Wednesday May 27, 2020

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

San Juan The

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DAILY

Star

Museums Decide How They Will Remember the Pandemic P20

Gov’t Gets a Break Oversight Board Establishes One-Year Pause in Right-Sizing 18th Public Meeting Turned Virtual; Members Will Consider Certifications of 2020 Fiscal Plan P4

Thousands of Coronavirus PRNG Starts Disaster Preparedness with Rapid Tests Recalled Municipalities

by Health Dept.

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NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

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Wednesday, May 27, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

GOOD MORNING

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May 27, 2020

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

We made a reservation to visit Plaza las Américas using its new app. This is what happened

Today’s

Weather Day

Night

High

Low

91ºF

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77ºF

Precip 50%

Precip 20%

Cloudy

Mostly Cloudy

Wind: Humidity: UV Index: Sunrise: Sunset:

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

From ESE 9 mph 78% 10 of 10 5:47 AM Local Time 6:55 PM Local Time

INDEX Local 3 Mainland 7 Business 11 International 13 Viewpoint 17 Noticias en Español 19 Entertainment 20 22 Fashion

Health Science Legals Sports Games Horoscope Cartoons

23 24 25 26 29 30 31

tarting June 1, Puerto Rico will have its economic litmus test, when Plaza Las Américas will reopen following two months of near-zero percent operations due to the COVID-19 curfew.

Considered the commercial lung of the San Juan metro area, Plaza Las Américas’ immediate reopening could serve as a barometer for how fast, or slow, Puerto Rico’s commercial sector will return to precoronavirus levels.

The island is still not out of the COVID-19 risk, however, and the multilevel shopping mall must operate under phase two of the government’s economic restart plans and follow all social distancing guidelines and health precautions.

Conscious of this, Plaza Las Américas announced new rules concerning visits to the complex’s stores,

offices and eateries. All the new rules have been integrated into a new app, which also allows users to make reservations to visit the shopping center, which will only be accepting prescheduled reservations to enter the mall.

The app is easy to use, with an instinctive and user-friendly operation. The San Juan Daily Star was able to download it quickly and problem-free, and almost immediately book a future visit to the well known shopping center. The app still has reservation spots open for the initial days of reopening.

Among the app’s additional features is a schedule with all upcoming events, a directory for stores and restaurants, and an interactive map. All could come in handy for navigating Plaza Las Américas under the new social distancing rules and Plaza’s very own temporary procedures for shopping under the COVID-19 pandemic emergency.

The Plaza Las Américas app is available for both Android (Play Store) and Apple operating systems.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Oversight board fiscal plan to establish one-year moratorium for gov’t

By THE STAR STAFF

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he revised 2020 commonwealth fiscal plan establishes a one-year moratorium on all government right-sizing so public officials can make changes in the way they provide services.

Financial Oversight and Management Board Executive Director Natalie Jaresko said Tuesday that the plan predicts a 4 percent economic contraction in fiscal year (FY) 2020, a drop in government surpluses to $8 billion from a prior prediction of $23 billion between FYs 2020 and 2032 and deficits onward, six years sooner that previously estimated.

As a result, Jaresko said, the fiscal plan, which is slated to be certified May 27, provides for a one-year pause in government right-sizing so public officials can focus on implementing needed structural reforms and on making changes in the way it operates.

The pause includes a one-year delay in the reduction of subsidies to the University of Puerto Rico and to the island’s 78 municipalities, she said.

Jaresko said that as a result, the government budget for the next fiscal year will not lead to layoffs.

The budget will remain virtually the same as the current one, at $9.4 billion.

Jaresko declined to discuss whether there will be enough money to make debt payments or what will happen to Puerto Rico’s debt restructuring, which has been delayed.

The oversight board will convene a virtual public meeting to certify the 2020 fiscal plan. In a roundtable with reporters, Jaresko provided an overview of some of the most important changes in the fiscal plan, which was amended to take into account the impact of the fiscal crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic that resulted in lockdown of all non-essential businesses on March 15.

On Tuesday, most businesses reopened, but with restrictions.

“The road ahead looks much more uncertain,” Jaresko said.

She described the impact of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus, as severe. Besides a 4 percent economic contraction this year, a decline in gross national product (GNP) of 0.5 percent in FY 2021 is projected.

The projections show declines in GNP for FYs 2022 and 2023, and zero growth in FYs 2024 and 2025.

“Simply put, Puerto Rico’s economy will contract over the next five years,”

Jaresko said.

The oversight board’s fiscal plan also projects a central government deficit from 2032 onward, which is six years sooner than the previous fiscal

plan projected. The 2020 fiscal plan projects a budget surplus of about $8 billion between FYs 2020 and 2032, compared to a $23 billion surplus in the previous fiscal plan.

PREPA director: Electricity costs will keep dropping

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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uerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) Director José Ortiz said Tuesday that the cost of electricity will drop even further in July, while giving assurances that the island’s electricity system is robust in the face of the hurricane season.

Ortiz made his remarks after announcing last week that electricity bills will drop by between $8 and $12 in June as part of the conversion to natural gas of the Central San Juan units 5 and 6.

“That is going to happen,” Ortiz said in a radio interview.

“We have already presented the numbers to the Energy Bureau.

The cycles that now begin to reach people, the bill [for] June 1 [and] onwards, will be experiencing that drop. I tell you what’s more, in July we expect another [lower] one, even greater.”

The PREPA chief also attributed the coming reduction to the drop in the cost of oil since mid-March, which will be reflected in the coming months. He also said there has been a renegotiation with Ecoeléctrica, the effect of which will be seen after July.

“This is going to remain constant. I hope that the drop in the cost of energy will remain well into the year 2021, almost to the year 2022,” Ortiz said. “That is a forecast, more or less

looming out there. … All these things as they come in, they help the consumer, and it is a time when the economy needs it. I think the economy was hit hard with this COVID-19 [pandemic emergency] and this is a factor that can help restart economic activity in Puerto Rico.”

Ortiz added meanwhile that the island’s electrical system

is robust in the face of the hurricane season that starts next Monday, June 1, and that according to forecasts will be more active than normal. He said the public corporation now has an inventory of $131 million, while before Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017 it was $22 million.

“We are better prepared. We are going to prepare for a hurricane equal to Maria to be able to compare,” Ortiz said, insisting that the system between the south and north of the island can withstand winds of 140 miles per hour. “I certainly wouldn’t watch people go 11 months without power because the conditions are so different. I think we have the equipment, we have the inventory, we have a much better built south-north system and we hired two companies a couple of months ago that will help us on the transmission lines for the untangling and cutting back of the vegetation, which was the main problem behind blackouts back then.”

The PREPA director also announced that by July the work on South Coast unit 5 will have been completed for it to begin operating, although there will be a trial month until Aug. 14. He added that even though the process of PREPA’s privatization has been complicated, during the summer an agreement must be signed, since a management entity has already been selected. It will then be presented to the commonwealth Energy Bureau and the federal Financial Oversight and Management Board for final approval.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

All for one, times 78 PRNG mission to coordinate emergency and rescue efforts with every island town begins in Canóvanas

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

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or Puerto Rico National Guard (PRNG) Adj. Gen. José Juan Reyes Peredo, learning from past mistakes is one of the keys to a successful future endeavor in any field.

That is why the man in charge of all National Guard personnel and equipment in Puerto Rico decided to up the ante and prepare an emergency plan for the whole island that includes strategies to deal with many of the situations the island has already lived through.

“What we are looking to do is to continue finetuning strategies and plans so that we end up being able to execute a full plan with a high level of effectiveness. And that comes with a lot of practice,” Reyes Peredo said following his meeting with emergency personnel from Canóvanas looking for any faults or errors in the proceedings so that they could be fixed.

“This one [meeting] in Canóvanas was the first of what we hope ends up being 78 meetings with all the municipal emergency management agencies and other first response personnel to coordinate and fine-tune our response to an emergency or disaster scenario,” Reyes Peredo said.

The meeting was not exclusive to military and municipal employees. Emergency management officials from La Fortaleza and from both local and federal agencies were in attendance.

“We had a good number of participants not only from the town, but also from the central government, like the head of State Emergency Management and Disaster Administration, commissioner José Burgos, and federal agencies,” the PRNG chief said.

Representatives from the island Family Department and Child Services, and the Housing and Education departments also took part in Tuesday’s meeting in Canóvanas.

“Unlike previous meetings, where the hypothetical scenario we were facing was a Category 5 hurricane, this year our coordination exercises are more dynamic and intense because they include hurricanes of different categories, a 6.6-Richter scale earthquake in the northeast of the island, as well

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as a tsunami on that coast and a viral pandemic,” Reyes Peredo noted.

“What we are looking to do is to continue fine-tuning strategies and plans so that we end up being able to execute a full plan with a high level of effectiveness,” he added. “And that comes with a lot of practice. There is no way that our response will be effective unless we practice continuously, especially in coordination with personnel from each municipality.”

Reyes Peredo said they tweaked other parts of the proposed plans to better react in case of an emergency.

“One of the lessons we learned when Hurricane Maria hit [in September 2017] was that of distribution of equipment and personnel,” he said. “Following Maria, we divided the island into four task forces.

Each task force has its own personalized combination of [U.S. Army] Corps of Engineers personnel, military police, medical personnel, and logistical crew. And in the PRGN we have also adapted to this plan with a new redistribution of military personnel and heavy equipment.”

Reyes Peredo added that the PRNG has aid agreements with the National Guard detachments of New Mexico, New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Kentucky, as well as with the regular Army.

Ever the perfectionist, the adjutant general believes that the PRNG’s heavy equipment should be better distributed on the eve of hurricane season.

Currently, 95 percent is distributed in areas where it would be needed.

“I think we can do better,” Reyes Peredo said.

“We are four or five days from the official start of hurricane season and there is no reason for that number to be that low. I think it should be over 98 percent. We shouldn’t wait to be this close to hurricane season before we prepare ourselves.”

Four-track drivers played around in a river. Now a PRASA plant is out of operation

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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uerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA) Arecibo Area Director Samuel Rosario Vega said Tuesday that the Hatillo-Camuy filtration plant continues to be out of operation due to the presence of oil particles in the reservoir.

Rosario Vega noted that due to the situation, today crews will continue to conduct cleaning work at the dam so that personnel can take the tests required by the island Health Department.

“It is important to urge citizens to avoid any activity that may create contamination in the water, including [riding] all-terrain vehicles and [dumping] waste,” the official said in a written statement. “To mitigate the impact, we will continue to send tanker trucks to the municipalities of Hatillo and Camuy.”

According to press reports, last weekend several off-road

vehicle drivers entered an area of the Río Camuy and contaminated the waters that flow into the reservoir and supply the surrounding sectors.

Given the situation, the process of restoring service will be completed by the end of the week, if complications do not occur, Rosario Vega said.

The following sectors of Hatillo are experiencing interruption of drinking water service: Capaez, Las Piedras, Naranjito, La Paloma and El Cementerio. Meanwhile, the following sectors of Camuy are also experiencing interruptions: Zanja Plaz, Matojillo, Cuatro Calles, Abra Honda Palomar, Yeguada and the urban center.

Given the possibility of turbidity when service is restored, it is recommended to boil water intended for human consumption for three minutes.

If additional information is needed, subscribers can contact PRASA’s Customer Service Telephone Center during regular business hours, 6 a.m.-11 p.m., by calling (787) 620-2482, 1-877411-2482 (island) or (787) 751-8125 for the hearing impaired.

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Wednesday, May 27, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Health Dept. orders Phamatech coronavirus tests withdrawn

By THE STAR STAFF

A

fter a notification from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Puerto Rico Health Secretary Lorenzo González Feliciano on Tuesday ordered the recall of Phamatech rapid tests distributed by the department for detecting the antibody of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

“Once we received the FDA notification prohibiting the use and distribution of Phamatech serological tests, we evaluated their distribution by the Health Department to immediately order that they not be used,” González Feliciano said in a written communication. “Today, we are ordering a ‘recall’ of the [remaining unused tests] to ensure that [they are] not available to citizens.”

Of the 8,100 serological tests that were received from the manufacturer Phamatech, 6,975 were distributed, the Health secretary said. Of those tests, about eight boxes, each of 25 tests, for a total of 200, were returned by laboratories that were not satisfied with their validation and decided not to use them.

At the moment, no other laboratory has returned tests, González Feliciano said. He added that it is important to clarify that there may be Phamatech tests acquired by private laboratories, for which reason the Division of Laboratories, which is under the purview of the Health Department’s assistant secretary for regulation and accreditation of health facilities, has notified the island’s private labs of the information provided by the FDA for due action.

The list of serological tests that have FDA authorization is constantly reviewed; therefore, the island Health Department remains attentive to the guidelines established for making decisions regarding the administration of the acquired tests, the Health chief said. The tests were distributed under the “Emergency Use Authorization” framework, which guarantees that although the tests are

not verified by the FDA, the manufacturers did submit their validation data.

“In the Department of Health, the most important thing is to ensure the integrity of our processes, as well as the well being and safety of citizens,” González Feliciano said.

“This is why our team is working to collect the distributed tests as soon as possible.”

Sisters accused in Keleher case plead guilty

By THE STAR STAFF

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lenda and Mayra Colón Ponce, two sisters charged with participating in a $13 million fraud scheme with former Puerto Rico Education Secretary Julia Keleher and three others, have pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud as part of an agreement for leniency in sentencing.

The sisters made the plea Tuesday before U.S. District Court Judge Pedro Delgado after their lawyers, Juan Matos and Francisco Adams, reached an agreement with federal prosecutor Alexander Alum.

In Glenda Colón Ponce’s case, as part of the plea bargain, the prosecution can recommend up to 33 months in prison. The other sister, Mayra Colón Ponce, could receive a 21-month prison sentence and seek probation.

The remaining charges against the defendants will be dismissed during the sentencing hearing.

Had the sisters decided to go to trial and been found

guilty, they could have gotten 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. Both agreed that the hearing be held by videoconference, as necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic emergency. The Colón Ponce sisters will remain out on bail until the sentencing hearing, which has not yet been scheduled.

The indictment charged Glenda Colón Ponce with using her position as Keleher’s special aide to provide internal information to her sister Mayra Colón Ponce to facilitate the awarding of a contract, giving her an advantage over other bidding companies.

Keleher and five other people were arrested in July 2019 on charges of steering federal money to unqualified, politically connected contractors.

Besides the two sisters, federal officials also arrested former Puerto Rico Health Insurance Administration Executive Director Ángela Ávila Marrero, businessman Fernando Scherrer Caillet and government contractor Alberto Velázquez Piñol. They face 32 counts of money

laundering, fraud and other related charges.

The alleged fraud involves $15.5 million in federal funding between 2017 and 2019. Of that sum, $13 million was spent by the commonwealth Education Department during Keleher’s time as secretary, while $2.5 million was spent by the insurance administration when Ávila was the executive director.

Keleher, a native of Philadelphia, drew controversy during her two-year tenure as Education secretary. She closed hundreds of schools and implemented charter schools.

Officials said there was no evidence that Keleher or Ávila Marrero had personally benefited from the scheme, but Velázquez Piñol allegedly had improperly taken advantage of contacts in the education and health insurance agencies to win federal contracts and illegally used federal money to pay for lobbying.

The six defendants could face up to five years in prison for conspiracy and up to 20 years for money laundering and electronic fraud.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

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Widower asks Dorsey to remove Trump’s false tweets. Twitter says no.

By MAGGIE ASTOR and DAVIE ALBA

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he widower of Lori Klausutis, whose death President Donald Trump has used to smear MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, is asking Twitter to remove the president’s tweets on the subject.

Twitter said Tuesday that it would not.

In a letter to Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, last week, Timothy Klausutis said Trump had violated Twitter’s terms of service by falsely suggesting that Scarborough killed Lori Klausutis in 2001 when he was a congressman and she was an intern in his office. Lori Klausutis, 28, actually died as a result of a heart condition that caused her to collapse at work and hit her head on her desk.

“An ordinary user like me would be banished from the platform for such a tweet,” Timothy Klausutis wrote in the letter, which was published Tuesday by The NewYork Times opinion writer Kara Swisher, “but I am only asking that these tweets be removed.”

Trump has repeatedly promoted the conspiracy theory against Scarborough, who has criticized the president on his MSNBC show “Morning Joe.” In a series of tweets over the past several weeks, Trump has urged law enforcement in Florida to “open a cold case” and suggested falsely that Scarborough “got away with murder.” He had tweeted about the same false conspiracy as far back as 2017.

“I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the president of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain,” Klausutis wrote in his letter. “My wife deserves better.”

Twitter has long been hesitant to remove posts from world leaders, even when they contain disinformation. The company has said posts from leaders are newsworthy.

There have been exceptions, especially during the coronavirus pandemic: In March, Twitter deleted posts by Presidents Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil in which they promoted unproven cures for COVID-19. But it has not deleted any of Trump’s posts.

Twitter said, for example, that Trump’s assertion that hydroxychloroquine showed “tremendous promise” in treating COVID-19 did not violate its policies because it was not a clear call to action that would harm the public.

