even Rick Tyler (Cameron Gellman) is that they’re not super defined in the lore, so it gave us the latitude to make the best versions for this show.

Q: This is your first time as a showrunner. What was that like?

A: It was an incredible learning process. I moved to Atlanta for production because I wanted to make sure that our tone was proper, that we were protecting the scenes we needed to and that the directors and everyone understood what we’re trying to accomplish. We tried to raise the bar on production, too — I wanted to bring a cinematic look and feel to the show. I hope we can do many more seasons of it.

Q: Did your time as Richard Donner’s assistant influence how you approached this production?

A: I was his assistant on “Conspiracy Theory” and “Lethal Weapon 4” and I was on set, and his attitude was amazing. I learned from some of the best people: from Dick to Patty Jenkins to Greg Berlanti and so many others. I co-wrote “WW1984” with Patty and Dave Callaham, and it was one of the most intense and fun experiences I’ve had writing. I’ve worked with Greg on TV since he was developing “Arrow.” We developed “The Flash” together and “Titans” with Akiva Goldsman and we’ve worked on several other DC shows. Greg’s passion and experience were invaluable during “Stargirl.”

Q: Does your approach to writing change when you’re doing a comic or a TV show?

A: With comic books, you have a finite number of pages and a finite number of panels. There is no budget, but there are limitations to what you can do in terms of the format. You can’t do silent moments as much because it eats up so many pages. With TV, you definitely have budget constraints. Once you figure out how to write within the budget, it gets easier.

Q: What’s the geekiest thing that you’ve included in the series?

A: There’s a lot of stuff in the JSA headquarters that digs really deep. Our goal was to embrace the material, from the opening scene, with our version of the swamp creature Solomon Grundy, to the pink pen carrying the magical Thunderbolt. When we get into the Seven Soldiers, that digs deep. But we try to do it in a way that is emotionally relevant. It wasn’t just throwing in Easter eggs; everything is a story to be told.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

21

America’s first concert in months rocks an Arkansas stage

By BRET SCHULTE

T

ravis McCready sang “Riders,” a song about perseverance, on Monday in a former Masonic Temple as Americans returned to hear live music in a concert hall for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic pulled the plug on the nation’s entertainment industry.

“I think this means hope to a lot of people,” said Lance Beaty, the president of the company that owns the venue in Fort Smith, Temple Live. “This is an experiment, though, on how does that work.”

The concert offered a preview of what music fans may expect from an industry struggling to find a path forward in the age of social distancing. Forget arenas roiling with sweating, screaming fans. Here, concertgoers were required to buy seats in clusters, or what promoters call “fan pods” — presumably a group of friends comfortable being in proximity — with scores of empty seats roped off on all sides to ensure space between strangers. Of the 1,100 seats available, just 20% were available for sale.

Planned tours of superstar acts like Taylor Swift, the Black Keys and Bob Dylan remain mothballed, but Dave Poe, a New York-based concert promoter and a co-founder of the Independent Promoter Alliance, called Monday night’s event “a great jump-start to the industry.”

Outside the concert hall, LaLisa Smiddy and Marcy Randolph, best friends from Duncan, Oklahoma, embraced the return of live music. Smiddy and Randolph, both 53, drove almost four hours with a homemade sign to hear McCready. It read “Okies (HEART) Travis and Van,” a reference to the musician’s Great Dane. The sign whipped in the wind as they stood in their face masks and waited for their temperatures to be taken.

“We’re happy to be here,” Smiddy said. “I’m one of the more paranoid ones out there, and when I saw everything this venue has done, I was ready to come. I think they’ve done an outstanding job.”

Many fans said they were ready for some semblance of regular life, even though the coronavirus pandemic had made this concert unlike any they had ever attended. For Daniel Neathery, 33, of Benton, Arkansas, the new normal meant having to buy six tickets — at $20 a pop — an entire fan pod, even though he came alone.

“For me it was worth it to have some normalcy,” he said.

Texas, Missouri and other states are also gradually reopening entertainment sites and bars, with restrictions.

Poe predicted it would be smaller venues like Temple Live that are the first to reopen because of lower operating costs, fewer staff members and the hesitation of some top-billed artists who work the larger arenas to expose themselves and their fans to the coronavirus.

“With the economy being the way it is, and ticket prices the way they are,” he said, promoters “are going to aim for smaller capacities to start out. It’s a regional, slow process at this point. I don’t see national tours happening.”

The economics of a show that prioritizes social dis-

tancing played out here, as a full staff of nearly 30 employees worked a house that was 80% empty. Ushers, wearing masks, guided patrons through the hallways to enforce one-way traffic flow. Others monitored the bathrooms to enforce social distancing. Two bartenders worked each service station — one to exclusively handle money, the other dedicated to food and beverage.

Even with the show selling nearly all its available tickets, Beaty said he lost money on the night. “It’s clearly not a financial decision that we did this,” he said.

At the door, fans received not only a temperature check, but also a mask if they did not have one, and they were required to wear them throughout the show. Yellow caution tape partitioned the red velvet seats. Bathroom sinks and urinals were taped off so that patrons never got too close. Arrows on the floor guided one-way traffic.

Dots indicated 6-foot distances.

Monday’s concert was the culmination of a showdown between the operators of Temple Live and Gov. Asa Hutchinson that drew national attention to Fort Smith.

The McCready concert was originally scheduled for Friday, three days before the date the governor set to reopen indoor venues such as theaters, arenas and stadiums in Arkansas — and then only with audiences of 50 people or fewer.

Temple Live representatives argued that, with appropriate safety measures, they should receive the same, more lenient standards of houses of worship.

“If you can go to a church and it’s a public assembly, there is no difference,” said Mike Brown, a representative for Temple Live. “How is it OK for one group to have a public meeting, and it’s not OK for a music venue to have the same opportunity?”

