Tuesday May 23, 2023

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.

Hurricane season prep continues in Loíza with public event this Saturday

By THE STAR STAFF

Loíza Mayor Julia Nazario Fuentes chaired a meeting of municipal officials on Monday at the northern coastal town’s Emergency Operations Center to review the Multi-Risk Plan for Emergency and Disaster Response, in the face of the start of the hurricane season, although it is designed for the whole year.

“What we have learned since hurricanes Irma and Maria we are putting into an organized and detailed plan, also expanded by what we experienced in the pandemic and earthquakes,” Nazario Fuentes said. “The mission is that our municipal administrative body is ready to activate before any large-scale emergency, at any time of the year.”

Municipal adviser Nazario Lugo Burgos, a former executive director of the State Bureau for Emergency Management and Disaster Administration (NMEAD by its Spanish acronym), noted that in relation to the hurricane season, which begins next week (June 1), Colorado State University has indicated that during 2023 there could be 13 tropical storms, of which six could become hurricanes, and two of those could be major storms.

“Being a flat and coastal town, with three bodies of water that surround us -- Boca de Cangrejos at the entrance of Loíza, Río Grande in the center of Loíza and Río Herrera on the border with Río Grande -- added to all the streams and pipes, the plan is to keep these bodies of water clean of debris, along with orientation for the communities and training for the leaders,”the mayor said.

This Saturday, May 27, the municipality will sponsor an event called “Ready for Emergencies” for the general public at the Cueva María de la Cruz Historical Park facilities from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Bureau, Mental Health and Anti-Addiction Services Administration, Puerto Rico Firefighters Bureau Department of Health, U.S. Small Business Administration, island Housing Department, NMEAD, Family Department and 9-1-1 Emergency Systems Bureau, among other agencies and entities.

About three years ago the municipality implemented the “LoízAlerta” system, which consists of a strengthened security system in “text mob” format, which allows sending messages in real-time to Loiceños, as well as ambulances, vehicles for the municipal police, emergency alarms, and water displacement pumps located in communities that are flooded, as well as coordination of vehicles for the Rescue Unit and Station Mobile weather. The system is in coordination with communications operators (KP4) and state and federal agencies.

“It works like the Amber alert, for example, but is designed for citizens residing in Loíza,” Nazario Fuentes said. “This is in addition to social media messages, sound buses by communities and coordinated efforts of community leaders.”

One of the topics addressed was the Incident Command System generated by FEMA, which was adapted for Loíza’s particular needs.

“This is a standardized command system for all types of emergencies and coordinated events,” the mayor said. “As it is a flexible structure, it applies different levels of complexity for the effective management of cases.”

“There we will have information tables, talks and orientations on the challenges and dangers in times of emergency,” said Yeidimar Escobar del Valle, director of the Municipal Planning Office. “This activity is for everyone to work and improve individual and collective resilience.”

Among the confirmed attendees are Michelle Bermúdez from Prepárate Puerto Rico, along with representatives of the National Weather Service (NWS), Puerto Rico Seismic Network, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Loíza Integrated Health Council, LUMA Energy, Puerto Rico National Guard, Puerto Rico Police

Loíza Mayor Julia Nazario Fuentes

House lawmakers say they’ll deliver amended budget by June 6

By THE STAR STAFF

Speaker of the House of Representatives

Rafael “Tatito” Hernández Montañez and Finance and Budget Committee

Chairman Jesús Santa Rodríguez, expect to finish the budget for fiscal year 2023-2024 by June 6 and pass changes to the tax laws.

“The House of Representatives will continue to seek all alternatives, in communication with all sectors, to ensure that this budget is a balanced one that meets pressing needs and that it is a responsible one,” Hernández Montañez and Santa Rodríguez said in a written statement.

The tax changes include reducing tax rates for individuals and small businesses, eliminating unequal competition between foreign and local investors, and simplifying

the process for obtaining internal revenue licenses.

They also hope to approve House Bill 1602, which seeks to attract and retain young doctors in Puerto Rico, increasing the age for receiving a tax exemption on the first $40,000 of income generated from 26 to 35 years.

Regarding the budget, which the Financial Oversight and Management Board already approved, lawmakers intend to earmark funds to finance programs at the University of Puerto Rico and essential services in the municipalities, and to honor the increase in the minimum wage, among other actions.

In addition, officials will set aside about $11 million to pay Family Department workers and retirees, who recently prevailed in a lawsuit demanding salary adjustments.

NPP House delegation to evaluate each item in budget

By THE STAR STAFF

The New Progressive Party (NPP) delegation in the House of Representatives will evaluate each item included in the new budget that Popular Democratic Party legislators say they will submit by June 6 for approval.

The announcement was made by NPP House Minority Leader Carlos “Johnny” Méndez Nuñez, who also stressed that within the budget will be items to implement a reduction in tax rates, including for the working class of the island, as well as for small and midsize enterprises.

“As we have always done, we will carefully evaluate the items that the Popular Party delegation details in the draft budget for the 2023-2024 fiscal year,” which begins on July 1,” Méndez said in a written statement. “We do not have exact numbers, since the Finance Committee has not concluded the evaluation of the budgets filed by agencies, but we already see a delineation of a total budget of $12.7 billion. We will be studying this to ensure that all services are paid for and that the budget is not used as a political wish list without concrete and verifiable sources of repayment.”

“There are realities that we have to work on, but it has to be done,” the NPP minority leader added. “One of the big problems is that the House and the Senate do not agree,

not only on priorities, but also on the filing of amendments, so much so that the [Financial] Oversight [and Management] Board itself that they defend so much in the House has been very vocal in its position around the lack of legislative action.”

Last week, the oversight board certified a 2022-2023 amended budget of $13.9 billion. During the announcement, the board’s executive director, Robert Mujica, attacked the Legislative Assembly, which is controlled by the PDP, for not presenting an amended budget as required by the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, commonly known as PROMESA.

“The budget is the main responsibility of any elected legislature; however, this is the third consecutive time that both houses of the Puerto Rico Legislature have failed to present a budget for the government,” Mujica said.

Méndez, a former House speaker, emphasized that the budget must contain items to implement tax reform.

“The Executive [branch] presented a reform in February that lowers taxes on our people and does justice to the working class of Puerto Rico,” he said. “According to the administration’s economic team, the application of these reductions will result in savings for individual taxpayers that exceed $262.5 million over a period of several years. The budget must contain sources of repayment for the next fiscal year.

We have also heard that the House seeks to amend the measure, which had already been discussed with the Board, to add many other things. We are not going to endorse anything that puts this reduction in contributions at risk. Tax reduction must be a priority and must be

addressed alone, not putting a lot of things into the bill that prevent its approval.”

Among the benefits of the reform is a reduction in the tax burden on households with incomes, whether individual or combined, of between $41,500 and $61,500.

Speaker of the House of Representatives Rafael Hernández Montañez, left, and House Finance and Budget Committee Chairman Jesús Santa Rodríguez

Rep. Carlos “Johnny” Méndez Nuñez

Economists warn about negative effects of PREPA debt plan

By THE STAR STAFF

Tom Sanzillo, José Alameda and Ramón Cao, analysts who presented reports on the economic impact of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) debt adjustment plan, warned on Monday of possible negative repercussions from the plan.

“The proposed Adjustment Plan is not viable and does not provide the capital and operational resources necessary for reliable electric service in Puerto Rico,” Sanzillo said in a written statement.

“This plan will keep the island dependent on expensive fossil fuel imports, without considering other options that could stabilize costs and decrease our dependence on these fuels,” the economists said in the statement.

The PREPA debt plan proposes to restructure PREPA’s debt principally through an issuance of $5.68 billion in new bonds to fund partial recoveries on creditors’ claims. PREPA owns about $8.26 billion in revenue bonds, plus some $218 million in prepetition accrued interest on such bonds. The utility also owns PREPA $700 million in fuel line loans and projects some $246 million to $4.9 billion in general unsecured claims. It also has over $3 billion in unfunded pension liabilities.

Under the proposed plan, PREPA would pay for the new bonds over a 35-year period through revenues from a legacy charge to PREPA’s customers. but the board has said an affordable and sustainable legacy charge will generate only $5.68 billion in additional net revenues.

The plan imposes a legacy charge of, on average, about $19 a month added to the utility bill for certain customers not currently benefiting from subsidized electricity rates. The PREPA legacy charge, which will be used to pay bondholders, would exclude qualifying low-income residential customers from a connection fee and a kilowatt-hour (kWh) charge for

up to 500 kWh per month. For non-subsidized residential customers, the proposed PREPA legacy charge would be: a flat $13 per month connection fee, and 75 cents per kWh for up to 500 kWh per month of electricity provided by PREPA, and 3 cents per kWh for electricity above 500 kWh per month.

For PREPA’s commercial, industrial and government customers, the proposed legacy charge would entail: a monthly connection fee of either $16.25 for small business customers, $20 for smaller industrial companies, and $1,800 for large businesses proportional to their current rate. They would pay between 97 cents and 3 cents per kWh per month for electricity provided by PREPA.

Sanzillo, along with fellow economists Alameda and Cao, filed reports to the federal bankruptcy court warning about the economic impact of the proposed adjustment plan.

Cao cautioned that further increases in electricity rates would have a significant negative impact on Puerto Rico’s economy.

“Rate increases would negatively impact the economy, which would also result in a reduction of more than 75,000 jobs by 2030,” he said.

Alameda stressed that the imposition of the so-called legacy charge creates an additional burden for residents and the industrial and commercial sectors.

“When you consider the impact of the Legacy Charge, the Fiscal Plan proposed by the central government becomes unsustainable,” he said.

The three analysts insist on the need to explore alternatives that can lead to a balanced and sustainable solution to PREPA’s debt.

Gov’t unveils new investor relations website

By THE STAR STAFF

Puerto Rico Secretary of State and Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority (AAFAF by its Spanish initials) Executive Director Omar Marrero

Díaz has unveiled a new investor relations (IR) website to facilitate communication with investors, bondholders and the public.

The puertoricobonds.pr.gov website contains almost 800 financial reports and documents on an easy-to-use platform that is free and open to all investors and visitors, according to an AAFAF statement issued Monday.

The platform powering the website, from Boston-based tech firm BondLink, also serves many of the top issuers in the U.S. municipal bond market, among them the State of California, Los Angeles County, and the cities of Atlanta and Dallas.

Marrero announced the website at the end of a conversation with Financial Oversight and Management Board Executive Director Robert Mujica that was moderated by Forculus Strategic Communications founder and CEO Francisco Cimadevilla at last week’s PRNOW 2023 New York Forum.

“Our new investor relations website will allow people to receive automatic alerts for important documents, event notices, press releases or project updates,” Marrero said.

Puertoricobonds.pr.gov currently includes subsites

for general obligation bonds, as well as those issued by the Puerto Rico Highways and Transportation Authority and the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority. It also includes the previously launched IR website for the Puerto Rico Sales Tax Financing Corp.

Economist Ramón Cao

Omar Marrero Díaz

Gov’t formalizes push to decentralize island education system

By THE STAR STAFF

Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia announced on Monday the beginning of the administrative decentralization of Puerto Rico’s education system, an action coordinated with the federal Department of Education called the Initiative of Decentralization of Education and Autonomy of Regions (IDEAR).

“The goal is to make this decentralization of the education system viable so that all our students, as well as their parents, and their teachers, can have confidence in their future and that of the next generations,” Pierluisi said at a press conference.

Executive Order 2023-014, signed by the governor and the U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, formalizes the initiative and establishes as public policy the strategy of increasing autonomy in the island Education Department’s regional school offices.

In addition, an executive committee is being created to design the decentralization strategy, evaluating existing governance models and best practices from other jurisdictions.

“This initiative has the full commitment of me and my team, as well as the federal government, through

Secretary Cardona and his team,” the governor said. Meanwhile, Pierluisi announced the launch of the P-Card initiative, which will allow each school principal to directly purchase necessary materials with a debit card.

“The Department of Education has worked hard to streamline procurement processes so that the necessary

materials and tools reach schools in a more efficient way,” he said.

The governor noted that his initiatives on education include the renovation of infrastructure, the increase of vocational offerings, and bilingual and specialized schools, as well as Montessori schools and extended hours.

Arecibo Job Corps Center to be rebuilt with $40 million in federal funds

By THE STAR STAFF

With an investment of $40 million in 100% federal funds, the reconstruction of the Job Corps Center campus in the Garrochales neighborhood of Arecibo began on Monday, Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González Colón and Arecibo Job Corps Director Miguelina Torres announced.

Attending the groundbreaking ceremony were mayors Wanda Soler (Barceloneta) and Gabriel Hernández (Camuy), Reps. José “Quiquito” Meléndez, José “Memo” González and Gabriel Rodríguez Aguiló, and Arecibo district senators Elizabeth Rosa Vélez and Rubén Soto.

“I am pleased to see the work in progress from the federal allocations that we have secured and supported for the island, but I am more proud of the federal government’s recognition of the work of this facility by describing it as the most productive of the 120 centers in the nation,” González Colón said. “This allocation will be of benefit so that more young people on the island can receive excellent training, with real expectations of jobs. I invite parents and young people to be part of the Job Corps family that in Puerto Rico has two campuses, this one and the one in Aguadilla [Ramey Job Corps] that is also under reconstruction with federal investment.”

“Job Corps offers young people a bright and promising path to higher-paying careers in the nation’s fastest-growing industries,” said Rachel Torres, national director of

Job Corps. “The investments we are making in this center, and in these young people, are in turn investments in the future of the island. Our graduates fill a critical need for employers, and for the economy.”

The new construction will replace many of the academic, administrative and training workshop buildings on the lower level of the campus, which was damaged by Hurricane Maria and the storms of 2022. In short, two buildings will be renovated and 11 buildings will be constructed.

The U.S. Department of Labor will make an investment of over $40 million for the work that is slated to begin this summer and is expected to conclude in around two and a half years. The allocation is from funds obtained for Puerto Rico by the resident commissioner after the impact of Hurricane Maria, most under the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018. The project is expected to create 150 to 180 jobs at its peak.

Arecibo Job Corps is currently the number one center among more than 120 Job Corps campuses in the United States, ranking in the top 10 in five of the nine categories in the U.S. Department of Labor’s classification system.

Job Corps is a federal vocational-technical education and training program for young people who aspire to higher-paying careers and higher education. With more than 120 residential and non-residential locations nationwide, training is available for eligible young people from 16 to 24 years old. The program is free for students.

Eighty percent of graduates enter the workforce, join the military, or continue their higher education or work practice. Among the courses offered are: Office Management, Medical Assistant, Practical Nursing, Building Maintenance and Electrical nTrainee.

The new construction at the Arecibo Job Corps Center will replace many of the academic, administrative and training workshop buildings on the lower level of the campus, which was damaged by Hurricane Maria and the storms of 2022.

Gov. Pedro Pierluisi

Debt limit negotiators debate spending caps to break standoff

By ALAN RAPPEPORT and CATIE EDMONDSON

As negotiators for the White House and House Republican leaders struggle to reach a deal over how to raise the nation’s debt limit, a solution that harks back to old budget fights has reemerged as a potential path forward: spending caps. Putting limits on future spending in exchange for raising the $31.4 trillion borrowing cap could be the key to clinching an agreement that would allow Republicans to claim that they secured major concessions from Democrats. It could also allow President Joe Biden to argue that his administration is being fiscally responsible while not caving to Republican demands to roll back any of his primary legislative achievements.

The Biden administration and House Republican leaders have agreed in broad terms to some sort of cap on discretionary federal spending for at least the next two years. But they are hung up on the details of those caps, including how much to spend on discretionary programs in the 2024 fiscal year and beyond, and how to divide that spending among the government’s many financial obligations, including the military, veterans affairs, education, health and agriculture.

What could a spending cap deal look like?

The latest White House offer would hold military and other spending — which includes education, scientific research and environmental protection — constant from the current 2023 fiscal year to next fiscal year, according to a person familiar with both sides’ proposals. That move would not reduce what is known as nominal spending, which simply means the level of spending before adjusting for inflation. Republicans are pushing to cut nominal spending in the first year.