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters at the White House Dorsey has faced multiple calls over the years to remove Trump’s misleading or false statements from the platform, including the president’s suggestion during a White House briefing last month that injecting disinfectant or using ultraviolet light could combat the coronavirus. Although Trump did not write about those subjects on Twitter himself, his statements led to a flood of other posts, videos and comments about false virus cures, which Twitter and other social media companies largely left standing.

Twitter clarified its policy this month, stating that it would label tweets containing misinformation about the virus, including those posted by world leaders, with three broad categories: “mis-

leading information,” “disputed claim” and “unverified claim.”

But the company said it would not label Trump’s tweets about Lori Klausutis.

“We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family,” a Twitter spokesman, Nick Pacilio, said in a statement in response to Timothy Klausutis’ letter. “We’ve been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly.”

Pacilio did not elaborate on what changes the company would make to its product or policies.

Trump shakes up staff for election, adding new deputy campaign manager

By MAGGIE HABERMAN

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resident Donald Trump’s aides are promoting one of his top political advisers to deputy campaign manager, in a move to bolster the team heading into the final five months of the reelection effort, officials said Tuesday.

Bill Stepien, the former White House political director who has been working as a senior political adviser to the

campaign, said in a statement that the new role will let him support both Trump and the campaign manager, Brad Parscale.

“I will continue to support Brad Parscale as he leads the campaign, working with all of our partners in states across the country, and helping to coordinate all of our efforts to ensure the president is reelected,” Stepien said.

The campaign is also promoting Stephanie Alexander, currently the Midwest regional political director, to the

campaign chief of staff.

The moves come as Trump has faced political headwinds and fallen behind Joe Biden in many polls, increasing speculation that he would reshuffle his campaign. But people on the campaign said that the ascension of Stepien, who has been involved in politics for many years, is intended to provide additional support for Parscale, who is not a political veteran.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Inside the dizzying effort to pitch Trump to black voters

By ANNIE KAMI

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early every week this spring, President Donald Trump’s reelection team has held one of the most peculiar events of the 2020 online campaign: “Black Voices for Trump Real Talk.” It is a dizzying effort by Trump’s black advisers to put their spin on his record — often with a hall-ofmirrors quality, as they push false claims about opponents while boosting a president who retweets racist material.

The most recent session, on Saturday night, was one of the most head-spinning yet. For an hour on a livestream, three black Republicans tried to portray former Vice President Joe Biden as a racist, while ignoring decades of racially divisive behavior by Trump, from his remarks on the Central Park Five to birtherism to Charlottesville.

Katrina Pierson, a campaign adviser, led the discussion from her living room, wearing a white sweatshirt with a recent gaffe by Biden printed in block letters: “#YouAintBlack.”

Another adviser, Ken Blackwell, former mayor of Cincinnati, had a message for Democrats, saying, “Don’t believe your eyes and ears, that’s what they’re telling black folks.”

The Trump campaign has been eager to court black voters, hoping to chip away at some of the overwhelming support Democrats enjoyed from them four years ago, when Trump won just 8% of African American votes. His advisers often highlight the administration’s work on criminal justice reform and financial support for historically black colleges and universities as twin planks of their appeal.

Using gimmicks like campaign swag emblazoned with the word “Woke,” Trump campaign officials are aiming for black millennials who they think may have no cultural or personal affinity for Biden, a 77-year-old white Democrat.

But the campaign’s chief pitch to black voters going into the 2020 presidential election — a lower unemployment rate among African Americans — has eroded in the past few months. And the Trump campaign has a lot to ignore in terms of comments from its own candidate, who has, in the past, made remarks widely seen as racist; over the Memorial Day weekend, the president promoted posts from a racist and sexistTwitter feed. Just increasing Trump’s share of black voters by a few percentage points would be a major challenge that spin room-style

President Donald Trump with officials from historically black colleges and universities in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington efforts like the “Black Voices” events would be hard-pressed to solve.

Still, on Saturday night, the Trump surrogates were trying to make the most of Biden’s latest gaffe, hoping they could use the moment to drive down African American turnout, the same way they used Hillary Clinton’s comment about “superpredators” as a cudgel against her in the 2016 presidential election.

Even from the captivity of his basement, and the limited exposure that comes with it, Biden last week had managed to deposit his foot directly into his mouth.

“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,” Biden said in an interview with Charlamagne Tha God, a host on “The Breakfast Club,” a nationally syndicated morning show popular with black millennials. Biden later apologized for the remark, saying he “shouldn’t have been so cavalier.”

The Trump campaign, which already had a “Black Voices for Trump” event on its online broadcast schedule, was poised for attack — a reminder that Biden will be confronting an opposing campaign with the resources to quickly amplify and capitalize on his mistakes. According to YouTube, more than 19,000 people tuned in to watch; it was not possible to tell where the viewers were from, their race or ethnicity or whether they were likely voters.

But the Trump campaign’s performance Saturday night also showed that on issues of

race, Trump advisers had no lines of attack, or policy arguments, to use against Biden that were not fiercely interrogated in the Democratic primary just months ago, when black voters breathed life back into the former vice president’s anemic campaign.

“At the end of the day, conversation reveals character,” T.W. Shannon, former speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, said on the broadcast, conveniently ignoring Trump’s own command to four congresswomen of color to “go back” to countries where they came from, when three of them were born in the United States.

Democratic strategists said the clip was unlikely to resonate with young black voters the way Clinton’s superpredator comment had.

“This doesn’t feel like an analogous opportunity in any way,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, noting that Biden had apologized immediately.

Charlamagne, the “Breakfast Club” host, said in an interview that the Biden gaffe was unlikely to move any black voter and that Trump had no shot at winning over his vote. But, he added, it wasn’t impossible to think that some black voters would be open to hearing Trump’s pitch.

“People are desperate, disenchanted with government, their conditions haven’t changed under either party,” Charlamagne said. One might imagine Trump making inroads by “presenting some type of economic

justice plan for black America,” he added.

Garin said it would be a steep hill to climb.

“They’re working to erode voting rights in a way that people notice,” he said, referring to Trump and his Republican allies. “If you take Biden’s comment, compare it to everything else that is happening, with coronavirus, the economy, the attack on voting rights, the tides are very much against Trump with African Americans.”

The Trump campaign wants to turn that tide, partly with its “Black Voices for Trump” events that it holds online every 7 to 10 days. The show, hosted by Pierson with a rotating cast of guests, typically finds a way to amplify the White House message of the day and drive home the same talking points about the black unemployment rate.

One episode in April, for instance, was dedicated to explaining how “President Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is protecting jobs for black Americans,” without acknowledging that the black community has been hardest hit by the virus, or that black-owned businesses have often had a harder time getting access to emergency federal loans.

On Saturday night’s episode, the “Black Voices” crew came ready to unload on Biden, but when the cameras started rolling they had no new argument to make against him.

“The media won’t vet him, so we will,” Pierson said. But what followed were a series of old clips from CNN and The New York Times — two news organizations that Trump and his campaign regularly criticize — reporting on Biden’s exaggerated claim that he had marched in the civil rights movement as a student in the 1960s, his opposition to busing as a desegregation tool and his fond recollections of working relationships with segregationists in the Senate decades ago.

“I guess Obama ain’t black now either,” Pierson said, noting that in 2016, former President Barack Obama encouraged Clinton to run instead of Biden — wildly misinterpreting Biden’s comment.

Garin, the Democratic pollster, said he thought the broadcasts were more telling about the Trump campaign’s resources than its chances of actually winning over black voters.

“I don’t think they get very much out of it,” he said. “They have a lot of money to spend, but it doesn’t mean that you spend it well.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

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A pandemic bright spot: In many places, less crime

By NEIL MACFARQUHAR and SERGE F. KOVALESKI

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hief David Todd of the Fargo, North Dakota, Police Department periodically abandons his desk to walk the beat downtown. In recent weeks, he found the streets so utterly deserted that he commissioned a movie about it.

Shot in black and white, the short, stark film shows police officers patrolling an eerily empty city: People evaporated from stadiums and playgrounds. Sidewalks purged of pedestrians. Shopping mall parking lots turned into vacant expanses. There is no narration, only a cover of “The Sound of Silence.”

“The quiet and sadness is something that we have never experienced before,” said Todd, a 32-year veteran of the police force. “I thought we should try to capture this, where we are right now, not just our community, but our nation as a whole.”

The absence of people during the coronavirus pandemic has produced a rare payoff in Fargo and most American cities — a steep drop in major crimes.

“The dynamics of street crimes, of street encounters, of human behavior are changing because people are staying home,” said Philip M. Stinson, a former police officer turned criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University.

Crime, say those who study it and those who fight it day to day, requires three things — a perpetrator, a victim and an opportunity.

With tens of millions of Americans off the streets, would-be victims and opportunities for crimes have vanished, causing a drop in the number of perpetrators committing infractions. The dip in crime is compounded by the fact that some police departments have been hampered by quarantines, or have made fewer arrests to limit interactions or to avoid filling the jails.

Arrests in Chicago, where the Cook County jail became one of the nation’s largestknown virus hot spots, were down more than 73% during roughly the initial month of the lockdown, said Deputy Chief Thomas Lemmer of the Chicago Police Department.

Crime did not entirely disappear, of course, and some of the worst offenders remained undeterred. Homicides in numerous cities remained flat or even rose. Burglaries of commercial properties and auto thefts

have often multiplied, as criminals exploited shuttered stores and unattended cars.

Young men, considered the most violent demographic, have adopted a certain swagger in many places, police officers and criminologists said. With fewer witnesses around and with the police less likely to stop them, they feel less vulnerable to being caught. The men also find it easier to track down rival drug lords or gang leaders, who are mostly sheltering at home like everyone else.

In Las Vegas, where police said crime fell more than 22% during the initial two months of the lockdown, the Strip area, with its crowded nightclubs and bars, had traditionally had its problems with crime. Since it was largely devoid of tourists for weeks, crime migrated to some residential streets.

“Gang members are certainly the part of society that goes out and looks for trouble and is trouble,” said Andrew Walsh, deputy chief in the homeland security division of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

“COVID-19 has not changed things like old beefs or a fight over a woman.”

The disease also brought unexpected new hazards.

Police officers in multiple cities in Michigan have been spit on by people screaming that they have COVID-19. Under an old law against using harmful biological material to assault someone, threatening exposure to COVID-19 is a felony that carries a five-year prison term, said David Leyton, the prosecuting attorney in Genesee County, Michigan. His cases include a suspect accused of menacing shoppers inside a grocery store, then licking a window inside a police cruiser.

In Kirkland, Washington, among the first coronavirus hot spots in the United States, officers put face masks on some people they are arresting to prevent spitting. The city has also been battling a rash of mailbox thefts by people looking to steal federal stimulus checks, Chief Cherie Harris said.

History indicates that hard times often reduce crime. Chicago showed a marked drop in murders in 1918, when America faced the devastating Spanish flu, according to records analyzed by Leigh Bienen, a law professor at Northwestern University. After 293 killings in the city in 1917, the number fell to 260 in 1918 before rising to 345 the following year.

The flu might not have been the only factor, she said. Yet other municipalities also

In most American cities, there has been a steep drop in major crimes during the coronavirus pandemic. reported a decrease.

For the month ending May 17, most major crimes in New York City were down 21% from the same period last year, according to department statistics, although murders were unchanged, burglaries were up, and car thefts jumped almost 68%.

There were no clear patterns across all cities, according to Christopher Herrmann, a professor of law and police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Murders this year were up 14% in Philadelphia and 85% in Nashville, Tennessee, but fell 2% in Baltimore and 11% in Atlanta. Nashville was a rare city with increased crime overall.

But Herrmann and other experts are wary about such statistics, suggesting the data is too raw and too recent to confirm trends.

Desperate shopkeepers might report their stores burglarized to collect insurance, he said, but it will be months before insurance inspectors start working again to confirm such thefts.

In Manhattan, one suspect arrested in early May was accused of breaking into 19 restaurants, making off with some $30,000 in cash, alcohol and electronics.

“They are targeting the very fabric of New York City, small merchants and businesses that had to close because of the pandemic,” said Chief Michael Lipetri, head of crime control strategies for the New York Police Department.

The trend is not limited to big cities. The

police in McMinnville, Oregon, southwest of Portland, said they arrested 26 people suspected in 35 break-ins over a monthlong period, compared to 14 burglaries in April 2019. A pattern of unusual thefts of clothes and electronics from area churches first alerted the police, said Capt. Rhonda Jaasko, the patrol captain.

With the country gradually reopening, experts wonder whether crime will rebound to its previous levels, as perpetrators and victims interact again. Large American cities last experienced a sustained slide in crime for some 13 years after 1992, said Wesley G. Skogan, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University who studies police programs, calling the reasons “one of the great mysteries of the end of the 20th century.”

Herrmann, of John Jay College, has a paper set to be published this fall detailing how crime fell near a Bronx subway station during its reconstruction. It took about two weeks after the station reopened for the numbers to rebound to previous levels, he said, but the post-lockdown rise will likely be slower because people are still hesitant about going outside.

Still, police officers are bracing for what happens next.

“I don’t know what the future holds,” said Chris Bailey, assistant chief at the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department. “It makes me a little nervous from the crime perspective.”

10

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

FBI to investigate arrest of black man who died after being pinned by officer

A bystander’s video in Minneapolis shows a police officer with his knee on a man’s neck during an arrest. The man died a “short time” later, the police said.

By CHRISTINE HAUSER

T

he FBI and Minnesota law enforcement authorities are investigating the arrest of a black man who died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by an officer’s knee, in an episode filmed by a bystander and denounced by the mayor Tuesday.

The arrest took place Monday evening, the Minneapolis Police Department said in a statement, after officers responded to a call about a man suspected of forgery. The police said the man, believed to be in his 40s, was found sitting on top of a blue car and “appeared to be under the influence.”

“He was ordered to step from his car,” the department’s statement said. “After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress.”

The statement said that officers called for an ambulance and that the man was taken to Hennepin County Medical Center, “where he died a short time later.”

On Tuesday morning, without referring to the video recorded by a bystander, the police updated a statement, titled “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction,” that said additional information had “been made available” and that the FBI was joining the investigation.

The bystander video that circulated widely on social media Monday night shows a white Minneapolis police officer pressing his knee into a black

man’s neck during an arrest, as the man repeatedly says “I can’t breathe” and “please I can’t breathe.”

Within minutes the man, lying face down in the street with his hands cuffed behind his back, becomes silent and motionless, the video shows; the officer continues to pin the man to the pavement with his knee.

Bystanders plead and curse, begging the officer to stop and telling him the man’s nose is bleeding. Another officer faces the people gathered on the sidewalk. An ambulance medic arrives and, reaching under the officer’s knee, feels for a pulse on the man’s neck.

The medic turns away, and a stretcher is wheeled over. The arrested man is then rolled onto the stretcher, loaded into an ambulance and taken away.

The video did not show what happened before the officer pinned the man to the ground by his neck. Chief Medaria Arradondo of the Minneapolis Police said at a news conference Tuesday that he had received information the night before that he “deemed necessary to contact the special agent in charge of the Minneapolis bureau of the FBI.” He said he asked the agency to investigate and declined to comment on what information he received.

The FBI is conducting a federal civil rights investigation, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said in a statement. The state bureau also said that it was conducting its own investigation at the request of the police department, and that it would release its findings to the Hennepin County district attorney’s office.

The name of the man will be released by the county medical examiner’s office after his family has been notified and the autopsy is completed, it said. The names of the officers would be released after interviews, it added.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., called in a statement for a “complete and thorough” investigation into the encounter, which she described as “another horrifying and gut-wrenching instance of an AfricanAmerican man dying.”

The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, on Tuesday described the event as “awful” and “traumatic.”

“Being black in America should not be a death sentence. For five minutes, we watched a white officer press his knee into a black man’s neck. Five minutes,” Frey said in a statement.

“When you hear someone calling for help, you’re supposed to help. This officer failed in the most basic, human sense,” he said. “All I keep coming back to is this: This man should not have died.”

The police department’s statement said that no weapons were used, and that the officers’ body cameras were recording. Frey said at a news conference that he had seen the video “taken and posted by a civilian” but not the body camera footage.

“Whatever the investigation reveals, it does not change the simple truth: He should still be with us this morning,” the mayor said. “I believe what I saw and what I saw is wrong on every level.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

11

China’s young struggle for jobs in the post-outbreak era

By ALEXANDRA STEVENSON and KEITH BRADSHER

B

efore China can fully recover from the devastation of the coronavirus outbreak, it needs to find people like Huang Bing a job.

Huang, who graduated last year from one of China’s most prestigious drama schools, got an offer in December for her first job in show business, working for a company that books bands for bars in Beijing and Shanghai.

The coronavirus, which virtually froze China for weeks, brought that gig to an end before it began. Huang has picked up freelance film production and publicity work, but she has slashed her spending and is counting her money.

“When it was April and I still couldn’t start my job, I started to feel worried,” said Huang, 24. “I began worrying that I may not be able to work this year at all. I can’t just keep waiting.”

Relations with the United States are at their lowest point in decades and Hong Kong is seething with fear and anger, but China’s biggest problem by far is getting its people back to work. Millions of workers were laid off or furloughed while China battled the coronavirus outbreak. Many of those who kept their jobs have seen their pay cut and future prospects narrow.