State health officials argued that a concert was more dangerous because it was likelier to attract out-of-state visitors and soon issued a cease-and-desist order. When promoters refused to back down, authorities seized the Temple Live liquor license last week.

At a news conference Thursday afternoon, Beaty argued that his constitutional rights had been trampled but said he was helpless to fight.

“I guess the governor wants me to say … ‘We will move the show,’ ” he said. “Is that what you want to hear?

We will move the show. I hope you’re happy.”

Apparently, the governor was. After conceding defeat, Temple Live had its liquor license returned and the seating capacity of 229 approved for the Monday night show.

The McCready concert doesn’t mean the entertainment industry will come roaring back any time soon. Audrey Fix Schaefer, a spokesman for the nascent National Independent Venue Association, said she did not know of any significant concerts planned by its 1,600 members.

“There are some folks in places where they could restart shows but they don’t feel ready, because they want to make sure it’s done in a way that’s safe,” Schaefer said.

The industry generally remains fearful of its financial health because of widespread closures, bills to pay, and

LaLisa Smiddy drove several hours from her home in Oklahoma to attend the concert in Arkansas, the first since the coronavirus pandemic shut down live millions in revenue lost in refunds to customers for canceled shows.

Schaefer’s organization, formed in March, hired the white-shoe lobbying firm Akin Gump to lobby Congress for financial support. “We were the first to close,” Schaefer said, “and we will be the last to open. We have zero revenue right now.”

In Fort Smith at times on Monday night, the monitoring and safety precautions designed to comfort health officials and music fans gave the rock concert an elementary school feel.

Fans, though, said it didn’t affect their experience. “I don’t think that would discourage anybody who’s a fan of live music,” said Jake Lung, 24, of Marked Tree, Arkansas.

Lung, a McCready fan, said he drove six hours to see the show. He was like many who said that, for all the hoopla about the virus and the first concert and the hurdles it had to clear, they had come for the music, not to make any statement about reopening the entertainment industry.

“He’s a genuine sweetheart,” Randolph said of McCready, whom she said she had met at a previous show.

“His voice is amazing and he has the best heart.”

FASHION The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, March May 4, 2020 Wednesday, 20, 2020 20 22

The TheSan SanJuan JuanDaily DailyStar Star

Amazon to the rescue of the fashion world!

By VANESSA FRIEDMAN

F

inally, Jeff Bezos is really in fashion.

Last week, Amazon rode to the rescue of the beleaguered U.S. industry — or at least one particularly challenged and particularly notable subsection: independent high-end designers.

Along with Vogue and the Council of Fashion Designers of America, the e-commerce giant announced the unveiling of “Common Threads: Vogue x Amazon Fashion,” a new storefront featuring 20 buzzy creative names, including Batsheva Hay, Brock Collection, 3.1 Phillip Lim and Edie Parker.

“I’m thrilled to announce this partnership and want to thank Amazon Fashion, not only for its generous support of ‘A Common Thread,’ but also for so quickly sharing its resources to aid American designers affected by the pandemic,” said Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue and Condé Nast’s artistic director.

“While there isn’t one simple fix for our industry, which has been hit so hard, I believe this is an important step in the right direction.”

The move will create a new outlet for brands that are at risk of bankruptcy after COVID-19 forced the closing of the stores that sell them, resulting in canceled orders and piles of unsold stock. Even luxury etailers like Net-a-Porter have had to close their warehouses.

But it also positions Amazon, which may be the largest fashion retailer in the United States but is often seen as, if not an enemy, at least a questionable suitor when it comes to the designer world, as its white knight. And the move gives Bezos a certain sway over a community that, until now, was largely suspicious of him.

But the ethos of Amazon — “the everything store” — has never mixed well with that of the fashion week flock, which may best be characterized as “only a few, very special, things,” just as its shopping “environment” never seemed sufficiently glamorous to many luxury brands. Though their products were sold on the Amazonowned Zappos or Shopbop, those brands shied away from being sucked into the parent company’s maw.

Danielle Romanetti, at work on a sock project at her yarn shop, Fibre Space, in Alexandria, Va. That did not stop Amazon from trying.

In 2011, the company introduced myhabit. com, a flash-sale site meant to compete with sites like Gilt Groupe. That closed in 2016, the year after Amazon teamed up with the CFDA to sponsor the first New York Men’s Fashion Week (a relationship that ended in 2017). That same year Amazon Fashion went all in with private label clothing, a category that now includes 111 different labels and 22,617 products, according to a report from Coresight Research.

On an investor call in 2016, JeanJacques Guiony, chief financial officer of LVMH, the largest luxury group in the world, announced: “We believe that the existing business of Amazon doesn’t fit our luxury, full stop, but also doesn’t fit with our brands. If they change the business model, I don’t know, but with the existing business model, there is no way we can do business with them for the time being.”

Still, WWD reported in January that Amazon was planning a new luxury platform to compete with the Alibaba Tmall, along with a $100 million marketing campaign; and as recently as February, Bezos was at Paris Fashion Week celebrating Diane von Furstenberg’s Légion d’Honneur with Wintour and designers like Christian Louboutin.

Now the novel coronavirus pandemic has changed the playing field.

Amazon, Hay said, “is the one place everyone is shopping.” (Indeed, Bezos is potentially on his way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire because of it.)

Whether they like it or not, designers, especially small ones, have no real choice. They need to move their existing inventory, and they need a partner with the logistics to do it. And one that has access to an enormous ready-made consumer base.

The idea for the storefront came out of an initiative created by Vogue and the CFDA, who have been working together on ways to support the industry through the pandemic. Last month they announced the Common Thread grant program, raising over $4 million to be disbursed in small increments to designers, retailers, garment manufacturers, as well as the fashion support system to help them survive until reopening.