One reason the White House is willing to entertain holding spending essentially flat has to do with politics. Given that Republicans control the House, getting an increase in funding for discretionary programs outside the military would have been nearly impossible. Congress would not have approved increases through the appropriations process, the normal way in which Congress allocates money to government programs and agencies.

Republicans have repeatedly said that they will not accept a deal unless it results in the government spending less money than it did in the last fiscal year. They have said that simply freezing spending at current levels, as the White House has proposed, does not enact the kind of meaningful cuts many in their party have long called for.

But Republican negotiators have shown some flexibility around how long they would require those spending caps to last. House GOP leaders are now looking to set spending caps for six years, rather than 10. Still, that is longer than the White House is proposing, with Democrats offering to cap spending for two years.

“The numbers are foundational here,” Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., one of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s lead negotiators, said Sunday. “The speaker has been very clear: A red line is spending less money and unless and until we’re there, the rest of it is really irrelevant.”

The approach is evoking debt limit déjà vu.

If spending caps sound familiar, that is because they were employed during the last big debt limit fight in 2011.

During that episode of brinkmanship, lawmakers agreed to impose limits on both military and nonmilitary spending from 2012 to 2021. The Budget Control Act caps were somewhat successful at keeping spending in check, but not entirely.

A Congressional Research Service report published this year noted that during the decade that the caps were in place, Congress and the president repeatedly enacted laws that increased the spending limits. Certain types of expenditures — for emergencies and military engagements — were exempt from the caps and the federal government spent $2 trillion over 10 years on those programs. Spending on so-called mandatory programs such as Social Security was not capped, and those make up about 70% of total government spending.

Still, the Congressional Research Service pointed out that spending was lower each year from 2012 to 2019 than had been projected before the caps were put in place.

The strategy is no fiscal panacea.

Caps that limit spending around current levels will help slow the growth of the nation’s debt, but will not cure the government’s reliance on borrowed money.

The Congressional Budget Office said this month that annual

deficits — the gap between what America spends and what it earns — are projected to nearly double over the next decade, totaling more than $20 trillion through 2033. That deficit will force the United States to continue to rely heavily on borrowed funds.

Marc Goldwein, the senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, estimated that it would require $8 trillion of savings over 10 years to hold the national debt to its current levels. However, he said that did not mean that enacting spending caps would not be worthwhile.

“We’re not going to fix this all at once,” Goldwein said. “So we should do as much as we can, as often as we can.”

The group has called for spending caps to be accompanied by spending cuts or tax increases as a plan to reduce the national debt.

Spending caps are not the only issue.

Finding an agreement on the extent and duration of spending caps will be a critical part of getting a deal.

But negotiators are still working to resolve several other issues, including whether to put in place tougher work requirements for social safety net programs including food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Medicaid, and whether to expedite permitting rules for energy projects, two key Republican priorities to which White House negotiators have shown some openness.

The U.S. Capitol in Washington, on May 8, 2023. As negotiators for the White House and House Republican leaders struggle to reach a deal over how to raise the nation’s debt limit, a solution that harks back to old budget fights has reemerged as a potential path forward: spending caps.

NAACP issues Florida travel advisory, joining Latino and LGBTQ groups

By JESÚS JIMÉNEZ

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People issued a travel advisory for Florida over the weekend, saying that under Gov. Ron DeSantis the state has become “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.”

The NAACP joins the League of United Latin American Citizens, a civil rights organization that issued a Florida travel warning Wednesday, and Equality Florida, a gay rights advocacy group that issued one last month.

The NAACP’s travel advisory does not explicitly recommend against travel to Florida. But it urges travelers to be aware of the state’s politics, and the organization said that “the governor and the state of Florida have shown that African Americans are not welcome in the state of Florida.”

The NAACP said in a statement on Saturday that the travel advisory was in “direct response to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Florida schools.”

The advisory comes after DeSantis last week signed legislation defunding diversity programs at the state’s public universities and colleges. The advisory also cited concerns with a number of other laws recently passed in Florida regarding voting rights and concealed carry of guns.

DeSantis’ office did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday.

After signing the legislation on DEI programs, DeSantis said that the law would ensure “Florida’s institutions encourage diversity of thought, civil discourse and the pursuit of truth for generations to come.”

DeSantis has often spoken out about what

he describes as “woke indoctrination” and leftist agendas in schools. It is not clear how much influence the statements will have on travel to Florida. But they demonstrated, along with his escalating disputes with Disney, how DeSantis’ reliance on conservative culture war issues as he gears up for what is expected to be a presidential run was colliding with the state’s signature industry.

Disney on Thursday announced it was backing off a plan to build an office complex in Orlando that would have cost about $1 billion and brought thousands of jobs to the state.

Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, said in a statement Saturday that under DeSantis’ leadership, Florida had “become hostile to Black Americans and in direct conflict with the democratic ideals that our union was founded upon.”

“Let me be clear,” Johnson said, “failing to teach an accurate representation of the horrors and inequalities that Black Americans have faced and continue to face is a disservice to students and a dereliction of duty to all.”

While the NAACP’s travel advisory follows the new legislation restricting diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Florida schools, the travel advisory from the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, cited concerns about legislation signed by DeSantis this month that focused on people living the country without legal permission.

The legislation will require private employers in Florida with 25 or more workers to confirm an employee’s eligibility to work in the United States. It will also invalidate ID cards issued to those in the country illegally in other states, such as New York, and it will require Florida hospitals that accept Medicaid to ask patients whether they are U.S. citizens or whether they are “lawfully present” in the country.

David Cruz, a LULAC spokesperson, said Sunday that depending on an individual’s immigration status, the organization’s travel

advisory was either a warning not to travel to Florida or an advisory to be cautious while traveling there.

Domingo Garcia, national president of LULAC, said at a news conference Wednesday that Florida was using “immigrants as political piñatas for the purposes of basically just getting votes.”

In addition to issuing a travel advisory, Garcia said that LULAC was considering filing a lawsuit in federal court against the state of Florida when the legislation goes into effect in July. Cruz said the organization was also planning protests “in key Florida cities with significant Latino essential worker populations.”

Equality Florida issued its travel advisory last month, citing concern with a number of laws in Florida, including last year’s passage of legislation that prohibits classroom instruction and discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity in some elementary school grades, a law that is often referred to by opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, said in a statement last month that her organization had to respond with a travel advisory “as the laws strip away basic rights and freedoms.”

LULAC officials pointed to the economic impact suffered by Arizona after the state passed legislation in 2010 that was viewed as the nation’s toughest effort to crack down on illegal immigration and criticized as encouraging racial profiling. A study at the time found that Arizona lost about $141 million alone in conference business after the state passed its legislation.

Lydia Guzmán, chair of LULAC’s national immigration committee and state director for the organization in Arizona, said the state took a serious economic hit as a result of adverse reaction to the legislation.

“I see that happening also in Florida,” Guzmán said.

Demonstrators stand outside an event where Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida delivers a speech in Peoria, Ill., on May 12, 2023.

Gloria Molina, pioneering Latina politician, dies at 74

By NEIL GENZLINGER

Gloria Molina, a groundbreaking Chicana politician at the city, county and state levels in California who was a fierce advocate for the communities she represented, even though that often meant defying entrenched political structures, died on May 14 at her home in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was 74.

Her family announced her death, from cancer, on her Facebook page.

Since she announced she had terminal cancer in March, colleagues, constituents and the California news media had been praising her achievements in articles and on social media. The Los Angeles Metro’s board of directors voted to name a train station in East Los Angeles after her. Casa 0101, a performing arts organization in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles, designated its main stage theater as the Gloria Molina Auditorium. Grand Park, in downtown Los Angeles, which she helped bring into being in 2012, is now Gloria Molina Grand Park.

“She championed for years to increase access to parks and green spaces,” the park’s overseeing body said in announcing the renaming, “as well as recreational opportunities that engage culture, support well-being and improve the quality of life for everyone in Los Angeles.”

The accolades reflected her legacy as one of the leading Latina politicians in the country, with much of her more than three-decade career encompassing a time when few Latinas were in important positions.

In 1982, after working on other politicians’ campaigns, including that of Assemblywoman Maxine Waters, who would later be elected to Congress, Molina became the first Latina elected to the California Assembly. She ran for that seat even though the political leadership of the Eastside area of Los Angeles County had already selected another candidate, Richard Polanco. She beat him in the Democratic primary and easily defeated a Republican opponent in the general election.

A similar thing happened in 1987 when she ran for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council that had been created by redistricting. The political leadership had chosen Larry Gonzalez for the post, but she beat him and a third candidate to become the first Latina council member.

In 1991, she scored a political hat trick of sorts, becoming the first woman to be elected to the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. (In 1979, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke became the first woman on the board when she was appointed to fill out the term of a retiring member.) Some 1,000 supporters attended her swearing in.

“We must look forward to a time when a person’s ethnic background or gender is no longer a historical footnote,” Molina said at the time. “And this election is another step in that positive path to the American promise.”

Gloria Molina was born on May 31, 1948, in Montebello, a Los Angeles suburb. Her father, Leonardo, was

trating against the Vietnam War and for Chicano rights.

One thing she realized, she said in the Cultural Education Foundation video, was that those activism movements were generally led by men and “really didn’t allow the women to have any role whatsoever.” She banded with other Chicana women try to change that culture.

“We were Chicana feminists when there weren’t any around,” she said.

In her career in the state Assembly, she told The Los Angeles Times in 1987, she prided herself on “being a fighter, one who doesn’t just go along with the program because that’s how the pressure is being applied.” That was certainly true for her signature issue during her assembly years — her opposition to a proposal to build a prison in her Eastside district, a plan whose proponents included Gov. George Deukmejian.

She won that battle, a significant one.

“She stopped the 100-year pattern of dumping negative land-use developments on the Eastside,” Fernando Guerra, the director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, said in a phone interview.

After leaving the Board of Supervisors, Molina made one more bid for political office, challenging José Huizar, an incumbent, for his Los Angeles City Council seat in 2015. She lost. Huizar later pleaded guilty to corruption charges.

Though no longer in office, Molina remained active in various causes. In 2018, she was among a group protesting outside an Academy Awards luncheon in Beverly Hills, denouncing the scarcity of Hispanic characters in films.

a construction worker who was born in Los Angeles but raised in Casas Grandes, Mexico, and her mother, Concepción, was a homemaker from Mexico. The couple immigrated in the 1940s, and Gloria was the oldest of 10 children.

“She was almost like a second mom in the family,” Molina’s daughter, Valentina Martinez, said in a video about her mother made in 2020 for the Mexican-American Cultural Education Foundation. “She did everything. She would tell me that she would come home from school every day and make tortillas for her brothers and sisters. She didn’t get to have fun or go to after-school programs. She was always kind of doing the hard work, making sure everyone was taken care of, changing diapers, cooking, doing all of that. So she was a tough lady from the very beginning.”

She was, Molina said, “brought up in a very traditionally Chicano family.”

She studied fashion design at Rio Hondo College, in Whittier, California, and took courses at East Los Angeles College and California State University, Los Angeles, though she did not get a degree because for most of that period she was also working full time to support herself, including as a legal secretary for five years. She joined in the student activism of the 1960s and early ’70s, demons-

“The movie industry should be ashamed of itself,” she said then.

In addition to her daughter, Molina is survived by her husband, Ron Martinez; her siblings, Gracie Molina, Irma Molina, Domingo Molina, Bertha Molina Mejia, Mario Molina, Sergio Molina, Danny Molina, Olga Molina Palacios and Lisa Molina Banuelos; and a grandson.

Gloria Molina in 1996. She was the first Latina elected to the California Legislature, the Los Angeles City Council and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Microsoft says new AI shows signs of human reasoning

By CADE METZ

When computer scientists at Microsoft started to experiment with a new artificial intelligence system last year, they asked it to solve a puzzle that should have required an intuitive understanding of the physical world.

“Here we have a book, nine eggs, a laptop, a bottle and a nail,” they asked. “Please tell me how to stack them onto each other in a stable manner.”

The researchers were startled by the ingenuity of the AI system’s answer. Put the eggs on the book, it said. Arrange the eggs in three rows with space between them. Make sure you don’t crack them.

“Place the laptop on top of the eggs, with the screen facing down and the keyboard facing up,” it wrote. “The laptop will fit snugly within the boundaries of the book and the eggs, and its flat and rigid surface will provide a stable platform for the next layer.”

The clever suggestion made the researchers wonder whether they were witnessing a new kind of intelligence. In March, they published a 155-page research paper arguing that the system was a step toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is shorthand for a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. The paper was published on an internet research repository.

Microsoft, the first major tech company to release a paper making such a bold claim, stirred one of the tech world’s testiest debates: Is the industry building something akin to human intelligence? Or are some of the industry’s brightest minds letting their imaginations get the best of them?

“I started off being very skeptical — and that evolved into a sense of frustration, annoyance, maybe even fear,” said Peter Lee, who leads research at Microsoft. “You think: Where the heck is this coming from?”

Microsoft’s research paper, provocatively called “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence,” goes to the heart of what technologists have been working toward — and fearing — for decades. If they build a machine that works like the human brain

like Google, Microsoft and OpenAI began building large language models, or LLMs. Those systems often spend months analyzing vast amounts of digital text, including books, Wikipedia articles and chat logs. By pinpointing patterns in that text, they learned to generate text of their own, including term papers, poetry and computer code. They can even carry on a conversation.

The technology the Microsoft researchers were working with, OpenAI’s GPT-4, is considered the most powerful of those systems. Microsoft is a close partner of OpenAI and has invested $13 billion in the San Francisco company.

The researchers included Bubeck, a 38-year-old French expatriate and former Princeton University professor. One of the first things he and his colleagues did was ask GPT-4 to write a mathematical proof showing that there were infinite prime numbers and do it in a way that rhymed.

it to write a letter of support for an electron as a U.S. presidential candidate, in the voice of Mahatma Gandhi, addressed to his wife. And they asked it to write a Socratic dialogue that explored the misuses and dangers of LLMs.

It did it all in a way that seemed to show an understanding of fields as disparate as politics, physics, history, computer science, medicine and philosophy while combining its knowledge.

“All of the things I thought it wouldn’t be able to do? It was certainly able to do many of them — if not most of them,” Bubeck said.

Some AI experts saw the Microsoft paper as an opportunistic effort to make big claims about a technology that no one quite understood. Researchers also argue that general intelligence requires a familiarity with the physical world, which GPT-4 in theory does not have.

or even better, it could change the world. But it could also be dangerous.

And it could also be nonsense. Making AGI claims can be a reputation killer for computer scientists. What one researcher believes is a sign of intelligence can easily be explained away by another, and the debate often sounds more appropriate to a philosophy club than a computer lab. Last year, Google fired a researcher who claimed that a similar AI system was sentient, a step beyond what Microsoft has claimed. A sentient system would not just be intelligent. It would be able to sense or feel what is happening in the world around it.

But some believe the industry has in the past year or so inched toward something that can’t be explained away: a new AI system that is coming up with humanlike answers and ideas that weren’t programmed into it.

Microsoft has reorganized parts of its research labs to include multiple groups dedicated to exploring the idea. One will be run by Sébastien Bubeck, who was the lead author on the Microsoft AGI paper.

About five years ago, companies

The technology’s poetic proof was so impressive — both mathematically and linguistically — that he found it hard to understand what he was chatting with.

“At that point, I was like: What is going on?” he said in March during a seminar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For several months, he and his colleagues documented complex behavior exhibited by the system and believed it demonstrated a “deep and flexible understanding” of human concepts and skills.

When people use GPT-4, they are “amazed at its ability to generate text,” Lee said. “But it turns out to be way better at analyzing and synthesizing and evaluating and judging text than generating it.”

When they asked the system to draw a unicorn using a programming language called TiKZ, it instantly generated a program that could draw a unicorn. When they removed the stretch of code that drew the unicorn’s horn and asked the system to modify the program so that it once again drew a unicorn, it did exactly that.