China’s youngest workers in particular have entered perhaps the country’s toughest job market in the modern era. Many are reducing their expectations to take any job they can get. The pressure is about to intensify: Another nearly 8.7 million young college graduates are waiting in the wings this year.

For the world, global growth will be hard to rekindle until China gets fully back to work. But the damage to the Communist Party could be long-lasting. It derives its political power from the promise of delivering a better life for the Chinese people, a promise that has become increasingly difficult to fulfill.

Demonstrating the depths of the uncertainty, Chinese leaders meeting in Beijing since last week parted with precedent and declined to set an annual economic growth target. But they have unveiled other goals that detail their biggest worries, including cutting unemployment in the cities and taming food inflation, which has jumped because of outbreak-related supply disruptions and an unrelated swine disease.

Chinese leaders have acknowledged broader problems in the workforce. China’s factory workers have been hit by the trade war with the United States. Service sector companies like online delivery firms are hiring, but these jobs offer low pay and high stress.

Last week, at the opening of China’s annual parliamentary session, Li Keqiang, China’s premier, cited both unemployment and the hundreds of millions of underemployed workers doing odd jobs with flexible hours and low pay.

“We will make every effort to stabilize and expand

Applicants reading recruitment information last month at a job fair in Wuhan, China, the city where the coronavirus outbreak originated. employment,” he said.

To help, China’s top leaders pledged last weekend to “use all possible means” to create jobs, including a goal to create 9 million new jobs this year. But many of its plans borrow from Beijing’s old playbook, which include spending on public works, funding wasteful state-run companies and keeping the financial sector supplied with new money.

Those tactics have proved to be less effective in recent years. Even when banks are pushed to lend to smaller businesses, China’s biggest group of employers, the borrowing burden is still too high for many companies. Spending on public works gets less bang for the buck than it once did, as China’s economy matures and as its workforce becomes increasingly college-educated and office bound.

China’s current official unemployment statistics, while considered imprecise by many economists, nevertheless suggest the depth of the problem for young workers. The jobless rate for people ages 16-24 totaled nearly 14%, more than twice the official figure for the nation as a whole.

In forums online, young job seekers share their frustrations.

“I’m about to cry,” one person recently wrote on Weibo, the popular Chinese social media service. “Finding a job is as difficult as finding a boyfriend.”

Many use words like “lost” to describe their state of mind.

“I’ve exhausted all kinds of software for job hunting,” another person wrote. “Did not find a job! What more can you do!! I’m going to lose faith.”

Many of these job seekers have lowered their salary expectations and are choosing to focus their energy on finding job security at a state-owned company. While private firms are typically more popular, competition for jobs among them has become fierce, according to a recent survey of 3,000 university graduates by Liepin, a recruitment platform. Three-quarters of graduates said they expected to earn less than $1,100 a month, one of the lowest salary ranges in the survey.

Chinese companies that are hiring can afford to be choosy. Recruits can choose from a larger pool of candidates, said Martin Ma, a human resources officer for iSoftStone, a software development company that has more than 60,000 employees and counts big foreign and domestic companies as clients. Starting salaries are lower.

“The posts available for graduates are all basic, and the salary isn’t too high,” Ma said. “The graduates do not fully understand the market. Their expectations are quite high.”

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Stocks

S&P 500 rises on economic recovery and vaccine hopes, pulls back from highs

U

.S. stocks closed higher on Tuesday on optimism about developing coronavirus vaccines and the revival of business activity, but the S&P 500 failed to hold above the key psychological level of 3,000 points.

Stocks pared gains late in the session, after Bloomberg News reported the Trump administration was weighing a range of sanctions on Chinese officials, businesses and financial institutions, reinforcing comments earlier in the day from White House adviser Larry Kudlow.

Kudlow said President Donald Trump was “so miffed with China on virus and other matters that the trade deal is not as important to him as it once was.”

The benchmark S&P 500 had crossed 3,000 for the first time since March 5 before dropping back.

The S&P 500 .SPX has risen about 37% from its March 23 low on central bank and government stimulus at a time when the U.S. economy is seeing its biggest job losses since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is now about 11% below its February record high.

On Monday, California, which has had one of the country’s most restrictive shutdowns, said it would allow retail businesses to offer in-store shopping and places of worship to reopen.

On top of vaccine-related news, Shawn Snyder, head of investment strategy at Citi Personal Wealth Management, pointed to better-than-expected home sales data and comments from JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N) CEO Jamie Dimon.

“When you add the news all together everyone’s getting a boost,” Snyder said.

Data showed U.S. consumer confidence nudged up in May, adding to hopes that the worst of the economic impact of the shutdown is in the past.

Unofficially, the Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI rose 531.53 points, or 2.17%, to 24,996.69, the S&P 500 .SPX gained 36.36 points, or 1.23%, to 2,991.81, and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 15.63 points, or 0.17%, to 9,340.22.

U.S. biotech group Novavax Inc (NVAX.O) soared as it joined the race to test coronavirus vaccine candidates on humans and enrolled its first participants. Merck & Co Inc (MRK.N) advanced after it announced plans to develop two separate vaccines.

While macroeconomic data was pointing at a deep recession, Citi’s Snyder was focused on the recovery.

But he questioned how much further the market would rise with the U.S. presidential election in November and simmering U.S.-China tensions.

“The returns from here will be harder to come by,” he said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

13

Dominic Cummings offers a sorry-not-sorry for U.K. lockdown breach

By STEPHEN CASTLE and MARC LANDLER

P

rime Minister Boris Johnson took a breathtaking gamble with his own popularity Monday, allowing his closest aide to go public with a detailed, yet stubbornly unapologetic, explanation for making a 260-mile journey that broke lockdown rules and ignited a political firestorm in Britain.

In an extraordinary hourlong session with reporters, the aide, Dominic Cummings, admitted to traveling from London to his parents’ home in Durham in late March while showing symptoms of the coronavirus, and making a second outing in the region while there, confirming reports that have consumed the British news media for three days.

It was a riveting tableau: a powerful, unelected political adviser seated in shirt sleeves at a table in the garden behind 10 Downing Street, where British prime ministers have played host to visiting heads of state, offering his version of a deeply personal story that has mushroomed into a national scandal.

For many Britons, it was the first time they had heard Cummings speak, let alone offer them a glimpse into his most intimate deliberations. He recounted rushing home from Downing Street in March to find his wife ill with symptoms of the coronavirus and of becoming fearful that they might not be able to care for their 4-year-old son.

And yet there were also signs of the Cummings all too familiar to followers of British politics: the brusque, Svengali-like figure who has become a staple of the British press. He was unrepentant, defensive, and quick to shift the blame to the news media, accusing it of reporting falsely about him, not just in this episode, but over his entire career.

Looking somber, but showing little contrition, Cummings explained he had left London to secure care for his son in the event that both he and his wife were incapacitated by the coronavirus. Because of his high media profile, he said, he had been “subject to threats and violence” at his home.

“I’m not surprised many people are very angry,” Cummings said. “I don’t regret what I did; I think what I did was reasonable in these circumstances.”

By now, most prime ministers might have cut loose an aide whose actions prompted accusations of hypocrisy and muddled the government’s messaging as it struggles to deal with a pandemic.

But despite the fierce political backlash, Johnson has offered his steadfast support for Cummings, illustrating what analysts say is the prime minister’s deep reliance on his mercurial, combative adviser.

Around an hour after Cummings spoke, Johnson tried to put the furor behind him by announcing new measures to ease the lockdown. Among other steps, outdoor markets and car dealerships will be allowed to open June 1; department stores and small shops will follow June 15.

Still, the prime minister said he regretted the anger the Cummings episode had stirred up and noted that he did not know in advance about his plans.

“My conclusion is that he acted reasonably,” Johnson said, adding that “people will have to make their minds up.”

It was not clear whether Cummings’ account would avert

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, defying a storm of criticism, said on Sunday that he would not dismiss his most influential adviser, Dominic Cummings, for breaching Britain’s lockdown rules by driving across the country to visit relatives, even when he was falling ill with the coronavirus pressure for his resignation.

While he offered a heartfelt portrayal of a family under pressure, he also admitted to having made a visit to a location more than 20 miles from the house where he stayed in Durham — another apparent breach of guidelines. Britons were instructed to leave their homes only for a daily walk or run, but told not to drive anywhere for recreation.

In the part of his account that might prove least convincing for many Britons, Cummings explained that he had made the trip — to Castle Barnard, a half-hour drive from Durham — to test whether his eyesight, which he said had been impaired by the illness, was good enough for him to make the 5-hour drive back to London. That raised questions about why he was behind the wheel at all.

When Johnson was pressed on his aide’s explanation, he said he had suffered his own eyesight problems since recovering from the virus.

Perhaps predictably, Cummings’ performance did not satisfy his critics.

“The British people were looking for at least an apology from Dominic Cummings for breaking the lockdown,” the opposition Labour Party said in a statement. “They got none. The message from this government is clear: It’s one rule for Boris Johnson’s closest adviser, another for everybody else.”

In his iconoclastic style and studied, casual dress, Cummings somewhat resembles Stephen Bannon, the populist bombthrower who rescued President Donald Trump’s campaign in

2016 and set about to dismantle what he called the “administrative state” as chief strategist in the White House.

The difference is that Bannon was quickly forced out. By contrast, Johnson has stuck with Cummings despite protests from at least 18 lawmakers from his own Conservative Party, a number of Church of England bishops, opposition lawmakers and members of the public.

Now, some scientists and opposition politicians are warning that the episode risks undermining the credibility of government public health messaging on the pandemic.

Ruthless, effective and deeply polarizing, Cummings was central to the Leave campaign that persuaded Britons to vote to quit the European Union in 2016 — and proved, ultimately, a pathway to power for Johnson.

Cummings had previously worked for a Cabinet minister, Michael Gove, then at the education department, and had ruffled feathers there, too. Former Prime Minister David Cameron once described him as a “career psychopath.”

Installed in Downing Street last year at Johnson’s side, Cummings was the architect of his uncompromising campaign to “get Brexit done,” helping to secure a landslide election victory in December for the Conservative Party.

“Boris Johnson is not much of a chess player,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London.

“He tends to think one move at a time, and he needs people able to see two or three moves ahead and to provide his government with a strategic direction it would otherwise lack.”

14

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

China’s military vows to defend the country’s interests in Hong Kong

The commander of the People’s Liberation Army garrison in Hong Kong and the city’s leader have defended Beijing’s push for new national security laws governing the territory.

By STEVEN LEE MYERS and ELAINE YU

T

he commander of China’s military garrison in Hong Kong said in an interview posted Tuesday that forces stationed there would “resolutely” protect the country’s national security interests, a pointed reminder of Beijing’s ultimate power to enforce its rule over the semiautonomous territory.

The commander’s remarks came as Hong Kong’s embattled leader, Carrie Lam, defended the central government’s plan to draft new national security laws to punish acts of dissent or subversion, even though the process sidestepped the territory’s own legislative process.

“Rights and freedoms are not absolute,” Lam said at her regular weekly news conference in Hong Kong.

“If a minority of people, indeed a very small minority of people, are going to breach the law to organize and participate in terrorist activities to subvert the state power, then of course they have to be bounded by the needed legislation,” she said.

She added that the new legislation, submitted to the National People’s Congress in Beijing last week, had a “positive response” in Hong Kong and would have “the opposite effects of what overseas politicians have said,” bringing greater stability and confidence, not

greater repression.

The proposal touched off a new wave of protests in Hong Kong over the weekend, with thousands pouring into the streets Sunday, defying restrictions put in place because of the coronavirus epidemic. There were periodic clashes between protesters and police, and at least 180 people were arrested. Several were injured.

The garrison commander, Maj. Gen. Chen Daoxiang, addressed the situation in Hong Kong in an interview on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress in Beijing, where he serves as one of nearly 3,000 delegates to the annual legislative gathering.

Chen said the new legislation would deter “all kinds of separatist forces and external intervention forces,” echoing the view of Lam and others in China’s political leadership that the protests have international support intended to undermine the Communist Party’s rule over the city.

“Garrison officers and soldiers are determined, confident and capable of safeguarding national sovereignty, security and development interests and maintaining the long-term prosperity and stability of Hong Kong,” Chen said in an interview with China’s state television network, CCTV. Video of the interview was accompanied by scenes of previous military training exercises, including drills

against rioters and marine operations in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor. Some of the clips appeared to be from operations last year, when protests overwhelmed the city and the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Armed Police sent a surge of new troops into and near Hong Kong.

“I have never heard of a garrison official in Hong Kong publicly commenting on Hong Kong’s affairs, even though of course the legislation is being done in Beijing,” said pro-democracy lawmaker Tanya Chan, calling the move “shocking.”

The Hong Kong garrison of the People’s Liberation Army is based in what was formerly the British military headquarters on Hong Kong Island. The garrison includes at least 19 sites around the territory, but it has generally kept a low profile in the city since the handover from British control in 1997. Many of its soldiers — estimates of the total vary from 6,000 to 10,000 — live and train in bases across the border in Shenzhen.

At the peak of the protests late last summer, the military and armed police rotated new troops in from the mainland, calling it a routine redeployment, but many are believed to have never left, giving Beijing a larger reserve force in the territory in case the security situation spirals out of control.

Lam said that the central government moved to draft its own national security laws because the Legislative Council had, for years, been unable to write its own laws, as required by Article 23 of the territory’s Basic Law, the miniconstitution that governs its affairs under the formula known as “one country, two systems.”

“Because the situation has gotten worse and behaviors and acts that endanger national security are more and more rampant, the central government had to do the work first,” she said, adding that she hoped the Legislative Council would still move ahead with its own legislation.

She also dismissed concerns that Beijing’s new legislation would allow officers and secret police agents to arbitrarily arrest protesters for speaking out against her or authorities in Beijing. She said the legislation was directed at illegal activities, not expressions of political opinion, even dissent. But she added that it would be “not quite reasonable” for her to say with certainty what would and would not be allowed.

“We are a very free society, so for the time being, people have this freedom to say whatever they want to say,” she said.

Avery Ng, a pro-democracy activist in Hong Kong, said her use of the phrase “for the time being” was worrying.

“Clearly, Carrie Lam already knew the answer herself,” Ng said. “Or you could say she’s already very honest with her words, to clearly say that what you can do today, there will be no guarantee tomorrow.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

15

By air and sea, mercenaries landed in Libya. But the plan went South.

By DECLAN WALSH

T

wo former British marines piloted their boats, a pair of military-grade inflatables, across the Mediterranean from Malta. Six helicopters were flown in from Botswana using falsified papers. The rest of the team — soldiers of fortune from South Africa, Britain, Australia and the United States — arrived from a staging area in Jordan.

To anyone who asked, the mercenaries who slipped into the war-pocked port of Benghazi, Libya, last summer said they had come to guard oil and gas facilities.

In fact, United Nations investigators later determined, their mission was to fight alongside Libyan commander Khalifa Hifter in his all-out assault on the capital, Tripoli, for which they were to be paid $80 million.

It quickly went wrong. A dispute erupted with Hifter, a notoriously mercurial leader, over the quality of the aircraft. On July 2, after just four days in Libya, the mercenaries scrambled for their speedboats and roared out to sea, headed for the safety of Malta.

Although short-lived, the botched mission offers a telling illustration of the melee in Libya, where a war driven by powerful foreign sponsors — principally the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Russia and Egypt — has created a lucrative playground for smugglers, arms dealers, mercenaries and other profiteers who flout an international arms embargo with little fear of consequences.

Libya is a singular magnet for its combination of oil wealth and scrappy standards of combat. With Russian, Syrian, Sudanese, Chadian and now Western mercenaries drawn to the fight, it has the rare distinction of being a mercenary-on-mercenary war — sometimes, in the case of Syrians, with men from the same country fighting each other.

“It’s a free-for-all,” said Wolfram Lacher, a Libya expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “Everyone is bringing ever more absurd types of weapons and fighters into Libya, with Syrians on both sides, and nobody is stopping them.”

Foreign Guns and Fighters Libya, a sparsely populated oil-rich nation, has been mired in chaos since the ouster of its decadeslong dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, by a U.S.-backed coalition in 2011.

Peace talks established a fragile U.N.-backed government in Tripoli that Hifter aims to overthrow.

Since his first offensive in 2014, Hifter has been backed by an array of foreign forces.

In the past year, a powerful Kremlin-backed private army, the Wagner Group, turbocharged his flagging assault on Tripoli. But Turkey joined the fight on behalf of Tripoli in January and has thrown Hifter’s campaign into disarray.

A large contingent of Russian fighters and their weapons retreated from the front lines south of the capital over the weekend and were flown in three planes to a Hifter stronghold, Reuters reported. Hifter’s powerful foreign sponsors will likely determine his next move.

The abortive mercenary expedition last summer was organized and financed by a network of secretive companies in the United Arab Emirates, according to a confidential report submitted to the U.N. Security Council in February. The companies are controlled or part-owned by Christiaan Durrant, an Australian businessman and former fighter pilot who is a close associate of Erik Prince, America’s most famous mercenary entrepreneur.