Amazon is donating $500,000 to the fund (for which many of the designers it will sell have also applied), and when Amazon asked how else it could help, the storefront idea was born.

As to what exactly it is: The designers can choose what inventory to sell on Amazon (most likely a mix of current and past

stock), and they control their own pricing and imagery. They can opt to use Amazon’s fulfillment platform or do the fulfillment themselves. The standard third-party selling fees — typically around 17% — apply.

According to one participant, however, Amazon agreed to eliminate monthly fees, warehouse fees and packaging fees for the initiative.

Vogue and the CFDA initially approached most of the designers about the deal because, as Hay pointed out, Amazon “doesn’t have much of a relationship with many of these brands.”

Now, of course, that will change. “It does feel like lot of things are shifting in the world,” she said.

Whether those shifts include a customer who wants to buy an irony-laden prairie dress (Hay’s signature) or a very expensive unique floral dress (a trademark of Jonathan Cohen) at the same time and in the same place that she buys toilet paper and nail polish remains to be seen.

After all, at the time of the Common Threads store opening, the three current top-selling items on Amazon, in clothing, shoes and jewelry, were a men’s T-shirt multipack, a Hanes men’s sweatshirt and a classic Croc. Even in the private label offering, the average price tag is only $32, according to Coresight.

And many shoppers attracted to the idea of supporting small designers are attracted specifically by their de facto positioning as the anti-Amazon. Now that these brands are a part of the Amazon universe, it could affect how they are perceived, as could the recent controversies around Amazon’s treatment of its warehouse employees.

That’s especially so because, even though the designers may control their own products and how they are photographed, the clothes are pictured on the shop “racks” in the classic Amazon square with the same typeface and price tag (albeit a much bigger number) that everybody who uses Amazon is conditioned to seeing when they buy, say, Clorox.

On the other hand, this could also be the beginning of high fashion’s slide down the slippery slope into Amazon’s waiting arms.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

23

ACLU warns against fever-screening tools for Coronavirus

A woman’s temperature was measured by an infrared thermometer as she entered a government hospital in Mexico City this month.

By NATASHA SINGER

A

irports, office buildings, warehouses and restaurant chains are rushing to install new safety measures like fever-scanning cameras and infrared temperature-sensing guns. But the American Civil Liberties Union warned Tuesday against using the tools to screen people for possible coronavirus symptoms, saying the devices were often inaccurate, ineffective and intrusive.

In a new report, “Temperature Screening and Civil Liberties During an Epidemic,” the ACLU said that such technologies could give people a false sense of security, potentially leading them to be less vigilant about health measures like wearing masks or social distancing. The group also cautioned that the push for widespread temperature scans during the pandemic could

usher in permanent new forms of surveillance and social control.

The organization’s advisory reflects a wider tension in the United States over concerns about reopening the economy at a time when the virus is still spreading undetected in various regions of country.

In particular, the report said that infrared temperature-sensing guns can be unreliable partly because they gauge skin temperature, in contrast to oral thermometers, which calculate core body temperature. The guns provide a superficial measure, the report noted, that can vary if a person is sunburned, is sweating or has just come in from outside.

Similarly, the report said that many free-standing thermal cameras, which gauge a person’s temperature at a distance, can be inaccurate, finicky and may need to be frequently

recalibrated.

Even if the temperature-scanning tools were more accurate, however, the ACLU said they could miss many people who were infected with the coronavirus but not running a fever.

“Nobody should imagine that blanketing our public spaces with thermal sensors is going to serve as any kind of effective automated ‘COVID detection network,’” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU, wrote in the report, “or that this technology is likely to contribute significantly to stemming the spread of the virus.”

Recent studies have reported that as many as a quarter of people infected with the novel coronavirus, or perhaps even more, do not exhibit fever or other symptoms. Even so, guidelines on reopening the economy from the White House ask companies

to monitor workers for symptoms like fevers. The idea is that such screening might at least reduce the risk of coronavirus outbreaks in the workplace.

To meet surging demand from factories, warehouses and office buildings, technology-makers haven been rushing to market a range of thermal cameras as coronavirus fever-screening tools. Companies have been encouraged to do so by the Food and Drug Administration. The agency said in April that it would temporarily allow device-makers to market thermal cameras, which have not been vetted by federal health regulators, for temperature checks in places like warehouses and factories.

But IPVM, an independent site that tests surveillance cameras, reported this year that numerous makers of temperature scanners had overstated their accuracy or made false claims.

Among other things, the site identified systems that automatically adjusted people’s temperatures to put them in the normal range or that failed to detect high fevers. The site also found companies that were marketing heatsensing tools designed simply to detect the presence of humans, or for fire detection, as fever-screening devices.

“A core issue is there are no independent tests of thermal camera performance,” IPVM said in a recent overview of the technology. “This has allowed manufacturers to tout products meant for body/fire detection as a fever solution, or falsely claim pinpoint accuracy at long distances.”

In its report, the ACLU recommended that public health experts study the effectiveness of temperature-scanning technologies “to determine if the trade-offs are worth it.”

Otherwise, the group said, the feverscreening systems should not be deployed.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers a lower-tech solution: “Ask employees to take their own temperature either before coming to the workplace or upon arrival at the workplace.”

24

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Deep in the cosmic forest, a black hole goldilocks might like

By DENNIS OVERBYE

S

even hundred and forty million years ago, a star disappeared in a shriek of X-rays.

In 2006 a pair of satellites, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s X-ray MultiMission (XMM-Newton, for short), detected that shriek as a faint spot of radiation coming from a far-off corner of the Milky Way. To Dacheng Lin, an astronomer at the University of New Hampshire who hunts black holes, those signals were the trademark remains of a star that had been swallowed by a black hole: an arc of leftover fire, like drool on the lips of the ultimate cosmic maw.