They asked it to write a program that took in a person’s age, sex, weight, height and blood test results and judged whether they were at risk of diabetes. They asked

“The ‘Sparks of AGI’ is an example of some of these big companies coopting the research paper format into PR pitches,” said Maarten Sap, a researcher and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “They literally acknowledge in their paper’s introduction that their approach is subjective and informal and may not satisfy the rigorous standards of scientific evaluation.”

Bubeck and Lee said they were unsure how to describe the system’s behavior and ultimately settled on “Sparks of AGI” because they thought it would capture the imagination of other researchers.

Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology who is part of the AI research group at the University of California, Berkeley, said that systems like GPT-4 were no doubt powerful, but it was not clear that the text generated by these systems was the result of something like human reasoning or common sense.

“When we see a complicated system or machine, we anthropomorphize it; everybody does that — people who are working in the field and people who aren’t,” Gopnik said. “But thinking about this as a constant comparison between AI and humans — like some sort of game show competition — is just not the right way to think about it.”

Sebastien Bubeck, an artificial intelligence researcher with Microsoft, in Seattle, May 8, 2023.

Nasdaq, S&P 500 rise amid fresh round of debt talks; Micron slides

The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq rose on Monday as markets awaited updates on a fresh round of talks about raising the U.S. debt ceiling, while shares of Micron fell after China’s ban on its memory chips.

President Joe Biden and House Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy will meet for talks on Monday after their discussions almost fell apart on Friday. The fresh talks come less than two weeks before a deadline after which the Treasury warned that the federal government will struggle to pay its debts.

A default would cause chaos in financial markets and spike interest rates.

“Everybody is paying attention to this Kevin McCarthy-Joe Biden meeting, waiting for some kind of signal as far as the debt ceiling is concerned,” said Robert Pavlik, senior portfolio manager at Dakota Wealth.

“People are just waiting and watching to see how this plays out.”

In a move that was perceived as ramping up trade tensions between Beijing and Washington, China barred chipmaker Micron Technology Inc MU.O from selling memory chips to key domestic industries, sending its shares down 4.5%.

The Philadelphia SE Semiconductor index .SOX dipped 0.4%.

Apple Inc AAPL.O slipped 0.4% after a report that Loop Capital downgraded the iPhone maker’s stock to “hold” from “buy”. This marked its first rating cut in five months, according to Refinitiv data.

At 10:14 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI was down 96.82 points, or 0.29%, at 33,329.81, the S&P 500 .SPX was up 1.64 points, or 0.04%, at 4,193.62 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC was up 46.62 points, or 0.37%, at 12,704.52.

Dow component Chevron CorpCVX.N fell 1.7% as the oil major said it would acquire PDC Energy Inc PDCE.O in an all-stock transaction for $7.6 billion, including debt.

PacWest BancorpPACW.O rose 6.3% after the regional lender entered into an agreement to sell a portfolio of 74 real estate construction loans to a subsidiary of Kennedy-Wilson Holdings Inc KW.N.

Investors will look for clues on the monetary policy path from a slew of Federal Reserve speakers and key data points this week such as the April personal consumption expenditure (PCE) index and durable goods.

The PCE index reading, considered to be the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, is due on Friday.

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkaritold CNBC in an interview that it was a “close call” on whether he would vote to raise rates at the Fed’s June meeting or take a pause, while St. Louis Fed chief James Bullard said the central bank might have to hike rates by 50 basis points this year.

Advancing issues outnumbered decliners by a 1.71-to-1 ratio on the NYSE and by a 1.78-to-1 ratio on the Nasdaq.

MOST ASSERTIVE STOCKS

PUERTO RICO STOCKS

The S&P index recorded 13 new 52-week highs and three new lows, while the Nasdaq recorded 46 new highs and 35 new lows.

Why Bakhmut? It’s a question as old as war.

By THOMAS GIBBONS-NEFF

Just weeks before President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine visited the city of Bakhmut in December, a soldier with the military call sign “Bear” stared out from the window of a ruined sixth-floor apartment overlooking the city’s eastern reaches. I quietly stood next to him. The battle below played out in muted ferocity.

Rockets lit the sky. A tank burned in the distance. To the south, Russian incendiary munitions floated downward, the thin arc of white flames igniting small fires on the ground but little else. There was nothing left to burn, the area already shelled to what seemed like oblivion.

“Bakhmut,” I wrote in my journal, “is in rough shape.”

That was one long night of hundreds, as Bakhmut became the focal point of some of the fiercest fighting of the war — the object of acute desire for Russia and of a tenacious defense by Ukraine. And now, the city of Bakhmut appears to have fallen to the Russians after 10 months, leaving thousands of soldiers wounded or killed, and a lingering question: How did a nondescript city the world had never heard of become the place where both sides decided to fight to the end, no matter the cost?

“Seems all the vultures are here,” one soldier messaged me as throngs of journalists showed up when the city seemed on the brink of falling in March. “Where were you before it got this dire?”

A war’s trajectory is unknowable. Combatants, political winds and military strategy have an equal say in the battles fought and the violence that follows. Bakhmut, a former Cossack outpost that was a salt-mining town at the war’s outset, happened to be where two armies collided. Pride, defiance and sheer stubbornness quickly gave the city outsize importance.

Fallujah, in Iraq, was unknown to much of the world until the United States tried to stamp out a growing insurgency in 2004. There were two separate battles for the city, one lasting three weeks, the second six. They were intense but much smaller in scale than Bakhmut’s destruction and loss.

Gettysburg was a rolling landscape of hills and fields typical of southern Pennsylvania, but it happened to be where three days of futile fighting dashed Robert E. Lee’s prospects of turning the Civil War in his favor. Iwo Jima was no more than a scab of an island in the Pacific, but the U.S. needed it for long-range bombers, and the struggle to control it became one of World War II’s most grueling battles.

for months, as if some military-style jargon might make it easier to stomach the loss of an entire city to an invading army. Russians could use their resources better, analysts said. Ukraine should retreat to better ground and continue their offensive elsewhere, they added.

Zelenskyy turned Bakhmut into the war’s official focal point when he visited in December, appearing alongside his war-weary soldiers in what looked like a vacant factory near the front. The speed bump of a city, formerly named Artemivsk, was in the spotlight.

Bakhmut, with its once neatly trimmed walking paths and a quaint and well-known winery, was suddenly strategically significant, whether the generals and analysts agreed or not.

Zelenskyy’s visit was all the media and the Ukrainian people needed. “Bakhmut Holds” became a rallying cry. The war had another set-piece battle, one that felt eerily similar to the siege of Mariupol and the fighting in Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk months before it: outnumbered defenders, fighting off a much larger army.

But whether it be Bakhmut or Iwo Jima or Fallujah, the end of the battle, no matter the stakes or victor, is always the same: unfathomable loss, and a reckoning with what comes next. How do you remember the dead, and prepare for what you fear will be the calculated indifference of your leaders, who are plotting their next campaigns, with battles that might lead to your own demise?

“‘The enemy,’” said Joseph Heller’s character Yossarian, in his World War II novel “Catch-22,” “is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.”

By Monday morning, Ukrainian officials were talking about controlling the “outskirts” of Bakhmut and preparing operations on the flanks, a subtle indication that the battle within the city had come to an end. Amid the rubble, the prewar population of about 70,000 has dwindled to a few thousand or less.

The Russian capture of Bakhmut at one point seemed unlikely. The Ukrainian army had pushed the Russians from around Kharkiv last September. In November, the port city of Kherson was liberated. Ukraine was winning. There was hope among some in Bakhmut that Kyiv’s troops would keep advancing, turning the tide once and for all.

But despite their defeats elsewhere, Moscow’s troops along with the Wagner mercenary forces, the Kremlin-backed group that was leading the assault on Bakhmut, never stopped attacking the city.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia had made it clear his forces were going to capture Bakhmut, and then take aim at the entirety of the mineral-rich Donbas region in which it resides. There was no winter lull as the ground hardened and the metal breaches of howitzers and Kalashnikovs became painful to touch with fingers numbed from the cold. Spring just brought more destruction in fierce and bloody street-to-street fighting.

Military analysts, Western officials and the media argued about the “strategic significance” of Bakhmut

We “are in full fire encirclement,” said one soldier fighting in Bakhmut toward the battle’s end, before asking if the Times would get the proper information to the public if he was abandoned there.

Opposite Zelenskyy was Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner. The once secretive tycoon started appearing in videos on the Bakhmut front. In the footage, Prigozhin is seen rallying his fighters and egging on Zelenskyy as he adjusts his body armor. In a video posted in March, Prigozhin asked the Ukrainian president to keep sending “battle-ready units” so his Wagner troops could kill them.

He also sparred with the Russian military leadership, castigating them and mocking them, adding a larger-than-life character to the Bakhmut narrative.

It was a camera-ready matchup heightened by the grisly images also coming from the front.

Videos posted from the battlefield showed a shellscarred landscape dotted with shattered trees. Soldiers fought from muddy trenches in knee-high water. Trench foot was rampant during the winter.

Zelenskyy’s visit had made it clear: His forces would fight until the end. Bakhmut would join the list of cities where many soldiers died in exchange for only a few miles of ravaged land.

Those soldiers who live will have the rest of their lives to ponder if it was worth it. And those who died will be remembered as the fallen heroes of the battle for Bakhmut, the ranks that met their end in a city many people had never heard of a year ago.

As I stood by the shattered window that frigid night in December, I remember thinking that despite the crescendo of artillery and the chatter of gunfire, the battle for Bakhmut felt far away. Two days later, a shell crashed into the empty apartment we had been standing in.

Now the Russians patrol the city. The war goes on. It will inch toward new places on the map, not yet destroyed by monthslong artillery battles, where new slogans might emerge, and where the “strategic significance” remains in question, as the world awaits another bloody finale.

Civilians trying to find a safe path make their way past a gazebo, center left, in this aerial drone image of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, on Friday, May 19, 2023. (Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)

France’s latest way to sound anger over pensions law: Saucepans

By CONSTANT MÉHEUT

Spreading across a highway so that no cars could pass, 100 or so protesters banged saucepans in a deafening racket that echoed through this remote valley of eastern France last month. They were marching toward a nearby castle where the French president was due to arrive, determined to stand in his way and create cacophony around the visit.

Suddenly, a helicopter carrying President Emmanuel Macron appeared overhead, the sound of its blades briefly drowning out the din. Although the boisterous demonstrators didn’t stop the French leader’s visit, the scene was an earsplitting reminder of the fury that has dogged his government since it enacted a highly unpopular pension overhaul this spring that raised the legal age of retirement to 64 from 62.

For weeks, opponents of the change have been harassing Macron and his Cabinet members by banging pots and pans on their official trips. In a country with no shortage of kitchenware, the protests, known as “casserolades,” after the French word for saucepan, have disrupted or stopped dozens of visits by ministers to schools and factories.

Like the yellow vest protest movement of 2018-19 that began over fuel prices and then expanded to include multiple grievances, the pan beating has also become the symbol of a broader discontent in France after months of large street demonstrations failed to push the government to back down on the pension changes.

“The desire to deafen and respond with noise reflects a kind of discredit of the political discourse,” Christian Salmon, a French essayist and columnist for the online publication Slate, said in an interview. “We are not being listened to, we are not being heard after weeks of protests. So now we are left with a single option, which is not to listen to you either.”

Macron’s decision to raise the legal age of retirement is based on his conviction that the country’s current pension system, which is based on payroll taxes, is financially unsustainable. Because retirees supported by active workers are living longer, people must also work longer, he says.

The pension law was pushed through using a constitutional provision that avoided a full parliamentary vote. Macron defended the move in a televised interview last Monday as an act of responsibility, noting that key government decisions in the past, such as building France’s nuclear-weapons force, had used the same mechanism.

marches that drew millions into the streets and then spawned some “wild protests” marked by heavy vandalism — also reflect a centurieslong protest tradition in France.

Pan beating dates back to the Middle Ages in a custom, called “charivari,” that was intended to shame ill-matched couples, according to Emmanuel Fureix, a historian at University Paris-Est Créteil. The tradition then took a political turn in the 1830s, under King Louis Philippe I, with people banging pots and pans at night under the windows of judges’ and politicians’ homes to demand greater freedoms.

tionwide day of protest early next month, and the government’s response to the casserolades speaks to the unease.

Many ministers now announce their travel plans at the last minute for fear of being surprised by saucepan bangers. And police have used anti-terrorism laws to ban several protests and, on one occasion, confiscated demonstrators’ pots after local authorities banned “the use of portable sound devices.”

Fureix said that the government had been “trapped” by the casserolades, just like Louis Philippe I in his time.

The casserolades began a month ago during a televised speech by Macron that was intended as a way to move on from the pension upheaval. Determined to keep up the fight, protesters gathered outside City Halls across France to bang pots and pans. In Paris, many residents joined in from their apartment windows, filling entire neighborhoods with metallic notes.

The culinary battle cry spread fast. Before long, members of the government were greeted by a cookware cacophony on official trips across the country.

“We want to show them that we’re not giving up the fight,” said Nicole Draganovic, a protester who was banging a saucepan on the highway at La Cluse-et-Mijoux in eastern France last month.

Around her, amid the red flags of labor unions, were the sounds of myriad utensils from a typical French kitchen: sieves, lids and frying pans banged in rhythm with metal and wooden spoons. Demonstrators without pots were clanging on metal fences that lined the highway.

“It’s like a symphony,” Draganovic said.

Several people involved in the weeks of protests said the main message was anger over the government’s decision to push through the pension overhaul without the support of a majority of voters or of labor unions.

“It’s a total denial of democracy,” said Stéphanie Allume, 55, who was bashing a stainless-steel saucepan during a May Day demonstration in Paris. “When it’s no longer possible to dialogue with our government, we drown out their voices with the noise of our pots.”

The casserolades — the latest stage of a protest movement that began with peaceful

Those saucepans, Fureix said, were “an everyday object, an instrument that embodied the voice of the people” at a time of poor political representation — a theme echoed in today’s casserolades. “The revival of gestures that belonged to an undemocratic age, the 19th century, is precisely the symptom of a democratic crisis,” he said.

Macron has been visibly annoyed by the pan beating, saying that “it’s not saucepans that will make France move forward” — to which Cristel, the French cookware manufacturer, responded on Twitter: “Monsieur le Président, at @cristelfrance we make saucepans that take France forward!!!”

The French leader has also strongly rejected the idea that the country has reached a democratic crisis, noting that the pension law was adopted in accordance with the country’s constitution. In the televised interview last Monday, he tried to move past the contentious reform by announcing tax cuts valued at 2 billion euros, about $2.2 billion, for the middle class before the end of his term.

“The country is moving forward,” Macron said.

But unions have called for another na-

“If they repress, they make a fool of themselves,” he said. “That’s the case today, as it was in the 19th century when trials were transformed into political platforms for opponents. If they do nothing, the phenomenon grows.”

And grow it has.

A website created by a union of tech workers now ranks French regions for casserolades based on the level of cacophony and the importance of the affected government official. At a recent protest in Paris, demonstrators held up a giant pot and spoon made of cardboard, instantly providing the surrounding crowds with a mascot to rally around.

The ubiquity of the pots and pans has been such that Salmon, the essayist, drew a parallel to the yellow vest protests. Both, he said, are objects “on which everyone can project their own meanings” and demands.

At the May Day protest, Allume said she saw wide-ranging significance behind the saucepans, including the struggle to put food on the table and the desire to voice one’s anger. She said that her own pot that she was banging had once been used to cook pasta and then to melt depilatory wax.

“It has had several lives, and now it ends up in a protest,” she said.

Protesters across France have taken to the streets with pots, pans, lids and spoons to make known their frustration over President Emmanuel Macron’s pension changes.