Prince, founder of the military company once known as Blackwater, has provided private militia forces for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates and the leading foreign sponsor of Hifter’s war in Libya.

Prince’s close ties to the Trump administration have come under congressional scrutiny in recent years.

U.N. investigators are examining whether Prince played any role in the failed mercenary operation. Through a spokesman, Prince said he had “nothing whatsoever to do with any alleged private military operation in Libya.”

‘Anything, Anytime’ The team of 20 mercenaries that deployed to Benghazi in June was led by Steve Lodge, a former South African air force officer who also served in the British military and worked as a private military contractor in Nigeria.

The others were also ex-military — 11 South Africans, five Britons, two Australians and one American, a trained pilot.

Their mission was to prevent shipments of Turkish-supplied weapons from reaching the government in Tripoli by sea.

The plan, U.N. investigators say, was to create a marine strike force using speedboats and attack helicopters that would board and search merchant ships. Investigators believe the marine force was part of a larger operation that also involved commandos who

The center of Benghazi, Libya, where years of conflict have left the area in ruins. would surveil and destroy enemy targets.

Three officials familiar with the U.N. investigation, which was first reported by Bloomberg, briefed The New York Times on its contents and provided copies of documents. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

Six helicopters were bought in South Africa and trucked to the international airport in Gaborone, Botswana. Though clandestine, the operation left behind a long trail of evidence, starting with photographs published online by The Botswana Gazette of three Super Puma helicopters, strapped to trucks, being driven down a highway.

The helicopters were loaded into cargo planes, one of which was owned by SkyAviaTrans, a Ukrainian company whose motto, borrowed from a Vietnam-era CIA airline, is “Anything, Anytime, Anywhere, Professionally.” The airline was cited last year in a U.N. report for transporting military items into Libya.

Flight documents listed the planes’ destination as Jordan but they landed at Benghazi airport, near Hifter’s headquarters in eastern Libya.

Two speedboats — rigid hull inflatables, a kind often used by special forces — were leased from James Fenech, a licensed Maltese arms dealer.

Lodge, the commander, negotiated the deals, but they were contracted and paid for by several Dubai-based companies controlled or part-owned by Durrant.

One of the companies, Lancaster 6, is part of a network of similarly-named companies in Malta, the Emirates and the British Virgin Islands. “Prosperity breeds peace,” reads its website.

Another, Opus Capital Asset, is run

by Amanda Kate Perry, a prominent British businesswoman in Dubai who promotes

women entrepreneurs and was hailed by a local magazine, Emirates Woman, as one of its 2019 “visionaries.”

Reached by phone, Lodge, who has an address in Scotland, used an expletive to dismiss the accusations of violating the arms embargo, then hung up. Perry, reached by phone, declined to comment.

A spokeswoman for Durrant dismissed the U.N. findings about the Libya mission as “simply not factual and misinformed,” and did not respond to further questions.

The Plan Hits a Snag In Benghazi, Hifter was infuriated that the mercenaries had brought old aircraft — one official called them “clapped-out helicopters” — instead of the more powerful craft they had promised. A document obtained by the United Nations indicated that the promised aircraft included a Cobra attack helicopter and a LASA T-Bird, a crop duster adapted for reconnaissance and warfare.

Unable to come to terms with the Libyan commander, the mercenaries decided to pull back to Malta. But after leaving Benghazi on the night of July 2, one of their boats ran into trouble and had to be abandoned. All 20 men crammed onto a single boat and continued to Malta.

Weeks later, the abandoned boat was found by the Libyan coast guard and photographs of it appeared in local news media.

In 2017, Durrant was linked to Prince’s proposal for a private air force to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan when Prince listed Lancaster 6 as a partner company in a submission to the Defense Department, The Military Times reported.

Durrant likes to flaunt his familiarity with Washington. His Facebook profile photo shows him wearing sunglasses at the podium of the press room at the Pentagon.

An avid sailor, he co-owns a trimaran yacht with Prince, and last month posted photos of a catamaran emblazoned with the Blackwater logo on sale for $25,000. The same craft has been registered in Prince’s name.

Last July, as the mercenary operation in Libya was underway, Opus Capital, the Emirati firm, paid at least $60,000 to the Washington lobbyists Federal Associates to pitch the White House on what it called “geopolitical issues in Africa.”

Both Opus Capital and Lancaster 6 were cooperating with the U.N. investigators and had offered to meet them, said the spokeswoman for Durrant.

Continues on page 16

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Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Oil-starved Venezuela celebrates arrival of tankers from Iran

By JULIE TURKEWITZ

A

n oil tanker called “Fortune” has sailed into Venezuela from Iran, the first of five ships expected to arrive in a nation so starved of gasoline that the docking of a single tanker was hailed on Monday by government officials as a victory.

The move represented a deepening of economic relations between Venezuela and Iran, two pariah states run by authoritarian leaders subject to punishing sanctions by the United States government.

Representatives of both nations cast the transaction as a sign of strength.

“Thanks Iran,” Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, tweeted on Sunday, adding that amid U.S. opposition “only the brotherhood of free peoples will save us.”

A spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department, Morgan Ortagus, criticized the move, accusing the Maduro government of being a “criminal organization” that used illegally obtained gold to purchase fuel from Tehran. But she did not say whether the U.S. would attempt to block the shipments, or if it would respond with further sanctions on either nation.

“Venezuelans need free and fair presidential elections leading to democracy and economic recovery,” she said, “not Maduro’s expensive deals.”

Risa Grais-Targow, a Venezuela analyst at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm, said that the oil shipment highlighted the increasingly parallel economic and political goals of the two nations, as well as the U.S. government’s increasingly limited options to obstruct their relationship.

Venezuela needs gasoline and has gold. Iran has oil but needs cash. Both Venezuela and Iran are eager to punch back at the Trump administration. And the U.S. government, distracted by the coronavirus pandemic and having already issued harsh sanctions, is left with few retaliatory options beyond military intervention.

“It’s striking that the Iranians feel confident enough that the Trump administration is not going to get in their way,” GraisTargow said, “and is willing to take this risk and come into what is traditionally thought of as the U.S. sphere of influence.”

Venezuela sits on the world’s biggest oil reserves and was once a major oil producer. But corruption, lack of investment and U.S. sanctions have destroyed the industry.

Its oil refineries are so run down that these days none produce gasoline, according to Ivan Freites, an oil union leader.

“Fortune” will be followed by “Forest,” according to the Venezuelan govern-

ment, followed by three other tankers.

Together, the ships carry an estimated 1.5 million barrels of fuel, according to Francisco J. Monaldi, a Venezuelan oil expert at Rice University in Houston, citing information from the industry website tankertrackers.com.

The load is far from enough to solve Venezuela’s severe gas shortage, a longstanding crisis that has become so acute in recent weeks that people are spending days in line at gas stations — or walking miles to work. Doctors have said they cannot get to work, and women in labor have reported excruciating delays in getting to hospitals.

The tankers could supply the nation with enough gasoline for a few weeks to a month at current consumption levels, according to Monaldi, providing a small reprieve in an increasingly dire situation.

But he cautioned against seeing the Iranian shipments as a long-term solution to Venezuelan’s fuel shortage, noting that it is an excess of gasoline in Iran prompted by the country’s coronavirus quarantine that had created the “perfect” situation for the transaction.

“The Iranians, as soon as they get their quarantine lifted, they will not have the capacity to supply Venezuela with gasoline,” he said. “I don’t think it’s something that can be continued systematically.”

Venezuela and Iran have a decadeslong relationship that dates at least to the government of Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor and the architect of Venezuela’s socialist state, who became president in 1999 and died in 2013. Under Chávez, Iranians ran car factories and cement plants, and built thousands of homes in the South American nation.

In the past few years, as Venezuela’s economy has declined, many Iranian businesses there shut down, and the ties between the two countries had become more political and symbolic.

The oil shipments, said Grais-Targow, represent “the most material support that we’ve seen, at least in recent years.”

A car that ran out of fuel is pushed into a gas station in Caracas, Venezuela, a country starving for gasoline

By air and sea, mercenaries landed in Libya. But the plan went South.

From page 15

Prince had no role in the companies, she said.

“He is not a shareholder, director or working in either company,” she said.

‘Joke’ of an Embargo The international arms embargo on Libya is notoriously toothless. Anyone violating it faces a possible travel ban and an asset freeze, yet only two non-Libyan nationals,

both Eritrean people smugglers, have ever been sanctioned. Even senior U.N. officials call the embargo “a joke.”

Big powers cannot agree on who should be sanctioned, either because they are openly at odds over Libya, or, like the United States, have vacillating and contradictory policies.

While the United States officially supports the government in Tripoli, Trump has

expressed support for Hifter, and last year his senior officials effectively greenlighted Hifter’s assault on Tripoli.

The mercenary operation came two months later.

The investigation into the mercenary operation is continuing. Officials say there is enough evidence already against some individuals to warrant sanctions.

But so far the only legal action has

come from Malta, where police last month charged the arms dealer, Fenech, and four of his employees with violating European Union sanctions for supplying the mercenaries with speedboats.

Fenech denied any wrongdoing.

“We have just chartered 2 vessels on a bare boat agreement and have found ourselves in a very unbelievable situation,” he said in an email.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

17

In praise of fallible leaders

By PAUL KRUGMAN

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ast week Joe Biden made an off-the-cuff joke that could be interpreted as taking AfricanAmerican votes for granted. It wasn’t a big deal — Biden, who loyally served Barack Obama, has long had a strong affinity with black voters, and he has made a point of issuing policy proposals aimed at narrowing racial health and wealth gaps. Still, Biden apologized.

And in so doing he made a powerful case for choosing him over Donald Trump in November. You see, Biden, unlike Trump, is capable of admitting error.

Everybody makes mistakes, and nobody likes admitting having been wrong. But facing up to past mistakes is a crucial aspect of leadership.

Consider, for example, changing guidance on face masks. In the initial phase of the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans it wasn’t necessary to wear masks in public. In early April, however, the CDC reversed course in the light of new evidence on how the coronavirus spreads, in particular that it can be spread by people who aren’t showing any symptoms. So it recommended that everyone start wearing cloth masks when outside the home.

What would have happened if the CDC had refused to admit it had been wrong, keeping its initial recommendations instead? The answer, almost surely, is that the death toll from COVID-19 so far would be much higher than it is. In other words, refusing to admit mistakes isn’t just a character flaw; it can lead to disaster.

And under Donald Trump, that’s exactly what has happened.

Trump’s pathological inability to admit error — and yes, it really does rise to the level of pathology — has been obvious for years, and has had serious consequences. For example, it has made him an easy mark for foreign dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, who know they can safely renege on whatever promises Trump thought they made. After all, for him to condemn Kim’s actions would mean admitting he was wrong to claim he had achieved a diplomatic breakthrough.

But it took a pandemic to show just how much damage a leader with an infallibility complex can inflict. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that Trump’s inability to acknowledge error has killed thousands of Americans. And it looks likely to kill many more before this is over.

Indeed, in the same week that Biden commit-

Joe Biden is imperfect, and he can acknowledge it. ted his harmless gaffe, Trump doubled down on his bizarre idea that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine can prevent COVID-19, claiming that he was taking it himself, even as new studies suggested that the drug actually increases mortality. We may never know how many people died because Trump kept touting the drug, but the number is certainly more than zero.

Yet Trump’s strange foray into pharmacology pales in significance compared with the way his insistence that he’s always right about everything has crippled America’s response to a deadly virus.

We now know that during January and February Trump ignored repeated warnings from intelligence agencies about the threat posed by the virus. He and his inner circle didn’t want to hear bad news, and in particular didn’t want to hear anything that might threaten the stock market.

What’s really striking, however, is what happened in the first half of March. By then the evidence of an emerging pandemic was overwhelming. Yet Trump and company refused to act, persisting in their happy talk — largely, one suspects, because they couldn’t bring themselves to admit that their earlier reassurances had been wrong. By the time Trump finally (and briefly) faced reality, it was too late to prevent a death toll that’s about to pass 100,000.

And the worst may be yet to come. If you aren’t terrified by photos of large crowds gathering over Memorial Day weekend without either wearing masks or practicing social distancing, you haven’t been paying attention.

Yet if there is a second wave of COVID-19 cases, Trump — who has insistently called for a relaxation

of social distancing despite warnings from health experts — has already declared that he won’t call for a second lockdown. After all, that would mean admitting, at least implicitly, that he was wrong to push for early reopening in the first place.

Which brings me back to the contrast between Trump and Biden.

In some ways Trump is a pitiful figure — or would be, if his character flaws weren’t leading to so many deaths. Imagine what it must be like to be so insecure, so lacking in self-regard, that you not only feel the need to engage in constant boasting, but have to claim infallibility on every issue.

Biden, on the other hand, while he may not be the most impressive presidential candidate ever, is clearly a man comfortable in his own skin. He knows who he is, which is why he has been able to reconcile with former critics like Elizabeth Warren. And when he makes a mistake, he isn’t afraid to admit it.

Over the past few months we’ve seen just how much damage a president who’s never wrong can do. Wouldn’t it be a relief to have the White House occupied by someone who isn’t infallible?

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Wednesday, May 27, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

We’re not really parenting. We’re managing parenthood in a pandemic.

By JENNIFER SENIOR

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ummer is upon us, and many summer camps across the Northeast — and other parts of the country — have been canceled. We all know what this means: three more months of family togetherness! 270 more meals!

540 if you have teenagers! All without the nominal structure of online school! Who’s excited?

I know. It’s a formula for enough tantrums to split the atom.

Because I’m a mother, and because I once wrote a book about modern parenthood, I’ve spent a lot of time these days trying to diagnose why it is, exactly, that the nerves of so many parents have been torn to ribbons in the age of quarantine. I’m talking about the lucky ones, the ones who still have jobs and do them from home. Here’s my best stab: — 1. Quarantine parenting is marked by a dire absence of flow, which is more essential to our well-being at this moment than we ever knew, and — 2. We’re living with the household requirements of the 1960s but the work and parenting expectations of 2020, which is a rotten combination, especially for mothers, and — 3. Both of the above are probably related.

Proceeding in order: “Flow” is that heavenly state of total absorption in a project. Your sense of time vanishes; it’s just you and the task at hand, whether it’s painting or sinking shots through a basketball hoop.

It turns out that flow is critical to our well-being during this strange time of self-exile. A few weeks ago I spoke to Kate Sweeny, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, who recently collaborated on a survey of 5,115 people under quarantine in China. To her surprise, the people who best tolerated their confinement were not the most mindful or optimistic; they were the ones who’d found the most flow. She suspected it was why Americans have spent the past two months baking bread and doing puzzles. “They’re intuitively seeking out flow activities,” she said.

Flow, unfortunately, is rare in family life. The father of flow research, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, told me so pointblank when I wrote my book. When kids are small, their developing brains actually conspire against flow, because they’re wired to sweep in as much stimuli as possible, rather than to focus; even when they’re older, they’re still churning windmills of need.

And that’s during the best of times. Now, not only are we looking after our children, an inherently non-flow acti-

vity, and not only are we supervising their schoolwork and recreational pursuits — two things we used to outsource — but we’re working.

You need a stretch of continuous, unmolested time to do good work. Instead, your day is a torrent of interruptions, endlessly divided and subdivided, a Zeno’s paradox of infinite tasks. There’s no flow at all.

Now add to this blurry slurry the other half of my theory: We’re both 1960s parents and 2020s parents all at once, a nightmare mash-up in the space-time continuum, brought to you by a wormhole from hell.

Without school lunches and cartons of takeout at dinner, most of us, both men and women, are doing more cooking — and therefore more cleaning — than we’ve ever done in our lives. The home has become the renewed locus of attention, just as it was when Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963.

The trouble is, it’s 2020. More than 70% of all mothers now participate in the work force. And as soon as women entered the work force, the first thing that went to seed was their homes. Instead, we compensate for our domestic delinquency by actively, intensively parenting our children, spending more time with them now than we did in 1965.

But in quarantine, we’re doing all of it. We’re homemakers. We’re stay-at-home parents. We’re paid workers.

All at the same bloody time. But there isn’t time for all three, only time to feel like we’re failing at all three, sometimes simultaneously, devoting low-quality or insufficient attention to each role. We’re all making choices about where to cut corners.

I cut corners on cleaning. But also, if I were to be honest, on intensive mothering. It’s basically a return to the laissez-faire parenting of the 1960s in my house. Fortnite has become my favorite child-care provider. It’s just fine, really — my son is self-regulating, so I can always get him to stop, and Fortnite gives him a chance to talk to friends he dearly misses. But I still can’t shake the dull sense, unique to our era, that this is simply wrong. Even though I know Betty Draper would never have harbored this kind of guilt.

She’d have shooed Sally out of the kitchen and enjoyed a cigarette.

Recently, a grateful employee tweeted out a memo from the Canadian federal government, which told its workers not to hold themselves to pre-pandemic standards during this time. “You are not ‘working from home’,” it said.