Such events tend to be perpetrated by supermassive black holes like the one that occupies the center of our own Milky Way. But this X-ray signal was not coming from the center of our or any other galaxy.

Rather the X-rays, the fading Cheshire cat smile of a black hole, perhaps were coming from the edge of a diskshaped galaxy about 740 million light years from Earth, in the direction of Aquarius but far beyond the stars that make up that constellation.

That meant that Lin had every reason to suspect that he had hooked one of the rarest and most-sought creatures in the cosmic bestiary — an intermediate-mass black hole.

The word “intermediate” might be a misnomer. If Lin was right, he (or, more to the point, that unlucky star) had stumbled upon an invisible sinkhole with the gravitational suction of 50,000 suns. He is the lead author of a paper, published in March in Astrophysical Journal Letters, that describes a cosmic ambulance chase.

Black holes are the unwelcome consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which explains gravity as the warping of space-time by mass and energy, much as a heavy sleeper sags a mattress. Too much mass in one place causes space-time to sag beyond its limit, trapping even light on a one-way tunnel to eternity.

Einstein disliked the idea, but astronomers have discovered that the universe is littered with black holes. Many are the remains of massive stars that collapsed after burning through their thermonuclear trust funds. Sometimes they collide, rippling space-time and rattling antennas like the LIGO gravitational wave detectors. These holes — the stellar survivors — tend to tip the scales at a few times the mass of the sun.

At the other extreme of cosmic extremities are supermassive black holes — weighing in at millions of billions of solar masses — squatting in the centers of galaxies. Their belches produce the fireworks we call quasars.

Nobody knows where these holes came from or how they get so big. Two years ago Australian astronomers discovered a black hole that was 20 billion times more massive than the sun, gorging itself back when the universe was only a couple billion years old.

Astronomers for years have sought the “missing link”

in this line of mythological-sounding monsters: black holes “only” thousands or hundreds of thousands of times more massive than the sun.

“Intermediate mass black holes are indeed fascinating, and in some sense these are becoming the frontier of black hole studies,” Daniel Holz, a University of Chicago astrophysicist who was not part of Lin’s team, said in an email.

We only notice black holes when they feed. Stellarsize black holes call attention to themselves as they cannibalize their companions in double star systems. Their supergiant cousins feed at troughs at the centers of big galaxies.

But intermediate black holes living in dwarf galaxies would normally find little to eat.

“We could only find them when gas and dust fall onto them,” said Natalie Webb, an astronomer at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie in Toulouse, France, a member of the XMM team and a co-author of the paper. “When this happens, they shine less brightly than the supermassive black holes, but they are usually just as far away (if not further), so they are usually too faint for our observatories.”

In effect they are only visible when they swallow a star, an event that occurs only once every 10,000 years in any particular galaxy, Webb said.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope and the XMM for more observations, Lin and his team traced the X-ray emanations to a dense knot of stars about 80 light-years wide that was far past the Milky Way. It was on the outskirts of a faraway galaxy named Gal1.

By coincidence, astronomers using the CanadaFrance-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea had recorded an outburst of light from that same spot in 2005. That was perhaps the first fatal bite.

A Hubble Space Telescope image around the field of J2150-0551.

Moreover, the knot of stars resembled precisely what astronomers thought the core of a small galaxy would look like if it had been swallowed by bigger one. It fit the notion that galaxies are assembled by mergers.

“This is good news, as it was thought that it is likely that intermediate-mass black holes are found in dwarf galaxies,” Webb said.

Back in the day, the black hole had been the center of its own little dwarf galaxy. Now it was an empty-nester, most of its stars gone. And it was on the way to an eventual marriage with the bigger black hole at the center of Gal1.

“Therefore, the new observations confirm the source as one of the best intermediate-mass black hole candidates,” Lin wrote in the recent paper.

Left unanswered is where such gigantic vortices of hungry nothing come from. The universe seems to come with some assembly required, and black holes are key, but astronomers are still struggling to put the parts list together.

Astronomers have a pretty good sense of how “ordinary” black holes, three to 100 times more massive than the sun, result from the collapse and explosions of massive stars.

But there has not been enough time in the history of the universe for such black holes to grow millions or billions of times bigger into the supermassive black holes we see today.

“They must have formed from something else,” Webb said, namely, intermediate mass black holes. Such holes would be dragged together as their home galaxies coalesced into ever bigger galaxies.

Lin agreed that it was “popular“ to believe that supermassive black holes can form from intermediate mass black holes, dragged together as their home galaxies collide and merge.

Less certain is where these medium-class black holes — too massive to result from the collapse of stars as we know them today — came from. One possibility, Lin said, was that they were created by runaway mergers of massive stars in star clusters.

Another idea, Webb said, is that they are left over from the first generation of stars in the universe. Astronomers have calculated that such stars, composed only of primordial hydrogen and helium fresh from the ovens of the Big Bang, could have grown much more massive than stars today and produced giant black holes capable of growing into the missing-link intermediate-mass black holes.

Indeed, some astronomers theorize, hugely dense clouds of primordial gas or dark matter could have collapsed directly into black holes, bypassing the star stage altogether.

Regardless, intermediate-mass black holes “are the missing link between stellar and supermassive black holes,” Holtz of Chicago said. “If we confidently detect this population, it will provide insights into how the universe makes all of its black holes.”

If not, he added, “theorists will need to work even harder to explain how a baby universe makes monster black holes.”

The San Juan Daily Star LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO

DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU-

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la descrita casa se la ha cons- LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. SS.

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truido una segunda planta toda EDICTO. vivienda. Finca 1497 inscrita

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ción II. La parte demandante alega que ci original del pagaré

se extravió y la deuda evidenciada y garantizada por el mis-

mo no ha sido saldada, según POR LA PRESENTE se le emconsta más detalladamente plaza para que presente al tri-

CIVIL NUM.: SJ2020CV01399.

en la Demanda presentada,

TUCIÔN DE PAGARE HIPO-

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POR

ESTADOS

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testar la demanda dentro del

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la contestación a través dcl

EDICTO.