With his party ahead in elections, Greek leader claims ‘political earthquake’

By NIKI KITSANTONIS

The party of Greece’s conservative prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, was on track to win a decisive victory in the general election Sunday but fell short of the majority required to lead a one-party government, setting the stage for another ballot within weeks since Mitsotakis appeared to rule out forming a governing coalition.

Mitsotakis described the preliminary outcome as a “political earthquake” that called for an “experienced hand to the helm” of Greece, and said that any negotiations with fractious potential coalition partners would only lead to a dead end.

With 93.7% of the votes counted Sunday night and his party, New Democracy, leading the opposition Syriza by 20 percentage points, Mitsotakis greeted a crowd of cheering supporters outside his party’s office in Athens.

“We kept the country upright and we’ve laid the foundations for a better nation,” he said. “We will fight the next battle together so that at the next elections what we already decided on, an autonomous New Democracy, will be realized.”

New Democracy had captured 40.8% of the votes by Sunday night, preliminary results showed, after calling on Greeks to opt for economic and political stability over “chaos” in a tense campaign. The center-left Syriza party, led by former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, under whose tenure Greece came close to leaving the eurozone in 2015, landed in second place, with 20.7% of the votes. The socialist Pasok-Kinal party took third place, securing 11.6%.

Tsipras said in a statement that he had called to congratulate Mitsotakis on his victory and that his party would convene to discuss

change. He highlighted a perceived abuse of power by the current administration, including a wiretapping scandal, and drew attention to the rising cost of living, which opinion polls show is most voters’ key concern.

Before casting his ballot Sunday, Tsipras called on Greeks to “leave behind an arrogant government that doesn’t feel the needs of the many.”

His message was convincing to Elisavet Dimou, 17, who voted for the first time Sunday in a central Athens school. She said she had been swayed by Syriza’s promise of “change” and “justice.”

the result given that a second election appeared all but assured.

On Monday, when the final result is clear, the leading party will get a mandate to try to form a government. But it appeared most likely that the prime minister will not explore that option, leading to a new election, possibly in June or early July.

New Democracy was on track to win 145 seats in the 300-seat parliament, with 72 seats for Syriza, preliminary results showed. Syriza’s poor performance spurred speculation in the Greek news media about the center-left party’s future.

“It reflects the utter collapse of Syriza’s strategy, its perpetual rightward drift, a hegemonic position on the left that deepened confusion and demoralization,” said Seraphim Seferiades, a professor of politics and history at Panteion University in Athens.

He also noted the high abstention in the vote, more than 40%: Turnout stood at 60%, preliminary results showed.

Three factors added to the ambiguity of the

election Sunday: the 1 in 10 undecided voters; the roughly 440,000 young people who were eligible to vote for the first time; and the 3% of the electorate that had backed a party founded by the jailed spokesperson of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, which was banned from running.

The absence of an outright winner had been expected, since the election was conducted under a system of simple proportional representation, which makes it hard for a single party to take power. Any second vote would be held under a different system, which grants bonus seats to the winning party, giving New Democracy a better chance of forming an independent government.

In his campaign speech in Athens on Friday night, Mitsotakis pointed to his government’s success in increasing growth (now at twice the eurozone average), attracting investment and bolstering the country’s defenses amid a testy period with neighboring Turkey.

“This is not the time for experiments that lead nowhere,” he said, adding that achieving an investment grade rating, which would allow Greece to lower its borrowing costs, required a stable government.

Mitsotakis was also unapologetic about Greece’s tough stance on migration, which has included heightened border controls and has led to a 90% drop in migrant arrivals since 2015. While his government has come under fire by human rights groups for illegally pushing back migrants at sea and creating camps with prisonlike conditions, many Greeks have welcomed the reduced influx. Migrants overwhelmed Greece’s resources at the peak of Europe’s migration crisis.

“Greece has borders, and those borders must be guarded,” Mitsotakis declared Friday to a crowd of cheering supporters waving Greek flags.

Tsipras, for his part, had campaigned for

“Syriza made mistakes, too, but they didn’t spy on half the country,” she said, referring to reports that the wiretapping scandal had swept up dozens of politicians, journalists and entrepreneurs.

Another factor in her choice of Syriza was the fatal train crash in central Greece in February that killed 57 people, including many students. “They had their whole lives ahead of them, and they died because those in power didn’t care enough to fix the trains,” she said.

Public outrage over the crash briefly dented New Democracy’s lead in opinion polls, but that edged back up as supporters were apparently comforted by promises of continued stability and prosperity.

One supporter, Sakis Farantakis, a 54-yearold hair salon owner, said: “They’re far from perfect, but it’s the only safe choice. We’ve moved on; why go backwards to uncertainty?”

Mitsotakis has argued that a one-party government would be preferable to a coalition deal to ensure stability and reassure investors. Economic growth has taken hold in Greece after a decadelong financial crisis that ended in 2018.

He has little choice of partners. The socialist Pasok party had been regarded as the only realistic candidate for a coalition with New Democracy. But Mitsotakis’ admission last year that Greece’s state surveillance agency had spied on Pasok’s leader, Nikos Androulakis, strained ties between the men and cast a shadow over any prospects for cooperation.

A leftist-led administration had been another possibility. Syriza had been courting Pasok for a coalition that would most likely require a third party, probably Mera25. That party, led by Yanis Varoufakis, Tsipras’ former finance minister, appeared not to have gained a foothold in parliament with most of the votes counted.

Androulakis had kept his intentions unclear, declaring that both parties were unreliable and that neither Mitsotakis nor Tsipras should lead any coalition government. Androulakis called to congratulate Mitsotakis late Sunday.

Supporters of the governing New Democracy party in Athens after the first exit polls came in on Sunday.

Liberals are convincing themselves of a debt ceiling plan that won’t work

By EZRA KLEIN

The debt ceiling might be the single dumbest feature of U.S. law. Congress decides to spend money and later schedules a separate vote on whether the government will pay its bills. If the government doesn’t pay its bills, calamity ensues.

Moody’s Analytics estimates that even a short debtceiling breach could cause a recession. An analysis by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers modeled a more protracted default and foresaw a crash on the order of the 2008 financial crisis: The stock market falls 45%, unemployment rises by 5 points and America’s long-term borrowing costs are much, much higher. All of this to pay money we already owe and can easily borrow. Madness.

Defenders of the debt ceiling will tell you that the limit has been around a long time and has largely operated to the good. The U.S. has never defaulted on its debts, but the debt ceiling has often motivated compromise between the two parties. That may be true, but it’s a bit like saying that since the U.S. has won every game of Russian roulette it’s played so far, it should keep playing.

And so I understand — and share — the interest in ways to render the debt ceiling null and void. Democrats

should have eliminated the debt ceiling when they held Congress and the White House in 2021 and 2022. But they didn’t.

Now, two more unconventional tactics are proving particularly popular in the liberal imagination.

In one, President Joe Biden simply declares the debt ceiling unconstitutional, pointing to the 14th Amendment, which holds that “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” Five Senate Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., are circulating a letter calling on Biden to do just that. On Friday, 66 progressive congressional Democrats sent Biden their own letter making a similar case.

In the other, the Treasury Department uses a loophole in a 1997 law to mint a platinum coin of any value it chooses — a trillion dollars, say — and uses the new money to keep paying the government’s debts.

In remarks after a meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Biden said he was “considering” the argument that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. The problem, he continued, is that “it would have to be litigated.” And that’s the problem with all these ideas and why, in the end, it’s doubtful that Biden — or any Democrat — will try them.

The legality of the debt ceiling or a trillion-dollar platinum coin doesn’t depend on how liberals read the Constitution or the Coinage Act. It depends on how three conservatives read it: John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who are the closest the Supreme Court now comes to having swing justices.

It’s easy enough to come up with counterarguments that conservative justices are likely to find persuasive. Michael McConnell, a former judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, to which he was appointed by President George W. Bush, just offered one in these pages. “For the United States to fail to pay interest or principal on its debt would be financially catastrophic, but it would not affect the validity of the debt,” he wrote. “When borrowers fail to make payments on lawfully incurred debt, this does not question the validity of those debts; their debts are just as valid as before. The borrowers are just in default.”

The coin gambit is similarly easy to poke holes in, if one wants to. Preston Byrne, a partner at the law firm Brown Rudnick, notes that the Supreme Court has often looked at statutes for which a simple reading of a limited law would seem to grant the executive almost unlimited powers. In many such cases, the court struck down those readings. Congress, the court has said, does not “hide elephants in mouse holes.”

My point is not that more conservative readings of

these laws are right in some absolute sense. It’s that no such absolute sense matters. We just watched this Supreme Court wipe out decades of precedent to overrule Roe v. Wade. It has repeatedly entertained cases that even conservative legal scholars thought farcical just a few years earlier. I still remember Orin Kerr, a law professor who clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy, telling me at the beginning of the Obamacare case that there was “a less than 1% chance that the courts would invalidate the individual mandate,” only to update that to a “50-50 chance” as the court prepared to rule.

The Supreme Court does what it wants to do. Does it want to let the Biden administration dissolve the debt ceiling using a novel legal theory?

If testing the question wouldn’t cost anything, there would be no harm in trying. But I don’t think it would have no cost. The strength of the Biden administration’s political position is that it stands for normalcy. The debt ceiling has always been raised before, and it must be raised now. But if the administration declares the debt ceiling unconstitutional only to have the Supreme Court declare the maneuver unconstitutional, then Biden owns the market chaos that would follow. Who will voters blame in that scenario? Republicans, who say they just wanted to negotiate over the budget, as is tradition? Or Biden, who did something no other president had done, and failed?

Right now, the positions are clear. The White House is open to budget negotiations but opposed to debt ceiling brinkmanship. Republicans are the ones threatening default if their demands are not met. They are pulling the pin on this grenade, in full view of the American people. Biden should think carefully before taking the risk of snatching it out of their hands and holding it himself.

AAA y Universidad de Puerto Rico en Mayagüez firman Acuerdo de Colaboración

SAN JUAN – La Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados (AAA) y la Universidad de Puerto Rico en Mayagüez (RUM) firmaron un Acuerdo de Colaboración el

lunes con el que se permitirá a los estudiantes de la universidad realizar prácticas en proyectos de infraestructura que la AAA lleva a cabo en toda la isla.

“Nos llena de mucha satisfacción la firma de este importante Acuerdo porque marca el inicio de la primera experiencia laboral en el campo de la ingeniería a los jóvenes universitarios del RUM. Con este Acuerdo, la AAA reafirma su compromiso con los estudiantes universitarios para brindarles las oportunidades necesarias que contribuyan a su desarrollo profesional y el futuro de nuestra isla”, expresó Doriel Pagán Crespo, presidenta ejecutiva de la AAA en declaraciones escritas.

El objetivo del Acuerdo es preparar y proporcionar las herramientas necesarias a los estudiantes de ingeniería a través de un programa integrado de trabajo y ca-

Alcalde de Arecibo bajo fuego por comentarios “homofóbicos”

ARECIBO – El alcalde de Arecibo, Carlos Ramírez Irizarry, enfrenta críticas por parte de líderes del Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana (MVC), luego de la filtración de audios donde supuestamente se burla de la comunidad LGBTTIQ+, trascendió el lunes.

“El alcalde debería tener más respeto hacia todas las personas y no utilizar el sexo, la orientación sexual o la identidad de género de forma despectiva para devaluar el carácter o liderazgo. Todos nos merecemos respeto”, afirmó José Cintrón, portavoz en la Legislatura Municipal de Arecibo por el MVC en declaraciones escritas.

“Aquí vemos como el alcalde le habla a la gente de su

partido utilizando el ser mujer o la feminidad en hombres como una connotación ofensiva o débil. Como mujer y arecibeña, me siento sumamente indignada por las expresiones machistas y anticuadas del señor alcalde”, declaró Eilat García Correa, portavoz del MVC en Arecibo y comisionada local del precinto 26.

José Carlos Rivera Santiago, subcoordinador de la Juventud del MVC (La Jota) y miembro de la comunidad LGBTTQ+, catalogó estas expresiones como “peligrosas y lamentables”. Agregó que “estas expresiones ratifican la importancia de una educación con perspectiva de género para erradicar este tipo de conductas”.

El liderato de La Jota y el local del MVC concuerdan en que el alcalde debe ofrecer una disculpa pública. “El

pacitación. Las empresas Arcadis, CSA Group, Black and Veatch, y CH Caribe están incluidas en el Acuerdo y estarán reclutando a los estudiantes para realizar sus prácticas en el campo de la ingeniería.

El rector del RUM, Agustín Rullán Toro, comentó que “esta herramienta será de mucho provecho para que los estudiantes en ingeniería pongan en práctica lo aprendido en el salón de clases. La experiencia adquirida será en beneficio para todas las partes, estamos muy entusiasmados por dar comienzo a este acuerdo”.

El Acuerdo permitirá a los estudiantes adquirir experiencia en el área laboral y realizar diversas tareas alineadas con su campo de estudio en distintos proyectos de la AAA. La cooperativa dará comienzo a partir de agosto de 2023.

señor Ramírez Irizarry le debe al pueblo una disculpa y un reconocimiento sobre la importancia de no hacer estas declaraciones que perpetúan la discriminación y la marginalización de las mujeres y de la comunidad LGBTTQ+”, concluyó García Correa.

Cámara inicia investigación sobre construcción de torre de telecomunicaciones en Guayanilla

POR EL STAR STAFF

EL CAPITOLIO – La Comisión para el Desarrollo y la Fiscalización de Fondos Públicos de la Región Suroeste inició este lunes el proceso de vistas públicas para investigar el proyecto de construcción de una torre de telecomunicaciones en la carretera PR-335 del barrio Indios, en Guayanilla.

A la audiencia pública comparecieron el Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales (DRNA), la Oficina de Gerencia de Permisos (OGPe), el Departamento de Seguridad Pública (DSP) y la Junta de Planificación. No obstante, el DRNA fue la única agencia que entregó un memorial explicativo para el récord de la comisión cameral.

“Todos los incidentes que se pueden alegar sucedieron en función y posterior a la intervención legislativa que ya estaba en curso y que no voy a detener por ninguna razón.

Nosotros tenemos un deber y una obligación de atender los asuntos que nos competen, y vamos a hacer lo propio”, expresó el presidente de la comisión, Ángel “Tito” Fourquet, al abrir los trabajos.

En una ponencia firmada por la secretaria Anais Rodríguez, el DRNA afirmó que su evaluación del proyecto concluyó que el lugar donde se pretende construir la torre de telecomunicaciones es un hábitat natural con bajo impacto de convertirse en hábitat esencial, hábitat de alto valor ecológico o hábitat de valor ecológico, según las categorías establecidas por la agencia.

La agencia explicó que este hábitat natural con bajo potencial se considera categoría 6 y no reúne las características de las categorías de hábitat anteriores. Esas categorías son: hábitat irremplazable (#1), hábitat esencial (#2), hábitat de alto valor ecológico (#3), hábitat de valor ecológico

(#4) y hábitat natural con gran potencial de convertirse en hábitat esencial, de alto valor ecológico o de valor ecológico (#5).

Las obras de construcción de la torre están detenidas desde el pasado 10 de mayo luego de que el alcalde de Guayanilla, Raúl Rivera Rodríguez, comunicó a la empresa proponente Elite Towers LLC que no podía continuar los trabajos debido a que no pagó los arbitrios y patentes municipales.

Además, tanto el Gobierno Municipal de Guayanilla como un grupo de vecinos de la comunidad radicaron por separado dos demandas para intentar detener la construcción de la torre en el sector San Germán. Entre los argumentos de ambas demandas se encuentran que el terreno donde se ubicará la torre es un humedal, por lo que no debe desarrollarse una construcción de ese tipo.

POR CYBERNEWS

Donna Summer’s bedazzled closet and ephemera will go up for auction

By JULIA JACOBS

For nearly a decade after Donna Summer’s death in 2012, her home in Nashville, Tennessee, remained like a shrine to the Queen of Disco’s decadeslong music career.