“You are ‘at your home, during a crisis, trying to work.’ ” It was such a generous distinction. It should be extended to raising kids. We are not really “parenting,” in whatever sense that usually means to us. We are managing parenthood during a pandemic. They are not the same. And whatever we’re doing? It’s good enough.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

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Comité Asesor somete revisión del proyecto de reglas de procedimiento criminal ante el Tribunal Supremo Por THE STAR

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l Comité Asesor Permanente de Reglas de Procedimiento Criminal, adscrito al Secretariado de la Conferencia Judicial y Notarial, sometió el martes ante el Tribunal Supremo de Puerto Rico un memorial explicativo con una versión revisada del Proyecto de Reglas de Procedimiento Criminal de 2018.

Este documento incluye las propuestas para actualizar las normas que rigen el ordenamiento procesal penal en Puerto Rico.

El Proyecto de Reglas revisado surge tras una Sesión Especial del Tribunal Supremo, celebrada el 7 de junio de 2019, donde el Comité Asesor presentó los cambios más significativos a las Reglas, se sostuvo una sección de preguntas con el público y se organizaron talleres grupales y mesas de trabajo en los que se compartieron impresiones relacionadas a temas específicos.

El Comité Asesor quedó a cargo de analizar las recomendaciones sometidas por parte de la comunidad jurídica en estos grupos y otras presentadas por escrito tanto por los sectores convocados a la Sesión

Especial como por entidades y juristas con interés en la propuesta.

Analizados estos comentarios, el Comité Asesor presentó un Proyecto de Reglas revisado unido a un memorial explicativo que contextualiza los cambios recomendados al Tribunal Supremo. Ambos documentos están disponibles al público en el portal de la Rama Judicial a través del enlace http://www.ramajudicial.pr/ sistema/supremo/conferencia.htm, bajo la sección dedicada al Comité Asesor.

Mediante la Resolución ER-2020-03, el Tribunal Supremo dio por concluida la encomienda referida al Comité Asesor y agradeció a sus miembros por “su excelente labor, su compromiso con el mejoramiento continuo del sistema de justicia criminal y con la protección de los derechos constitucionales.” El Tribunal Supremo procederá a examinar el proyecto sometido y le solicitó paralelamente al Secretariado que proponga lenguaje para integrar al Proyecto de Reglas la normativa aplicable en nuestra jurisdicción sobre la unanimidad de veredictos, según lo resuelto en Pueblo v. Torres Rivera, 2020 TSPR __, 204 DPR __ (2020). Igualmente,

el Tribunal solicitó evaluar si amerita incluir propuestas concretas sobre el uso de la tecnología en los procesos penales para atender las necesidades impuestas por la pandemia del COVID-19.

Solicitan a gobernadora que pida extensión a FEMA para hacer reclamaciones iniciales por terremotos Por THE STAR

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a directora ejecutiva del Instituto de Educación Práctica (IEP) del Colegio de Abogados y Abogadas de Puerto Rico (CAAPR), licenciada Emily Colón Albertorio, pidió el martes a la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced que gestione con las autoridades federales la extensión del periodo para la solicitud inicial de las ayudas económicas disponibles para los damnificados por los terremotos registrados desde finales del año pasado, que vence este domingo, 31 de mayo de 2020.

A su vez, exhortó a la Agencia Federal para el Manejo de Emergencias (FEMA, en inglés) que reabra sus centros en la Isla para que la ciudadanía pueda entregar los documentos requeridos para completar la elegibilidad de sus solicitudes. Ello, con todas las medidas cautelares para la protección del personal de servicio, así como de la ciudadanía.

“Debido a la pandemia, los centros de FEMA están cerrados, y las personas que no tienen herramientas tecnológicas para enviar sus documentos por internet; siguen necesitando ayuda”, subrayó Colón Albertorio en declaraciones escritas.

Explicó que a poco menos de una semana para que concluya el plazo, la abogada alertó sobre las situaciones que han provocado la mayoría de las denegaciones, e instó a los afectados por los sismos a llamar a la línea telefónica de orientación y asesoría legal libre de costo del IEP, para poder ayudarlos. Específicamente,

los abogados y abogadas del IEP ofrecen orientación tanto en reclamos a FEMA y seguros de propiedad (hazard u otros), como en apelaciones a determinaciones de FEMA y/o seguros, y pérdida de documentos como resultado del evento sísmico.

A través de esta iniciativa, el IEP ha identificado que muchos de los casos están siendo rechazados porque, tras la inspección telefónica de FEMA, los solicitantes no habían enviado los documentos para validar su identidad, dirección y titularidad por problemas de acceso a la tecnología. También, se han denegado porque hubo un cambio de identificación en la dirección de la residencia, y la agencia asegura que el reclamante no puede probar que esa es su vivienda principal, y que es el dueño de esta, porque las direcciones no concuerdan. Otra dificultad que se repite es la cantidad de personas afectadas por los sismos que residen en pueblos que no fueron declarados zona de desastre. El 23 por ciento de las personas que han llamado para solicitar asesoría legal tienen esa situación.

“Exhortamos a los alcaldes que hagan una evaluación continua de los daños y los presenten a la gobernadora para que se determine si pueden incluirlos de dentro de los municipios elegibles”, recomendó la directora del IEP. En cuanto a las reclamaciones hechas a las compañías aseguradoras, la abogada indicó que muchas de ellas se encuentran en su fase de evaluación, por lo cual, los perjudicados todavía no han recibido su com-

pensación.

Por otro lado, Colón Albertorio detalló que el 37 por ciento de los casos atendidos por abogados y abogadas del IEP, a través de la línea telefónica, corresponden a Ponce y Guánica. El 43 por ciento de las personas que han solicitado asesoría legal telefónica tiene 60 años o más, y el 61 por ciento, son mujeres.

“Estos datos reflejan dónde está la mayor necesidad de asistencia legal en los trámites ante FEMA, la Administración de Pequeños Negocios (SBA, en inglés) y las compañías aseguradoras, pero también, cuáles son las poblaciones afectadas por los sismos que son más vulnerables, en momentos en que además tienen que enfrentar una pandemia”, sostuvo.

Para ser elegibles a los servicios, los interesados deben ser residentes de uno de los 33 municipios declarados como zona de desastre, a consecuencia de los terremotos. El número a llamar es 939-545-4550. El horario de servicio es de lunes a sábados, de 9:00 de la mañana a 5:00 de la tarde. Al comunicarse, deberá ofrecer el nombre de su aseguradora (si cuenta con una), el tipo de cubierta que tiene y el número de solicitud de FEMA. La iniciativa se trabaja en colaboración con la Clínica Legal Psicológica de la Universidad de Puerto Rico (UPR) en Cayey, que ofrece apoyo emocional.

Esta campaña de orientación y asesoría legal es subvencionada por la Fundación Fondo de Acceso a la Justicia (FFAJ) y la Hispanic Federation.

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Wednesday, May 27, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

How will we remember the pandemic? Museums are already beginning to decide

By ADAM POPESCU

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ix-year-old Franklin Wong captured the simple frustration of being a student in the Los Angeles Unified School District in mid-March, after his classes were canceled. He wrote in big blocky letters: “I did not go anywhere,” and added an unhappy face in green and red crayon for his remote-learning assignment.

This may be the first time a first grader’s homework is headed to a permanent museum collection instead of a parent’s refrigerator door, a novelty that underscores how far into uncharted waters curators are sailing.

The Autry Museum of the American West, which recently acquired Franklin’s diary, is among the growing contingent of museums, academic institutions and historical societies from here to Bozeman, Montana, and Washington, D.C., that have begun recording this moment of collective uncertainty in the country’s war against the coronavirus.

“Museums have a responsibility to meet history head on,” said Tyree Boyd-Pates, 31, associate curator at the Autry, whose goal is collecting moments of shared experience as “a chance to record how the West navigated this epidemic.”

Jake Sheiner, 33, a restaurant server in Glendale, California, who has been out of work since mid-March, has painted 22 quarantine scenes of life inside his apartment, donating his work to the University of Southern California Libraries. In New York, Mitchell Hartman, a retired commercial photographer, has been walking the streets snapping photos of his native Queens, sharing images with the Museum of the City of New York.

Museums are not just seeking artists’ works but everyone’s memories — the more personal, the better — in an effort that recalls the repositories of first-person testimony, along with material evidence and historical records, gathered by cultural institutions after Sept. 11. But some scholars and historians point to today’s challenges of depicting an event authentically and from many angles when there is still no end in sight to the pandemic. And, they ask, when everything is an artifact, what is truly historically important — and just whose COVID stories are being told in these archives, and whose are not?

The Autry’s project follows in the footsteps of the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s initiative, Collection Stories, and the California Historical Society across town, all of which are asking patrons to document COVID-19 experiences across the Golden State.

The Museum of the City of New York, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Cape Fear Museum and the city of High Point Museum in North Carolina have also begun similar initiatives.

The requests have struck a chord. Bob McGinnis, who at 81 suffers from heart disease, obesity and compromised lungs, said he felt the call to share experiences, “for historical purposes,” after he and his wife, Sandi, came down with COVID-19, along with hundreds of passengers aboard a Carnival Cruise ship in January.

“It brings into sharp focus my mortality,” he said in a threepage essay to his children and grandchildren that he also sent to the COVID collection at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas.

The Autry, for its part, is gathering recipes, personal protective equipment, face masks with Native American motifs, and oral histories for its new project, “Collecting Community History: The West During COVID-19.”

Boyd-Pates joined the Autry in January after spearheading a revival at the California African American Museum, where his tenure as curator included organizing a 25th anniversary retrospective of the Los Angeles confrontations in 1992. He says COVIDrelated items of “historical and cultural significance” are being digitally submitted and shared online.

Among the roughly 160 items gathered since April are an illustrated journal from Tanya Gibb, a resident of Gardena, California, who was taken to an emergency room three times this spring before being hospitalized for a high fever days before her 37th birthday. Gibbs was suspected of having the virus but never tested during two earlier visits because she had not traveled abroad or been directly exposed. This disruption and confusion in her life — after two months she is finally getting back her sense of taste and smell, she said — mirrors a common frustration for many Americans, Boyd-Pates said.

“It’s about clarifying this moment in history that is so bewildering and confusing and doing that by sourcing face masks, journal entries and home recipes from our communities,” he added.

Organizers had a decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to assemble multiple views of history that would be examined in repositories culminating in the National September 11 Memorial Museum at ground zero — and even longer to put together the many Holocaust Museums scattered across the globe.

David Kennedy, a historian at Stanford University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945,” says COVIDthemed museums and collections are a good idea. But he adds, “it depends on how it’s done.”

“A successful museum of this kind should provide context and enable future visitors to understand the tenor and temper of the times, including inequities, racial and otherwise,” Kennedy said.

In the cases of Holocaust and Sept. 11 museums, personal items represented the memories and traumas of everyday people.

As institutions rush to bear witness to the pandemic, some historians ask, will they serve us all and account for the deep divides this virus has tapped?

“Museums are places where we convene to make sense of our shared human experience,” said Martha S. Jones, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University. “Still, the burden, pain and grief of this pandemic are not being experienced in the same way across the nation’s many communities.”

COVID-19 has exposed a vein of bigotry toward Asian Americans. It has been particularly virulent toward African Americans and Latinos. Jones suggests that localized museums, like the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit or the Baltimore Museum of Art, could better speak to some of these issues and perhaps create new narratives rather than echo a singular one. She points to the cellphone videos of what she called “the overpolicing” of people wearing face masks incorrectly, or not wearing them at all, as evidence that should also be collected for museumgoers of the future.

A Navajo-inspired PPE mask and necklace created by Brighid Pulskamp is displayed in La Habra, Calif.

Brenda Stevenson, a professor of African American studies at UCLA, suggests that museums also display “oral accounts, TikTok shorts, newspaper accounts, hospital and emergency medical workers’ testimony, and data from Johns Hopkins and the CDC.” Collections should include hospital beds, and even unemployment records and conspiracy theories, she added, which all help “better understand this event and explain it to future audiences.”

In New York, over 4,000 photos of daily life have been shared by citizens with the Museum of the City of New York’s #CovidStoriesNYC, a social media platform organized by Sean Corcoran, the curator of prints and photography.

Corcoran said that as the crisis continues “we’re debating what types of materials we’ll bring into our collection.”

He noted that when the Kings County Distillery in Brooklyn switched to making a hand sanitizer, he kept a bottle as an artifact of “how local businesses are changing to deal with the crisis.”

But Kennedy warns that curators sifting the tea leaves could invite nostalgia and exploitation; the goal is “engaging the public but informing them — and not just tickling their fancy.” The NewYork Historical Society, he noted, “has taken on subjects like Japanese internment in really exploratory ways, not just memorializing victimization.”

He wishes there had been cultural institutions focused on studying the 1918 Spanish flu or the bubonic plague of the 14th century, leaving historians and scientists to “scratch our heads and ask why we didn’t know more,” he said.

“Any serious studying of the past has to be aware of not waiting too long,” he added. “You want to figure out what happened and why.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

21

How a pianist salvaged his lost Carnegie Hall debut

By JOSHUA BARONE

I

t’s a story that has become tragically common since the coronavirus pandemic brought live performances to a halt: Composer and pianist Timo Andres spent months preparing for his Carnegie Hall recital debut this spring. Then the concert was canceled.

He had planned for the program to be a preview of the album “I Still Play,” out now on the Nonesuch label, with its brief pieces accompanied by several longer ones, including the world premiere of Gabriella Smith’s restless and sparkling “Imaginary Pancake.”

Instead, he has been homebound in New York City. He hasn’t left a roughly 2-mile radius of his Brooklyn apartment since March, although he has still kept busy, teaching at the New School, composing and spending a lot of time on YouTube.

“I know,” Andres said in a recent interview. “It’s like, welcome to 2006.”

But these days he is also very much on YouTube. Bucking the trend in classical music of often low-quality livestreams, yet not wanting to lay low completely, Andres decided to salvage his Carnegie program by documenting it as a series of videos on the platform.

To pull off the project, Andres had to learn how to become a one-man filming operation, equipped with just a microphone, iPhone and editing software.

The videos don’t quite achieve the refinement of a studio recording, but they come impressively close.

Not only homespun, they are also homey: Andres is dressed casually, against a backdrop of art that includes a drawing by Buckminster Fuller, and sitting at the Bösendorfer piano he inherited from his teacher Eleanor Hancock.

In a video of Steve Reich’s “For Bob,” from the Nonesuch album, he echoes the composer’s signature look with a baseball cap on his head.

In a FaceTime call, Andres talked about how the videos came together, and where they might fit into a year when live performance seems increasingly unlikely to return. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: What made you want to present

Once the coronavirus pandemic canceled concerts around the world, Andres decided to reconstruct his recital as a series of YouTube videos. your Carnegie program this way?

A: I had a sense of things moving online, and I knew I wanted to do something with it. Friends suggested, “You should do a livestream when the concert would have happened.” Mentally, I couldn’t bring myself to practice the program for another month just for a livestream. Even if it’s for more people online, it’s just not the same. And I don’t love listening to livestreams, to be honest.

This was a way to keep myself occupied, to make these videos more slowly and sequentially. And to kind of have a sense of closure for the months of practicing that I had put in. It feels good to have a record of it that I can point to. Maybe I didn’t have my Carnegie Hall debut or whatever, but I made this thing you can listen to for free at any time.

Q: With the “I Still Play” pieces, what’s the difference between playing them in the studio and on video?

A: I often find that recordings, in the attempt to emulate the concert experience as ideally as possible, sometimes lose something in the way of risk-taking.

And it’s something that, especially as I start to record music that’s not just my own music, I’ve been thinking about a

lot, how to capture the spirit of that moment.

Onstage, I perform a mental trick where I imagine myself in my living room at my own piano. That’s where I feel that I play the best, when I’m here on my own with nothing to lose. What’s interesting is that I couldn’t quite put myself in that mindset. Simply the fact that I was making a record of it made it difficult.

Q: How does that consideration change for a premiere made on video, like the Gabriella Smith?

A: Putting a piece out there for the first time, I need to make a good impression. But I know as a composer, one doesn’t necessarily envision every version of the interpretation as you’re writing. I need to learn how to interpret my own music when I play it.

I did run the final video by her before publishing. I was in fairly constant touch with her. In ideal circumstances I would be able to play it for her in person and go over all that stuff. This obviously wasn’t ideal, but she gave me a lot of leeway to interpret it.

Q: It’s one of the longer pieces on the program. How do those fit in?

A: What they have in common is, they have a bigger canvas for bigger land-

scapes. There’s a different emotional impact that you can get with a piece that’s the length of Frederic Rzewski’s “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues.” Or Aaron Copland’s Piano Sonata, which is a beautifully economical piece and a beautifully eloquent, and really tragic, statement in the end, going from that intense outburst in the middle of the third movement to the coda, where it is just receding and receding and receding in these sort of progressive elegies.

There’s something so deeply moving about that to me. It’s simultaneously anger and resignation, and of course a particular Americanness. And I do have this sense that we’re living through a weirdly slow-motion tragedy. Obviously worldwide, but in this country specifically because it’s a failure of leadership and a failure of empathy on the grandest scale imaginable. My piece “Old Ground” deals with another historical American tragedy, and then there’s the Rzewski. All this music is so topical. I certainly didn’t plan it that way, but when we’re thinking about people working in Amazon warehouses — that’s what it’s about.