DE

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A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE

Se le notifica que se ha presentado una Demanda en su contra

en este caso. En la Demanda se solicita se decrete judicialmente la sustitución de un (1) pagaré

hipotecario a favor de Oriental

Bank and Trust o a su orden, por la suma de $225,000.00, con interés a razón del 6.75% anual, vencedero el 1 de enero

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de 479.83 metros cuadrados y marcado con ci 36 del piano de inscripción de los terrenos de Rafael Bernabé. Colindante

por el Norte, en 13.00 metros, con la calle en construcción en

los terrenos del Doctor Rafael

Bernabé; por el Sur, en 13.47 metros, con la Urbanización El

Vedado; por ci Este, en 35.16

metros, con ci solar 38, propiedad hoy de Pedro Alicea Junior;

y por el Oeste, en 25.00 metros,

MAC), al cual puede acceder pr, salvo que se represente por utilizando la siguiente direc- derecho propio, en cuyo caso ción electrónica: https://unired. deberá presentar su alegación ramajudicial.pr/ sumac, salvo responsiva en Ia secretarla del

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CA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE

con rejas en todos los lados. A DE LOS EE.UU. EL ESTADO

@

tomo 297 de Toa Baja, Finca

17692. Registro de la Propie-

dad de Bayamón, Sección II.

La escritura de hipoteca consta inscrita al folio 15 del tomo 470 de Toa Baja, Finca 17692.

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enviando copia de la contestación a la abogada de la Parte Demandante,

Lcda.

Belma

Alonso García, cuya dirección

es: PO Box 3922, Guaynabo, PR 00970-3922,

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BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

PARTE DEMANDANTE VS.

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guiente propiedad: RÚSTICA: SALA SUPERIOR Parcela marcada con el núme- GUAS. ro ciento uno A en el plano de parcelación de la comunidad

rural Ingenio del barrio Sabana Seca del término municipal

de Toa Baja, con una cabida

superficial de cero cuerdas con mil quinientos cincuenta y

cuatro diezmilésimas de otra, equivalente a seiscientos diez

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DE

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en autos donde podrá usted

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de Puerto Rico, dentro de los

10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el proce-

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Wednesday, May 20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Stranded MLB prospects find a backyard of dreams

By ANNA KATHARINE CLEMMONS

D

anny Hultzen, a pitcher in the Chicago Cubs organization, was at the team’s spring training complex in Mesa, Ariz. on March 12 when he learned that all MLB practices and games had been paused indefinitely because of the coronavirus.

Almost immediately, Hultzen, the No. 2. overall pick in the 2011 MLB draft, thought of an offer from a friend.

Several years earlier, while training in Tempe, Ariz., Hultzen had met Seth Blair.

A first-round MLB draft pick in 2010, Blair had advanced as high as Class AAA before being released by the St. Louis Cardinals. He took a five-year break from baseball and returned in 2019, pitching in the San Diego Padres farm system.

“If you ever need to throw, just let me know — I’ve got everything in my backyard,” Blair had told Hultzen, referring to the 2,500 square feet behind his rental home in Scottsdale, Ariz.

So the next morning, Hultzen drove 2 miles from his apartment to Blair’s house.

As he walked into the backyard, Hultzen Danny Hultzen, a Chicago Cubs prospect, pitching from a makeshift mound in the Scottthought to himself, “Damn, this is all you sdale, Ariz., backyard of Seth Blair, right. need.” He saw the wooden mound covered with turf that Blair had commissioned a carpenter to build; the mat backstop On a typical day, the first trio of Purell and disinfecting wipes in hand. propped up against a giant trampoline be- pitchers arrives at 7:30 a.m. They each Franklin Van Gurp, 24, met Blair when longing to Blair’s 6-year-old son; a radar throw anywhere from 40 to 80 pitches, they were Class A teammates last year in gun; a projection board; and a Rapsodo before moving over to the weight area as Lake Elsinore, Calif. Van Gurp, who grew machine, which provides tracking data on the next group of pitchers arrives. That up in the Dominican Republic and now pitches. No frills, just the basics for a pro. usually includes Hultzen, who spends pitches in the Padres farm system, was “The whole ‘Field of Dreams’ con- his earliest morning hours working out in staying in his apartment in Scottsdale cept,” Blair said of his setup, laughing. another player’s backyard. when baseball stopped. He had utilized “Once I had a mound and a radar gun, Hultzen, 30, had battled injuries to Blair’s backyard early this year but started it didn’t matter that my pad was attached his left shoulder over the previous se- driving over daily once the Padres’ Cactus to a trampoline — it was somewhere you ven years, enduring multiple operations League training complex closed. could throw and talk to someone who’s before his first major league call up last A former catcher who switched to in the same process as you.”

September. If it weren’t for Blair’s offer, pitching in college, Van Gurp said he As March turned to April, other ma- Hultzen would have returned home to had found Blair’s throwing advice to be jor and minor league players in the area Bethesda, Md., where he wouldn’t have as helpful as his facilities. Van Gurp tylearned about Blair’s backyard — and the had access to a gym, much less a base- pically arrives with several Latin players unlikeliest of MLB training facilities was ball facility. whom he befriended during his time in born.

As many as 15 players cycle in three- the San Francisco Giants farm system.

Inside the open-air carport there, man shifts through Blair’s yard before Blair doesn’t speak Spanish, so Van Gurp Hultzen found a mini-gym, complete with dusk — though never more than five or serves as translator. That is, when he’s nea bench press, dumbbells and weighted six simultaneously, as per social distan- eded. plates. Small Bluetooth speakers broad- cing recommendations.