Beaded gowns that she had worn onstage remained tucked away along with designer pumps in the upstairs closet; ephemera such as an annotated album cover design for “She Works Hard for the Money” were stored downstairs; and in the basement, there was an accumulation of brightly colored paintings, awards and gold records.

Never eager to talk about death, Summer — who died of lung cancer at 63 — had not given directions for what should be done with her possessions, her husband, Bruce Sudano, said recently. It was only in the past few years that Summer’s family was ready to fully comb through her belongings at the Nashville home, many of which will go up for sale at Christie’s next month, the auction house announced Friday.

“You’d go into these spaces and it would be almost a time capsule of your life,” said Brooklyn Sudano, one of Summer’s three daughters.

One of the items up for sale is a silver goblet that Summer often had onstage with her, filled with caffeinefree Pepsi. Brooklyn Sudano remembered that when she and one of her sisters were on tour with their mother in the 1990s, one of their jobs would be to stir the soda inside the goblet to get rid of any bubbles. (“While she’s singing she can’t be burping,” she explained.)

A versatile singer-songwriter whose music spanned funk, dance, rock and gospel, Summer shot to fame in 1975 with the erotic extended cut of “Love to Love You Baby,” followed by the pioneering electronic song “I Feel Love,” whose pulsating club beat can be heard in Beyoncé’s “Summer Renaissance.”

The announcement by Christie’s came shortly before HBO’s release on Saturday of a new family-backed biographical documentary, directed by Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano. Chronicling Summer’s rise from a cast member in a German production of “Hair” to an international superstar, the film, called “Love to Love You, Donna Summer,” is as much about her personal life as her career, discussing her struggles with depression, physical abuse by a boyfriend, and her chapter as a born-again Christian.

The auction includes glamorous possessions and others that are more mundane. On the glamorous end: a glittering blue and green dress Summer wore in the music video for her 1983 song “Unconditional Love,” a rhinestone-studded dress and bolero jacket that she wore at a concert in 1995, and a collection of the diva’s sunglasses.

and the Elton John AIDS Foundation, the auction house said.

One item, a poster for a 1998 concert supporting the nonprofit Gay Men’s Health Crisis, gestures to the history of Summer’s at times strained relationship with LGBTQ fans, many of whom boycotted her music in the ’80s after they had helped to fuel its rise.

The documentary briefly addresses that history, with Summer’s husband recounting how an off-the-cuff comment onstage — “God didn’t make Adam and Steve, he made Adam and Eve,” he recalled her saying — deeply hurt many gay fans. Summer worked to repair her relationship with the fan base, especially after New York magazine wrote that she had described the AIDS crisis as a “divine ruling” on gay people, a report she fiercely denied and ultimately sued over.

The sale also includes about 15 paintings and manuscripts with scrawled lyrics, including for the 1977 song “Now I Need You,” written on stationery from a hotel in Munich, as well as edits in pencil to the lyrics for the hit “On the Radio.”

Brooklyn Sudano scrutinized documents like those while piecing together the HBO film, which she said bolstered her belief that her mother was not a pop star engineered by outside forces, but rather an artist who was deeply involved in creating the hits that made her famous.

“People just saw her as this persona,” she said. “I don’t think that they truly understood that she was an artist and had an active role in creating the Donna Summer that people knew.”

As for the mundane — but perhaps intriguing to the most devoted of fans — the sale includes unworn shoes and a dozen unused Louis Vuitton towels.

“There are people in the world who love her,” said Bruce Sudano, who is in charge of caring for her estate.

“It felt like we can’t just hoard all of this stuff for ourselves.”

The online sale, which Christie’s expects to garner about $200,000 to $300,000, begins on June 15. A portion of the proceeds from the sale will go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Save the Music Foundation

Donna Summer performing in Minneapolis in 1995. The gown she is wearing will be sold by Christie’s next month.

Jonatan Ramos Director Funerario

Rita Lee, Brazil’s Queen of Rock, dies at 75

By ALEX WILLIAMS

Rita Lee, a convention-flouting titan of Brazilian music who emerged with seminal experimental band Os Mutantes and went on to become a solo star known widely as her country’s Queen of Rock, died May 8 at her home in Sao Paulo. She was 75.

Her death was announced in a statement posted on her Instagram account. She had been receiving treatments for lung cancer, which she learned she had in 2021.

With Os Mutantes, Lee was a product of the tropicália movement (also known as tropicalismo), an anti-authoritarian Brazilian cultural flowering that started in the late 1960s. She ultimately became a commercial powerhouse, selling a reported 55 million records over a career that stretched over a half-century.

As a solo artist, she churned out a string of hits in the 1970s — among them “Ovelha Negra” (“Black Sheep”) and “Mania de Você” (“Mania for You”) — that became enduring classics. She was accompanied by the band Tutti Frutti in her early years, and later, by her husband, Roberto de Carvalho.

In 2001, Lee took home a Latin Grammy Award for best Portuguese-language rock or alternative album, for “3001.”

Her reach was global. Kurt Cobain, David Byrne and Beck are among the many musical innovators who hailed the subversive oeuvre of Os Mutantes. In 1988, King Charles III, then the Prince of Wales, requested one of her records for a dance at a banquet at the British Embassy in Paris. He was said to know the words “by heart,” according to The Daily Mirror.

Brazil after the Civil War (Rita’s middle name was inspired by Gen. Robert E. Lee), and Romilda Padula, a pianist.

When she was a child, Lee recounted in “Rita Lee: Uma Autobiografia” (2016), a sewing machine repairman sexually abused her in her home, a traumatic experience that fueled her rebellious spirt.

Musically inclined, she played in several groups as a teenager and, despite her early stage fright, formed Os Mutantes (The Mutants) with brothers Arnaldo and Sérgio Dias Baptista in 1966. In an early interview, she claimed that the band, whose name was inspired by a science fiction book called “O Planeta dos Mutantes” (“The Planet of the Mutants”), had “come from another planet to take over the world.”

The band was to Sao Paulo “what the Grateful Dead were to San Francisco, the Velvet Underground to New York or Nirvana to Seattle,” Larry Rohter of The New York Times wrote during a comeback tour in 2007.

In terms of psychedelic trappings and extravagant plumage, the band was far more Dead than Velvets, although it took the free-for-all spirit of the ’60s to absurdist levels, mixing American and British psychedelia with Brazilian genres such as bossa nova, and adding electronic experimentalism and a prankster sensibility that served as a pointed rebuke to Brazil’s authoritarian climate.

Os Mutantes made its mark backing Gilberto Gil at the Festival of Brazilian Popular Music in 1967. The next year, the band appeared on the groundbreaking compilation album “Tropicália: Ou Panis et Circenses,” featuring songs by Gil, Caetano Veloso and other leading lights of the movement.

But she was no pop confection. After a troubled and rebellious youth, she was arrested in 1976 for marijuana possession and held up as a cautionary tale by Brazil’s military dictatorship. She also made multiple trips to treatment facilities for drug and alcohol use.

Irreverent and candid, Lee carried herself with rockstar swagger. (After her cancer diagnosis, the mordant Lee nicknamed her tumor Jair, a jab at Brazil’s incendiary president at the time, Jair Bolsonaro.)

As one of the few female rockers to play guitar onstage in the 1960s and as a solo artist who explored sexuality from a woman’s point of view, Lee was hailed as a feminist hero. When informed of Lee’s death during a Senate commission hearing, Brazil’s cultural minister, singer Margareth Menezes, was visibly overcome with emotion, describing Lee as a “revolutionary woman.”

Lee herself was a little more blunt about her triumphs.

“When we talk about feminism and all these things, I don’t really have the theory of it. I’m more of the action,” Lee said in a 2017 television interview. “They used to say that women couldn’t wear long pants. Huh? Yes, we can, I wore mine. They used to say that women couldn’t play rock. I would get my ovaries, my uterus, I’d play my rock ’n’ roll.”

Rita Lee Jones was born Dec. 31, 1947, in Sao Paulo, the youngest of three daughters of Charles Jones, an American-born dentist descended from Confederates who fled to

The band’s debut album, released that same year, was sprinkled with environmental sounds, jagged guitar riffs. and other sonic detritus. It was, Rolling Stone wrote when including it in a 2013 roundup of the greatest stoner albums of all time, one of the late 1960s’ “most mischievous head trips, which is saying something.”

Lee left the band to pursue a solo career after it released its fifth album, “E Seus Cometas No Pais Do Baurets” (“Mutants and Their Comets in the Country of Weed”), in 1972. She retreated from the limelight after her final studio effort, “Reza” (“Prayer”), in 2012, although she did release a new song, “Change,” with her husband and producer Gui Boratto in 2021.

She is survived by her husband; her sons, Beto, João and Antônio; and two grandchildren. Her first marriage, to Arnaldo Baptista of Os Mutantes, ended in divorce in 1972.

A vegan and animal welfare activist, the onetime countercultural firebrand spent much of her final years “confined to my den, in a little house in the middle of the woods surrounded by animals and plants,” only going out shopping or to the dentist, she wrote in a 2020 essay for Brazilian magazine Veja.

“Today,” she added, “I do everything over the internet and pray I don’t break a tooth.”

Rita Lee performing in 1988. She got her start with the band Os Mutantes before finding success as a solo artist, selling a reported 55 million records over a career that stretched over half a century.

Hotels roll out the red carpet for pets

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

If you wouldn’t dream of going on vacation without your pet, you’re in luck. Hotels and resorts are increasingly catering to them with new packages and amenities (or “pet-menities,” as Virgin Hotels puts it), be it an in-room dining menu for dogs with a “beef woofslider” at Andaz Mexico City Condesa, or a posh pet blanket made of recycled wool from one of the Marine & Lawn Hotels & Resorts in Britain. Perks abound, like “puppuccinos” at the Omni La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, California, and paw-and-nose balm at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

With more and more guests wanting to travel with their pets, especially since the pandemic, major hotel companies such as Marriott, Hilton and Kimpton are rolling out or expanding their programs across thousands of hotels and vacation rentals. While many inns have long welcomed pets, today all kinds of lodgings are courting them. Whether you and your furry friend are seeking a budget hotel in Ithaca, New York, or a villa in Umbria, Italy, these new programs and properties aim to make it easy for the both of you to sit and stay.

HOTELS

Andaz Mexico City Condesa

If you’re longing for a getaway with the four-legged love of your life, the first Andaz in Mexico City might be the perfect escape. You can hang out at the hotel’s indoor-outdoor Wooftop Beer Garden & Canine Club and enjoy snacks and drinks from a food truck that offers “dog beer” — not to worry, it’s made with water, bone broth, meat and herbs — for your companion, and then check out the pop-up pet accessory boutique from Perro de Mundo.

Retreat to one of the 213 rooms and suites and you’ll find a record player (a nod to the neighborhood’s long-standing record store La Roma Records) and a minibar with Mexican snacks and drinks. And for your pet? A dog bed and an in-room dining menu with dishes that could make a human jealous, including chicken Xolo-taco (a corn tortilla and shredded chicken with steamed vegetables) and salmon fillet (salmon steak, broccoli and green peas). For dessert (your dog’s, not yours), there’s birthday cake: apple cookie, banana and peanut butter.

Prices from $269 a night; the pet fee (cats are also welcome) per room is $100 per pet.

Virgin Hotels New York City

Never mind the amenities for humans. Virgin’s first hotel in New York City, which had its grand opening party in April, offers “pet-menities,” including a dog bed that the hotel promises pets is “as comfortable as your human’s,” a food and water dish, and a Virgin Hotels dog bandanna. Dogs also receive treats from Shameless

tum, offering plenty of picturesque and historical places for you to stroll with your pet.

Prices from $269 a night; free for pets.

HOTEL CHAINS

Aloft

When checking into some of the latest Aloft hotels — Aloft Austin Southwest, Aloft Playa del Carmen and Aloft Chicago Schaumburg — you and your pet can participate in the brand’s ARF (Animals R Fun) program, which is available at Alofts in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America. Pets receive a free ARF kit with a bowl, a bed and a Frisbee or rope toy. (Some properties may even dole out additional amenities, like dog towels and paw wipes.) More Aloft hotels, which are geared toward travelers who enjoy music and a social scene, are set to open this year, including Aloft New York Chelsea and Aloft Indianapolis Downtown. Nightly pet fees vary by hotel.

Hilton

Pets, a company that upcycles leftover food into treats.

Occupying the block between 29th and 30th streets on Broadway, Virgin Hotels New York City is in NoMad near Madison Square Park with its popular dog run. Its 460 rooms and suites have red minifridges, yoga mats, smart TVs, lights and thermostats that can be controlled with the Virgin Hotels mobile app, and floor-toceiling windows with views of the city, including, in some cases, the Empire State Building.

Prices from $595 a night; free for pets.

Kimpton the Forum Hotel

This new 198-room boutique hotel opened in Charlottesville, Virginia, in April and has all the benefits pet owners have come to expect from Kimpton, which has been pet-friendly since it was founded in 1981. Its hotels don’t charge extra for pets, and they have essentials on hand, like water bowls and doggy bags, as well as lists of local pet-friendly restaurants, parks, groomers and boutiques. Last year, Kimpton, part of IHG Hotels & Resorts, introduced a partnership with Wag!, an app that connects pet owners with local caregivers for services like dog walking and pet sitting. So if you’re a guest at a Kimpton property in the United States, you can schedule walks and drop-ins (for a fee). You’ll also receive a complimentary month of Wag! Premium, which provides discounts on services and waives booking fees.

Kimpton the Forum Hotel is on the grounds of the University of Virginia, which is on the UNESCO World Heritage List and was founded by Thomas Jefferson (who designed the Academical Village at its heart). The hotel, located at the Darden School of Business, is about a mile-and-a-half walk to the university’s Central Grounds. It’s also near botanical gardens and an arbore-

As anyone who travels with a pet knows, sometimes questions or concerns about their health or behavior arise while you’re on the road. If you happen to be at a Canopy by Hilton, Embassy Suites by Hilton, Homewood Suites by Hilton, Hilton Garden Inn, Hampton by Hilton or Tru by Hilton hotel in the United States or Canada, you’re able to get free virtual support from a service called Mars PET On-Demand from Mars Petcare, a pet products and services company.

One pet-friendly program is Canopy by Hilton Paws in the Neighborhood. If, for example, you and your dog are staying at certain Canopy hotels, you’ll be provided with a dog bed, food, a water bowl and a “bark bag” with a toy, treats and a guide to pet-friendly activities. Today, nearly 85% of U.S. Hilton properties are pet-friendly. Check individual hotels for programs, policies and pricing. Pet fees apply and vary by hotel.

VACATION RENTALS

Homes & Villas by Marriott Bonvoy

Since the pandemic, one of the most popular search filters on Marriott’s luxury home rental booking site has been “pets allowed.” In response to more travelers taking their pets on vacation, Homes & Villas by Marriott Bonvoy, which has more than 80,000 upscale and luxury rentals around the world, has teamed up with Petco Health + Wellness Co. For the last several months, users of the Homes & Villas booking site have been able to browse “Pet-Friendly Picks by Petco,” where they can check out properties from West Palm Beach, Florida, to Athens.

Other home rental sites like Airbnb and Vrbo also enable users to search for properties that allow pets, though Marriott’s platform is particularly attractive to members of its loyalty program because they can earn and redeem points for their stays.

In an undated image provided by 2023 Hilton, dogs at a Hilton. As people increasingly travel with their four-legged friends, hotels are stepping up with more amenities.

The best and worst habits for eyesight

By HANNAH SEO

If you were ever scolded as a child for reading in the dark, or if you have used bluelight-blocking glasses when working on a computer, you might have incorrect ideas about eye health.

About 4 in 10 adults in the United States are at high risk for vision loss, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But many eye conditions are treatable or preventable, said Dr. Joshua Ehrlich, an assistant professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the University of Michigan.

Here are nine common beliefs people have about eye health, and what experts have to say about them.

Reading a book or looking at an electronic device up close is bad for your eyes.