Q: It doesn’t look like live performances will be returning for a while.

Would you make more videos?

A: There is one thing I’m doing: an outdoor performance of Reich’s “Six Pianos” in Union Square Park. That’s still on in August, as far as we know. It seems like if anything should happen, it’s that.

But this model of presenting a recital program, I’m interested in it. I don’t know if it’s something I can make any money on, to put it bluntly. Maybe there are presenters who could take them on, and that could be a stopgap in the meantime. I’ve also heard presenters planning things like instead of one big recital, two or three one-hour programs with the audience spaced out, and three seatings like you would at a jazz club. It’s sad. I saw those photos from — where was it in Germany?

Q: Wiesbaden?

A: Yeah. I mean, it looks like some new music concerts I’ve been to in my life (laughs). But it’s definitely depressing. You get a certain energy from a good audience, and it will be hard to replace that.

FASHION The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, March May 4, 2020 Wednesday, 27, 2020 20 22

By KATHERINE CUSUMANO

R

etail as a whole has declined rapidly over the last two months, but one segment of the struggling industry has defied the trend: face masks. In early April, the Centers for Disease Control began encouraging Americans to wear face masks outside their homes. By then, a crop of doit-yourself solutions had already emerged, intended to abate shortages of medical-grade personal protective equipment among those on the front lines of the fight against the coronavirus. More than a month later, it’s apparent that social distancing — and thus, mask-wearing — will continue to be necessary throughout the summer. (Of course, in some parts of the world, face masks are already worn daily.)

So it’s perhaps unsurprising, even as it generates some uneasy tensions, that face masks have become vehicles for personal expression. They come in florals and geometric prints, adorned with sequins or images of cartoon characters and in a multitude of fabrics and textures. Here are a few standout options (note that these won’t offer N95level protection); their availability may fluctuate because of demand, but most are being periodically restocked.

Jeune Otte: Tween fashion line Jeune Otte, which launched in Chicago last fall, has created an array of masks for smaller faces using fabrics, like dotted chiffon, left over from their garments; other versions are cut from a Liberty of London floral and gray chambray. The brand has also partnered with Maison Me, the house line of youth retailer Maisonette, on an additional range of masks made from custom fabrics. And with each sale, Jeune Otte donates five reusable masks to individuals in need. $20, jeuneotte.com.

Majoie Maldives Botanical Silk Face Mask: Maldives-based brand Majoie primarily makes bath products — body and bath oils, self-tanners — but with the coronavirus outbreak, it has added face masks to its offerings. Made from botanical-dyed raw silk with cotton interiors, the masks come in tie-dyed patterns and solids. Majoie is part of Nest, the New York-based nonprofit that aims to preserve traditional crafts and employ women artisans outside of factories; as such, a portion of the profits from these masks benefit the local Maldivian community through Majoie’s “Beyond Sustainable Project.” $45 for two, collection.majoiemaldives.com.

Ziran Reversible Silk Face Masks: Another Nest guild member, Los Angeles-based brand Ziran started making face masks even before the onset of the pandemic, using scraps of xiang yun sha silk fabric, which is naturally dyed using vegetable juices and mud from the Pearl River and sourced from a single village in China. The elegant dark florals, like “black dahlia” and “jasmine,” are a striking pick, perhaps

Splashy

masks to try on

Face masks by, clockwise from bottom left: Jeune Otte, IJJI, Diop, Parachute and Caraa, and at center: Ziran. Face masks have become vehicles for personal expression, and if you’re in the mood to buy instead of making your own, most of these also include a charitable element. for dads who want something a little more sophisticated than your average monochrome or glen plaid. For each mask sold, Ziran donates 20% to the restaurant relief organization Frontline Foods; the brand also regularly donates medical-grade masks to health care workers. $45, theziran.com.

A Diop Face Mask: Detroit-based brand Diop, founded in 2018 by Mapate Diop and Evan Fried, makes brightly patterned tops and bandannas from batik-printed Ankara fabrics that are modeled on those that Diop’s mother used to bring home after trips to her native Nigeria. Its masks are similarly

The TheSan SanJuan JuanDaily DailyStar Star bold: There’s “knickerbockers,” covered in a vibrant geometric illustration; “golden bloom,” a floral filigree; and “black,” the best-selling style, a simple but compelling black mask with white detailing inspired by mud cloth from Mali. Since launching its face masks, Diop has raised more than $30,000 for a range of charities in the Detroit area and donated 5,000 medical-grade masks to health care workers in the city. $15, weardiop.com.

Ijji Non-Surgical Face Masks: Sold in packs of two — and currently available in a pinstriped pattern — the one-size-fits-all face masks offered by gender-neutral brand Ijji are, like the monochrome basics that make up its main collection, appealingly minimalist. Ijji clothes seem to compose a daily uniform, of sorts, so it’s fitting that this most recent addition is also a new everyday companion. $12 for two, ijji.co.

Rendall Co. Sentry: Since 2012, Deirdra Jones’ company, Jones of Boerum Hill, has provided workwear for companies like Le Labo, Woodford Reserve and the chef Marcus Samuelsson. But after many businesses — including much of the restaurant industry — were forced to shutter because of the coronavirus pandemic, Jones’ newer brand Rendall Co. has focused on making masks. Its Sentry design, available in four fabrics, has the same rough-hewn aesthetic of your most beloved apron. And for each mask sold, Rendall Co. donates one to an essential worker or nonprofit. $19, rendallco.com.

The Vampire’s Wife Face Mask: Earlier this month, The Vampire’s Wife — the fashion label founded in 2014 by Susie Cave and known for its high-femme gothic aesthetic — launched a limited collection of floral silk masks. They sold out within minutes, so the brand scheduled another drop, adding cotton masks and other designs — which also sold out almost immediately. Fortunately, The Vampire’s Wife plans to restock each Friday for the near future, and for every mask sold, donates a portion of the proceeds to charities supporting food banks, shelters and other organizations in need. $44.40, thevampireswife.com.

Parachute Face Masks: The spa robe of face masks? Maybe. Cult-favorite bedding and bath manufacturer Parachute now makes masks from the same fabric as its ultra-cozy cotton sheets — in pajama-like hues (pale blue stripes, pale gray) and with wide twill ribbon ties. For each set of five sold, one set is donated via Baby2Baby and the Bowery Mission. $30 per set, parachutehome.com.

Caraa Mask Pack: Accessories brand Caraa repurposes scraps of nylon fabric — left over from its plush totes, backpacks and fanny packs — to make masks. In simple colors like blush pink and robin’s egg blue and with a faint shine, they’re a bit sporty and, like so many others on this list, the brand makes a donation to New York City relief efforts with each purchase. $25 for five, caraasport.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

23

Returning to exercise after recovery from Coronavirus

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

I

s it OK to resume athletic training, even if you have gotten through a bout of COVID-19 or tested positive for coronavirus or suspect you might have been infected?

Two new expert-consensus statements from pulmonologists and cardiologists, published separately in The Lancet and JAMA Cardiology, urge caution.

The new statements point out that the always-thorny issue of when injured or ill athletes can return to training is further complicated now, since the novel coronavirus is novel and much about its short- and long-term effects on the body remain unknown. So, the authors of the new statements lay out tentative evaluations and protocols that, ideally, ill or homebound athletes would complete before returning to strenuous exercise. They also highlight a few troubling symptoms that potentially could raise new concerns down the road.

By now, of course, almost all of us recognize that fitness is no guarantee against COVID-19. Marathon runners, competitive cyclists, professional basketball players and other athletes are among the many who have tested positive for the virus, and some reportedly have developed severe illnesses. Untold numbers of other athletes may have been infected but asymptomatic and never realized they carried the virus.

Many of these athletes might now feel ready to resume heavy training. But the usual return-to-play criteria for sick athletes probably do not apply to someone who has been infected with the coronavirus, said Dr. James Hull, a sports pulmonologist at Royal Brompton Hospital in London and co-author of the new statement in The Lancet about athletes and coronavirus.

Since the 1990s, he said, sports medicine physicians typically have relied on the “neck check” to decide whether an athlete with a respiratory condition should train. Using this measure, if symptoms are confined, by and large, to his head — meaning, above or in the neck, such as a runny nose, sinus pain and sore throat — the athlete usually would be cleared to train and play.

But the novel coronavirus worries sports pulmonologists, Hull said, in part because in some people, the illness can seem benign at first, then rapidly go downhill.

Because of this potential trajectory, he said, “it is important that, unlike what people would do with a normal viral infection,” such as a head cold, “they don’t exercise hard” while they have symptoms, especially in those first seven days.

Instead, he and other pulmonologists advise athletes who have tested positive for the coronavirus or suspect they might be positive to rest, without exercise, for at least 10 days from the point they first feel symptoms. Then, assuming their illness stays mild, they should continue to rest for another week, even after symptoms resolve.

This protocol is conservative, but aligns with a new consensus opinion about athletes, coronavirus, exercise and hearts published in JAMA Cardiology, with the backing

Two new expert consensus statements urge caution for athletes with coronavirus who are returning to serious training. of the American College of Cardiology’s Sports & Exercise Cardiology Council.

The cardiologists felt compelled to release this statement in part because the new coronavirus seems sometimes to have unexpected and perilous effects on hearts, even among robust athletes, said Dr. Jonathan Kim, a sports cardiologist at Emory University in Atlanta, and co-author of the new recommendations, with Dr. Dermot Phelan of the Sanger Heart and Vascular Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Dr. Eugene Chung of the University of Michigan.

With most viral respiratory infections, Kim said, perhaps 1% of infected people develop related heart problems.

But there are indications that people infected with the coronavirus could have a much higher incidence of heart issues, he said, although the actual risks are hard to assess, with so much about the virus still mysterious.

Even so, he and his fellow cardiologists suggest, much like the authors of the Lancet paper, that athletes and committed exercisers who have tested positive for the virus but have mild or no symptoms — or who worry they might have been infected, without testing — stay home and rest for at least two weeks from the date of their first symptoms or positive test. This time period also is the length of self-isolation mandated by current health guidelines following any possible exposure to the virus.

After at least two weeks of resting at home and assum-

ing symptoms have improved, the experts advise returning slowly to exercise training, with a wary eye on symptoms.

“You might have a mild cough and minimal shortness of breath when returning to sport now,” Hull said. But those symptoms should lessen day by day. If they do not or you develop new wheezing or shortness of breath, “go to your doc and get your chest examined,” he advised, or arrange a telehealth call.

Kim agrees. For most athletes who have spent weeks at home recovering from the virus, the first few workouts could feel lousy, he said, since any lingering viral effects may combine with general physical deconditioning. So, expect some discomfort. But if you experience considerable or increasing chest tightness or new heart palpitations, stop exercising, contact your doctor and discuss whether you should complete cardiac testing, he said.

Any athletes who have been hospitalized or bedridden by the virus will be likely to need extensive pulmonary and cardiac testing and clearance from their physicians before working out again, he said.

But for those of us who are casual exercisers who have not tested positive for the virus or felt ill during this pandemic, walking, jogging, cycling and other activities remain safe and desirable, he said, with proper social distancing and face covering, of course. “It’s a good idea to be cautious now,” he said, “but exercise is still one of the best things you can do for your health.”

24

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

3 Africans in Mexico City grave tell stories of slavery’s toll

By NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR

T

he three skulls were unlike hundreds of others in the 16thcentury mass grave uncovered at the San José de los Naturales Royal Hospital in Mexico City. Their front teeth were filed decoratively, perhaps as a ritual custom, unlike those of “los naturales,” the indigenous people who made up the majority of bodies at the colonial burial site. Archaeologists concluded the three individuals were most likely enslaved Africans, but they needed more evidence to be certain.

Now, researchers have extracted genetic information from the individuals’ teeth, confirming they were Africans, perhaps among the earliest to be stolen from their homeland and brought to the Americas.

“We studied their whole skeletons, and we wanted to know what they were suffering from, not only the diseases but the physical abuse too so we could tell their stories,” said Rodrigo Barquera, a graduate student at the Max-Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. “It has implications in the whole story of the colonial period of Mexico.”

The findings, published in Current Biology, offer a glimpse into these people’s lives before their forced voyages and add insight into the infectious diseases that the trans-Atlantic slave trade may have brought into the New World.

In 1518, King Charles I of Spain authorized the direct transportation of enslaved people from Africa to the Americas.

In 1542, he enacted Las Leyes Nuevas, “The New Laws,” which prohibited the colonists in the Viceroyalty of New Spain from using indigenous people as slaves. The law liberated thousands of indigenous laborers, but increased the demand for enslaved Af-

ricans, Creoles, mulattoes and other African-descended people to work as servants, cooks, miners and field workers. Between 1518 and 1650, some 120,000 enslaved Africans arrived in what is now Mexico.

Spanish colonists already demanded these groups because they believed they fared well against diseases brought over from Europe such as smallpox, measles and typhoid fever, which — along with the brutal European conquest — had nearly eliminated the indigenous population.

The San José de los Naturales Royal Hospital was created around 1530 to serve exclusively indigenous patients, many of whom were dying in smallpox outbreaks. The three Africans were also treated there. When they died, they were buried alongside the indigenous people. Perhaps all were victims of an epidemic, Barquera said.

The three individuals’ remains were recovered in 1992 during construction of a new subway in the city. Archaeologists noticed their teeth had decorative filings, which were observed in enslaved Africans in Portugal, and the practice continues today in some sub-Saharan ethnic groups. That led the researchers to suggest the individuals were Africans.

“We don’t know exactly if they were ‘negros esclavos’ or ‘negros libre,’” said Lourdes Márquez Morfín, an archaeologist at the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, referring to the distinction then made between slaves or freemen. But the trauma etched in their skeletons suggests they were slaves.

“One had these gunshots,” said Barquera, referring to five pieces of buckshot in the man’s chest cavity. “You could see that the bone was stained with a copper greenish pigment because

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The men might have been among the earliest to be stolen from their homeland and brought to the Americas. the bullets stayed in the body of this individual until he was dead.”

Some of the men showed signs of nutritional deficiencies, skull and leg fractures and shoulder deformities, suggesting they performed backbreaking work and suffered harsh physical abuse. The men all died between the ages of 25 and 35.

Barquera and his team removed a molar from each of the three skulls to extract and analyze their DNA. The genetic signatures obtained from the molars showed the three men had their origins in western or southern Africa. They also found isotopes on the teeth that further indicated they were all born and grew up outside Mexico.

“It was hypothesized that maybe they were descendants of Africans and Native Americans or Africans and Europeans, but that’s not the case,” Barquera said.

The team also sequenced the genome of pathogens recovered from the skeletal remains. One of the men was afflicted with the virus that causes hepatitis B, and another had a bacterium that causes the skin infection yaws, a disease similar to syphilis.

The findings provide some of the earliest known examples of those pathogens in human remains in the Americas, as well as the first direct evidence from the early colonial period that pathogens from Africa may have been brought to the Americas, said Johannes Krause of Max-Planck and Barquera’s co-author.

Krause added it is possible the men caught the diseases while on the overcrowded transoceanic voyages.

“We are always so focused on the introduction of diseases from the Europeans and the Spaniards,” Krause said, “that I think we underestimated also how much the slave trade and the forceful migration from Africa to the Americas contributed also to the spread of infectious diseases to the New World.”

The paper “does a really nice job of putting together archaeological, osteological, molecular and isotope data to provide insight into the lives of early colonial — likely enslaved Africans,” said Anne Stone, an anthropological geneticist at Arizona State University who was not involved in the research.

Hannes Schroeder, an archaeologist from the University of Copenhagen said the study’s multiple lines of evidence “paint a very detailed picture of the lives of these individuals, their origins and experiences in the Americas, that reminds us once again of the cruelty of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the biological impact it had on individuals and populations in the New World.”

The San Juan Daily Star LEGAL NOTICE

tion Association. SUMMONS BY PUBLICATION.

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE TO: MAGDA PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GERODRÍGUEZ-RODRÍGUEZ NERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUPursuant to the Order for ServiNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA ce of Summons by Publication DE CAGUAS. entered on May 21, 2020 by ELIZABETH the Honorable Daniel R. DoRODRIGUEZ BAEZ mínguez, United States District Parte Demandante vs.

Judge (Docket No. 15), you are hereby SUMMONED to appear, SUCESION DE JUAN RODRIGUEZ MALAVE: plead or answer the Petition to Confirm Arbitration Award (the JOHAN MARIE “Petition”) (Docket No. 1) filed RODRIGUEZ CRUZ Y in this case no later than thirty JUAN FRANCISCO (30) days after publication of this Summons by serving the original RODRIGUEZ CRUZ plea or answer in the United StaParte Demandada CIVIL NÚM. CG201CV04475. tes District Court for the District SALÓN: SOBRE: LIQUIDA- of Puerto Rico, and serving a CION DE COMUNIDAD HE- copy to counsel for Petitioner, REDITARIA. EMPLAZAMIENT- Doctor’s Associates LLC: POO RE DICTO. DEL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

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POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza y se le notifica que una Demanda ha sido presentado en su contra, la cual obra en el expediente de el Honorable Tribunal de Primera Instancia sala de Caguas, en el caso de epígrafe y se le requiere para que conteste la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto, radicando el original de su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notificando con copia de la misma a la parte demandante por conducto de sus abogados.