“Seth has such a good way of translacast music, and Blair’s son, Beckham, pla“I honestly don’t know everyone’s ting it that I barely have to say anything,” yed basketball at a mini-hoop while his name at this point,” Blair said.

Van Gurp said. “He’s like a coach. He has father pitched.

Still, he has welcomed everyone, with changed the way I think about how we

do things.”

The lessons appear to be working: Van Gurp said he had increased his fastball velocity from 96 mph to 103 mph (with a 3-ounce training baseball, not the roughly 5-ounce version used in games) while working in Blair’s backyard over the past two months.

Blair, 31, a hard-throwing right-hander, just wants to pitch well enough to sign with a team when baseball resumes.

His neighbors have sometimes wondered what was happening over the 5-1/2-foot fence that separates their properties. After one moved in recently, Blair lost a weighted ball in the person’s yard. He knocked on the front door as he heard several dogs barking. When the homeowner finally answered, she professed to be a major Los Angeles Dodgers fan and showed him a side door to use whenever he wanted to retrieve a ball.

Blair said his landlord, Tony Champy, doesn’t mind the visitors or the equipment pileup. The landlord’s nephew, Georges Niang, plays for the NBA’s Utah Jazz.

“So he gets it,” Blair said.

Barking dogs aside, the backyard has been an unexpected boon for its visitors, as players around the country try to find ways to stay in shape. Hultzen and Blair said they knew of only one or two nearby residents with a backyard mound, including Kansas City Royals pitcher Jakob Junis. Blair said Junis had the mound built after seeing his.

“I have buddies throwing off the backside of a barn or a field, or into a net in their tiny backyard,” Hultzen said. “I think there is a little bit of, ‘Damn, that’d be really nice to have!’”

And whether the players are trying to make a 40-man major league roster or simply hoping to return to baseball, the stripped-down environment has reminded them of why they play.

“For how terrible the overall situation is, it’s kind of taken us back to the days when we were 12, and you played because you loved it,” Hultzen said. “A couple of times, Seth and I have fielded ground balls with each other, and neither of us had done that since college. You don’t necessarily need the turf, the fancy field — you just need a bunch of baseballs and something to throw to.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

27

He had picked the last day of his career. Now it may never come.

By RORY SMITH

A

ritz Aduriz has thought, every day, about the goodbye he might never have. It is not his first thought: That, of course, is his family, his wife and daughters, locked down with him in their apartment in central Bilbao, Spain. It is not his priority: That is hoping the deaths cease, the coronavirus crisis eases, and one day they might all be able to go outside again.

But at times, his mind drifts, and he starts to wonder about his own, personal ending. He has, for some time, felt privileged.

Lucky, even. He is 39, almost impossibly ancient for a soccer player. His career as a striker stretches back almost two decades, far longer than he had ever thought possible. Last summer, though, he decided this would be his final season.

Aduriz knows that is not how it ordinarily works.

“Normally, football leaves you before you can leave it,” he said.

Aduriz, though, was able to choose his where and his when: at the end of his contract, on June 30, and at Athletic Bilbao, the club where he has spent most of his career, the club he could never quite leave.

“It feels like closing a circle, retiring at the same place where I started out,” he said. “I’ve been very fortunate.”

It had seemed clear for a while how it would end, too. Early in February, FC Barcelona visited Bilbao in the quarterfinal of the Copa del Rey. Athletic scored a late winner. The same night, Real Sociedad eliminated Real Madrid. In March, both teams booked places in the final, scheduled for April 18, in Seville.

This would be the perfect way to leave: a derby between the two biggest clubs in the Basque Country, the team Aduriz has devoted his life to against the team from San Sebastián, the city where he grew up, the team his wife’s family supports. Neither has won either of Spain’s major trophies since the 1980s.

Barely two weeks later, though, the game was postponed, indefinitely. The Spanish soccer authorities remain determined to somehow finish the country’s league season, but the fate of the cup final is a secondary consideration. Aduriz’s goodbye is on hold.

“It is possible, maybe even probable, that we cannot play,” he said. “Things are changing so quickly.”

Aduriz wonders, perhaps, if it might be better simply to fade to black. Besides,

Aritz Aduriz is still ready to retire. The pandemic may have stolen his chance to say goodbye. perhaps he has already had his moment; maybe what will be special about Aduriz’s last season will not be the final act, but the very first touch.

Back in August, a few days after Aduriz announced that he would retire, Barcelona came to Bilbao for the first game of the Spanish season. For 87 minutes, Aduriz sat and watched from the bench. The game seemed to be petering out into, for Athletic, a creditable stalemate.

A minute later, the ball was looping high into the air, into Barcelona’s penalty area. Nélson Semedo, the Barcelona defender, was running toward his own goal, unable to halt his momentum. Behind him, Aduriz, introduced for the final few moments, had stopped.

Aduriz had, by his own estimation, tried a thousand scissor kicks — what the Spanish call a chilena — during his career.

None, to the best of his recollection, had ever come off. He knew, deep down, that what he was trying to do was score “the sort of goal you dream about as a child.”

From the outside, it had the patina of a movie. Aduriz paused, the wily veteran proving to the young defender that sometimes stillness is as effective as speed. Stopping his run bought the space he needed.

He contorted his body, propelled himself into the air and swung his right foot.

Nine months later, Aduriz still insists he cannot adequately describe the feeling.

What he remembers, from that moment, is the celebration. He knew where his family was sitting in the tumult of San Mamés, Athletic’s stadium. His older daughter, Iara, had only recently started to realize “what football, what Athletic, meant.” He wanted to share the moment with her.

“It was very emotional, to see them jumping around,” he said. He blew a kiss into the sky. When he returned to the changing room, his teammates stood to sing his name.