True. Our eyes are not meant to focus on objects close to our face for long periods of time, said Dr. Xiaoying Zhu, an associate clinical professor of optometry and the lead myopia researcher at SUNY College of Optometry in New York City. When we do, especially as children, it encourages the eyeball to lengthen, which over time can cause nearsightedness, or myopia.

To help reduce the strain on your eyes, Zhu recommends following the 20-20-20 rule: After every 20 minutes of close reading, look at something at least 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds.

Reading in the dark can worsen your eyesight.

False. However, if the lighting is so dim that you need to hold your book or tablet close to your face, that can increase the risks mentioned above and create eyestrain, which can cause soreness around the eyes and temples, headache and difficulty concentrating. But these are usually temporary symptoms, Zhu said.

Spending more time outside helps eyesight.

True. Some research (mostly focused on children) suggests that outdoor time can reduce the risk of developing myopia, said Maria Liu, an associate professor of clinical optometry at the University of California, Berkeley. Experts don’t fully understand why this is, but some research suggests that bright sunlight may encourage the retina to produce dopamine, which discourages eye lengthening (although these experiments have mostly been conducted with animals, Zhu said).

Too much ultraviolet light can harm eyesight.

True. There is a reason experts say not to stare at the sun. Too much exposure to ultraviolet A and B rays in sunlight can “cause irreversible damage” to the retina, Ehrlich said. This can also increase your risk of developing cataracts, he said.

Too much UV light exposure can also increase the risk for developing cancers in the eye, Ehrlich said — although this risk is low. Wearing sunglasses, glasses or contacts that block UV rays can offer protection.

Taking a break from wearing glasses can prevent your eyesight from getting worse.

False. Some patients who need glasses tell Safal Khanal, an assistant professor in optometry and vision science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, that they don’t wear

their glasses all the time because they think it will make their condition worse. “That’s not true,” he said. If you need glasses, you should wear them.

Even a little blue light from screens is damaging to your eyes.

False. Although some research has found that exposure to blue light can damage the retina and potentially cause vision problems over time, no solid evidence has confirmed that this happens with typical exposures in humans, Ehrlich said. There’s also no evidence that wearing blue-light-blocking glasses will improve eye health, he added.

But screens can be bad for eyesight in the other ways described above, including by causing dry eyes, Zhu said. “When we stare at a screen, we just don’t blink as often as we should,” she said, and that can cause eyestrain and temporary blurred vision.

Smoking is bad for eye health.

True. A 2011 CDC study linked smoking with self-reported age-related eye diseases in older adults, including cataracts and agerelated macular degeneration, a disease where part of the retina breaks down and blurs your vision. Toxic chemicals in cigarettes enter your bloodstream and damage sensitive tissues in the eyes, including the retina, lens and macula, Khanal said.

Carrots are good for your eyes.

True. Although a diet full of carrots won’t give you perfect vision, some evidence suggests that the nutrients in them are good for eye health. One large clinical trial, for instance, found that supplements containing nutrients found in carrots, including antioxidants such as beta-carotene and vitamins C and E, could slow the progression of age-related macular degeneration.

Following an antioxidant-rich diet won’t necessarily prevent an eye disease from occurring, but it can be helpful “particularly for people with early macular degeneration,” Ehrlich said.

Worsening eyesight is an inevitable part of aging.

False. Most causes of declining eyesight in adulthood — including age-related macular degeneration, cataracts and glaucoma — are preventable or treatable if you catch them early, Ehrlich said. If your vision is starting to wane, don’t dismiss it as “just aging,” he added. Seeing an optometrist or ophthalmologist right away (or regularly, every year) will give you the best chance of staving off these conditions, he said.

A photo illustration shows a woman watching her phone. The Best and Worst Habits for Eyesight. Are carrots good? Is blue light bad? Experts weigh in on nine common beliefs.

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A : ACREEDORES DE LA SUCESIÓN VÍCTOR A. PERALTA PICCO.

Vista la moción presentada por la parte demandante sobre publicación de edictos en cumplimiento con el Art. 594 del Código de Enjuiciamiento Civil Sec 2542, en el caso de epígrafe se les notifica a los acreedores, si alguno de Víctor A. Peralta Picco que se notifiquen con la Administradora Judicial Jacqueline Frances Rapale Burgos a la siguiente dirección en un plazo no mayor de sesenta (60) días. P. O. Box 20083

San Juan, P. R. 00928-0083

Dada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, hoy día 24 de marzo de 2023. GRISELDA RODRÍGUEZ

COLLADO, SECRETARIA

REGIONAL. LINDA LEVY RODRÍGUEZ, SECRETARIA DE SERVICIOS A SALA.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU-

NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA

SALA SUPERIOR DE FAJARDO

TE COMPRO TU

CASA CASH LLC, REPRESENTADA POR SU

PRESIDENTE, HÉCTOR

VIDAL VEGA RODRÍGUEZ

Parte Peticionaria EXPARTE

RG2023CV00159. obre: EXPEDIENTE DE DOMINIO. Sala: 305. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS E.E.U.U., EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PR, SS.

A: LAS PERSONAS IGNORADAS Y DESCONOCIDAS A QUIENES PUDIERA AFECTAR LA INSCRIPCIÓN DEL DOMINIO A FAVOR DE LA PARTE PETICIONARIA EN EL REGISTRO DE LA PROPIEDAD DE LA FINCA

QUE MÁS ADELANTE SE DESCRIBIRÁ Y A TODA

PERSONA EN GENERAL QUE CON DERECHO PARA ELLO DESEE OPONERSE A ESTE EXPEDIENTE.

POR LA PRESENTE se les notifica para que comparezcan, si lo creyeren pertinente, ante este Honorable Tribunal dentro de los veinte (20) días contados a partir de la última publicación de este edicto a exponer lo que a sus derechos convenga en el expediente promovido por la parte peticionaria para adquirir su dominio sobre la finca que se describe más adelante. Usted deberá presentar su posición a través del Sistema

Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación en la secretaría del Tribunal. Si usted deja de expresarse dentro del referido término, el Tribunal podrá dictar sentencia, previo a escuchar la prueba de valor de la parte peticionaria en su contra, sin más citarle ni oírle, y conocer el remedio solicitado en la petición, o en cualquier otro, si el Tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

URBANA: Solar situado en la calle Soledad del Pueblo de Rio Grande, compuesto de doscientos noventa y ocho (298.00) metros cuadrados de superficie, o sea, catorce punto noventa (14.90) metros de frente, por veinte (20.00) metros de fondo, en el enclava una casa terrera, de maderas del país y americanas con techo de zinc, que mide ocho (8.00) metros de fondo, por cinco punto treinta y tres (5.33) metros de frente, por dos punto sesenta y seis (3.66) metros de fondo, colindantes, por el NORTE, con tierras de don Ramón Pérez Villamil, hoy Ángel Cruz Meléndez; por el SUR, con casa y solar e Dionisio Ramos, hoy Ismael Márquez Correa; por el ESTE, con la calle de la Soledad y por el OESTE, con Rosa Narváez Rosario. El representado legal de la parte peticionaria lo es: Lcdo.

José Rubén Vélez Marrero, The Executive Building, Suite 1100-A, Ave. Ponce de León 623, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00917; Teléfono: 787-773-1111; jrvelez@centronotarialpr.com. Este edicto deberá ser publicado en tres (3) ocasiones dentro del término de veinte (20) días, en un periódico de circulación general diaria, para que comparezcan si quieren alegar su derecho. Toda primera mención de persona natural y/o jurídica

que se mencione en el mismo, se identificará en letra tamaño 10 puntos y negrillas, conforme a los dispuesto en las Reglas de Procedimiento Civil, 2009. Se le apercibe que de no comparecer los interesados y/o partes citadas, o en su defecto los organismos públicos afectados en el término improrrogable de veinte (20) días a contar de la fecha de la última publicación del edicto, el Tribunal podrá conceder el remedio solicitado por la parte peticionaria, sin más citarle ni oírle. En Fajardo, P.R., hoy día 28 de abril del 2023. Wanda I. Seguí Reyes, Secretaria Regional. Kathia Ferrer Figueroa, Secretaria Auxiliar Del Tribunal.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU-

NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA

CENTRO JUDICIAL DE PONCE SALA SUPERIOR BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

Parte Demandante Vs. LA SUCESIÓN DE ANA HILDA RENTAS RAMOS

T/C/C ANA H. RENTAS

RAMOS COMPUESTA

POR: SADIE ANNETTE SAMBOLÍN RENTAS

T/C/C SADIE ANNETTE ANTHONY, FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS

Parte Demandada Civil Núm.: PO2022CV01685.

(406). Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO, EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS. AVISO DE PÚBLICA SUBASTA. El Alguacil que suscribe por la presente anuncia y hace constar que en cumplimiento de la Sentencia dictada el 23 de enero de 2023 y notificada el 1 de febrero de 2023, la Orden de Ejecución de Sentencia del 23 de marzo de 2023 y el Mandamiento de Ejecución del 24 de marzo de 2023 en el caso de epígrafe, procederé a vender el día 9 DE AGOSTO DE 2023, A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA, en mi oficina, localizada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Centro Judicial de Ponce, Sala Superior, en 2150 Ave. Santiago de los Caballeros, Ponce, Puerto Rico, al mejor postor en pago de contado y en moneda de los Estados Unidos de América, cheque de gerente o giro postal, todo título, derecho o interés de la parte demandada sobre la siguiente propiedad:

URBANA: Solar Número trece

(13) del Bloque “H” en el plano de la Urbanización Villa Tabaiba radicada en el Barrio Canas de Ponce, Puerto Rico, con un área superficial de 144.48 metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE: en 21.00 metros con el Solar Número catorce (14) del Bloque H de la urbanización; por el SUR: en 21.00 metros con el Solar Número doce (12) del Bloque H de la urbanización; por el ESTE: en 6.88 metros con la Calle Los Tres Santos Reyes; y por el OESTE: en 6.88 metros con Ferré Development Corporation. Sobre dicho solar enclava una estructura residencial para uso para una familia, la cual por ser una estructura en hilera comparte la pared al lado Norte y Sur y como pared medianera con la estructura construida en los Solares Números catorce (14) y doce (12) del Bloque H de la Urbanización. Inscrita al folio 91 del tomo 1909 de Ponce, Finca 59996. Registro de la Propiedad de Ponce, Sección I. La escritura de hipoteca consta inscrita al tomo Karibe de Ponce, Finca 59996. Registro de la Propiedad de Ponce, Sección I. Inscripción séptima (7ma). Dirección Física: Urb. Villa Tabaiba, 305 ( H-13) Calle Caguana, Ponce PR 007161308. Número de Catastro: 63-411-030-639-21-0000. El tipo mínimo para la primera subasta será de $64,804.00. De no haber adjudicación en la primera subasta se celebrará una SEGUNDA SUBASTA, el el día 16 DE AGOSTO DE 2023, A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA, en el mismo lugar, en la cual el tipo mínimo será de dos terceras partes del tipo mínimo fijado en la primera subasta, o sea, $43,202.66. De no haber adjudicación en la segunda subasta, se celebrará una TERCERA SUBASTA el día el día 23 DE AGOSTO DE 2023, A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA, en el mismo lugar, en la cual el tipo mínimo será la mitad del precio pactado, o sea, $32,402.00. Si se declarase desierta la tercera subasta, se adjudicará la finca a favor del acreedor por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada si ésta es igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la tercera subasta, si el tribunal lo estima conveniente. Se abonará dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si ésta es mayor. Dicho remate se llevará a cabo para con su producto satisfacer a la demandante el importe de la Sentencia por la suma de $62,272.56 de principal, más intereses sobre dicha suma al 4% anual desde el 1 de diciembre de 2021 hasta su completo pago, más $49.52 de recargos acumulados, los cuales continuarán en aumento hasta el saldo total de la deuda, más la cantidad estipulada de

$6,480.40 para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogados, así como cualquier otra suma que contenga el contrato del préstamo. Surge del Estudio de Título Registral que sobre esta propiedad pesan los siguientes gravámenes posteriores a la hipoteca que por la presente se pretende ejecutar: a. Embargo Estatal: Anotado sobre esta finca, como perteneciente a Domingo Santos Negrón & Ramos Rosa, por la suma de $2,589.78 a favor del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, según certificación de fecha 15 de abril de 2015, presentada en mayo de 2015, al folio 73, número de orden 288 del Libro de Embargos Estatales número 3. Nota: No podemos precisar si la vendedora y embargada son la misma persona. b. Bitácora: Al Asiento 2022-099480-PO01, el 29 de julio de 2022, Demanda de fecha 24 de junio de 2022, ante el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Ponce, en el Caso Civil Número PO2022CV01685, seguido por Banco Popular de Puerto Rico vs. Sucesión de Ana Hilda Rentas Ramos también conocida como Ana H. Rentas Ramos, compuesta por Sadie Annette Sambolín Rentas, también conocida como Sadie Annete Anthony, Fulano y Mengano de Tal sobre Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca, en la que se reclama el pago de la hipoteca, con un balance de $62,272.56 y otras cantidades, o la venta en pública subasta de la propiedad. Pendiente de anotación. Se notifica al acreedor posterior o a su sucesor o cesionario en derecho para que comparezca a proteger su derecho si así lo desea. Se les advierte a los interesados que todos los documentos relacionados con la presente acción de ejecución de hipoteca, así como los de Subasta, estarán disponibles para ser examinados, durante horas laborables, en el expediente del caso que obra en los archivos de la Secretaría del Tribunal, bajo el número de epígrafe y para su publicación en un periódico de circulación general en Puerto Rico por espacio de dos semanas y por lo menos una vez por semana; y para su fijación en los sitios públicos requeridos por ley. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante, continuarán subsistentes; entendiéndose que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate y que la propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gra-

vámenes posteriores tal como lo expresa la Ley Núm. 2102015. Y para el conocimiento de los demandados, de los acreedores posteriores, de los licitadores, partes interesadas y público en general, EXPIDO para su publicación en los lugares públicos correspondientes, el presente Aviso de Pública Subasta en Ponce, Puerto Rico, hoy 5 de abril de 2023. MANUEL MALDONADO, ALGUACIL, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, CENTRO JUDICIAL DE PONCE, SALA SUPERIOR.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA MUNICIPAL DE CAYEY JUNTA DE RESIDENTES VILLAS DE JOHNNY TOLEDO, INC.

Demandante Vs. Pedro rosario, YESENI Rodríguez torres; AMBOS POR SI Y EN REPRESENTACIÓN DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR

AMBOS

Demandado(a)

Civil Núm.: GGCI2015-01558. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO (R.60). EDICTO DE SUBASTA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: PEDRO ROSARIO, YESENI RODRÍGUEZ

TORRES; AMBOS POR SI Y EN REPRESENTACIÓN DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS. FÍSICA &

POSTAL: URB. VILLAS DE JOHNNY TOLEDO, #92 CALLE 4, CAYEY, PR 00736.

PÚBLICO EN GENERAL:

El Alguacil del Tribunal que suscribe anuncia y hace constar: 1. Que en cumplimiento del Mandamiento que me ha sido dirigido por la Secretaría del Tribunal de Primera Instancia de Puerto Rico, Sala de Caguas, en el caso de epígrafe, venderé en pública subasta y al mejor postor de contado y en moneda de curso legal y corriente de los Estados Unidos de América, todo derecho, título o interés que tenga la Parte Demandada en el bien inmueble que se describe a continuación: “URBANA: URBANIZACIÓN

VILLAS DE JOHNNY TOLEDO de Cayey. Solar: 92. Cabida: 154.0366 Metros Cuadrados.