VAZQUEZ& ASSOCIATES LAW OFFICES f:/ LCDA. ROSA L. VAZQUEZ LOPEZ RUA 20486 319 CALLE CESAR GONZALEZ HATO REY, PR 00918 TEL: (787) 766-0949/ FAX: (781) 771-2425 CORREOE LECTRÓNICO: VAZOUEZYASOC!ADOSPR@ GMA!L.COM Se le apercibe que de no hacerlo, se podrá dictar Sentencia en rebeldía concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda, sin citarle ni oírle. EXPEDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y sello del Tribunal , hoy dia 18 de mayo de 2020.

Carmen Ana Pereira Ortiz, Sec Regional, Carmen R Diaz Caceres, Sec de Servicios a Sala

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Wednesday, May 27, 2020 DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA ENTRE ELLA Y EL CAUSANTE SERGIO ALBERTO MORALES MARRERO LILLIAN MERCED SOTO; FULANO DE TAL Y MENGANO DEL CUAL

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. SJ2020CV00608 (906). Sobre: SUSTITUCION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

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(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 19 de mayo de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto.

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JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE

Demandante

This Summons shall be published only once in a newspaper of general circulation in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Within ten (10) days following publication of this Summons, a copy of this Summons and the Petition shall be sent to Magda Rodríguez-Rodríguez by certified mail/return receipt requested to her last known address.

Should you fail to appear, plead or answer the Petition as ordered by the Court and noticed by this Summons, the Court will enter default against you and proceed to enter judgment based on the relief demanded in the Petition. BY ORDER OF THE COURT, this Summons is issued pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 4(e) and Rule 4.6 of the Puerto Rico Rules of Civil Procedure, PR Laws Ann. Tit. 32 App. V, R. 4.6. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, this 22nd day of May, 2020. MARÍA ANTONGIORGI-JORDÁN, LEGAL NOTICE ESQ., CLERK OF COURT. By: Viviana Diaz-Mulero, Deputy Estado Libre Asociado de PuerClerk. to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de PriLEGAL NOTICE mera Instancia Sala Superior de Estado Libre Asociado de Puer- AGUADILLA. to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior de SAN JUAN.

ARROYO ARROYO Y DENISE DELIZ MARIA CELDONIA ARROYO GRAJALES

25 Morales Morales t/c/c Reynaldo De Jesús Morales Morales, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal como posibles herederos de nombres desconocidos; Centro de Recaudaciones Municipales; y a los Estados Unidos de América.

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. AG2019CV01779.

Sobre: CANCELACION DE PAGARE HIPOTECARIO EXTRAVIADO CANCELLATION OF MISSED MORTGAGE NOTE. DEMANDADOS NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTEN- CIVIL NÚM.: DCD2017-0753.

CIA POR EDICTO. SALON NÚM: 505. SOBRE: Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de A: JOHN DOE Y Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria.

RICHARD ROE, SE EDICTO DE SUBASTA.

DESCONOCE DIRECCIÓN P/C LIC. JUAN J. NOLLA AMADO 3051 Ave. Juan Hernández Ortiz, Suite 202 Isabela, Puerto Rico 00662

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

Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 22 de mayo de 2020. n AGUADILLA, Puerto Rico, el 22 de mayo de 2020. SARAHI REYES PEREZ, Secretario(a). SARAHI REYES PEREZ, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

Al: Público en General A: SUCESIÓN DE REINALDO MORALES VARGAS T/C/C REYNALDO MORALES VARGAS COMPUESTA POR CARLOS RUBÉN MORALES MORALES, LUZ MORALES MORALES, JOSÉ JAVIER MORALES MORALES, REYNALDO MORALES MORALES T/C/C REYNALDO DE JESÚS MORALES MORALES, FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANO DE TAL COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DE NOMBRES DESCONOCIDOS; CENTRO DE RECAUDACIONES MUNICIPALES; Y A LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA.

Yo, MARIBEL LANZAR VELAZQUEZ, Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Bayamón, a los demandados, acreedores y al público en general con interés sobre la propiedad que más adelante se describe, y al público en general, por la presente CERTIFICO, ANUNCIO y HAGO CONSTAR: Que el día 16 de junio de 2020, a las 11:15 de la mañana, mi oficina, sita en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de BaLEGAL NOTICE yamón, Bayamón, Puerto Rico, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE procederé a vender en Pública PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE Subasta , al mejor postor, la proPRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE piedad inmueble que más adeBAYAMÓN. lante se describe y cuya venta en pública subasta se ordenó Finance of America por la vía ordinaria mediante Reverse, LLC Sentencia dictada en el caso de DEMANDANTE VS. la cual se notificó y arSucesión de Reinaldo epígrafe, chivó en autos el día 30 de eneMorales Vargas t/c/c ro de 2019 . Los autos y todos Reynaldo Morales Vargas los documentos correspondiencompuesta por Carlos tes al procedimiento incoado, Rubén Morales Morales, estarán de manifiesto en la Secretaría durante horas laboraLuz Morales Morales, bles. Que en caso de no produJosé Javier Morales cir remate ni adjudicación en la primera subasta a celebrarse, se Morales, Reynaldo

(787) 743-3346

celebrará una segunda subasta para la venta de la susodicha propiedad, el día 23 de junio de 2020, a las 11:15 de la mañana, y en caso de no producir remate ni adjudicación , se celebrará una tercera subasta el día 30 de junio de 2020, a las 11:15 de la mañana, mi oficina sita en el lugar antes indicado. Que en cumplimiento de un Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia que ha sido liberado por la Secretaría del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Bayamón , en el caso de epígrafe con fecha de 10 de abril de 2019, procederé a vender en pública subasta y al mejor postor , todo derecho, título e interés que tenga la parte demandada de epígrafe en el inmueble de su propiedad ubicado en A-11 2 St. Panorama Estates Dev. Bayamón, Puerto Rico, 00957, y que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar radicado en la Urbanización Panorama, situado en el Barrio Cerro Gordo de la Municipalidad de Bayamón, Puerto Rico, que se describe en el Plano de Inscripción de la Urbanización con el número, área y colindancias que se relacionan a continuación: Número del solar: A-once (A-11), área del solar: cuatrocientos treinta y nueve punto cero doce metros cuadrados (435.012 m.c). En lindes por el NORTE, en una distancia de treinta metros (30.00 m.), con el solar número doce (12) del Bloque A; por el SUR, en una distancia de treinta metros (30.00 m.), con el solar número diez (10) del Bloque A; por el ESTE, en una distancia de doce punto quinientos setenta y tres metros (12.573 m.), con la Calle número dos (2) de dicha Urbanización; y por el OESTE, en una distancia de dieciséis punto seiscientos noventa y cinco metros (16.695 m.), con área para futuro desarrollo. En este solar enclava una casa de concreto para residencia de una familia. Finca número 65,051, inscrita al folio 21 del tomo 1469 de Bayamón Sur, Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección I de Bayamón. La subasta se llevará a cabo para satisfacer, hasta donde alcance, el importe de las cantidades adeudadas a la parte demandante conforme a la sentencia dictada a su favor, a saber: $285,600.29, incluyendo intereses y otros gastos acumulados hasta el 30 de junio de 2017, y los cuales continúan acumulándose a razón del 5.6% por ciento anual, hasta su completo pago; más la cantidad de $45,000.00, equivalente al 10% de la suma principal original pactada, estipulada para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado; más recargos acumulados hasta la fecha en que se pague la deuda; más cualquiera suma de dinero por concepto de contribuciones, primas de seguro

hipotecario y riesgo, así como cualesquiera otras sumas pactadas en la escritura de hipoteca, todas cuyas sumas están líquidas y exigibles. La hipoteca a ejecutarse en el caso de epígrafe fue constituida mediante la escritura número 145, otorgada el día 14 de marzo de 2012, Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, ante el Notario Público Maris G. Chevere Mourino y consta inscrita al folio 202 del tomo 1924 de Bayamón Sur, Puerto Rico, finca número 65,051, Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón Sur, Sección I de Bayamón. Que la cantidad mínima de licitación en la primera subasta del inmueble antes descrito será la suma de $450,000.00 según se establece en la escritura de hipoteca antes relacionada. En caso de que el inmueble a ser subastado no fuera adjudicado en su primera subasta se ordena la celebración de una segunda subasta de dicho inmueble, en la cual, la cantidad mínima será una equivalente a 2/3 parte de aquella, o sea la suma de $300,000.00; desierta también la segunda subasta de dicho inmueble, se ordena la celebración de una tercera subasta en la cual, la cantidad mínima será la mitad del precio pactado para la primera subasta, es decir la suma de $225,000.00. La propiedad se adjudicará al mejor postor, quien deberá satisfacer el importe de su oferta en moneda legal y corriente de los Estados Unidos de América en el momento de la adjudicación, entiéndase efectivo, giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, y que las cargas y gravámenes preferentes, si los hubiese, 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. La propiedad no está sujeta a gravámenes anteriores y/o preferentes según surge de las constancias del Registro de la Propiedad en un estudio de título efectuado a la finca antes descrita. Por la presente se notifica a los acreedores que tengan inscritos o anotados sus derechos sobre los bienes hipotecados con posterioridad a la inscripción del crédito del ejecutante o acreedores de cargos o derechos reales que los hubiesen pospuesto a la hipoteca del actor y a los dueños, poseedores, tenedores de o interesados en títulos transmisibles por endoso o al portador garantizados hipotecariamente con posterioridad al crédito del actor que se celebrarán las subastas en las fechas, horas y sitios señalados para que puedan concurrir a la subasta si les conviniere o se les invita a satisfacer antes del re-

mate el importe del crédito, de sus intereses, otros cargos y las costas y honorarios de abogado asegurados quedando subrogados en los derechos del acreedor ejecutante. Una vez efectuada la venta de dicha propiedad, el Alguacil procederá a otorgar la escritura de traspaso al licitador victorioso en subasta, quien podrá ser la parte demandante , cuya oferta podrá aplicarse a la extinción parcial o total de la obligación reconocida por la sentencia dictada en este caso.

La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores. Si el producto de la venta fuere insuficiente para satisfacer la cantidad reclamada, se procederá a la ejecución de la sentencia en contra de la parte demandada por el remanente de las sumas no satisfechas, mediante embargo y venta en ejecución de cualesquiera otros bienes propiedad de la parte demandada en cantidad suficiente para dejar cubierta y totalmente satisfecha a la parte demandante cualquier deficiencia o parte insoluta de la sentencia dictada a su favor según dispuesto en la sentencia dictada en este caso. Se dispone, conforme con la sentencia dictada en este caso que, una vez efectuada la subasta y vendido el bien inmueble , los adjudicatarios sean puestos en posesión del mismo dentro del término de veinte (20) días por el Alguacil de este Honorable Tribunal y los actuales poseedores lanzados del referido inmueble. De ser ello necesario, el Alguacil podrá diligenciar el Acta de Subasta que se expida en horas laborales, de día, los 5 días de la semana y podrá romper cualquier cerradura o candado que dé acceso al inmueble objeto de este desalojo. Y para la concurrencia de licitadores y para el público en general, se publicará este Edicto de acuerdo con la ley, mediante edicto, en un periódico de circulación general en el Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, una vez por semana, por espacio de dos (2) semanas consecutivas con un intervalo de por lo menos siete (7) días entre ambas publicaciones , y para su fijación en tres (3) lugares públicos del municipio en que ha de celebrarse la venta , tales como la Alcaldía, el Tribunal y la Colecturía, y se le notificará además a la parte demandada vía correo certificado con acuse de recibo a la última dirección conocida. EN TESTIMONIO DE LO CUAL, expido el presente Edicto de Subasta para conocimiento y comparecencia de los licitadores, bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en Bayamon, Puerto Rico, a 24 de febrero de 2020.

SRA. MARIBEL LANZAR VELAQUEZ, Alguacil, Placa 735.

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Wednesday, May 27, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

How Kobe Bryant created his own Olympic Dream Team

By SCOTT CACCIOLA

K

obe Bryant was 17 when he worked out for the Phoenix Suns before the 1996 NBA draft. Jerry Colangelo, who owned the team at the time, already knew a great deal about Bryant, who had emerged from Lower Merion High School in suburban Philadelphia as the flashiest phenom of his generation.

Colangelo knew, for example, that Bryant had spent part of his childhood in Italy.

Sure enough, there was something about Bryant’s demeanor, the way he carried himself, the way he spoke, that struck Colangelo as different. Bryant was not a typical teenager, and Colangelo suspected that had a lot to do with his childhood.

“He was becoming a man of the world as a young guy,” Colangelo said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Phoenix. “And there’s a maturity that goes along with that. Once you travel and you’re involved in other cultures, you just kind of grow up differently and more quickly, and probably with a little more depth.”

The workout itself was spectacular, Colangelo said — so spectacular that it Kobe Bryant won a gold medal with the U.S. men’s basketball team at the 2008 Olympics was the best predraft workout Colangelo in Beijing, showcasing his intense work ethic to a new generation of N.B.A. stars. had ever seen.

“He had this self-confidence,” Colangelo said. “He knew he was special. He morial Basketball Hall of Fame, is schedu- shooting guard, said in a telephone interknew he was good — really good. And led to preside over Bryant’s posthumous view. “He made me a better basketball then you add to that the incredible desire induction. Bryant, who died in a helicop- player.” he had to be the very best. It was the com- ter crash near Los Angeles on Jan. 26, is For the first half of Bryant’s career, Cobination. It’s one thing to have confidence. part of a celebrated class that also includes langelo had to watch Bryant’s handiwork It’s another thing to be able to back it up Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and Tamika from a distance, and for a rival team. They with talent.”

Catchings. would exchange pleasantries — “a nod The bad news for Colangelo was that Bryant retired in 2016 with five cham- hello, a shaking of hands,” Colangelo said the Suns had the 15th pick in the draft pionships and all the gluttonous statistics — but that was pretty much the extent of and were unable to move up in the order. befitting an 18-time NBA All-Star. But far their involvement with each other.

Bryant went 13th to the Charlotte Hornets, beyond his longevity and the production That all changed in 2006. A couple of who had agreed to trade him to the Los he crammed into a 20-year career, Bryant days before Bryant scored 81 points agaAngeles Lakers for veteran center Vlade will be remembered for the moments he inst the Toronto Raptors, Colangelo invited Divac. Bryant went on to spend the bulk created. He was the rare player capable of him to his office in Phoenix. The Lakers of his career torching the Suns and the rest turning basketball into theater. were in town to face the Suns, but Colanof the league.

His alley-oop to Shaquille O’Neal du- gelo had something else on his mind: He Colangelo saw it all — and even found ring the 2000 Western Conference finals. wanted Bryant to represent the United Staan opportunity to nurture his relationship His jersey-tugging celebration after he hit tes at the 2008 Olympics. with Bryant through their association with a game-winning jumper against the Suns “I knew in advance that he really USA Basketball, which culminated in a in 2006. The 61 points he scored against wanted to be a part of USA Basketball,” gold medal at the 2008 Olympics in Bei- the New York Knicks in 2009. The two said Colangelo, who had taken over as jing. free throws he sank on a freshly torn Achi- managing director of the men’s national Another punctuation of sorts will lles’ tendon in 2013. team after its disastrous third-place finish come later this year when Colangelo, in “He was the fiercest competitor I ever at the 2004 Olympics in Athens — a far his role as chairman of the Naismith Me- played against,” Michael Redd, a retired cry from the standard of excellence set by

Michael Jordan and the so-called Dream Team that won gold in 1992. “It was on his list of things that he wanted to accomplish, because he had never played for USA Basketball. No junior teams or anything like that. So it was important to him, and his commitment was huge.”

Bryant’s desire to be the team’s driving force became clear to Colangelo at the 2007 FIBA Americas Championship in Las Vegas, where he scouted a couple of tournament games from the stands with Bryant.

“He had so much insight,” Colangelo said.

At the team’s pre-Olympic training camp the next summer, Bryant was the first player to arrive. In fact, he beat most members of the coaching staff — and was getting in workouts at 5:30 a.m. The rest of the team, which included the likes of LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Dwyane Wade, soon followed his lead.

“I think Kobe challenged everybody,” said Jim Boeheim, one of the team’s assistants and the men’s basketball coach at Syracuse. “He was like, ‘I’m going to defend the toughest guy on every team, I’m going to push everyone, so just come along with me.’ And he did that from Day 1.”

For Colangelo, it was a window into greatness. The foundation for all of Bryant’s feats — the 81-point game, the scoring titles, the series-clinching jump shots, the three championships he had already won with the Lakers — was his work ethic and desire. The spectacular was rooted in the mundane, in the monotony of hard labor.

At the Olympics, Bryant helped lead the way in the gold medal final against Spain — and did it with flair. With about three minutes remaining in a tight game, Bryant effectively sealed the win with a four-point play. He raised an index finger to his lips to silence the Spanish fans in the crowd.

A few minutes later, as the Americans celebrated on the court, Colangelo embraced the player he had once dreamed of drafting. The wait, in some ways, was worth it.