If he has a regret from his final suspended season, it is that he has not scored again. He would have liked, he said, at least a couple more goals. But that has not diminished his enjoyment of his farewell tour.

He has tried to savor everything: the days spent at Lezama, Athletic’s training facility; the visits to the stadiums he would not play in again; the sound of San Mamés.

“I knew these moments would not come back, but that meant I could enjoy them more,” he said. “It has been more happiness than sadness.”

Through it all, he has been convinced that something special was waiting for him at the end. Long before Athletic qualified for the Copa del Rey final, he was telling his teammates that they could win something this season. That, to almost everyone in Bilbao, would have been the ending Aduriz deserved.

The bond between Athletic’s players and its fans is an uncommon one. The club is an exception in the hyper-globalized marketplace of world soccer in only recruiting players born or raised in the Basque Country. The policy means that players are only rarely, expensively and begrudgingly, allowed to leave. It gives the club the feel, Aduriz said, of a “neighborhood team taking on the world.”

Even by those standards, though, Aduriz is special. There is something in his story that makes fans hold him close to their hearts, that helps his people see something of themselves in him.

Perhaps it is that he was a late bloomer. As a child, his parents preferred to take him out into the Pyrenees for cross-country skiing, rather than allow him to play soccer. It was not until he was 19, late by most standards, that he was first noticed

by Athletic. It was only when he was 23, and had spent a season playing for Real Valladolid in Spain’s second tier, that he finally believed he could make a living from soccer.

Perhaps it is his longevity. Aduriz, a powerful, rangy, industrious striker, has seemed to get better with age, his scoring totals only really peaking as he reached his 30s. It was not until he was 35 that he staked a claim for a regular place on Spain’s national team. Along with Lionel Messi, he is the only player to have scored in 15 straight La Liga seasons.

Or perhaps it is the sense that he could never say no to Athletic, that it was his one true love. He was sold in 2004, only to return two years later. In 2008, he left again, hurt that Athletic felt Fernando Llorente was a better bet. He went first to Mallorca, then to Valencia. But in 2012, he came back again, this time for good.

The Copa del Rey final would have been the perfect denouement, a season that started with a Hollywood moment garnished with a cinematic climax. Aduriz, again, seemed to be living in a movie.

“Except,” he said, “it is a surreal movie, where at the end there is this sudden terror.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

US Golf Association cancels qualifiers for multiple tournaments

By BILL PENNINGTON

A

Gary Woodland celebrated winning the 2019 United States Open, held at Pebble Beach Golf Links in California.

cornerstone tradition of the U.S. Open was canceled Monday for this year’s tournament.

The U.S. Golf Association (USGA), which conducts the championship, determined that the vast system of qualifying rounds, which is held throughout the U.S. as well as in several other countries and customarily selects a wide swath of the field for its major tournament from thousands of entrants, was infeasible because of the coronavirus pandemic.

This year’s U.S. Open will host an all-exempt field. Players earn exemptions in myriad ways, like being in the top 60 of the world golf rankings, or being a past champion of the event or another major championship. The U.S. Open, originally scheduled for mid-June at the Winged Foot Golf Club in Westchester County, N.Y., was postponed last month to Sept. 17 to 20. Other changes to the tournament are being weighed, including a significant reduction in the number of fans allowed on the golf course or perhaps hosting the event without spectators.

Three other USGA championships will also be

held without qualifying rounds: the U.S. Women’s Open, which was postponed until Dec. 10 to 13, at the Champions Golf Club in Houston; the U.S. Women’s Amateur, scheduled for Aug. 3 to 9 at the Woodmont Country Club in Rockville, Md.; and the U.S. Amateur, which was scheduled for Aug. 10 to 16, at the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Bandon, Ore. “We take great pride in the fact that many thousands typically enter to pursue their dream of qualifying for a USGA championship, and we deeply regret that they will not have that opportunity this year,” said John Bodenhamer, senior managing director of championships at USGA. “Throughout the process, our primary focus has been the safety and well being of everyone involved, including our players, volunteers, host club representatives and staff.”

Bodenhamer added, “We have not taken these decisions lightly and wish we had more options.”

The USGA on Monday also canceled four other 2020 championships, which brought the number of canceled championships sponsored by the association to 10.

Michael Jordan’s game-worn sneakers sell for $560,000

By SANDRA E. GARCIA

B

eing like Mike comes with a high price tag these days.

A pair of Michael Jordan’s game-worn, autographed sneakers from his rookie season sold at an online Sotheby’s auction for $560,000 on Sunday, breaking the previous record for a sneaker, according to the auction house. Sotheby’s is not naming the buyer.

The red, white and black Nike Air Jordan 1s are the same color scheme as the Chicago Bulls uniform and sport Jordan’s autograph in black ink on an upper red leather panel. The sneaker is part of a signature line that Nike created for Jordan to persuade him to sign a sneaker deal with the sportswear company, Sotheby’s said.

The variations that differentiate this pair of sneakers from ones sold to the public in 1985 include the red laces — the others came with only black and white laces — a leaner and longer Nike check, and the materials used to make the shoe.

The sale took place on the same day as ESPN aired the finale of “The Last Dance,” a 10-part documentary about Jordan’s career.

The shoes were sold by Jordan Geller, a sneaker collector and the founder of the Shoezeum, a sneaker museum.

“These are the most iconic and coveted sneakers

of all time,” Geller said. “Owning this pair has been a real pleasure and with all the excitement surrounding Michael Jordan and ‘The Last Dance,’ my wife and I decided that it’s time to let the shoes find a new home.”

Geller created the record that the sale of the Air Jordan 1s broke. In 2019, he sold the Nike Moon Shoe, the prototype to the first waffle-soled shoe by Nike, at a Sotheby’s auction for $437,500.

This specific pair of Air Jordan 1s was the forerunner of the sneaker that was eventually sold to the public.