Linderos: Norte, en una distancia de dieciséis punto treinta y seis metros (16.36 m.) con Detention Pond. Sur, en una distancia de dieciséis punto treinta y seis (16.36 m.) con lote noventa y tres (93). Este, en una distancia de nueve punto catorce metros (9.14 m.) con el lote número noventa y tres (93). Enclava edificación tipo “Town House” o casa en hilera de dos niveles de forma irregular. Entrada principal mirando hacia el Este, que colinda con calle número tres (3) de la Urbanización Villas de Johnny Toledo. Primera planta, sala, comedor, cocina, área de lavandería, medio baño y marquesina; Segunda planta, tres (3) dormitorios, un baño y terraza. Se segrega de la finca número 23,339, inscrita al folio 10 del tomo 569 de Cayey. Aprobada dicha segregación en virtud del plano archivado bajo el número 3078-

A. Finca #23387, de Cayey, Registro de la Propiedad de Caguas, Sección I.” Dirección física: Urb. Villas de Johnny Toledo, #92 calle 4, Cayey. PR 00736. 2. Que los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado estarán de manifiesto en la secretaría del tribunal durante las horas laborables. 3. Que se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito ejecutante, continuaran subsistentes, entendiéndose que el remanente los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. 4. La propiedad para ejecutar se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores. 5. Que el licitador y/o mejor postor pagará el importe de su oferta en efectivo, cheque certificado o giro postal a nombre del Alguacil de Tribunal. 6. La propiedad se encuentra afecta a los siguientes gravámenes:

A. HIPOTECA: A favor de First Bank de Puerto Rico, suscrito bajo testimonio 22663, por la suma de $137,700.00, con intereses al 5% anual. Vencimiento el 1 de mayo de 2040. Se tasa la propiedad en $137,700.00, en caso de subasta. Así resulta de la escritura número 209 otorgada en San Juan el 9 de abril de 2010, ante el notario Jorge García Soto, según inscripción

2. B. ANOTACIÓN DE EMBARGO (JUDICIAL, LEY 209): a favor de la JUNTA DE RESIDENTES VILLAS DE JOHNNY TOLEDO INC., por la cantidad de principal de $1,470.70 y otras sumas por concepto de cuotas vencidas y no pagadas. Orden expedida por el / la Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala de Cayey en el Caso Civil nú-

mero GCCI2015-01558 sobre R.60, Parte DEMANDANTE: JUNTA DE RESIDENTES VILLAS DE JOHNNY TOLEDO INC., Parte Demandada: Pedro Rosario; Yeseni Rodríguez Torres; ambos por sí y en representación de la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales. Compuesta por ambos, el día 22 de mayo de 2019., según anotación A. 7. Dicha subasta se celebrará para con el importe de la misma satisfacer a la parte demandante la suma principal de $1,470.70 cantidad que incluye cuotas de mantenimiento vencidas y no pagadas al 30 de noviembre de 2015, más costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado; más intereses desde que se dicte la sentencia al 4.25% anual ($0.17 diario), a partir de esa fecha en la cantidad de $248.31, al 19 de noviembre de 2019; más $950.00 por concepto de las costas y gastos del proceso de ejecución de la sentencia mediante embargo de bien mueble, inmueble y vehículo, concedidos mediante Ordenes de fecha de 25 de febrero de 2019 (mueble y vehículo), y 22 de mayo de 2019 (inmueble); menos pagos realizados por la parte demandada ($420.00), totalizan la cantidad de $2,799.01; más $950.00 por concepto de honorarios de abogado en el proceso de ejecución de la sentencia mediante venta en pública subasta, más las costas y gastos del proceso de acuerdo a lo dispuesto en la Regla 51.10 de las de Procedimiento Civil de 2009, más intereses diarios a razón de 4.25% anual ($0.17 diario), a partir del20 de noviembre de 2019, todo ello sin prestación de fianza por solicitarse luego de dictada la sentencia. La subasta se llevará a cabo en mi oficina localizada en el local que ocupa en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Municipal de Cayey, el día 14 DE JUNIO DE 2023 A LAS 9:00 DE LA MAÑANA. Y para la conveniencia de los licitadores expido el presente Edicto para su publicación en un periódico de circulación general y por un término de catorce (14) días en los lugares públicos que determine la ley. En Caguas, Puerto Rico, a 02 de mayo de 2023. ALEJANDRO L. URBINA ROQUE, ALGUACIL AUXILIAR PLACA #997.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA

tificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 17 de mayo de 2023. San Juan, Puerto Rico, el 17 de mayo de 2023. Griselda Rodríguez Collado, Secretaria Regional. Vanessa Nieves Morales, Secretaria Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU-

NAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA

TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

Demandante V. ROSALINA NIEVES MAYSONET, A-Z MORTGAGE CORPORATION, JOHN DOE

Demandad(a)

Civil: BY2023CV01630. Sala:

501. Sobre: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO

POR LA VÍA JUDICIAL. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: A-Z MORTGAGE CORPORATION Y JOHN DOE COMO TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARE.

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

EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 16 de mayo de 2023, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido

archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 19 de mayo de 2023. En Bayamón, Puerto Rico, el 19 de mayo de 2023.

Laura I. Santa Sánchez, Secretaria Regional. Nereida Quiles Santana, Secretaria Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA

CENTRO JUDICIAL DE CAGUAS

JUNTA DE RETIRO DEL GOBIERNO DE PUERTO RICO, ANTES SISTEMA DE RETIRO DE LOS EMPLEADOS DEL GOBIERNO, SISTEMA DE RETIRO DE LA JUDICATURA Y SISTEMA DE RETIRO DE LOS MAESTROS

Demandante V. LUIS ALFREDO RAMOS LEÓN; CRISTINA

MORERA CARTAGENA Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandado

Civil Núm.: CG2023CV00637.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO

Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA

POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS.

A: LUIS ALFREDO RAMOS LEÓN. DIRECCIÓN RESIDENCIAL

Y POSTAL: CARR. 787

KM 5 HM 2, BO. BEATRIZ, URB. PAOLO #3, CAGUAS, PR, 00725.

Por el presente edicto se le notifica que se ha radicado una demanda en este Tribunal, en la cual, Luis Alfredo Ramos León, es parte co-demandada en el caso de epígrafe. Se le requiere que en el término de treinta (30) días, contados a partir de la publicación de este edicto, usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema

Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal, y notificarle copia a la representación legal de la parte demandante a la siguiente dirección:

GUILLERMO A. SOMOZA COLOMBANI

TSPR. RUA 10396

PO Box 366603

San Juan PR 00936-6603

Tel. (787) 919-0073

Email: billysomoza@yahoo.com

MARCOS MORALES SBERT

TSPR. RUA 18706

Edif. Asociación de Maestros

452 Ponce de Leon, Suite 515

San Juan, PR, 00918

Tel. (787) 340-2966

Email: mgm@moralessbert.com

Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. EXTENDIDO BAJO

MI FIRMA Y SELLO DE TRIBUNAL, en San Juan, Puerto Rico, hoy 17 de mayo de 2023. Lisilda Martínez Agosto, Secretaria General. Carmen L. Soto Planas, Secretaria Del Tribunal.

LEGAL NOTICE

IN THE UNITED STATES BANKRUPTCY COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO

IN RE: GUILLERMO JESÚS TIRADO MENÉNDEZ & SHERRY LEE WOOLARD RODRÍGUEZ

Debtor WIGBERTO LUGO MENDER, TRUSTEE FOR THE ESTATE OF GUILLERMO JESUS TIRADO MENENDEZ & SHERRY LEE WOOLARD RODRÍGUEZ

Plaintiff V. ALEXANDRA MARIE GONZALEZ FUENTES AND ENRIQUE ALEJANDRO GONZALEZ FUENTES

Defendants

Case No.: 19-01969. ESL.

CHAPTER 7. ADV. NO. 2300032 ESL. COMPLAINT TO OBTAIN COURT APPROVAL FOR THE SALE OF CO-OWNED PROPERTY OF THE ESTATE. SUMMONS BY PUBLICATION.

To: ALEXANDRA MARIE GONALEZ FUENTES.

Whereas, the Chapter 7 Trustee of the Estate of Guillermo Jesus Tirado Menendez & Sherry Lee Woolard Rodríguez, appearing as Plaintiff has formally filed a complaint commencing the above adversary proceeding against the Defendants seeking (1) to obtain Court approval for the sale of both the interest of the estate and of a co-owner’s interest on real property with the distribution of all proceeds on this sale to be performed between the estate and the co-owner as per Section §363 (j) and (2) the reimbursement to the estate for the necessary costs and expenses of the adversary proceeding estimated in $500 and attorney’s fees incurred in prosecuting this action estimated in $2,500.

(Docket Entry No. 1). On May 16, 2023, Plaintiff submitted a motion to serve summons by publication pursuant to F.R.B.P. 7004 (c), Rule 4 (e) of the Fe-

deral Rules of Civil Procedure and Rule 4.6 of the Puerto Rico Rules of Civil Procedure, dueto the fact that Defendants are not in Puerto Rico and/or cannot be found and there is no knowledge of their addresses, notwithstanding plaintiff having taken all the pertinent steps to ascertain their whereabouts. The aforementioned motion was granted on 5/17/2023.

Pursuant to the Order for Service by Publication entered on 5/17/2023, by the Honorable Enrique S. Lamoutte, United States Bankruptcy Judge (Docket No. 7), you are hereby SUMMONED to appear, plead or answer the Complaint filed herein no later than thirty (30) days after publication of this Summons by serving the original plea or answer in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Puerto Rico, and serving a copy to counsel for plaintiff: Alexis Betancourt Vincenty, Esq., and/or Wigberto Lugo Mender, Esq., at Lugo Mender Group, LLC, 100 Carretera 165, Suite 501, Guaynabo, Puerto Rico 00968-8052, telephone number (787) 707 -0404. This Summons shall be published by edict only once in a newspaper of general circulation in the Island of Puerto Rico. Plaintiff has been excused from sending to defendant copy of this Summons and the Complaint, by certified mail/return receipt requested, to defendant’s last known address within ten (10) days following publication of this Summons. Should you fail to appear, plead or answer to the Complaint as ordered by the Court and noticed by this Summons, the Court will proceed to hear and adjudicate this cause against you based on the relief demanded in the Complaint.

BY ORDER OF THE COURT, summons is issued pursuant to Rule 7004(c) of the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure and Rule 4.6 of the Rules of Civil Procedure for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, this 17 day of May, 2023. Wilma Jaime, Clerk, U.s. Bankruptcy Court. Jose Romo, Deputy Clerk.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA

SALA SUPERIOR DE VEGA

BAJA

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

Demandante V. SUCESIÓN DE JOSÉ MIGUEL ANDINO SANTANA, COMPUESTA

POR: ANACELIS ANDINO CRESPO; CHRISTIAN EFRAIN ANDINO RIVERA; FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESION; DEPARTAMENTO DE

HACIENDA DE PUERTO RICO

Demandados

Civil Núm.: MT2021CV00715. (201). Sobre: INTERPELACIÓN; COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE GARANTÍAS. EDICTO DE SUBASTA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS.

A: PUBLICO EN GENERAL.

El Alguacil del Tribunal que suscribe anuncia y hace constar: A. Que en cumplimiento del Mandamiento que me ha sido dirigido por la Secretaria del Tribunal de Primera Instancia de Puerto Rico, Sala de Vega Baja, en el caso de epígrafe, venderé en pública subasta y al mejor postor de contado y en moneda de curso legal y corriente de los Estados Unidos de América y cuyo pago se efectuará en efectivo, giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, todo derecho, título o interés que tenga la Parte Demandada en el bien inmueble que se describe a continuación: RÚSTICA: Parcela marcada con el número cuatrocientos treinta y dos (432) de la comunidad rural Guárico del Barrio Algarrobo del término municipal de Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de cero punto mil doscientos veintiún (0.1221) cuerdas, equivalentes a cuatrocientos setenta y nueve punto setenta y tres (479.73) metros cuadrados. En lindes; por el NORTE, con parcela número cuatrocientos doce (412) de la comunidad; por el SUR, con parcela número cuatrocientos treinta y uno (431) de la comunidad; por el ESTE, con parcela número cuatrocientos diecinueve (419); y por el OESTE, con calle número veintidós (22) y parcela número cuatrocientos cuarenta y tres (443) de la comunidad. Inscrita al folio 6 del tomo 207 de Vega Baja, Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección Sección IV de Bayamón, finca número 11,815. Dirección fisica: Lot.#432, #22 St., Guarico Community, Algarrobo Ward, Vega Baja, PR. 00693. B. Que los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado están de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal durante las horas laborables bajo el epígrafe de este caso.

C. Que se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito ejecutante, continuarán subsistentes, entendiéndose que el rematente los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes poste-

riores. D. Que la propiedad se encuentra afecta a los siguientes gravámenes posteriores: Hipoteca en garantía de un pagaré a favor de RF Mortgage & Investment Corporation, o a su orden, por la suma principal de $50,000.00, con intereses al 8 5/8% anual, vencedero el día 1 de mayo de 2015, constituida mediante la escritura número

341, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 29 de abril de 2000, ante el notario Enrique N. Vela Colón, e inscrita al tomo Karibe de Vega Baja, finca número 11,815, inscripción 2da.

(así surge),como Asiento Abreviado, extendidas las líneas el día 29 de agosto de 2016, en virtud de la Ley número 216 del día 27 de diciembre de 2010.

(Fue presentado el día 16 de mayo de 2000, al Asiento 83 del Diario 125. E. Dicha subasta se llevará a cabo para satisfacer a la parte demandante el importe de la sentencia que ha obtenido ascendente a la suma principal de $78,053.40, la suma de $12,064.03, que incluye intereses según pactados, cargos por demora y otros cargos, que se acumulan diariamente hasta su total y completo pago, más la suma de 10% del principal, por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado. La PRIMERA SUBASTA se celebrará el día 3 DE AGOSTO DE 2023 A LAS 9:15 DE LA MAÑANA en la Oficina del Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia de Vega Baja, por el tipo mínimo de $99,216.00. De declararse desierta dicha subasta se celebrará una SEGUNDA SUBASTA el día 10 DE AGOSTO DE 2023 A LAS 9:15 DE LA MAÑANA en el mismo lugar antes mencionado. El precio para la segunda subasta lo será 2/3 partes del precio mínimo de la primera, o sea, $66,144.00. De declararse desierta dicha segunda subasta, se celebrará una TERCERA SUBASTA el día 17 DE AGOSTO DE 2023

A LAS 9:15 DE LA MAÑANA en el mismo lugar antes mencionado. El precio para la tercera subasta lo será 1/2 del precio mínimo de la primera, o sea, $49,608.00. Y PARA QUE ASÍ CONSTE, y para su publicación en un periódico de circulación general y por un término de catorce (14) días en los sitios públicos conforme a la ley, expido la presente bajo mi firma y sello de este tribunal, hoy 16 de mayo de 2023 en Vega Baja, Puerto Rico. Alg. Freddie Omar Rodríguez Collazo, Alguacil.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE TOA ALTA

ORIENTAL BANK

Demandante V.

DENISSE MARCANO

FERNANDEZ Demandado(a)

Civil: TA2022CV01042. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: DENISSE

MARCANO FERNANDEZ.

PMB 226 PO BOX 2400, TOA BAJA, PUERTO RICO 00951-2400.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 17 de mayo de 2023, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 18 de mayo de 2023. En Toa Alta, Puerto Rico, el 18 de mayo de 2023. Laura I. Santa Sánchez, Secretaria. Maritza Bonilla Hernández, Secretaria Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE HUMACAO SALA SUPERIOR DE HUMACAO

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

Demandante V. SUCESIÓN DE NELSON

WHARTON OCASIO, COMPUESTA POR “JOHN

DOE Y RICHARD ROE” COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; Y NILSA ILEANA MORALES

CABRERA; CENTRO DE RECAUDACIONES DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (C.R.I.M.)