“How often does someone have an objective, a goal, and have it perfectly executed?” Colangelo asked. “It was just so special.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

27

Athing Mu might be America’s fastest teenager. How much faster will she be in 2021?

By MATTHEW FUTTERMAN

A

thing Mu’s days are a lot less complicated than they were supposed to be.

There is sleep, online classes, some last exams in her final days at Trenton Central High School in New Jersey, and, for now, easy running in the afternoons. No more than seven miles, none run faster than a sixminute-mile pace. And now that tracks in the state are opening, a little speed work.

At some point, somewhere, there will be a meet, and Mu, 17, will race her signature distance, the half-mile, and perhaps everyone will see once more why she is considered the fastest female teenager in America.

It’s a far cry from what had been planned: an intricate juggling act that included prom, high school graduation, preparing to leave home for her freshman year at Texas A&M and gearing up for the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and possibly the Tokyo Games — that is, until they were postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic. For Mu, and a number of developing American stars, that was not such a bad thing.

“This whole time period of uncertainty, it’s time to mentally get yourself together and physically get yourself ready instead of rushing everything,” Mu said during a recent phone interview. She had just completed her Advanced Placement calculus exam.

Some of the budding stars, like Mu, were on the cusp of qualifying for their first Olympics when the Tokyo Games were postponed until July 2021. Others were just beginning to dream of winning a medal, perhaps even gold. Waiting can be difficult, but the added year of preparation arrived at a moment when their bodies and their minds were best poised to benefit from 12 extra months of seasoning.

“When you get these really talented outliers, the X factor is what is going on above the neck,” said Mark Verstegen, the founder of EXOS, a high-performance training company that has worked with many of the world’s top athletes. “The extra year gives them a bit of a superpower, a confidence and courage that comes with more physical preparation.”

The bottom line is, he said, for Mu and her peers, “This extra year, it’s really worth more than a year.”

The dynamic is especially prevalent among young American swimmers and

Athing Mu, center, during a women’s 800-meter run in Belarus in September. runners, who participate in the two sports that accounted for more than half of the medals the U.S. won in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Both teams featured aging stars, like Michael Phelps and Allyson Felix, and needed a new generation of standouts to come along to help sustain that level of excellence. Several had just started to arrive.

Sydney McLaughlin, 20, just missed winning the gold medal in the 400-meter hurdles at the World Athletics Championships last year. Sha’Carri Richardson, 20, is in her first year as a professional sprinter after breaking the NCAA women’s record in the 100. In swimming, Regan Smith, 18, is on her way to becoming the world’s dominant backstroker, and Luca Urlando, also 18, was the third fastest in the world last year in the 200 butterfly, the race that made Phelps a legend.

“I do think I am definitely going to be faster in a year,” said sprinter Noah Lyles, 22, who won world championships in the 200 and the 4-x-100 relay last fall.

The dynamic is not true for every sport.

A one-year delay for a growing female gymnast could be disastrous, because the sport generally favors small body types. Also, an athlete’s progression is not completely predictable. There are often leaps and set-

backs, bad-luck injuries and unforeseeable challenges.

But among those athletes on the verge of stardom, Mu has the potential to make the most dramatic jump from precocious high school senior to world-class runner, even if shutdowns caused by the coronavirus have left her running on the streets around Trenton for most of the past few months. Last year, at 16, she broke the American indoor record for the 600, and then finished fifth in the 800 at the outdoor national championships that summer. She plans to enter Texas A&M this summer and major in kinesiology.

“This is not the way we planned it, but this worked out perfectly for her,” said Al Jennings, the head coach at the Trenton Track Club, who has coached Mu since she was 9. “Now if we can just get her some meets.”

Mu, whose parents immigrated from Sudan 20 years ago, has never had to look far for competition. She is the second youngest of seven children and the first in her family to be born in the U.S. Her parents divorced in 2003. Her mother works in a warehouse, and her father is a seafood processor in the Pacific Northwest.

Several of the Mu children ran competitively, and Athing tagged along to their

practices. Another coach with the Trenton Track Club, Bernice Mitchell, quickly alerted Jennings that Mu might be a special talent, and Mu began winning age-group national championships when she was in elementary school. That is when Jennings made not burning her out the club’s primary focus.

During those early years, Mu trained just two days each week and competed mostly in local competitions. The important thing was to win in high school and college, Jennings told her, not in middle school. A natural runner, Mu needed only small adjustments — tiny corrections to her arm movements during the sprint to the finish and reminders not to overstride, especially as she grew to 5 foot 11.

At Jennings’ urging, Mu opted not to run for her high school team. The idea was to concentrate on her best races, rather than how she might help a team win championships, which can often compel the most talented runners to compete in multiple races in a meet. So while other Trenton Central students were heading to the school track, Mu was meeting Jennings at nearby colleges.

Everything seemed to be working out, except for the quadrennial Olympic schedule. Mu has little experience racing against women a decade or more older than she is. Going from junior competitions to the Olympics was going to be a tall order this year.

“Confidence is one thing I have to get a little better at,” Mu said. “Intimidation is a factor.”

Deng Mu, one of Athing’s older brothers, said he was confident his sister’s mindset would catch up with her legs. He remembers watching her take the baton for the anchor leg in a 4-x-400 relay in middle school. Athing was roughly 100 meters behind the leader when she started but well ahead by the finish line.

“When you are from an immigrant family that comes in with its back against the wall, you know what the bottom is,” Deng Mu said. “It gives us a focus on pursuing things that would help us improve our lives.”

With the Olympics postponed and racing on hold, Athing Mu, for the first time in her life, was running just for the sake of running, rather than to prepare for a specific race.

That was OK. She had another A.P. test to take in language and composition, more school work and a chance to enjoy her last weeks of high school.

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Tyson’s Top 5 potential comeback opponents: Meet the men ready to test Iron Mike

By RT NEWS

F

ormer “baddest man on the planet” Mike Tyson is once again the talk of the fight game after announcing a potential comeback at age 53 -- but who will be his opponent? RT Sport gives you the Top 5 Tyson comeback contenders.

Tyson has received offers from a host of faces in the combat sports world since releasing a string of impressive pad workouts and topless shadow boxing routines that shows Iron Mike hasn’t gathered much ring rust, even explicitly announcing “I’m back” in one sweat-drenched clip.

Fellow boxers and MMA fighters have expressed interest, as well as a lucrative $20 million-plus offer from the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship (BKFC) to make an ungloved return 34 years after he became the youngest ever heavyweight champion aged 20 years, 4 months and 22 days when he demolished Trevor Berbick in two rounds for the WBC title.

The New Yorker says he’s set to announce a comeback opponent “this week,” but with so many hats thrown into the proverbial ring, it can be difficult to work out the contenders from the pretenders. Here, RT Sport gives you a rundown of the Top 5 potential opponents who could test Iron Mike’s mettle.

Evander Holyfield -- The Rematch option “The Real Deal” has laced up the gloves once again and linked up with fellow former heavyweight ruler Wladimir Klitschko and former light-heavyweight champ Antonio Tarver to whip himself into shape for a charity bout at the grand old age of 57.

Unsurprisingly, the three-time world heavyweight champion’s return to full-time, Rocky-style training has sparked talk that he and Tyson could extend their famous rivalry to a trilogy over two decades after they contested the then-most expensive fights in heavyweight history.

The $35 million and $30 million that Holyfield and Tyson respectively earned for their 1997 rematch was the summit of box office money in the 1990s, but the fight will forever be remembered for Tyson’s third-round disqualification for biting both of Holyfield’s ears.

Holyfield had won their original match in 1996, springing a huge upset in what many thought was simply a proud warrior’s last stand to batter Tyson into an 11th-round TKO loss that shattered the mythical aura of the former “baddest man on the planet.”

A third fight between two bonafide and

legitimate boxing legends would undoubtedly be the most credible and marketable fight available for Tyson and Holyfield, who wrapped up a career of 44 wins and 10 losses in 2011 at the spritely age of 49.

After their last fight ended with Tyson being banned from boxing and fined $3 million you’d be hard pushed to find anyone who doesn’t want to see a third installment.

Wanderlei Silva -- The Bare Knuckle option Former UFC hero and former PRIDE champion Wanderlei Silva at least has the ring nicknames to rival Tyson. The man known as “Mad Dog” and “The Axe Murderer” was mooted by BKFC chief David Feldman when discussing possible opponents subject to an improved offer to tempt Tyson into the BKB ring.

Feldman told MMA fighting: “I think a Wanderlei Silva, someone of that nature. No matter how old Silva gets, he’s dangerous, and I think that would be an intriguing matchup.

Something like that, but I don’t actually have anything in mind right now.”

Silva is a legend in MMA circles but last fought in Bellator in 2018 and is deemed well below someone of Tyson’s stature in pulling power and fighting ability, however diminished those skills have become.

The fact Silva represents a crossover into MMA and therefore would attract those from that sport is only lightly regarded in this case, as if there are any mixed martial arts fans who aren’t interested in watching Tyson fight full stop (if they exist, then they frankly aren’t fans of fighting).

It was unthinkable during Tyson’s glittering career, in which he amassed and then squandered $300 million in fight purses, that it would be possible, but should he be swayed by the $20 million-plus purse offered

by BKFC, it looks like Silva is the only concrete option.

Sergei Kharitonov -- The Russian MMA option Russian MMA fighter Sergei Kharitonov has been active more during the coronavirus outbreak than in many of his fights during his 30-7 professional career. The heavyweight has w aaged war on protective face masks, calling them “muzzles” and insisting anyone who wears them are considered “clowns and cannon fodder” by experts.

The former Bellator and Strikeforce fighter became known as the man who purposefully tried to infect himself with coronavirus by standing in places where people cough in Moscow in an attempt to “feel the virus” for himself.

But his battle against COVID-19 safety measures isn’t the biggest fight he has accepted. He took a potential fight with Mike Tyson after confirming he had been preliminarily offered a bout by Russian promoter Vlad Khrunyov.

“I never dreamed of facing Tyson. In my childhood I was a fan of his and he was my idol,” Kharitonov said earlier this month. “I think that if we fight in the rules of boxing, then we will give a great fight, show great technique and gather many fans of boxing and the sport will be even more popular in our country. Therefore I accept the call.”

However, Kharitonov is in worse shape at 39 and having last fought in February than the bulking, toned Tyson at 53. If power is the last thing to go, Kharitonov will stand no chance in the squared ring and any hype surrounding his callout should be treated with a pinch of salt, if not ridiculed completely.

Sonny-Bill Williams -- The Charity option New Zealand international rugby player Sonny-Bill Williams is the most unlikely of any contender to be named. Although more famous on the rugby field, Williams does have a handy 7-0 undefeated record as a profession-

al boxer, last turning out in 2015, although the calibre of the All Black’s competition leaves a lot to be desired.

Kiwi Williams sheepishly said he’d love to tangle with Tyson in a charity match.

“If it’s for a good cause, I’d love to get in the ring with Mike Tyson. It would be an honour,” the 35-year-old said. However, Tyson emphatically shot down Sonny-Bill’s dreams by calling it an “insult to boxing” if he fought a rugby player.

Despite there being a clear chasm in boxing skills, Tyson and Williams do share a common opponent in South African Frans Botha; Tyson tucked away Botha with a 5thround highlight reel straight right KO in 1999 despite a lackluster performance at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Williams, on the other hand, labored to a 10-round decision over a 44-year-old “White Buffalo” in 2013 in Auckland. Judging by their respective performances, it would be silly to even suggest a potential fight -- even if only for charity.

Tito Ortiz -- The Former Champ option Former UFC light heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz is a legend in mixed martial arts and had been rumored to be in the reckoning to fight Tyson in his comeback match, going as far as to say he’d been contacted with regards to the fight.

Ortiz is certainly keen to, in his words, “double” the money made by Floyd Mayweather Jr and Conor McGregor for their 2017 crossover match, the biggest ever spectacle involving combatants from boxing and MMA. “I got a phone call and someone started asking me, ‘What do you think about fighting Mike Tyson?’ I was like, ‘Really?’ This is an opportunity that I like. I’m in,” Ortiz told TMZ, adding that he didn’t yet know whether the bout would be under MMA or Marquess of Queensberry rules.

Ortiz, who was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame in 2012, admitted that he’d be comfortable stepping into a ring with Tyson, and claimed his boxing skills may be brought onto a level playing field on account of Tyson’s inactivity.

“I’ve been boxing for 20 years. My boxing skills have gotten better and better. They may not be at the same level as Tyson, but has Tyson been punched in the face in the last 15 years? No he hasn’t,” Ortiz said. “I have been.

I’ve been able to subdue everyone I’ve competed against over the last four years.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Sudoku

29

How to Play:

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

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

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

Ordering people around will create resentment. Be more respectful of people’s dignity. Just because you are someone’s supervisor doesn’t give you the right to treat them like dirt. Be courteous, even if you’re not being treated with respect. The tide will turn. Taking a break from work will be therapeutic. Lately, you’ve been burning the candle at both ends. Put out the fire and get some rest. A few days off work will be therapeutic.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Is a relative getting on your nerves? Stop falling for their power plays. When you don’t respond to their provocative remarks, they’ll become deflated and look for someone else to torment. The adage is true: It takes two to tango. An ache or pain can be quieted by an alternative healing therapy.

Although acupressure and Reiki would normally be worth exploring perhaps this time try aromatherapy. Ask a friend for a recommendation on who to speak to for advice. They’ll direct you to the right practitioner for you.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Scorpio

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

You’re tired of dealing with a fanatic. Be direct about how their diatribes bother you. Tell them you’re no longer willing to listen to their views on religion, politics or culture.

If they ignore you, cut off the relationship or file a complaint. Spending time on calls your friends will lift your spirits. You enjoy brainstorming with fellow artists. It feels so good to have your ideas greeted with excitement and enthusiasm. Get started on a painting, song or design.

Exercising your imagination brings out the best in you.

Your partner’s financial difficulties are putting undue stress on your relationship. The only person’s behaviour you can control is your own. Therefore, you must do whatever you can to feel better about your life. Open a separate bank account or find another source of income. A dream job will become available. The prospect of taking on such a highprofile position might make you feel a little nervous. Push past your fear and apply for it anyway. Getting paid to exercise your imagination will fill you with joy.

Don’t let a business or romantic partner dominate you.

Although you appreciate their help, there are some decisions you’d like to make yourself. Stop taking a back seat to them.

Becoming more assertive will help your relationship, not hurt it. Taking a relaxing walk along the waterside is strongly advised. Being near the water helps you connect with your spiritual side. Brilliant breakthroughs will occur after watching the waves lap the shore. Obey an impulse to call a friend.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Your natural state is healthy. When you experience illness, it’s because you’re pinching yourself off from wellness.

Instead of dwelling on aches and pains, praise your body for serving you well. Get some gentle exercise and rest when you are tired. An attentive romantic partner will be eager to make you feel better. Let them take chores off your plate. If they volunteer to give you a back rub, accept.

Above all, let their compliments and praise sink into your bones.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

It’s tempting to abandon yourself to pleasure, but this will only turn small problems into big ones. People are depending on you to deliver on promises. If you take the day off, you’ll put a colleague in an embarrassing position. After you dispatch your duties, you can run back into your amour’s arms. Are you single? You could meet someone special while processing paperwork, delivering some materials or helping someone relocate. Work paves the way to love. There’s a silver lining to every cloud.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

An argument with a relative or neighbour is driving you to distraction. The less you focus on this disagreement, the faster it will be resolved. When you can’t take your mind off this dispute, make a list of positive aspects about your tormentor. An art project is another welcome distraction from anger. Get your hands dirty with clay or paint. Fill your notebook with some amusing observations about work. Your imagination is a rocket ship. Let it take you to beautiful and compelling places.

You’re tempted to file a lawsuit against a business that committed a minor infraction. Before letting your temper get the best of you, take a few deep breaths.

Making a mountain out of this molehill will cost time, money and energy. Change your focus. Domestic activities can soothe your nerves. Take this opportunity to prepare some comfort food, put fresh linens on the bed or plan a garden. If you’re lonely, invite friends to a group chat.

You’re having difficulty conforming to the new social norms.

That’s an unusual situation for a traditionalist like you. Right now, you can’t make sense of a current trend of remaining silent in the face of abuse. Continue to speak out, even if it causes trouble. A creative project serves as a healthy outlet for frustrations. Take this opportunity to develop an idea for a novel or screenplay you’ve been toying with for years. After putting a few ideas down on paper, the words will flow like a mighty river.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

A secret enemy is causing problems at work. If you keep getting in trouble, it may be because this colleague is blaming you for their mistakes. Be more proactive about accounting for your actions. The true perpetrator will be revealed. Are you looking for a new way to make money? You can make a tidy profit by selling your artwork.

Whether you throw pottery, bake cakes, write stories or build furniture, you can build a profitable cottage industry.

Get to work.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Be respectful of the rights of others. Inconsiderate behaviour will drive a wedge between you and a friend. Resist the temptation to poke into their private affairs. You may have access to some of their information, but refrain from reading their messages; it may be an unforgivable violation. Your magnetism is powerful. Use it to lure someone special into your web of amour. You’re charmed by their offbeat sense of humour, while they enjoy your vivid imagination. w

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

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Ziggy

32

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

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