“I think that this sneaker holds a particular importance to sneaker heads,” said Brahm Wachter, Sotheby’s director of e-commerce development and the organizer of the sale. “The Air Jordan 1 helped bring about the hype and importance that sneakers have in the world.”

The sneakers were the inaugural pair in Jordan’s line with Nike. In 1985, the NBA informed Nike that Jordan’s shoes violated the league’s uniform policy and banned them from its games. Nike in turn created an ad campaign highlighting the ban.

In the ad, a young Jordan stares at the camera and bounces a basketball in place as the camera pans down to his feet. Censorship bars are superimposed over the sneakers and a voice says, “On Sept. 15, Nike created a revolutionary new basketball shoe. On Oct. 18, the NBA threw them out of the game. Fortunately,

the NBA can’t stop you from wearing them.”

The sneaker went on to earn $126 million in its first year, Jordan says in the documentary.

Nike created this specific pair of Air Jordan 1s for Michael Jordan as a way to persuade him to sign a shoe deal.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 20, 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

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

Your energy is too intense for some people’s taste. It’s possible they feel intimidated, even threatened, by your dynamism, fearing that you will step into their shoes. Flying beneath their radar is a good strategy. You don’t want to lose your job because of jealousy. Devoting more time to your favourite hobby will be a welcome diversion. If you’ve always wanted to learn how to paint, sculpt or make clothes, now is the time to do so. You will have great communication with your teacher and peers.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Getting attention has never been a problem for you. Thanks to your grace, good looks and sharp intellect, people are naturally drawn to you. Use your charisma to attract educational opportunities. Studying with a respected artist will be a strong possibility. A narrow minded relative will warn you against doing something new. Ignore their gloomy forecasts.

You’re smart enough to know that you make your own luck.

When you’re upbeat and excited, good fortune flows easily to you. Pessimism, on the other hand, deflects success.

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)

Avoiding the spotlight is a good move. Your willingness to attend to thankless jobs will earn the admiration of your boss and colleagues. Don’t be surprised if you are offered an exciting position as their assistant. You’ll acquire lots of valuable skills as a result. Having an accomplished employer will teach you important lessons about success. It will soon become obvious that anyone who brags about their abilities is desperately insecure. Truly gifted people let their work speak for itself.

You’re very sensitive now. That’s why it’s important to associate with positive people. Dealing with optimists makes it easy to see the golden opportunities available to you. These friends will make it easy to find a great job, helpful medical practitioner or talented stylist. It’s time to turn away a needy person who is always asking for loans and favours.

Continually meeting their needs is making them reliant. You shouldn’t have the responsibility for supporting this individual. Tell them to help themselves.

After dreaming about your ideal career, you finally have a chance to turn this fantasy into reality. Apply for a position in your desired industry. If your courage falters, recite positive affirmations in the mirror. Ask a loving relative for moral support. Be aware that your best friend or romantic partner feels threatened by your plans. Instead of getting encouragement from them, you’ll only hear dire warnings. Don’t let your other half drag you down. You are destined for professional success.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

When faced with difficult choices, it’s important to obey your conscience. If this means turning down a job or suitor, so be it. The last thing you want is to get involved with an unscrupulous company or rude romantic partner. Disabuse yourself of the notion that you must work hard to make a lot of money. The reverse is true. When you do what you love, money will flow into your bank account like a mighty river. Someone with your creative talent could easily become a successful artist.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Big changes are on the horizon. It’s up to you whether they will work to your advantage or not. Clinging stubbornly to an old routine will make the changes ahead uncomfortable. Treating these transitions as golden opportunities will help you reach new heights. A romantic partner or child will complain about the upheaval. Don’t let their resentment deter you from your path. After seeing how much better life becomes because of your courageous choices, their anger will change to joy.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Keeping busy can either lift your spirits or drain your energy.

It depends on the work you perform. Rather than assuming a dreaded chore, do something you truly enjoy. Volunteering at an animal shelter, clearing out your closet or preparing a meal are good options. Negative feedback has come from a jealous rival. Don’t take their remarks to heart. There’s no reason to feel guilty about pursuing your heart’s desire.

Anyone who resents your success is misguided. They could have the same success if they followed your brave example.

Are you restless? The temptation to spread your wings and fly is strong. Although funds are short, that isn’t a good reason to abandon a bold plan. You enrol in university or write a book if you want. Ask your best friend, romantic partner or someone you work with for help. They’ll find a way to finance your dream. Everyone is eager to help you, since you’ve always been generous with resources, praise and practical support. Prepare to receive what you’ve always given.

Instead of making a big production about how hard you work, take it easy. The less you complain, the more confidence people will have in your leadership. When a promotion begins to look likely, you’ll be the natural choice for this position. Resist the temptation to assume more responsibility. Enjoy some retail therapy instead. You’ll find some beautiful items that draw attention to your most attractive features. Spend a little more than usual; you’ve earned a handsome reward for your diligence.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Your love life is sizzling with excitement. Pour your energy into romantic pursuits you can create at home. Make a special dinner, put on soft music and dim the lights, enjoying a night out in the comfort of your abode is suited to their tastes. Are you single? Join an online dating app. When you cross paths with someone attractive, don’t hide your feelings. Introduce yourself. After some stimulating chitchat about your favourite writers and hobbies, the object of your affection will be eager to meet in the near future.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Do you long for a raise? If you’re going to increase your income, you must expand your skill set. Taking an advanced course requires time, money and dedication. Pace yourself for a marathon instead of a sprint. Don’t worry; you’ll cross the finish line. Friends may discourage you from pursuing a higher income. They’re worried you’ll forget them once you earn more money. Nothing could be further from the truth. Continue to go after your dream; you’re worth your weight in gold.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Wednesday, May 20, 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

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

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