Demandados

Civil Núm.: HU2023CV00476. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO E INTERPELACIÓN. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, S.S. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO E INTERPELACIÓN DIRIGIDOS

A: “JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE” COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESIÓN DE NELSON WHARTON OCASIO. PARCELA #566 COMUNIDAD RURAL DAGUAO, CALLE 18, NAGUABO, PUERTO RICO 00718, Y 5173 BO. DAGUAO, NAGUABO, PUERTO RICO 00718; Por la presente se le emplaza y notifica que debe contestar la demanda incoada en su contra dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación del presente edicto. Además, en cuanto a la interpelación de los herederos del causante, a que dentro del término legal de treinta (30) días contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden, acepten o repudien la participación que les corresponda en la herencia del causante conforme dispone el Artículo 959 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. §2787, de no expresarse dentro de ese término de treinta (30) días en torno a su aceptación o repudiación de herencia, se tendrá por aceptada. También se le APERCIBE a los herederos antes mencionados que luego del transcurso del término de treinta (30) días antes señalado contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden, se presumirá que han aceptado la herencia del causante y, por consiguiente, responden por las cargas de dicha herencia conforme dispone el Artículo 957 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. §2785. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio. Si usted deja de presentar y notificar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el Tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, o cualquier otro, si el Tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Los abogados de la parte demandante son:

ABOGADOS DE LA PARTE

DEMANDANTE:

Lcdo. Reggie Díaz Hernández RUA Núm.: 16,393

BERMÚDEZ & DÍAZ, LLP

Edificio Ochoa, 500 Calle De La Tanca Suite 209 San Juan, Puerto Rico 00901

Tel.: (787) 523-2670 /

Fax: (787) 523-2664

rdíaz@bdprlaw.com

Expido este edicto bajo mi firma y el sello de este Tribunal, hoy 19 de mayo de 2023. Ivelisse C. Fonseca Rodríguez, Secretaria Regional. Michelle Guevara De León, Secretaria Auxiliar.

Vinícius Júnior charges racism is ‘normal’ in Spain

By TARIQ PANJA

Vinícius Júnior has had enough. The Real Madrid forward, a magnet for racist chants from the stands in Spanish stadiums for the past two seasons, took to social media after the latest attack against him Sunday, when he was called a monkey by fans in Valencia. This time, he took aim not only at his abusers but also at Spain itself.

“It wasn’t the first time, nor the second, nor the third,” Vinícius wrote in a post on his Twitter and Instagram accounts. “Racism is normal in La Liga. The competition thinks it’s normal, the federation does too and the opponents encourage it.” Spain, he said, was becoming known in his native Brazil “as a country of racists.”

On Sunday, Vinícius was met by fans chanting the word “mono” — monkey — before he even stepped off the Real Madrid bus outside the Mestalla stadium in Valencia. The match was briefly halted in the 71st minute as he pointed out some of his abusers to the referee, and an anti-racism statement — part of a league protocol for such incidents — was read to the crowd over the stadium loudspeakers. By the end, though, it was Vinícius who was cast as the villain: He received a red card in the dying minutes of injury time after scuffling with an opponent who had charged at him.

Bouts of racial abuse echoing through the stands in Spanish soccer stadiums are not uncommon or new, but they have become particularly pointed toward Vinícius, who has emerged as one of the league’s marquee players since the departures of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

In a statement announcing an investigation into the events Sunday in Valencia, La Liga acknowledged it had reported nine separate incidents of racist abuse against Vinícius in the past two seasons alone. By then, the player had taken to social media, where he wrote that the attacks on him were tarnishing Spain’s image around the world.

“A beautiful nation, which welcomed me and which I love, but which agreed to export the image of a racist country to the world,” he wrote. “I’m sorry for the Spaniards who don’t agree, but today, in Brazil, Spain is known as a country of racists.”

He even suggested a failure to act against racism could drive him from the country.

“It’s not possible, in the middle of the 21st century, to have such strong racial prejudice in so many football stadiums,” Lula said.

Current and former players also rallied around Vinícius, taking aim at the authorities in Spain for not doing more to stamp out racism, which some commentators in the country have routinely described as merely an effort to gain an advantage on the field.

Kylian Mbappé, who almost moved to Spain last season to join Vinícius in Madrid, posted a message of support on Instagram. He was joined by Neymar, a Brazilian star who also faced racial abuse when he played in Spain for Barcelona.

La Liga issued a statement detailing what it said were its efforts to stamp out racism in its stadiums. The league said it was working with authorities in Valencia to investigate what took place, and it vowed to take legal action if any hate crime was identified.

The reaction to what occurred at the Mestalla brought new scrutiny on Spanish soccer’s handling of racism inside stadiums. In a television interview immediately after the match, Real Madrid’s coach, Carlo Ancelloti, reacted incredulously when he was asked to talk about the game. “I don’t want to talk about football,” he said. “I want to about what happened here.”

In a news conference that followed, local journalists tried to correct Ancelloti’s assessment that the entire stadium was responsible, telling him he had misheard the chanting. Then officials from Valencia issued denials of widespread racism in the stands, despite videos online appearing to show large sections of the crowd chanting “mono.” Some reporters suggested to Ancelloti that a majority of supporters had actually been chanting “tonto,” a word that means silly in Spanish. “Whether it was ‘mono’ or ‘tonto’, the referee stopped the game to open the racism protocol,” Ancelotti replied. “He wouldn’t do that if they just chanted ‘tonto.’ Speak to the referee.”

Within hours, La Liga’s chief executive, Javier Tebas, was engaged in a back-andforth exchange with Vinícius on Twitter. In it, Tebas defended Spain, detailed the efforts the league had made to tackle racist behavior and scolded Vinícius for what Tebas said was a failure to show up to two meetings to discuss the abuse he had received.

Tebas’ statement led to a furious response from the player.

“Once again, instead of criticizing racists, the president of La Liga appears on social media to attack me,” Vinícius wrote. “As much as you talk and pretend not to read, the image of your championship has been hit by this. See the responses to your posts and you will have a surprise. Omitting yourself only makes you equal to racists.”

The incident drew criticism, and messages of support, from around the world.

Speaking at a news conference at the close of a Group of 7 summit in Japan, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said he wanted to send a message of solidarity to Vinícius, saying it was “unjust” that he “gets insulted at every stadium where he plays.”

The latest incident will mean new scrutiny on Spanish soccer at a time it is looking for global support to secure the hosting rights to the 2030 World Cup as part of a joint effort with Portugal and Morocco.

“La Liga has been fighting against this kind of behavior for years, as well as promoting the positive values of sport, not only on the field of play, but also off it,” the league said.

Still, it is limited in the type of penalties it can levy against clubs. Stadium closures, for example, can be sanctioned only by the national soccer federation, which by midday Monday was silent about the events in Valencia.

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Real Madrid’s Vinícius Júnior pointing out a group of Valencia fans who he said called him a monkey.

Koepka wins PGA Championship, vanquishing demons and boosting LIV

By ALAN BLINDER

Six weeks ago on Sunday, Brooks Koepka did not sleep. He had brooding to do and demons to chase. After everything — the ghastly knee injury, the agony of unfulfilled ambition, the taunts and the splenetic rift in professional golf that he helped personify — he had rallied to a Masters Tournament lead, and then he had fizzled. Collapsed really.

He ultimately vowed, he recalled over the weekend at Oak Hill Country Club in Pittsford, New York, never to “think the way I thought going into the final round.” On Sunday evening, Koepka found his vindication: a twostroke win at the PGA Championship, earning him his first major tournament trophy since 2019. It was Koepka’s fifth career major victory, tying him with figures such as Seve Ballesteros and Byron Nelson.

“I think this one is probably the most meaningful of them all with everything that’s gone on, all the crazy stuff over the last few years,” said Koepka, who said that he had received about 600 text messages by the time he held a news conference. “But it feels good to be back and to get No. 5.”

The victory made him the first member of LIV Golf, the year-old breakaway league bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, to win a major title since joining the circuit. And while Koepka’s triumph at Oak Hill may do little to stanch some of the criticisms of LIV — its ties to a repressive government, its disputed intentions, its gleeful instigation of a financial arms race in an ancient sport — it definitively ended the wrangling over whether men who play a smattering of 54-hole tournaments can prevail on golf’s grandest, 72-hole stages.

“I definitely think it helps LIV,” Koepka said, “but I’m more interested in my own self right now, to be honest with you.”

Fair enough, for he silenced the notion, one that seemed a little more off-the-mark after the Masters at Augusta National, that his contending days were done by carding a 3-under-par 67 on Sunday, taking him to 9 under for the tournament. But this is a 33-year-old player whose results in 2022’s major season looked like this: missed cut, tie for 55th, solo 55th, missed cut. It had been easy to forget that in 2021, the sequence went like this: missed cut, tie for second, tie for fourth, tie for sixth.

By the end of last year, he had a mounting hunch that his recovery was nearly done and that he could, finally, be

relevant again. Around January, he has said, he was certain of it.

“He is back to being healthy,” said Cameron Smith, who won the British Open last summer and then joined LIV later in the year. “I think that brings a little bit of internal confidence as well being out there and just being able to do your stuff.”

It did not look that way as recently as Thursday, when the prospect that Koepka would outlast a swarm of stars seemed closer to impossible than even improbable. He had opened his tournament with a 2-over-par 72 and, by his own account, was out of sorts and struggling to strike the ball as he wished. He could not remember, he said, the last time he had hit so poorly.

But he was not that far behind because the tournament, the first major played at Oak Hill since a sweeping effort to restore some of the daunting tests that characterize Donald J. Ross-designed courses, emerged as one of the most fearsome PGA Championships in recent decades, often evoking the rigors of the 2008 competition at Oakland Hills in Michigan. Of the 156 players who competed this past week, only 11 finished below par — a departure from 2013, when the PGA Championship was contested at Oak Hill and 21 players finished in the red.

The stinginess came even with the course, with its perilous rough and humbling bunkers, being more accommodating Sunday than it had been earlier. Smith, Cam Davis, Kurt Kitayama and Sepp Straka all shot 65s on Sunday, running them high up the leader board. Patrick Cantlay, who made one of the tournament’s scarce eagles, signed for a 66. Michael Block, whose day job is being the head pro at Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club southeast of Los Angeles, had a hole-in-one at No. 15, the first PGA Championship ace by a club professional since 1996.

But much of the focus Sunday was on Koepka; Viktor Hovland, the budding Norwegian talent; and Scottie Scheffler, the No. 2 player in the Official World Golf Ranking. Koepka, his standing shriveled because of his lucrative ties to LIV, whose tournaments are not accredited in the ranking system, entered Sunday at No. 44. (The PGA of America, which organized this tournament, is distinct from the PGA Tour, LIV’s rival.)

Koepka stepped into the first tee box with a one-stroke lead and doubled his margin in short order when he made a birdie at the second hole. He had played the hole to par the first three days, always reaching the green in two shots but leaving himself with long putts. On Sunday, with the pin at the front-right of the green, he needed less than 5 feet.

His birdie putt at the third hole required even less, after his longest tee shot of the tournament at the hole known as Vista, moving his advantage to three stokes.

The sixth hole, a threat to so many players throughout the tournament, loomed. Koepka had survived the hole, a par-4 challenge that the field finished in an average of 4.52 strokes, well enough Thursday, Friday and Saturday: par in each of the first three rounds. On Sunday, though, his tee shot rocketed rightward, into thick grass in the so-called native area. He took a drop and then, about 191 yards from the hole, struck it onto the green and eventually escaped

with a bogey. Although Koepka followed with another bogey, Hovland also stumbled at No. 7.

At the turn, Koepka led Hovland by a lone stroke. Scheffler, a steady-voiced sensation since he won last year’s Masters, and Bryson DeChambeau, the 2020 U.S. Open winner, were three off the lead.

Koepka answered with a tantalizing streak: birdie, bogey, birdie. Hovland had a chance for birdie at the 12th hole, but his tap from nearly 15 feet edged just left of the cup. With six holes to play, Koepka’s advantage was back to two strokes. Two holes later, it was down to one.

He arrived at the 18th hole, which was playing 497 yards Sunday, with two shots to spare. His tee shot soared and then thumped into the fairway, stopping at 318 yards. The towering grandstands waited in the distance, filled with spectators, as the fairway-lined galleries were, looking to see whether, after everything, Koepka was indeed back.

His next swing lifted the ball onto the green. The applause was rising, seemingly with every step in his march up the steep incline, the kind of incline that would have felt Everest-like to Koepka in the recent past. He knelt — there had been times, he said, when he could not so much as bend his knee — and then approached the ball. He steadied himself and tapped the ball forward.

It stopped, according to tournament officials, about 3 inches short.

He flashed a tight smile, as if to say that, of course, there would be one last hiccup.

He tried again. The ball fell into the cup. He pumped his fist and then embraced his caddie for nearly nine seconds.

Indeed, after everything, Koepka was back.

Koepka claimed his fifth major championship when he outlasted a swarm of stars on Sunday at Oak Hill Country Club near Rochester, N.Y.

Sudoku

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

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Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

Aries (Mar 21-April 20)

Aries, you don’t have to be at everyone’s beck and call all the time. This is exhausting, and you lose contact with yourself. You should try to take some time out today. Take a good look at your life to see where you’re going. Go for a walk or take a long bubble bath. Things will be much clearer after a relaxing day of reflection.

Taurus (April 21-May 21)

Is it possible you’re too demanding, Taurus? Today’s planetary aspects may be asking you this question. You’re choosy about the people you spend time with, and you have a tendency to ask them to go too far for you. Sometimes you have trouble knowing your limits where other people are concerned. You might want to think about this.

Gemini (May 22-June 21)

Today’s a day to daydream, although this may not be an activity you usually do. You may even feel as if you’re on vacation. Let’s just hope people don’t ask you a lot of difficult questions, because your answers will be anything but clear. But you shouldn’t have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders every day, Gemini.

Cancer (June 22-July 23)

If you have someone special in your life, Cancer, today is a perfect day to stop playing at being your partner’s parent, as you sometimes seem to do. Reverse roles, and let other people take care of you. The world won’t fall apart if you let go for a while. No matter what happens, a day like today should open your eyes.

Leo (July 24-Aug 23)

You won’t be able to fix your indecisiveness, Leo. You just need to give yourself some time. The direction your life is taking isn’t clear at the moment. There are great changes going on inside you. So, even though it may sound like strange advice, don’t do a thing about it! Let the situation get clearer before you act.

Virgo (Aug 24-Sep 23)

You have a strange and wonderful day ahead, Virgo. Once you’ve finished your work, you may want to either draw or write something that will help you remember today for a long time. You’re beginning to see the results of recent changes in you, and you’re looking for a way to express them. It may be difficult to find just the right words. But aren’t you a natural-born writer?

Libra (Sep 24-Oct 23)

You have a nice day in store, Libra. People may seem more attentive to your needs and generally very pleasant. You may not be used to this kind of treatment! You feel more outgoing and sociable than ever. You could take advantage of the day’s tolerant atmosphere to meet people you may have been too afraid to introduce yourself to. They will surely have some new things to teach you.

Scorpio (Oct 24-Nov 22)

Today is a day for healing and reconciliation. You may have been feeling abused and mistreated lately by someone (or a few people) in your family over the past few weeks. You’re now ready for a new start, because you were able to work things out and you’ve learned something from what happened. Take the time to savor the moment, and spend some time with the people you love.

Sagittarius (Nov 23-Dec 21)

You may feel living your life is like crossing a desert, but fortunately, Sagittarius, today brings your oasis. Take advantage of it! Some people you’ve met over the past few weeks could turn out to be more interesting than you originally thought. It’s up to you to change those parts of your personality that have been holding you back.

Capricorn (Dec 22-Jan 20)

Certain questions about your family life aren’t as cut and dried as you might think, Capricorn. This can be the case when emotions are involved. Yet more than anyone else, you need to be careful not to hurt anyone’s feelings. Today something could happen that will let you control the situation while controlling your emotions.

Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19)

Aquarius, you may have had some confused emotions about your relationship or family over the past few days. You may not have been able to fully express your worries to others. But today these emotions will find a way to come out. Look around you. There might be someone right next to you who can help with your problems.

Pisces (Feb 20-Mar 20)

If every day were like today, life would be heaven, Pisces! This is potentially a wonderful time for you. You may find the answers to problems that have been bothering you for a few weeks. Keep your eyes and ears open in all conversations. You could come across the piece you’ve been waiting for.

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